Calder House

There were five of us in Calder House that night. I was sure of that because, on most occasions, we were four, so the odd number stood out to me.

Eliott and I had been Eliott-and-me for the better part of three years at university. James and Nina were our respective roommates and best friends by proximity and, somewhere along the way, by choice. We moved through campus as a unit, like atoms in a molecule, individually identifiable but rarely encountered apart. We were loud, speaking so fervently over one another without ever quite interrupting, each of us familiar enough to detect when a sentence would end and a breath would begin.

And then, occasionally, there was William—the joker in our deck of cards.

He floated in and out of rooms, staying close enough to feel the pull of our gravity but never long enough to be sucked into it. He was there for study groups, birthdays no one could believe he kept track of, and the occasional crisis that required an extra pair of hands to applaud or comfort. He had lived with Eliott and James during first year, but then moved into a dorm on campus, if only in the hope that being in the vicinity might motivate him to actually attend his classes.

William was not part of the four, which sounds crueler written down than it ever felt in real life, and substantially more catastrophic in retrospect.

It was James who had invited him that night, or at least I always thought it was. 

Eventually, this invitation that seemed to materialize from somewhere different in each of our heads would occupy eleven long minutes of the disciplinary hearing. None of us ever understood why it really mattered. 

DISCIPLINARY HEARING

NOVEMBER 13, 1992

DR. HARPER: Ms. Sullivan, who invited William Shaw to Calder House that evening?

LENORA: James did.

DR. HARPER: Mr. Evans says he didn't.

LENORA: Well, somebody did.

DR. HARPER: I'm asking who.

LENORA: I already told you, James.

DR. HARPER: Mr. Shaw says you invited him. He remembers you asking him outside the library on Tuesday afternoon.

LENORA: Then he’s remembering something else.

DR. HARPER: Is it possible you are?

Calder House belonged to the History department, located on the east side of campus. It was far enough from the modern buildings that once night fell, it became deserted and cold. The building’s birth date was unknown, but unlike the rest of us, James took personal offense at not knowing. He was a History major which apparently gave him responsibility to account for all the facts we didn’t know about the past. Its floors were slanted gently toward the courtyard, and the single-pane windows often rattled which made the portraits of former department heads lining the staircase all the more creepy. 

The four of us had spent every Thursday night there since freshman year, a secret little get-together we thought made us mysterious. There was nothing particularly clandestine about it beyond four underage students drinking alcohol and feeling triumphant for having gotten away with it.

Officially, Nina had after-hours access because she worked six hours a week cataloging material for Professor Dare, a job she had managed to get and maintain for years by making up her expertise as she went. Unofficially, her key had become communal property within the first month.

We would buy the cheapest wine from the corner store across from campus, and smuggle it to Seminar Room Three in battered tote bags. Sometimes we actually studied, shoving our books in with the wine that, on more than one occasion, had ended badly. 

By senior year, Thursday nights became more the piece to a puzzle of tradition, and we indulged in the fact that it was ours to share. We had been warned repeatedly for the fleeing nature of senior year, and while it had been a joke at first, by November we knew that there were only so many Thursdays left before graduation. 

That night, Nina and I arrived first. It had been raining since the afternoon, thin but incessant. By the time we crossed campus, the cuffs of my jeans were sagged with water and Nina had given up on her poor attempt to protect her curls with a flimsy newspaper she’d found outside the student union. She unlocked the side entrance to Calder House a little after eight, if the hazy darkness of the sky was any indication, and I followed behind her carrying two bottles of wine beneath my coat.

I remember Nina having the key, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to enter the building before everyone else. This would jumpstart another long hour of back-and-forth later in the hearing. 

DISCIPLINARY HEARING

NOVEMBER 13, 1992

DR. HARPER: Who had the key when you arrived?

LENORA: Nina.

DR. HARPER: Ms. Patel says you did.

LENORA: I was with her, but she had the key.

DR. HARPER: The key was found in Mr. Shaw's coat the following morning.

Calder House was always cold, even during the warmest of summer days. On a November night, it was almost unbearable. The radiators worked approximately one fourth of the time we were there, and the window in Seminar Room Three wouldn’t close completely after years of damp had swollen the wooden frames. We had developed an arrangement in which whoever arrived first shoved a few newspapers into the gap to stop the wind from barging in. That Thursday, Nina dealt with the window, and I turned on the radiators with a silent prayer, then the lamps. 

The overhead lights were fluorescent, the usual institutional lighting that made everyone look terminally ill, so we never used them. Instead, we had relocated three table lamps, and even though it had been without permission, they had stayed put throughout the years. They made the place look tender and if we were anything at that age, we were hopeless romantics. 

At twenty-one, the cold was atmospheric and wearing coats indoors was funny instead of downright uncomfortable. Even the walk across campus in the rain was meaningful because it was a part of something grander we scrupulously did together. 

Nina put on a cassette on the radio. I remember the click of the player swallowing the tape, but not the actual song that filled the room. This would become another question we all apparently got wrong in the hearing, and of all of them this one bothered me the most for not remembering. 

Eliott and James arrived sometime after nine. I knew the sound of Eliott’s body before I heard his voice. I was fluent in him by senior year. I knew the weight he allocated to each footstep and the sound of his breathing after coming in from the cold. He entered the room with James behind him, who was complaining about the rain.

When Eliott saw me, his face split into a grin. He walked over to me, slipped both hands beneath the back of my sweater, knowing perfectly well how icy they were, and I nearly knocked over one of the bottles trying to squirm away from him.

We sat on the desks, legs crossed or mindlessly hanging, and we drank. The more wine we had, the braver we got against the cold. Without fail every time, coats started coming off. By the time William arrived, Nina and Eliott had already rid themselves of their coats, so that must have meant that we were one bottle down. 

William appeared in the doorway, armed with another bottle and a toothy smile.

“You started without me.”

“We didn’t know you were coming,” James said.

William looked at him for a moment. “You invited me.”

“I did?”

“You wound me.”

That was the interaction, as far as I remember. 

Nina shuffled over to make room for him beside the radiator and William dropped his coat over the back of an empty chair before lowering himself to the floor. My only explanation was that he’d arrived with a considerable head start on the rest of us. 

DISCIPLINARY HEARING

NOVEMBER 13, 1992

DR. HARPER: Had you been drinking before you arrived?

WILLIAM: No.

The fifth person never made us quieter. It actually had the opposite effect. William had a habit of asking questions no one else would come up with, and then sit back while we argued over the answer. By ten, we had covered what profession we would specialize in if we were an animal and why, and whether we would like to know the time of our death or the reason. 

At some point, Eliott took James’s cigarette from between his fingers and finished it. Seemingly, there was nothing unusual about the interaction. They had lived together since they were eighteen, sharing food, clothes, cigarettes, and occasionally beds when one was too drunk to make it back to his own. Still, I noticed and so did William. He was sitting across from us, his eyes moving from Eliott, to James, and then, briefly, to me. 

There were things about James I had learned not to look at directly. It wasn’t because I was afraid, but more so confused. Acknowledging them would require some sort of action from me, and I had not figured out what yet.

I couldn’t remember the first time I had noticed the longing in his eyes when they landed on Eliott. The whole picture revealed itself in slow increments. The slight change on his face when Eliott entered the room, the tenderness with which he tolerated things when it came to him that would have otherwise driven him mad. For a while, I wondered whether I had invented an obstacle of jealousy simply because I was in love and afraid to get hurt. But the more time I spent with him, the more I was convinced this was no figment of my imagination. I never told Eliott. Sometimes, I questioned whether that made me cruel. 

Whether Nina knew, I was never sure of. We had never discussed it, which wasn’t necessarily proof of anything. Silence was an active member of our friendship by then. There were plenty of things the four of us knew without ever suffering the indignity of having to say them aloud.

William, unfortunately, had never developed the same instinct. Or he just didn’t care much for it. 

His eyes turned to James, but before his mouth could open, I kicked his shoe beneath the table. 

He looked at me and I gave him the smallest, most discreet shake. 

For once, William listened. 

He reached for the wine instead.

I have often wondered whether the night would have ended differently if only he had kept reaching for it. 

DISCIPLINARY HEARING

NOVEMBER 13, 1992

DR. HARPER: Who first mentioned Mr. Evans' feelings for Mr. Mercer?

LENORA: William.

DR. HARPER: Mr. Shaw claims it was you. 

Sometime after eleven, we decided to go upstairs. The Senior Common Room had occupied the floor above us for all four years of our Thursday nights, forbidden to all students and naturally fascinating. We had invented stories about what the department hid inside: rare books, a hundred-year-old liquor, paintings donated by dead alumni, even ghosts. But we were graduating in May, and a ghost story would have been an ideal way to end our academic career.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, the only ghost in that room would be our Thursday night gatherings.

The key was in the top drawer of Professor Dare’s desk. I remember William retrieving it. Nina remembers James. James remembers the key already being on the table downstairs and Eliott remembers nothing. 

Getting in was embarrassingly easy. Adrenaline and merlot had us questioning why we hadn’t attempted it before. 

The room at first glance was disappointing. It was larger than Seminar Room Three but hardly more fascinating: two leather couches, bookshelves covering most of the walls, an enormous wooden table and a liquor cabinet that, to William’s great offense, was double locked. A painting hung above the fireplace, of some former dean whose name none of us knew despite having spent four years in his department.

“This is it?” William said. “Four years of this?”

“You were here for…” Nina said, thinking. “Give or take, ten Thursdays.”

James laughed at that which tuned William’s attention to him. Whatever authority and restraint I had managed to inflict downstairs had apparently expired somewhere on the way.

“At least I’m not spending my final year pining after someone else’s boyfriend.”

The room was silent, but it was violent and ugly—like the first moments of calm after an explosion.

James looked at me with wide eyes before he looked at Eliott.

If I remember anything clearly from that night, it’s the panic in James’ eyes. 

Eliott followed his gaze.

“You knew?”

The question was directed at me. I almost stumbled backwards from the invisible force.

I could have laughed, I could have played dumb, I could have blamed it on William being drunk and out of his mind. Instead, I said nothing and I believe, now, that this was a conscious decision. 

“You knew?!” James repeated to me in exasperation. 

Eliott looked around, his gaze landing on Nina. She was the only one who hadn’t accounted for what she knew or didn’t, one way or another. But Eliott was met with more silence, and his face grew angrier. 

James’ voice was slurred as he pointed an accusatory finger toward William. “Oh, fuck you.”  

William shrugged. “Come on. Everyone knew.” 

“Shut up.”

“I’m not judging you.”

“I said shut up.”

The events that unfolded next depend on which one of us you ask. I remember James shoving William into the crystal cabinet. William remembers Eliott moving first. Nina doesn’t remember anyone making the first move until after the cabinet shattered. Eliott doesn’t remember the cabinet breaking at all. 

But I will never forget that sound.

One moment there were five voices climbing over one another, and the next there was the crystalline shatter of the cabinet door and the dull thud of William hitting the shelves inside it.

For several seconds, nobody moved.

Then everyone did at once.

James was screaming slurs at William. Eliott had a hand against James’s chest in an attempt to hold him back. Nina was shouting for all three of them to stop. I remember grabbing Eliott’s arm. I remember somebody knocking the bottle from the desk. I remember wine spreading across the rug so putrid that, for one horrible moment, I convinced myself it was blood.

After that, memories come as objects.

A bottle against the fireplace.

James’s battered lip.

Nina crying.

A chair broken on its side.

Eliott’s bloody knuckles.

The painting hitting the floor.

William standing beside it.

It felt like the skies had split open and chaos had been unleashed on earth by some higher power. 

William stormed out first, and I don’t remember anyone asking him to stay. By then, the room looked nothing like the place we had been so disappointed to see just a few minutes earlier. Everything was broken or turned upside down. We sat in the mess, avoiding the shreds of glass that littered the carpet, and tried to get our story straight. It wasn’t an elaborate lie we rehearsed to trick the university. It was four drunk kids putting together pieces of a story that would always remain blurry.

DISCIPLINARY HEARING

NOVEMBER 13, 1992

DR. HARPER: Did the four of you discuss the incident before giving your statements?

LENORA: Of course.

DR. HARPER: For how long?

LENORA: I don’t remember.

DR. HARPER: Mr. Shaw says he left shortly after midnight. Campus security found the four of you in Calder House at four seventeen.

I remember that, but the hours in between William leaving and getting caught by security are an enigma. If held at gunpoint, I would have sworn only a few minutes had gone by in between the two events.

Four hours.

Four hours of correcting, disagreeing, reminding. Nina would remember something and I would tell her it had happened later with no proof to back it up. Eliott would insist James had moved first. James would shake his head, and one of us would remind him that he had been drunk. Eventually, someone would concede.

We had always been good at that, after all—filling in the spaces for one another.

Perhaps that was why our statements sounded like the same broken record on repeat.

There were five of us in Calder House that night. I remain sure of that.

Everything after, I’m not so sure.

For years, I had assumed that knowing someone meant knowing the weight of their footsteps, the cadence of their voice, the exact moment their sentence would end and their next breath would begin.

It never occurred to me that you could know exactly when someone would pause for breath and still misunderstand everything they said between them.