Where the Body Meets Memory by David Mura

Author:David Mura [Mura, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76653-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

AFTER TWO WEEKS, five or six of the freshman girls have developed crushes on me. News like this travels quickly in a dorm, and when I hear about it, I am both exhilarated and troubled. It engenders in me a fit of schizophrenic moral quandaries, which I quickly manage to evade. I have responsibilities, I shouldn’t take advantage of my situation, I should be acting as their student adviser. I just want to be their friend. In my ponderings, I’m a bit officious and take myself too seriously. After all I’m twenty years old.

I am attracted to only two of these freshmen, and really only to Susie, but the irony of suddenly being at the center of female attention is a delight that I keep wanting to deny even as I revel in it. One woman waits outside my Yeats class to watch me pass. Others try to sit with me at lunch or dinner, though, caught in my faux romanticism, I often go off to the corner of the dining hall to sit alone, a copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems open before me. When I am talking with one of the freshman women in my room, another goes outside to see if my lights are still on. One woman tells me of a dream where I stand on a balcony and all the freshman women on the floor are calling to me and I jump into a pool of water and disappear.

One night Susie comes to me and tries to insist that she wants to be just friends. She’s not like the other girls, she’s not interested in me. Much to her consternation, I reply that she is the one I am really interested in. (Years later, she’ll tell me that when I said this, she said to herself, “Damn, I just blew it.”)

The next night, I go to On the Waterfront, with my roommate from last year, John, whose girlfriend is in France. We sit between Susie and another girl who’s interested in me.

Now we all sit in a row, watching Brando pick up the tiny glove that Eva Marie Saint has left behind, slipping its delicate leather onto his prizefighter’s knuckles, watching him later stagger across the threshold of the shipping yard, his jaw busted, gut kicked in, knees buckling beneath him. I’m as conscious of the women around me as of what’s happening on the screen.

“That was strange,” observes John afterward as we walk back to the dorm. “I kept feeling all these weird vibes going back and forth. Are you going to do anything about it?”

“I don’t know. I’m supposed to be their student adviser.”

“All last year you complained about being alone, and now you don’t want to do anything? You’re crazy. Listen, I’m going to talk to her.”

“To who?”

“To the one you’re interested in, stupid.”

Later, while I’m upstairs studying, John ends up sitting with Susie in the dorm lounge. It’s near midnight. She’s wearing her nightgown. He starts the conversation by saying that David is awkward with girls.

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