The Tutor

by Peter Abrahams

  Julian went into a coffee place, had an espresso, studied his map. He discovered a much shorter route to Robin Road in West Mill, a route that involved cutting through the town forest. No paths were marked on the map, but whoever heard of pathless forests? He ordered a brioche, took out the memo pad, tried again to find the poem:

  negligent is to forsake as

  mendacious is to deceive

  What came next? A poem hid in there, he could feel it, a brilliant poem, the kind that would find its way into the language, be quoted, change the way people thought. But whatever came next didn’t come. Julian paid his bill, left the brioche half eaten. Not very good anyway, not a real brioche, and his authentic pronunciation of the word had confused the serving girl. No tip.

  A few minutes later, he entered the town forest, the wind dying at once, as though someone had cut off the power. The path—of course there was a path, with the odd root sticking up, the odd rock, but easy for him, he sped up if anything—led through silent woods. This was a good place: Julian knew so at once, full of shadows and strange perspectives. The word that followed deceive began to take shape deep in his mind, just out of reach. He passed a little clearing, heaped here and there with beer cans, and the word receded inexorably, like a falling tide.

  Julian climbed a long rise, glimpsed a tiny oblong of water in the distance. The blue flicker blinked out the moment he started down, the path now winding. Julian stopped pedaling, just coasted, as silent as the forest around him, the only source of wind he himself. Then water flashed again on his right, many oblongs of it now, the trees concealing them until the last moment. He heard a voice, a child’s voice.

  “Don’t do that, Zippy.”

  Julian paused by a boulder, the granitic type left by departing glaciers, peered over the top. Below lay a pond, almost a perfect circle, another glacial remnant. On a strand of frozen mud about a hundred feet away stood a girl in a blue jacket with yellow trim. A large mutt was shaking itself off, spraying her with water. Almost a Norman Rockwell scene, but it was much too dark in this forest for Norman Rockwell, and except for the blue-and-yellow jacket, there was no color at all.

  “Zippy!” The girl—she wore a strange hat of some kind—raised her hands ineffectually. From that single gesture, and from her piping voice, Julian could tell how commonplace she was. Now the girl threw a stick into the water. The dog refused to chase it. They both stood there, child and dog, gazing, or gaping perhaps, at the expanding circles the stick had made. How bored they were, girl and dog both, and how boring. It would take a very dark Norman Rockwell to make art of this little nonscene, an upside-down Rockwell, and the result would not be uplifting. Julian titled the imaginary painting Lumpen Child and rode on, silent, through the woods.

  Trees, trees, the wonderful sensation of having the planet to himself, except for the little girl and her dog, of being very big, of bringing the wind: this could go on forever. He’d barely had the thought before the forest journey was over. No trees, the real wind, now in his face, and he was at the edge of someone’s backyard.

  Julian paused. A big, unfenced backyard, with woodpile, swing set, a dozen or more tennis balls lying around like dirty yellow flowers, patio, bird feeder. The feeder was in the form of a cute little house, white with black trim, someone’s idea of cozy comfort. A crow stood on the perch outside the tiny door, not feeding, but watching him. Beyond the patio rose the real house, which seemed to have sprung from the same sort of esthetic: also white with black trim, also cute, also cozy. The only difference was the tall red-brick chimney, too tall, really, almost unstable-looking, as though a giant could topple it with one casual swat. A matching brick walkway led around the side of the house, past a deck, coiled garden hose, trash cans. Julian dismounted, prepared a suitable tale—the woods, a little lost, fill in your own blanks—and walked his bike over the bricks toward the front of the house and Robin Road. He heard a toilet flush as he went by.

  But no need to go all the way to the street, because halfway across the front lawn Julian caught the number on the mailbox: 37. He’d homed in exactly on target, like the kind of missile yet to be perfected. He leaned his bike against a lightpost beside the front walkway, removed the green plastic A-Plus Tutorial folder from the carrier, approached the front door.

  Black, solid, with solid brass fittings. Julian took out one of his new business cards, put a solid businesslike expression on his face. As he rang the bell he noticed the welcome mat. It actually said welcome, the word entwined with daisies. Daisies! His mood, not the best since the failure—not failure, how could that word apply?—to find the word that came after deceive, lifted. He heard footsteps coming from the other side of the door, felt his solid businesslike expression altering slightly, striking an added note or two of amiability. From the tiny house in the backyard came the cawing of the crow.

  6

  Linda opened the door. A tall man stood on the threshold.

  “Yes?” she said.

  The man had a friendly smile. “Julian Sawyer,” he said. “From A-Plus Tutorial. I’m here for Brandon’s SAT prep.”

  “You are?” said Linda. “We were expecting someone named Sally.”

  “Sick today, I’m afraid.” He gave her a business card with a mortarboard logo on the front. The shape of his hand caught her eye—a Michelangelo study come to life. “Margie has sent me in her stead.”

  Not a good start, Linda thought. The reason she’d chosen A-Plus in the first place was this Margie woman’s recommendation of Sally’s skills with reluctant boys, uncooperative boys, the insanely hostile. Sally was a junior at Trinity, a lacrosse star with five brothers. This man was—what? Too old to be a student, even a graduate student. When she thought of tutors, Linda thought of college kids or schoolmarms, not this. He wasn’t right for the part—not that he didn’t look intelligent, far from it—certainly wouldn’t be right in Brandon’s eyes; Brandon, at that moment sulking in his bedroom, headphones clamped on tight.

  “I appreciate your coming at the last minute and everything,” Linda said. She glanced past him, looking for his car, spotted only a mountain bike leaning against the lightpost. “The problem is that Brandon’s not what you’d call enthusiastic about this idea.”

  “The sacrilege of it.”

  “Sacrilege?”

  “Schooling, on a Saturday.”

  “Exactly. And Margie thought that since Sally—”

  Scott came up from behind her with a handful of Ruby’s blue-and-yellow feathered arrows. “Where’s her bow?” he said. Then he noticed the substitute tutor, whose name Linda realized she had failed to catch. The first lesson was critical: how to postpone it until Sally was available without being rude to him?

  “This gentleman’s from the tutoring place,” Linda said.

  “I thought—”

  “She’s sick.” Linda noticed with surprise that the two men were about the same height, Scott slightly taller if anything, which meant that the other man wasn’t even six feet. “The problem is—”

  A cry—Ruby’s cry—and Zippy shot out from the side walkway, his leash flying free.

  “Not again,” said Scott. He dropped one of the arrows. Bending to pick it up, he lost control of them all.

  At the same moment Ruby appeared, also on the run, her hair in that ridiculous devil do, her jacket missing. Zippy tore across the street, Ruby following, calling, “Zippy, Zippy!” Oh, God. Ruby wasn’t going to . . . and she didn’t. Didn’t stop, didn’t look left or right. The burst of fright Linda felt in her chest couldn’t have been more powerful if a car had indeed been coming.

  “Ruby!”

  Then Linda was running too. Zippy bounded onto the Strombolis’ lawn, headed straight to their rosebushes, the glory of Robin Road every summer, now hooded in plastic. Without a pause, like a madman with a plan, Zippy started attacking the plastic.

  “Zippy!” Ruby dove for his leash, caught it, tried to drag him away, but couldn’t. Zippy yanked the plastic free.

>   “Zippy!” Linda called, from halfway across the street.

  Zippy seized the rosebush at the base of its stem, started tugging at it in fury, growling and jerking his head from side to side. The Strombolis’ front door opened and Mr. Stromboli came out in a purple robe and slippers, a golf club in his hand. He ran too, surprisingly fast for such a fat man, raising the club high. Ruby, now on her feet, saw him coming, screamed in terror, got tangled in the leash, fell. Zippy strained at the rosebush, blind to everything else. Linda shouted something at Mr. Stromboli, she didn’t know what.

  Then suddenly the substitute tutor was on the Strombolis’ lawn, not running, just there. Ten or fifteen feet from Zippy, he said: “Heel.”

  Zippy stopped what he was doing at once. His head came up, swiveled. He saw the substitute tutor, trotted over and stood beside him, tail wagging. Everyone else—Linda, Ruby, Mr. Stromboli—froze. It was strangely quiet, like after a jackhammer stops. The substitute tutor helped Ruby to her feet, handed her the leash, then knelt at the rosebush, digging around a little with his hands—Linda could actually hear his fingers in the dirt—repositioning the roots. He replaced the tattered plastic, walked over to Mr. Stromboli, said something Linda didn’t catch. Mr. Stromboli replied, the substitute tutor nodded, they shook hands. Mr. Stromboli walked back to his house. Mrs. Stromboli was on her way out, also in a robe, although not carrying a golf club. He spun her around and they both went inside.

  The tutor turned to Linda: “No harm done,” he said.

  She didn’t know what to say. For one thing, she still couldn’t come up with his name.

  Brandon, headphones back on, Unka Death in his ears, sat at the dining-room table, watching the tutor guy grade his evaluation test. Call me Julian, he’d said, and added some joke about another guy with a weird name, Ishmael or something, a joke Brandon didn’t get. Julian: a gay name for sure, but he didn’t seem gay, not literally, not whatever the other term was either, when it’s just a metaphor or something. He hadn’t said much after that, sitting quietly in Dad’s chair at the end of the table while Brandon took the test. For a while he’d gazed at some words on a memo pad, pen in hand although he never wrote anything. Later he’d got up and examined the collage on the wall behind the sideboard, mostly tennis pictures of the kids, none recent: Ruby, Brandon, Adam. After that he’d taken a look at the bottles in the wine rack. That’s where he’d been—standing behind Brandon—when he’d said, “Time’s up,” startling him a little and taking the test booklet away.

  Unka Death was something else. And his video was fucking incredible. That girl in the gold shorts and the white old lady wig? He thought about her every night.

  Fuck you good as new all we do then it’s through

  The job you got, the brains you spew

  Ya horn-hoppin momma just about—

  Brandon became aware of the tutor looking at him, lips moving, smoothing the test booklet under his hand. He lowered the headphones, Unka Death rapping on tinnily around his neck.

  “. . . projecting the results to a full-length test,” Julian was saying, “you did a little better in math this time and about the same on the verbal.”

  Hey! The tutor guy had one of those soul patches under his lower lip, which was kind of cool.

  “Interested in your exact scores?” he said. He also had a great speaking voice, like an actor.

  “I guess.”

  The tutor guy checked his paperwork. “Six hundred math, five hundred verbal, eleven hundred total score.”

  Six hundred. Didn’t sound so bad. What was his name? Julian, but not gay. Brandon waited for him to say, “Not bad,” or “Good job,” or something like that.

  Julian said nothing. He opened his green folder, turned pages, stopped. Brandon read: questionnaire upside-down. “What colleges are you interested in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Julian made a check mark in a box.

  “GPA?”

  “About three two.”

  “Favorite subject?”

  Brandon shrugged.

  “Least despised, then.”

  Brandon thought. School was all so fucking boring. He was half asleep just behind his eyes most of the time. “Maybe history.”

  Julian wrote it down.

  “Best book read in the past year?”

  “Helter Skelter.” The only book he’d read in the past year—he’d come across it in Dewey’s garage.

  “Helter Skelter?”

  “It’s about the Manson family killings.”

  Julian looked like he was about to smile but didn’t. “What did you like about it?”

  “Kind of interesting,” Brandon said.

  Julian watched him, as though maybe waiting for more. Brandon couldn’t think of anything else.

  “And finally,” Julian said, returning to the questionnaire, “any career plans?”

  Brandon shook his head.

  “I’ll just write ‘interested in serial killing.’ ”

  So deadpan, Brandon didn’t get it right away. Then he did, and started laughing. Now Julian smiled.

  “A little surprise for Sally when she comes for your lesson next week.”

  Brandon laughed again. He switched off his MP3. Julian wrote something on the sheet.

  “You’re really writing that?” Brandon said.

  “Should I?” Julian said.

  Brandon shrugged. Julian slid the folder across the table. In the box beside career plans Brandon read: Indefinite.

  “No need to frighten Sally,” Julian said. “But I will leave her a note to spend extra time on analogies.”

  Brandon hated them.

  “Not your favorite?” said Julian.

  “They—” He shook his head.

  “Suck?”

  “Yeah.” The exact word he had in mind, although it sounded weird coming out of Julian’s mouth, almost like Brandon was hearing it for the first time.

  Julian opened the test booklet. “ ‘Revenge is to bloodshed,’ ” he said. “You circled C—’as sadness is to death.’ ”

  “Wrong?”

  Julian came around the table, sat down, placed the booklet in front of him.

  A) knife : wound

  B) rain : corn

  C) sadness : death

  D) electricity : light

  E) mercy : healing

  Brandon gazed at the question, his brain now too tired to think, to even absorb the individual meanings of everyday words. Maybe he really was stupid. And who was the asshole who dreamed up that little system of colons? He felt Julian’s gaze.

  “Any thoughts?” said Julian.

  Brandon shook his head.

  “Why don’t you try cause and effect?”

  “Cause and effect?”

  “As a method. For example, revenge leads to bloodshed. Similarly, does knife lead to wound?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about a bread knife?”

  While Brandon was thinking about that, Julian said: “Rain to corn?”

  “Kind of,” Brandon said.

  “Tip number one,” Julian said. “Eliminate all kind ofs. Electricity to light?”

  “Sure,” Brandon said, but he wasn’t feeling sure.

  Julian reached into his pocket, pulled out a wooden match. Not a box of them, just one. He ignited it with his thumbnail, real easy, not even looking at it, his eyes on Brandon. What was he getting at? That you could have light without electricity? Ah.

  “Mercy to healing?” Julian said.

  “I guess that’s the one,” said Brandon. “I had it the other way around.”

  “The other way around?” Julian was looking at him closely. There was something about his eyes, like the chip driving them was the very latest.

  Brandon nodded.

  “Death causing sadness?” Julian said. “And bloodshed revenge?”

  “Totally screwed up, right?”

  “Not at all,” Julian said. He blew out the match, looked around for somewhere to put it.
But there was nowhere. No one smoked but Brandon, weed when he could get it. Julian stuck the burnt match back in his pocket. The high-speed processor behind his eyes switched off. “Completely defensible,” he said. “Your problem is the College Board doesn’t include a section for student defenses.”

  Brandon laughed.

  “And therefore?”

  Brandon shrugged.

  “Therefore, Brandon, you have to think like them.”

  “Like the College Board?”

  “Not so hard. Not hard at all, in fact. Imagine the kind of people who formulate these questions. Are they brilliant?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or are they smart?”

  “Smart.”

  “Smart, not brilliant. Do they listen to the Beatles? Or do they listen to Unka Death?”

  Brandon was stunned. Unka Death was practically brand-new. And Julian looked too old to know about rap, although not as old as Mom and Dad—there wasn’t a line on his face, his hair was thick, his stomach flat. The light changed, or Julian’s head shifted, because suddenly his eyes were like mirrors for a second, opaque and glittering. Brandon realized he’d been staring at Julian, maybe rudely, and looked away.

  “You must know someone at school,” Julian said, “maybe not the most entertaining of your friends, but he usually gets the right answer.”

  Sam. Not at his school; at Andover. But Sam.

  “Tip number two,” Julian said. “Think like him.”

  Fuck that.

  Then Julian added: “Just for the duration of the test. No one will ever know.”

  Brandon laughed, one of those single-beat laughs, mostly through the nose. Julian was kind of funny, in a sneaky way.