The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  By now you had begun to gaze at Boy 18, who was in your English class in the spring of junior year. You liked his quiet, sprightly, manly dignity. He had a way in class of reading poetry aloud that conferred on each poem the tone it required. “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving"—you don’t remember anymore who wrote the poem, but you can still summon up the mournful bell-toll of his voice reading it. He had delicate yellow hair, pale blue eyes; every day he wore a tweed sport coat and a white shirt, while the other boys were all dressing like lumberjacks and stevedores. He had an air of sadness, you thought, but it was somehow a pragmatic sadness, as if he were saying, “Yes, life is pointless, but then why not just get on with it?”

  You talked with him about books. Virginia Woolf, Nathanael West, Maupassant, Faulkner, Kafka—you could be glib about all of them, even the ones you hadn’t read. You giddily paraphrased Katherine Mansfield to him on the novels of E.M. Forster—something about how he warms the tea pot beautifully, only there ain’t going to be no tea, and he said gravely, passionately that no, there really was tea, and that you should re-read Howards End. You did read it then (for the first time), and told him he was right, there was tea; and he paraphrased Katherine Mansfield to you on the difficulty of discerning whether Helen Schlegel had been impregnated by Leonard Bast or by Leonard Bast’s forgotten umbrella. You discovered that you both liked, and were good at, writing limericks, and you started slipping them through the vents in each other’s lockers. This was all it took, that spring, to flood you with happiness: the moment when you would open your locker and see, lying on top of your book bag or half in and half out of your cruddy gym shoes, a slip of white paper, with five lines of his small sloping letters, written in black fountain pen. Conversely, opening your locker and not finding a limerick was beyond disappointing—it felt crushing, as if you’d been abandoned, though you knew that the rarity of his offerings, and the suspense, was part of what kept you interested, and you worked to match your pace to his, to restrain yourself from littering him with too much rhyming confetti.

  During your senior year, you and he were co-editors of the literary magazine. The art director was your best friend: the girl who knew all your secrets. She could understand why you liked him—she liked him, too—but liking him? What did you like about him? You would try to enumerate, and she would look politely dubious, which made him seem more entirely yours, or at least more entirely intended for you. You kept waiting for him to see this. In the darkening fall afternoons, while other people played football or programmed in the computer lab or made out in the theater lighting booth, you and your best friend and Boy 18 sat at a table at the back of the library, sorting through poems and stories and drawings. She was small, vivacious, elegant. She was also, you knew, unhappy. She liked bad boys, brutal boys, motorcycle boys. She worried every month that she might be pregnant—who knew if foam worked the way it was supposed to, and he refused to wear a rubber. She worried that she was dumb, while you worried you were ugly; you reassured each other, no no she was smart, and you were very attractive. All of this was hidden during the afternoons when you sat around that table with Boy 18, choosing and pruning and discussing and arranging. The three of you laughed and laughed.

  A touring theater company was coming to your town with a production of Our Town. You invited Boy 18 to go with you. He blushed and cleared his throat and told you that he had, uh, actually already invited your best friend to go with him. (You fastened on that word “actually”—the pomposity of it, the self-regarding, inhibited precision. You stood there looking at him, mentally imitating him: “Uh, actually,” “ac-tually,”—it was the first remotely critical thought you’d ever had about him—and imagined the fun of mocking him aloud, later; but of course the two people with whom you would have mocked this sort of thing had suddenly become unavailable.) But, he added, you’d be welcome to join them.

  Incredibly, you did. It was partly that you couldn’t figure out how to say you were doing something else that night when having issued the invitation made it clear that you weren’t, and partly that you simply couldn’t let them go without you; jealousy, and curiosity to see them together in this new way, and hope that maybe he would change his mind or that maybe you were misinterpreting the situation, beat out pride. You waited alone outside the town hall and watched as they came walking toward you together; and then you went in and watched the play and thought of how convenient things were in art, where there seemed to be only two young people in town and so they fell in love (the fact that it ended in death and grief seemed to you, that night, beside the point). The three of you kept working together on the magazine. He kept taking her to things—a movie, a coffee shop. She kept saying yes and going, even while she kept sleeping with the motorcycle boy. She didn’t seem to notice that your friendship had cooled, that you’d stopped confiding in her.5 Meanwhile Boy 19, who was Boy 18’s antipode, was beginning to shine in the distance.

  He was handsome, Boy 19, in a way you thought yourself indifferent to (though you knew this indifference was at least in part preemptive, a resolution to spurn something you weren’t going to be allowed to have). He was also generally thought of as a jerk. Wait—that’s not quite true. It was more that he was not generally thought of at all. He had come into your school partway through the year and had somehow failed to register on the social Richter scale—he wasn’t a brain or an athlete, he didn’t play an instrument, he didn’t do anything, except stand around looking vaguely sardonic. You asked a couple of your friends who had classes with him what he was like, and they shrugged. Did they think he was good-looking? They guessed so, they’d never really noticed. It was almost as if he were invisible to everyone but you, like the murderer in a horror movie who can only be seen by his eventual victim. You watched him circling around at lunchtime, sometimes sitting next to one girl for a few days, not getting anywhere, and then a week or two later moving on to another. You had your own busy lunch life going on, but you could have charted his like a sociologist; you were always aware, in some half-conscious way, of where he was in that vast school cafeteria, his pattern of movement, his trajectory.

  Finally, a few weeks before graduation, he worked his way around to the table where you sat with some of your friends. The girl he was targeting didn’t want him. You weren’t sure you did either—up close like this, real, he scared you, not anything he said or did, but a trapped uneasy sense that the tractable, almost fictional, object of surveillance had suddenly become aware of you, as if you’d looked into your telescope one day and found an eye looking back at you. Now what? Now banter, for a couple of weeks. None of it memorable—you couldn’t even remember it later the same day, unlike your conversations with Boy 18 which you could have written out afterward and attributed to Noel Coward.

  “Ah,” said Boy 19. “Well, then.”

  “Well, then,” you agreed.

  All of it just lay there, a leaden placeholder where you felt wit should have been. Or if not wit, then some shared way of seeing, thinking, feeling. Wasn’t that, or the hope of it, the mirage of it, the thing that had always driven your longing? But here you were, walking into the woods one afternoon with Boy 19, lying on the ground in a grassy clearing propped on your elbows, chattering away. Then, abruptly, he told you to turn over, and you turned over.

  A triumphant sense of relief, even that first afternoon when all you did was kiss each other. Oh, so this was it. This, not that dutiful checklist pecking you had done with the long-ago Boy 7. This was what people meant—what they did, what they liked. When his tongue came into your mouth, you were startled and exhilarated, you almost wanted to say, Oh you read that book too? You felt that way again a week or two later, when he was kissing you up against the wall inside your parents’ garage—it was a hot day, he was wearing gym shorts and a light loose Indian cotton shirt and when he pulled away, his shirt was tented out in front of him, and you thought Oh so it really is, he really does—you’d been reading about and trying to imagine
all of this for so long that you were surprised to discover it was true. He saw where you were looking and grinned and told you to give him a minute, it’d go down; and he was so relaxed with it, with you, not wheedling or pressuring you, that you put your hand there and his eyes slipped closed. It fascinated you, a real cock in your hand, the live strong veiny heat of it, and what you could do to him when you touched it. I want to go down on you, he said a few days after that, and you weren’t sure what he meant but then that was another happy surprise—the thing you’d done for years alone in your room suddenly confirmed and magnified, connected up with this, in the way you’d suspected it might be without ever quite knowing—along with the brazen luxury of his hands on your breasts and the salty, grass-tasting slide of him in your mouth.

  At the same time, you were troubled by love.6 Where was it? How could you be loving all of this without loving him? His chuckly euphemisms—he called his wallet “the old exchequer.” Once, after you and he had a fight about something—you were always having fights, and you, not he, picked them—he put a note in your locker. When you first saw it lying there, you felt a wild stab of hope that it might be another of Boy 18’s limericks, which had stopped coming months before; but you saw that it was Boy 19’s scrawly writing, also in fountain pen (fountain pen was big among the boys of your year): “I am yours / You are not mine / You are what you are.” That he would quote Crosby Stills and Nash was bad enough. That he would change the lyrics was even worse. Why not just pick an apt quotation in the first place? Why alter something to make it apt?

  “It’s just sex,” you said to your friends, when they asked why you were with Boy 19. You liked the tough, worldly sound of it. Finally you had caught up with everyone else—not just caught up, but leapt over the conventional linking of sex and love, and flown, like Evel Knievel clearing an impossibly long string of barrels, to land triumphantly farther down the road, where sex had a sophisticated, detached, unencumbered life of its own.

  But

  a) what you meant when you said this was “Hey, listen, he’s good for something.” You were ashamed of Boy 19. You were also ashamed of yourself, for disowning him.

  b) you were not really a “just sex" person. You thought about him, planned for him, missed him; were happy when he wrote to you that summer from Edinburgh, where he had gone to spend a month with an uncle; kept seeing him all through your freshman year and part of your sophomore year in college, even though he went to school in Boston and you were in New York; said you loved him when he said he loved you—and you did love him in a way, while continuing to find him irritating.

  c) you weren’t actually fucking him.

  This last, c), is worth closer inspection. You were scared. Not that it might hurt, not that you might not like it, not of pregnancy, not of him leaving you. You were scared of doing something that, once done, would never again be something you’d never done. You had always planned to wait until it felt right, and this was not what you’d thought “right“ would feel like. If you could somehow have combined Boy 18’s soul, the excitement and rightness of those conversations, the sacredness of your feeling for him, together with Boy 19’s frank desire, his physical ease and confidence (and maybe, too, his smell, and the way he tasted)—if you could have combined all that in one person, you would have slept with that person.

  Were your expectations unrealistic, were you being too picky? You felt you’d been waiting, waiting, and hadn’t even really come close to what you were waiting for—you could be waiting forever. But if you gave in just to get it over with (and because you kind of knew it would be terrific), were you betraying yourself, taking lightly something that, for you, needed to retain its meaning? You went back and forth about this for months, while continuing to go back and forth on the train between New York and Boston. Boy 19 was actually lovely about your indecision—he could have been frustrated and fed up with you, but he was patient. He let you know what he wanted, but didn’t pressure you and liked the many things that did go on between you in those narrow little dorm beds on the weekends. In fact, you spent most of your time together in bed, and when you weren’t in bed you ate. You couldn’t remember ever having been as happy as you were in his dorm room on Sunday mornings, wearing only his shirt, sitting with him in the bright sunlight in front of the open window while he played Bach cantatas for you on his stereo and handed you pieces of Entenmann’s coffee cake.

  You ate with him in delicatessens and chowder houses and Chinese places and Italian restaurants where everything was covered in breading, cheese, and red sauce; and in a different kind of Italian restaurant, pale and severe, where you had tortellini in brodo and veal with truffles. You got dressed up and went with him on Saturday afternoons to glittering or dowdy hotels (he was rich), where starchy string quartets and velvet-gowned harpists sat being efficiently romantic amid potted palms while you and he drank tea and ate scones with clotted cream and talked about where you wanted to go for dinner. There was a deli you both liked on 43rd Street, and you would walk there together on Friday nights, late, from Penn Station where you’d just met his train. You ate borscht with sour cream, and potato pancakes with sour cream and applesauce, and onion bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon or whitefish, all in the same meal—a clatter of white plates crowded onto the tabletop, along with tall glasses of fresh orange juice, furry with pulp. You loved these Friday nights, the startling lanky wolfish beauty of him rising from the train platform to the place where you always waited at the top of the stairs, the first kisses, the walk through the dark cold windy streets to the deli, that clean feeling of the weekend in front of you, with nothing yet to mar it, no blot on the paper (though he would always say, “I refuse to call it Avenue of the Americas. To me it will always be Sixth Avenue,” and you would think, Who asked you?—it wasn’t the remark itself, it was the fact that he said it every time, in the same words), you hadn’t fought yet, the meal was still ahead of you to be eaten with a greed that was new each time, always innocent, as if you had never known the feeling that invariably came afterward: too much, too full, too heavy, regret, atonement, resolution to do it differently, carefully, next week. You could eat in front of him without shame, without hesitation, without dissembling. Once he took you to a department store and told you to close your eyes, and he held your hand and led you gently, eagerly across the floor until—“Open your eyes!”, and you were standing inside a gilded alcove devoted to a kind of Belgian chocolate you had heard of but never tasted. There was a little radar blip of shame then, as you imagined for a moment what it had looked like: a solicitous boy leading a fat girl across the selling floor—past the gloves, the perfume, the jewelry—to paradise; but you put it aside and gave yourself over to the pleasure of choosing exquisite little squares and mounds and fluted ovals for the saleslady to seize with deft fingers and arrange for you in a deep and costly golden box.

  He said you were beautiful, and maybe he meant it: once he gave you a pair of silver earrings and looked at you in them so unremittingly that he bloodied his nose walking into a lamppost on the Boston Common. But even the credibility of a bloody nose couldn’t take away the deep sting of the occasional but terrible signals you’d gotten from other boys over the years: the one in high school who, you had heard, when asked to name the girl he would least want to sleep with, named you; and Boy 20, whom you’d met during freshman orientation at your college and hung around with for several weeks by what seemed like mutual agreement, until you had blurted out one evening that you liked him and he had told you apologetically that he only went out with pretty girls.

  Yes, even while you and Boy 19 were commuting back and forth, you were still sort of looking around. Boy 21 was an elegant pre-med student from India who spoke with a British accent and struck you as kind and heroic (he was playing Henry Higgins in Pygmalion—you were Mrs. Pierce, the housekeeper—and when the director, who was always fighting with his girlfriend, slapped her across the face one evening during a rehearsal, Boy 21 intervened,
in a robust, morally incisive way that reminded you of Boy 2 rescuing you on the playground all those years ago). (Oddly, Boy 2 had recently and briefly reappeared: he was a student at your college. You noticed his name one day when you were thumbing through the freshman directory, and went over to his dorm to knock on his door. He remembered the playground, but had no memory of the boy in the cowboy suit or of you. He was polite, but neither of you could think of anything else to say, and so your fantasy that—that—oh, never mind.) Boy 21 seemed to like you, but he also liked your roommate, one of those ethereal girl-on-the-moors types that you would have liked to be. For Valentine’s Day he gave her a dozen roses and you a gigantic heart-shaped box of chocolates; and not long after that he started going out with someone else.

  Boy 18 wrote to you—you had not heard from him since graduation—to ask if you would like to come down to his college for a crew regatta. He was not a rower, as far as you knew; nor were you; and neither of you had ever expressed any interest in watching crew races. What could this invitation mean, if not that he had finally recognized that you and he were right for each other? Even as you formulated this theory, you knew that it was wrong—knew, in the language that you and Boy 18 had once seemed to share, that there wasn’t going to be no tea.7 You took the train down Friday night and he met you on a dark little platform, his face bleached and ghastly under the overhead light. He hugged you and told you that he’d arranged for you to stay with a girl whose roommate had gone home with mono, and he got you to her room very quickly. You lay awake that night in a top bunk under a moonlit ceiling, listening to the deep-sleep breathing of a girl you didn’t know, feeling that you needed to be very still, vigilant, though you didn’t know what you were on the lookout for, or hiding from. The next day he showed you over the campus, introduced you to some of his friends, stood with you in the hot sun on the riverbank watching the crew shells slide by. It was impeccable, he was perfectly nice, but you still had that pinched feeling—not sadness, not dread, but a kind of cautious baffled alertness. Why did you invite me? you might have asked, not reproachfully, but out of curiosity—except that, surprisingly, you weren’t really curious. You’d wanted him for so long, it was as if your wanting had worn a deep groove in the landscape; and now the groove was still there, but it was empty, the riverbed was dry. That night you sat up late with him talking; it was pleasant but formal, effortful. You both fell asleep on his bed, you with your head on the pillow and he with his head resting against the footboard. When you woke up Sunday morning, you lay very quietly, still clenched and vigilant, so you wouldn’t wake him; and you found you were thinking of Boy 19 and the sun coming into his dorm room and the soft hair on his legs and his excitement when he played you Bach and the coffee cake with its wet tunnels of cinnamon.