The phone didn't ring all night, and I slept badly, on the couch and alone.
*
I took another early and deserted train to Hyde Park the following morning.
The deep and fresh snow made everything, from our backyard all the way to Hyde Park, look beautiful. Untouched. Peaceful.
I was reduced to being thankful I could still identify something to do with peace.
No Volvo. No answer. No lights. The same mail in the same place.
I skipped breakfast and sat on a bench in the middle of the University, starting and restarting a poem I didn't like in the leather notebook Brennan had given me over the weekend.
I ignored the curious glances from the passing university students as my wheels spun almost out of control, retracing the past few weeks in my mind with nearly possessed detail, sitting alone and out of place in a Gothic courtyard that would seem haunted, if I had taken the time to notice.
I broke off a large, round piece of ice from the side of the bench, and held it in my bare hand, squeezing it until my hand and arm shook from the effort. It was too thick to break. The cold water dripped out of my frozen fingers and down my wrist and shirt sleeve, until the ice finally melted into a shape that collapsed under the pressure of my grip.
My hand still hurt after I put it back into my gloves, but not as badly as my heart did, turned inside-out by the conclusion I found inescapable.
God damn you, Felix.
*
The entire class looked at me strangely as I walked into Mister Granger's room after the bell had rung, a few seconds before. I was never late. None of us were ever late. I didn't even show up in the two classes before that, which was unheard of. Felix didn't look at me, Granger barely so, a brisk nod that understood, forgave, and forgot, in one fell swoop.
Forgiveness...I wondered what that was?
Our Literature teacher had published a gripping and horrific fictional memoir of his service in Korea a few years ago, but kept teaching while he toiled over his follow-up novel. He had wound imagery and gestures into his storytelling without a shred of effort, and demanded the most out of our readings and writings. Every class was an emotional roller-coaster, but it was so real, so visceral, whenever his wide, rounded eyes scanned the room while Granger's rich baritone voice began discussing or reading something.
We had come to Richard III.
"It's time to read. Anyone?" He avoided my side of the room, even though I was the only guy to raise his hand. Of course Kim raised hers. Felix looked like he was about to raise his hand.
"I'd like to read." I met Felix's eyes very hard. The room was uncomfortably silent. Granger finally acknowledged me with another clipped nod. He sat in his seat like he always did, with his elbows dug into his knees, his face resting on his folded hands, his eyes half-closed, in order to take in the reading fully. "Read to the cheap seats," he would always say.
But I was reading for only one seat. Each syllable and phrase hissed through my clenched teeth and jaw. The words became forever, and mine.
"Now is the winter of our discontent...cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up...since I cannot prove a lover...I am determined to play a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days..."
The emotionless, icily enunciated reading I gave rumbled in the classroom long after Mister Granger raised his palm and brought me to a halt. A strange, exciting power had flooded through my senses as I read, making those centuries-old words fly off of the typeset pages in front of me and into the collective consciousness of my classmates and teacher. I took my time before I sat back down.
Granger coughed twice to clear his throat. "What did you hear in this Richard," he asked? The responses given by my fellow classmates gratified me.
"A lot of pain."
"Someone crushed by their separateness."
"Defiant hatred."
"Consuming emotions."
"Loneliness. He's so lonely from the rest of the world, he wants to destroy it."
"Sadness turning into something else."
"An unjust life being rebelled against."
"The pain everyone feels about their place in the world."
"The edge of madness."
Personally, I heard myself. And I dared Felix to look back at me.
*
When I went to Nicolasha's apartment after school, the mail had been removed, and, from the front porch, I could see his entire living room had been, too.
He was long gone.
* * *
X X
Rude am I in my speech,
And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace.
Othello
It was Friday night. I had spent all week trying to make contact with Nicolasha. His landlady had no idea where he had gone, and seemed concerned about how he was acting before he disappeared into the evening sunset. Basilio kept denying he knew anything at all, and hung up on me after I called the fifth time. Nobody at school would even talk about it, except to say that Mister Rozhdestvensky had resigned. I even tried to contact his parents in Washington D.C., but they were on tour with the National Symphony somewhere in Europe. I left a message, along with all the others I had spread out across the city of Chicago.
It was Mister Granger who told me what had happened, hidden in the privacy of the Pilot School's ancient library stacks during lunch period.
A student claimed he had been molested by Nicolasha during a visit to his apartment, and another anonymous note professed that an attempt was made on him, as well. A faculty Board of Inquiry refused to take a position, citing inconsistencies in the stories told by the students interviewed. Evidentally, the entire Junior-level faculty backed Nicolasha. In a million years, I could not picture Messieurs Abbado, Clive, Granger, Tanaka, and Wheatley, our highly eccentric calculus professor, agreeing on anything, above and beyond what day it was (and, even then, Wheatley would probably cite some astronomical anomaly to suggest it was in fact Wednesday...). Nicolasha had burst into tears during his "questioning" by Gruppenfuhrer Connelly, and withdrew on the spot, unwilling to confront the charges in another forum.
I asked Mister Granger why he was telling me things I was clearly not meant to know.
"Because I don't think Nicolas did anything, either."
*
The phone rang twice. I leapt at it each time.
Uncle Alex would finally arrive Sunday morning, flying down with his easels, oils, and steamer trunks. It sounded like he had a send-off party going on in the background, so the conversation was short.
Brennan was on his way over to pick me up for a night at the movies and, later, a fireside chat. He complained about getting busy signals all week, but I didn't explain.
As I was cleaning up the family room, the doorbell rang. I ran to answer it, looking forward to a good, long, close hug from Brennan. I knew the hug wasn't going to make me feel any better about Nicolasha's disappearance, but I wanted one, just the same.
My smile melted away in an instant. It was Felix.
There he was, still short, still cute, black hair going off in every direction, a face made to look happy but now wearing a mug that brought me back to the wake. He looked he had just gotten back from one. His father's Continental was parked and running on the street in front of our house. They wouldn't even pull into the driveway.
"Hi." I nodded once, without moving aside to welcome him into the house. "I wanted to give you this." The young Cromwell held out a thick envelope.
"What's that?"
Felix shrugged. "I spent all afternoon writing it."
"I don't want it."
Felix reached forward with his free hand and touched my shirt sleeve. "What's happened with us? You were like my brother before we left for Florida. Mom and Dad are really upset." His voice broke in a sadly adorable way. I looked away for a moment. I missed Jason and Arlene, too. "Please take it."
"No."
; I went to slam the door in Felix’s face, but he sprang forward into the door jamb. I snarled like a werewolf, taking his parka in both hands and swinging him to the tile floor, knocking the breath out of him. I knelt over Felix and mashed my mouth over his, forcing his lips open, practically sucking his tongue down my throat. I didn’t see or feel his legs flailing under mine, much less, his panicked arms trying to pry me off him. I only stopped when I tasted blood (which turned out to be his). The pause was long enough for me to hear him choking for air inside my mouth.
I rolled off Felix, who, rather than bolt back up and run or even scurry away on his knees, tried to fix his hair and re-arrange his layer of shirts with averted eyes. He stood up unsteadily and had trouble hitching his slacks back into place. He looked like he was going to try and say something, but left without a sound instead.
My heavy breathing stuttered with glee when I realized Felix couldn’t get his britches righted because he had had a terrific hard-on from his first boy kiss.
*
Later on, Brennan didn't ask what was bothering me. He just saw the dead look on my face, sat us down next to the fireplace, and tried cuddling me. I stayed mute. We sat there for the rest of the night, silent together, until we fell asleep, still in our clothes, still holding on to each other.
*
The following Monday morning, as I was going to my locker, Felix ran up and cut me off at the top of the staircase. He held me back with one hand and carried his letter in the other.
"Please wait a minute. Please." He was out of breath. I glared at him, my teeth grinding. "Read my letter. It'll explain everything."
"Explain?"
He nodded like a drunken marionette. I lowered my head and took a step backwards. Felix relaxed a bit, which I took quick note of. I swung out the full length of my arm, throwing all my weight behind my fist as it smashed across and broke Felix's nose. Blood spurted out of his face as he screamed sharply and lost his footing. Felix tumbled down the iron stairs into a group of lower graders, knocking them over like they were bowling pins.
I wheeled past Doctor Clive as he emerged from his homeroom, hearing Felix's loud, painful sobbing down the hall.
*
I got suspended. Not just the first in my class, but the first in the Pilot School for over 21 years. Uncle Alex cared less. I didn’t say a word to Brennan, because his ‘why’s’ had a way of lasting hours, if not whole days. I caught up on my sleep.
*
In his first act as "head of the household", Uncle Alex turned our backyard into an ice skating rink.
Instead of unpacking or buying a car or even cleaning out Dad's old bedroom, you know, something productive, he spent all week mounting and nailing the baseboards together, laying down and sealing the plastic tarpaulins he brought with him from Minnesota, and, to finish the job, filled the massive frame with hose water. It was below twenty-degrees the entire time he toiled away, and it still took two days for the water to freeze completely.
My contribution to the project was to install an 8-track player (on loan from Brennan's dad) into our barbecue shell, with speakers running along the back of the house. The stereo filled in the icy expanse of our back yard very nicely. Sound carries in a funny way during the winter.
Unc proclaimed the rink suitable for use Thursday night. The first thing I did was to play the Gloria all'Egitto from Verdi's Aida rather loudly, shaking one of the speakers clear off of the house. Unc approved, and demanded I make tapes of every loud opera chorus and march I had in my collection.
Being suspended from school wasn't so bad, after all.
*
Brennan's dad, George, was the handy man's handy man, a first-rate landscaper as well as private cultivator of interesting equatorial plant species. Unc made a point of being too nice and over-paying him when he came over to install a number of flood lights over the rink. Good handy men were worth their weight in gold, Unc believed. He didn't have go overboard, though. George was in on the secret about the particular nature of me and Brennan’s relationship, and seemed supportive of us in a quiet sort of way.
We weren't sure about Doris, Brennan's thirty one-year-old mother, but, then again, nobody really was...
I’d gone pale when Brennan said he had told his dad about us. It seemed important to Brennan, so I didn't put up much of an argument, until he started pushing me to do the same with Uncle Alex. We agreed to disagree. Temporarily, Brennan insisted.
*
During the weekend, Felix called twice. I hung up the moment I heard his voice the first time.
Me and Brennan were about to undress each other and do the fur-and-fireplace thing when Felix called for the second time. He sounded like he was crying, and said something I could barely understand, making me feel like I had been teleported into one of my bad dreams. I told him to go to hell, and slammed the phone down.
Brennan sat down next to me on the couch and held one of my hands, waiting for me to start talking, but I didn't. I couldn't even begin to think about the betrayal I felt, the violence Felix used against Nicolasha to get to me, shattering the trust I between us. It was limitless. Much less, the pain and shame in my heart, knowing how Nicolasha must have felt about the trust and love he’d placed in me. It was inestimable.
I had years of familial inculcation to prevent me from spewing out what was raging inside of me. Brennan didn't understand this, and took my not opening up to him as a deep and personal rejection.
Our night together collapsed like a straw house in a gale. He didn't say a word to me and went home, leaving me alone to use Uncle Alex as a bad example and Wyborowa myself to sleep.
*
I became an odd sort of celebrity upon my return to school. In the bathroom, Zane whispered I was the first ever Pilot School student to be suspended for fighting. It wasn't a fight, I thought, it was an attack. Counterattack, really. I saw glimmers of respect in many eyes, especially the lower graders, as I stalked through the halls in my ticking time bomb style. I also picked up on the antagonism that Felix attracted wherever he went.
Nicolasha, the beloved Papa Rozh, was gone. Three students had been called down to the office over something to do with him. One was too quiet and unassuming to have said anything. Another got suspended for punching out the third, a new kid nobody had really gotten to know.
And the new kid got blamed. Too bad for the little bastard.
*
I got off of the train late that night. I decided I didn't want anything to do with the Pilot School coming into my house, at least for the time being, so I did all of my homework at school.
I was quietly stunned to see Brennan waiting for me on the platform. It was already dark, and very cold. He had taken the night off from work and been waiting for me to get off of a train for two hours.
"What are you doing here? I thought you were mad at me."
The only friend I had left smiled weakly. "I still am." He took a step closer to me. "But I love you, and wanted to tell you that to your face, so you wouldn't forget."
"That would be pretty hard," I replied softly.
We hugged for so long out there in the cold, I wondered if any of the cars waiting for their commuting husbands and wives noticed, or made remarks about us.
*
Me and Uncle Alex had an outdoor party the following Saturday, and it was a gigantic success.
I invited Lawrence and his family (but they didn't come, as Unc predicted); Mister Granger, who couldn't go; Zane, who asked Farrah to be his date (and arranged for them to spend the night with us "since they lived so far away"!); and Doctor Clive, whose radio gal companion stunned us all by wearing a floor-length parka and a tight nylon skating dress, which showed off her sexy young body. Brennan invited his parents and all our baseball friends, most of whom brought dates I didn’t recognize. And Uncle Alex invited some tough-looking Israeli woman, who was his agent or something. She out-skated everyone, except Doctor C's radio gal. Unc found some caterers willing to do an outdoor spread
prepared to withstand the winter elements, with cuisine featuring the very finest in ballpark eats: thick kosher hot dogs, beer-soaked bratwursts, giant pretzels, snow cones (with a number of tasty liqueurs on hand for flavoring with a kick), freshly-fried nachos, drumsticks, and, of course, a giant trail mix made up of Cracker Jack, unshelled peanuts, and over-salted cheese popcorn.
In little more than an hour, the food was cleaned out. Zane and Farrah stayed close to me, and were much more fun than I thought they'd be. The baseball gang hogged the well-lit end of the rink, playing a rough-and-tumble version of hockey without sticks or skates. Doctor C and the Radio Gal (how's that for a short story title?) carried on very romantically in our wrought-iron glider, watching the action on the ice, while the Israeli and George crossed swords over international politics. Doris and Uncle Alex were in some kind of drinking contest in the kitchen. I was afraid to see who was winning.
Brennan was happy to play bartender.
*
Everybody seemed to love the Viennese waltzes, polkas, and marches I taped for the party. I had thought about keeping a few good dance or sing-along songs handy, but there was such diversity in the age of our guests, I decided to keep it classical. The ambience of the Strauss family's compositions alone, combined with the ice rink, the Christmas lights in the trees, the baseball food (especially the snow cones), and the company created a wonderful atmosphere that left everybody giddy.
And Uncle Alex had been here less than two weeks, I thought...!
Doctor C and his gorgeous date came up to me as I sat next to Brennan at the rented bar. "Young man, we'd like to have a skate on that rink of yours. What do you suggest for a group round-a-bout?"
Miles Page 19
