The Altruists Page 9

  Though the building was new and its facilities were up-to-date, a stigma had already attached itself to Wrighton, Ethan’s sophomore dorm. Consisting mostly of single rooms, it was thought of as “the creepy dorm,” a refuge for the friendless and the specially accommodated. The showers were outfitted with seats and handles for the wheelchair-bound students who, per the university’s disability policy, were guaranteed spots in Wrighton. Those kinds of flourishes put people off. It didn’t help that a clinically depressed econ major had thrown himself from a fourth-story balcony there one year earlier.

  By the time his second year at Danforth had begun he’d succumbed to a loneliness that was in part facilitated, if not encouraged, by the structure of the dorm itself. The staggered rooms and lack of common spaces were designed to keep the shut-ins shut in. Ethan even found himself missing Eugene, whom he sometimes saw on campus with a new girlfriend, surrounded by the children of Chinese diplomats and bankers. The 2004–2005 academic year did not look any more promising than the last.

  A minor mystery sustained him. Draped over the door of the room across from Ethan’s was a banner, white with blue stitched lettering, that read: YOUR FELLOW MAN. It was the only sign of life in Wrighton. The banner confronted him each time he stepped out of his room into the hall, running the height of the door and disappearing through the crevice on top. He obsessed over the banner. He wondered who lived behind it. In the fog of post-lunch lectures, Ethan doodled, his pen loafing carelessly across the page, casting off lines and curves at random, but when he came into consciousness at the end of class, more than once he found the words YOUR FELLOW MAN encroaching on his notes.

  One afternoon in late September, the campus cross-breeze ripe and cold, Ethan discovered the electric kettle, boxed, in a duffel bag deep in his dorm-room closet. He recoiled. His chest contracted and his cheeks went hot. It was like he was at Tubs & Tupperwares Too again, watching his parents bicker, the sales assistants judging from a distance. The shame was fresh. He picked up the box and went to dispose of it.

  On his way to the large trash bins at the end of the hall, a voice behind him asked, “What’s that?”

  Ethan turned. A young man was leaning on the banner-draped door, framed by those three mysterious words. YOUR FELLOW MAN.

  The fellow man had a plain, matter-of-fact handsomeness to him. He had round cheeks and light brown hair. A stiff cowlick furnished his wide forehead. He stood on the balls of his feet, giving him an extra inch. He wore the well-fitting khaki pants of a guy who “got it,” fashion-wise, and the Old Navy T-shirt of a guy who didn’t. His eyes were sea-foam green, two lone extraordinaries.

  “It’s a water heater,” Ethan said, scrambling to regain his presence of mind.

  “A what?”

  “An electric kettle.”

  “Oh. Ha,” he said. “Gay.”

  The color fled from Ethan’s cheeks. Though he had been out to his parents for almost three years now, he usually passed for straight, which put him in the awkward position of having to come out to every new person he met. It was burdensome, dragging sex into the conversation just to let people know—and to what end? So they could put him in some arbitrary category? Eventually he stopped trying. It became a point of pride that no one could read him for what he was. But how had the fellow man known immediately? Then he remembered what was in his hands. The kettle, he realized—the kettle was gay.

  “I’m Charlie.”

  “Ethan.”

  Charlie followed him to the end of the hall. “I’m getting rid of this,” Ethan explained.

  “Whatever.” Charlie shrugged, lifting the lid of the trash bin. “In you go,” he told the kettle.

  And suddenly he was everywhere. In the dining hall, in the library—they had matching schedules and habits. Ethan must have passed his hallmate a thousand times before they met, never before noticing the skinny kid with the cowlick, the way a pop song can go unnoticed despite repeated passive listenings in supermarkets and malls. They even had a course together, Introduction to Human Evolution, where Ethan started sitting next to Charlie, helping him with the names of their hominid precursors. Australopithecus africanus, he’d whisper. Homo heidelbergensis.

  Charlie was a physics major and had enrolled in human ev for the social science credit. He was also, Ethan came to learn, a St. Louis native, the fifth and youngest son of Dan and Ellen Bugbee and the only one not currently working at Anheuser-Busch in distribution with their father. “It’s what you do in my family,” he explained. “Anheuser’s been good to us. The brewery? Near Soulard? It feels like our family legacy is there. Like it’s our estate. Dad used to say we had horses growing up—he meant the Clydesdales. Put it this way: no one in my family has ever lost a game of Flap-or-Fill.” On Highway 40, an orange neon sign flashed between images of an eagle flapping its wings and an empty Anheuser A filling up with beer. Charlie claimed all Bugbees could guess, with stunning accuracy, which image would appear at the moment their car drove past. Charlie’s favorite jacket bore a similar logo printed across the back, the eagle and the A.

  Charlie was a Bugbee to the core. Unlike the majority of English, history, and philosophy majors, whose studies colonized their personalities, Charlie refused to let Danforth make an intellectual of him. “My parents were surprised that I went here and not Mizzou, like my brothers. I promised them it wouldn’t change me. I don’t know why it would. I mean, I still watch Tiger football,” he said. “I’m not going to stop drinking Bud.”

  “What’s with the banner?” Ethan asked one afternoon. Class had ended, the lecture hall was thinning out, and the two Homo sapiens were heading back to Wrighton. Ethan walked the walk he’d perfected as a preteen, half consciously humming the song that kept his footsteps heavy and deliberate: I–am. E–than. Al–ter. And–my. Mid–dle. Name–is. Da–vid.

  “What banner?”

  “On your door.”

  “Oh. Yeah, that. It’s from my camp, in Maine.” Charlie explained that though his family hardly left the Midwest, for the last ten summers he’d flown east to Brundle Pines, the oldest continuously running boys’ camp in America, first as a camper and later as a counselor. The camp was, in Charlie’s telling, an idyllic Eden amid a forest of spruces by a warm, sleepy pond. Where boys, he said sincerely, learned to become men. “My dad works double shifts all summer to send me.” A pair of wooden monuments to the Brundle Boys lost in World Wars I and II stood at the center of the campground. He spoke rapturously of the place: of paddling at sunrise, dusted with conifer needles, free from the calculating eyes of girls; of the camp’s four pillars (brotherhood, nature, leadership, silence); and of the singular luxury of unexploited New England wilderness, his eyes brightening as he did. The underside of the banner on his door, he explained, read COMES FIRST, the Brundle Pines motto.

  Your fellow man comes first.

  “Sounds awesome,” Ethan said.

  “It is.”

  They reached the dorm entrance. Charlie swiped them in with his key card.

  “Can I ask,” said Ethan, “why are you in Wrighton? I mean, I wanted to live alone, but some people don’t. I was wondering . . .”

  “Fucked over,” Charlie said. “By my rich-kid hallmates from last year. Said we could all get a suite together and then bailed last-minute for this place off campus. A three-bedroom in the Central West End. I was like, I can’t afford this. Heated tiles in the bathroom.”

  “Sucks,” said Ethan.

  “You’re not one of them, are you?”

  “One of who?”

  “The rich kids. Like all the other entitled East Coast assholes at this school.”

  “I grew up in St. Louis,” Ethan said, omitting the name of the gated neighborhood. His heart paced faster as he added, excitedly, “I’m here on a subsidy. A tuition discount.” Charlie nodded approvingly.

  This was the first of many ways that Ethan Alter,
college sophomore, began to unburden himself. After class most days he sat in Charlie’s unadorned room and drank Bud Light. They played Halo and talked. Side by side before the television screen, Ethan revealed things he’d formerly kept secret—and found, to his surprise, that Charlie had mirror stories. They shared traumatic dental episodes (Charlie had had impacted canines) and a sense of being ill fit to their families. It occurred to Ethan that he’d never been as happy as he was drinking mass-produced pale lager in an unadorned room with a boyish guy on the shorter side of five foot six. Maybe, after a quarter lifetime in the Alter household, this is what he’d always wanted: no cynicism, no pretention, only the wan honesty of being.

  Ethan had put a lot of care into his own room. Above his bed hung a framed poster of a foggy Monet bridge he’d seen at SLAM. On the wall opposite was a watercolor landscape his grandmother had painted. Beneath it, an Easton bat, laser cut with the words ETHAN ALTER—2000–2001 SPORTSMANSHIP AWARD was pinned to the wall with brackets. Christmas lights circumscribed the window. His desk was bare. When Charlie walked in for the first time he was silent with awe, pausing to dote on both the Claude Monet and the Nan Alter, and whispered, “Your room is sick.”

  Ethan knew he meant it. Charlie never said a thing he didn’t mean. Irony, sarcasm—these were foreign languages to him. And yet every earnest expression of sensitivity was quickly undercut by something vulgar—“Curtains are kinda gay, though”—that left Ethan dizzy and confused.

  Straight men confounded him. Saying the right thing and then immediately the wrong—what was that? A side effect of not having to hide oneself? Of a life without filters or amendments?

  * * *

  • • •

  A student suicide in late October resulted in the canceling of classes on the third Friday of the month—an unexpected three-day weekend. Ethan asked if Charlie had plans.

  “I don’t. Go home, I guess.”

  “Yeah, same. I was thinking, though. What if we went somewhere? Like a trip? I can borrow a car.” He loathed the thought of spending this impromptu long weekend at home, with his father and without Charlie.

  “Yeah. Actually, that could be tight. Where would we go?”

  “You pick!” Ethan said, a bit too excitedly. “If we leave Thursday afternoon we can take a straight shot anywhere.”

  Charlie paused to think. His eyes glazed and shone. After a long minute he turned to Ethan and stated, definitively, “Pittsburgh.”

  Pittsburgh. That, from the depths of Charlie’s mind. Pittsburgh. Not Nashville, four and a half hours south, or Chicago, equidistant to the north, but Pittsburgh: the City of Bridges, Steel City, Iron City—nine hours away by car. That Charlie had not (or could not) name a more interesting place was dangerously endearing.

  “Okay,” Ethan said and smiled. He would have gone anywhere with Charlie. “Pittsburgh it is.”

  On Thursday afternoon, they set out in Francine’s new Toyota station wagon, a sea-green Spero, which she offered to Ethan and his friend.

  “Why did you say ‘friend’ like that?” Maggie asked. She was reading in the living room with her mother.

  “Like what?” Francine said.

  “You said it like, friend.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You did!”

  “You kinda did, Mom,” Ethan interjected.

  “I’m happy you found someone,” she said. “A friend. A friend to take a weekend trip with. A weekend trip to Pittsburgh.”

  They left at three. Charlie wore his Anheuser jacket. As they approached the Mississippi River, Ethan saw the Arch through his window, the Gateway to the West growing awkward and superfluous as he put it behind him—the massive, stainless-steel catenary shrinking in the rearview as if calling out, You’re going the wrong way! And then the city flattened, Missouri became Illinois, East St. Louis passed them by and there was nothing. Trees, grass, open sky—a billboard reading LOVE YOUR BABIES, BORN & UNBORN. Rattling in the backseat was a twelve-pack of Bud Select that Charlie had insisted they take with them.

  “You know what I like about you?” Charlie said in Illinois.

  “What?”

  “You act like you’re this quiet kid but really you’re crazy. You’re down for whatever.”

  “Yeah?” Voltage in his veins.

  “Yeah. Like this trip. I said Pittsburgh and you were like, ‘Yes. Let’s go.’ You know what I mean? You’re just down.”

  Charlie fell asleep somewhere in Indiana. Ethan sneaked prolonged looks at him—he found he could stare for six seconds at a time before having to check back with the road—as headlights swept Charlie’s face. Around eight thirty he pulled onto Route 68 and drove south into Yellow Springs, Ohio. He wound his way through the dark, veering into residential neighborhoods of discomfiting quiet until the road broadened again.

  Ethan pulled into the parking lot of a green clapboard pizzeria with a loud sign. He decided not to wake Charlie. He went in, ordered four slices, ate two alone in the restaurant, and boxed two for his sleeping friend. Back on the road, Charlie woke with a smile to the smell of hot cheese.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “For you.”

  “You’re crazy.” Charlie took a bite. “Fuck, this is good.”

  “I looked it up. Supposed to be the best.”

  “You went out of the way for this?”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “But where did you find it?”

  “I did a little research beforehand.”

  “You’re cultured, you know that?”

  “I am? Oh, man. Thanks.”

  “I know I’m not.” Charlie wiped a spot of glistening grease from his lips.

  “You are!”

  “No. I’m not. No one in my family is. We have other good things about us, but we’re not knowledgeable in that way. I know that. I figured that out a long time ago.”

  Ethan smiled. “You really know yourself, huh?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe I don’t want to know. It’s scary, I think, to look at yourself that way. That’s what’s cool about you. You’re brave enough to look inside yourself and know.”

  “Some people don’t like that,” Charlie said. “That’s why it’s hard for me to make friends. At school, I mean. Some people want you to adjust yourself to fit some bullshit precon . . . precom . . .”

  “Preconceived notion.”

  “Right. See? Cultured. But that’s why I love Brundle Pines. I don’t have to change who I am.”

  “I think I do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Adjust myself. For other people.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “No?”

  “Not at all. No way.”

  Ethan swelled.

  “Do you think I’m dumb?” Charlie asked. “Because of what I said about being cultured?”

  “No,” Ethan said. “God, no. I’d never think that. You’re not dumb. No. Never.”

  Ethan checked his reflection in the rearview mirror, his face coming in and out of darkness as he passed through pools of highway light. Though his path to physical desirability was by no means over, in recent years the expander had come out, granting him a handsome, architected smile. His pores had tightened. His shoulders broadened, as if there had been a larger version of himself encased within a narrow body all that time, a self that had finally hatched.

  They checked into a first-floor room in a Holiday Inn Express south of downtown Pittsburgh. The room had two double beds. Ethan dropped his bags on the scratchy carpet and fell onto his bed, exhausted. He passed out listening to Charlie recount a news item he’d seen on TV where investigators shone black lights on hotel rooms to disgusting effect.

  He
woke at sunrise. He could hear the patter of shower spray on plastic from the neighboring room, and smelled the waffle batter bubbling between irons in the lobby’s breakfast bar.

  He opened his eyes. Charlie was standing by the side of Ethan’s bed. In his left hand was a sweating bottle of Bud Select. His right hand gripped his erect penis. Both were extended in offering.

  Pittsburgh gave them sun for three days. Or so the view through the windows implied—the boys hardly left the hotel. They fooled around and slept late and drank all day. They hung the PRIVACY PLEASE placard on the doorknob as the room grew provocatively stale. Every now and then they went in search of food. Charlie mispronounced pierogi on three separate occasions. The city was unassuming and let them get away with everything. The boys Ethan had previously slept with were fumblers. They were as uneasy in their bodies as he was. Charlie was different. He led with his body. It was, Ethan thought, the best weekend of his life. So it came as a surprise when, after the flames of Pittsburgh cooled and they drove back to Danforth, Charlie too went cold—sitting apart from him in class, shutting the door to his room—and Ethan found his worst fears realized: he was alone again, entirely uncertain as to why, until Charlie returned from winter break that year with a girlfriend and said that what he and Ethan had done was a “camp thing,” distinct from the life he wanted in St. Louis, and if Ethan ever told, he’d kill him.

  Sophomore spring was chaos, a period of record losses. Loss of appetite. Loss of interest. Loss of energy. He felt faint. A high-pitched sound burrowed in his ears and stayed there. He felt like there was an expander in his chest, rapidly expanding. For weeks his mouth carried the taste of batteries.

  He stayed in bed. His heart skittered, little manic bursts puncturing the torpor like a mouse darting from one corner to another. Ethan checked himself into Student Health Services when he knew his mother wouldn’t be there. He was given two Tylenol and told to relax. He couldn’t understand what had happened. His life wilted like a question mark.

  On top of this he lived in fear. Charlie’s room was right across the hall, the banner still hanging from the door. YOUR FELLOW MAN. It had a menacing air to it now. Ethan had to plan his comings and goings to avoid his hallmate. At first he spent whole days on campus, leaving early and coming home late. Once, at night, as he stepped through the threshold into his room, he heard the click of a door opening. He could feel a presence behind him. He bounded forward and slammed his door shut.