At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  Thomas let us in (using a key that hung on a nail under the porch, which seemed to me another adult touch) and I was struck almost at once by a feeling I hadn’t had in years. There are certain places, certain objects, that seem in some hard-to-explain way alive, and that give a weird charmed quality to everything you do in them or with them. When I was little I seemed to get this feeling more regularly; it would come over me when I was holding a glass, or wearing a particular sweater, or sitting in the unpainted corner of the kitchen in one of the first apartments I remember. Warmth? Happiness? Home? What comes to mind is the way wood sometimes looks in sunlight; there’s a Vermeer-ish quality to what I’m talking about. Anyway, the Pells’ house had it.

  Aside from this feeling, and a general attic kind of smell, the sound of his house’s floors is what struck me most vividly. They creaked with every step anyone took, this deep, almost cartoonish sound. And the walls of the living room were covered, absolutely covered, with books: the seven-volume complete works of Freud, the notebooks of Tolstoy, the letters of Virginia Woolf, on and on and on (none of these names meant anything to me, but I was very impressed with the sight of a real library; this, I figured, was what he did with himself while I was watching back-to-back episodes of The Fresh Prince).

  And underneath all this was the fact that his parents weren’t home, that no adult was. I knew enough not to mention it, but it was as impressive and unusual as if we’d come in and there had been a pet tiger roaming around (in fact there was a pet cat, Vladimir, who wove around my legs as if he were trying to tie my shoelaces together). I was used to people’s houses in the afternoons: being drearily hovered over by mothers who wanted to relieve the loneliness of their days by making us grilled-cheese sandwiches, or by housekeepers who couldn’t pretend not to mind seeing footprints and backpacks on their just-cleaned floors. To get away you’d have to close yourself in a bedroom, where you’d look at someone’s Magic 8 Ball and wait for the sound of footsteps in the hall.

  But Thomas was an adult in the way only children sometimes become adults. As soon as we walked in he went to the kitchen and made us a chicken breast in a pan with tomato sauce poured on top; we sat side by side at the high counter eating, while he sorted through a stack of mail as if there might be a bill or a magazine for him.

  “Do you want to … see the backyard?” he said afterward. This led to a few minutes of wandering through the bamboo, peering through the fence at a neighbor’s dog licking himself. “Should we go up to my room?” In his room we sat on his bed and he showed me a book of old New Yorker cartoons, some of which were racy in a way I could hardly understand; I half smiled in case he wanted me to laugh. A truth was slowly making its way through me, like heat through a cold house: Thomas had no idea how to have someone over. The worry was not all mine. He must have figured that something would just happen if you put two people together in playdate conditions, but here it was, not happening.

  “I hope you don’t think it’s weird,” he finally said, “that I invited you over.” By then we were downstairs in front of the TV (Thomas scanned through the channels with the arrows rather than the numbers, giving himself away as an amateur).

  “No. Why would it be weird?”

  “I don’t really have people over. I always think they wouldn’t have any fun.” He paused for long enough that I thought he might have been waiting for me to say that of course people would have fun. But he said, “If I ask you something, do you promise you won’t tell anyone at school?”

  “OK.”

  “I feel like I should ask you to swear to God. Do you believe in God?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Me neither. Well, I’ll just trust you then.”

  Like everyone who insists on how trustworthy they are, or maybe just like everyone, I broke promises constantly, but I was determined to know Thomas’s secret. Maybe he wanted me to join him in committing the perfect murder, maybe he was actually forty-five years old.

  No: he wanted to know if I thought there was any way Michelle Koller liked him.

  I was lucky to have the TV to look at while I considered this. It wasn’t the thought of Michelle liking him that was absurd (although it was), but the thought of him, reader of Hamlet, expert on the Treaty of Versailles, liking Michelle; so this was what was going on all day inside that famous head.

  “You went to her party a few weeks ago, didn’t you?” he said, talking faster now. “Did you see her room? What are her parents like?” A few minutes later: “I wanted to ask Rebecca about her, but I couldn’t get her alone.”

  Michelle was the leader of a group of girls—a group that included my girlfriend, Rebecca—who were collectively known for their hotness. They were a kind of chorus, with a girl at every pitch (Alice, tall and muscular, was the baritone; Rebecca, tiny and dainty, was the soprano). And Michelle was like the note you get when you rub a wet fingertip on crystal: she floated above varieties and was just sort of the thing itself.

  “Has Rebecca ever said anything about me liking Michelle? I’m worried she knows.”

  “No,” I said honestly. Rebecca had hardly ever said anything at all.

  Anyway, the caste system is strict in middle school—I was just at the edge of what my status allowed with Rebecca—and Thomas had no more chance of dating Michelle Koller than he did Michelle Pfeiffer. Still, I did my best to look serious as he showed me a Valentine’s Day card he’d made and then not given to her, and the couple of pages of surprisingly good sketches he’d made of her sitting at her desk, her hair behind her ears.

  I gave him advice, like a stock picker with a dupe for a client. It turned out not to matter after all that I couldn’t remember which side Russia had been on in World War II. Tell her you like her sweater, I said. Ask her if she needs help with her homework. Leave mix tapes on her desk. Try to be the last person to say good-bye to her at the end of each day.

  And each of these little dramas, although they of course weren’t going to lead anywhere, gave us something to talk over afterward at his house. I liked being the kid who’d cracked Thomas Pell; it was like having learned to communicate with an owl. First I’d go over once a week, maybe twice. By May we didn’t even have to ask what the other was doing—we’d walk out of school together and head straight for the bus stop. I’d come to like him more than I liked the people who used to laugh at my impressions of him. Soon we were having sleepovers in his bedroom with its bookshelves and slanted ceilings; we were making up names for people at school and making up words for things we didn’t want to be overheard talking about; I was eating dinner at his house so often that his mom would set a place for me without asking.

  But throughout all this, he remained gloomily obsessed with Michelle. I hadn’t read The Great Gatsby yet, but this was pure Gatsby and Daisy: tragic longing, obsessive planning.

  At the end of that first May of our friendship there was a grade-wide field trip to the aquarium in Baltimore. This meant signing permission slips, getting to school at seven thirty in the morning, climbing onto an old-apple-juice-smelling bus. Thomas and I had come up with a plan that Thomas was going to sidle up to Michelle at some point in the afternoon, probably in a dark exhibit, and try putting his arm around her. I knew this was hopelessly, ridiculously creepy, but Thomas and I had spent a couple of afternoons at his house, standing at his bedroom window and pretending it was an aquarium tank, practicing how he’d ease his arm up her back and around her shoulders.

  We were in the Amazon River Basin Gallery when he told me that it wasn’t working. “I tried to get near her and she used Alice to scrape me off. I think she might be upset with me. Or just in a bad mood.”

  “No, try in the next exhibit. See? In one of the little dark hallways.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded, and I watched as he spent the next five minutes slowly following her around between the jellyfish tanks, edging his way close to her, looking like someone trying to pick her pocket.

  He came back over to me and said, �
��Well, that was an Arc de Triomphe,” which was what we said when something had gone wrong. On the bus ride home we sat next to each other not talking, and it occurred to me, watching miles of those beige sound-blocking walls, that he might finally have realized how hopeless he was, and that now might be the time to admit that he was right. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” was all I could think to say, which was another of our words for failure (our language, it’s occurring to me now, was especially rich on this subject).

  Once it started to get dark outside, and once the teachers and chaperones had all begun either falling asleep or sinking into a post-field-trip state of not giving a shit, a game of Truth or Dare developed. Paul Wolham rubbed his penis against the window and pretended he’d had an orgasm. Lauren Langer had to say whether she’d ever had a sex dream. John Swider had to go to the front of the bus and ask the driver if there was anywhere on board to poop.

  I could see where this was going. Being friends with Thomas was like being friends with an alcoholic; chances to creep out Michelle were his liquor stores, his bars. He and I went back to join the game just after Michelle and Rebecca did. By then Rebecca and I may have been breaking up; anyway we didn’t acknowledge each other.

  It was Alex Rozmarin, this spastic red-haired kid, who finally dared Michelle to kiss Thomas. There are no secret crushes in middle school; Thomas’s hopelessness was becoming as public a fact as his intelligence.

  It wasn’t a fact for him, though. He turned toward her and raised his eyebrows in a way that said, Well? Here I am, and I guess we’re going to have to do this, aren’t we?

  She didn’t move and she wasn’t (it was as clear as if she’d said it) even thinking about it. “Truth,” she said. “I choose truth.”

  “You said dare!” Alex shrieked. “You can’t go back! You have to kiss Thomas!”

  But he was overruled. Thomas stayed standing but now he’d turned his face away from Michelle, down toward the floor, and he seemed to be shrinking inward, like a burning leaf. In the look that had come over her at the thought of having to kiss him, he’d finally seen the truth. If the bus’s back door had been open I think he would have flung himself out.

  Instead (and this was, I think, when I first noticed his inclination toward emotional seppuku) he looked up, as if he’d heard a whistle in the distance. In his clearest, most measured voice, he said, “Michelle, I’ve made you uncomfortable, and I apologize. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should have accepted what was obvious a long time ago. You won’t need to worry about avoiding me anymore. I’ll never bother you again.”

  On a Saturday a week or so after the tea with Anna, I took Nicholas and Teddy ice-skating in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery. This was a dripping, dishrag-gray day, and I was feeling mildly poisoned not only because of the weather but because I thought I’d seen Claire in the crowd that afternoon at Metro Center. The changing room smelled like wet socks and dirty rubber. As I kneeled in front of a bench, tying Nicholas’s skates, he said, “You’re kind of like our dad now, huh?”

  For some reason this added to my gloom, and without looking up I said, “No, your dad’s your dad. I’m just your friend. Now give me your other foot.”

  Teddy, standing balanced with one hand on my head, asked if he could go get a soft pretzel (he was always in a panic about when he was going to eat next), and I knocked his arm away, stood up, told them to quit being so slow or else I was going to take them home. I spent the hour on the ice dropping their hands, telling them they needed to learn to stay up on their own, doing everything I could not to look like their father. Beatles songs played on a loop out of faraway-sounding speakers and backward-skating show-offs zoomed around and between us.

  “Can we stop for bagels on the way home?” Teddy asked, while we were hobbling back into the locker room.

  “No.”

  “Are you mad at us?”

  “No. Not if you take your skates off and go get your shoes.”

  I must have already known that I was going to start sleeping with their mother. When I try now to pinpoint the first moment when I realized this might actually happen, it keeps getting pushed earlier. Yes, the night of the tea, the dream, but hadn’t there been weird looks, little pauses, before then? Joel used to call her my middle-aged mistress, when I’d stand talking to her on the phone at night—he’d once dated an older woman, and he talked about it like an exotic dish he’d once eaten on vacation, something everyone should try before they die.

  Anyway, a few days after the skating Anna left me a message (she always left me a couple of messages a week, asking if I could babysit an extra night or stay after to tutor Teddy), saying that she wondered if we could grab coffee sometime to talk about Nicholas. He’d gotten in a fight at school, apparently, and this wasn’t new, but this latest one was especially bad. There were a couple of kids in his class who called him “the Dick,” poured Pixy Stix in his hair, and he was incapable of backing down or shutting up—he was the kind of kid who’d keep shouting even as the teacher dragged him away with a bloody nose (he was also the kind of kid whose nose bled if you tapped it). She worried, she said, that with everything going on with his dad he’d keep acting out more and more and she was just about out of ideas. She wasn’t working Wednesday afternoon, if there was any way she could steal me for an hour.

  We met at a coffee shop on Wisconsin just after four, when it was already almost dark. It had been raining so long that the sun seemed possibly to have gone out altogether. I’d spent the day researching law schools, which had meant mostly writing emails and watching old episodes of Family Ties on YouTube. There were only a few other people with us in the café, which had kids’ crayon drawings all over the walls and butcher-paper tablecloths. A classical radio station that sounded like falling asleep was playing, and in the corner a woman was breast-feeding with a kind of amazing lack of self-consciousness. The one waiter drifted around grumpily, forgetting to bring sugar, checking his phone. We didn’t talk about Nicholas at first—instead we talked about a friend of hers at work who’d started beekeeping, a new Spanish restaurant in Friendship Heights. We both had big ceramic mugs of weak coffee and we made a show, to the waiter’s indifference, of deciding whether we wanted something sweet. Finally we settled on sharing a slice of German chocolate cake, which I ended up eating most of and she ended up pretending to have eaten most of.

  “It’s so nice talking to someone who actually knows the boys. I get almost greedy about it. Would you tell me if I was too much?”

  “You’re not too much.”

  “Well, you’re sweet. How have you been?”

  Something about Anna made me able to talk about Claire without sounding, I think, like someone who lies in bed at night with his heart pounding, wondering what went wrong—instead I could say things like, “Well, I think I’m about done licking my wounds,” as if I were describing the aftermath of a tough game of cricket.

  “Whoever does end up with you is going to be seriously lucky,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “I’m serious! You’re a total catch.”

  Too-frank compliments can have an effect on a conversation like too-frank insults. We hadn’t said much for a minute when the waiter brought the check, and when we finally started to stand up she said, “I love these afternoons when they both have lessons,” and that, if I had to pick a moment, was when it was decided. In the corner the woman was still breast-feeding, this white veiny watermelon hanging out, and that may have had something to do with the mood too. I pretended I was walking up the block with her because I felt like getting some fresh air (the rain had picked up again); she pretended this sounded reasonable. Within fifteen minutes we were together on her large white bed, my jeans were around my ankles before my shoes were off, my coat was on the floor in the corner of the room, the lights were on, we were making the noises that people make, she was whispering the things that people whisper. I was distracting myself by trying to make wo
rds out of the letters in middle-aged mistress.

  This, I thought, tugging a bra strap here, feeling myself yanked and squeezed there, is actually what’s happening! The person who this morning couldn’t stop thinking about Claire is right now scrambling around on his knees, reaching across to …

  Afterward I settled down with my head on her chest. We’d known what we were doing, apparently.

  “See?” she said. “I told you people would want you.”

  She petted my head and I looked around the room, thinking of Nicholas running out of that bathroom in his Cars pajamas with his hair still wet. The radiator pipes knocked and knocked. Anna smelled not at all bad but very noticeably like skin and sweat and person. I looked into the dark window next to the bed and thought, Cold (in fact there were now goose bumps all along my arms and legs) but not alone. My heart seemed to have become slow and loud and enormous, as if I’d just come out of a long bath.

  I told her I needed to get home to get ready for another appointment, which wasn’t true, but I did suddenly feel that I had to get away before what we’d done could catch up with us. Dressing in front of her somehow seemed much more intimate and embarrassing than having sex with her. “Do you want to borrow an umbrella?” she said. She watched me sleepily from the bed and beckoned me over (making me think, very much against my will, of an old lady calling to her children from her deathbed). “Don’t drive yourself crazy,” she said. “We’re adults.” She kissed me on the forehead.

  Driving home I didn’t feel crazy, exactly; I felt the way I’d felt after losing my virginity in high school, this strobe light flashing between pride and disbelief. And I thought, like a mantra, Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. A woman came out of her house with her two fat huskies. A boy in a Curious George poncho ran ahead of a mom who was carrying a yoga mat and groceries. Was it really, for the rest of the world, just a regular Wednesday afternoon? Didn’t anyone know or care what I’d been doing? A police car stopped behind me at a red light and I thought for a half heartbeat they might be pulling me over.