by Simon Rich
As usual, it was a false alarm. It was only Ashley.
“Seymour, hey,” she said. “You made it.”
“How did you get up here?” I demanded.
She shrugged.
“The stairs.”
“What?” I said. “Are you serious?”
I started to gather up my stuff.
“They’re probably coming up right now!”
She laughed.
“Oh, man,” she said. “You better get out of here!”
I didn’t know much about marijuana. Elliot never used it—he classified it as a “street drug”—and in fact, it was possible that I had never even seen it before. But I could tell that Ashley was pretty high.
“I come here every day,” I told her, firmly. “I’ve been doing it for, like, six months.”
“I’ve been coming longer than that,” she said. “See? I have a chair.”
She reached under the water tower and pulled out a folded red-and-white-striped lawn chair. It did look pretty old.
“You should get a chair,” she said.
Ashley had spent the ninth and tenth grades away from Glendale. There were lots of rumors about where she had gone, and why, but no one knew any hard facts. Most people believed she had suffered some kind of breakdown, although some maintained that she had been impregnated by Han Wo, her foreign-exchange-student campaign manager, and had given birth to twins. What people did know is that when she returned, she was a completely different person. She’d lopped off her French braid and its absence was shocking, like she had returned to school an amputee. Her grades were awful, and she never, ever volunteered for anything. I liked to think Ashley had left Glendale for a number of reasons, and not just because of that ridiculous eighth-grade election. But of course I never asked her. I doubted that anyone had, not even her old friends from the math club. Ashley never even sat with anyone in the cafeteria. She just grabbed a plate of food and left—I guess, to come here.
“I saw you outside Lance’s party on Saturday,” she said. “You were pretending to talk on your cell phone. It was pretty crazy.”
She shook her head and laughed.
“I mean, you looked like an actual crazy person.”
“I have to go.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “No one saw. Except for me.”
I reached for my notebook, but she snatched it up before I could get my hands on it.
“Give it back!” I shouted. I had meant the words to sound like an intimidating threat, but they came out as a childlike plea.
“Give it back,” I repeated, in a deeper voice. Ashley was dangling my notebook over the side of the roof and humming some kind of off-key schoolyard taunt. Was she stoned enough to drop it? Would she use it to blackmail me into smoking her crazy drug? I didn’t think the situation could get any worse—until she flipped the book around and started reading it.
“Pop quiz in English? Holy shit.”
I started to stammer some kind of lie, but she didn’t seem to be listening.
“Why are you cheating on this?” she asked.
“That’s so hypocritical,” I stammered. “I mean—you’re doing drugs.”
She laughed.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t cheat,” she said. “It just looks like a lot of work, is all. I mean it’s just a quiz.”
She wiped her light-brown bangs away from her eyes and smiled at me.
“Do you need some help?” she asked. “Come on, I’ll test you.”
I grabbed the book out of her hand and crawled back into the steam vent.
“Good luck,” she said.
• • •
Terry met me at the door in a riding jacket and boots.
“Welcome!” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “Did you have a nice time riding?”
“I haven’t left the house in four days,” he said. “Scone?”
“No thank you,” I said. “Listen, I better go find Elliot. James came to my study hall and told me to come right after school.”
“Elliot didn’t send James,” Terry said. “My son is having what can charitably be referred to as a ‘bad day.’”
“Oh,” I said.
There was a lull in the conversation; I heard a faint crashing noise in the distance.
“I sent James,” Terry said, brightly. “Just because Elliot’s feeling under the weather doesn’t mean that we can’t be sociable.”
He grabbed me roughly by the elbow.
“Let’s go to the study,” he said. “I’ll tell you an incredibly long story.”
It was only half past three, but Terry’s desk was already lined with decanters. The entire study was uncharacteristically disheveled—books on the floor, pillows strewn across the couch. The bear, I noticed, was wearing one of Terry’s top hats.
“I should probably get going soon,” I said. “I mean, if Elliot’s sick.”
“Nonsense!” Terry said. “Now, let’s think…there must be one you haven’t heard. Did I tell you about the time I spiked a ’64 Bordeaux with GHB? So the editor of Wine Spectator looked drunk during his annual address?”
I nodded.
“What about my fortieth birthday party? Where I made all those rock bands reunite against their will?”
“You showed me the tape,” I said.
“Did I tell you about what I did to that snooty literary magazine?”
“You mean when you bought an ad on every page? To turn it into a flip book?”
“Yes, but do you remember what kind of flipbook?”
“Was it…sexual?”
Terry sighed.
“You’ve heard all of my good ones.”
I had never been in Terry’s study this early in the day. It was strange to see it so brightly lit. Terry’s leather chair looked almost red in the sun’s glare and I could see flecks of dust swirling all over the room. Terry picked up a scone, looked at it for a moment, and then put it back in the basket. He leaned toward me.
“How is he?” he asked.
“Elliot? He’s…well…I guess he’s sick.”
Terry took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted his bloated, red face. I felt a sudden urge to leave, but I had no idea how to do it politely.
“I know he’s sick,” he said. “What else?”
I remembered the note Terry had slipped into my birthday present back in the eighth grade. It had taken four years, but we were finally having the conversation he’d requested.
He looked me up and down, like he was trying to decide something.
“All right, Seymour,” he said, finally. “Here’s one you haven’t heard.”
• • •
“My wife, when I married her, was hilariously younger than I was. I won’t use exact numbers. Let’s just say that the age difference was so extreme, my priest refused to conduct the ceremony, even though my family had paid for the construction of his church.
“She was technically a princess, although she would blush and protest whenever anyone referred to her by her official title. I met her in Monte Carlo, at either a wedding or a funeral—I was too enraptured to focus on anything but her. There’s a solid-gold statue of her in the Vatican, in the center of the holy courtyard. Well, according to the plaque, it’s the Virgin Mary. But the Pope instructed his sculptor to use my young wife as his model. She had the kind of face, you understand, that demanded simple worship.
“She had no real schooling, at least not in the academic sense. She was raised in a castle, you understand, by servants. She could play the harp, but she couldn’t drive. She was fluent in Spanish, German, French, and English, but she counted on her fingers. Which was, of course, adorable. Her father was extremely old—she was his eleventh child. I offered to hire him a nursing staff when we got married, but she insisted he move in with us. She wanted to take care of the old man herself. By the time he arrived at our house, he had gone completely mad. He was a decorated World War II veteran—he had received the Croix de Guerre in 193
9 while serving under Charles de Gaulle—and he believed the war was still in progress. He used to flip through the daily tabloids in disgust, furious that no one was covering the European conflict. When his delusions persisted, my wife called a house meeting and begged the servants not to contradict her father. If he asked for an update on the war, they were to say, ‘The Russian army’s closing in,’ or, ‘Hitler is on the run.’ He always went berserk when he saw women wearing nylon, since the material was needed ‘for the war effort.’ So my wife banned stockings in the house. She also outlawed televisions, which my father-in-law found confusing. It was World War II in our home for that entire year, and on his deathbed, she told him we had won. She was that kind of woman.
“A few years after Elliot was born, she fainted on a cruise to Greece. She had gone up to the deck for some air, and if I hadn’t taken to following her, who knows how long it would have been until someone discovered her. The ship’s doctor, an incompetent, monkeylike idiot, prescribed aspirin. And the captain, trusting the medical man’s expertise, refused to divert his course. I reasoned with him, threatened his life—but he wouldn’t budge. In the end we settled on something like four hundred thousand dollars.
“We docked within an hour and took a cab to the closest hospital. My wife insisted she was feeling better, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.
“It turned out she had kidney problems that had gone undiagnosed for some time. Every doctor I flew in agreed: She needed to find a donor, within weeks. The best specialist, a surgeon on Park Avenue, told me there was a shortage of transplants in the United States—and that my wife would have to go on some kind of government waiting list. I nodded and reached into my pocket, assuming he was signaling for a bribe. But apparently the list was real and somewhat ironclad.
“Within hours, James set me up with a prize-winning professor from Oxford, named Dr. Highsmith. He had been medical council to the Royal Family, among other nobility, until he had his license revoked for taking tips from his patients. I jetted out to England and handed him a single blank check.
“The doctor telephoned forty-eight hours later, from Thailand. He had found a Christian convent in the countryside. There were forty nuns, and all were in perfect health, thanks to a life of abstemious humility. Eight shared my wife’s blood type, and four of those were sufficiently impoverished to sell a kidney. He compared and contrasted their vital statistics—their age, genetic histories, etc. But ultimately, he confessed, he couldn’t determine the quality of their kidneys without removing them from their bodies and examining them directly. He couldn’t tell me which nun to dissect.
“Until that moment, Dr. Highsmith had struck me as a particularly unsentimental man, a straight shooter whom I could see eye to eye with. But when I suggested he remove all four kidneys and pick the best one, he protested.
“‘What would you have me do with the remaining three?’ he asked.
“‘Give them away,’ I said, ‘to some charity hospital.’
“‘We’d be caught instantly,’ he said.
“‘Then I’ll keep them on hand,’ I said, ‘in case my wife needs a spare.’
“‘They’re not sirloin steaks,’ he said. ‘They don’t “keep.”’
“‘Then throw them in the garbage,’ I said. ‘Put them in a trash bag and throw them in the garbage can.’
“There was a long pause.
“‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Purchasing organs is already incredibly illegal, by any standard of the law. But to buy organs and discard them…’
“I thought about my lovely young wife, chatting with her old man about the advance of Stalin’s army.
“‘I don’t have time for this,’ I said. ‘Tell me within ten seconds.’
“I was about to hang up when I heard him clear his throat.
“‘Well, all right,’ he said. ‘But this is going to affect the fee.’
“And so we flew to Thailand. We bribed the proper officials, we purchased the correct equipment, we hired the right doctor and bought the right kidneys, we chose the best one and threw away the rest. And then she died anyway.”
• • •
Terry relit his cigar and casually resumed smoking.
“That was a terrible story,” he said. “I should have told you the one about the bear.”
He gestured at the gigantic stuffed beast.
“That one’s quite fun.”
“How old was Elliot?” I asked. “When all of that happened?”
Terry shrugged.
“Who ever knows with that one?”
“He never told me that story,” I said.
“He doesn’t know it,” Terry said. “I hope someday he’ll think to ask.”
He poured himself a large drink.
“I don’t spy on him, you know,” he said.
“What?”
“I could easily hire a spy,” he said. “I have three full-time private investigators on retainer. I could have him tailed, but I don’t. Not anymore. Because I don’t care, Seymour. I couldn’t care less. James writes me weekly reports—he’s been doing it for years—and I throw them in the garbage. I throw them in the trash.”
The sun had gone down, but Terry hadn’t turned on any lights. I stood up and made my way across the darkened study.
“Stay!” he said. “Have a seat, have a brandy.”
“It’s getting pretty late,” I said.
“I’ll tell you about the bear,” he said. “It’s a good one!”
“I really need to—”
“It takes place at a circus and involves a professional fat lady.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“It’s sexual.”
“I can’t.”
“Would you…like to see a painting? I’ll show you a painting from my collection—something no one’s ever seen before!”
“Mr. Allagash, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go home. My parents are probably getting worried.”
Terry blinked a few times and smiled broadly.
“Fine,” he said. “That’s just as well. That’s fine.”
I walked out into the hallway, my eyes burning at the brightness, and closed the heavy door behind me.
• • •
For as long as I could remember, my parents had been communicating with me through Post-it notes. They usually left me two or three bulletins a day, telling me who had called or where in the fridge I could find dinner. The notes were always a revealing indicator of what my parents thought of me. It wasn’t what they wrote—they could only fit a few words onto those tiny yellow squares. It was where they placed them in the house. For instance, when I was in eighth grade, they posted all my Post-its on the Oreo cabinet, clearly determining that it was the one place in the apartment I was guaranteed to visit. At some point in high school, they had started tacking them to my bookshelf—convinced, evidently, that I had turned into a scholar. Lately, though, they had begun to plant the Post-its on my mirror.
Elliot called—× 5
Jessica called
I ignored the top note and stared at the bottom one, convinced that I had misread it. How had Jessica even found my number? The class directory still listed the one from our old apartment. I peeled the Post-it off the mirror and held it up to the light. It felt irrationally substantial in my hands, as if her name had infused the paper with added mass.
I took out the directory, looked up her number, and dialed.
“Laura?” she asked.
“Um, no,” I said. “It’s Seymour?”
“Who?”
“Seymour?”
“Oh!”
“You called, right?”
“Oh, yeah! Mr. Hendricks gave me your number. He said, ‘You need a tutor for the French test,’ so I said, ‘How about Seymour? He knows everything!’ and he said, ‘Okay,’ so then I called you up!”
I covered up the receiver and cleared my throat.
“Can you believe how many tests there are?” I tried. “It’s so lame.”
; Jessica laughed. It was a miraculous sound, like coins falling out of a slot machine.
“Stop,” she said, giggling. “Stop! Quit it!”
I heard some rustling, followed by some sharp squeals.
“Jessica?”
“Sorry,” she said, panting. “Lance is being a jerk.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Are you free on Wednesday? Because the test is on—”
She squealed again—louder this time—and dropped the phone onto some kind of hard surface. I could hear both their voices now, but the sound was too muffled to make out any of the words. I felt like hanging up, but I didn’t want to be rude. So I just sat there for a couple of minutes, waiting for them to finish whatever it was they were doing.
There’s no way I could tutor Jessica—it would be a disaster. How could I teach her a language I didn’t even speak?
Jessica sighed into the receiver.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Listen, Jessica—I don’t think I can.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I’m just too busy.”
“Okay, what about Tuesday?”
“No, I can’t at all. I actually have to go.”
“Oh, okay. Hey look, I’m sorry for bothering you! I just thought, you know, since you were good at French—”
“Yeah, it’s okay. But I have to go now. Bye.”
“Okay, bye—”
I closed my phone, shut the directory, and tossed the Post-it note into the garbage.
I should have known that’s why she had called—what other reason could there possibly be? I pictured her in Mr. Hendricks’s office, solemnly jotting down my phone number. And Lance doing God knows what while she reluctantly dialed it. But there was no time to think about all that—I had bigger problems. When Jessica told Mr. Hendricks I had refused to help her, he’d call me in for a meeting to ask why. I’d have to have some concrete alibi ready, so he wouldn’t get any more suspicious than he was already. I took out my notebook and a pencil and called Elliot.
“Where were you?” he demanded. “I called your cell phone, your home phone, left messages on your voice mail and with your mother…I mean, I didn’t actually physically do any of these things. James did, on my behalf. I’ve been in a custom-made bathing pool for the past four hours. But still, that’s time James could have spent inventing me new cocktails.”
