by Ann Beattie
Ben had spaced out. He only realized he had when LouLou re-entered the room and he was startled to see her. She looked at him—it was such a relief; her eyes met his and again he felt their instant connection, the peaceful one that had nothing to do with talk.
“Macbeth doth murder sleep.” What did that mean? LaVerdere had asked. And more important, was that Shakespeare’s best thought about how to express those sentiments? Who but LaVerdere would think to ask that? Even in Shakespeare’s day, LaVerdere continued, there was circumlocution, “so might the playwright have sought a poetic way for the character to express his thoughts—and when I say ‘poetic’ it would be naïve to assume the word was synonymous with something inherently good, hmm? Ask yourself: Was the character being clear, or was he hiding behind what some might call ‘highfalutin language’? If there was intentional ambiguity, what would be gained by choosing those exact words?” Ben rubbed his hand over his face. Skin not ruined by acne. Rubbing your eyes only made it worse. It seemed the TV would be turned on forever, and his eyes would never stop burning.
Tessie pulled LouLou down beside her. She whispered to her as she continued to pray her beads. Ridiculous! Everything was ridiculous, people dying, plants dying, a response paper he’d worked on about Macbeth late into the night that he knew he’d never turn in. Why was LouLou sitting where she was, her arm around another person’s shoulder? He couldn’t stop thinking of the line “Macbeth doth murder sleep.” Maybe it meant nothing. Sleep was sleep. Inanimate objects and states of being couldn’t be murdered—that was an erroneous concept, as silly as personification. Twit, he thought, angrily. He hated it that LaVerdere could analyze anything and transform its clarity into ambiguity.
Where was LaVerdere?
“I told you no phones!” Mrs. Vale said sharply to Phillip Collins, though she hadn’t. He turned it off and pushed it into his pocket.
Dr. Ha had walked to the window.
Ben left to find Jasper—he assumed he’d be called back, but no one took notice. He was so upset, though, that he took a wrong turn and almost collided with a man who turned out to be Ms. Alwyn-Black’s brother, who’d come looking for his sister (though he called her only “Lauren,” so Ben had to ask twice what her last name was). Ben could certainly see the family resemblance. Out the window in the corridor, Ben could see what he assumed must be the man’s car idling with its door open and the hazard lights blinking. Pointing, Ben explained how to find the solarium. Yes, he could confirm that he’d just seen Ms. Alwyn-Black. The man looked enormously relieved as he rushed away. Years later, there’d be security. People would no longer be able to show up and go wherever they wanted on campus. A cousin of Binnie’s would be posted as a guard in a kiosk inside a locked gate. But that day, no different from any other, the grounds seemed to exist apart from the world.
“Jasper?” Ben said, knocking on his door.
“Ben?” Ms. Delacroix said from behind him.
“Hi,” he said, startled. He hadn’t seen anyone coming. “Just checking out Angelina.” The TV had been turned louder, though this far away, because of all the voices talking over whatever was being said on TV, it was impossible to hear anything clearly.
“You’re what?”
Ms. Delacroix’s face was pale. At first she’d seemed on the verge of tears, though when he spoke, her expression resolved itself into a frown.
“It got my attention,” Ben said, pointing.
Old tape marks, as well as new photographs Jasper had been told to take down (LaVerdere had let Jasper know that he thought the students should be able to put anything they wanted on their door) that Jasper had gradually snuck up again and were lined up, just above eye level: a page ripped from a tabloid of two actresses wearing the same dress, the viewer asked to decide who wore it better; photographs purporting to be about cars, subliminally orchestrated to sell sex; a photograph of Angelina Jolie, dangling a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood from a necklace.
“I can’t believe this, I truly cannot,” Ms. Delacroix said. “We are gathered together to comfort one another as this horrible moment unfolds, which is sure to change air travel in our time, and you have walked off to stare at a photograph of an actress? Wasn’t that junk supposed to be taken down?”
It didn’t seem the time to tell Ms. Delacroix that Angelina Jolie’s politics were liberal, that she was one of them. She’d had a rift with her father—nothing new there—some actor famous for a movie he’d acted in with Dustin Hoffman. Ben’s mother had watched it many times on TV, crying at the end every time.
As Ms. Delacroix fled, shaking her head, Ben knocked again, trying silently to send Jasper the message that he was the one knocking. He empathized: If Jasper knew that something horrible was happening in New York, but he was already on sensory overload because of his mother’s health problems and The Man, why open the door and admit one more thing? All those contrived stories like “The Lady, or the Tiger?,” of people having to decide what was behind a door and what they’d risk by opening it—it worked the other way, too; when you were inside, you had to decide who’d come knocking, which might range from Mormon missionaries to the Red Death, the Grim Reaper, or your friend Big Ben, not as tall as his father and not likely to be, recipient of one of LaVerdere’s uninspired nicknames. Though the worst thing was to have no special name.
Ben gave a last, two-knuckled tap. His next idea was to slip a note under the door. Jasper was determined to have privacy. Or maybe he’d decided to go for a run. That was more likely. He should go to his own room and put on the dirty clothes from the night before and set out, see if he met Jasper on the trail. Everyone their age was skilled at making something intentional appear coincidental; Hailey just happening to find herself next to LouLou so often—whether in photographs, at relay races, or just standing around on the insane wall-to-wall carpeting at the Sunday social; Darius Beltz leaving any room into which snacks were brought because a thought had just occurred to him that he had to write down immediately. (Jasper, noticing the same thing, had drawn a cartoon that looked very much like Darius, transforming him into a lightbulb.) Ben wondered what he, personally, would have done if his father had shown up drunk, holding Eleanor’s hand. Die, that’s what.
When he left, went down the hallway, and opened the unlocked door to his own room, he saw—though he hadn’t before—his name on an envelope that had nearly slid under the bookcase. It was unsealed. “Mom’s in the hospital. Too much chemo,” Jasper had written. “Binnie’s friend Ray is dropping me at the bus to Hanover. Don’t tell anybody, including LaV. Whatever my dad told LaV, my mother doesn’t know anything about his coming home. He’s probably still drunk. If he comes back, you don’t know where I am.” No signature. There was a quickly drawn figure below the message. The face looked remarkably like The Man’s, but after giving careful attention to the face, Jasper had drawn a stick figure, the torso’s long vertical line pierced with arrows. Ben put the note back in the envelope, then pretended it was a puck and toed it under the bookcase.
When he’d first seen it, he’d feared it was a note from LouLou, saying something he didn’t want to hear.
Seven
Now everything in the world was going to be rethought (“defamiliarized,” to use one of LaVerdere’s favorite words). For a while, Ben’s dreams made him awaken confused, as if he really had been on the bus with Jasper. He’d think he could smell the tires’ burning rubber, hear the bus driver’s announcement of “a problem in our country,” the ripple of astonishment drifting down the aisle like Sarin as the driver pulled onto the shoulder and communicated through his walkie-talkie. That was when 9/11 became 10/4, as Jasper had said to Ben.
At times, Ms. Delacroix’s look of incredulity would come back to him, as he’d stood in front of Angelina Jolie’s photograph. Of course he hadn’t been looking at it. There’d been nothing anybody with any courage could do but lie, rather than blow a friend’s cover.
The lawyer’s address was One World Trade Center.
She found the note on the kitchen counter when she returned from the hospital on September 14. She called the school immediately. Who was the French teacher her husband had talked to, and what did he know?
There was no French teacher. There was a Spanish teacher, but there was no French teacher.
Tessie’s cousin Dolores was the school operator. She was doing her best to be helpful.
Then flip forward: Suddenly everyone knew The Man was dead. The information spread quickly. People never seen outside their offices clustered all over the grounds. The useless Bailey headmaster—it was an open secret he had dementia—appeared for what he kept referring to as “a press conference” beside the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stumbling through a reading of a Wordsworth poem and refusing to let either his grown son or the school nurse lead him away. Ms. Alwyn-Black broke down in tears when someone came into the art gallery and asked to see “inspirational art, instead of this pointless junk,” and had to be driven home by Ms. Delacroix. All of Bailey became one big, dysfunctional family. Even the groundskeeper went to church for the first time in years. Although he kept his head down and never talked to anyone, he told this to Hailey outside the cafeteria, tears in his eyes, and for some inexplicable reason, she’d shouted, “There is no god. You’re fooling yourself. Everybody’s just going to die and disappear.” Eleanor gave Jasper a blowjob. Dr. Ha went to be with his brother in Storrs, Connecticut, leaving no one in charge of his classes.
Jasper’s mother’s attempt to see him had compounded the problem. She’d passed out in her friend’s car as she was being driven to Bailey and had to be taken to the ER, so that as the teachers and students were awaiting her arrival, prepared to join the family in a quickly arranged memorial service in the art gallery against a backdrop of The Peaceable Kingdom, her panicked friend was at the hospital, trying to think what to do. She’d called Jasper, trying to downplay his mother’s collapse (“It was a little too soon, so maybe we should try another day”), crying herself. Getting the most recent bad news had put Jasper into a tailspin. He’d handed Ben the phone the same way he’d handed him the bag with his medicine in it from the drugstore, then disappeared. After talking to Jasper’s mother’s friend—rather, listening—Ben had turned to LaVerdere for advice, catching him walking out of the restroom. The two of them, grim-faced, had headed quickly toward Jasper’s room and its yet-again closed door, like a team in a cop movie, LaVerdere muttered under his breath. They’d crossed paths with Aqua and Ms. Delacroix, rushing toward the art gallery still empty of its director, carrying a box of devotional candles in small glass containers. Dr. Ha appeared, wearing new, black-framed oversize glasses. Everyone was going off in various directions as if they’d been launched by the pinball machine outside the cafeteria.
The memorial service was delayed, the same way everything planned had misfired, for what seemed like forever. The devotional candles were put back in the box, unlit. The girls got in a huddle, and Hailey burst into tears, because somebody always burst into tears. Word spread about Jasper’s mother the same way it had with the awful news about The Man’s death. The newly installed spotlight above The Peaceable Kingdom was turned off by Tessie. She looked so solemn, it was as if it had become her personal responsibility to turn off the sun. Ms. Delacroix was red-eyed. A bracelet fell from her wrist and she didn’t know it had until one of the girls handed it back to her. The clasp had broken and she couldn’t put it back on. Dr. Ha took it from her and put it in his pocket. He handed her a bandanna that he explained he hadn’t worn when he’d gone running. She buried her face in it.
Jasper had become crazier than Darius Beltz about not wanting anyone to touch him. He frowned fiercely, insisting on terrible scenarios about his mother’s health. He had some theory about how The Man’s neediness had caused his mother’s initial collapse and then, in her weakened state, she’d succumbed to cancer. His reasoning was far from scientific. Then another phone call had come from the ER. Nothing but bad news. His mother’s blood pressure was abnormally low. She’d been admitted to the hospital. “What do you think, this is just a little setback?” Jasper said sarcastically to Ben, dismayed at his friend’s stupidity. Jasper turned and left the room.
“Blowing off steam,” LaVerdere said to Ben as the spring-loaded launcher was pulled back and released. Pinballs began flying: There went Dr. Ha; here came Binnie; there went Phillip Collins, calling, “Jasper, man, c’mere, I’ve got something to say.” The door closed in his face. Phillip Collins’s hair was slicked back. He’d put on a suit for the memorial service, which made him look years older.
After 9/11, everyone at Bailey perfected staying out of other people’s way, leaving them with their own thoughts. Attempts at false cheer had become depressing. Were Dr. Ha and old Ms. Delacroix having an affair? They were, weren’t they?
The box of candles fell and broke. That meant nothing, really, in a world where no one would ever care about minor breakage again—or at least that was the way it seemed. They might never know, though—as LaVerdere later remarked on graduation day—whether, if the world hadn’t appreciably changed on them, leaving Bailey would still have resulted in a backlash of regret. It was another one of his questions that, as he himself pointed out, hinted strongly at its answer by being posed. Or, as Benson Whitacre came to think, he was insidiously cueing them to be adolescents instead of adults, because that way he’d remain in their minds.
Once they’d graduated from Bailey, what bonds would make them keep their friendships, their infatuations, their animosities? Would some still tell one another their dreams, or would they become embarrassed by such obvious symbols? They’d be going out into the real world—a place LaVerdere, the person many of them respected most, thought was only another cultural concept that was inevitably politicized, with so-called national pride worn as blinders, doled out like 3-D glasses at the movies to keep the citizens of the world thinking they were seeing reality, when all they saw was an optical illusion.
There was a rumor that Binnie had had an abortion over Christmas break. Aqua knew it wasn’t true; she’d had a D&C because of gross fibroid tumors that made her menstruate almost nonstop, Binnie had confided. Aqua told LouLou. LouLou told Ben. If anyone else found out, it wasn’t because he repeated it.
In their last semester, Darius Beltz began going to church with a family friend, who came in his Mercedes and took him to Episcopal services in the only affluent town within radius of Bailey. The friend was a former alcoholic, though he’d recently gotten a job and had his driver’s license reinstated. Rather than hiding this information, Darius announced it proudly. “Don’t you think it’s weird there’s no church at Bailey, just the stupid Spiritual Studies building that’s a wing of the art gallery, with the Buddha jumbled together with statues of Mary, and music playing that sounds like the music played on the Titanic as it went down?” Darius asked Ben.
Ben hadn’t thought about it. Attending church services was optional, and since they were presided over by a rotation of three math teachers, of course Ben had never bothered to go. His father hadn’t gone to church after Ben’s mother died. Even his wedding had been a civil ceremony. After 9/11, the Spiritual Studies building had been set up to of
fer psychological counseling. Hailey had had a meltdown there, talking not about the terrorist attack, but about the necessity of being reunited with Stiff Formaldehyde, though Stiff had a restraining order against going near her. She’d emailed, she’d called, she was sure he wanted to get together again, but nothing was happening, her whole life would never happen, it had already happened and she’d given her baby away to someone else.
Phillip Collins was accepted at Harvard. His mother and father separated, though they attended his graduation together. His father had moved into a house in Redding, Connecticut, with his graphic designer girlfriend, who also dealt in anime art. She was not at graduation, though her dog was, a malamute, tied to a tree, who behaved perfectly throughout the ceremony. “A true representative of The Peaceable Kingdom,” as LaVerdere said, scratching the dog’s ruff afterward.
Barbara Ehrenreich was the commencement speaker in June. Ben and his friends had rushed up to give her high fives—the girls, especially, though immediately afterward Jasper had faded away. Ben had noticed that as the last semester wound down, Jasper acted like someone who’d already put Bailey behind him. He didn’t even want to play chess anymore. He jogged without asking Ben to go along. He’d been talking a lot to his uncle. He’d be going to Stanford. He was thinking of declaring himself premed.
Ben suffered much indecision about whether he should go to college. Jasper had had little tolerance for his self-doubt. It had been to LaVerdere’s credit that he’d taken him aside in May and told him he was sure he’d sort it out. He’d been rejected at Yale, which had really disappointed his father, wait-listed at Penn and Harvard, and accepted by Georgetown and Cornell. He spent so much time the summer after he graduated working around his father’s place, he thought of becoming a landscape architect. Since indentured servants didn’t exist anymore—technically, they didn’t—Ben hoped simple exhaustion might provoke an epiphany. He spent his days chopping and stacking wood, for both his father and his father’s elderly neighbor (a former federal judge, who’d written a letter of recommendation on his behalf to his alma mater, Cornell), pruning bushes, removing and reglazing windows cracked by winter storms, then scrubbing them down with newspaper soaked in vinegar, the fumes stinging his eyes, making sure he got rid of every smudge when he rehung them, snapping on latex gloves he pulled out of a dispenser like tissues.
