by Simon Rich
“New chef?” I asked.
Elliot sighed.
“It’s a long and ridiculous story.”
I took another bite of the croissant and waited for Elliot to tell it to me.
“Last year, after Terry’s second heart attack, his doctors pleaded with him to appoint a full-time personal trainer. He eventually hired some German to get them off his back—a former Olympian named Dolf. But on the same day, he hired Passard.”
“Who?”
“Jacques Passard. He is arguably the greatest pastry chef of his generation.”
“Jesus,” I said, my mouth full of crumbs. “Do these guys know about each other?”
“Are you kidding?” Elliot said. “Terry’s favorite hobby is pitting them against each other. They live in the same apartment. No more interruptions.”
I finished off the croissant and grabbed another.
“Terry pays them a modest base salary,” Elliot explained. “But the bulk of their income comes from performance-based bonuses.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every month, Terry goes to their apartment and writes out an enormous check. Then he steps onto a scale. If he’s lost weight since his last visit, he gives the check to the trainer. If he’s gained weight, he gives it to the chef.”
“So they’re constantly at war.”
Elliot nodded.
“You should see the look on Dolf’s face when Jacques makes meringue. His cheeks turn bright red and the muscles stand out in his neck. Those two men hate each other more than you could possibly imagine.”
As Elliot racked up the next game, it occurred to me that he had never mentioned either of his father’s heart attacks. I wanted to ask him how serious they were, but of course I knew better.
I offered Elliot a pastry and he waved me off with his usual flick of the wrist. I wondered if Elliot had his own team of doctors. If he did, he certainly wasn’t listening to any of their advice. Every time I visited him, he seemed smaller and weaker than ever. For a while, I assumed it was an optical illusion. I was going through a drastic growth spurt, and everyone in the class seemed to be shrinking. But no one was shrinking as dramatically as Elliot. He usually wore a new outfit every day, but occasionally I recognized a pair of pants from two or even three years ago. And once, I could have sworn that I saw him sporting the same pair of boat shoes he had worn on his very first day at Glendale, back in the eighth grade. It was possible, I thought sometimes, that he hadn’t changed at all.
Elliot turned around to break, and I took the opportunity to jot down the word “rubicund,” so I wouldn’t forget it. At some point, toward the end of eighth grade, I had started to carry around a thick red notebook in my pocket. Elliot always knew about Mr. Hendricks’s pop quizzes in advance, and I wanted to have the dates on hand so that I would know when to study. Before long, I was writing down the questions, too—and from there, it didn’t take me long to move on to the answers. I didn’t feel guilty. French was obviously a useless language. If anything, cheating at it was improving my capacity to learn by allowing me to focus on my other, more worthwhile classes.
By tenth grade I was cheating in every class, including, somehow, pottery. And by senior year, I was filling the notebook with information that had nothing to do with school. There were summaries of books I was supposed to have read, meanings of paintings I was supposed to have created, spellings of diseases I was supposed to be trying to cure, and a shockingly long list of homeless people whom I had supposedly befriended. The notebook became so incriminating that I developed a habit of frisking my pocket every couple of minutes to make sure it was still on my person. I wanted to destroy it, but I couldn’t: There was too much to keep track of.
I occasionally felt guilty about my success, but on the whole it felt deserved. It wasn’t like I hadn’t worked hard. Perpetuating so many lies was difficult, and I was doing it all on my own. Or mostly on my own.
I got a call on my cell, and even though Elliot was hunched over the pool table and my phone was set on vibrate, he noticed.
“Don’t answer,” he said.
I waited until the ringing stopped and flicked it open so I could hear my new voice mail.
“Speaker,” Elliot demanded.
I laid the phone on the table and we listened together, in silence.
“Hey, man. I know I already left you a message, but I want to make sure you knew that the party’s still going. I know you’re probably busy, but everyone keeps asking where you’re at, so I guess they want to see you. Anyway, if you need the address, give me a call.”
I picked up the phone and was about to dial when Elliot snapped his fingers.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Calling back Lance,” I said. “That’s the third time he’s called.”
“All the more reason to ignore his calls! I mean, honestly, do you realize how pathetic that is?”
“Well, yeah, but…it’s his birthday.”
“If he hadn’t called you or invited you, than maybe his party would be worth attending.”
“So I should only go to parties that people don’t invite me to?”
“You shouldn’t go to any parties,” Elliot said, “if you can help it.”
“I already promised him I’d go,” I said. “What am I going to tell him?”
“Nothing,” Elliot said. “The more evasive you are about your activities, the more impressive people will assume them to be. We’ve been over this a thousand times.”
“But if I never go to parties, won’t people stop inviting me? I mean, it’s the middle of senior year and I still haven’t really been to any.”
“Of course you haven’t been to any,” he said. “You’re far too popular.”
I laughed.
“I never hang out with anybody, Elliot, ever. I’m only popular on paper.”
“What other kind of popular is there?”
He dashed off a note and tossed it into the dumbwaiter.
“I’m going to show you something,” he said. “It’s the most desired and envied artifact in the entire Allagash collection.”
“Can you show it to me after the party?”
He ignored me and spun the wheel. The box landed downstairs with a thud, and a few seconds later I heard the sound of running, followed by an elaborate series of clicks and snaps.
“We keep it locked up,” Elliot explained.
There were some more clicks and snaps. Then the wheel creaked in the opposite direction and the box returned.
Elliot took a long and lazy sip from his martini. I could tell he was deliberately stalling.
“Come on,” I said, finally. “What’s in there?”
He took another slow sip, and then, finally, he opened the box.
It contained a small, heavily rusted key. It was dark green with brown splotches, but I could tell that it used to be gold or silver.
“Have you ever heard of the Seven Circles Club?” he asked me.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Then listen closely,” he said. “And no interruptions.”
• • •
Before it was completely destroyed in the Great Fire of 1835, the Seven Circles Club dominated New York’s cultural scene. There were plenty of prominent gentlemen’s clubs in those days. The Excelsior Club was so wealthy that two of its bathroom attendants became noted philanthropists after their retirement. And the Vanitas Club was so old that its address—24 Rum Way—no longer referred to an existing street. But the Seven Circles was older and richer than all of them—and far more exclusive. A club’s status is usually measured by the number of luminaries it attracts. But the Seven Circles Club was less famous for the people it let in than for the people it rejected. In its first ten years of business, the governing board denied membership to three millionaires, five U.S. senators, the man who cured scurvy, Lewis and Clark, and George Washington’s only son.
“Why’d they reject him?” I asked.
“Becau
se his father was a farmer,” Elliot said.
The Seven Circles occupied a dome-shaped building on the site of Peter Stuyvesant’s original mansion. It was comprised of seven concentric circles, nested within one another, like the rings of Saturn. The outermost layer was as decadent as any club in New York, Paris, or London. The circular walls were plastered with masterworks from the Renaissance. Liveried butlers walked in a continuous loop, offering members imported British gin and cigarettes from Turkey. But the first circle was practically monastic compared to the second circle. Of the club’s forty members, only twenty had keys to the giant brass door that led into the next ring-shaped room.
Once inside the next compartment, members were treated to French absinthe, Brazilian cocaine, and a display of real Renaissance paintings. (The first circle’s paintings, it turned out, were clever forgeries—a prank on the less prestigious members of the club.)
Only ten members had keys to the third circle. It was adorned with stained glass and Christian relics, and unlike the first two circles, it lacked servants of any kind. It was within this circle that members learned the true mission of the Seven Circles Club: to reject evil and embrace Christ. The room was lined with granite kneelers so members could supplicate and pray for the sins they had committed before ascending to the third circle.
The fourth circle was an opium den. The five men with keys smoked out of ruby pipes, slept with whores from the Orient, and congratulated one another on the hilarious prank they had pulled on the fools still stranded in the third circle.
The fifth circle was made out of wood from Judean palm trees, which have been extinct since the time of Caesar. The sixth, somewhat predictably, was made out of real Judean palm trees. And the seventh room—well, that was open to debate. One contemporary minister held that it contained a piece of the True Cross. And a pair of Columbia University scientists insisted that it contained the last dodo, still alive but struggling on a largely gin-based diet. There were plenty of rumors, but the only man who knew its contents with certainty, the only member of the Seven Circles who possessed the coveted seventh key, was the founder himself, Elliot’s ancestor—the first American Allagash!
“So what was in the seventh room?”
“A stool,” Elliot announced triumphantly, “made out of wood.”
“Extinct wood?”
“What? No. Regular wood.”
“Oh.”
Elliot blinked a few times, exasperated by my reaction.
“Don’t you get it?” he said. “The contents were irrelevant! The only thing that mattered was the thickness of the walls, the impregnability of the lock! Four different men tried to assassinate Cornelius just to obtain the key. It’s rumored that he started the Great Fire himself, to make sure his club would burn before anyone knew the truth. He spent up to eight hours a day in that little room, gaining power and prestige with every passing second—just by sitting there! That is how the game is played!”
I imagined Elliot’s ancestor sitting alone in the dark, surrounded by the sounds of laughter and clinking glasses.
“Wouldn’t it be more fun to hang out in a different room? Like the one with opium?”
Elliot tossed the key back into the dumbwaiter and sat down, exhausted.
Lance called again and my phone skittered awkwardly across the wooden table.
“Go ahead,” Elliot wheezed. “What do I care?”
• • •
“Keep going,” I told the cab driver.
“This is Seventy-sixth and Lex,” he said.
“Um…I meant Seventy-fifth.”
I got out of the cab, stood behind a tree, and watched my classmates stroll in and out of Lance’s brownstone. It was two forty-five in the morning, but music still blared from the second-floor window. Lance had invited the entire grade and almost everyone had shown up.
I got invited to lots of parties, but Elliot always convinced me not to go to them. I argued with him occasionally, but he never ran out of points to make. He’d rant for hours about the “low station” of the other guests, referring to them alternately as “animals” and “garbage animals.” Usually, by the time he was finished with his tirade, it was too late to go anywhere and I would just spend the night at Elliot’s.
But Elliot couldn’t keep me away from Lance’s birthday party. It was the biggest event of the year. He had distributed fliers. If I didn’t go to this party, which one would I go to? In school, my social interactions consisted primarily of people approaching me in the hall and congratulating me on things (like getting reelected as class president, getting into Harvard, or saving a homeless man’s life). Elliot had urged me to remain as aloof from the student body as possible—and I understood his logic. But sometimes, while rushing through the halls, I’d hear two people laughing about something that had happened at a party, and I’d feel left out, even if it was a party I’d been invited to.
I checked my hair in the window of a parked car and stepped out from behind the tree. Some of my classmates were sitting on the stoop, exchanging cell-phone numbers with kids from different schools. I even recognized kids from other grades—juniors, sophomores, even a couple of freshmen. How cool could a party be if there were freshmen?
I checked my hair again. I had recently started going to Elliot’s hairstylist, an intense salon owner from Milan. I could tell he had given me a good haircut because it had taken him four hours, and when he was finished, his assistants had taken photographs. But the haircut was really difficult to maintain. I was supposed to rub some kind of gel into the sides every morning, and I had to go downtown every Saturday for a touch-up.
It was almost three in the morning. If I showed up to the party this late, the kids on the stoop would definitely ask me where I had been. I would need a pretty exciting answer to justify such extreme lateness. Maybe I could tell them I had been at some other, more impressive party? Or that I had become engrossed in some important book? But what if they asked me follow-up questions? I didn’t know about any other parties going on that night and I hadn’t read a book in months. I retreated behind the tree to think things over.
The truth was, Lance’s party had pretty much ended. It would be pointless to show up just as everyone else was leaving. One thing was clear: I couldn’t stay where I was for much longer. If someone spotted me hiding, the night would be a total catastrophe. My stomach lurched: What if they had already spotted me? What if they were watching me right now?
I took out my cell phone and pretended to make a call—so that if people were watching, they would assume I was attending to some kind of important business.
Never mind, I imagined one of the guests saying. I was wrong—he’s not hiding behind that tree. He’s just making a phone call, on his way to the party.
Oh, you’re right. That Seymour guy’s really busy, huh?
Yeah. That’s why he always comes to parties so late, or not at all.
I scrunched up my eyebrows and nodded solemnly.
Look at that. He just heard some kind of urgent news.
I wonder who he’s talking to? Probably someone important, if it’s this late at night. Like a celebrity.
Hey look at that…he’s turning around and leaving.
He’s moving fast.
I guess he has somewhere important to be and it can’t wait another second.
That’s too bad. I was really looking forward to hanging out with him.
We all were.
My breathing slowed to its normal pace as the music faded behind me. I scurried around the corner and stuffed my cell phone into my pocket. What the hell had happened back there?
“Seymour?”
Lance stomped out a cigarette while Jessica threw her arms around me.
“I can’t believe we missed you! We just went out for a smoke.”
“Must have lost track of time,” Lance said, smirking.
Lance had gotten into some decent schools, I’d heard, but had rejected them all in order to play basketball for a Division
II team. He was still the tallest kid in the class. And even though I was gaining on him, I could still see his nostrils.
“So,” he said, “how’s my party going?”
“Great!” I said. “Just really…great.”
Jessica curled her arms around Lance’s waist.
“Did you see Lance play?”
“My band did a few songs,” he said. “Mostly covers.”
“It was awesome,” Jessica said. “And they gave out shirts.”
She twirled around a couple of times to model the one she had on. It was bright pink and looked as if it had been designed for a toddler. She was wearing a new jewel on her belly-button ring.
Teachers no longer punished Jessica for dress-code violations. Monitoring her offenses had become too exhausting and at a certain point, they had simply given up. Jessica still managed to land herself in detention from time to time, however, with Lance’s help. The couple had received their first PDA (public display of affection) citation sometime in the ninth grade. By senior year, they had accumulated so many that whenever a teacher shouted “Hey!” in the hallway, students instinctively glanced in their direction to see what kind of physical offense they were committing.
“We changed the name of our band,” Lance said. “We’re called the Fuzz now.”
“That’s a cool name,” I said.
“I told you,” Jessica whispered to him.
Lance rolled his eyes, clearly annoyed that Jessica had cast me as an authority on band names.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We might change it again.”
I tried not to stare as Lance slid his hand down the back of Jessica’s jeans. He had begun with just his fingertips, but now most of his palm was inserted. My throat felt dry and constricted as I watched him inch farther and farther down. Eventually, I realized that Jessica was saying something to me.
“How’s research going?”
“What?”
“You know,” she said. “Research, for that disease? The one you’re trying to cure?”
“Oh!” I said. “It’s, you know…it’s complicated.”
Jessica nodded solemnly. I could tell that she respected me, or at least the things I claimed to have achieved. But I was still just as nervous around her as I had been in the eighth grade. I was juggling so many lies and every time she spoke to me, I feared the entire act would come crashing down.
