That night at the kegger, when the beer had gone warm in the cups and the smoke lay under the ceiling like some low, greenish weather of appetite and forgetting, the room seemed less a room than a cave into which youth had crowded with its laughter and its sweat and its old inherited hunger. On the couch, in the blunt shamelessness of the hour, a boy and a girl had become almost a spectacle, not lovers exactly but figures in some ancient public rite, while the others stood about them grinning and watching, solemn with intoxication, as if astonished to discover that the flesh, once loosed from manners, could make its own law.
And I, too, felt it—the hot, bewildering summons of it, the body answering before the mind could name what it had seen—and I went out from that smoky room and down the corridor to the dormitory men’s room, where the fluorescent light hummed above the stalls and the tiled floor smelled faintly of beer and disinfectant, and there, alone behind a locked metal door, I relieved myself of that fever. So no, it does not happen only in the tawdry kingdom of film and fantasy. Sometimes life itself, drunk and laughing and half-stoned in a college room after midnight, stages the scene first.