The Rules of Attraction

“Well, it sounds really happening,” she says.



She leaves abruptly, taking a cookie, and asks Judy, “I’m going into town with Beanhead, wanna come?”



Judy says, “Plath paper. Can’t.”



Lauren leaves without saying anything to me. Obviously embarrassed, flustered, by my presence.



Tonight, I think. I go back to the table.



“The weight room opened today,” Tony says.



“Rock’n’roll,” I say.



“You’re an idiot,” he says.



Once the sun sets, I’m thinking.



PAUL I got off the bus with the other college students and the blind man and the fat woman with the blond kid and got lost amid the flotsam in the large terminal in Boston. Then I was outside and it was rush hour and overcast and I looked around for a cab. There was a sudden tap on my shoulder and when I turned around I was confronted by The Boy Who Looks Like Sean.



“Yeah?” I lowered my sunglasses. I was experiencing an adrenaline rush.



“Man, I was wondering if I could borrow five bucks,” he asked.



I got dizzy and wanted to say no but he looked so much like Sean that I fumbled for my wallet, couldn’t find a five and ended up giving him a ten.



“Thanks man,” he says, slinging the pillow case over his shoulder, nodding to himself, walking away.



I nodded too, an involuntary reaction, and started to get a headache. “I am going to kill her,” I whispered to myself as I finally wave down a cab.



“Where to?” the driver asked.



“Ritz-Carlton. It’s on Arlington,” I told him, sitting back in the seat, exhausted.



The driver turned his neck and looked at me, saying nothing.



“The Ritz-Carlton,” I tell him again, getting uneasy.



He still stares.



“On … Arlington…”



“I hear you,” the cab driver, an old guy, muttered, shaking his head, turning around.



Then what the f**k are you staring at? I wanted to scream.



I rubbed my eyes. My hands smelled awful and I opened a package of Chuckles I bought at the bus station in Camden. I ate one. The cab moved slowly through the traffic. It started raining. The cab driver kept looking at me in the rearview mirror, shaking his head, mumbling things I couldn’t hear. I stopped chewing the Chuckle. The cab had barely made it down one block, then turned and pulled over to the curb. I panicked and thought, Oh Jesus, what now? Was he going to kick me out for eating a goddamn Chuckle? I put the Chuckles away.



“Why have we stopped?” I asked.



“Because we’re here,” the driver sighed.



“We’re here?” I looked out the window. “Oh.”



“Yeah, that’ll be one forty,” he grumbled. He was right.



“I guess I forgot it was … so, um, close,” I said.



“Uh-huh,” the driver says. “Whatever.”



“I hurt my foot. Sorry,” I pushed two singles at him and tripped in the rain getting out of the cab and I just know Sean’s going to f**k someone at the party tonight and I’m in the lobby now, soaked, and this just better be good.



He doesn’t know it but I had seen Him over the summer. Last summer. I spent my summer vacation on Long Island, in the Hamptons with my poor drunken father. Southampton, Easthampton, Hampton Bays—wandering the island with other Gucci-clad nomads. I stayed with my brother one night and visited a recently widowed aunt on Shelter Island and I stayed in tons of motels, motels that were pink and gray and green and that glowed in the Hamptons light. I stayed in these havens of shelter since I could not bear anymore to look at my father’s new girlfriends. But that is another story.



I saw Him first at Coast Grill on the South Shore and then at this oh-so-trendy Bar-B-Que place whose delightful name eludes me at the moment. He was eating undercooked chicken and trying not to sneeze. He was with a female (a wench, definitely) who looked anorexic. Fag bartenders stood around them, looking bored, and I would order Slow Comfortable Screws to bother and tease them. “That’s made with rum?” they’d lisp, and I’d lisp back Yes because you can’t lisp No. Mouth-breathing waitresses came on to You, You, who were bronzed like a God, a GQ man, Your hair slicked back. I heard Your name called—a phone call. Bateman. They’d mispronounce it—Dateman. I was sitting, shrouded in darkness at the long sleek bar and I had just found out oh-so-discreetly that I had failed three out of four classes last term. Unfortunately I had forgotten to hand in, to even complete, the prerequisite “Some Papers,” before I left for Arizona and hit the Hamptons. And there You sat. The last time I had seen You was at a Midnight Breakfast; You hurled a balled-up pancake at a table of Drama majors. Now You lit a cigarette. You did not bother to light the wench’s. I followed You to the phone booth.