Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [81]
Now a few other students had heard his voice and were walking up to him in the hallway; there were those parties when I was a boy, how Pop’s voice was always at the center of them, how he seemed to be the axis of the wheel everyone else lounged on, spinning around what he had to say or yell or laugh about. Then the parties would end and Pop would become another man, one who worked quietly and alone, then went running alone, then left in his car alone to go teach, a man who returned to us tired and distracted and needing sleep to get ready for the next day’s solitary work.
Metrakos smiled at me, then walked into the hallway where Pop was leaning close to Marie, his hand on the shoulder of a blonde girl from Long Island. Theo whispered something into my father’s ear, then ushered him gently back down that concrete stairwell at Tupelo, and it was clear to me Metrakos was mellowing while my father, ten years older, was not.
WEEKS LATER, there were two feet of snow on the ground, the air so cold and dry it hurt your lungs to breathe through the mouth. There was a loud crowded party at one of the international student houses on campus across from my father’s, and I was at this party hoping to see Marjan, to maybe get her alone and introduce myself and talk, but it was the kind I hated because it was full of young men in polyester shirts and pants, smelling of cologne and dancing to disco music which sounded to me synthetic and soulless, its relentless beat the echo of some narcissistic machine.
The place was small and dark and hot. Some of the women were dancing, too—an Indian girl from Bombay, one from Bahrain, another from Venezuela, their movements sweet and graceful in jeans and blouses, their gold bracelets jangling. Many were drunk, including me, sipping beer after beer, and though Sam wasn’t with me, he and I had vowed to always run one mile the next day for each beer we drank. I’d begun to lose count but believed I was going to have to run seven, maybe eight miles in the morning. The Bee Gees came on, a song I hated from a movie I hated, and I drained my beer and was just about to leave when I saw Marjan dancing, her long dark hair swinging, her friend Parvine dancing beside her.
There was a banging on the bathroom door behind me. The tall girl from Bombay turned to me. “Your father’s been in there with Louisa a long time. People need to use the bathroom.”
“My father’s in there?”
“Yes, with that girl from Brazil.”
Louisa. She had dark skin and wore tight jeans and would walk around campus holding four or five textbooks to her chest. She was a junior or senior but didn’t seem to have a boyfriend.
The music was too loud. I leaned close to the girl from Bombay, could smell her perfume and skin. “How long’s he been in there?”
She shrugged. “An hour, perhaps longer.”
I stepped to the door and knocked on it, could barely hear my own knocking above the party noise. “Pop. Pop, people need to use the toilet. Go someplace else.”
A line of fluorescent light shone at the bottom of the door. I tried the knob, but it was locked. I pressed my ear to the door. Heard his voice, then hers. So maybe they were just talking. Let somebody else deal with it. I shrugged at the Indian girl and made my way past the polyester boys from Turkey and Iran, Nigeria, Kenya, and New Jersey. In the candlelit gloom I caught a glimpse of Marjan dancing with two Asian girls, and I pulled the slider open and stepped out onto the frozen deck.
It felt good to be in the cold air, that disco a bit muffled behind me now. I opened another beer and drank. Across the lawn and through the bare trees not