Flood’s language seemed to shift back and forth between an easy colloquialism Raphael found comfortable and a kind of stilted eastern usage. There was a forced quality about Flood that made him uncomfortable.
They had a couple of drinks, and Raphael feigned enjoyment, although the sharp taste of nearly raw gin was not particularly to his liking. He was not really accustomed to drinking, and Flood’s martinis were strong enough to make his ears hot and the tips of his fingers tingle. “Well,” he said finally, setting down his glass, “I guess I’d better go get moved in.”
“Taylor,” Flood said, an odd note in his voice. “I’ve got a sort of an idea. Is your roommate up the hall an old friend?”
“Never met the man, actually.”
“And I’ve never met Edwards either-obviously. Why don’t you room in here?” There was a kind of intensity about the way Flood said it, as if it were far, far more important than the casual nature of the suggestion called for.
“They don’t allow that, do they?” Raphael asked. “Switching rooms, I mean?”
“It’s easy to see you’ve never been in a boarding school before.” Flood laughed. “Switching rooms is standard practice. It goes on everywhere. Believe me, I know. I’ve been kicked out of some of the best schools in the east.”
“What if Edwards shows up and wants his bed?”
“We’ll give him yours. I’ll lie to him-tell him I’ve got something incurable and that you’re here to give me a shot in case I throw a fit.”
“Come on.” Raphael laughed.
“You can be the one with the fits if you’d rather,” Flood
offered. “Can you do a convincing grand mal seizure?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”
“The whole point is that we get along fairly well together, and I don’t know diddly about Edwards. I know that you’re white, but I haven’t got any idea at all about what color he is.”
“Is that important?” Raphael said it carefully.
Flood’s face suddenly broke into a broad grin. “Gotcha!” he said gleefully. “God, I love to do that to people. Actually, it doesn’t mean jack-shit to me one way or another, but it sure as hell does to old J.D. Sooner or later somebody from back home is going to come by, and if words gets back to the old pirate that his son has a nigger roommate-his word, not mine-thee shit will hit thee fan. Old J.D.’s prejudiced against races that have been extinct for thousands of years-like the Hittites-or the Wends.”
“It won’t work out then, Damon,” Raphael told him with a perfectly straight face. “My mother’s Canadian.”
“That’s all right, Raphael. I’m liberal. We’ll let you come in through the back door. Have Canadians got rhythm? Do you have overpowering cravings for northern-fried moose?”
Raphael laughed. The young man from the east was outrageous. There was still something slightly out of tune though. Raphael was quite sure that he reminded Flood of someone else. Flood had seemed about to mention it a couple of times, but had apparently decided against it. “All right,” he decided. “If you think we can get away with it, we’ll try it.”
“Good enough. We’ll drop the Rafe and Jake bit so we don’t sound like a hillbilly band, and we’ll use Damon and Raphael-unless you’d like to change your name to Pythias?”
“No, I don’t think so. It sounds a little urinary.”
Flood laughed. “It does at that, doesn’t it? Have you got any more bags? Or do you travel light?”
“I’ve got a whole backseat full.”
“Let’s go get them then. Get you settled in.”
They clattered downstairs, brought up the rest of Raphael’s luggage, and then went to the commons for dinner.
Damon Flood talked almost continuously through the meal, his rich voice compelling, almost hypnotic. He saw nearly everything, and his sardonic wit made it all wryly humorous.
“And this,” he said, almost with a sneer as they walked back in the luminous twilight toward their dormitory, “is the `most intelligent group of undergraduates in the country’?” He quoted from a recent magazine article about the college. “It looks more like a hippie convention-or a soiree in a hobo jungle.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
“Indeed they can, Raphael, Angel of Light”-Flood laughed-“but appearance is the shadow at least of reality, don’t you think?”
Raphael shrugged. “We’re more casual out here on the coast.”
“Granted, but wouldn’t you say that the fact that a young lady doesn’t wear shoes to dinner says a great deal about her character?”
“Where’s your home?” Raphael asked as they started up the stairs.
“Grosse Pointe,” Flood said dryly, “the flower on the weed of Detroit.”
“What are you doing way out here?” Raphael opened the door to their room.
“Seeking my fortune,” Flood said, flinging himself down on his bed. Then he laughed. “Actually, I’m putting as much distance as possible between my father and me. The old bastard can’t stand the sight of me. The rest of the family wanted me to go to Princeton, but I preferred to avoid the continuous surveillance of all those cousins. A very large family, the Floods, and I have the distinction of being its major preoccupation. All those dumpy female cousins literally slather at the idea of being able to report my indiscretions back to old J.D. himself.”
Raphael began to unpack.
“J.D.’s the family patriarch,” Flood went on. “The whole damned bunch genuflects in his direction five times a day-except me, of course. I suppose I’ve never really forgiven him for tacking that `Junior’ on me, so I set out to be as unlike him as I could. He looks on that as a personal insult, so we don’t really get along. He started shipping me off to boarding schools as soon as I lost my baby teeth, though, so we only irritate each other on holidays. I tried a couple years at Pitt, but all that rah-rah bullshit got on my nerves. So I thought I’d saddle up old Paint and strike out for the wide-wide west. What do you say to another drink?” He sprang up immediately and began mixing another batch of martinis.
Their conversation became general after that, and they both grew slightly drunk before they went to bed.
After Flood had turned out the light, he continued to talk, a steady flow of random, drowsy commentary on the day’s events. In time the pauses between his observations became longer as he hovered on the verge of sleep. Finally he turned over in bed. “Good night, Gabriel,” he murmured.
“Wrong archangel,” Raphael corrected. “Gabriel’s the other one-the trumpet player.”
“Did I call you Gabriel?” Flood’s voice had a strange, alert tension in it. “Stupid mistake. I must have had one martini too many.”
“It’s no big thing. Good night, Damon.” Once again, however, something in the very back of his mind seemed to be trying to warn Raphael. Flood’s inadvertent use of the name Gabriel seemed not to be just a slip of the tongue. There was a significance to it somehow-obscure, but important.
In the darkness, waiting for sleep and listening to Flood’s regular breathing from the other bed, Raphael considered his roommate. He had never before met anyone with that moneyed, eastern prep-school background, and so he had no real basis for judgment. The young men he had met before had all come from backgrounds similar to his own, and the open, easy camaraderie of the playing field and the locker room had not prepared him for the complexity of someone like Flood. On the whole, though, he found his roommate intriguing, and the surface sophistication of their first evening exhilirating. Perhaps in time Flood would relax, and they’d really get to know each other, but it was still much too early to know for sure.
iii
Raphael’s next few weeks were a revelation to him. Always before he had been at best a casual scholar. His mind was quick and retentive, and neither high school nor the community college he had attended had challenged him significantly. He had come to believe that, even as on the football field, what others found difficult would be easy for him. His performance in the classroom, like his performance on the field, had been more a reflection of natural talent than of hard work; everything had been very easy for Raphael. At Reed, however, it was not so. He quickly discovered that a cursory glance at assigned reading did not prepare him adequately for the often brutally cerebral exchanges of the classroom. Unlike his previous classmates, these students were not content merely to paraphrase the text or the remarks of the instructor, but rather applied to the material at hand techniques of reason and analysis Raphael had never encountered before. Amazingly, more often than not, the results of these reasonings were a direct challenge to the authority of the text or of the instructor. And, even more amazingly, these challenges were not viewed as the disruptions of troublemakers, but were actually encouraged. Disturbed and even embarrassed by his newfound inadequacy, Raphael began to apply himself to his studies.