The Three-Day Affair by Michael Kardos Page A

going to make the most of it. During our weeklong orientation, he bought a new computer and began to read ahead for his classes. Once the semester began, he awoke for crew practice at dawn, and was showered and off to the library before I was out of bed. Within two weeks, he’d already decided to major in political science, joined the debating society, and begun to spend time with a pretty sophomore , the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Chile.
    Had he prepared for this life at some exclusive high school, an Exeter or Andover? No. He’d come straight off a midwestern farm, where he got up before dawn each morning for several hours of chores before school, which, from the sound of it—leaky ceiling, shared textbooks—was barely a school at all. Yet here he was, succeeding.
    That seemed to be the common trait among the people here. They succeeded. They had succeeded in order to be invited here. And now that they’d arrived, they would prove themselves all over again.
    Impressive? Damn right—but I didn’t care for any of it. Everything about the place intimidated me, and I longed for those simple afternoons of music, marijuana, and local girls who didn’t care if I was ambitious or lazy, a Rockefeller or a Buttafuoco. I would have taken solace in my coursework, but that was another problem. I’d always sailed through school without much effort. But now, my calculus class was quickly losing me. My natural ear for music took me only so far in a music theory class where half the students had studied classical piano since the age of three.And what I’d assumed would be the gut course—the required freshman writing class—ended up being an intensive study of modern European authors: Malraux and Mann and Pirandello and Beckett and Sartre and Camus.
    Two weeks into the semester and I was swamped. I hadn’t even done a load of laundry yet.
    Sunday afternoon, I returned to my dormitory from brunch to hear, coming from a nearby window, the whiny jangle of a badly played electric guitar. I followed the sounds of the guitar down the hallway and knocked on the door.
    The guy opened the door wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt. He was pale and stick skinny with longish hair and an unsuccessful blond beard. Smoke curled in front of his face from a cigarette, which he plucked from his mouth.
    “Gotcha,” he said. “I’ll turn it down.”
    “Oh, I don’t care about that,” I said. “Do you mind if I bum a cigarette?”
    In the time it took to smoke one of his cigarettes, I learned that Jeffrey Hocks, from Los Angeles, California, was having as hard a time adjusting to Princeton as I was.
    “I really wonder,” I told him, “if I’m meant to be here at all.” It was a relief, saying this aloud. Having somebody to say it to.
    He motioned toward his desk chair and told me to grab a seat. He sat on the bed. “I
know
I’m meant to be here,” he said, “but that doesn’t help any.” And then he went on to reveal his exceptional talent, which was even less exceptional than my own. He was a legacy. His father, two uncles, and grandfather had all gone to Princeton. He was simply keeping the tradition alive. “I had no choice,” he said. “My baby clothes had tigers stitched onto them.”
    Both of Jeffrey’s parents were microbiologists at UCLA. They hoped that their son might decide to become a groundbreakingresearcher, too. But if not, they’d be satisfied if he became a surgeon , or a partner in an international law firm, or really anything at all as long as it was incredibly impressive.
    He took the last drag from a cigarette and dropped it into an empty soda can. “But do you know what I think? I think I’m meant to be a world-class guitarist.”
    His playing had been so awful that I looked at him and said nothing. He grinned. “I’m kidding. I just started playing over the summer. How about you? Do you play an instrument?”
    We smoked most of the pack and talked for the next couple of hours. I learned that