Free Loner by Teddy Wayne Page B

with the certitude of someone finished with his important business, and looked up.
    â€œHey,” I said.
    You nodded. There was now, at least, instant facial identification.
    I opened the door for you. You went to the nearest empty seat. It didn’t look strange when I sat in the one next to it; we’d entered the room together and these were the easiest-to-reach places.
    I would be sitting within a foot of you for eighty minutes. There was no chance I could follow Samuelson’s winding disquisition on The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller .
    My peripheral vision was limited to your left hand, its blue rivers of veins faintly flowing under smooth skin, its piano-player fingers, its pale pink nails and their small white suns cresting over thecurved horizon. I could absorb more comprehensively your scent, whose intimations that I’d nosed before now blanketed me: an amalgam of your shampoo and lavender perfume, a hint of cigarettes and whatever natural aroma you exuded. If I could inhale it continuously, eternally, without ever breathing out, I would.
    Samuelson riffled through papers on his lectern as he prattled on. “One of you wrote an essay this week that nicely dovetails with that point. Let me just find it . . .”
    We overestimate destiny’s role in our lives, selectively applying it to favorable outcomes; think of all the times when you didn’t run into your long-lost friend in the street, when you didn’t just catch a bus, when you didn’t get placed in a dorm with Veronica Morgan Wells. Or, more starkly, of all the good things that never happened to you because you weren’t born as someone else with a better life. But the law of averages—which, when advantageous to us, we prefer to call fate, when disadvantageous we decry as bad luck, and when neutral we ignore—will occasionally smile upon us when we most need it.
    Samuelson located the correct paper. “David Federman argued that, quote, ‘perhaps the peg-leg-as-primal-wound is intended to throw the reader off the scent with a facile psychological misreading, and Melville’s underlying point is that Ahab is simply a susceptible participant in an economic system designed for manic, unslakable ambition. The real primal wound is not his missing leg; it is America.’ ”
    I hadn’t even known Samuelson read the student essays; my section leader must have been so taken with my writing that she’d pressed it on him. It was thrilling to hear those sentences preached to the entire room, especially the final clause, intoned with the halting majesty of a presidential peroration or the voice-over in a domestic car commercial. Rendering the experience even more exhilarating: you, in an orchestra seat to witness my glory.
    â€œDavid, are you here?” Samuelson asked, peering out into the crowd, since he didn’t know who I was.
    Everyone looked around for the mystery writer. I raised my hand slowly, as if reluctant to take credit.
    I savored your surprise next to me: you didn’t know who David Federman was, either; might not have even remembered my first name and certainly didn’t know my last. You wouldn’t forget it now.
    â€œIt’s a compelling idea—I’d love to discuss it further,” Samuelson said to me. “Sign up for office hours.”
    He dismissed us. My body, to others, remained earthbound, but I was in a crow’s nest high above them. And good luck, let alone destiny, had nothing to do with it. No; years of solitude, hours spent reading when others were going to birthday parties and sleepovers and keggers, had all built up to Professor Samuelson’s public acclamation for an essay I’d tossed off in a single sitting. I imagined him inviting me to guest lecture an upcoming class, whatever topic I liked; he just wanted the other students to be inspired by my example, and you would sit in the front row, transcribing every word,