The Book of George E-Book

Kate Greathead

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A smart, funny and surprisingly moving read for fans of Dolly Alderton' THE I PAPER 'A commercial-literary gem for fans of Kiley Reid, Curtis Sittenfeld and Alison Espach' PANDORA SYKES 'If you're honest, you'll admit that you've raised George or dated George or, worse, you are George' WASHINGTON POST 'This book is a knockout' MARIA SEMPLE 'An excellent novel...as convincing as it is moving' ADELLE WALDMAN 'Perceptive, funny and tender' ALISON ESPACH We all know a George. He's the kind of guy who's brimming with potential but incapable of following through; he doesn't know if he's in love with his girlfriend, but he certainly likes having her around; he's distant from - but still reliant on - his mother; he swears he'll finish his novel one day. Sure, you might find him disappointing. But no one is more disappointed in George than George himself. As funny as it is astute and as singular as it is universal, The Book of George is a deft, unexpectedly moving never-coming-of-age tale and a portrait of one man, but also countless others.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY KATE GREATHEADLaura & Emma

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Henry Holt and Co., an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Kate Greathead, 2024

The moral right of Kate Greathead to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 324 5

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 325 2

EBook ISBN: 978 1 80546 326 9

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Teddy

You are not an evil human; you are not without intellect and education; you have everything that could make you a credit to human society. Moreover, I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.

—Johanna Schopenhauer in a letter to her son,

Arthur Schopenhauer, November 6, 1807

1. THE SHOPPING PROBLEM

George, 12–18

To George’s D.A.R.E. graduation in the Cochran Gym, his father wore a suit. The suit hadn’t registered as embarrassing to George, who couldn’t even remember what it looked like when he overheard his mother mention it to a friend on the phone later that week, but from her derisive tone in describing it—custom-made, seersucker, J. Press—he understood that there was something inherently foolish about it. Or perhaps it was his father’s wearing it to such a silly occasion: George and his classmates on the bleachers singing a song about abstaining from drugs and alcohol, the culmination of the substance-abuse unit of their seventh-grade health class.

George struggled to grasp the nuances of his mother’s contempt, but it was the beginning of his awareness of a problem in his parents’ marriage that had to do with his father’s love of expensive clothes.

Ellen didn’t discuss it with her kids, but she wasn’t exactly sotto voce when venting to her friends on the phone, and there were certain cutting remarks that George wished he hadn’t heard. Not normal. Shopping the way a woman shops—a woman with a shopping problem.

It was hard for George to imagine his mother having any vices. Ellen, who wore very little makeup and had let her hair go gray, rolled her eyes when people referred to her as beautiful, but she maintained the body of the ballet dancer she’d been in her youth and there was an awareness of her own grace in the way she moved. Her posture could be forbidding. She had a way of silently materializing at the threshold of her children’s rooms at incriminating moments, though she rarely intervened beyond expressing her opinion.

“It’s just not very attractive,” she’d told Cressida the first time she’d caught her smoking.

George recalled, as a young child, a tender, involved mother, but as he got older she withdrew. By the time he and Cressida were teenagers, Ellen seemed to view them as fully formed people who were going to do what they were going to do. She supported their endeavors and applauded their successes, but their accomplishments were not a particular source of pride for her. Nor was she inclined to interpret their struggles as a referendum on her mothering.

Denis had always been the more parental of the two, though between working and commuting, he was not around as much.

* * *

“Do you ever think how random it is, that Mom and Dad are married?” Cressida asked George as they rifled through a gift basket someone had sent their parents, who’d just left for JFK. It was their twentieth wedding anniversary, and they would be spending a week in London. Cressida, who was living with friends in a house upstate after finishing her first year at Bard, had come home so that George, who had just turned fourteen, wouldn’t be in the house alone.

George shook his head as he examined a furry brown specimen that turned out to be a dried apricot.

“It’s pretty random.” Cressida used her teeth to uncork a bottle of champagne.

The sun was setting, and the kitchen was slathered in electric orange. For the third day in a row the temperature had been over ninety, and the house was ripe with the musk of heat-saturated materials, old rugs and cedar closets, Ellen’s acrylics. The upholstered window seat was still warm, almost hot to the touch.

“We should go swimming in Sugar Pond,” George said.

Cressida rejected the proposal with a flared nostril.

“That’s disgusting,” she said as he dipped a prune into a jar of olive tapenade, mistaking it for chocolate.

“It’s good,” George claimed, too proud to admit otherwise.

* * *

That evening, Cressida had some college friends over. Like her high school crowd, they were not friendly and dressed in mostly black. They slept over, and the following afternoon more arrived. They kept trickling in, an unsavory cast of characters who regarded George with sardonic amusement—hey, little brother—on the rare occasion they acknowledged him at all.

George did his best to avoid them as they colonized various rooms of the house, eating and drinking and smoking.

The second night, as George was reading in bed, his bedroom door creaked open and one of them entered. She was shockingly skinny, with a shaved head and septum ring, but her most arresting feature was her eyes: a metallic gleam in her irises that must have been colored contacts. There was something fantastically sinister about the effect. Demonic. Earlier that day, George had caught himself staring at her as he ate a bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter.

Perhaps she’d taken it the wrong way.

George said nothing as she stripped down to her underpants and climbed into his bed. Her primitively angular breasts and hips that jutted out like spears were the first he’d encountered. They kept their underwear on, but the experience left George unsettled, and even a little depressed.

“How was your night?” Cressida asked with a knowing smile when he came downstairs the next morning.

* * *

George spent the next few nights at his friend Pete’s. On Thursday he returned to change his clothes. He was surprised to discover the driveway, which had been jammed with cars belonging to Cressida’s friends, was now clear. The house was still a mess, but quiet. His mother’s suitcase was at the bottom of the stairs.

Ellen was in the kitchen, leaning over the sink, drinking straight from the faucet.

The countertops were covered with dishes, takeout containers, liquor bottles, things that were not ashtrays but were filled with cigarette butts. Open cabinets revealed bare shelves. The gift basket remained in the center of the kitchen table like a disemboweled carcass, its wicker skeleton surrounded by empty tins, tufts of paper confetti, pistachio shells, and husks of cellophane.

The late afternoon sun embalmed the tableau in a listless copper glaze.

“I thought you weren’t getting back till Saturday,” George said.

“Five nights was enough,” Ellen said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand as she turned off the water.

“Where’s Dad?”

“He’s still there.”

George was confused. “In London? By himself?”

Ellen nodded. “He’s fine. He’s having a good time, doing what he likes to do.” She smiled wanly. “He really likes to shop.”

To hear her put it like this, without the snideness she adopted on the phone with her friends, was disconcerting.

“Sounds like a midlife crisis,” George said with chipper authority.

He associated the term with New Yorker cartoons and sitcoms. He’d hoped the comment would inject the mood with a little levity.

But Ellen seemed to give it earnest consideration.

She started talking about how Denis never made partner at his law firm. He had gone through life feeling in the shadow of taller, more charismatic men. Men who weren’t necessarily as smart, hardworking, or loyal as he was, but who had a certain swagger that earned them respect and credibility, resulting in opportunities that Denis felt he’d been denied.

“He doesn’t feel very good about himself,” she concluded, “and there’s no question that the shopping has to do with that.”

* * *

Ellen, whose family had money, had a small trust, to which Denis had access. That fall she discovered that he had secretly been dipping into it to pay off credit card debt he had amassed shopping for clothes. George made a point of being out of the house the Sunday his father moved out. When he returned that evening, George was relieved to find that Denis hadn’t taken much; the house didn’t feel very different.

Ellen set the table for two and defrosted a lasagna for dinner. Just as they sat down to eat, the doorbell rang.

“It’s probably just a Seventh-day Adventist,” Ellen said as George got up to answer it.

It was Denis.

The two hadn’t exchanged a word about his moving out, or any of it. George hoped he wasn’t about to initiate some kind of conversation now.

“I forgot to buy silverware, and everything’s closed,” Denis said.

George had recently surpassed Denis in height, and the difference was exaggerated by his standing in the house, which was higher than the stoop, where it appeared Denis planned to remain.

He waited outside while George went to the kitchen, opened the silverware drawer, and plucked out a fork, a knife, and a spoon.

“You can give him more than that,” Ellen said. George took out another fork, spoon, knife, and then whatever they had duplicates of: garlic press, carrot peeler, corkscrew.

“What’s this?” George held up an instrument.

“Lemon zester,” Ellen said. “He can have that.”

George put everything in a ziplock bag and returned to the front door.

“This is more than I need,” Denis said as George passed him the bounty. “I was thinking just a fork and spoon to hold me over.”

“Mom said to give you more,” George said.

“Oh. Okay. Well, thank you. I’ll bring it back.”

“Just keep it,” George told him. “We don’t need it.”

Denis looked as if he were about to protest.

“It’s fine,” George said. “But I should go back in. We’re in the middle of dinner.”

George hadn’t meant to sound cold.

“Thanks,” Denis said, holding up the bag like a prize.

“Enjoy,” George responded, and shut the door.

Enjoy.

* * *

When George heard himself say something that was not natural, that sounded like something someone else would say, it troubled him. His goal in life was to be authentic, no matter the consequences. It was the subject of his college essay. After procrastinating, he wrote the whole thing in a single sitting two nights before applications were due to be postmarked.

When he was done, he didn’t let anyone read it over, lest he be susceptible to their opinions and suggestions. To alter what he’d written seemed disingenuous, at odds with the spirit of his essay.

George didn’t get into either of his top-choice colleges.

“It used to be anyone could get into Harvard or Yale,” Ellen told him. “Things are different now. Much more competitive.”

George knew he shouldn’t be surprised—in the middle of tenth grade he’d pretty much stopped doing homework—but still, it felt like a slight when he wasn’t accepted to a single Ivy.

* * *

Later that month, Ellen took the kids to Bermuda, their first trip without Denis. The weather was terrible, and they spent most of the time inside their cottage. Mostly they read books, but sometimes George and Cressida watched TV in one of their rooms.

One afternoon they watched the show Jackass. In one sketch a guy goes to a restaurant and orders a vegetarian platter. After being served he furtively procures a log of human feces he’d brought with him, deposits it on his food, and then summons the waiter to complain that there’s something on his plate that looks like a sausage. George noticed Ellen standing in the doorway, looking bewildered.

“What happened to this country?” she asked.

Cressida laughed, but George was embarrassed. He’d always felt implicated in his mother’s disgust with lowbrow contemporary culture, as though he were somehow responsible for it by being a member of the generation it was directed toward.

“I’m going for a walk,” Ellen told her kids. “In case either of you wants to come . . .”

She lingered.

“Well, okay,” she said, and turned to go.

“I’ll come,” George said, getting up.

The rain had stopped, but the sky remained bleak.

At the bottom of the path that led to the water, Ellen removed her sandals and placed them neatly beside each other. George kept his sneakers on as he followed her down the beach.

A breeze frisked her linen skirt, revealing the contours of her legs.

She took long, purposeful strides, occasionally leaning down to pick up a shell, which she gingerly deposited in the breast pocket of her shirt.

When they reached the end of the cove, George assumed that was it, but Ellen scaled a barrier of large rocks to access the next beach.

“Mom.” George pointed to a sign that read THIS BEACH IS FOR THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF GUESTS OF CLOVER COVE BEACH CLUB. PLEASE TURN AROUND.

Ellen shrugged and continued walking. George followed.

Eventually they turned around. When they reached the spot where Ellen had left her sandals, she sat down.

“This is where I learned that Dad was afraid of the ocean,” she said, hugging her knees to her chest. George sat down beside her.

“You came here with Dad?”

Ellen nodded. The wind was blowing her hair in her face.

“Right after I discovered I was pregnant with Cress. The weather was perfect. Sunny. Warm. It was the first time I’d been to the beach with Denis, and he never said anything about not liking the ocean, but as the week unfolded, I noticed he never went in deeper than his thighs. ‘I’m a pool guy,’ he kept saying.

“One afternoon I swam out, and as he stood on the beach watching me, I pretended that I was in trouble. That I needed him to rescue me.”

“You pretended that you were drowning?” It was hard to imagine her doing this.

“I pretended that I had a cramp and needed help getting back in. Do you know what he did next?” Ellen looked at George. “He ran to get the lifeguard. Who was about half a mile down the beach.

“I was pregnant.”

George nodded. She’d included this detail already.

“Afterwards, instead of apologizing, or admitting the shame I’m sure he’d felt, he told me about that dream he had as a kid.”

“The ocean dream,” George said.

“The reincarnation one,” Ellen said dryly.

Growing up, Denis had had a recurring dream that he was on a beach when the tide abruptly receded. Where the ocean had been became a silky carpet of sand strewn with rocks and shells and thatches of seaweed. The beach was full of people, and there was an air of adventure as they all began walking out toward the horizon. When Denis first heard screaming in the distance, he assumed it was from excitement, but then he noticed that the people farthest up ahead had turned around and were running back in the direction they’d come. Behind them, a wall of water was advancing.

Denis, who believed in reincarnation, claimed he’d begun having the dream before he knew what a tsunami was. He speculated that it was a memory from a previous life. This explained his dread of the ocean.

As a child, George had been fascinated by the story. Enchanted. Spooked. He shared his father’s interest in things that could not be explained.

But now he understood his mother’s contempt. On top of its being ridiculous and self-mythologizing, to think that it justified such cowardly behavior.

* * *

The evening before their flight home, the sky cleared. They got dressed for dinner. As they approached the main house, a chorus of male voices singing “Runaround Sue” carried through the French doors. An a cappella group from Yale was performing in the dining room.

“Are they going to be singing all night?” Cressida asked the maître d’ as he showed them to their table.

“They’ll take breaks,” the man answered.

Ellen asked if they could sit at one of the tables outside.

“We should’ve always eaten out here,” she said as they were led to a flagstone terrace overlooking the water.

“It was raining,” Cressida reminded her.

As a waiter filled their water glasses, Ellen asked Cressida if she’d called Denis.

Cressida nodded conspiratorially.

“Was he upset?” Ellen wanted to know.

Cressida shrugged. “He understands,” she said quietly.

“What are you talking about?” George asked.

Ellen looked at Cressida, who took a long drink of water.

“That house Denis rented over Memorial Day weekend”—Ellen put on her reading glasses to look at the menu—“it turns out Cressida has a concert that Saturday, so it’ll just be you and Dad.”

“A concert?” George was incredulous. “You’re skipping the trip to go to a concert?”

“She’s in the concert,” Ellen explained. “She’s performing.”

“It’s my friends’ band,” Cressida said. “I’m filling in for the vocalist.”

“You’re singing in a band? Since when do you sing?”

Cressida glowered. “I’ve always sang.”

“You got kicked out of middle school chorus,” George reminded her.

“That’s because of what happened on the Disney World trip. That had nothing to do with my singing ability.”

“That was a fun phone call to get as a parent,” Ellen said drolly. “Never thought I’d hear the words Mickey Mouse and indecent exposure in the same sentence.”

“It was a dare,” Cressida said. “The whole thing was totally overblown. I was fourteen. I barely had tits.”

The waiter came to take their orders.

“What happened to the vocalist?” George asked Cressida when he’d left. “The one you’re filling in for?”

“She has to go to a wedding,” Ellen answered for her.

“Her sister’s getting married.” Cressida emptied a packet of sugar onto her bread plate and, using the dull end of a butter knife, began pushing it around, divvying it up like lines of cocaine.

“Where’s the wedding?” George asked.

“Why do you care?”

“Where is it?”

“You think I’m making this up!” Cressida’s jaw dropped in theatrical outrage.

And now George knew for sure she was making it up, because this was her strategy in these situations, to feign outrage at having her credibility questioned. It almost always worked. Flustered, beleaguered, her interrogator backed off.

“What’s the band called?” George asked.

“The Angry Pussy,” Cressida said.

Ellen looked out at the water. “Well, this is pleasant.”

She patted George’s wrist. “It’ll be nice for you and Dad to spend some alone time together.”

The prospect of spending a three-day weekend alone with his father in a stranger’s house in a random town in Pennsylvania filled George with dread and anxiety. That Cressida had managed to weasel her way out was infuriating. Typical and infuriating.

Cressida left the table to have a cigarette. She sat on a stone bench at the edge of the lawn. George watched one of the a cappella guys approach her. He could tell from her embarrassed smile that the guy was asking her something. And that she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but the answer was no.

Ellen also noticed.

“He’s handsome,” she said when Cressida returned to the table.

Cressida rolled her eyes. “He invited me to hang out with them on the beach after.”

Ellen smiled. “You should go.”

“Are you kidding? You think I want to hang out with those herbs?”

“Herbs?” Ellen said.

“Dorks,” George translated.

Their drinks arrived.

“Thanks for paying for all this, Mom,” Cressida said, licking the salt off the rim of her mojito. “It’s got to be really expensive.”

“It’s nice to take a vacation together,” Ellen said. “Even if the weather was crummy, I’m glad we did it.”

“How much did Dad take from that fund?” Cressida asked, as though the question had just occurred to her.

When Ellen had made the discovery three years earlier, she’d refused to disclose the amount, but tonight she said, “You really want to know?”

George did not, so Ellen wrote the figure on a piece of paper, which she passed across the table to Cressida, who looked impressed.

“Man loves his clothes,” she said, popping an olive in her mouth.

George pointed to the horizon. “Is that a UFO or an airplane?”

“It’s a UFO, George,” Cressida said. “You found one. Congratulations.” She turned to Ellen. “Mom, would you have been as upset if Dad had spent the money on something other than clothes? Like what if he’d had a thing for boats, or power tools?”

Ellen looked taken aback. “I’m not sure what you’re insinuating, but in fact he did spend the money on more than just clothes.”

She paused deliberatively.

“He also used the money,” she said, “to pay for a hair transplant.”

“A hair transplant?” Cressida repeated.

Ellen nodded. “He was very concerned about his receding hairline.” The skin above her upper lip crinkled; she was trying to restrain a smile.

“How exactly does a hair transplant work?” Cressida asked. “Like, where does the hair come from, and how do they attach it to the skin?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellen.

George rotated his chair so that it faced the ocean rather than the table.

“But is it from another part of his body, so his scalp doesn’t reject it? Like, is it from his back? He has a lot of hair on his—”

“Let’s discuss this later,” Ellen said crisply. “It’s upsetting George.”

She reached over and patted his head. “Don’t worry. Balding comes from the maternal grandfather. You won’t have that problem.”

George wasn’t worried about losing his own hair. He had so much of it. Had been born with it. His whole life, people had commented, Nice hair. So thick. What a waste on a boy!

George wasn’t worried. He was bewildered. He’d never known anyone who’d gotten a hair transplant. It wasn’t something people they knew did. It didn’t even sound like a real thing. A hair transplant. Had it not occurred to his father that getting a hair transplant was infinitely more embarrassing than losing his hair?

Their food arrived. George rotated his chair back to the table, though he wasn’t very hungry.

For the past few years, his sadness over his parents’ divorce had been complicated by the embarrassment of what had triggered it, a tender little knot of grief and shame—what kind of a father had a shopping problem?—but with this new revelation, his feelings coalesced into something more definitive. Something cold and hard. A stone he could pick up and hurl into the ocean.

“Fuck,” George said.

Ellen held a finger over her mouth. A well-dressed elderly couple had just been seated at the next table.

“Fuck,” George repeated in a whisper. “I just remembered that I signed up to volunteer at Kids’ Day.”

“What’s Kids’ Day?” Ellen asked.

“It’s like field day for kids with special needs. There are obstacle courses. Team-building exercises. That kind of thing.”

Ellen’s brow rose. “And what’s the problem?”

“It’s Memorial Day weekend,” George said. “I forgot that it was the weekend Dad was renting the house.”

“Is this something that your school does every year?” Ellen asked. “I’ve never heard about it before.”

“It’s an annual event.” George chewed his lower lip. “I mean, it’s been happening since I was a freshman . . .”

Ellen stayed silent.

“Not really sure when it started,” he added with a shrug.

“I remember it,” Cressida spoke up. “It was around in my time.”

“And did you participate?” Ellen asked.

Cressida shook her head. “I wanted to, I was going to, but they made you sign up a few months in advance, and they made this big deal that you had to be one hundred percent sure you could make it, because each student gets paired with one special-needs kid, and there has to be the same number, and so you couldn’t back out.”

“It was too big of a commitment,” Ellen said.

Cressida nodded. “You remember how I was in high school.”

George appreciated Cressida’s corroboration.

“Well.” Ellen sighed. “Poor Denis. I hate to think of him going there all alone.”

This was directed at George. She knew he was lying, but, rather than call his bluff, she was trying to manipulate him into feeling sorry for Denis. She was going to let him get away with the lie, but not without making him feel bad about it.

And it worked. George’s relief that he wouldn’t have to spend the weekend with his father was eclipsed by a terrible sadness imagining Denis’s disappointment. George resented this; how unfair that, on top of everything, he should have to feel sorry for his father.

And then an unforgivable thought: George wished his father were dead. How much easier it would be if he never had to deal with him again.

2. CANADA

George, 18–21

The first night of college, George drank nine beers. The room he drank most of these beers in was small, and the air was thick with the odor of the bodies of his classmates who had convened in this room to get drunk—the smell of fresh sweat and pheromones, of gin from huge plastic bottles and spearmint gum. George got pressed into a corner with a guy named Benji, who had no trace of the jocky aggression that George associated with his Boston accent, and toward whom he felt an immediate affinity. As he stood there taking it all in, Benji’s expression was equal parts amused, embarrassed, and giddy, which was precisely how George felt. There was something ridiculous and cliché about the scene, but he was excited to be a part of it. At one point, George overheard someone nearby say something to the effect of “And the best part is, no curfew, no parents,” and it was clear from Benji’s expression that he had, too.

“No parents,” George said.

“No parents,” Benji repeated.

Later, Benji would take credit for the chant that quickly took hold of the room, but it was George who had initiated it—a bold move, considering how foolish he would’ve looked had it not caught on.

“No PAR-ents!” the freshmen all yelled for a good five minutes. “No PAR-ents! No PAR-ents! No PAR-ents!”

George was assigned to a triple in the only dorm on campus that had two halls segregated by gender. He had not requested this. When it came to residential preferences he distinctly remembered circling single, coed. Even worse, it had several hockey players who proudly referred to it as “the Sausage Hall.” At least he wouldn’t have to endure the awkwardness of sharing a bathroom with girls. His roommate Solomon had cited this as his reason for requesting the all-male hall.

Solly (as he went by) was short and barrel-chested, with an impressively thick beard and a collection of oversize T-shirts featuring the names of concerts and music festivals he’d attended. Among the possessions he’d brought with him to college was a special cereal bowl that had a built-in straw to drink the leftover milk. Solly knew a lot about a lot of things and was an enthusiastic dispenser of obscure facts and trivia—except in the company of girls, when he fell mute. He spoke to his parents every evening, providing them with a detailed account of his day, from impressions of his professors to what he’d eaten for dinner. After getting off the phone with his parents, Solly would share dispatches from their days with whoever was in the room, referring to them by their first names and depicting them with reverent amusement: “And then Miriam tells Ira, ‘To think your grandfather spent his days peddling peanuts on a corner of Flatbush so you could sit around in your underwear criticizing society!’”

Solly was very proud of the fact that his father was a newspaper columnist.

George’s other roommate, Jeremiah, was not particularly proud of his father, George gleaned from his curt answers to questions about what he did (real estate) and the kind of person he was (“You know, he’s of another generation”). He had just turned eighty, and Jeremiah was the youngest of his five offspring, a product of his third marriage, to a former elementary school teacher who was now a member of various boards. George respected Jeremiah’s detached critical assessment of his socialite parents and his privileged Manhattan upbringing—which was not something he was eager to brandish as central to his identity, unlike the other city kids in their freshmen class who had self-segregated the very first day, dressing like one another and trafficking in insider references.

The first few days of the semester, Jeremiah was often mistaken for Solly, which George thought was odd, since to him they looked quite different. Jeremiah also had a beard, but it was much more kempt, and he was taller and a preppy dresser. On occasions when the two of them got confused, or were told they could be brothers, Jeremiah did not look pleased. George had observed a tensing of his jaw, a subtle sharpening of his features.

He had come to this school for the film program. “It’s one of the top film programs in the country,” he told George, who hadn’t known this and was a little surprised a university in Connecticut would have this distinction.

Jeremiah had to have things a certain way. He was a meticulous bed-maker and no one was allowed to sit on it. He got mad when someone ate his food, especially if they ripped the packaging “like an animal” or finished off the last of something without disposing of the container. It didn’t take long for the roommates’ polite accord to dissolve into the playfully contentious rapport of the familiar. Jeremiah was not amused when he returned from taking a shower one morning to discover George in his bed, an assortment of crumpled food wrappers scattered over the blanket (Solly’s touch).

As George emerged from his sheets, Jeremiah pointed to his feet. “You know there’s something called a nail clipper, and it was invented for a reason.”

George found that the type of bond that took months or even years to develop in other contexts happened much faster in college, nurtured by proximity and the inherent lowbrow comedy of campus life: cafeteria dining, the herdlike shuffling from this location to that, the absurd intimacy of dorm living—taking a shit in a stall while a few feet away someone brushed their teeth. There was a collective self-mythologizing that took place in Foss 7 room 114. In the generation of nicknames, the accumulation of private jokes, the ritualistic recapping of the previous night’s drunken escapades, there was a sense of laying the groundwork of a communal psychic landscape—through which their future selves would roam, pining, Oh, to be back in college!

Jeremiah was a true cinephile. He knew films, he appreciated their technical craft, and it did not feel affected. He didn’t dress the part or drop last names of obscure directors or unnecessarily say things like “mise-en-scène,” which was the one esoteric movie term George knew. He was shocked to learn that neither Solly nor George had ever seen The King of Comedy. He owned the DVD and played it for them on his computer.

In the first twenty minutes of the film he pressed pause several times to relay some piece of trivia. George found this distracting and asked him to stop, but Jeremiah couldn’t help himself. Sometimes he’d pause just to repeat his favorite lines.

“‘He’s touching everything, he’s ruining the house!’”

“That was funny,” George conceded.

“Yeah, and he improvised that line. Also, the part where he has trouble opening the front door wasn’t in the script. He really couldn’t open the door, and he just went with it.”

At the end, Jeremiah marveled, “Completely anticipates the modern fantasy of mediated fame.”

George was envious of his ability to summarize it so pithily.

* * *

The second morning of classes, a plane crashed into a tower of the World Trade Center. And then another plane crashed into the other tower.

There was a room in the campus center with a giant screen featuring live news coverage. George stood in the mass of students watching. The screen was so tall that you had to crane your neck to look up, creating the impression of standing on the street below the burning towers. At one point something fell from above, and at first George thought it was a part of the building, a piece of debris, but it was a person. Everyone saw it. There was a sort of collective groan in the room. A low, guttural sound, like a large animal in the final throes of painful death. More than the image of the first tower collapsing—which would happen a few minutes later—George would be haunted by the memory of this sound.

When the second tower collapsed, George headed to his dorm to call home, but Jeremiah had beaten him to the phone. “I’ve got a lot of people to check on,” he said, when George asked how long it would be. George returned to the campus center, where there was a line to use the pay phones. Everyone was eager to call their family. The line was long and moving very slowly. A dean approached and asked if anyone in line was from Manhattan. Anyone with relatives in New York City was invited to come with her.

George, whose father worked in the city, though not downtown, followed the dean into the science center, where a bank of phones had been set up in the corner of the lobby. There was no line to use these phones, and George felt a kind of numb panic as he dialed Denis’s office number. Since George’s departure for college, Denis had left several messages, but George had not called him back. He was a shitty son.

The call did not go through. There wasn’t a busy signal, just silence. The dean told George to keep trying. “So many people are calling New York, the system can’t keep up,” she said.

George kept hanging up and dialing. He thought of a bike accident he’d had when he was five. George had face-planted in the driveway. There was lots of blood. After carrying him inside and cleaning him off, Denis had removed several low-hanging mirrors, concerned that George would be further traumatized by his wounded appearance, a gesture Ellen had found hilarious.

Eventually George got through. Hearing Denis’s voice, George worried he might cry.

“Don’t worry,” Denis said. “The worst is over.”

But it wasn’t over. When he got off the phone, George learned that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

* * *

For a little while things felt grim, uncertain. Planes were grounded. There was talk of war, of being drafted.

“I guess this makes us the new greatest generation,” Solly said.

Off campus, American flags proliferated like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and the shop windows of Main Street were plastered with signs featuring the likeness of Osama bin Laden and the words WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. Solly, mistaken for a Middle Easterner, was refused service at a local barbershop.

It all felt a bit surreal and at odds with the levity of being a freshman in college.

One Friday night, when they were pregaming in the girls’ hall, George got bored. He’d drunk three beers and was ready to go out. One of the girls in the room they were in had converted her desk into a vanity table. Amid the clutter of beauty products, George spotted a bottle of talcum powder. When no one was looking, he picked it up, twisted the top open, and gave it a shake. A cloud of white powder descended upon the group. “Anthrax!” he shouted. There was a silence, and then everyone laughed.

An irreverent hilarity persevered. In a way, it felt like a kind of patriotism, to carry on as if nothing had happened, or else, as people were now fond of saying, the terrorists had won.

* * *

Jeremiah was obsessed with the teaching assistant in his Introduction to Film class. If he recognized that it would never happen, that didn’t stop him from talking about her and her resemblance to Monica Vitti. Her likeness was so striking that Jeremiah, paranoid that others might overhear them discussing her, insisted they change her nickname from Vitti to Lewinsky.

They had private nicknames for lots of people, some people in their dorm, others they’d never spoken to but who were hard to miss. Queen Frostine, Belligerent Mike, Creepy Mike, Dollface, Russian Spy, Punky Brewster, Hot Mormon, Friendly McGee.

“Odds are we have nicknames, too,” Solly mused. “And we’ll never know what they are.”

Within room 114, George was known as “Half Jew.” Both Solly and Jeremiah, who were fully Jewish, had been surprised to learn George was Jewish on his father’s side.

“You don’t look Jewish at all,” Carrie Michaels agreed. “Not even Jewish-ish.”

Carrie lived upstairs. She was always forgetting her key and having to climb through their window, which was on the first floor. She had a little dog, Frankie, that she took everywhere she could get away with.

Sometimes she lingered, sitting on Solly’s beanbag chair and talking about whatever was on her mind.

“If I’m fat and single at thirty-five, please do me a favor and euthanize me,” she said one afternoon.

“What?” she asked, looking at George. “Does it make me an antifeminist that I have certain biological urges?”

“I didn’t say anything,” George said.

“Thirty-five isn’t even that old,” said Solly. “My parents met when they were thirty-eight and forty.”

“Well, I plan on having a bunch of kids,” Carrie explained, “so I need to start earlier.”

“How many kids do you plan on having?” Jeremiah asked.

“Six.”

“Six,” Jeremiah repeated. “Are you not concerned with overpopulation?”

“We’re going to have a low carbon footprint, we’re going to live on a farm,” she said. “My husband’s going to be this hot carpenter, and while he’s out chopping wood, I’ll be all barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, baking bread, sewing our own clothes . . .”

“A lot of women have that fantasy,” Solly remarked with authority. “Back to the land.”

“Are you saying I’m a cliché?” Carrie stood up, clutching Frankie under her arm, to make one of her theatrical exits. There was a tear in the back of her skirt, and she wasn’t wearing any underwear, and as she strode across the room you could see a slice of her butt, which was somehow more shocking than if you’d been able to see the whole thing. It wasn’t erotic—more embarrassing that she didn’t know.

Then again, maybe she did. You never knew with Carrie.

* * *

George did not get confused with his roommates, or anyone else. He was someone people noticed and approached, acknowledged and remembered. He suspected part of the reason for this was a benign eye condition that required him to wear an eye patch for the first several weeks of the semester. He’d been given the choice between a black patch and a flesh-colored sticker, but Cressida had convinced him to go for the less discreet option.

“I feel like a kid dressing up as a pirate,” he said.

“Trust me, you look cool,” she said. “People will be like, ‘Who’s that?’”

* * *

In October, George was invited to join a secret society. The first meeting took place in an underground tunnel. George and several other recruits were escorted to the location by a guy wearing a fedora and holding a rifle. A BB gun, George assumed. When they arrived at the club’s headquarters, a dimly lit graffitied cement dungeon, they were told to sit on the floor. The perimeter of the room was lined with old couches, upon which sat the members of the club. George had assumed these would consist of a motley cross section of campus characters—roller skate girl, tambourine man, the nude saxophonist, those guys who stayed up all night playing poker in the laundry room—but the people on the couches were all run-of-the-mill hipsters. They’d mistaken George for one of their own because of his eye patch.

“Not my thing,” George told Jeremiah when he got back.

Jeremiah was irate. “Are you kidding? You don’t turn something like this down. Things like this could get you things later in life. Professionally speaking . . .”

Jeremiah’s initial bitterness over being snubbed himself had subsided. Now he wanted George to be a member so he could enjoy the benefits by proxy.

“Not doing it,” George said.

“You’re an idiot,” Jeremiah said.

But Carrie nodded approvingly. “That’s a punk move,” she said. “Not joining society or a secret society.”

* * *

“The problem with improv is the people who do it aren’t funny,” Jeremiah remarked on the way back from an improv show.

Solly, who’d made them go to the show, began to protest, but George agreed with this statement. “Look at me, I’m a clinically depressed penis going through airport security . . .”

Without overthinking it, George did an impression of a clinically depressed penis going through airport security, complaining about having to take off its shoes and get searched, and it was very funny—much funnier than anything in the show. It was so funny, George was inspired to try it out on a larger audience at a party later that night. It was a hit, a real crowd-pleaser. People loved it, even those he’d never have expected to be susceptible to such lowbrow humor, such as George’s poetry TA, Rose—whom he had a crush on. Everyone had a crush on Rose, whose dimpled, freckled beauty was accentuated by a distracted, sad look in her eyes. But at George’s impression of a clinically depressed penis going through airport security, she laughed. And there was a brightening in her eyes as she talked to George afterward. They went outside for a cigarette, and then headed to another party, and when George woke up in her bed the next morning—never had he imagined!—she asked him to do it again.

* * *

George didn’t understand why it was a big deal that Jeremiah got an A minus in his Introduction to Film midterm until Solly explained, “In order to major in film, you have to get an A in Introduction to Film, and now that’s impossible.”

Jeremiah was lying in bed with his shoes on. His eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling.

“But it’s one test,” George said. “Can’t he talk to the professor?”

“Could you be quiet?” Jeremiah said. “I’m trying to take a nap.”

George walked over to Solly’s side of the room. “I’m sure they make exceptions,” he whispered.

Solly shook his head solemnly. “It’s a strict policy. It’s to weed out the poseurs.”

“But Jeremiah’s not a poseur.”

Solly nodded, looking remorseful. “Life’s a bitch.”

Jeremiah slept through dinner and the rest of the night.

The next morning, Solly tried to give him a pep talk. George did his impression of a penis going through airport security. Carrie told him the department was overrated, that it was actually UCLA that had the best film program in the country.

Jeremiah wasn’t having any of it. He was angry, distraught, depressed. For a few days he didn’t make his bed. He barely got out of it.

On Friday, Solly tried to get him to go to a screening of an alumnus’s film in the campus theater. A low-budget indie about an autistic boy who gets lost in the New York subway system. Afterward there’d be a Q and A. Jeremiah said, “I’d rather stick a needle in my eye.”

Solly was worried. One night when Jeremiah was in the bathroom, he left a flyer with the number of a suicide hotline on his pillow.

This pissed Jeremiah off. “Fuck you, I’m not planning to kill myself.” He crumpled up the paper and tossed it across the room, where it landed in the trash bin.

“Nice shot,” George said.

“Maybe I’ll join the NBA,” he said dryly. “First Jew in the NBA.”

A few weeks passed, and slowly Jeremiah began to become his old self again. One day he announced that he would double major in sociology and English.

“You don’t have to choose your major for another year,” Solly reminded him. “It’s not like you have to decide now.”

“What’s wrong with sociology and English?”

“Nothing,” Solly said. “It’s a respectable choice.”

* * *

As a sophomore, George lived in a condo-style dorm on the edge of campus with Solly, Jeremiah, and Benji, whom they’d befriended during their year on the Sausage Hall. It was an upgrade; they each had their own room, and there was a kitchen and a common room that came with an oversize pleather sofa the previous occupants had left behind.

Carrie Michaels lived across campus but occasionally swung by to ask Benji if he could spare a Ritalin. Once she knocked on George’s door to loan him a book of poetry she thought he’d appreciate: Actual Air by David Berman.

“I don’t know why, but it made me think of you,” she said. “Read it and let me know what you think.”

George, who’d never discussed poetry with Carrie, was flattered. The poems were very good. Direct, unpretentious, funny. They were the kind of poems that made George think he could write poetry. When he was younger he had.

George tried to write some poems, but they all felt like imitations of David Berman, and he abandoned them. Out of frustration he wrote a poem about trying to write a poem. Look out the window. / See a leaf falling. / Think an original, profound thought . . . It went on in this vein for a while. He couldn’t decide if it was brilliant or garbage, if he was talented or a hack, but its acceptance by a campus literary magazine made him consider the possibility of the former.

There was a party to celebrate the publication. It was a distinctly literary crowd, and after feeling a little alienated, George had a few drinks and found himself engaged in some interesting intellectual conversations. As the evening progressed he began to wonder if these were his real people and who he’d be had he fallen in with them as a freshman. From afar it was easy to deride the members of this scene as affected, as trying too hard, but how much of that was based on their easily stereotyped hipster aesthetic? His own cohort’s lack of a coherent group identity suddenly seemed pathetic. What did George and his friends have in common beyond being lumped together in the same dorm when they were eighteen? What made them special?

When he got back to his apartment, it was empty except for Dominic, a kid who lived down the street whom they’d somehow gotten to know and who came over a few times a week. He was playing Xbox.

“Dominic,” George said, taking a seat on the futon next to him. “Of all the apartments in Low Rise, why do you choose to hang out at ours?”

Dominic didn’t respond.

“Like Gabe and his buddies across the patio, they’re nice guys. Why don’t you go to their place? And the girls in C who are always baking vegan desserts . . .”

Dominic ignored him as he continued playing.

“Dominic, you’re being rude. I’m asking you a question. Pause the game. Why do you come over here? What do we have on everyone else?”

Dominic paused the game.

“You have an Xbox,” he said.

“That’s it?” George asked. “Just an Xbox?”

“You always have Double Stuf, too,” Dominic said.

“C’mon.” George was getting frustrated. “Anything else? Really think about it.”

Dominic thought.

“Gatorade sometimes,” he said.

“Go home, Dominic,” George told him. “It’s almost eleven. You should be in bed.”

* * *

On the eve of the day he was required to declare a major, George filled his flask and went for a walk. It was hard not to envy those who knew what they wanted to do, who made a plan and stuck to it. Solly, who wanted to work at the UN, was majoring in international studies and economics. Jeremiah, who’d spent the summer as a production assistant on the set of a documentary about rural poverty in America, had decided upon American studies, an interdisciplinary major that incorporated anthropology, English, history, religion, and sociology.