Loner by Teddy Wayne Read Free Book Online Page B

that I could follow you around for the afternoon and sign up for the same classes you did.
    As I took a final bite of cereal and trailed you outside, I imagined revealing to you, in the future, this moment of my taking decisive, romantic action. Just think, we would conjecture, we might never have gotten together ; life is so random .
    You proceeded toward the redundantly named Harvard Hall, the contours of your shoulder blades pulsing under a thin blacksweater, your gait as fluid as the motion of an underwater breaststroker. We arrived at a second-floor lecture room and you took an aisle seat. I found a free chair in the row behind, from which I had an unobstructed view of your profile.
    A professor, his white hair fringing a dome that shone brilliantly under the lights, fiddled with his notes at the podium. The syllabus was distributed: From Ahab to Prufrock: Tragically Flawed Hero(in)­es in American Literature, 1850–1929.
    Throughout the eighty-five-minute lecture I was riveted on you and only you, the professor’s voice droning like talk radio in the background. You composed notes in longhand, scribbling in your Harvard-insignia blue spiral notebook, periodically snake flicking your tongue between your lips to moisturize them before flexing the angle of your mandible. At one point you massaged your nape, precipitating a delicate flurry of dandruff that drifted onto your shoulders, becoming a constellation of stars on the night sky of your sweater.
    When you tilted your head in my direction to work out a knot, I looked at my laptop screen and busily typed Professor Jonathan Samuelson’s last insight, about how the whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick enables it to stand for anything in the minds of both Ahab and the reader.
    â€œIts very blankness, the colossal void it imposes on the text, reifies a central tension of post–Manifest Destiny American literature,” he proclaimed with closed eyes and an upturned head, as though channeling his wisdom from above. “The twinned desires of narrative and of capitalism. The populist author entices the ravenous reader via withheld information to keep him wanting more and more, just as the free market promises additional capital to seduce the never-satisfied worker. To quote Blake, ‘Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained . . .’ Anyone know the rest? TFs?”
    One of the graduate teaching fellows who had helped hand outthe syllabus spoke up from the back of the room. “ ‘And the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling,’ ” he recited behind a trim sandy beard and tortoiseshell glasses. “ ‘And being restrain’d, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire.’ ”
    At the end of the lecture Samuelson announced that those planning on taking the class should sign up online for one of the four graduate student–led weekly discussion sections. I had no way of knowing which one you’d be in—assuming you even remained in the course.
    You slipped out ahead of me. By the time I exited the building you were traversing the Yard, your over-the-shoulder bag—its handsomely distressed leather standing out in a sea of gaudily zippered backpacks and nonprofit-logoed totes—rhythmically colliding against your hip.
    I stopped and prodded at my phone when you crossed paths with one of your dining hall friends, a sharp-faced, nearly translucent girl with blond hair (Jen Pelletier, East Eighty-Seventh Street in New York; a fellow alumna of the Chapin School). You each pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, in defiance of the Yard’s ­tobacco-free policy. That was the end of your competitive running days, I surmised, not without some disappointment; I liked imagining you extricating yourself from your social circle to log hours on a chilly outdoor track, the masochistic introversion of the