Chapter 25

Gavin woke up naked in the bed of Rona Gomez.  Which was weird enough, but weirder, Rona wasn’t there with him.  He patted around the bed, like maybe he had lost her under the blankets somewhere.  The air on his arm felt like he was inside a refrigerator.

He pulled it back under the blankets and turned on his side to look across the room.  There, on Rona’s desk, was the alarm clock: eight zero zero, the same time Gavin’s eyes popped open every morning, running on their own invisible clockwork.  He remembered the red numbers glowing in the dark last night, just before his consciousness finally gave out on him: five four seven.

Then he remembered something else. Rona wriggling from between his arms. This bed is too small. Going to her roommate’s bed on the other side of the room.

That’s where she was now, sleeping peacefully under the puppies and sunsets.  Red and blue flowers draped across her shoulder, skimmed over the small mountain of her hips.  Just the sight of them and his senses were flooded: her skin on his, the salty taste of her shoulder. Her smell, something dark like cloves and wine. Those hips, smothering his face. Grinding hard into his own hips. Her face above him, strained and concentrating, eyes closed, breasts bouncing.  The low moan of her orgasms—not a hundred, but four at least—the long deep breaths through her nose as she shuddered them out to completion.  Her soft round ass in front of him, her back a perfect cello as he pulled the condom off and spurted his own orgasm onto her spine.

His dick was getting hard again.  Warmth rose from his stomach to his chest.

I’m special.

He threw back the covers—cold, cold, cold!—skipped across the room with his arms wrapped around his shoulders, and climbed into bed with her.

She opened her eyes, surprised, but she moved a little to let him in.  Not far; they were single beds, so she ran into the wall pretty quickly.  He had to lie partway on top of her, which was fine with him.  He hadn’t lay in bed with a girl for, let’s see.  Fourteen months since his last break-up. He had made out with a couple girls since then, but nothing serious, certainly not wake-up-naked-with-you serious.  Although actually Rona wasn’t naked.  She was wearing a t-shirt.

“It’s early,” she said.  She looked pale and tired and her cheekbone was a little more swollen than last night.

He kissed her.  Her mouth still tasted like Scotch, which was a great thing to taste in Rona’s mouth at eight on a Sunday morning.  

“Just so we’re on, you know, the same page.”  She squirmed and turned onto her back.  Gavin ended up with his face right next to her ear. “I’m not looking for a relationship or anything.”

“Oh, right.”  He swallowed, a mixture of her Scotch and his own sour saliva.  “Me neither.”

He hadn’t actually thought things through that far.  A relationship? Like where you made regular appointments to hang out and have sex and love each other?  No way, who would want that? Geez, they’d only slept together once.  Who was talking about a relationship?

He lay there next to her for a while, listening to the rise and fall of her breath, wondering if she was asleep or awake.  He kind of felt like just going home.  He got up, pulled his clothes back on, walked over to the bed.  She was definitely sleeping now. He wrote his phone number on the back of the Scotch receipt and left it under the half-empty bottle.

Outside, the cold morning air felt good on his skin.  He cut through the middle of campus, surreal on a Sunday morning with no students. Church bells rang in the distance, nine o’clock.  Too early.  He already knew he would waste the whole day pacing around, half-assedly reading some articles, waiting for night so he could go to bed.  He walked past the language arts building, a 1950’s concrete maze.   Gavin’s office was on the third floor with the other graduate student instructors, in a twisty hall of little offices, all alike. Frick’s was up on the fifth in something like a penthouse.

By the time he got back to the city streets on the south side of campus, he was starting to feel sweaty and nauseous, like his body was covered in a layer of toxic grime.  He took his coat off and put it under his arm.  There was a dark stain on the front of his sweater, a piece of the protein bar, it looked like.  He put the coat back on.

Walks like this were usually walks of shame or walks of victory, depending on how you felt about the girl.  But this one was somewhere in the middle. Part of him felt excited, giddy, like something really good had happened to him.  But then there was this dread in his stomach.  It was like when you finished writing an article you thought was really smart, and then you sent it off to a journal that you knew was never going to publish it.  I don’t want a relationship.  Who said that?  It’s not like he wanted one, not necessarily.  He was leaving soon, if everything turned out correctly, and long-distance was a pain in the ass.  But that was months away.  Seriously, what was so bad about him?  If things worked out, if they got along, if they kept having sex like—like that—would it really be such a nightmare to have a relationship with him?

He shook his head and tried to distract himself looking at the textbooks and New Buffalo sweatshirts in the store windows.  Who said anything about relationships, anyway?  She was the one who brought it up.  Way to ruin a perfectly pleasant night of the hottest sex he’d ever had in his entire fucking life.  Fucking Rona Gomez.

When Gavin got home, Sinder was sitting on the couch looking all cracked out, way more cracked out than Gavin felt, and that was pretty cracked out.  Sinder usually slept until eleven or so on weekends, and it was only nine fifteen.  His eyes were red and veiny like a cartoon drawing of a crazy person.  His laptop was open on the couch next to him.

“Dude, what’s going on?” Gavin said.

“Were you with Rona?”

How does he know? 

Oh wait, duh, of course.  He had told Sinder he was trying to date Rona, back before he actually was.  Not dating her.  But you know, whatevering her. 

“Um.”

He felt like he should lie, like he’d been caught doing something wrong.  Which he hadn’t.  All he did was have sex with another consenting adult, no law against that.  Maybe it wasn’t super cool that the adult was his student, but that wasn’t even forbidden according to university policy. It was only highly discouraged.

Then he remembered the other news, that Sinder had been hanging out with Rona, that they had gone to some kind of skeleton museum together.  He kind of kind of wanted to grill Sinder about it, like, How about you, were YOU with Rona?  But he looked like such a wreck that Gavin didn’t have the heart to mess with him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“That’s cool.”  Sinder didn’t sound like it was cool at all, actually.  He sounded like he wanted to kill himself or something.  He leaned his head into the back of the couch, so that Gavin could see straight up his hairy nose. “It’s too bad, though, because it would have been nice if you were here last night.”

He picked up his laptop and held it in front of him like it was a screaming baby he was trying to pass off to somebody, until Gavin came over and took it.   There was an email open on the screen, from Sinder’s advisor Randy Ledbetter.  Gavin put it on the table and sat down.

Sinder,

I have finished reviewing your essay responses in preparation to meet with the rest of your exam committee tomorrow. I have to admit that I am disappointed with your work. It reflects a disconcerting sense of detachment and skepticism towards the ethical arguments you claim to be supporting.  The vulgar Utilitarian ideals underlying your position are as trite as they are impractical/unrealistic, suggesting a hesitation to grapple with your own foundational questions about fairness and justice.

If you are to continue in the philosophy doctoral program, I would strongly suggest that you reframe your position as a meta-ethical one rather than a normative one.  That said, you might want to give some serious reflection to your intended career as an ethicist.

Best,

Randy

Gavin stared at it for a minute, his elbow on the table, his cheek cupped in his hand.  Vulgar Utilitarian ideals. It was a little early for a philosophy pop-quiz, especially when he’d only slept like two hours.

“He thinks my exams sucked,” Sinder said.  His head was still tilted back, his face pointing upwards.   

Gavin thought back to the last time he had seen Randy Ledbetter, at Café Firenze.  He had seemed so kind and jolly, not an evil witch advisor like Marjorie Mendelssohn, the opposite of her.  Gavin had been jealous.  

“He’s right,” Sinder said.  He stared at the ceiling, his arms passive at his sides.   Gavin had never seen him so still. “They sucked.”

“Don’t listen to him.  He’s being an asshole.”  He snapped the laptop closed.

“No, he’s right.” Just staring at the ceiling, unmoving, like he was praying to the heavens or something.  “I didn’t even believe my own argument.  When I was writing it, I just felt like, you know, what’s the point?”

“The point?”

“You know.  The point.  As in, like, why are we doing this?  Why am I writing about what a bunch of people I don’t know should or shouldn’t do?”

Gavin didn’t know if it was the sleep deprivation or just his general disorientation based on the events of the last twelve hours, but looking at Sinder, he was getting a strong wave of déjà vu.  Sinder’s blank, hopeless stare.  His skinny limbs flopped out listless on the ugly tan couch, like he had lost the will even to fidget.  The doubt, the question, what’s the point. It all seemed like a rerun, like they had had this conversation before, not once, but maybe hundreds of times.

“You’re contributing to the body of human knowledge.”  Gavin sat up straighter in the dining chair to counteract Sinder’s slouching, trying to buoy Sinder’s psyche with his own. “You’re advancing the culture.”

“Am I?  Or am I just wasting a lot of time and electricity writing a bunch of bullshit?”

No no no.  This was the direction you were never supposed to go.  Gavin had seen it tons of times, sometimes in his own brain.  But more often from the mouths of other people: his aunts and uncles, high school friends, the dentist or the guy who cut his hair.  Oh, so you study the plays of Liam Stump?  What’s that supposed to achieve? What’s the goal?  

“The point is to have a fulfilling life doing stuff you enjoy.”  He tapped the side of his fist on the table next to the laptop, animated, like he was trying to make up for Sinder’s lost spazziness. “That’s the only point there is.  You can’t go around asking what’s the point about everything, or you’ll never do anything.  There’s no point to any of it.”

“Well, if there’s no point.” Sinder raised his head from the back of the couch.  He had a different look in his eye that Gavin hadn’t seen there before.  A grown-up look.  It kind of reminded him of his father. “Then maybe it shouldn’t be so fucking hard.”

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Chapter 26>