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Having mono at Princeton was the best thing that ever happened to him.
He was a scholarship kid from Newark with a bedspread from JC Penney and one dinner jacket to his name. He was eighteen years old, making up for lost time, and he joined everything. He joined the Tigertones, sang his heart out, and learned that having been the best baritone in his high school choir didn't count for much. (As if that was what it was about anyway.) He joined the rowers before deciding that being up at the crack of dawn didn't agree with him. He even joined the college Republicans, just because they were kind enough to ask him. (Even then it gave him an uneasy feeling.)
He joined the Terrace Club though he was firmly told by not one or two people that it was social suicide to become part of an eating club that F. Scott Fitzgerald had never mentioned by name. It was more than enough for him. After all it meant that he had to buy himself another dinner jacket, using the money that he'd made that summer working at Al's French Fries. In his most paranoid moments he imagined that the smell of frying grease still clung to it. Mostly he just sat back and let the Negro waiters serve him rare steaks on crested china. Sometimes he had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming.
When the Rosenbergs were executed he was standing on the banks of the river with cocktail glass in hand watching the sculls sweep past. It was the end of his sophomore year. In retrospect he always felt guilty for that one.
In the fall he would don his Princeton sweater and heed the lure of football. Not that he played it much, apart from a pickup game or two on the lawns. But he went to the games; everyone did. The stands were full and heaving. Boys in raccoon coats; girls in plaid pleated skirts and chrysanthemum corsages. Bright blue skies. Air so crisp that you could see your breath. You didn't even have to watch the game.
(Mostly he just went so that he could make fun of the band.)
A friend of his from the Tones had a 1950 Chevy Bel Air that his father had bought him when he went away to college. Paul tried not to look too envious as he ran his hands over the two-toned leather upholstery, but he knew very well that he'd betrayed himself when he slipped into falsetto on the last word of "your father bought you a car?" Everyone was too polite to mention it.
Five of them crammed into the car and drove upstate for an away game at Dartmouth, blowing past the suburbs of Newark without a second glance. Paul was stuck in the middle seat but he gazed past heads and over shoulders at the rolling hills of the Taconic Parkway. He thought he saw a deer, brown and still amidst the brilliant oranges and reds of the sugar maples. All the guys were talking about skiing trips and Christmases at Stowe. Paul held his tongue. His family had never gone further than Atlantic City on summer vacations and in the winter they stayed put.
Over the Berkshires and into the Pioneer Valley, where they stopped for the night at Smith College. It was a tradition, said the guy with the car. Big tradition. Whatever the reason, the girls were almost as happy to see them as they were to see the girls. It was like they were explorers stumbling into a remote oasis that happened, fortuitously, to be filled with succulent and untouched desert maidens. Paul found himself expanding upon the analogy at the college mixer that night.
"And so," he explained, downing the rest of a glass of apple cider, "I'm parched."
The girl he was talking to gave him a polite but wary smile. He was probably drunk already. She was a lawyer's daughter from Manhattan and probably had no idea why he was even talking to her.
Once again, Paul struck out. So did the Princeton football team. Maybe it was fate.
It wasn't the fault of the band. They were up bright and early the next morning marching through the Smith campus, brass blaring and drums thumping as they made their way to the band bus. And to glory. Another tradition. Geese rose from the pond, stretching affronted wings as they were roused by the blare of brass and the thump of drums. Curtains twitched aside in house windows and girls waved excitedly. Paul stood by the side of the road with a cup of scalding hot coffee, trying to get rid of his hangover. He wasn't a conquering hero and he wasn't getting any either.
By the time they got all the way up to Hanover it was drizzling. Leaden grey skies over the brown and tattered remnants of the autumn leaves. The Dartmouth stadium was ivy-covered brick, a small collegiate parody of the Coliseum, and the thrashing that the football team (and the band) handed to Princeton was unequivocal. It was a dispirited and deflated band of travelers who made their way back to New Jersey in the dead of night, seven hours straight driving. A hell of a lot of silence. Paul nodded off and nearly drove the Bel Air into a semi somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike. (Thankfully everyone else was asleep at the time.)
Three weeks after the inglorious Dartmouth excursion, he came down with mono. And he was almost entirely sure that he'd got it from sharing some upperclassman's toothbrush. It figured.
Compassionately the university allowed him to take a leave of absence from his work-study job and for the rest of the semester at least he was a man of leisure. He dropped most of his classes. His professors seemed glad enough to see the back of him and his smart-aleck questions. All he had to do was write his senior dissertation.
In his narrow bed he ate Fig Newtons and pored over the works of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. Not to mention Swinburne, a volume which he'd eyed up in the stacks for ages and then checked out without meeting the heavy-lidded and knowing gaze of the librarian. (She was over forty, ancient, and seemed like she had seen everything.) In between poems he played games of solitaire in the rumpled mountains of the bedclothes. Cards scattered like autumn leaves all over the carpet, and he cursed softly with no one but himself to hear.
Having to get up seemed like too much of an imposition so he stretched out the cord of his roommate's heavy record player as far as it would go and put it on the floor right next to the bed. (Once, in the middle of the night, he forgot and nearly stepped on it. But he didn't speak of it. He was far more careful after that.) Every fifteen minutes or so he would sit up to turn the record over, then lapse back into his supine pose.
He listened to Thelonious Monk over and over again until, under his breath, he could hum almost every note of the solos. Gilbert and Sullivan too. One of the Tones, back from a Christmas visit to London (Paul could have died of jealousy), had shared around a newly pressed Decca LP of Edith Sitwell and Peter Pears performing Facade. And Paul had never returned it.
Alone in his bed Paul imagined himself reciting "Sir Beelzebub" to rapturous applause. Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate's steps, moving in classical meters, he carefully echoed Pears' pronunciation. Luxuriantly he rolled his Rs, savoring the feeling on his tongue. (If it hadn't been for singing, he never would have been able to lose his Jersey accent.) As he fell asleep, nonsense syllables chased themselves nightmarishly around his head.
His roommate dutifully stole the newspapers for him every evening from the Terrace Club after the rest of the undergraduates had finished with them. Paul read them a day late, complaining that the crosswords had already been filled in.
"And badly!" he said.
(He was never able to finish the Times crossword but he liked to fancy himself the sort of person who could if he really wanted to.)
For the first time in his life he became a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal. Advertising! Every article that he paged through, advertising was the thing. It stood to reason. Even his parents had both a television set and a hi-fi nowadays. Someone had planted the idea in their heads and it hadn't been him, although he would have tried if only he had known that he would succeed. Keeping up with the Joneses, that was what made the world go round. It disgusted and fascinated him at the same time.
He had a lot of time to think, looking out at waving tree branches and his own little slice of northern sky. When the light was right he could see rainbows. Faithfully he wore his woolly Princeton sweater, which kept him warm but seemed to have shrunk in the wash.
"You're malingering, Kinsey," said his roommate, bringing him dinner one evening just as the light was starting to fade. "You're not sick, you're just lazy."
"I'm working on my magnum opus," Paul explained as the record player hissed in its groove. "On the thought of the Stoics. I need time and space to contemplate."
His roommate laughed. "I think you're more an Epicure than a Stoic."
"Epicurean."
"If you say so."
"Think what you like," said Paul, "but when will I ever get the chance to do this again?"
And then he started in on his apple pie before the ice cream had a chance to melt. Dessert before dinner: it was a necessity in situations like this.
It occurred to him, one long dreamy afternoon when the rain lashed against the window, that if one could be a Princeton student just as easily from the comfort of one's own bed, then there was something fundamentally wrong with the system. It pleased him to think that he was subverting it from within. The idea gave purpose to the bed--and to the scholarship. So he finally started to work on his thesis.
Pages scribbled in longhand piled up on one side of his bed, next to the record player. Dirty plates stolen from the Terrace Club piled up on the other side. (He intended to bring them back when he felt better, really he did.) His fountain pen leaked on the sheets and it all added to the atmosphere of faintly bohemian intellectual glamour.
So did the marijuana brought to him by Jeff of the Tigertones. It was meant to be a get-well gift but it made his head spin even worse than the mono had. Still, just having the little packet of weed tucked into his slippers underneath the bed made him believe himself to be more creative. More alive, even though he felt half dead.
He didn't have the money to hire a typist so he dragged himself out of bed one afternoon and took the heavy parcel of manuscript to the post office, where he covered it with stamps and mailed it to his mother back home in Newark. Then that evening he had to stand in the dorm hallway in his bare feet while she complained over the phone that she couldn't read his handwriting. She never mentioned the scent of marijuana that imbued all the pages.
He got a B- on his thesis. In the margin his professor wrote "well typed," which seemed to be damning with faint praise. He didn't tell his mother about it. She wouldn't understand.
And what had he learned from the endeavor? His carefully prepared index cards full of notes had fluttered away somewhere into the recesses of his mind, as evanescent as those endless games of solitaire. A haze of Mary Jane concealed his deep thoughts on the Stoics. All his semester of leisure had taught him, really, was to recite the whole of "Dolores, Our Lady of Pain." And that was really useful only at the sort of party to which he never got invited anyway. It all added up to one thing, one awful, unavoidable truth.
He would have to get a job.
The realization was wrenching, coinciding with a dreary summer vacation where he doggedly typed two-fingered resumes and listened to his parents lamenting his lack of initiative. Despite his best efforts while bedridden, he had been informed that he would have to spend an extra semester at Princeton in order to graduate. From the way his mother carried on you would think it was the end of the world.
She was wrong. The end of the world had just been put back by one semester.
When he got back to Princeton, he found everything subtly and unsettlingly changed. Time had not stood still. Most of the old gang from the Tigertones had gone and in their place was a crop of squeaky-clean new freshmen--class of 1959, God--who looked as if they'd all been turned off the assembly line in a modern factory. It made him feel ancient.
He interviewed for a management position at an IBM plant but was just as relieved to be turned down. He could not imagine anywhere more unhip and out of the way than Essex Junction, Vermont, even if the skiing was good. He had never learned to ski anyway.
Full of new energy, he strode across campus with his hands jammed in the pockets of his cardigan and his feet crunching through the autumn leaves. He whistled jauntily.
"Him?" he once overheard someone saying from the steps of the library. "Oh, that's Kinsey."
And his heart swelled a little bit.
He went in for looking cynical and jaded and world-weary, which he managed with a modicum of success in the way that only a twenty-two year old can. He read Marx in the privacy of his top-floor library carrel when he was supposed to be studying German verbs. Off-campus, he went to a couple of meetings about McCarthyism and nuclear war. Privately he found them unutterably dull, full of pedantic points and endless logic-splitting, but he took great pleasure in telling a few select friends that he thought the people there had been fellow travelers.
When his friends asked about his illness, he talked about his time apart as if he were a war hero reluctant to draw attention to himself by outlining the gruesome details of his campaign.
"It was very special," he said modestly and maintained an enigmatic silence. Privately he had thought of himself like an arctic explorer holed up in his tent, discovering his inward being through utter physical exhaustion. He had read Apsley Cherry-Garrard on the race to the Pole and lived vicariously through the suffering of others. He had developed, he concluded, a keen sense of the absurdity of daily life.
The letter from Sterling Cooper came just as he'd begun to give up on the capitalist system, and it was absurd and delightful both. It was neither the ivory tower nor the barricades but a man had to start somewhere. Anywhere was better than back in Newark.
"I'm going to be an ad man," he told the mirror earnestly while shaving. (Even a cut-throat razor irritated his sensitive skin. It was terrible.)
He frowned.
"I'm going to be a copywriter," he said.
That sounded better. It was all in how you said it, how you presented yourself. It was all a matter of style.
Two weeks before graduating from Princeton, Paul Kinsey started smoking a pipe.