The Orchard

by David Hopen

  “No, I’m not drinking,” I said meekly, as Oliver gestured at the shot designated for me. “I’m still groggy—”

  “You’re absolutely drinking.” Evan pushed a glass in front of me. “On three. One, two—”

  We threw them back. I closed my eyes, tried not to choke, grabbed a handful of Pringles to mitigate the burning. There were more shots, each precipitated by bawdy toasts. I stopped refusing. The kitchen, soon enough, became slightly slanted.

  “I’m starving. Have any grub to share with dear drunken friends?” Oliver found his way into my refrigerator, removing options that caught his eye. Schnitzel. Potato kugel. Mayonnaise.

  Noah descended on the refrigerator, too, helping himself to a sizable stack of leftovers. “Hear that sound, Drew?”

  Amir and Evan were arguing loudly at the table. Something about re-enfranchising felons, I think, or maybe Second Amendment rights. I wasn’t paying attention. My head wasn’t spinning exactly but had acquired alcoholic warmth.

  Noah stuck his head out of the refrigerator. “Drew?”

  “Did I hear what?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  “Someone’s at the door,” he said, chin stained with mustard.

  Oliver walked over to the table, poured himself another shot.

  I grabbed his shoulder. “You said no one else was coming.”

  Oliver frowned. “I said that? Doesn’t sound like something I’d say.”

  “Oliver.”

  The knocks again. Oliver wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and gave a large, drunken grin. “I do apologize.”

  Cursing, I hastened from my kitchen, slapping my cheeks to sober myself. I peeked, carefully, through the peephole. At the door, to my disbelief, were Rebecca, Remi and Sophia. I swallowed hard.

  “We bear gifts,” Remi announced. She handed over two bottles of Smirnoff and sidestepped around me, following the voices into the kitchen.

  Rebecca studied my face, cringed. “You didn’t know we were coming, did you?” she asked. “Oh, God. Don’t kill me, Ari. Noah told us to come.”

  Noah emerged from the kitchen, red-cheeked, grinning stupidly. “That’s what Oliver claimed you told him?”

  “Look at you. Already drunk?” Rebecca delivered a peck to my cheek and a light slap to Noah’s. “Too much to ask for you to wait?”

  Sophia entered last. She allowed Noah and Rebecca to disappear before pulling me aside. Our bodies were inches apart. I tried not to think about this. “He isn’t here, is he?”

  “Who?”

  She glanced down the hall. “Evan.”

  Her pointedness surprised me, but the impact was dulled by the brunt of the shots. I nodded.

  “I don’t want to see him,” she said.

  My heart soared. I could count her eyelashes. “You don’t?”

  “We can leave.” She lowered her voice again. “Clearly this was a hoax, I can steer them out—”

  Her whispering appeared to complicate my cognitive abilities. I shook my head. “Don’t worry, I don’t want to see him, either,” I said. “Stay a while with me, it’ll be fine.” She pursed her lips in thought but eventually allowed me to lead her to the kitchen, where Oliver continued pouring, demanding that the girls catch up. Sophia gave Amir a hug. She and Evan nodded.

  “To our friend, alcohol,” Oliver announced. We raised our shots. “Cause of, antidote for, all our many problems.”

  We moved to the living room and, with the exception of Sophia, who sought refuge on the couch, took turns ripping the bottle. Oliver and Noah proposed toasts—to Sophia’s presidency, to winning on Saturday night, to the ghost of Oliver’s and Remi’s relationship, to burning bushes and sunrise minyanim and what Noah termed “weird-ass rebellions.” My living room began whirling at a frightening speed. I excused myself for the restroom, where I bowed before the toilet, contemplating the relief of vomiting. I came out, drifted into my room and found Remi on the floor, knees against her chest. “Remi?”

  She looked up mournfully.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Just fine.” She tried standing, fell back to the floor. “This your room?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Kind of sparse.”

  “Decorated it myself, thanks.”

  She held a picture of my parents and me, taken at my elementary school graduation, which she found beside my bed. My parents had their arms around me. I stared blankly into the camera, clutching a blue siddur to my chest. “You’re not smiling.”

  “Yeah, I tend to forget to do that.”

  “You don’t smile much in general,” she said.

  “Listen, I’m working on it.”

  “You should do it more.”

  “Duly noted, thanks for the tip.” I rocked slightly on the balls of my feet. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Don’t you think you have a reason to smile?”

  “Whoa,” I said, “guess we’re getting personal.”

  She frowned. “You flirting with me?”

  “No, I—well, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

  “I wouldn’t go for you,” she said, shrugging.

  “Yeah, that’s actually perfectly okay with me, Remi.”

  “You could probably use some more self-confidence.”

  “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “I mean, you have nice teeth, if nothing else.” She threw the picture at my bed before I could stop her. I tried intercepting it, but to my relief it landed on my pillows. “So, what do you think Evan’s deal is?”

  I kicked at a stack of books on my floor. “Why do people keep bringing him up?”

  “Who else?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “Never mind that.”

  “Well.” She threw her head back, then returned it to an upright position. “I was looking for him.”

  “In here?”

  “I guess. I don’t know, I’m pretty drunk, to be honest.”

  “He’s probably in the living room, where every other person is.” I offered my hand, eager to remove her from my room. “Let me take you.”

  She held on to me but didn’t budge from the floor. “Ari.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve spoken before?”

  “You and Evan? I’d certainly say so.”

  “No. Me and you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Uh, minimally would probably be a generous answer.”

  She went on holding my hand. “You don’t want to be friends?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Are you extremely shy or extremely stuck-up?”

  “You just said I needed more self-confidence.”

  “Yeah, socially. But sometimes it feels like you’re shut off. Like, I don’t know, you think you’re smarter than other people. Or you’re above everything else or just not interested.”

  “You think I’m like that?”

  “I guess what I mean is I don’t know if you’re a little bit cold and emotionless.”

  “This is—fairly unexpected criticism.” I was taken aback that Remi had spent enough time contemplating my existence to actually formulate an opinion of me, but even more so that I could be perceived as anything other than introverted, out-of-place, insecure. How strange, I thought, feeling the weight of the alcohol again, for external life to exist in diametrical opposition to the life in your head.

  “I give good drunken therapy. So we should speak more, shouldn’t we?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Start now, open up. You like Sophia.”

  I was far too dizzy to blush. “I might.”

  “Want to know a secret?”

  “That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me one.”

  “But it’s about Sophia,” Remi said in a high, drunken voice. “I think she thinks you’re cute. Kind of handsome, actually.”

  This was enough to throw me, even in my current state. “She said that to you?”

  “But you think she’s beautiful.” She laughed, pulled her hand away. “Everyone
thinks she is.”

  “She is beautiful.”

  She looked up at me, dazed eyes sharpening, a finger tracing her retroussé nose. “But do you think there’s something else about her?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Her breathing slowed. “I do. I think she’s sad. I don’t know why, but she is.” She paused. “It’s why she won’t drink much, I think. Like, for a while she didn’t drink anything at all. So she won’t lose control, maybe.” Remi blinked heavily, licked her lips. “Okay, turns out I don’t feel too well,” she decided, her head falling back to her shoulders. Quickly, I grabbed the wastebasket from under my desk and looked away as she was sick. “Hold my hair,” she commanded, midway through her retching.

  I obliged, kneeling beside her. When she felt better she had me lead her back into the living room, though only after making me swear not to tell anyone what I’d seen. Game of Thrones was on mute. A dragon was annihilating several hundred people but nobody was watching. Evan held the Kierkegaard. “Where’d you get this?” He had it opened to the front cover, where a faded L.B. was traced.

  Admitting I’d been studying with Rabbi Bloom felt, in my current state, inexplicably self-defeating, akin to surrendering a secret on which I might, one day, desperately rely. “Nowhere.”

  “Right. Well, just so you know, I was given this once, too.” He closed the book, returned it to the couch. “Tell him not to forget that loss is a more important step for the self than God.”

  It became difficult to focus my eyes. Noah and Rebecca slipped into my backyard. Evan and Remi grabbed one of the bottles and, as I’d later discover, locked themselves in my parents’ bathroom. Oliver and Amir raided my food cabinet, guzzling jellybeans. I stood around, dimly, wondering how it’d come to pass that I occupied a new home in which intoxicated strangers ran wild.

  “Hamlet?” Sophia was snapping her fingers in the airspace above my head. “You all right?”

  I closed my eyes, steadying my vision. I piled jellybeans into my mouth. Pale blues, bright oranges. “Don’t I look good?”

  “You look green.”

  I scattered jellybeans to the floor. “I should really stop eating these.”

  She looked me over once more. I felt an irrational urge to explain that I’d presented an inaccurate version of myself. This is not, in fact, who I am, I wanted to tell her. I am someone else entirely. I do not know what has happened to me. I do not quite grasp where I’ve gone. “You look almost as bad as you did at Oliver’s house.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “Drunk, that is.”

  “I respectfully disagree.”

  “What do I look like drunk?”

  “Sad. Sloppy.”

  Nausea boiled in my stomach. “I didn’t want them here,” I said quietly.

  “I know.”

  I leaned toward her. “I’m happy you’re here.”

  “Absolutely, and that’s our cue to get you to bed.”

  “No,” I objected incoherently. “Actually, what I want is—”

  I was on all fours, heaving a pool of colors. Evan was laughing, Oliver recording a video on his iPhone, my cheeks glued to the wet tile floor. Remi held my hand in solidarity, and then I was in bed, my ceiling spinning into the dark, Sophia’s voice fading in and out.

  * * *

  IT WAS NEARLY TWO IN the afternoon when I woke, sunlight streaming through my window and hurting my eyes. I was lying over untouched sheets, half dressed, a fierce headache coming on, an awful stench coming from the wastebasket. I washed my face, changed and made my way into the kitchen where, to my astonishment, Sophia sat drinking coffee and reading The Sickness unto Death. “Really dull stuff,” she said without glancing up. “Thanks for leaving me all morning with such shoddy reading material.”

  I sat beside her, trying to figure out what she was still doing in my house. My heart pulsed with possibility. Had she slipped in this morning to check on me? Had she never—

  “I slept in the living room, for the record,” she said, seeing my mind racing. “With Remi.”

  “Remi’s here?”

  I peeked into the living room. Sure enough, Remi was splayed out on the couch, blond hair blanketing her face.

  “She was even worse than you,” Sophia said. “So it was either letting her hibernate here or bringing her to Noah’s.”

  “I was that—rough?”

  “You did regurgitate an ungodly number of jellybeans.”

  “Yikes.”

  “And I was forced to undress you. Had no choice. You know, to get you to sleep.”

  I blinked frenziedly, turning outrageous shades of red.

  “Relax. I kept you decent the whole time.”

  I looked around the kitchen. I had a hazy memory of Oliver sketching his name in ketchup on the table, but now it was spot-free, the bottles and general mess all gone. “Did you clean this all up?”

  “What choice did you leave me? It was utterly appalling in here.”

  “Thank you,” I said hoarsely.

  “You owe me.” She stood, started making coffee. “You should’ve seen this disaster. I found an avocado in the bathroom sink.”

  “An avocado?”

  “I’d double-check the house before your parents come home, if I were you. Make sure vegetables aren’t floating where they don’t belong.” She handed me coffee. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like an enormous idiot,” I said.

  “I believe I’ve emphasized this previously, but you can’t let them overpower you like that.”

  I sipped too quickly, scorching my tongue. “My parents are going to kill me.”

  “You’ll survive because they won’t find out. I cleaned too well.” She sat beside me. “Where are those jet-setting parents of yours, anyway?”

  “They’ve jetted all the way back to Brooklyn.”

  “How exotic.”

  “It’s my cousin’s bar mitzvah.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “Told them I had too much work.” I took another sip, the pounding in my head lessening slightly. “Truth is I didn’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t go back right now.”

  “Do you hate it here, too?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Phone the local media,” announced a cool voice behind us. “I just woke up in Ari Eden’s house.” Remi, whimpering, massaging her forehead, strolled in. “I need strong coffee, Soph. Generously tinged with vodka. Eden, not a word from you about any of this, ever, or I’ll send videos from last night to every rabbi in Brooklyn.” She took a mug from Sophia and, ignoring me, sat down, sipping slowly.

  We sat awhile, drinking in silence. I stole glances at the curve of Sophia’s fingers, at the corners of her mouth as she returned to reading. Eventually, Remi felt well enough to leave. I thanked Sophia again, walked them out and then returned to my room, collapsing onto my bed.

  November

  Since nor th’ exterior nor the inward man

  Resembles that it was

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet

  I spent the early-morning hours before the SAT tossing in bed, trying to surrender to sleep. I stared at the red numbers of my digital clock, my room stuffy, listening to the whirling of my fan, acutely aware of time passing. Around four-thirty I nodded off into an unsatisfying, dreamless trance.

  At six-thirty I gave up. I davened quickly—please help me, God, I whispered throughout Shemoneh Esrei—took a hot shower, attempted push-ups to get my blood pumping. I found my mother in the kitchen, scrambling eggs. While I ate, my mother quizzed me on vocabulary words—Junoesque (“an imposingly tall woman”), perambulate (“the ability to walk”), cicerone (“a guide for sightseers”)—until I decided the exercise was pointless. My father was already at early minyan and cared little that I was taking the test, but my mother continued to hover, insisting I was prepared, refusing to listen to my objections. I said goodbye and met Noah in the driveway.

  We arrived at school to find the majo
rity of our grade loitering nervously near the model temple. Donny was asking Amir how to solve some geometrical equation. Noah was distracting Rebecca and Remi by suggesting racy words that might appear on the test. (“Lubricious, anyone? Or how about: Good Lord, aren’t Amir’s rugged looks simply titillating?”) Oliver disappeared to hit a joint. Davis was hunched over on a bench, plugging something into his calculator at a rapid clip, glancing about guiltily. Evan was silent, inspecting the tips of his pencils.

  Eventually, Dr. Flowers waddled outside, coughing, reeking of smoke. (“Unfortunately for all parties involved, I’m in no economic position to forgo proctoring.”) She led us into a double classroom on the first floor, arranging our seating so that there was an empty desk between every seat. She placed me on the right side of the room. “Hope this goes better for you than our last quiz, Eden,” she said, which was a fairly distressing comment, considering she hadn’t yet returned that examination.

  When the clock struck eight she began pacing gravely from desk to desk, glaring at anyone with whom she made eye contact. “All right. Welcome to the test that realistically determines your earning potential. It certainly did mine. For the next four hours, you will be tested on your reading, problem-solving and writing skills. This test is a national, accredited . . .” She read on in her rasping voice, pausing twice for violent coughing bouts. Whenever she turned to face the opposite side of the room, I noticed, Amir stole glances at his supposedly sealed packet. “Well,” she concluded, “I guess I wish you luck. You may begin.”

  The opening section was the essay:

  Literature often correlates suffering with character development. Assignment: Can sorrow and growth be linked in everyday life? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Be certain to support your stance by utilizing logic and examples derived from your personal experiences, literary awareness and academic studies.

  I read the prompt twice. The close of “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” came to mind: For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent. I thought about my conversations with Evan, about how being incomplete somehow allows certain people to long for transcendence, to escape present solitude and sadness by absorbing themselves in something patently extra-human. “We modernists,” I began writing, conscious of the way my mind was surrendering itself to some sort of automatic trance state, “live without glory, without adventure and, largely speaking, without much in the way of formal meaning. How is it, then, that we achieve real heights? We tear apart some essential aspect of ourselves.” I continued on in this way, wondering all the while whether I actually believed what I was writing. Was it true, in my experience, that “gradations of suffering result in a kind of moral allure”? In Evan’s case, perhaps it was: his wound, whatever it was precisely, did prove somewhat cathartic, insofar as it lent him an aura of tragic grandeur. Indeed, wasn’t Evan’s loss integral to the way we looked up to him? No one vocalized this, but in my eyes it was true: his unhappiness, the sheer boldness of it, the singularity and marvel of it, gave him power over us. In my own case, however, I knew my social and religious deficiencies were just that, not sources of dignity.