Saturday, April 18, 2015
The Ivy Snob
Nets of Silver and Gold
Rens met the trio in the laundry room.
Two six-packs, and they kept offering
beers. They had just come out of the
state university, and were alarmingly
allusive in Lit and History.
After a few beers, Rens told them.
“Look! I’m a snob. Just let it go!
Underneath I’m even worse.”
“We never met anyone like you. Should be
in a case at the Smithsonian,” laughed Wynken.
“Brilliantly lit!” added Blynken.
“And revolving!” screamed Nod. Yes, screamed!
He had gotten a head start by drinking in
the afternoon.
From then on, a quartet. Rens felt inferior
to their quick wit, and read the books that had
been actually assigned in the courses he had
bullshitted through.
With girls, different. They had three steadies
from the opinion survey team they worked on.
Rens had none and no possibilities. He worked
for his uncle in Finance, bouncing around
small New Jersey branches.
Gwennie coming along one night for no apparent
reason, Blynken phoned Rens.
She proved...Chemistry! At least that’s how he
tried explaining it.
And a great beauty!
“Great Beauty my ass! I wanna DO something in
this world. Not ornament it. And Chemistry begins with C. There’s a whole range of other letters!”
She moved into his studio apartment after a bit,
and they often lapsed into theoretical talk of
marriage.
“My mother’d love you! Manners. She eats that
crap up!”
The quartet, and the one of girls, did several
things together. Great days and nights!”
Then Wynken told him that the trio would be
‘sailing off in their wooden shoe.’ Grad work at
Indiana where they got a pretty good deal for all.
“Of course, we want you too.”
“Impossible!” he pronounced in French. “And you don’t NEED...”
“Not a great mystery, Rens. We love you.”
He told Gwennie that night, with the news, too,
that his uncle’s firm was establishing headquarters in Newark, leaving Wall Street. So he had to move there in the new scheme.
He omitted the uncle’s racist jokes involving spear-carrier guides.
“Trains run both ways,” she told him. “Love can move with them.”
Altogether too much ‘love’ of a day and evening, and he stayed up late reading his lease and figuring an escape
from it.
Gwennie slept nested in his old JPress shirt, singing, just audibly, the Broadway tunes her mother adored.
It felt so pretty he fell asleep at his computer.
Woke up in the red light of his clock radio, face soaked
with tears.
“This...won’t do!” he informed 3:00 AM.
“A River of Crystal Light,” muttered Gwennie.
“Go back to sleep. No such thing.”
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
“Nowhere. Nothing.”
Labels: Blynken, Eugene Field, Ivy League, Newark, Nod, River of Crystal Light, Wall Street, Wynken
