The Orchard

by David Hopen

  “What does that mean?” I asked this too abruptly, only to curse myself for the misery in my voice.

  She leaned over the passenger seat. I made an effort to focus only on one portion of her face; taking in her entire image suddenly proved overwhelming. I examined her forehead, her clear skin, save for a single hint of irritation beneath the surface of her right temple, her thin, nearly imperceptible veins. “We need terms.”

  “Right,” I said, “okay.”

  She avoided my gaze. “We should keep things concealed, at least until I feel like I’ve had enough time.”

  “All right. I won’t tell anyone.” A long, strained pause. “But what do you need time for?”

  “To heal.” She said so immediately, much to my surprise.

  I restrained myself from pressing further. I was desperate for her, entirely impaled, as Evan had once warned. I was willing, sitting in the car, red-eyed, sprinklers erupting on her lawn, palm trees moving in the wind, my desire for Sophia approximating something like delirium, to accept waiting, to be used, to trade future hurt for present happiness.

  We looked at each other for a few moments.

  “Good night, then, sweet prince.” She kissed me lightly and headed inside her house.

  * * *

  ICE-CREAM DATES, MINIATURE GOLF OUTINGS (she beat me soundly), trips to the beach, ice skating (I fell too often, spent most of the time clutching her arm), a visit to the Vizcaya Gardens: carefree, joyous nights away from schoolwork, parents, friends. It’d been several bright, windswept weeks, her warm hand in mine, her lips on mine, her breath on my neck, intense euphoria, intense restlessness, the feeling of being propelled through several days at a time. Still, I couldn’t help but agonize over what drew her to me, couldn’t help but wonder when she’d come to her senses. I was different from the others, I reminded myself. I was naïve, I was sincere, I was thoughtful, I was untainted. This last part had to be it: above all else, I was not yet broken.

  Even harder than it was to accept that she liked me was accepting that I could have what I wanted most, that I could become, overnight, unequivocally happy. Believing so involved a certain logical absurdity, not unlike Moore’s: certainly I could know I was dating Sophia Winter without believing it. It would be only a matter of time, I was convinced, before things detonated, and yet I was content to pay any price if it meant hanging on to her for however long I could.

  * * *

  WE MET RABBI BLOOM THREE times each week. After Lucretius, we darted from creationism to political theology, exploring the relationship between Modern Orthodoxy and normative ethics. We devoured readings, wrote brief papers, competed to stand out. Evan, to our collective disbelief, emerged as our group’s most serious student, despite his reputation in our real classes. He never missed an assignment, he always had a notebook to record epiphanies at a breakneck pace and he had a habit of lingering, after the rest of us had left, to engage Rabbi Bloom in heated discussions.

  “Why wear tefillin?” Rabbi Bloom asked in our most recent session. “What’s meaningful about tefillin?”

  “It’s obvious,” Oliver said, sipping tea, “we find the dyed hide of a cow super beautiful.”

  “Because God delivered us from enslavement,” Amir said, rolling his eyes, “and we value daily reminders of the life from which we came.”

  “There’s the organ idea,” Noah added, “the one they preach in middle school, right before your bar mitzvah: the arm and the head are the two ways we serve God.”

  “Yeah, but personally I think we serve God with a third organ,” Oliver said, “at least the righteous do, isn’t that right, Rabbi Bloom? A little healthy dose of pru urvu?”

  Rabbi Bloom listened to us echo everything we’d been taught: we need constant reminders of God’s sovereignty, we savor beautifying the mitzvah, we take solace in accepting that there are commandments we are not permitted to understand. Then, in his quiet, severe way, he lectured on Kierkegaard’s belief that unfettered freedom is true enslavement, that liberty comes at the price of binding ourselves voluntarily, that tefillin leaves marks on our arms to remind us we’ve been changed in a way that is more than skin-deep. I miss these rapturous sessions greatly, spots of time to which I still turn regularly. Even nowadays, I’ll wake from a distant dream and, in that delightful corridor between consciousness and reverie, I’ll hear his voice, envision the fire in his eyes as he went on about Hume and Kant and all the others in whom I may never again believe.

  December

  Do the gods light this fire in our hearts

  Or does each man’s mad desire become his god?

  —Virgil, Aeneid

  The SAT came back on a Saturday, which meant I had to endure an entire Shabbat of anxious waiting. I passed time reading and, later, walking the streets, hoping to chance upon Sophia. I considered stopping by her house, so close was I to jumping out of my skin, though came quickly to my senses and decided instead to try Noah.

  “Sup, bud?” Noah said, clapping my back as he answered the front door. “Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?”

  “I feel like I’m waiting to see a ghost,” I said, following him down the hall.

  “Then you might not like what’s going on in the living room,” Noah said.

  “What do you mean?”

  We stopped in his kitchen so that Noah could grab me a Heineken, and then he steered me into the living room, toward the others. “We’re checking scores.”

  “Look who it is,” Oliver said, iPhone in hand. Evan, beside him, snorted to himself when he saw me. “We were just revealing Noah’s score to the kehillah.”

  I sat on the couch, put the Heineken on the floor. Amir examined my face, as if probing for evidence of guilt. “You haven’t looked, right?” he asked me.

  I blinked awkwardly. I was still unaccustomed to having people around me violate Shabbat with such impunity. Watching Amir await my answer, I thought of how, in the fifth grade, Mordechai admitted he had turned his Walkman on and off one Friday night. It was electrifying, he insisted, urging me to try it. “Even if you don’t like it, even if you never want to do it again,” he reasoned, “you’ll always know you rebelled once.” I requested a week of deliberation, but when Friday night arrived I refrained, suddenly picturing Mordechai as the snake presenting fruit to Eve. Why he’d entrusted me with his secret was evident in my reaction: I’d been shocked but not horrified. Unlike Shimon and the others, I was capable of entertaining sin. For weeks afterward, I imagined myself as Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, flirting too closely with betraying God. “It’s Shabbat,” I said.

  “I assume that’s a no, to be clear,” Amir said.

  “It’s a no.”

  “Well, if it makes any difference to a Beis Din,” Noah said, throwing himself down beside me, “it wasn’t technically my sin. Oliver went online for me.”

  I sipped tensely from my beer. “Yeah, not sure it works like that.”

  Noah laughed with some degree of guilt. “You don’t think our sins are transferable? Like currency?”

  “By the way, in my defense,” Oliver said, opening a Budweiser, “I didn’t check my own score. So, I’m pretty sure that means the sin remains Noah’s. Eden, need me to check yours? I won’t charge for the service.”

  “Nah, I’ll pass, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Amir inched forward on the couch. “Oliver, you seriously didn’t check your score?”

  Oliver raised his drink. “Heard that right.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Does it matter what it says?”

  “Uh, yeah. It matters a ton.”

  “For you,” Oliver said, taking a swig. “Not for me, thankfully.”

  “What a privilege,” Amir muttered.

  Oliver shrugged. “To be so rich? Yeah, can’t complain.”

  “No. To be so simpleminded.” Amir turned back to Noah. “So did you get the score you needed for recruitment?”

  “Yes, sir,” Noah sai
d. “The coach will be happy.”

  “Awesome. Congrats. What about you, Evan?”

  Evan, silent until now, was lying on the other side of the couch, the Wall Street Journal over his face. “What was that, Amir?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “What you’re asking is if you beat me,” he said lazily from behind the paper. “And I’m not in the mood to play that game.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” Amir grabbed for an old copy of Sports Illustrated in an effort to appear nonchalant. “I’m just being, you know, polite.”

  “Wait,” I said, unable to stop myself, “Amir, you checked?” Until now, I’d been grateful to rely on Amir holding out against our friends’ routine trespassing of Halacha—failures to daven, violations of Shabbat, a pervasive indifference to keeping kosher. When aligned with Amir, I defended ancient customs with pride. Hearing he had checked made me feel suddenly alone.

  Oliver laughed. “Judgmental much, Eden?”

  Amir, shamefaced, began tearing through a LeBron James interview.

  “But yeah, I checked for him, too,” Oliver said, looking pleased. “Trust me, I tried stopping him, but the man simply couldn’t wait. Such tyvah! I’m sure God understands. We get a few hall passes in our youth, don’t we?”

  “Leave the dude alone,” Noah said. “Everyone has a right to make a personal decision. Anyway, Amir did pretty damn well. Big surprise.”

  “Yeah,” I said, angry at myself for having such a difficult time suppressing my disappointment in Amir. “I bet.”

  Oliver leaped from the couch and headed to the kitchen. “I’d guess Evan still did better, though.”

  “Couldn’t have done too much better,” Noah said.

  We exchanged looks, waiting for Amir to snap. “Screw it,” Amir said when he finally did, tossing aside the magazine. “Let’s hear it.”

  Evan didn’t lower his paper. “We don’t need to compare, Amir.”

  “Bullshit. You already know mine. Oliver probably told you.”

  “Nope. He didn’t.”

  “Yeah, my bad,” Oliver called from the kitchen. I heard him rifling through drawers, looking for a bottle opener. “He got a 1560.”

  Amir reddened. “Shut the hell up, Oliver!”

  “That’s very impressive.” Evan dropped the paper to the floor, stood, stretched lazily. “Noah, please tell me Cynthia has leftovers for us.”

  “Come on, Ev,” Noah said, “you’re leaving the poor dude in suspense. Just look at him.”

  Evan walked toward the kitchen, pausing at the doorway. “You really need to know?”

  Amir didn’t answer.

  “I beat you.”

  Now it was Amir visibly failing to stifle his reaction. He tried, rather unnaturally, jutting his jaw. This made things worse. “By how much?”

  “Relax,” Evan said. “It’s enough.”

  “I want to know by how much.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Was it by ten?” Amir scratched at his scalp. He looked prepared to rip hair from his head. “By twenty?”

  Evan still said nothing.

  “Thirty?”

  “Amir,” Evan said, “none of this matters, I promise.”

  Amir gave an exacting, fake laugh. “You’re going to tell me you got a perf—”

  Evan left the room.

  * * *

  I CHECKED THE MOMENT MY father finished havdalah. Math was as expected—fine, perfectly unremarkable—though I did rather well on verbal, even better than anticipated. I told Sophia my scores the next afternoon. It was my first time visiting her house; she’d invited me to keep her company as she tended to her brother, since her parents were in St. Augustine, visiting Castillo de San Marcos. Her room was precisely how I imagined: whitewashed, dozens of recital plaques, her desk organized with schoolwork and a large calendar into which she inputted all elements of her day, her childhood upright piano against the wall. When I admitted my scores, after some pressing on her part, she kissed me gently, that faint thrill returning to my chest, only to pull away for her computer. “Forget Ballinger’s list,” she decided, typing furiously, overcome with the prospect of revising my fortune. “Where do you actually want to go?”

  I put my fingers to my lips. I could still feel the taste of her lips. “But my math sucks.”

  “It doesn’t suck, per se.”

  “Yeah? You’d be happy with that score?”

  She twirled a finger through her hair. “No, I’d be inconsolable. But I’m a different story. For you it might not matter. We’re selling you on English, right? On being delightfully right-brained.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been called anything but half-brained.”

  She rolled over on her bed, putting her head against my ribs. “Provide names. Now.”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “You don’t have a single thought on where you want to spend the next four years of your life?”

  Light-pink pillowcases. An endless row of perfumes. An old picture of Sophia at a piano bench. She was only nine and already had a haunting superiority radiating from somewhere behind her eyes. “Columbia,” I blurted.

  “Columbia?”

  Iron gates. Low plaza. Alma Mater’s outstretched arms, an owl beneath her robes. Hushed memories from my mother. The purported epicenter of the world. “Yeah.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Interesting?” I said. “As in, yikes, Ari, you’re clinically insane?”

  “As in, wow, I’m admittedly somewhat floored by this secret ambition, but what a lovely idea.”

  I had a fistful of her sheets. “You don’t actually think that.”

  “No, I do.”

  “Well, I mentioned it to Bearman.”

  “And?”

  “He laughed in my face. Literally. A belly-deep laugh.”

  She rolled her eyes, continued to comb through admission statistics. “What does that moron know?”

  “A lot, I’d imagine.”

  “You’re above their average verbal score,” she said officiously. “Which makes you viable.” Triumphantly, she shut her laptop and placed her head on my lap. “But Ari?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You wanted out of New York?”

  “I wanted out of Brooklyn. Columbia had as much to do with the New York I knew as London did. Columbia would be an alternate universe for me.”

  “You’ve visited?”

  “Once. When I was really little and learning to read, my mom took me to look at the library. She did a lot of things like that. She went there, you know, for a bit. To Barnard.”

  “Why a bit?”

  “Well, she became frum.”

  “You can be frum there.”

  “Highly frum, I mean. Brooklyn frum. My father frum.”

  She fingered one of her pillows, peeked up from my lap. “So you’re telling me then that this has absolutely nothing to do with me.”

  My right hand was in her hair. “What does that mean?”

  “In case I go to Juilliard.”

  I shrugged.

  She sat up, held her socked feet in her hands. “I really don’t think you should be doing this for the wrong reason. It’s a big life decision.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said curtly. My hands moved away from her.

  She nodded. “Columbia it is.”

  * * *

  WITH SOPHIA’S ASSISTANCE I BEGAN the Early Decision application. She pushed me through a headache-inducing Proust Questionnaire—Describe your favorite heroes in fiction; share your take on happiness—and offered advice about the personal essay, on which she herself had been hard at work for several months.

  “I can’t believe you started in August,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

  “I didn’t start in August.”

  “Oh. Okay, you’re slightly more human, then.”

  “This is Kol Neshama, Ari. I started last year.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Don’t look
so shocked. Everyone did.”

  “Well, what’re you writing about? I’ll take notes.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the writer?”

  I moved closer to her, put my lips to her neck. She lifted her chin, almost reflexively. Seeing her body move in response to mine made me feel a weird sort of strength, one that was exciting but far-off, unrelated to who I actually was. “I want to know the story Sophia Winter told.”

  “Sorry, kid. It’s a secret.”

  “I thought we liked sharing secrets.”

  She squeezed my hand, moved away slightly. “It’s a little too personal,” she said, and I didn’t press further.

  * * *

  “ARI EDEN,” MRS. BALLINGER SAID, surprised to find me unannounced at her doorway. “Been a while, hasn’t it? How might I help you?”

  I approached, handed her bulky forms. “Any chance you have a second to sign some application stuff?”

  She flipped through the documents, eventually removing her glasses and rubbing down her eyes. “Have a seat.”

  I sat.

  “So.” She leaned backward in her chair. “This is a joke to you?”

  I raised my brows. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “Mr. Eden, the way this works—the way I’ve built this to work—is no joke.”

  “Respectfully, Mrs. Ballinger,” I said, attempting to maintain leveled deference, “I just figured I’d apply.”

  “You figured? Despite the fact that I made your stratosphere crystal clear?”

  “You did. But then I took the SAT.”

  She fell silent, excavating my folder from her records. “Well, this is the very first time I’m seeing this,” she admitted, surveying my scores, clicking her tongue. “And I can’t say I’m totally unimpressed.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Actually, I can’t deny I’m pretty shocked.”

  “Yeah, I was, too. Imagine what Bearman will say.”

  She sighed. “Still. I’m afraid my reservations remain.”

  “Look, I know my math is comparatively weak, but it’s still pretty good and—”

  She pushed my forms across the desk. “I won’t sign these, Ari.”

  I felt my intestines tightening unpleasantly. “You won’t?”