My Unsentimental Education

said, accented, authoritarian. She was German. She’d married an American soldier during the Allied Occupation. She had a daughter my age, but they argued because the daughter skipped work, no warning, to go to motocross races with a boy who wore Budweiser T-shirts. Kristine left the receiver uncovered and said: “It is a call from a boy!”
I must have looked surprised. No one called me. When I answered, James Stillman said he’d gotten my number from the campus directory, called my house, and one roommate said I was at work. He’d asked where. She and another roommate didn’t know, but they found Maribel—brooding and burning incense in our room, I figured—who’d told him the Crosstown Café. James wanted to go out. I was thinking: Friday, Saturday. Tonight, he said. With Kristine listening I didn’t feel I could say I didn’t get off work until late and had class in the morning. I said I’d call him after work.
When I got home, Maribel, Farm-Paula, and Cello-Paula were waiting in the kitchen. Who was he? How did I know him? When I said he wanted to go out tonight, but it was late and I’d take a rain check, they objected, especially Maribel, who was in love, unrequited. “Not the first time he asks you, no,” she said. “Be picky later.” Farm-Paula: “We have our studies, and we have our real goal, boys.” Cello-Paula: “I tend to agree with Maribel this time. What class is that important?” I balked. My hair smells like kitchen grease, I said. I’d wash it, and it would take an hour to dry. It was fifteen degrees outside. Maribel threw her hands up. “For God’s sake, use a hairdryer. Catch a cold.”
I called James Stillman. He gave me directions to his house.
When I got there, he said he’d been insistent on tonight because his roommates had gone to a concert in Minneapolis, and he’d likely never have the house to himself again. He uncorked a bottle, lit a candle, put a jazz record on. He preferred Hendrix-style guitar. “But it makes conversation difficult.” He showed me his own guitars, erect like trophies in front of a lit aquarium. We sat facing this guitar-and-fish-tank tableau. I took off my coat. Maribel had insisted I forsake thrift store creations for jeans and her own best sweater, mauve, fluffy. “You look incredible,” James said. “I thought you might.”
James rolled a joint and said my boss seemed mean. I said no, she was nice, just strict, no phone calls. He asked about my roommates, the ones who didn’t know where I worked, the one who did. I explained that I hadn’t known them when I moved in. I’d be moving to a new house soon—I’d arranged for Maribel’s friend to take my half-bedroom. During Christmas break I’d move to a house more rundown, but I’d have my own room. I didn’t tell James I didn’t know roommates in my new house either, that I’d never made friends. Though I’d dropped out for just a semester, according to papers I’d filed as I re-enrolled, I was already nontraditional, a student “with above-average financial stressors and potentially isolating life experience.” James asked where my new house was. Around the corner, I said. “From here?” He smiled and set down the joint. He started kissing as if to send a message: he had technique, also ardor, but he’d hold back until I murmured yes.
Then the music stopped. James said it was cold—on the couch, outside. “Will your car even start?” It would, I said. If it wouldn’t now, it wouldn’t in the morning either, the coldest hour of the day. His face clouded up. “I don’t know anything about cars. I don’t even have a license.” This was unprecedented. Public schools still taught drivers ed. Some people didn’t have cars, but no one didn’t have a license. I asked why not. He said, “My so-called troubled youth. But I’m not getting into that.” He said I should sleep on the couch, and he’d go sleep in his room. Because I’d been drinking, he added, kinder. He pulled blankets off his roommates’ beds, heaped them on me, and went upstairs.
When dawn came through the window, I went outside and let my car idle as I scraped frost off the windshield. People were driving to work in rows, their faces calm, brains freshly rinsed by sleep. Then the front door to the house banged open, and James shivered on the porch, bare-chested, disheveled. “Call me tonight after you get home from your whatever.” His voice echoed in the hush. A bundled-up girl walking past, book bag over her shoulder, glanced at me, then away. I went to class. But first I went to the mustard-colored house to get my textbook. Maribel said my morning return meant that I belonged to James Stillman now. “From here on,” she told me, “your attention is divided.”
My Intro to Communication professor said, “After you see these pie charts, the reason for reciprocity in self-disclosure will hove into view.” A few days later: “I never appreciated the importance of Uncertainty Reduction Theory until a conversation with a colleague finally hove it into view.” This professor’s verbal tic and systematic enthusiasm about why we divulge intrigued me. But I got a D on my first paper, in which I wrote that that how we talk, act, and look is communication, and we change according to who we meet, becoming the person the other person wants. The professor said I was describing Accommodation Theory with semiology larded in, but none of this was on the syllabus.
More puzzling, I was getting a D- in Freshman English, though I was almost a second-semester sophomore. I went to Dr. Darden Stoat’s office hours to ask why. In the spectrum of professor appearances, he was well groomed as opposed to, for instance, a history professor who wore the same pair of pants hooked at the waist with a paper clip for an entire semester. I spoke