The Shoe on the Roof Read online

  Competing punch lines and self-aggrandizing anecdotes, shrieks and sudden bursts of unprovoked laughter: the room became louder and louder as the students tried harder and harder to convince themselves they were having fun. Or maybe they were having fun. Maybe the problem was not with them, but with Thomas. The notion irritated him and he retreated to a corner, staked out a spot near the window. The window itself was open, though only a few inches (it could go no farther; to prevent indie music–inspired suicides, he imagined). The faint breeze it afforded was a welcome reprieve.

  “Not a fan?”

  He looked up. A young woman in a frosh-week sweatshirt and a crooked smile was waiting for his response. Not a fan? For a moment he thought she was referring to mechanical fans and artificially induced air circulation (he was standing by an open window, after all). But no, she was referring to the music or maybe the cannabis or maybe dorm parties in general.

  “Nope,” he said. “Can’t say that I am. It’ll pop your brain cells like bubble wrap. You’re almost guaranteed to come out with a lower IQ than when you started.”

  “The weed?”

  “The music.”

  She laughed. “Wendy,” she said, presenting her hand.

  “Like in Peter Pan,” he noted.

  “Yes! That’s who I was named after. You’re the first person not to make a crack about hamburgers.”

  He offered his hand in turn. “Thomas,” he said, “like the Tank Engine.”

  “Thomas what?” she asked, shouting as the music built to an ennui-fuelled crescendo.

  He hesitated, then said, “Alexander.” It was the first time he would adopt his mother’s maiden name.

  “Nice to meet you, Thomas Alexander.” She hadn’t told him her own last name. It was Burke, but he wouldn’t learn that until two sweaty sexual encounters and several sticky orgasms later.

  For all its complexity, the human brain—as noted—can be tricked with the simplest sleight of mind, and this would prove beneficial. Thomas had come from an evening seminar on suggestibility, where they’d discussed the tenacity of certain ideas, the way in which an image or a notion, once planted in the cerebral cortex, can prove remarkably difficult to shake. He was about to learn the power of planting an idea in someone’s mind firsthand.

  “Want to go somewhere else?” he asked.

  Wendy’s lopsided smile was already sending electrical currents running through his autonomic nervous system, pumping blood—rather optimistically, all things considered—into his penile tissues, causing a slight but undeniable swelling. (You really have to admire the penis; it has absolutely no common sense whatsoever. “Aye, aye! Reporting for duty, sir!”)

  “Sure,” she said, still shouting. “Where do you want to go?”

  “My room?” he said, a little too quickly.

  “And what could you possibly have in your room that we don’t already have here?”

  “Board games,” he said, and she laughed.

  Laughter is good. A release of endorphins loosens inhibitions, momentarily disengages the critical functions of the brain’s prefrontal lobe. (A woman’s prefrontal lobe is the enemy of seduction. Emotional responses reside in the brain’s limbic system, proper behaviour in the prefrontal lobes. Man’s attempts at mating were largely a dogged effort in circumventing the prefrontal lobes and appealing directly to the limbic system.)

  He leaned forward till his breath touched her neck, “Here’s what I propose.”

  The word propose is always a good one to use when flirting. It resonates with images of diamond rings and Jumbotron swains, of a humbled man kneeling before a woman, a cheering crowd. “We go back to my place,” he said, “put on some music, turn down the lights, get undressed, rub baby oil all over our bodies, and”—just as she was about to pull back, just as her face hardened—“we break out the Parcheesi.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “Parcheesi?”

  “That’s right. The board game. You haven’t played nude Parcheesi? It’s the best. There’s also nude Sorry!, nude Battleship, nude Snakes and Ladders, nude Candy Land. I have a wide repertoire.”

  She laughed again, openmouthed and unrestrained.

  They ended up back in Thomas’s room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, speaking profoundly about trivial things (as you do) whilst drinking cheap college-dorm wine by the gallon—and is there anything sweeter in this world than the memory of cheap college-dorm wine? (Not the wine itself, which is horrid, but the memory of it.) Wendy was studying linguistics; Thomas was already considering the switch to neurological medicine. “A brain surgeon!” she said.

  “Well,” he admitted, “it’s not exactly rocket science.”

  They never did play Parcheesi. But they did end up naked. The image he’d planted in Wendy’s mind, of bodies unrobed and sheened in oil, had taken hold, had sent currents down her own autonomic nervous system, had tingled areas that lived for the tingling.

  It’s about reversal of expectations, Thomas realized as she grappled with his belt, sproinging him free from the tyranny of his trousers. That’s where the tension lies, in the reversal of expectations. And what is it that tension demands? Release.

  She pulled him into her. “Give it to me,” she said, flustered and pink, for she was new at this as well and was trying her best. “Give it to me hard.”

  And . . . he didn’t.

  Instead, he pulled back. He slowed down, reduced his touch to the faintest of flutters, to ghostlike caresses and butterfly kisses. He slowed down until she was out of her mind—almost literally. She was now operating on brain stem alone, in the thrall of that reptilian structure in the base of our skull. Her desire was primal, as were her frustrations and her hoarse laugh, her final surrender. Afterward, sweaty and sated, she would admonish him, “You’re awful.” It was an accusation he would often hear. You’re awful.

  That first encounter would set the tone for the course of their time together. They’d study beside each other late into the night, and then, when their brains were tired and their bodies were demanding equal time, they would slither into each other’s arms. Thomas would whisper, “How do you want it?” and no matter what she said—“gentle” or “slow,” “hard” or “fast”—he would do the exact opposite. If she wanted it now, he would be agonizingly tender. If she wanted it languid and loving, he would drive it home to the hilt without pretext, would deny her the tenderness she thought she wanted. Tension and release.

  Another game they played was “holding your breath when an intruder enters the room.” Wendy’s dorm room was two floors down, and sometimes, late at night, she would stretch and say she was going to bed, and Thomas would feign indifference, except to remind her, “Don’t forget to lock your door.”

  He would then wait ten minutes, maybe twenty, sometimes half an hour, and would tiptoe down the stairwell, would find her door unlocked, would open it slowly—if only the hinge creaked to have made the moment complete! Wendy would be lying in bed, facing the wall, pretending to sleep. Looming above her, Thomas would slide his belt free, would crawl in beside her, and then—hand over her mouth—would tell her not to move, not to make a sound. He would churn into her from behind, pushing her to the brink . . . and then over. And when he was finished, he would slip away, leaving her in a heap, always making sure to lock the door behind him.

  And then, one day, Wendy came bounding over after class with her textbook open to page 145 and it was all over. She was taking an intro course in psychology, and she asked excitedly, “Is this you? It is, isn’t it! Why didn’t you tell me your real name?”

  Thomas felt his jaw clench, his face burn. He ended it soon after.

  The following spring, Thomas moved out of the dormitory and into the townhouse apartment his father had arranged for him. Dr. Rosanoff would have purchased a condo for his son—a better investment, building up equity rather than throwing money away in rent—but the market was inflated and the timing wasn’t right. As his father often reminded him, “Eve
ry major decision you make in life needs to be carefully weighed.” (Wendy, meanwhile, would lie in her room, door unlocked, facing the wall, waiting for someone who never showed. Sometimes, late at night, she would sob.)

  It had only ever been an experiment, Thomas living in a dormitory: a way to experience normal life. And every experiment, like every love affair, must eventually end.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “TICKLING THEIR HYPOTHALAMUS IS all fine and good,” Bernie had said, peering over his glasses at his lab partner. Thomas had been regaling him with the details of his ongoing neuropsychological experiments in the Science of Seduction, but Bernie had remained skeptical. “To be really effective,” said Bernie, “you have to learn to read a potential conquest’s facial expressions.”

  This was true. Thomas did sometimes misread the situation. On occasion, his more exuberant test subjects would pounce before he’d even gotten to the moment of reversal. “Listen, why don’t we go back to my place, get undressed, rub baby oil over our naked bodies, and—” “Cool! Let me grab my jacket.” Those were pleasant revelations when they occurred, but at other times Thomas would mistime his pitch, and the target of his would-be seduction would cut him off before he could finish. He would see frost crackle across their gaze and no matter how hurriedly he exclaimed, “Parcheesi!” (a magical word, akin to alakazam or abracadabra—“Hocus pocus! Clothes be gone!”), it was too late. Their prefrontal lobes had taken over, were now guarding the gates. Oh, how he resented those damnable prefrontal lobes!

  Bernie had been doing research for Professor Cerletti on “micro-expressions,” tiny facial shifts—flashes of fear, lust, anger, despair—barely perceptible, wholly involuntary, and often lasting less than a hundredth of a second, appearing when someone suppresses their true feelings. Although not usually discernible to the conscious mind, these micro-expressions can be picked up on tape. Slow the footage down, and they will jump out at you. A test subject is happily describing her day-to-day life when the topic of, say, her marriage comes up, and there it is in stark relief: a face filled with pain and anguish, a flutter, gone in an instant.

  “Want to know what makes us human?” asked Bernie.

  “Opposable thumbs?”

  “The fake smile. The social smile. That’s what separates us. Other animals express their emotions openly, all the time. Only humans have learned to mask them.” But a mask is still a mask, and the real feelings are still there, trying to get out. “You can see a clear difference, for example, between a spontaneous smile and a forced smile. It’s in the eyes. Here, let me show you.”

  They were in the cafeteria, peering into the faces (souls?) of various test subjects who were stored on Bernie’s laptop. “See? We ask her if she’s happy in her relationship and she says ‘Sure!’ Big smile, but slow it down and . . . there. Her mouth is smiling but her eyes tell a different story. That’s a fake smile, my friend. A spontaneous smile will linger longer as well. See how quickly that one falls away? If I were her husband, I’d be worried.”

  “So poker tells are really micro-expressions?” Thomas asked.

  “Basically, yes. They’re very hard to suppress, even harder to read. But break down any facial expression into its component parts and you can crack the code.”

  Bernie pulled up a map of the human face with various groupings labelled.

  “The face is basically a communications device. There are forty-four facial muscles, and a full forty of those are used to express emotions. Certain groups fire in sync, others in opposition. It’s called the Ekman Facial Action Coding System. So, a contraction in the lateral cheek muscles, together with a flattening of the upper lip and expansion of the outer nostrils? That would signify repulsion. If you catch that, you might as well move on. A constriction at the sides of the mouth—signifying a suppressed smile—with slightly raised eyebrows and a dimpling effect in the chin, well, that’s promising.” There was a pause. “I don’t see that one very often.”

  Thomas had better luck.

  Following Bernie’s tutorial, he was able to adjust his presentations depending on the signals he was receiving, sometimes going into greater and even more lurid detail (watching the arc of their eyebrows expand and expand). With one young woman he managed to add whipped cream, honey, and a feather duster to his proposed scenario before uttering the magic word. “Sounds messy.” She laughed. “Aren’t you afraid of ruining your Parcheesi board?” “That’s a chance I’m willing to take,” he said. Having ratcheted up the tension, the night had ended in greater fury than usual. With expectations raised to such heady heights, the onus had been on her to deliver—and she’d come through admirably. Thank you, Bernie! he’d grinned as he walked home. (He never learned her name. Or if he did, he didn’t remember it.)

  Once he had his test subjects in bed, or on the dining room table or holding on to the balcony rails, it was always the same question, whispered in their ear: “How do you want it?” Ask and ye shall receive the exact opposite.

  Word, however, has a way of spreading, and when one attractive pre-med student stopped him in mid-incantation to say, “Are you the Parcheesi guy?” he knew his study had run its course.

  He discovered his next set of subjects soon after.

  Having once again slept in a strange bed, Thomas woke alone, cotton-mouthed and groggy, to a silent room, had gotten dressed, left a scribbled note (the extent of modern etiquette in such matters), and then slipped out into a bleary-eyed morning, feeling empty and alive. He would’ve killed for a coffee, so when he passed a bookstore café, he ducked inside. But the shop had just opened—the coffee was still brewing—so Thomas wandered the stacks awhile, avoiding Self-Help, looking for Science, when he spotted something remarkable. Although the bookstore as a whole was largely empty, the Travel Section was not. Three different women were running their fingers along the spines of guidebooks and travel memoirs. Soccer moms, from the looks of it, women who had dropped their kids off at school and then stopped here to dream awhile before returning to the everyday mundanities of life. Paris. Paraguay. Portugal. Qatar Cambodia. A world so far away it hardly seemed real. Here, he realized, was an aching, a longing, that he might be able to assist with.

  And so it was that the Travel Sections of Boston’s bookstores became Thomas’s hunting grounds. He would arrive as soon as they opened (the moms always came in first thing in the morning to sip lattes and sigh among the atlases) and Thomas would watch and wait, select one of the moms as a test subject, and then take note of where she lingered: Okinawa or Macao, Morocco or Istanbul—you could almost taste the desire and loneliness—and then, using his phone, he would look up a few salient points about the destination in question. From there it was an easy step to choose a similar guidebook. “I’ve always wanted to visit Morocco, too! The walled city of _______ or the markets of _______. But,” and here he used the Ekman Facial Action Coding System to create a wistful self-deprecating smile, “I’m only a broke university student, so who knows if I’ll ever make it. Maybe someday . . .” His voice would trail off, pregnant with possibility, at which point the soccer mom’s own mirror neurons would kick in. “Oh, don’t say that. You’re so young. You still have time.”

  The longing for travel is, of course, the longing for escape, and while he couldn’t whisk the soccer moms off to Istanbul, he could at least offer a few hours’ idyll in the afternoon. (He often skipped classes to do so; he was something of a philanthropist that way.)

  Doctors can identify a brain as male or female simply by looking at it: female brains are more symmetrical, with greater interconnections between the emotional and the cognitive. The male brain, in contrast, looks as though someone took a normal brain and gave it a sharp twist: the lobes don’t line up with the same precision, and the areas that connect the right brain to the left—and the rational frontal cortex with the emotional limbic system—are smaller, less tightly woven. Fewer connections means fewer distractions, better focus; it also means less nuance.

  Female b
rains have more surface area, male brains more volume. But when it comes to sexual arousal, brain scans reveal a deeper, even greater divide, with male sexuality more closely linked to those regions that handle aggression, and female sexuality more closely associated with hunger. Thomas had made note of that as well: male, aggression; female, hunger. The trick, then, was to play to that hunger, to that appetite, whether physiological, psychological, or emotional.

  Thomas drew a circle around the city and by systematically visiting every Barnes & Noble in Boston and the outlying areas, ranging as far as Salem at times (an especially fertile constituency), he quickly worked his way through several PTA rosters. His youthful demeanour appealed to their maternal instincts, and more than one fretted about his finances, asking whether he was “eating properly.”

  Soccer moms smell of fabric softener. Soccer moms wear lululemon to Whole Foods. Soccer moms close the curtains before they undress, trying to blot out the sunlight (but light will find a way; it seeps in unbidden; eyes adjust and details emerge; although, as Thomas would discover, the gaze goes both ways). Soccer moms are starved for laughter. They laugh easily. They are sardonic and wry. They are embarrassed about their stretch marks, but not ashamed. Soccer moms have tricks they haven’t used in years, and they like to finish on top. They would roll Thomas onto his back and stare into his eyes when he was inside them. He learned to avert his gaze, just as he learned to avoid looking at their children’s toys on the floor or the report cards on the fridge. (He often wondered what grade they would give him: A for effort?) He preferred to experience the world they inhabited primarily through his peripheral vision. He even managed, having caught a glimpse of The Good Son on one shelf, to pretend he was someone else entirely.