to feel pride and embarrassment over his privileges. In any conversation he sought to make it known that he did not come from a grand or protected place, but whenever he said that he felt as if he had lied. Hadn't he known money and love? Weren't his troubles, in fact, the complaints of the privileged?
“Hah-vahd,” Cody said again, pleased and disdainful. “The new crop of saviors. What are you reading there?”
Billy held up his copy of Absalom, Absalom! Cody nodded.
“The grand old man himself,” he said. “Tell me, Will, what do you love in this world?”
“What?”
“What do you love?”
Billy smiled nervously, and felt that he himself was at once desirable and slightly absurd. He wanted this man's continued attentions, not because he enjoyed them but because, if they were withdrawn—if Cody suddenly dismissed him as a dull Harvard boy—his own uncertain promise might start to wither inside him. Dullness might become a fact about him.
“Well, I love Faulkner,” he said, and his ears burned at the well-behaved insufficiency of the answer. The more he needed to fascinate this Cody, the more he found himself hating him.
“Not a book,” Cody said. “Not somebody dead. What do you love in the world, I mean the living, breathing organism?”
“I love coffee,” Billy said thoughtlessly. “I love a good sale at Kmart. Now I'm afraid I've got to go.”
Cody put his hand on Billy's forearm. His fingernails were a turgid, living pink, cut short.
“Don't go yet,” he said. “Just walk with me for a minute first. I've got a feeling about you. I need to find out if I'm right”
Billy spoke to Cody's hand. “You really are pushing it,” he said.
“Just walk with me a few blocks. Things are happening, Will. Things are clicking and turning and opening and closing all around us. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“Yes you do. Come on.”
He hesitated. Then he decided he could do this as Will, a brave, reckless figure who did not quite exist. With mingled sensations of abandon and dread, Billy paid for his coffee and walked away with Cody. The streetlights had switched themselves on, pale lemon against the pale evening sky.
“You don't really love sales at Kmart,” Cody said. “You were just being clever.”
“Well, it was a pretentious question.”
“Clever clever clever. You've got to be careful or that fancy school you go to will get you so clever and wised up and cynical that you'll think you can see through everything. You don't want to be that old.”
Cody, as he walked, put out a faint scent of wood shavings. He was a compact man who moved through his own nimbus of odors and small metallic sounds: keys in his pockets, bracelets on his wrists. Billy was nervous and faintly humiliated. He felt a swelling at his crotch. He had always known what he wanted but he couldn't imagine turning his desires into flesh and so he'd lived like an aesthete, a young disciple. He'd been a friend and a scholar and a demure object of questioning glances, thin and talkative, elusively romantic, no one's. All his congress had been with himself, a hurried business. He'd been careful about his dreams.
“I do want to be old,” he said. “And I don't see what's wrong with being clever.”
“Poison,” Cody said. “Wit and cleverness, worse for you than thirty cups of coffee. Talk about surrounding yourself with static electricity. But listen here, Will. Do you think you could love me?”
“What?”
“I think I could love you. For an hour. Maybe longer. There's no point in speaking in code. I see a purity in you I'd love to touch.”
“What?” Billy laughed. His laugh had a swaying, arid squeak.
“Don't act shocked. No is no, no is your business, but don't act like I'm asking a question you never thought of.”
“Well.” The laugh again, though he hadn't meant to laugh. “I just—”
He stopped walking. He and Cody stood in the middle of the block, with people passing around them. Ahead and to the right was a doughnut shop, part of a chain that had an outlet in Billy's hometown. He looked at the shop's bright sign, the rows of ordinary, lurid confections displayed on metal trays. He thought of his room, the books on his shelf.
“I'm staying right down the street,” Cody said. “Why don't you come up and smoke a joint with me?”
He looked at Cody's burnished, harmed face, and realized the question could answer itself. He didn't have to work at this; he didn't have to seek