Part Twenty Four

While I spent the summer in Santa Fe digging up Anasazi ruins (don’t ask), the little bastard waited tables and actually started working on his senior thesis.

Which wasn’t due until January.

“Poetry and the Semiotics of Identity.” I remember the title to his paper as vividly as my own – “History, Pop Culture, and Will Durant.”

Mine was about the mass-marketing of scholarship to lay readers. Preacher had lots of passages from Aristotle and Hank Williams in his.

That’s not important.

This was part of Mark’s story: “One time that summer he gave me a twenty dollar bill – I forget what for, maybe groceries – and there was a telephone number written on it. Apparently this was fairly routine for him – he’d work a table and when he got his tip, some woman would have left her phone number for him. He never called any of them, of course.”

Preacher suffered from Groucho Marx syndrome for awhile, I think – he couldn’t be interested in anyone who would actually want to date someone like him. Maybe it was more than that.

Mark took him clubbing occasionally just to get him out of the house. Gay bars, or at least places where gay men could reasonably be expected.

“He was a good sport about it,” Mark recalled. “In fact, he had the same nonchalance about men and women.”

“You used Preacher as your wingman in gay clubs.”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Was he any good at it?”

Mark seesawed his hand. “Whatever it was that straight women saw in Preacher,” he said, “gay men mostly did not. He would talk me up, he would intercept the losers, and if there was a group of people there together he would get us into their midst like we were all old friends… but he wasn’t exactly a guy magnet.”

Interesting.

And apparently when they went to places where they might both meet someone, Preacher was supremely disinterested. Mark said it was quite remarkable to watch, actually. He wasn’t standoffish, or rude, or morose; neither did he flirt, pursue, or invite. He just… was. And at the end of the night he always went home alone. And never returned phone calls.

“To my knowledge,” Mark said, “he had no intimate contact of any kind with anyone that summer. Not even himself, for all I know.”

Our senior year Ellen was back for poker nights. She was the same old Ellen – smart, cute, driven. Actually rather wearying.

And Preacher’s intentionally dateless streak continued. Oh, he would talk to girls at parties and he couldn’t help but flirt a little around campus but he was just not interested. Which, apparently, made him all the more desirable.

He came home with me at Christmas. He had ridden me like a $10 mule after Thanksgiving to get my senior paper finished. So we were the only two seniors not busting our asses to get it done over the Christmas break. I wanted to wring his neck at the time, but of course he was right.

Bastard.

I didn’t have any real girlfriends, per se, that year. But the few times a girl tiptoed out of the house early in the morning with her underpants in her pocket… it was my room she was leaving, not Preacher’s.

Until the croquet match against Navy that Spring. Preacher still ran and rowed and did all that sweaty stuff, and yet the only competitive sport at the school – croquet – required roughly the same amount of athletic conditioning as tying one’s shoes. Without the bending down part. Still, he played, and with that muscle memory thing he had going, he really cleaned up. This was a man who knew as much Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and Musashi as any of these Navy guys. I don’t know if that helps you prepare croquet strategy. Doesn’t hurt, I suppose.

So our senior year they were gunning for him; he’d kicked their asses twice (he didn’t play his freshman year). But – as usual – the drunks from St. John’s (costumed that year as pirates, if memory serves) carried the day, and Haywood led the way.

Which brings me to Captain Debbie Feder. I actually met her at the L&N Seafood Grill at the Pentagon City Mall. She was in uniform. Captain Feder had something to do with logistics for the Navy; an abbreviated CV is in the archive. She’s married with three kids. But the first time I met her, her name was Debbie Kupek, and she wasn’t married, she was a senior company commander at the US Naval Academy.

It was after the party had broken up; Preacher was nowhere to be found, but some of the rest of us went to an after-party party that took up two floors of one of the dormitories and I kept expecting him to show up there, but he never did. It made me a little angry, at the time. Him sitting there at our house alone. I thought that the whole broken-hearted thing had gone on long enough.

And thus my first introduction to Debbie Kupek – I got home, the house was dark, and just as I was tiptoeing up the stairs to my room, the two of them came tiptoeing back down towards the kitchen.

She was wearing his pirate shirt and that familiar dazed smile. Short strawberry blonde hair and freckles.

“Good timing,” Preacher said to me. Kupek had the decency to look sheepish.

“Because I missed the whole wounded-goat phase?” I said. I was thinking: I hope they’re finished, because I need to get some sleep.

Kupek turned beet red.

“No, because I need your help,” he said.

We sat in the kitchen and drank Seven-Up and Preacher concocted an elaborate plan for sneaking her back into the Academy when her pass had, technically, expired at midnight. It involves a security flaw which I suppose has been patched since then – we stole a crew hull from the St. John’s boathouse and the two of them slipped silently across College Creek. My job was to serve as lookout at the boathouse so he wasn’t caught returning the shell.

So that was the first question I asked her, after the pleasantries were out of the way: did you get caught that night?

“Not officially,” she said. “My conduct officer knew. I mean I showed up three hours late, soaking wet. And I think my cheeks were still… you know, flushed. Because she took one look at me and guessed everything.”

Best friends will do that.

“No,” she said to a later question, “I am not a Worshipper. I’m a Presbyterian. But I read his book. My husband doesn’t… this is all kept sealed for 50 years, right?”

“At least,” I promised for the umpteenth time.

“Nobody knows about us. I mean Sarah – my roommate, the conduct officer – she knew, but she’s dead. I mean it was just one night, a million years ago, but… still.”

I understand, I told her.

Sarah died of breast cancer. Satisfied? Try to stay focused on the relevant stuff.

I told her that Preacher had been, quite deliberately, celibate that entire year, that she was the first girl after his heart had been broken the previous June. And she said:

“Well, to be honest, it was his butt first, and it was another woman who pointed it out to me. That got me looking at him. Then it was the way he walked – with that sort of unconscious grace. That had me looking at him closer. And, of course, no Navy haircut – that was a plus, too. So after the match I talked to him. And he was smart, and funny, and nice, which had me talking to him more… and at one point I said something to him that was supposed to sound coy and sexy but it came out a little forced and he looked at me with this little half-smile and I made the mistake of looking deep into his eyes. It was like… how can I put this? When you looked there they went a mile down. And for the first half-mile he was a pussycat. Then for the next quarter-mile you saw a glimpse of mountain lion. Wild and a little scary. And if you could look down long enough, that last quarter-mile there was something so lonesome and sad and… and maybe I’m remembering more than there actually was. But either way, once we shared that look, that was all she wrote. I mean it wasn’t like me to just pick up some guy like that. And to be honest I kind of made fun of you Johnnies back then. Bunch of long-haired… well, you know. Although someone told me later that Preacher was an all-around athlete… anyhow. After the Navy spent three and a half years making me tough as nails, I looked into those eyes and I was torn between the desire to put my arms around him and the desire to wrap my legs around him, if you know what I mean. But… but I fought it off for awhile. We talked about music. And he was shocked that I had never heard of the Plimsouls. So that was the excuse. I went back to his place to listen to the Plimsouls. Although we both knew that wasn’t why I was going back to his place.

“But when you tell me I was the first one in a year… you know, I thought something was funny. About the way he acted. Especially afterward. But he… You know what I mean. You made that crack about the wounded goat. I wanted to punch you. Plus I was past my curfew. I didn’t have much time to spend trying to figure it out.”

At the time, I hadn’t thought for a heartbeat about the fact that the Navy mascot was a goat, but it finally hit me there in the restaurant. Sometimes it takes me 16 years to catch up. I told her that the wounded goat thing hadn’t been a Navy crack. It was something we said about all the women he brought up there.

She gave me an icy, withering glare. “Funny how that doesn’t make it any nicer.”

I said nothing, ducking – cringing, you might say – behind my objectivity.

“But the thing was,” she said, “I had this distinct feeling that I had… that he had left the room, in some way. Once we sort of got… once we started… it was like someone turned something off in his eyes. I mean… there was a reason I never called him again afterwards. He called me – he was a gentleman – but I brushed him off. I wanted something more than just sex. And I was definitely not a one-night-stand kind of girl; I never would have gone with him if I hadn’t thought he was special. I mean I had every intention of making it the first night of many. But all that went out the window sometime that night. I’m not sure when.”

I bit my tongue. I swallowed hard. I listened to her prattle on about her career. I was going to be objective, damn it! I wasn’t going to taint the interview!

I couldn’t help it.

“You didn’t tell him to stop.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“That night. He’s a nice guy, he’s got dreamy eyes, whatever. Then you start getting down to it and you decide all that has gone away. That something about having sex has shut him down in a way you don’t like.”

“Something like that,” she said.

“But you didn’t tell him to stop. You didn’t try to go back a few steps and see if you could bring that back.”

“We weren’t really in a position to stop, just then,” she said.

“I know my roommate,” I said, “and I know that whatever you did took hours, and happened more than once.” I watched myself talking. In horror. I took myself by the shoulders and shook myself, hard. I demanded to know what the hell I was doing, defending someone who didn’t need defending and screwing up an interview at the same time. I threatened to slap myself. But I didn’t shut myself up. “I mean, let’s be real, Captain. This is supposed to be historically accurate. You started out the night hoping for a relationship AND orgasms. But once you had a little taste of the latter, you decided they were worth forgoing the former. Rather than stopping to figure out what was wrong with him.”

She pursed her lips. Stared at me for a moment. Got up and left.

Why is it that my every impulse is counterproductive?