“So I keep telling him, ‘Turn here, Russell, turn here,’ but he just keeps on going. He doesn’t want to listen to me. Because he thinks he’s so smart, you know. And cursing, every word out of his mouth. He’s supposed to be so angry. Then I see the sign for New York City. Here he is, burning up the highway, going in the wrong direction…”
I looked out my doorway and saw the boy they called T. J. standing next to my mother and laughing. His face was flushed, his brown eyes were lit very bright. I could tell he was enjoying her story. My mother always loved an audience. She smiled her fullest smile, relaxed for the first time on this alien planet. I’m sure T.J. was the only person she met that night that she actually liked.
In the Bennetts’ living room T.J. was the obvious star. He stood out like the only technicolor character in a field of black-and-white silhouettes. He was very agitated; he found it necessary to change his position every few seconds, roughly crossing and uncrossing his legs, pushing back into the pleated reclining chair he’d commandeered, then bounding up and stepping over sprawled legs and arms to find himself an empty spot on the floor. He talked more loudly than everyone, and I noticed a perpetual warble in his voice, as though his words could at any point break into nervous laughter. Though I didn’t speak to him, and instead made polite chatter with a few of the quieter boys, my attention was drawn to his ever-changing location in the room.
T. J.’s room was right across from mine, so I could see into it across the hall. After the tea party, he stripped to just shorts and began to rearrange his room. He moved an easy chair to one side and hoisted a duffel bag onto the top shelf of his closet. Then he bent over his travelling trunk and strained to shove it underneath his bed. He looked up and caught me watching him. His eyes flickered, but registered nothing except frustration with the heavy trunk. He sat back and rested, winded after just a mild exertion. Then he went back to work, and his indifference to my staring I took as an invitation to continue my close inspection.
He was thin and long-legged, slightly small for his age. He looked healthy, though not especially athletic because of his knocked knees. The muscles in his shoulders and arms were smooth and soft — all small, sweet, bulbous curves. His small brown eyes were treats — gleaming photosynthetic dots that captured more than their fair share of light. I remember that I especially liked his hair. It was cut moderately short, an inch or so past crew-cut length, and shaded a sandy brown — the color of trees. There was just enough play in the brown strands to accent the movements of his head, bouncing as he pushed, drooping over his face as he peered under the bed, and then flopping across his forehead as he reared back for a breather. With a lunge the trunk was where he wanted it. He glanced at me again, then moved to a corner, out of sight.
I turned away and looked around my new room. The quarters were spare, almost military — two metal beds with thin mattresses and pea green bedspreads in opposite corners of the room. Two bureaus up against the wall, two spartan wooden desks right next to each other, a floor lamp in my roommate’s corner, and an overhead bulb in the center of the ceiling. The walls were painted a waxy yellow. A single window looked out on a row of hedges and a white two-story house, about twenty yards back. The porch light was on and a station wagon was parked in front. I opened the window and looked and listened. There was a chill outdoors, and a breeze across my skin made my pores open. Crickets were singing to one another, their rapid, scratchy call so loud I thought a giant one must be hiding in my closet. I could see into the kitchen of the white house through a lighted window that stood out starkly in the night. From my window, I thought, I too must have stood out starkly, my blackened silhouette emphatic against a square of yellow light in the darkness.
I thought of my family, speeding on the highway back to New York in this same cool night, a little more room in the car. For a moment I felt left behind, palpably alone. I started to panic, but the sensation passed quickly. My thoughts drifted to the time when I was three years old and my mother lost me in front of the post office, and the police found me and brought me home. I could see my mother disappear into a crowd on the street, and though I don’t remember speaking, I still remember a police officer kneeling down to talk to me. Oh, I also remembered being small, close to the ground — looking up at my mother’s floating handbag and looking up at the seat in the police car. I was startled from these thoughts when my roommate Barrett came into the room.
My roommate was reputedly a super brain, a high honors student, which meant he was allowed to have a stereo in his room. I didn’t care that he was a brain and I didn’t care about his stereo. I was intuitively disinterested in Barrett. He was tall and gawky, with murky blond hair. He wore pasty-looking dental braces that slurred his speech. He didn’t seem to know what to make of his black roommate; he went silently to his bureau and pulled out a t-shirt and put it on. Then he put on a record by a psychedelic rock band I’d never heard of. I didn’t like rock music. The sounds were disordered and surreal — there seemed to be no start or end, no jumping-in place.
T.J. came into our room when he heard Barrett’s stereo. He sat on Barrett’s bed with his back to me and the two of them talked about the rock band — Vanilla Fudge, I think — and about the past summer. T.J. sat with his thigh flat on the bed. He kept running his fingers through his hair and nodding his head with animation. T.J. was still shirtless. His skin seemed to be under a spotlight — bright around the edges. He bounced his rump on the mattress and shook the bedsprings. “Your mattress is thicker than mine. Let’s switch,” he said. “No way,” said Barrett. “Come on, Granger, switch. I’ll let you blow me. You always wanted to.” I was shocked to hear this and lost my breath, until I realized they were joking. The two of them looked at me, and I looked back in silence. T.J. turned away and giggled. They went on talking, ignoring me, so I sat quietly on my bed until a boy I’d met in the Bennetts’ living room, Will Halpern, came in and sat down in my desk chair. Will started talking about professional ice hockey, which I knew nothing about, but his enthusiasm made it interesting. We talked until Mr. Bennett came down the corridor and announced lights-out.
2
At first I wasn’t sure I liked T. J. He made me nervous. His noisy presence on the corridor was the unpredictable x-factor in my new world, and I preferred to concentrate on more orderly matters. Like obeying the rules. There were dozens of them to follow. I was always supposed to be somewhere doing something mandatory: mandatory chapel or mandatory breakfast, classes, mandatory lunch, quiet hour, then sports, dinner, study hall, a half-hour break, and lights-out. My first few days at school went by like machinework./p>
Mr. Bennett kept a special watch on me at first. Perhaps he thought I’d have trouble adjusting, coming from the ghetto as I did. Before long he was as brusque with me as with the other boys — abrupt commands to dust under my bed, and no excuses accepted for breaking even the most trivial rules. Mr. Bennett needn’t ever have worried. I actually found solace in the strict schedules and endless requirements. Studying hard and obeying the rules were the most finite notions I had of fitting in.
T.J. couldn’t abide all this regularity. He couldn’t keep still during afternoon quiet hour, he couldn’t get up in the morning for breakfast. He was always late on the hall after dinner. He was so different from me. I wondered if T.J. was one of those boys who suffered from abnormal blood chemistry — an oversupply of naturally occurring amphetamine.
Every afternoon was the same. “Acheson!” T. J. would call from his room in a sibilant voice that was supposed to be a whisper, but was loud enough for everyone to hear. “Ache-son, can I borrow your tennis racket?”
“Keep it quiet down there,” Mr. Bennett would call from his study.
“I’m sorry, sir.” Then a minute later: “Acheson, did you hear me?”
“T.J., stop bothering me.”
“Okay.” Five minutes later, he’d come out of his room and stand in Acheson’s doorway.
“Acheson, let me borrow your tenni
s racket.”
Mr. Bennett would poke his head out of his study. “Get back in your room, T. J.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I need Acheson’s tennis racket.”
“T.J., will you please—!”
T. J. made me uncomfortable, so I politely avoided talking to him, just as I’d avoided the bad boys in my public school in Harlem. But I was a fickle little puritan. Though I didn’t speak, I peeked: at the suggestive scrunch of corduroy in his crotch or at the nubile curve of his bare legs and ankles. Through the corner of his doorway I could see him studying at his desk, his palm pressed to his forehead and the white glow of a tensor lamp on his face. He settled down for evening study hall and worked hard for two hours — which surprised me; I expected bad boys to be thoroughly bad, not to do their homework.
After study hall he’d revert to normal form — noisy, hyperactive frenzy. I could hear his voice from other boys’ rooms and the slap of his bare feet on the floor as he ran up and down the hallway. Now I found him irritating, threatening, though no less attractive. “That boy should behave himself,” I thought. “Doesn’t he know this is a private school?”
At the peak of his frenzy, T. J. could be very obnoxious. He exuberantly sought out ways to offend everyone on our corridor, including Mr. Bennett, who publicly doubted T.J. would survive four years at the school. T.J. and his roommate Kent Mason patrolled our corridor as the two dominant Third Formers, teamed possessors of the most cutting wits. They threw spit wads, ‘borrowed’ clean towels, poured shampoo into the shoes of the more defenseless boys. T.J. concocted nicknames to suit his favorite targets: ‘Femmo’ Davis had regrettably admitted he liked ballet; ‘Horseballs’ Ache-son had short black hairs growing from his nose; ‘Captain Zero’ suffered from am unflattering crew cut, generic facial features, and an exaggerated faith in the Republican party.
Most vulnerable of all was Ashley Downer, whom T.J. nicknamed the Frog, a sullen Second Former with glasses so thick they looked like framed shale, and whose mouth seemed as wide across as his hips. Armed with his lacrosse stick, the flaps on his white tennis cap turned downwards to resemble a safari helmet, T.J. announced one afternoon that he was going ‘frog hunting,’ then headed down to Ashley’s room to wreak unspeakable torments.
Minutes later Ashley came walking briskly out of his room and down the hall, and T.J. right after him, waving his lacrosse stick in the air and slapping it on the floor in a zigzag pattern, as if chasing an invisible grasshopper.
“Boy, that critter sure can hop. He’s too fast for me.” Ashley did his best to fight back. Down the hallway I could hear the ruckus:
“T.J., leave me alone.”
T.J. answered with his frog imitation in a grainy basso profundo. “Rrrribbit.”
“This is the last time I’m telling you.”
“I’m trying to talk in your native language, Downer. Speak amphibian!”
“Stop it, T.J.!”
“Rrrrrribbit!”
T.J. reveled in self-exposure. He seemed to be constantly battling an impulse to take his clothes off in public. In the half hour we were allowed between evening study hall and lights-out, he wandered the hallway in drooping boxer shorts, the points of his hipbones bare, a narrow patch of pubic bristles showing over the stretch waistband, his penis dangling half-exposed through the slit. After showering in the morning he would linger in the bathroom to dry himself, obviously thrilled to be publicly nude.
He had a terrific gift for toweling his crotch, one foot perched up on the sink, the other on the floor, coyly concealing his cock (or was it his vagina?) so that his genital area looked bald and ambiguous. Or skillfully revealing just a few suggestive strands of moist pubic hair, his head bowed in concentrated perusal of his boyhood. Sometimes he would stand up straight and face me, looking blankly into my eyes while he stretched his shoulder backwards to dry the crack of his rear end.
I began to plan our meetings in the bathroom. T.J. must have noticed these unsubtle coincidences, and a silent voyeuristic complicity arose between us. While I, slightly stunned, stood over the toilet and stared, T.J. smiled and went on drying his crotch, or brushing his teeth in the buff, his penis jiggling on the rim of the sink in time with his vigorous brushstrokes, then sliding off and twitching gingerly in the air as he rose on his toes and cocked his head to reach his back molars. Sometimes he’d stop and stare me down or let out a little laugh.
One day I was studying geometry, and I overheard T.J. talking on the hall. “That Givens kid is really weird,” he stage-whispered from right outside my door. I pretended not to hear him, fearing I’d end up like Ashley Downer. “Where did they dig up that Givens guy?” he said in a louder voice. I felt butterflies in my stomach, until he peeked into my doorway and smiled. He asked me how I was doing. “Surviving,” I answered. That’s all I would ever say to T. J. “Working hard,” or “hanging in there.”
My stone-faced responses didn’t daunt T.J. at all. If I passed him in the hall, he’d poke me in the stomach or flip my necktie up into my face. It hadn’t occurred to T.J., as it had to some of my dorm mates, that the black kid on the hall was ‘off-limits.’ He teased me like he teased everyone. But he was never really mean to me, the way he was to the Frog or Captain Zero. More and more often, from across the hall or outside my door, or in the shower, I’d catch him watching me, a mildly predatory look on his face. I became even more determined to avoid him.
Social life in boarding school revolved around the corridor. I became friends with the boy next door, Will Halpern, and with his roommate, ‘Femmo’ Randy Davis. Will was obsessed with sports — it was always football and hockey and baseball with him. He was a happy-go-lucky sort, always with a sweet, vapid smile and clear blue eyes that literally sparkled with simple, unhurt happiness. Randy was a tiny wraith of a boy with short red hair and wire-framed glasses. He liked to talk about John Locke and Martin Luther, and about different theories of morality and love. I wondered how anyone could become so intellectual in just thirteen years of life. Secretly, I thought Will and Randy were both weird, improbable people, but I liked them anyway. I didn’t care that they were white — I mean, I didn’t intensely feel a racial difference. I stood in their doorway whenever I felt like talking. Will noticed that I was hesitant to enter. “There goes Pete, standing in the doorway again,” he’d say and, shamed, I’d enter and sit on the edge of his bed.
The Bennetts were our surrogate parents. Mr. Bennett berated us for laziness and ordered us to bed with the same exasperated bluster as any beleaguered dad of a dozen or so borderline pubescents. By corridor consensus, Mr. Bennett was the coolest master at school, partly because he was mean and selfish, and partly because his wife, though elderly, was still a beautiful woman. Mrs. Bennett could have been the ideal, stylized mom from an old TV sitcom. She was quiet and dressed plainly. She never lost her temper. And she was indeed beautiful. Her gray hair, cut short and brushed to her left, was turning silver at the cut edges. Her face was lightly powdered, her eyes were whitish blue, almost colorless; in her pastel-colored dresses she looked gracious and angelic, and sexy, even, in the way that butter cremes could be considered sexy.
On Sunday mornings, Mrs. Bennett invited pairs of roommates into her dining room for tea and English muffins. She prepared a choice of toppings — peach marmalade, blueberry marshmallow, mint gelatin — and kept our mugs filled with peppermint tea. She talked about her two sons, one at Harvard, the other in the Marines, and asked us about classes and whether we had girlfriends back home. She seemed especially fond of T.J., who became quiet and respectful in the Bennetts’ dining room, inquiring about the framed photos on the divider, and mentioning that he loved the blueberry marshmallow topping, even though it got stuck in his teeth. Mrs. Bennett suggested flossing. I was touched by this gracious side of T.J., in contrast to the hysterical imp that he became every night on our corridor. I felt a fondness for him well up in my chest, and I even thought for a moment that he had changed, that his disturbing wildness was ju
st a post-summer phase, until he saw me looking at him and knocked my spoon over into my lap. By Mr. Bennett’s decree, we were allowed just an hour to impose ourselves on his family. Then he’d sally into the kitchen in baggy blue boxer shorts, sleeveless t-shirt, and sweat socks. “Get out! Go clean up your rooms!” he’d holler, and we’d scurry out and leave the Bennetts to their private affairs.
I can see, looking back, that I was a furtive little apple-polisher — ingratiating myself to my corridor master for whatever I thought I might gain. I figured Mr. Bennett liked me since I cleaned my room and didn’t cause trouble. I also figured he was obliged, it was his job to be my friend. I saw him one afternoon as he walked whistling along the long path that cut from our dormitory to the gymnasium. He was wearing plaid shorts, soccer cleats, and a blue Princeton College windbreaker. His legs were surprisingly well toned for an old man with white hair. He had a coach’s whistle dangling from a cord around his neck. He heard me behind him and turned just as I caught up with him.
“How do you like it here, Peter Givens?”
“Lots of work. But it’s okay, sir.”
“You making new friends?”
“Yes. Most of the kids seem like nice people.”
“Are you getting along with your roommate?”
“He’s okay,” I said, looking to the ground. I followed a trail of pebbles in the path as we walked along for several yards. “Everybody’s fine … except for that boy T.J. He doesn’t seem to fit in here.”
Mr. Bennett paused before answering. “T.J. just has some growing up to do.”
“Yes, he’s immature. He’s unpredictable.”
Mr. Bennett looked at me with a knowing smile. Then his face showed a glimmer of worry. “Is T.J. bothering you?”
The Color of Trees Page 2
