“Is this true, Brandon?” said Mom.
No answer.
“Brandon?” said Dad.
A little grunt, more yes than no.
Ruby was transfixed. This sounded like
Ferris Bueller
, one of her favorite movies, but happening for real. Ferris: her own brother! She had a million questions, one of which was:
Are you going to take that bumper sticker off before you sell the car? If you do, I want it.
“. . . reimburse half,” Dad was saying.
“I’ll accept your money,” said Dewey’s mom, “but it’s not why I came. I wanted to inform you as to the character of your son, in case you didn’t know already.”
“I understand your feelings, Mrs. Brickham,” Mom said, “but I think that’s a little harsh.”
“If you choose to defend his actions, so be it,” said Dewey’s mom. A chair scraped on the kitchen floor, then another.
“Here’s a check,” said Dad.
Yes!
He was a great dad.
Footsteps came toward the hall. Ruby lit out for the entertainment center. She found Zippy gnawing on a pool cue and little puddles of something here and there.
D
ewey’s mom left, Brandon got up.
“Where do you think you’re going?” said Scott.
“Taking a fucking piss,” Brandon said, or shouted. In the bathroom off the front hall, with those lacy towels that didn’t absorb water, Brandon finally had time to think, but his only thought was,
Jesus Christ. You can’t do the simplest goddamn thing.
His parents were assholes, Dewey’s mom was an even bigger asshole, the tow truck driver was an asshole, those assholes at the car pound were assholes.
Brandon left the bathroom. They were waiting on the other side of the door.
“I can’t even take a piss around here.”
“You realize the discussion about the prep course is over,” Linda said.
“You’re taking it,” Scott said.
Brandon felt much too hot. His clothes were uncomfortable. A zit was about to erupt on the tip of his nose. He could feel its push, like a goddamn volcano.
“Do whatever you want,” he said, went past them, not really pushing, up to his room, slammed the door, lay on his bed. The message light on his phone was blinking. He hit the button.
Dewey. “This is so fucked, man.” Unka Death was in the background. “How does that bicycle messenger job sound?”
Real good.
Fuck you good as new all we do then it’s through.
L
inda checked the time, realized the SAT prep offices might still be open for night sessions. She called Kaplan, then Princeton Review, learned there wasn’t an opening in any of their central Connecticut courses until the next cycle, two months away.
“I can’t believe this,” she said.
Scott opened one of the flash card boxes. “Maybe we could do it ourselves.”
“Do what?”
“Teach him.” Scott checked the card. “What does
lachrymose
mean?”
“Weepy.”
He turned the card over, read the definition. “Hey, you’re right.” He tried another.
“Perfidious.”
“Traitorous.”
Scott looked on the back. “Wow. The English major.” He took another card.
“Miscreant.”
“Miscreant,” Linda said. “That’s a tough one. Liar, maybe?”
Scott checked the answer, shook his head. “Villain.”
An English major,
Linda thought,
but from UConn.
Didn’t make any sense at all, she knew that right away, but it was one of those thoughts that coming out of nowhere had the ring of truth.
“It won’t work,” Linda said, “us teaching him. He won’t cooperate. And we’re not teachers.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll have to find someone, a professional, just till we can get him into one of the courses.”
Scott opened the yellow pages. “What should I look under?”
“Tutor.”
“Lots of them in here,” Scott said. “ ‘One-on-one instruction in your own home, affordable hourly rates.’ ”
“We need to do some research first. I’ll talk to people in the morning,” Linda said. “Make some calls.”
“Me too,” said Scott.
She glanced at him, about to say,
I’ll take care of it,
but he wasn’t looking. Instead he was cracking open a fortune cookie, reading the message. He passed it to her.
Happiness is all around.
Scott ate the cookie;
crunch crunch
and it was gone.
5
J
ulian’s phone rang. He was watching a huge flock of starlings, thousands of them, flying nervously back and forth between two groves of bare-limbed trees in the distance; at the same time, he was enjoying the first drag from his first cigarette of the day. Smoking was so pleasant, a perfect harmonizing of the physical and mental, even spiritual. But Julian wasn’t stupid, understood the health risk, had even at one time encouraged the growth of nicotine-inspired tumors along the spines of white mice in a biology lab, and therefore limited himself to three Dunhill Internationals a day: on awakening, after dinner, and a third whenever he wanted it, usually when he was feeling especially good, but sometimes the exact opposite.
Julian half sucked a smoke ball over his tongue, letting the smoke absorb his moisture, held it, still a ball, at the back of his mouth, breathed in fully, then let the smoke lazily find its curling way out through his nose and mouth. Tantric smoking. Through the blue-tinged plume of his own making, he saw the starlings rise as one from the tree crowns of the westernmost grove, wheel toward the east, all banking at the identical angle, about forty-five degrees. In their uniformity of movement and solid black coloring was something undeniably fascistic. That thought was pleasant too, intimately associated with the smoke in a way hard to define, although Julian had no doubt he could make the connection crystal clear, given time. Already he knew it had something to do with the utter lack of vulgarity in nature.
The phone, still ringing, or ringing again. Julian picked it up. A woman. Paulette, Pauline, Paula, something.
“Settling in yet?” she said.
Ah, yes, the woman from the front desk at the office. He recalled two shallow horizontal lines, not deep—not deep yet—at the base of her neck and a cheap ornament on a chain, gold-plated head of some bland breed of dog; not much else.
Julian glanced around his Spartan quarters. “Yes, thank you.” He was nothing if not polite.
“Had a chance to take in much of the town?”
“Unfortunately not,” Julian said.
“I’m sure you’ll like it,” said the woman. “Everyone does. I’m from Indianapolis originally.”
Was this the woman he’d glimpsed in the glass of the front door as he’d left, giving him an appraising look from behind, or had it been the other one, her boss, who’d hired him? Julian didn’t mention where he was from originally, just watched the starlings on their metronomic flight path. At that moment, the sun shone through a tiny gap in the clouds making the flock gleam like an armored column. He took another drag, deeper than the first, breathed it noiselessly into the phone.
“Um, the reason I’m calling,” said Paulette, Pauline, Paula, “and I know it’s late notice, especially on a Saturday, but one of our people called in sick, and I wondered if you could fill in, just for today.”
It wasn’t in his plans. Not that he had plans: he didn’t require them. He’d always been good at keeping himself amused. Breakfast, a long walk, perhaps some reading. On the other hand, there was always the issue of money. His mood, so relaxed, benign, began to shift a little.
“Margie said we’d waive our percentage—you could keep the whole fee.”
“What’s involved?”
“SAT prep, initial evaluation. You should have all the materials. They’d be in the green plastic—”
“I’m sure I do.”
“Then it’s a yes?”
It’s a yes.
The temptation to mimic her was suddenly very strong. Julian mastered it. “Why not? I might as well start somewhere.”
“You’re a doll, Julian. Eleven till one, but these evaluations sometimes go longer, depending on the client. It’s in West Mill, thirty-seven Robin Road.”
He wrote the client’s name and the directions on a Moroccan-bound memo pad he carried, using a Mont Blanc fountain pen with dark blue ink, almost black, that came from a shop on Regent Street. Then he opened the green plastic folder to see if there was anything unusual in the manual’s approach to bringing the hapless up to speed; at least, what passed for up to speed in this society, in these times. Of course there was not.
Inez makes 75 percent of her free throws in basketball. What is the probability, to the nearest tenth of a percent, that she will make her first three free throws and miss her fourth?
The answer, 10.5 percent, popped up in Julian’s mind—literally, white figures on a black mental screen—at once, before he’d even had a chance to scan the multiple choices. There it was, D, 10.5 percent. A, B, and C—100 percent, 75 percent, 25 percent—were to catch the idiots, E—17.5 percent—to catch all the other catchables. Julian checked the step-by-step teaching guide to the Inez problem, thought of one or two variants—although none could resemble the actual unconscious method he used—flipped through to the verbal section.
negligent : forsake ::
A) ostentatious : vaunt
B) illustrious : succeed
C) adamant : concede
D) mendacious : deceive
E) tenacious : clutch
Clearly D. Transparently so, as if there were an arrow pointing to the letter. He envisioned the tedium of explaining to—he checked his memo pad for the name—Brandon why A and E were wrong, hoped he wouldn’t have to do the same for B, or heaven help him, C as well.
Julian took a last luxuriant drag from his cigarette, then put it out although an inch or more remained unsmoked. Disgusting to smoke it down to the tiniest butt, evidence of the addict, the pig. On the memo pad he wrote:
negligent is to forsake as
mendacious is to deceive
There was a poem somewhere in that little couplet. What came next? He sat bent over the memo pad, thinking, thinking. Nothing came. His mood, so lighthearted to begin the day—he glanced out, the starlings were gone—darkened some more. He rose and went into his tiny bathroom.
The first thing Julian did, without quite knowing why, a whim, really, was to shave off his beard. How full it had grown, like some woodcutter, hippie, or rabbi. He felt a little mental lift from that triple-barreled joke. Julian used an Eagle Brand straight razor from Thiers-lssard, sharpened to a fine edge on a stone he kept in his kit, shearing off the beard in long tessellated swaths of foamy hair that piled up in the sink. His bare face appeared, section by section like jigsaw pieces, a fine face. When there was nothing left of the beard but that strange little tuft under the lower lip, he paused. There was a name for that tuft, some appropriately low name for what really was a gutter affectation, but Julian couldn’t bring himself to shave it off. He liked that little thing. And on a face as distinguished as his, how could the effect be gross? It would be more like a diacritic from an ancient tongue, or a single-lettered surname, or one that began with
ff
. He left it on, a tiny badge of . . . something special.
Julian consulted his USGS map. He believed in good maps, always got one first thing on arriving somewhere new. He found the street of the client—Robin Road—measured the distance with dividers: a very long walk, too long given the time, which meant the bicycle. He had no car, had been carless for some time, didn’t mind. Flexibility, adaptability—the keys to resilience, and resilience the key to strength.
The clouds recovered the sun as he dressed. Julian was watching them thicken and darken, a pleasing sight—he didn’t like things too bright—when he sensed another person. He went to the window, looked down. His landlady stood in the yard, looking up. Middle-aged, overweight, dressed on a Saturday in red-and-black checked flannel jacket, jeans, waterproof boots. She saw him and waved. Also a smile, too big. She had good teeth and knew it, no doubt. Julian waved back, keeping his own smile to himself. She made a little window-opening gesture, up up. Julian released the catch, an old-fashioned brass one, the brass all brown, and raised the window.
“A letter for you, Mr. Sawyer.”
A letter. How was that possible? Julian glanced quickly beyond her, saw nothing but what she called the big house on the other side of the long lane, and in the distance the two groves of trees, empty of starlings. Nothing unusual, then. He left his little room, the only habitable space in what she called the carriage house, and went down the worn stairs,
creak creak
. Cold air rose to meet him even before he opened the outer door. Julian noted it, that was all; he was impervious to the elements.
She came toward him, her lipstick the same shade of red as the checks on her jacket. “Settling in all right, Mr. Sawyer?”
He’d already dealt with that question this morning, inane and nosy at the same time. “Nicely, thanks, Mrs. Bender.”
“Gail, please,” said Mrs. Bender. “And I haven’t been a real Mrs. since the Reagan administration.”
“Julian,” said Julian. He supposed her voice was a good feature too, humorous, even intelligent, but what he wanted was the letter. She reached through the buttons of the red-and-black jacket, pulled it out, handed it to him, the envelope warm from being in there against her body. Julian took it in an unhurried, unconcerned way, but his eyes found the return address at once: A-Plus Tutorial Center, his employer. His unconcern turned genuine; a very interesting sensation, that change, the make-believe becoming real, quite physical.
She was giving him an odd look, head on a slight tilt. “Why, you’ve shaved your beard.”
“How can I deny it?”
She laughed, and through her laughter gave him a complicated look reflective of several emotions, all receptive.
“Thanks for bringing the letter, Gail. We’ll have to arrange some less disruptive method in the future.”
She lowered her gaze slightly, down to the little tuft left behind, and locked on it. “It’s no trouble,” she said, missing the point.
I
n the envelope, Julian found a dozen A-Plus Tutorial business cards and a note from Margie, the boss, written in big round letters: “So glad to have you on board, Julian. You can ink your name on these for now. We’ll have printed ones in a week or two.” He put them in his pocket, secured the green plastic folder in the spring-loaded carrier over the rear wheel of his bicycle—not his, but a rather new and sturdy mountain bike he’d found draped in spiderwebs in the cellar of the carriage house—rode up the long lane to Trunk Road and turned right.
So pleasant; and the wind was even at his back. Not that it mattered: he was very strong, legs, back, shoulders, without being at all bulky, thick-necked, clumsy. He pedaled through rolling farm country, seeing no one, then into a suburban landscape, perhaps exurban, since the houses were still far apart, and quite suddenly he was rolling down Main Street in Old Mill, ten minutes earlier than he’d expected.
Julian went into a coffee place, had an espresso, studied his map. He discovered a much shorter route to Robin Road in West Mill, a route that involved cutting through the town forest. No paths were marked on the map, but whoever heard of pathless forests? He ordered a brioche, took out the memo pad, tried again to find the poem:
negligent is to forsake as
mendacious is to deceive
What came next? A poem hid in there, he could feel it, a brilliant poem, the kind that would find its way into the language, be quoted, change the way people thought. But whatever came next didn’t come. Julian paid his bill, left the brioche half eaten. Not very good anyway, not a real brioche, and his authentic pronunciation of the word had confused the serving girl. No tip.
A few minutes later, he entered the town forest, the wind dying at once, as though someone had cut off the power. The path—of course there was a path, with the odd root sticking up, the odd rock, but easy for him, he sped up if anything—led through silent woods. This was a good place: Julian knew so at once, full of shadows and strange perspectives. The word that followed
deceive
began to take shape deep in his mind, just out of reach. He passed a little clearing, heaped here and there with beer cans, and the word receded inexorably, like a falling tide.
Julian climbed a long rise, glimpsed a tiny oblong of water in the distance. The blue flicker blinked out the moment he started down, the path now winding. Julian stopped pedaling, just coasted, as silent as the forest around him, the only source of wind he himself. Then water flashed again on his right, many oblongs of it now, the trees concealing them until the last moment. He heard a voice, a child’s voice.
“Don’t do that, Zippy.”
Julian paused by a boulder, the granitic type left by departing glaciers, peered over the top. Below lay a pond, almost a perfect circle, another glacial remnant. On a strand of frozen mud about a hundred feet away stood a girl in a blue jacket with yellow trim. A large mutt was shaking itself off, spraying her with water. Almost a Norman Rockwell scene, but it was much too dark in this forest for Norman Rockwell, and except for the blue-and-yellow jacket, there was no color at all.
“Zippy!” The girl—she wore a strange hat of some kind—raised her hands ineffectually. From that single gesture, and from her piping voice, Julian could tell how commonplace she was. Now the girl threw a stick into the water. The dog refused to chase it. They both stood there, child and dog, gazing, or gaping perhaps, at the expanding circles the stick had made. How bored they were, girl and dog both, and how boring. It would take a very dark Norman Rockwell to make art of this little nonscene, an upside-down Rockwell, and the result would not be uplifting. Julian titled the imaginary painting
Lumpen Child
and rode on, silent, through the woods.
Trees, trees, the wonderful sensation of having the planet to himself, except for the little girl and her dog, of being very big, of bringing the wind: this could go on forever. He’d barely had the thought before the forest journey was over. No trees, the real wind, now in his face, and he was at the edge of someone’s backyard.
Julian paused. A big, unfenced backyard, with woodpile, swing set, a dozen or more tennis balls lying around like dirty yellow flowers, patio, bird feeder. The feeder was in the form of a cute little house, white with black trim, someone’s idea of cozy comfort. A crow stood on the perch outside the tiny door, not feeding, but watching him. Beyond the patio rose the real house, which seemed to have sprung from the same sort of esthetic: also white with black trim, also cute, also cozy. The only difference was the tall red-brick chimney, too tall, really, almost unstable-looking, as though a giant could topple it with one casual swat. A matching brick walkway led around the side of the house, past a deck, coiled garden hose, trash cans. Julian dismounted, prepared a suitable tale—the woods, a little lost, fill in your own blanks—and walked his bike over the bricks toward the front of the house and Robin Road. He heard a toilet flush as he went by.