At the time, I didn’t know about all the bad things that water could hide. I considered water as something that made me feel otherworldly, like a dolphin or a sea turtle on a very long journey. Back when I had never even heard of this school, it was easy to pretend that the deep end of the public swimming pool was the Pacific Ocean.
The old man and the sea. The boy and the river. I can pretend all I want, but the fact is, I will never finish this book.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 4:30 P.M.
Who the hell are the Manhattoes, Her-man? Did you make them up? Are they a tribe of crazies who live on some island? I live on an island. Hell, I am an island. I am a rock.
But a rock does feel pain. And an island cries often in the privacy of his own room. I am a big fan of Simon and Garfunkel, thanks to my dad; I grew up listening to their melancholy strains. Today’s pop music doesn’t interest me. Foreigner? REO Speedwagon? Give me a break.
Campus at one a.m. when almost no one is here is just plain weird. As the bus rolls up the drive, the cluster of stone buildings looks like the set of a horror movie—a sequel to The Shining, which is a damn scary movie. There now is your Insular City of Man. Mist shrouds the grass. The lamps along the sidewalk look disembodied from their posts, fuzzy balls of light, just enough to see by.
In my room, the books I left stacked on my desk have something to say, but they aren’t talking. The photograph of me and my dad with our arms roped over one another’s shoulders was taken a lifetime ago. There is a fly at the window beating its brains against the glass. Poems buzz behind my worn-out eyes, but I don’t want to think about poems anymore, I don’t want to think about what my English teacher might have seen us doing at the river. I want to sleep with Haley’s sweatshirt. I want to sleep with Haley. I put on Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits album, and like a bridge over troubled water, I lay me down and picture the way I would touch her waist, trace the curve of her shoulders, put my mouth on her lips, her neck, her breasts, and, gently, within the sounds of silence, push inside her.
Faraway Betty
After his parents drop him back on campus late this morning, Glenn knocks on my door. I am at my desk, struggling with trigonometric equations.
“We were looking for you,” he says. “My mom and dad wanted to say hey.”
“I must have been in the library,” I say.
“I saw Miss Dovecott just now,” he tells me.
“Well, whoop-dee-friggin’-doo. I just saw Mr. Parkes.” I stopped by his apartment because I was afraid if I didn’t, Miss Dovecott would arrange a meeting for the three of us to talk about the day at the river. As they say, the best defense is a good offense: I told my advisor that I’d been feeling guilty but that I was working it out for myself on paper, which was helping a lot, and I needed time before I talked about it with anyone other than Reverend Black, but I did want to talk about it with Mr. Parkes eventually, and I would let him know when I was ready.
“Yeah, so your girlfriend was in her classroom. I hope you don’t mind; I just stopped in to say hello.”
“Glenn,” I say, “what did you do?”
“Nothing, I swear. I just popped in to ask how she was doing. You know, up close, she’s not all that good-looking. She’s a Faraway Betty.”
“Whatever you say.”
“And she smells like mothballs.”
“It’s probably her sweater.”
“Have you ever noticed,” says Glenn, “how she dresses like a college student trying to pass herself off as a teacher?”
“Nope.” But I had noticed that her outfits were slightly out of whack—a button-down shirt and wrinkled khakis with a silk scarf or a string of pearls.
“I bet she’s a lesbian,” Glenn says.
“Get over yourself.”
“She dresses like a man. Most lesbos do.”
“Yeah, like you know a lot of lesbians.”
“I do, as a matter of fact. My mom’s best friend is a lesbian.”
“Maybe your mom’s a lesbian, too.”
“In your dreams.”
“Everson,” I say, “I can honestly say that I have never, ever dreamed about your mother.” She has bouffant hair and wears lots of gold jewelry.
“Well, I can’t say the same about yours. She’s a Fum.” (See? I told you.)
“Get out.”
“I never finished telling you what happened that night when I went for help on the Roethke poem.”
“So tell me.”
“She put her hand on my knee. When we were sitting there. She reached over and put her creepy lesbo hand on my knee.”
“You are such a liar.”
“I reported her,” Glenn said.
“What?”
“To Dean Mansfield.”
I am standing now. “Oh, my God. What were you thinking?”
“At least one of us is thinking.”
“He’s going to know you’re lying, and then we are screwed. He’s not going to take your word over a teacher’s.”
“Wanna bet?”
“I am out, Glenn. Seriously, leave me out of this.”
“Have you done the English homework for tomorrow?” I haven’t. “She’s smoking us out, Stromm. Miss Dovecott knows. You’ll see what I mean. The poem for Monday isn’t even in our book. Stevie Smith is British, not American. And a chick—probably a lesbo, with a name like Stevie. Which obviously Miss D failed to mention.”
“How do you know that?”
“I looked it up,” Glenn says. “In the Dictionary of Literary Biography. This is an American literature class, remember? Why would she have us read an English poem?”
“How should I know?”
“You’re the Poet Boy.”
“Leave, please.”
“Just wait. You’ll see what I mean.”
I don’t tell Glenn what Miss Dovecott said to me at the mixer—I never even tell him I went to the mixer in the first place—and I don’t read the poem on the handout until just now. “Not Waving but Drowning,” it’s called, about a man who drowns, but his friends think he’s waving. I try to hold my pen straight as I answer the questions asked of me. I try not to read the poem too many times because if I do, it will worm its sneaky way into my heart.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 7:45 P.M.
English Homework
Miss Dovecott is standing at her classroom door this morning as we file in from assembly. I swear to God she is watching my hands, staring at them like they are foreign things not attached to my arms. I steady my page of notebook paper for her to take and do not look her in the eye.
We expect her to go over the Stevie Smith poem, but instead she hands out a copy of a poem that a friend of hers from college wrote called “Superman Laments His X-Ray Vision.” It makes me laugh out loud; Superman walks around the city wishing he couldn’t see through ladies’ bras and underwear. And it makes me sad, too, when Superman starts wishing that he didn’t have the ability to see inside people’s souls because there is too much in need of saving there, and one person, even a superhero, can’t possibly do all that.
I think it’s cool that a college student wrote it, and I think it’s even cooler that Miss Dovecott shows it to us. She compares it to Holden Caulfield’s realization in The Catcher in the Rye, and at that point, I tune out and focus on undressing Miss Dovecott with my X-ray vision.
Green Fields
I fondled a girl’s breasts once. Her nipples were tiny, but her tits were huge. They took up the whole top half of her, and I swear she would have let me have the bottom half, too, if my dad and her parents (also university professors) hadn’t been on the other side of the sliding glass doors. We sat on the side of her swimming pool with our shorts on, our backs to the house, our feet in the water. She told me my tanned legs were sexy. It was summer, and the girl, a year older, was home from boarding school—Foxcroft. She was wearing a sweatshirt that did not reveal, until she removed it, how stacked she wa
s. I almost couldn’t breathe. She laid the sweatshirt across my crotch and slid a hand underneath it. She put her other hand across my mouth when I moaned and came in my shorts. Before we went inside for dessert, I spilled a Coke down my front on purpose to cover up what else was there, and the whole rest of the night I worried that I’d gotten some of it on her sweatshirt.
The Sweatshirt
I have been hiding it in the bottom drawer of Clay’s empty dresser because it feels like I have stolen it. Something in me doesn’t want to give it back. It could be a simple process, really—just put it on her desk when no one is looking. I saw her wear the sweatshirt once when she was on her way down to the soccer field. She worked out with the team every now and then. She never knew I was watching her, but the whole time, she was constantly—or is it continually? I’ve never gotten those two adverbs straight—adjusting her shorts, rolling them up at the waist, then rolling them back down again, trying to decide, I guess, if she was showing too much leg or not. She opted for more leg than less, and why shouldn’t she? But most of her clothes, like her sweatshirt, are baggy.
After class today, I take a long whiff of the gray cotton fabric just as Glenn bursts into the room. “Stromm, what are you doing?”
I shrug and hold it up for him to see.
“ ‘Princeton,’ ” he reads. “I didn’t know you got in early.”
“Ha, ha.” And I tell him some of the story of how I got the sweatshirt.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had it?” Glenn asks, as calm as ever. “We can use it against her.”
“I was going to wrap it up and give it to you for Christmas.”
“Fck you.”
“You wish,” I say.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“You know what, Stromm? I don’t trust you.”
“I don’t trust me, either,” I say. “I don’t like what we’re doing to Miss Dovecott. I don’t like The Plan.” I pause. “Did she really put her hand on your knee?”
“Yep,” Glenn says.
“But she didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I think she did.”
“You think she’s a lesbian. Why would a lesbian put her hand on your knee? She was being motherly.”
“She was coming on to me, just like she’s come on to you.” He pauses. “Are you jealous? You look green.”
“Of course I’m not jealous,” I say. But I am.
“We’ve got to keep her off balance,” Glenn says. “I’m doing my part. I unsettle her, and you get close. So get close.”
“How much closer do you expect me to get?”
“Alex,” Glenn says. “Come on. Now I’ve got to go to practice, and so do you. And do something about these walls. This room is depressing as hell.”
Is hell depressing? I doubt it, I bet it shoots you full of speed, I bet you are forever up and running for your life, which is to say your death. Before I leave for practice, I stuff the sweatshirt into the bottom of my laundry bag. If Glenn comes back to steal it, he might think to look there, but at least he’ll have to comb through plenty of dirty underwear and socks to get to it.
It is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 9:20 P.M.
Boarding-school calendar: September, low because summer’s over; October, higher because the sky is so clear and blue. November, low; December, high because we’re away from school for half of it. January, lower than September and November combined; February, lower still. March, high because of spring break; April, higher—the end is in sight; May, even higher. June, the highest, high as a kite.
We never do go over the Stevie Smith poem, but the story about the monkey is returned to me with the words “See me” written across the top. See me. Miss Dovecott, I see you all the time, in my mind, in the clouds, in the trees, in my dreams. I am always seeing you.
Seeing Her
When I walk into her classroom after school today, she smiles. She hands me a sheet of paper announcing a nationwide literary essay contest for high-school juniors and seniors; she wants me to submit something. I say sure, why not, and she smiles even wider. Then, THEN, she asks me to tell her a little more about myself, stuff she may not know, so that she can write the recommendation that goes with the essay.
So I tell her a little about my dad and his European background.
“I’ve been to Europe,” Miss Dovecott says. “Two summers ago. My mom and I went. We did the whole ‘art in Europe’ tour. In Florence, we stayed in a very old convent smack in the middle of everything. You should go someday.”
With you, I am thinking. Let me go there with you. Instead I ask, “So, what was the convent like?”
Sitting at her desk, she leans forward on her elbows. “It was the most perfect place. We had a window that reached from the floor to the ceiling. I think I could have stood at that window for the rest of my life.”
“I like windows, too.” God, I sound stupid.
“Have you traveled abroad, Alex?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Maybe you should think about going on one of the summer programs with Birch to Spain or France.”
“I take Latin. There’s no place to go for that.”
“There’s the art trip to Italy over spring break. They used to speak Latin there.” She smiles. “And you would get to see Florence.”
“I’m not sure my dad can afford it,” I say.
“I wish I could take you,” she says.
My eyes open wide. “You do?”
“Sure. I was a scholarship student at Princeton, so I understand where you’re coming from.”
“I wish you could take me, too.”
“Well, maybe someday.” She smiles an enigmatic Emily Dickinson smile. Is she flirting with me? I think she is flirting with me. I don’t know what to say next, so I ramble.
“My dad will be happy that you are having me enter this contest. What should I write about?” I look down at the flyer she has handed me and read from it. “ ‘Literary essay.’ Like the ones we write in class?”
“Not exactly. More like an artful narrative. A more polished version of your ‘What I Carry’ essay, for example. You could even use that one.”
“I don’t want to use that one,” I say. “Give me another idea.”
She plays with her watch, and then I see her see something in her head that will make sense to me.
“In Florence, one morning after breakfast—we had breakfast on the balcony, strong Italian coffee and hard rolls and butter, very simple, everything was so simple there—anyway, one morning after breakfast, I was standing at the window looking down at the street, and I saw a girl—a young woman—who looked just like me. She walked like me; her hair was the same color, the same length. And she was looking up just as I was looking down. We both froze.”
I am right there with her, face to the glass. “Then what?”
“Well, I put my palm up to the window. I remember thinking that it was like that moment in Romeo and Juliet when they first talk to each other, palm to palm, the holy palmers’ kiss. ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand/This holy shrine.’ Do you know that part?” I don’t, but I nod anyway. “Then the girl on the street did the same thing, put her palm up. All of a sudden, the sun, which had been behind a cloud, washed over her face, blanking it out like a canvas. All I could see was her palm. It felt as if she were blessing me.”
“Weird,” I say, still nodding.
“It was weird,” she says. “I’d never felt this before, and this will sound crazy to you because it is—crazy—but I thought this girl, this woman, might have been God. I ran out of my room, down the stairs, but when I got to the street, I couldn’t find her. I stood there in her spot for a few minutes, hoping she might come back. She didn’t.” Miss Dovecott stares at me like I have some kind of psychic insight. I don’t.
“That’s too bad,” I say.
She leans toward me across the plane of birch or whatever woo
d her desk is made of. “But here’s the really freaky part. As I was standing there on the street, I looked up at the window, my window, and I realized she hadn’t been able to see me at all. There was a glare. She hadn’t been able to see anything. I had washed my nightgown out in the sink and had hung it right next to the window to dry, and I couldn’t even see that.”
She goes on about something else, but I am stuck on the wet nightgown. I can see her in it, standing on a balcony in the Italian sunshine, damp with desire.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 7:15 A.M.
Seeing Glenn
I knock on his door, the door that used to be Thomas’s door, too, Wednesday night. He isn’t there. I am ready to tell him that I want out. But it is too late to get out. I know it, and Glenn knows it. I hate myself for agreeing to The Plan. I hate myself for reeling Miss Dovecott into my heart even though I want her there, and I hate her for allowing it. I hate myself for what I will tell Glenn when I see him. I hate myself for all that I know.
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Thomas does hit his head on a rock when he dives into the river. He does lose consciousness, he does sink, and Glenn and I do pull him to shore. When I try to do CPR one last time, Glenn pushes me off Thomas and pulls me up so he can look at me straight on. “He’s dead, Alex.” I kneel back down and grab Thomas’s wrist, searching for a pulse. I feel nothing, and I take Thomas’s hand in mine and hold it there.
But still, I’m not so sure he’s dead. I mean, I think he is. I’m 99 percent sure. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, or a flash of last sun through the treetops, or Glenn’s shadow standing over us, maybe it’s even magic, but I think I see Thomas’s eyelid flutter.
Glenn says he doesn’t see it. He says what I see is due to panic and a million other emotions flashing through my heart at a hundred miles per hour. He says that we have done all we can do, that he’ll run up to the infirmary while I wait with the body. “I’ll be back,” he says, and then he grabs my shoulder. “Wait. No, you go; you’re faster. I’ll stay here.” What he does see is me take off running, full of breath, seconds before, from the other direction, Miss Dovecott comes upon the scene, breathless.
Paper Covers Rock Page 9
