professors locked in conversation or dancing to Justin Timberlake in the now almost impassable foyer and the living room beyond. “Their parents gave them one.”
“The music industry isn’t that straightforward—”
Owen continued as though he hadn’t heard him. “Listen, if you really want to make art, you have to be all in. And nobody is going to give you anything. You have to take it for yourself.”
Stu stepped aside to let a couple of partygoers slip around him and out the front door. He wasn’t sure if he was being patronized or not, which made him uneasy. “Take what?”
“Whatever you need.” The writer waved his whisky. “Time. Freedom. The means of doing your creative work.”
“Just take it,” repeated Stu.
“That’s what I’m saying. Leave behind your expectations of a conventional life. Art is too important to come in second to marriage or kids. If you don’t feel that responsibility, you probably shouldn’t be making it.” Owen stepped back towards the party. “Oh, and if you don’t have a map, find someone who does.”
* * *
—
Jericho was still awake when he got back. “Did you see Sarah?” his roommate asked, bent over his desk, reading Nietzsche.
“Yes.” Stu studied Jericho’s face. It had always been hard to tell what he was thinking. His eyes were hawkish behind his glasses, and his jaw was grim. He was an Easter Island head with a pair of wire spectacles. “If you like her, why didn’t you come?”
Jericho turned the page without glancing up. “I don’t like parties.”
Stu kicked off his jeans and pulled on a pair of flannel pyjama pants. He’d stopped bothering to keep his half of the room tidy after his friend moved in. Jericho was the only person he had ever met who was a fastidious slob—who would press a shirt even as the legs of the ironing board crunched down on dried-up pens and empty Cheetos bags. “Do you think knowledge is erotic?”
“No.”
Stu slipped into bed. As his head hit the pillow, he could feel the room spinning when he closed his eyes. He was drunker than he’d thought. “Why not?”
“If it was, I’d definitely have had sex already.”
* * *
“How’s Jericho holding up?” Stu’s mother asked on the phone.
“He seems fine, Ma.” Stu returned his guitar to its stand.
“He doesn’t really know how to be in the world, does he?” she said. “He’s so sensitive.”
Stu thought she had it partly right. “Don’t you mean insensitive?”
“He feels things deeply,” his mother said. “Karen and I talk a lot. Jericho’s all she has, you know.”
“I know.” Worry had become his mother’s chosen pastime, her natural vocation—except, it seemed, when it came to her own son. After Stu turned eighteen, it was as though all of his choices had suddenly moved outside of her power to influence or even discuss. Likewise, any concern for his inner life or private doubts seemed to have evaporated. The only person who worried less about Stu was his father.
“Stuart,” he said, when Stu’s mother passed him the phone. “I hope you’re learning a lot.” His voice was gruff. Like so many men of his generation, he hadn’t learned how to carry on a telephone conversation. He half shouted, as though into a walkie-talkie or a tin can.
“Plenty,” said Stu.
“Like what?”
Stu hesitated. “Like, what is the nature of What Is? Is What Is all good? And what about What Is Not?” A short silence followed in which he felt faintly ridiculous.
“Anything you can take to the bank yet?”
Stu frowned, then remembered something that Rachel had said on the first day of class. “I’m learning how to think.”
“Uh-oh,” said his father. Stu could hear him handing the phone back to his mother. “Good thing the boy already knows how to tie his shoes.”
* * *
—
And yet, sitting in Rachel’s classroom, Stu felt a connection not to the philosophers themselves but to the followers he imagined sitting at their feet, suddenly alive to the mysteries of the universe, the mind, the soul. It was the first time in his life he had encountered thinking—the deliberate thinking of difficult thoughts—as a thing to be encouraged, rather than staved off or endured.
And with every class, he noticed that Rachel got a little more comfortable. Like a flower in the sun, as he’d written in the chorus of a song that was never quite finished.
“According to Heraclitus,” Rachel was saying, “you can’t step into the same river twice. Has anyone ever heard that saying before?”
A few people nodded in response to the question, including Sarah.