And I had grand notions, too. I had quit hockey because I was too slow, but also so that I could read Kierkegaard. My history teacher’s list was nice, but here was Fear and Trembling. Here The Sickness Unto Death. I considered dipping into Weber. Occasionally the word Foucault would float from my tongue, a trial balloon. In such moods I denounced Ferdinand, he was not Harvard!, but at the end of the year I stayed with him. We were hanging out with lacrosse players and their girlfriends, I was badly drunk three nights a week, and some of my morning classes went by unattended, went by anyway, while I lay in bed moaning. And yet my political-science professor had still sent one of my papers to a peer-reviewed journal and laughed with gusto when I showed him my several fake IDs—on one of them my name was Jürgen Habermas. (In the little basement shop in downtown Boston, I had indignantly demanded the umlaut. “Yeurgen Habermas, not Yoorgen. Yeurgen!”) There seemed, in short, to be no system I couldn’t beat, whether I stayed with Ferdinand or not. In the weeks before rooming groups were due, I made a few half-hearted sorties in the Freshman Union to some of the more articulate kids I’d met in my classes, but they were as wary as they were intelligent, their groups had congealed and they liked it that way, and anyhow I hadn’t yet learned how to talk with them, and instead of Foucault the word douchebag kept escaping, like a dark secret, from my lips.

She began to come by in the evenings, and often she was drunk. Are the rich very different from you and me? Judge for yourself. She was drunk and it was my role to sit in the room I shared with Ferdinand and try to work on my sophomore paper. “It’s important that you do this,” Ferdinand told me the second time she was over and they sat in the common room, watching our old Simpsons tape. “You need to be, like, The Scholar. It creates an atmosphere.”

I looked at her—closely, closely. She resembled royalty, I tell you, she was practically the leader of the free world. Yet she lacked speech. I—on the other hand—standing in that little room, my fingertips still warm from the keyboard—I did not lack it! “But that’s just it!” I began. “I mean, we’re in college. It’s time to get serious! It’s time to get to the bottom of things. The meaning of them. I mean—”

And as I began to expound on this, I thought I saw her looking at me in a way I hadn’t seen a woman look at me in a long time. Probably she wasn’t, or she was just startled by all the words, but I was already examining the ethical implications. And I took a deep breath, a pause, because first I needed to tell her what I thought of things, and I needed to blow her mind. It wasn’t Ferdinand himself that I wanted to dissuade her from, exactly, and not in favor of me, per se, but the idea of Ferdinand, and the idea of me—it was important that I arranged these properly in her mind. Because fun—I turned the word over in my mind. Did she mean sex? Boats? Ice cream? There was right action and wrong action. There was Kierkegaard. There was fun, and then there were those ten minutes before the Grille closed, the music turned off, the lights coming up to reveal the beer spilled on the floor, the plastic cups lying there, and people’s coats had fallen off the little coat ledge in the corner, and you’d be going home alone. And how was I going to explain all this to anyone? To Lauren, for example, poor privileged Lauren for whom no amount of grooming and training would turn her into the person she actually wanted to be? To Lauren, who’d passed out on my bed?

And then, about a month after that happened, things came to a head in Leverett J-12. I had been buried in Widener, reading all of Lincoln’s little notes and letters, all sixteen volumes, and finishing my great Lincoln paper, though admittedly much of my time was spent imagining what it would be like to already be the author of a great Lincoln paper. Would I grant interviews? But now things were getting hairy, the deadline was nine in the morning, and I had to finish the Lincoln, for no one else would. When they stumbled in at around three I was already in bed, turning some final phrases over in my mind. When I heard them pause in the front hall to take off their jackets and then paw each other for five minutes—transparent were the ways of Ferdinand to me—I knew I should get up. The trip to the couch was momentous, and though I wore a fairly new T-shirt and my best boxers I felt underdressed. I took my laptop along and they smiled sheepishly at me, apologizing, as they walked past into the bedroom. And Lauren, happy and seeing me there on the ridiculous couch, my face illuminated in simulated concentration by the bright nimbus of the laptop, Lauren winked.