Running: A Novel by Randolph Rhett

Author:Randolph Rhett [Rhett, Randolph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-24T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The Joy of Schadenfreude

The music woke him, or rather the absence. Jim, his roommate, had just turned it off. The sex had apparently ended and it was time to sleep it off. In his final year at Yale, Henry and Jim shared a two-room suite. It was considered a great privilege to have a two-man suite, but the walls were still thin. The loud music was Jim’s attempt to cover the noises of his sexual exploits. Henry had not had sex, not for a long time. Sex eluded him, and he wondered how it was a regular part of his peers’ lives and so absent from his. That, however, didn’t mean that sex was far from his mind.

He lay in bed thinking about Claire. He hadn’t had a thought of her, let alone spoken to her, for almost three years. His brain had frozen her out. For nearly three years, she simply didn’t exist for him. He hardly recognized her when he saw her in a crowd, at a party, or crossing a courtyard going to class. No one spoke to him about her, and he had nothing tangible from his time with her. She had been just gone.

Then, unexpectedly, she came back. What began as lying in bed fantasizing about a sexual encounter with some other girl he had just met took a sudden turn. The girl morphed in his mind. Like the Cheshire Cat, first her smile and then the rest of her. The thought of Claire began to thaw.

He was on the verge of leaving school, no more a child, and he found himself taking stock. A new girl had been a respite from his growing sense of dread at graduating. But she had proven to be a brief and fleeting reprieve. He had spent the last semester and a half scrambling to boost his grades and find a way to salvage a corporate-friendly degree. A pretty sophomore had gotten drunk at a party and picked Henry as the focus of her lowered inhibitions. Nothing about her even remotely resembled Claire. She was from New Jersey. Like so many at Yale, she hammed up her “identity” so that at times she seemed to be auditioning for a reality show based on the Sopranos meet the Real Housewives. The reality was that she was from an affluent suburb named Summit, and her father had been at Yale thirty years earlier. She and Henry had shared an hour of groping and fumbling and had moved on. Now he lay in bed fantasizing of more sexual encounters with her.

And yet, somehow, this brief encounter had opened a fissure in his defenses to Claire. Atop the mountain of frustrations and failures, the vertigo had somehow broken his mental blockade and she began inhabiting his thoughts again. The failure, white hot shame, and confusion her memory provoked wilted his sense of self-worth. He lay in bed tortured by the thought that somehow, if he had only known what he was supposed to do or say, if he had known the right formula, things would have been different.

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