“Are they ignoring you?”

“They think of me as the business office. You know. Not quite the newspaper.”

Ronny said, “It’s still a pretty good party.”

She was sniffing her scotch, blinking deliberately, slowly, luxuriating in it. She took a long look at him and lowered her voice. “You’re faking it with that drink, aren’t you? You’re sober.”

“Don’t tell.”

“My father says these are the days we’ll remember later on. Do you think it’s true?”

“Maybe not this party.”

She laughed. One of the reporters was dancing a bit too intensely. A couple of the sportswriters were leading him to the bathroom, planning to hose him down in the shower. There was a shouting match that followed. It was getting close to time to leave. The hostess turned out a lamp here, an overhead there. People were sprawling on the floor.

“I can give you a ride home if you’re ready to go,” Lily said.

“Are you sober enough to drive?”

“Absolutely.” This took some time, however. She had to collect David, who was deep in conversation with the editor’s girlfriend. The editor was asleep on the couch, mouth open, arms loose at either side. Someone was about to try the trick on him in which you dunk a person’s hand into warm water to make him pee. The girlfriend rushed in to rescue him, so they would never know whether this method of humiliation would have worked. This freed up David, and so the three of them slipped out of the apartment and Lily drove Ronny to campus, letting him out at the cemetery while she and David were insulting each other’s favorite poets; Lily favored Wallace Stevens, whom David called a watery-thin jumped-up insurance broker; and David favored T. S. Eliot, whom Lily claimed would have been better off if he’d continued to wander in the wasteland a while longer. A poet of spoons, she said. Drunken foreplay of a sadly desperate kind, Ronny thought.

He found his way to the dorm by a route he had not often walked, near the track field and the practice field for the football team, past tennis courts and along the darkened, tarp-covered baseball field. Cold air stirred him. Walking from one world to another, he thought. Ehringhaus rose over everything else, balcony lights blazing, some traffic visible from suite to suite. Not quite midnight.

It had been a few days since he talked to Ben, and he had a bleak sense that their odd friendship was waning. Ben had met somebody, more than likely. Maybe she was helping him keep up with his schoolwork, too. Ronny felt the gloom of it, told himself how stupid it was. There was nothing but a fantasy relationship between them, there was nothing to hope for, and there were plenty of actual gay people on campus that he could meet whenever he wanted. It was a thought that felt new, to use the word “gay” in his head in that easy way. It’s what I am, he thought. As for what Ben was—no matter what Ronny wished—well, that was none of his business, was it?