Life After Genius

by M. Ann Jacoby

  Lenny knocks on the office door. “I’m taking off now,” he says. “You gonna be around tomorrow, Teddy?”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Then I guess I’ll see you in the morning.” He leaves by the back door.

  Mead continues to stare at the phone but doesn’t make any calls. Because questions would be asked. Questions Mead does not want to answer.

  ON THE WAY HOME IN THE CAR , Mead’s dad suggests they stop at the Elks Lodge for supper and Mead jumps at the opportunity, happy to avoid what would have otherwise been an uncomfortable evening spent in the presence of the six-legged creature. The Lodge is nestled inside a grove of trees on the north edge of town, a log cabin whose parking lot is more brightly lit than its rooms. Mead follows his father through a lobby decorated with rifles into a smoky dining hall ripe with the smell of sweaty bodies and malt liquor. A room full of men celebrating the end of yet another workweek, escaping from the demands of their lives at least for a few hours. It is a concept Mead is all too eager to embrace: escape. Not just from the past week, but from the past month. Past year. Past decade. Oh hell, Mead would like to escape from his whole frigging life, to go back to day one and just start all over again. Maybe next time he won’t worry so much about pleasing his mother. Maybe next time he’ll refuse to skip third and then sixth and then tenth grades, because next time he’ll know better. Next time he’ll know that being the kid with all the right answers means being the kid with no friends. If only somebody had told him this before, then Mead could have saved himself a whole lot of grief.

  Four people are sitting at the table to which his father has led him. Three strangers and Uncle Martin. Shit. Mead cannot believe his father did this. Tricked him. If the man had told Mead ahead of time that his uncle was going to be here, he wouldn’t have come. No way. As a matter of fact, he can still leave. No one is stopping him. He can just turn around and walk back out the front door. After all, the Lodge is only about a mile from his house. It’s completely doable. He could just leave right now, walk home, and eat supper with the six-legged creature.

  Mead pulls out a chair and sits down.

  “Well, well, well, would you look who’s here,” his uncle says. “Surprised you could make it, Teddy boy.” The man’s got one hand wrapped around a beer mug, the other around a fork, a combination that strikes Mead as downright dangerous.

  “Does everyone know who this is?” Martin says and gazes around the table at his companions. “Why, this here is the infamous Fegley genius. The family jewel. A freak of nature. So tell me, Teddy, to what do we owe this great honor?”

  Mead’s uncle is drunk, so everybody ignores him. Instead Mead’s father introduces Mead to the strangers. Sitting beside Martin is Mr. Sammons, a broad man with the body of a superhero, only older and softer in the middle. Next to him is the missus. She looks like an ex–beauty queen, her face and hair all made up as if she’s planning to attend a pageant after knocking back a few frosty brews. And seated next to the missus is this pretty blond girl, Hayley. The daughter. She looks like what her mother probably looked like before age and time took its toll, only without all the makeup.

  “I know who you are,” Hayley says. “I remember you from first grade.”

  “I was never in first grade,” Mead says.

  “Yes, you were. I gave you a shoebox with a dead bird in it for Valentine’s Day. You know, because your dad’s an undertaker. It was a pretty awful thing to do but I was only six. I hope you can forgive me.”

  Great. Of all the people in all of High Grove that Mead has to end up sitting next to on the worst day of his life is the girl who was responsible for the second worst day of his life. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific,” he says. “I got a lot of dead birds that year. Was it the robin, the blue jay, or the wren?”

  “I never heard this story before,” Mead’s father says.

  “And you didn’t hear it just now either, Dad. She’s making it up. Or maybe she’s thinking of somebody else.”

  “Teddy’s right,” Martin says. “She probably gave it to the other undertaker’s son. You know, to Percy.”

  Not a single person sitting at the table believes that Hayley gave a dead bird to Percy for Valentine’s Day. Not a one. He just wasn’t the kind of kid to whom other kids gave dead birds. He would much more likely have been the kid who handed them out. Besides, Percy wasn’t even in first grade the year Hayley and Mead were. He was in fourth grade.

  “Congratulations on your recent graduation,” Mrs. Sammons says and reaches across the table to pat Mead’s hand. “I saw the announcement in the local paper.”

  “What announcement?” Mead says and looks at his father.

  “Your mother sent one in to the Grove Press,” he says. “They weren’t supposed to publish it until next week.”

  “Phi Beta Kappa,” Mr. Sammons says. “That’s pretty impressive.”

  “And yet you don’t look a day over sixteen,” the missus adds.

  “He’s eighteen, Mother,” Hayley says. “Like me.”

  “Hayley just graduated from high school,” Mr. Sammons says. “Last week.”

  Everyone in the dining hall is shouting to be heard above everyone else and all the yelling is beginning to give Mead a headache. That and the cigarette smoke. A waitress drops by the table to take a drink order and Martin asks for a pitcher of beer but it is unclear to Mead whether he is ordering it for the whole table or just for himself. Mrs. Sammons orders a gin and tonic. Hayley asks for a Pepsi. Mead looks up at the waitress and says, “Two Tylenol, please.” She thinks she has heard wrong and asks him to repeat his order. He motions to his glass, using international sign language to say, “I’ll just have water.” But when the waitress comes back, she places a frosted mug in front of Mead and fills it with beer. “I’m underage,” he says and tries to hand it back to her. “I don’t drink alcoholic beverages.”

  “If I was you,” Mr. Sammons shouts above the din, “I’d learn how.”

  THE ROAST BEEF IS CHEWY and the string beans are mushy and bland —just like in the university cafeteria —so Mead has no trouble at all swallowing them down. What he does have a hard time swallowing is the sight of his uncle, hunched over his dinner plate as if the weight of the whole world rests solely on his shoulders, as if he has cornered the market on bad things happening to good people. But it simply isn’t true. Shitty stuff happens to good people every day. Okay, so maybe Mead wouldn’t have believed that a week ago. A week ago he would have thought that people bring bad stuff upon themselves. A week ago, if you had told Mead that everything he has worked so hard for was going to add up to squat, he would have dismissed your words out of hand. He would have thought you jealous or delusional or worse. But he would have been wrong. Mead does not mean to take anything away from his uncle. The man has a damned good reason to be angry —he really does —but so does Mead. The difference being that Mead is not wearing his heart on his sleeve, because he does not find it to be a very attractive look. He prefers to suck it up and move on. The way he did in junior high when his so-called peers Super-Glued his desktop shut. And when his father missed his fourth, fifth, and sixth birthdays in a row because of deaths in other people’s families. Mead is simply going to look upon this latest unfortunate turn of events in his life the way he has looked upon all the others: as an opportunity for personal growth. And so he resolves, as of this very moment, to change things up. To live out the rest of his life as the other half is living theirs —or, according to his SAT scores, the other ninety-nine percentile —and if that means trying new things, things Mead would never have even dreamed of trying before, well then, that is exactly what he is going to do.

  Mead looks across the table at Mr. Sammons, who has locked heads with Uncle Martin to talk baseball statistics. Last week Mead probably would’ve seen an overweight individual with ruddy cheeks, suggesting a man who suffers from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, the beginning stages of heart disease, and p
robably a little cirrhosis of the liver too. But now he sees a sanguine fellow, wise to the ways of the world. And so he lifts the beer mug to his lips and gets a first taste of his new life at 5.2% alcohol per volume.

  MEAD’S DAD EXCUSES HIMSELF to go say hello to the people at the next table. He spends about five minutes or so talking to them, then moves on to a second table. And then a third and a fourth and a fifth table, hell-bent on making his way around the entire dining hall. The man probably knows every person in this place —and on a first-name basis no less. Mead wonders how he does it, how he memorizes a whole town’s worth of names. He pictures his father sitting up in bed late at night, surrounded by dozens of high school yearbooks and the telephone directory. The man opens the directory and flips to the L’s. Runs his finger down the page until he finds the name he is looking for: Brad Lastfogel. Then he reaches for the 1969 edition of the High Grove High School yearbook and turns to the section titled MUSIC. The caption below a black-and-white photograph of eight boys and one girl reads: BAND: BACK ROW: E. JOHNSON, C. THOMPSON, R. KELLEY, AND B. LASTFOGEL. Bingo! Brad doesn’t have as much hair anymore, and he has put on a few pounds, but the impish grin and square jaw line are still intact. Under the phrase, WHAT I WANT TO BE WHEN I GROW UP, it says astronaut or doctor. Mead’s father crosses that out and writes in its place: Manager and Pharmacist of Lastfogel’s Drugs.

  MR. AND MRS. SAMMONS’S DAUGHTER leans across the table and says to Mead, “You doing anything tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Getting on with my life.”

  “Well, how would you like to get on with your life out at Snell’s Quarry?”

  “I have personal obligations,” Mead says, “which must be met before I can indulge in the ordinary frivolities of life.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can’t, I have to work at my father’s store.”

  “How about after that then?”

  “That won’t work either.”

  “Why not?”

  Mead is suspicious. Any boy in High Grove with a pair of working eyes would jump at the opportunity to go swimming with Hayley Sammons, so why is she asking him? Unless her plan is to lure him out there and then laugh at him with all her friends because he actually showed up.

  “Don’t worry, Theodore. I’m not going to make fun of you or anything.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “Then it’s all set. I’ll pick you up at your father’s store at five.”

  Shit.

  MARTIN SITS DOWN IN THE CHAIR next to Mead. Oh boy, here it comes. His uncle has been waiting for this opportunity all day: to be alone with his nephew. Without Mead’s shield (i.e., his father) around to protect him. Uncle Martin has downed three beers —that Mead knows of —and god knows how many more before Mead and his dad arrived. Picking up the pitcher the waitress has just set on the table, Martin refills Mead’s empty mug and tops off his own. “To homecomings,” he says and holds up his beer for a toast. Mead taps his mug against his uncle’s and then knocks back half the contents in one gulp, as fortification against what he knows is about to come next.

  “Thanks for inviting me to your graduation, Teddy.”

  Mead looks over at Mr. and Mrs. Sammons, hoping for a rescue. But they have fallen into deep discussion with their daughter, the three of them with their heads together, thick as thieves, like secretaries around a water cooler. “I didn’t graduate, Uncle Martin.”

  “I know. What the hell is the matter with you? Do you have any idea how much it cost your father to pay for four years of college? And this is how you show your appreciation? By walking out a week before graduation?”

  “Three years, Uncle Martin. I completed all my credit requirements in three years.”

  “Three, four. That’s not the point, Teddy; the point is you’re an overeducated, underachieving momma’s boy with no care or concern for anyone except yourself.”

  These words fall upon Mead in a shower of spit. Placing his hand over his beer mug, Mead glances at the Sammonses once more. They have come out of their huddle and are staring at Martin with pity in their eyes, even though he is the one doing all of the name-calling. “I’m sorry, Uncle Martin,” Mead says. “I didn’t miss Percy’s funeral on purpose.”

  “Funeral? There wouldn’t have even been a funeral if you had been where you were supposed to be when he drove up there to visit you.”

  Suddenly sick to his stomach, Mead stands up. Fresh air. He needs some fresh air now. The floor begins to tilt beneath his feet, his brain comes loose from its moor and sloshes around inside of his skull, and between the floor and his brain Mead is finding it hard to walk. He grabs on to the backs of chairs as if they were railings on a ship at sea and makes his way across the dining hall toward the lobby. A buck’s head is mounted above the men’s room door, a doe’s head hangs over the ladies’ room. The two stuffed deer gaze down upon Mead with indignation in their glass eyes. He pictures his own head, mounted above the door to Herman’s bedroom. Dust collects on his nose and in his hair and, once a year, a maid takes him down to vacuum him off. But the rest of the time Mead hangs there all but forgotten, Herman’s interest in him lost as soon as he was bagged.

  Mead staggers into the bathroom and throws up. Maybe he shouldn’t have come home. Maybe he should have just accepted Herman’s proposition, graduated with honors, and continued on with his life. No one would ever have to know just how dishonorable it really was. No one, that is, except Mead.

  2

  MUSIC TO THE EARS

  Chicago

  Four Months Before Graduation

  SOMEONE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR and Mead looks up. It’s after midnight on a Tuesday night and everyone else in the dorm is asleep. Or so Mead thought. Glancing back over his shoulder, he looks at his roommate, Forsbeck, who is nothing more than a series of lumps under a snoring blanket. It’s probably one of his cohorts from down the hall. Rick or Dick or Joe or Bob, some monosyllabic person who has decided to take a late-night study break but cannot do it without the help of one of his codependent buddies.

  Mead sits motionless and waits for whomever it is to leave. A pair of feet is visible along the crack under the door, or at least their shadow is. A minute goes past and then two. The visitor doesn’t knock again but neither does he leave. Mead decides to ignore the feet and goes back to work. Picks up where he left off reading about the theory of Riemann surfaces that contains powerful results and deep insights into the behavior of complex functions, yoking function theory to algebra and topology, two key growth areas of twentieth-century math. There are hardly enough hours in the day anymore, what with Mead trying to write a paper of his own on the Riemann Hypothesis for his senior thesis. But the feet outside his door keep pulling his attention away from complex planes. When another five minutes go by, and the feet are still there, Mead puts down his book and pulls open the door, prepared to explain to whoever is standing on the other side of it that his roommate is asleep and does not wish to be woken. Mead has no idea if this is true or not, but then neither does he care because it is enough that Mead does not want his roommate to wake up.

  On the other side of the door, however, he does not find Bob or Rob or Joe or Dick, but Herman Weinstein.

  HERMAN DOES NOT LIVE ON THIS FLOOR . His room is two stories up and all the way over on the other end of the building. Mead sometimes goes for days —even a week —without running into him. But that does not mean that he does not see him, that he is not fully aware of the guy’s presence here on campus. Mead has been aware of Herman since day one of freshman year. But this year —senior year —they seem to be crisscrossing each other’s paths almost constantly. It sometimes feels to Mead as if Herman is stalking him. Which is a crazy thing for him to think because they live in the same dorm and are taking the same Mon-Wed-Fri class. Of course their paths would cross. And Herman has never given Mead more than a cursory glance. He barely seems to register him on his personal radar. There’s just something about the guy, something Mea
d cannot quite put his finger on, that makes him think all this crossing of paths is more than mere coincidence.

  “I was beginning to think you really weren’t in there,” Herman says.

  “I’m studying. Or was.”

  “Thank you, I’d love to,” he says and steps past Mead into the room.

  Herman invited Mead up to his dorm room last quarter, an invitation Mead never took him up on because he didn’t perceive it as sincere. And because of this math professor of theirs: Dr. Kustrup. As a matter of fact, Mead had forgotten all about that invitation until now.

  Herman plops down on his bed and picks up the book Mead was just reading. “Bernhard Riemann, eh? A mathematician’s mathematician. Don’t you ever read for pleasure?”

  Mead tries to grab the book from his hand but Herman holds it out of arm’s reach. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to wake up my roommate.”

  “Forsbeck the Bear? No way. He doesn’t sleep, he hibernates.”

  And as if on cue, Forsbeck rolls over, groans, and starts snoring again.

  “See?” Herman says and stretches out on Mead’s bed, making himself at home.

  Mead looks back at the open door, hoping that Herman will take the hint and leave. It isn’t as if they are friends or anything. Quite the opposite, in fact. At least as far as Mead is concerned. When Herman doesn’t take the hint, Mead says, “Why are you here, Weinstein?”

  “I couldn’t sleep and thought to myself, who else do I know who might be awake at this ungodly hour of the night, and you came to mind.”

  “Yeah, well, I was just going to shut off my light when you knocked.”

  Herman reaches up and turns on Mead’s radio. Strains of Bach’s Goldberg variations fill the room. Forsbeck groans but doesn’t wake up.