It was the hardest thing for Alice about living at Windsor, these people who had invaded the places where she had been a child and a girl and which she had always considered her own, the places that should have been reserved only for students of the kind she had once been and for the most disadvantaged, the truly hard cases with whom it was necessary tomake alliances if the world was ever to be put right. That was the key, the thing that mattered more than money, in the days when there had been anything that mattered more than money. Decent people were dedicated to the spread of fairness and social justice. These people were dedicated only to themselves.
She had a pile of Elizabeth Toliver’s books sitting on the small deal table that sat against the living room window that looked out on the quad. Peter had put it there for her to look through, along with a videotape of Ms. Toliver on some CNN talking-heads program where she appeared a couple of times a week. Alice had seen the program on and off and made note of Ms. Toliver, since she was the mother of a student. Peter had not left her any CDs by Jimmy Card, probably because he didn’t think she needed them to be familiar with Card’s work, which was true. Alice didn’t like the music Jimmy Card had produced in the days when he’d been a real, genuine, not simply has-been rock star, and she didn’t like the music he produced now, when he seemed to think he could turn himself into a classical composer a hundred years after the form had died in a mess of atonal aesthetic theory. She wondered if he even knew the theory. These people tended not to. She didn’t need to look through any of the things on this table. She’d met them both at orientation in September, and then again at Parents Day in October, and she had been about as impressed with them as she’d been with the one and only chicken fajita salad she’d eaten at a Chili’s restaurant—meaning, not at all. She’d known people like both of them in college, the people who’d worked too hard and dressed too well to ever really belong in the places they’d managed to scramble their way into.
If anybody were able to hear me think, they’d call me an elitist, Alice thought, but she knew it wasn’t that. It was exactly the opposite. They were the elitists. They believed it all mattered, the “polish” they got from a good education, the “achievement” of spending their lives doing things that were worth nothing to anybody, while the people who did the necessary work—who planted the crops and cleaned the sewersand filled the potholes in the roads—existed only to give them somebody to look down on. There was a nobility in poverty. There was no nobility in what these people were. Alice thought that she herself, if she had found herself born into the wrong circumstances, would have opted for living on the street or on welfare rather than grubbing away at schoolwork and a “good” job. She would not have played the lottery; and if she had, and if she’d won it as Michael’s mother had, she would have taken the jackpot only to give it all away again to the people who were working so hard to abolish all lotteries. She would not have been brainwashed into believing that qualifying for a mortgage on a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath house in a subdivision in New Jersey was “success.” She would not have been so drunk on the power of money that she thought thirty-five thousand square feet in Scarsdale was “success” either. She would have seen what Michael had seen, and what his mother had not. She would have understood that wanting that subdivision house was no different than wanting that Scarsdale one or a mansion in Malibu. It was all corruption, and the only way to remain authentic and fully human was to walk away from all of it.
The books were still sitting on the table. The window was still looking out on the quad. The weather looked as awful as it had for weeks. The sky was slate gray and showed no signs of getting better anytime soon. The air was that odd color it got before they had a truly impressive snow, and they’d already had three or four this winter. She didn’t like thinking about Michael. She was sure she had done what she had to do in that case, right up until the end; but it was hard to think about, even so, and harder to think about when she put Mark DeAvecca into the same picture. It was too bad that Michael had had to room with that particular boy. Almost anybody else would have been better and less of a problem in the long run.
What she remembered, what stuck in her mind, was her last vision of Michael, only hours before he died, on that last night. He was standing out by Maverick Pond behind thehedge of trees that curved along its bank closest to the library, his hands stuck in his pockets, his arms held tightly against his chest, and she had suddenly thought how wrong it all was. He hadn’t escaped the brainwashing, not all of it. Everything he was wearing had logos on it. Even his jeans had a big leather patch on the back meant to let strangers know he’d bought a brand and a famous corporate one at that. She’d been thinking about ripping the patch off with her bare hands, and then it had been his bare hand she’d noticed, stripped of its glove, plunging up the front of her sweater, through the layers made by her cape and her camisole, his fingers pricking at the tips of her nipples as they got hard under the touch. The shock had been so immediate and so total, she’d almost given into it. She’d wanted to drop to the ice just as she was and open her legs to him without reservation, the way she’d done the first few times they had been together in her own bedroom in President’s House, while Peter was away at his conference and the campus had not suspected anything yet. She remembered those first few times quite clearly, even now, when thinking about Michael too often made her imagine, against her will, the process of fucking a dead body. That last night she could have made love to him in the frigid open air, risked frostbite for herself and for him, and exposure of a more lasting kind as well. For a few seconds before her sanity returned, she had reached for him as he had reached for her. She had put her hand down the front of his jeans and found his penis stiff and resistant against her hand. She’d had no idea if she was cold. She didn’t think he did either. His hand had moved away from her nipples and gone downward, down and down. His finger was right at the very tip of her clitoris when there were suddenly sounds in the quad. They were far away—the quad was light years away from the pond, she’d thought at the time, although of course that wasn’t true—but for some reason they were distinct and immediate, as if they were being projected over a very good speaker system. They both felt as if those voices were right beside them. His hand froze against the mound of her pubic hair and then retreated. Herown hand came up into the cold without her willing it. It happened because it had to happen, because the one thing they could not do, not either of them, was let the rest of this campus know that what everybody suspected was true.