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“It tastes like—” She frowned the thought away. “No, that’s not right.”

“For God’s sake,” Lear moaned, “don’t be such a tease.”

“Quiet.” Another moment slipped by; then she brightened. “Like…the air of the coldest day.”

I was amazed. She was exactly right. More than right: her words, rather than functioning as a mere decoration of the experience, actually deepened its reality. It was the first time that I felt the power of language to intensify life. The phrase was also, coming from her lips, deeply sexy.

Lear gave an admiring whistle through his teeth. “That’s a good one.”

I was frankly staring at her. “How did you do that?”

“Oh, just a talent I have. That and twenty-five cents will get you a gumball.”

“Are you some kind of writer?”

She laughed. “God, no. Have you met those people? Total drunks, every one.”

“Liz here is one of those English majors we were talking about,” Lear said. “A burden on society, totally unemployable.”

“Spare me your crass opinions.” She directed her next words to me: “What he’s not telling you is that he’s not quite the self-involved bon vivant he makes himself out to be.”

“Yes, I am!”

“Then why don’t you tell him where you were for the last twelve months?”

In my state of information overload, and under the influence of three strong drinks, I had overlooked the most obvious question in the room. Why had Jonas Lear, of all people, needed a floater for a roommate?

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Liz said. “He was in Uganda.”

I looked at him. “What were you doing in Uganda?”

“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. As it turns out, they’ve got quite a civil war going on. Not what the brochure promised.”

“He was working in a refugee camp for the U.N.,” Liz explained.

“So I dug latrines, handed out bags of rice. It doesn’t make me a saint.”

“Compared to the rest of us, it does. What your new roommate hasn’t told you, Tim, is that he has serious designs on saving the world. I’m talking major savior complex. His ego is the size of a house.”

“Actually, I’m thinking of giving it up,” Lear said. “It’s not worth the dysentery. I’ve never shat like that in my life.”

“Shit, not ‘shat,’ ” Liz corrected. “ ‘Shat’ is not a word.”

These two: I could barely keep up, and the problem wasn’t merely that I was smashed, or already half in love with my new roommate’s girlfriend. I felt like I had stepped straight from Harvard, circa 1990, into a movie from the 1940s, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn duking it out.

“Well, I think English is a great major,” I remarked.

“Thank you. See, Jonas? Not everyone is a total philistine.”

“I warn you,” he told her, wagging a finger my direction, “you’re talking to another dreary scientist.”

She made a face of exasperation. “Suddenly in my life it’s raining scientists. Tell me, Tim, what kind of science do you do?”

“Biochemistry.”

“Which is…? I’ve always wondered.”

I found myself strangely happy to be asked this question. Perhaps it was just a matter of who was asking it.

“The building blocks of life, basically. What makes things live, what makes them work, what makes them die. That’s about all there is to it.”

She nodded approvingly. “Well, that’s nicely said. I’d say there’s a bit of the poet in you after all. I’m beginning to like you, Tim from Ohio.” She polished off her drink and set it aside. “As for me, I’m really here to form a philosophy of life. An expensive way to do it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’ve decided to go with it.”

This luxurious ambition—four years of college at twenty-three grand a pop to amass a personality—struck me as another alien aspect of her that I was hoping to learn more about. I say alien, but what I mean is angelic. By this point, I was utterly convinced that she was a creature of the spheres.

“You don’t approve?”

Something in my face must have said so. I felt my cheeks grow warm. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say anything. Piece of advice. ‘That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.’ ”