“Um—we did the Symposium,” Paul offered in dismay. “And some Descartes, a little bit of Kant.”
“That’s not philosophy, that’s paleontology.” Julian spoke with a sardonic grandness that couldn’t quite conceal his enthusiasm. “You’re better than that, you need a philosophy that’s equipped to grapple with the moral reckonings of the twentieth century—you’re already most of the way there, you obviously ruminate better than most. Is that your last class of the day?”
Paul was so dizzy on the compliment that it took him a moment to parse the question that followed. He noticed odd notes of likeness between them—the shape of their hands, their heights within an inch. It made him feel better about how dissimilar they were otherwise, as if he might really be worthy of notice.
He nodded, belatedly, and Julian grinned.
“Good,” he said. “Come on. I need to lend you some books.”
On campus tours, the college always showed off its handful of spotless, intensely modern dormitories with poured-concrete walls and façades pitted with plate-glass windows. The building where Julian Fromme lived was not one of these—it was ancient and drafty, built in the same cheap brick as an elderly elementary school.
The kitchen was a dank subterranean room with grills on its squat windows. The dim light was a mercy, since it spared Paul from seeing too clearly how filthy every surface was.
“I’m not seeing any ginger ale,” said Julian, peering into the fridge. “Barbarians. Is Coke okay?”
“Sure.” Paul glanced over his shoulder toward the group of boys sitting at the kitchen table, who were eating beans on toast in their boxer shorts and sweatshirts. Julian had serenely ignored them, breezing past them as if they were furniture. Paul wasn’t convinced they were returning the favor.
“Don’t mind them,” Julian said quietly. He handed Paul his soda and glanced dismissively at the strangers. “They don’t deserve your attention.”
Julian didn’t belong in this place. He was like a dart of clean bright light, alien and vibrant.
He led Paul back into the hallway and up a staircase through the atrium. Someone had misplaced a volume of Hegel on the landing; Julian paused over it with feline disinterest, then deliberately kicked it the rest of the way down the stairs.
“You don’t live on campus, do you?” he said as he searched for his keys.
“I live with my mother.” Paul realized the moment he spoke that he couldn’t have phrased it any more like a Hitchcock shut-in. He quickly tried to paper over it. “—and my sisters. I wanted to be in the dorms, but my scholarship doesn’t cover housing, and we only live a couple miles away.”
“Well, as you can see, you get a lot for your money.” Julian gave his door a shove to free it from the damp-swollen frame. “Come in, make yourself at home.”
Paul did his best to pretend he did this sort of thing all the time. He tried not to linger too long over the details, lest it become obvious that he was trying to commit them to memory. There were no family photographs—just a picture of Julian himself, several years younger, arms flung around the neck of a large brown dog. There was a small stereo by the window, but no television. Instead the little room was dense with books, which spilled over from the shelves and sat in crooked stacks on the dresser and floor. Many of the spines were titled in French, and a few, with their spiky half-familiar alphabet, looked like they had to be in Russian.
A portable chessboard lay open on the desk, pieces scattered in full combat. Paul stared at it to see if he could make sense of it, but when Julian looked at him, he turned away and seated himself tentatively in the desk chair.
“Arendt is mandatory,” said Julian. He tossed his coat over the end of the bed and began gathering books from the case. “She’s brilliant, I Greyhounded up to New York last semester for a talk she gave at the New School. She gets at why behavioral norms can’t function as a conscience—the purpose of social norms is to norm, not to attain moral perfection—oh, let’s get some of old Fritz in here too, why not, the Teutonic bombast will stick to your ribs. Your other friends don’t give you homework, do they, Fleischer?”
“I wish,” Paul said faintly. It startled him, perhaps more than it should have, for Julian to use the word friend.
“You’ll regret saying that by the time I’m through with you.” Julian had dropped the books at Paul’s elbow and was rifling through his milk crate full of records. “I was led to believe,” he said, “that college was a haven for the intellectually curious. Turns out that it’s really just about acculturating you to academia—which is fascinating, petri dish of maladaptive behavior that it is, but still.”
“Is that even true? I thought it was about drugging yourself into a stupor.”
“I think they prefer to pronounce it ‘seeking enlightenment by way of the chemical expansion of the mind.’ How else are they going to feel self-righteous about it?”
Julian flung himself onto his bed. Paul felt an odd thrill, not unlike relief, when he saw that Julian was grinning. He was terrified Julian would notice that he spoke too haltingly around the remnants of his childhood stutter—that his thoughts were ugly and incomplete and insufficiently well-read.
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Uh—I’ll be seventeen in March.”
“Ha! I knew it.” Julian retrieved his soda from the windowsill and settled back on his elbows. “I can always spot a fellow runt. I skipped third and seventh—ruined my chances of ever playing varsity sports. My father was furious.”
He could have resisted the impulse to be honest, but he chose to yield. The surrender made his body feel light and cool.
“I just had to graduate early, because otherwise they wanted to expel me.”
“Get out,” said Julian. “What did you do?”
He had never said it out loud before. It occurred to him, as he was speaking, that it ought to feel stranger than it did.
“I hit a guy in the face with my locker door.”
“The hell you did!”
“He needed about fifteen stitches.” Paul couldn’t decide if Julian looked enthralled or horrified. “He had it coming,” he added, but Julian waved him off.
“I can imagine. God, If I’d known that was all it took to get out of high school, I’d’ve done it myself. Did your parents hit the roof?”
Paul scrambled for an excuse to avoid Julian’s eyes. He busied himself making room in his knapsack for Julian’s books; the diversion felt transparent, but he couldn’t think of anything more sophisticated.
“My mother doesn’t really . . . she just gets sad,” he said. The truthfulness was beginning to burn like an overextended limb. “That’s all she does anymore, she worries at you and asks ‘Why are you doing this?’ and sits around feeling sorry for herself where she knows you can see her, so you feel like you have to do something about it—which is what she does anyway, she’s a house-widow, all she’s good for is cashing the pension checks and making people feel bad for her. So it was just—more of that. And I guess I got grounded, but I don’t go out much anyway, so I didn’t really notice.”