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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONEcstasy
STEVE ALMOND’s most recent essay collection is titled Not that You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (Random House). He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife and their daughter, Josephine, who recently started walking and shows no signs of ever stopping.
I’D FALLEN IN with a group of beautiful blondes. I have no clear idea how this happened. Something about a friend of a friend. Something about a party. They’d caught me on a good night, I think, and the impression had never quite worn off. They called me “Lush,” not because I drank but because, in their eyes, I embodied some verdant aspect of hope. This was a terrifically inaccurate notion, but flattering, and certainly worth preserving.
I lived that year, my second at college, in a flurry of winks and kisses, minty breath, the cream of necks and décolletage. We must have gone to classes, though I remember now only the classrooms: yellow, wooden desked, and faintly diseased, suggesting privation, the loss to be swallowed on the path to wisdom. Wisdom was something we desperately wanted, from books and lectures and so forth. It sounded sexy and protective. We had, in other words, an authentic thirst for wisdom, but it had occurred to none of us that the acquisition of wisdom might entail loss.
The real business of those years was experience: dawn confessionals and inside jokes, bouts of incompetent hedonism chased by flamboyant displays of empathy for the have-nots (whoever they were). What were we hoping for? An end to the lacerations of self, I guess. An alleviation of guilt. A single moment of emotional extravagance that would allow us to believe, wholeheartedly, in our youth. Grace.
It really happened only once, on the day we took Ecstasy, which was a new drug then, though old to the therapists. The blondes appeared at my door. “Take this,” Kath said.
“What is it?”
“Medicine.”
“Take it,” Maddie said. “We already took ours.”
“It’ll make you feel better,” Dana said.
“I’m OK how I am, really,” I said. “I’ve got to finish this paper.”
They were smiling, all three of them in loose dresses, the tops of their breasts purring with sun. The other guys on the hall hung from their doorways, cursing me softly. Then a fourth woman appeared, and the blondes began singing.
“Solange,” they sang. “Solange, Solange.” I wanted to sing it myself: Solange.
Someone said, “This is our friend Lush.”
She was pushed forward, a figure as dark as me and nearly as tall, elegantly slanted, and smiling, but quizzically, as if she had walked into the wrong wedding reception. “Hey,” she said.
I looked at Solange, trying to look away at the same time. I was desperate in that moment not to fall in love with her; with the way she looked, her cheeks and heavy lips, her sloping hips, her feet — my God, her feet! — in sandals whose leather strips circled the stems of her calves. With some awareness of how much I loved her, of how happy I would be to wake up beside her every morning for the rest of my life, both of us naked and smelling of sleep — with all this, I set out not to love her.
“Hey,” I said.
The blondes laughed musically.
I took the pill from Kath’s palm.
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