As for John, Jess saw how carefully he treated Ricky.
As for Biscuit, Jess saw how she hid things under her bed.
As for Paul, he might have been a changeling. Lumpen and darkly aloof, he’d barely said two words to her.
What she remembered of the Ryries, the memory she cherished above all of her time with them on that single summer holiday eight years ago, was how shiny she had appeared in their eyes, how good and honorable and clean.The happiness of those two weeks had been the happiness of having her worth gauged by strangers, of being seen fresh—it was her debut, after all, as an independent person, with no mother or father or teacher or friend to lend her context—and found estimable. She had not the least doubt about this, their regard.They’d expressed it amply, in ways both direct and indirect. Had she thought it would all come back so easily, that all she need do was show up, help herself to their kitchen and kettle, announce her condition, dissemble a little about her state of need, and be reinstated as precious, as prized in their eyes—is that what she’d hoped? Is that what she’d come for?
After hanging up the phone with her mother, after scraping up the dry last bit of cake, Jess had helped herself to a sweatshirt from the coatrack and taken her coffee out to the porch. The wisteria that grew up along the posts was winter-bare, its branches forming a gnarled proscenium. She’d stood at the edge of the top step, face tilted toward the thin bright sun, and took stock: she was twenty-three, two thousand miles from home, with a baby (and two bowls of cereal and a piece of cake) inside her. What did any of that mean, bode? The April air cut like scissors, the light spooling across the grass, and she stood on a kind of brink, a lip, pressing forward into the morning, but the park stood empty, the street stood empty, there was no one to see her: the world was blind.
So Jess had abandoned her mug on the shady porch and crossed over into the sunlight of the park, removing her clogs as she stepped onto the grass. And there she’d lain this past half-hour, at first feeling weighed by real misery, but eventually sliding into half-pleasurable, even improbably cheering, suicidal reveries. Now she propped herself on her elbows. The grass spread all around: new, slim-bladed, palest green. She thought of Walt Whitman, leaning and loafing, observing his spear of summer grass. She thought of her father as a young man, loafing in the grass with the very copy of Whitman he’d passed along to her. He was mysterious to her in this vision, someone she’d not guessed at. She could drum up, barely, wisps of memory: herself as a child in the grass with him, her father instructing her in the art of tying shoelaces, calmly batting away a wasp.Then another wisp, this one not memory but projection: herself loafing in the grass with her own child years hence, the two of them observing the green strands together, the intensity of the grass doubled. Whitman had a line about that, too, didn’t he? Where had she come across it,Topeka? St. Louis? About a child fetching a handful of grass, displaying it as treasure. That was the silver lining, then, the sweet surprise of pregnancy: at best, it seemed to promise an antidote to loneliness. Someone else to witness the particularities up close, to share with her her vision, her singular perspectives and thoughts. It was a doubling, the prospect of an imaginary friend who would become, in a matter of time, incarnate. (Though there was a part of her that did not believe it at all. Was she fatter? Did she feel any different? Sleepy, yes, but nothing more. She wanted proof. She wanted kicking.)
Down the slope from where she sat, hidden from sight by shrubbery, younger-than-school-age children were frisking in the little playground. She listened to their high, purposeful voices registering thrill, and the countering voices of their caregivers, bent, from the sound of it, on squashing thrill. “Get down from there, Connor!” a woman ordered. “You know you can’t go that high!” Jess smiled: evidently Connor could. One thing she knew for sure—if there really was a baby inside her, if she really was about to become a mother, she would never sound like that.
She knew who she hoped to sound like: her friend Annie. Annie had no kids, but she had a dog, a rescued greyhound she called Brokedown Palace, and Annie was great with her dog. Jess had met her at Conefucius, the ice cream parlor where they’d both scooped their way through college, and where Brokedown hung out during Annie’s shifts, mostly out on the sidewalk, cadging the ends of people’s cones, snapping lazily at bees, dozing in the shade of a fan palm. Once a customer had asked, “Is that your dog out front?”
Annie, looking up slowly from under the brim of her omnipresent Stetson, had given one of her slow grins. “Nope, she’s her own dog.”
It was the kind of thing that made Jess both admire Annie and want to crack her over the head. No wonder, in that land of anarchic shop owners, ice-cream-fed greyhounds, and cowboyhatted girls, Jess got termed “eminently practical.” Could that be the reason she’d gotten pregnant in the first place, the reason she’d quarreled with her mother, bought that epic bus ticket, and delivered herself so rashly into the house of her not real family, her alternative-reality family? In order to repudiate the designation?
Maybe. In part. Jess was at once too clear-sighted not to consider the possibility and too smart to fall sway to the kind of reductive thinking that would make it the whole answer.
It was Annie’s younger brother, Seth, who was the father. Now there was a designation to make Jess snort. Better simply to say he was the one who’d gotten her pregnant—not that he knew or ever would. He was still in college—a sophomore, for God’s sake—undeclared but leaning toward environmental studies, a lanky, unstudied heartthrob who wore an ancient Chinese coin on a cord around his neck. In her mind’s eye he could be found eternally playing Hacky Sack in Sproul Plaza, his dirty-blond hair bouncing on his shoulders, his long, tapered torso naked and tanned, frayed cargo shorts hanging low off his waist. They’d met at a house party last fall; he’d filched Annie’s Stetson off her head and settled it on his own, where, Jess thought, it showed to better effect. In fact, it had been the hat that caused her to approach him, the odd draw of a familiar object radically transformed by virtue of its placement in a strange context. Much the effect Jess hoped to gain for herself by coming here.
Jess, herself at that point six months out of Berkeley with a degree in English and no real clue of what was next, had been chatting him up with what she’d thought was big-sisterly interest, asking him about his classes and profs. It was two or three in the morning by then, the air sweet with pot and sleepy bodies. No one was dancing anymore. Someone had taken off Kanye West and put on Leonard Cohen. Seth was in the midst of some genial riff involving the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and fair-trade coffee, when “Suzanne” came on and he interrupted himself first to listen, and then to sing, “And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.” But privately, unshowily, it had seemed to Jess at the time. Doing that thing men do with their eyebrows when they’re straining to reach the high notes.
Then he’d shot her an embarrassed grin—it was almost the same grin as Annie’s, though his was crazy sexy—and, shrugging, confessed, “My dad loves this song.”
Who ever knew what it would take? It was always unexpected, she was learning, the thing that smote your heart, always something untranslatable, irreducible, something that refused to come through in the retelling, so that you felt the absurdity of it increase each time you tried to parse it.The moment that caused your chest to expand, the moment your shortness of breath let you know you had fallen for somebody new. Seth and Jess had fucked on and off then for the next couple of months in a sweet, blasé way—almost childlike, almost puppylike, their lightly pleasurable tumblings—each knowing there was no future in it, Jess sternly trying to keep her heart and hopes in line, to remind herself this was how it went with her generation; indeed, it was the very rubric of her generation. She knew no one her age who was in a long-term relationship, no one who seemed even to wish to end up with the person they were sleeping with.
By the time Jess realized she was pregnant, she’d neither seen nor spoken with Seth in five week
s, obviating the need to break it to him, or for that matter, break up with him. By then, neither she nor Annie worked at Conefucius anymore. Annie (improbably) had begun studying for the LSAT, and Jess (ironically) had taken a job in the career placement office on campus, assisting students with the very process that, in her own life, most baffled her.
Could that be the reason she’d gotten pregnant? In order to saddle herself with something she had to do, thereby precluding the need to figure out what it was she wanted to do?
All at once she heard panting near her ear, felt pungent breath on her face.
“No!” scolded a man’s voice. “Come away from there! You dunce.”
She propped herself on her elbows and squinted across the park. Already the apparent culprit, an enormous dog, had moved off. A slight red-haired man in a plaid jacket threw a stick for it.The dog caught it in midair with a hard snap of tooth on wood, then lumbered slowly back toward the man, slower, slower, before coming to a halt some distance away. It lowered its head suggestively. The man approached with stealth. The tail wagged. The man drew nearer. Nearer. At the last moment, just as he lunged, the dog bounded away, its entire massive body seeming to radiate laughter.
“Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be,” the man said to the dog, and they squared off against each other.
It was a hackneyed routine that remained somehow fresh, and Jess, who had recognized them both, did not suppress a laugh. At the sound the man turned toward her, shading his eyes. He looked hesitant, then surprised.
What was his name? Greg, Gregory? They’d sat in the kitchen together for a long time, the day she’d arrived. His presence had mitigated, in a way, the awkwardness of her own unexpected arrival. Was it Jordan?
Oh, well: “Hi!” she called, waving. She snatched up her clogs, began walking toward him. “It’s Jess.We met”—jabbing a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the Ryries’ house and enjoying, even as the words flew out of her mouth unbidden, the absurdity of the statement—“over tea and Biscuit.”
2.
Mitosis.” Ms. Nuñez put the word on the board as she spoke, the chalk clacking as if impatient. She was young, new to teaching this year (as she’d jauntily and perhaps unwisely announced to Paul’s seventh-grade Life Science class on the first day of school last September), and had actually turned out to be pretty decent, except for her oddly hyped-up tempo. She talked twice as fast as anyone Paul had ever met, as though she’d taken to heart some mentor’s warning that unless she did everything with Internet-era velocity she’d risk losing the kids’ attention.
“Mitosis,” she repeated, “is the process by which autosomal cells reproduce. So. What’s ‘autosomal’?”
When no one responded, she added this word to the board, the chalk flashing with such urgency that the final result was legible only by broad stretch of the imagination. Ms. Nuñez whipped back around to face the class. She wore her hair slicked so tight it looked painted on, except at the back, where her ponytail bobbed and swung.
“Autosomal: meaning the non-sex chromosomes. Okay? So mitosis is how cells reproduce asexually.” She enunciated the last word deliberately, thereby eliciting smirks and laughter, as Ms. Nuñez, green or not, had to have known she would. She shook her head and rolled her eyes, pretending exasperation. But she’d warmed them up, brought them to attention, and on some level Paul understood she’d thrown in sex in order to ingratiate herself, to grease the wheels of teacher-student rapport. He didn’t really fault her for it. In a weird way, she got his sympathy whenever she pulled something like this, some transparent effort to remind them she was hip. Still, he couldn’t help regretting that she’d held the door so irresistibly open to rejoinders.
Here it came now, so predictable Paul could almost laugh, a jibe from Stephen Boyd, speaking low enough that his remark didn’t carry all the way to the front, loud enough to set off a staccato burst of snorts and giggles around the desks in back: “That’s how Ryrie’s parents had him.”
“That’s mean,” chided a girl, but admiringly.
The worst part was that the comment—which a year earlier would have blindsided him—only confirmed what had become his regular status, the miserable part he now played, the costume he wore through the halls of school like a heavy, invisible cloak. At least Paul’s desk was toward the front of the classroom, so he could pretend not to have heard. He frowned intently at his book, as though contemplating a particularly challenging passage. But one comment was never enough.
“That’s how Ryrie’s parents do it every night,” said Noah Prager, speaking for some reason in a television-cowboy drawl. He was a Stephen Boyd wannabe, but meaner than Boyd and lacking the charm; short, with an overdeveloped set of biceps and pecs to compensate. He shifted into a disgusting, whispery falsetto—“Oh. Oh! Oh-hh-hh!”—presumably simulating the sounds Paul’s mother (or worse, father) made during sex.
Paul’s heart thumped; his temples throbbed. He made his face dead stone, made his eyes dead fucking shit, drilled them straight ahead at the board.
“Noah, you’re such an asshole,” whispered someone—Fiona Conley, Paul guessed—and the sniggers flared up again and died out.
At the front of the room Ms. Nuñez was continuing blithely, sailing along on her newly fortified confidence. “A lot of your own body’s cells reproduce this way.We’re talking skin cells, hair cells, stomach cells, heart . . .” As she spoke she set up a series of cardboard diagrams on the chalk ledge: INTERPHASE, PROPHASE, METAPHASE, ANAPHASE, TELOPHASE, CYTOKINESIS.
Then she spun around and started waving her hand in the air. “But, Ms. Nuñez, Ms. Nuñez, how does this occur?” she said, in a kind of parody that achieved moderate success: she received polite laughter from the first couple of rows. After a moment’s delay, however, she hit the jackpot in the form of Noah Prager singing out from the back in a faithful echo of her own eager cadence, “But, Ms. Nuñez, Ms. Nuñez, how does this occur?” He did this in a way that managed to suggest equally that he was her co-conspirator in the joke and that he was mocking her attempt at humor.
“Ah, Mr. Prager,” she replied, “I’m glad you asked. Open your binders, people. New heading: ‘The Six Stages of Mitosis.’”
Beneath the generalized shuffling and flipping open of twenty-eight binders, Paul heard Prager mutter, “He’s fucking gay, anyway,” and then the same female voice, Fiona Conley’s, retort sanctimoniously, “So? That doesn’t mean you should make fun of people,” and it was the retort more than the crack—the retort that seemed to assume the veracity of the crack—that defeated him utterly, withering whatever shred of dignity he’d hoped to convey, even to himself.
Ms. Nuñez began to lecture. At first Paul took fastidious notes—not out of any scholarly impulse, but in an effort to appear thoroughly engrossed in the lesson and therefore oblivious to the words being traded behind his back. Baptiste wasn’t in this class, and Paul was grateful. He didn’t know whether Baptiste had heard any of this particular breed of comments, which had started up and multiplied over the past several weeks, the odd “faggot” or “homo” tossed with appalling casualness his way. He’d become used to other epithets, digs at his weight or his general unpopularity, but the references to sexual orientation were new. They made the earlier insults seem almost benign in comparison, and Paul worried about the effect they might have on his and Baptiste’s friendship, should Baptiste become aware of them.
On two occasions during their friendship Paul had heard a racist slur directed at Baptiste. “Jesus Christ, another shitskin.” An older boy from another school had said it at a track meet when the Nyack team had filed into their locker room. It had taken Paul a moment to figure out that the comment was directed specifically at Baptiste and that it referred to his color.The kid, a towering specimen of advanced puberty, had muttered it in a low voice, with apparently sincere revulsion: more damaging than if it had been delivered with spiteful glee.
The other time it had been a pair of quite small elementary scho
ol girls, cute in their dresses and patterned socks, sitting on the wall in front of the post office, next to a baby stroller, swinging their legs and singing with impunity, “Happy birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a Haitian and you smell like one, too.” Both times Paul’s stomach had turned, and he’d wondered sweatily whether or not to comment. Both times he’d ultimately deferred to Baptiste’s own silence, interpreting it as Baptiste’s wish for how he, too, would respond. Yet afterward, both times, he’d been haunted by the worry that Baptiste had not wanted his silence, that there might in fact be nothing dignified in it.
On Friday the only periods the friends had together were art and lunch. Lunch was next. Paul stole a glance at the clock. All the school’s clocks were an hour off, no one having yet adjusted them for daylight saving time. Its long hand juddered forward one audible notch. Twenty-six minutes left in the period. He smelled, or imagined he could, lunch: The school tuna (pinker, wetter, sweeter than at home), the school lettuce (iceberg, shredded noodle-thin), the school fries (skinny, hard, greasy). The sandwich rolls (dry, almost scratchy). The school disinfectant (a kind of inorganic citrus, acrid yet not altogether unpleasant), which provided the olfactory backdrop for every lunch period and which, alone, could stimulate Paul’s appetite.
His stomach rumbled and he scuffed his shoes on the floor in an effort to mask the sounds. There was the pain of being ridiculed, which was the pain of knowing yourself to be despised for an isolated moment, and there was the pain of anticipating ridicule, which was the pain of knowing yourself to be the object of ongoing contempt.
He swallowed, and ground his teeth against tears, the effort to contain which made his head ache. He needed something beyond this room on which to focus, something to transport him from this place. Jess. Two Jesses, superimposed: the starry teenager he remembered from that long-ago summer at Cabruda Lake, and the plainer, more ambiguous figure she cut now. So that in his head he saw her simultaneously long-haired and shorn, slender and plump, quick and languid, teasing and decorous. She at once wore braces on her teeth and none; viewed the world unmediated and through lenses. Which was the true Jess, which the false? It felt that way, as though one version was a guise and the other genuine. Behind one lay the promise of his highest hopes for himself; behind the other, the explicit dashing of those hopes.
The Grief of Others Page 15
