All the Houses (34 page)

“My dad doesn't let me go on dates,” she said. “All we ever do is e-mail, since he doesn't go to my school. We can never see each other.”

“It would have been better if you'd told me about this before now.”

She didn't say anything, rereading the tickets instead, until more words burst out of her. “It'll just be like, two hours, and we'll be inside the club the whole time. You can do whatever you want and I'll just call you when the show's over.”

Just do this one thing for me, her eyes said, for young love and pop music.

People were clustered in front of the club, stomping and shivering as they waited to get in, smoking cigarettes with frozen fingers. Nina got out of the cab, and the mob ejected this boy come to meet her. Was he really in high school? I wondered. I couldn't tell anyone's age anymore. He was on the small side, his dark hair more neatly trimmed than any of the other guys' hair, his skin neither dark nor light, his ethnicity unclear to me, his jacket too thin for the weather—he looked like an engineering student from someplace warm. They beamed at each other without touching, he and Nina.

Oh shit, was all I could think. I bumbled after her and told her I'd pick her up at that exact spot at 10:30, no later. She started to say that she could just call me when—but this was me feebly putting my foot down. “Ten-thirty,” I insisted. Then I stuck out my hand and introduced myself to the boy, who politely said his name, Sam. His tone was soft. Then he smiled so broadly that I wondered whether he might be high, but I couldn't tell, and before I had a chance to think it over they said so long.

Suddenly I was the nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
, only the nurse never had to spend two hours in a fricking Burger King on 19th Street, which is what I did, eating onion rings out of a cardboard pouch and reading an article from somebody's discarded newspaper, about a planned overhaul of government intelligence services, and asking myself why I'd let myself be manipulated by a sixteen-year-old kid. But then I remembered the question my dad had posed—are you depressed?—and I decided that no, I didn't think I was anymore, and that this improvement seemed to have come about less because I'd figured anything out about my life than because I was no longer sitting in my L.A. apartment watching election coverage. Even sitting in this Burger King seemed better. Even here I was busier, and while I did still want something more for myself, I had a new appreciation for the merits of keeping busy. I wondered whether this was one reason why everyone around me worked such long hours, whether they were all warding off secret funks.

My phone shuddered at me.

What are you doing?

The text was from Rob, and I was all too glad to get it.

Eating onion rings.

R they hot?

Yes. Want to come over later?

He didn't reply. Though I had bought a texting-enabled phone, I wasn't in the habit of texting and certainly didn't have the hang of text banter. For the next ten minutes I kept checking the phone, thinking maybe I'd missed a response from him. I walked back to the club. Nina came out at exactly 10:30, alone, her coat over her arm as if she could no longer be touched by the cold. “Thank you,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, not knowing what to say. For the first part of the cab ride home we barely talked. Then I asked her how she and Sam had met.

“He was my math tutor, last semester.”

“Where does he go to school?”

“AU,” she said. “He's a junior there, but he started college early. He's only three years older.” She took a deep breath. “He's actually from Turkey. Samed is his real name but he calls himself Sam. He's like, the smartest person I have ever met.”

I thought about Anthony Jaffe, my high school not-quite-a-boyfriend, and the things he used to say. “Did you know,” he said to me once, “did you know that time is not a property of the universe? It is a property of clocks. A convention,” he said.

But then how come I can't be rid of it, I'd wondered.

“Does your dad know?” I asked Nina.

“The first time we kissed, he walked in on us. Oops. That was the end of math tutoring. He thinks Sam's too old, even though hello, my mom was three years older than him. He says that's different, but I don't see why it's different.”

“So you're not allowed to see him.”

Her phone buzzed, and she took it out and read something that lit up her face. She thumbed a reply, then looked back to me. “Please don't tell,” she said.

“I kind of should.”

“I'm really sorry.”

No, I thought, no you're not. She begged me not to say anything, and I refused to make a promise one way or another. I said I would have to sleep on it. She angled her head back against the seat and returned to the club and the boy with two names and the adorable-miserable singer, and the sight made me sentimental in spite of myself, late-night sentiment trumping the sense I might've had at another time of day or another time of life: though I was pretty sure I'd messed up, I also thought that now she would have this for the rest of her life, this night when she was sixteen and went to hear music with the boy she was nuts for, and who was I to take that away from her?

At home I checked my phone again.

I can't. Let's check in fri.

I felt out of sorts. I could still smell the onion rings. I put the phone away.

 

1986

Coach E used to lecture us on the topic of desire. What do I mean when I say the word
desire
? she would ask, with her arms folded and her chin out, her gaze aimed at the rim. I am not talking about lust. I am not talking about your
teenage urges
. Where does this word
desire
come from? From the stars. From the stars. Desire comes from the stars.

This is about something bigger than you, ladies. This game. This game! This game is greater than you. You reach for the sky, and that's desire. You ask the stars for help. That's desire. You strain with all your might toward something greater! That's what desire is. The
desire
to play the game with everything you have, and more.

For me one desire swirled into another. I would watch the boys' varsity team play basketball in a kind of terrific swoon. All those legs, the hairy, knobby legs and the smooth pillars, pale legs and dark ones, jumping up, up, up. I wanted to jump. I wanted a body that could hang in the air. It was amazing to me that the same boys who scuttled stupidly around the school in their stupid jackets could soar the way they did. I wanted to jump like them, and it's true, I also wanted to be jumped by them. At their games I used to swish my tongue around my mouth, imagining what another tongue would feel like in there, and press my hands into the bleachers, and feel all my skin, the entire surface of me getting warmer. But when they put their stupid jackets back on, I didn't want them anymore.

My friend Anthony used to come find me during free periods, and we would loaf in the student lounge or sometimes we would shoot around in the gym together. He had unruly blond hair and grasshopper legs and I guess a thing for me, ever since we were in math class together in ninth grade. I was quicker than him in math, which got his attention, and one day I'd found a screw on the floor and picked it up and said, Wanna screw?—then realized my mistake. The answer in his eyes was yes, yes, yes. But I'd just said it to be funny. He was really skinny, not that I was fat, but he had the kind of metabolism that made him susceptible to head-rushes and even fainting first thing in the morning. I was bigger than he was, that was one reason we never went out.

He was eleven months older and so had his driver's license well before I did, and he also had his own car, which he drove to school and to his job as a projectionist at an arty movie theater. His parents were doctors, a neurologist and a psychiatrist, and loyal BMW owners. He drove one that had been his mother's, a car that embarrassed him (though I cherished it, for it was like the car Cybill Shepherd drove in
Moonlighting
), with deep seats of cream-colored leather and a removable stereo and a car phone that didn't work. Anthony used to slap the seat, or the steering wheel, or his own leg, to emphasize something ridiculous or to punctuate the silence when he wasn't saying anything. “Mrs. Gonnerman!” he would say—this was our chemistry teacher—and then give the car a slap and then repeat, “Mrs. Gonnerman! Well, I never.” He would just say these nonsense kinds of things and I would laugh. We drove around doing that, parroting phrases we thought were funny and listening to Whodini and the Fat Boys. “So should I go buy some Timberlands?” I remember him asking, making fun of the other white boys who borrowed whatever bits of black style they could get away with, but also I think genuinely wanting to know whether he too could pull it off.

Otherwise I was at loose ends socially. My best friend from ninth grade had transferred to public school in Virginia, and besides Anthony I had people I sat with at lunch, but none of them called me at night, or wrote me notes during the day.

*   *   *

In November Dick Mitchell went before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and so did Assistant Secretary Elliott Abrams, who explained to the senators that the “State Department's function in this has not been to raise money” for the Contras. Less than two weeks later, Abrams went back to the committee and owned that he himself had asked the foreign minister of Brunei to contribute $10 million to aid the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. During that second appearance, the senators raked him over the coals. (“You've heard my testimony,” said Abrams to Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri. “I've heard it,” said the senator, “and I want to puke.”)

Like most kids I couldn't have told you much about any of that, but Courtney was paying attention, she was piecing things together, and after she read about Abrams's second round, she had some questions for Dad. Why did he lie? she asked one night at dinner. Dad told her that Abrams may not have known what he was allowed to talk about and what he wasn't allowed to talk about.

“He didn't say that. He didn't say, ‘I'm not allowed to talk about this.' He lied.”

“If you look at the exact wording of what he said, I don't know that it was a lie. It was an omission.”

Courtney looked toward Mom, who had a way of being studiously distant in those moments, who was serving herself some more salad.

“The thing is, at this stage, there's a lot we don't know,” Dad said.

“I know it's lying,” she said, and on her face was betrayal. Dad mashed his lips together and then said, “We are not going to talk about this at dinner.”

Courtney didn't say anything more, in that case she wasn't going to talk at all.

After that, absurdly, our parents tried to shield us from what was going on. Not only did they pretend everything was normal, they pretended we were ten years younger than we were, or they treated us like that anyway. They imposed a news blackout—such a thing was still possible in 1986, insane but possible, though the gist of the affair did reach us eventually. They instructed us to cover our ears, and for a little while we went along with it, even as we learned also to read lips, to puzzle out what people were saying. Mom was the family censor: she no longer watched the evening news as she was making dinner, and every morning she cut out all the relevant articles, making lacework of
The Post
.

Of course she and Dad still read those snipped-out stories themselves, and after 11:00 p.m., the anthems of the late news seeped out of their bedroom. I used to sneak out to the hallway, trying to hear what was being said. I could sometimes hear Dad yelling, “That's a bunch of bull!” at the television, though I had no way of knowing who was being accused, the men in the story—
bull!
—or the news program itself—
bull!
Or both: everybody was lying. On Sundays, when he was at home, he would be looking out the window or into the refrigerator, and his brow would lower. His lips would move ever so slightly. You could see him getting angry again, silently having it out with someone, everyone, the president himself.

It was as though the background chatter of TV and print news had been a string knitting together the household. Once it had been pulled out, we lost our footing. Rules and rituals were forgotten. When was dinnertime? Were the Redskins playing? Together my sisters and I did chores that we'd argued over in the past, wanting to keep some kind of order. And as we washed and dried the dishes I would perform for Courtney, to make her laugh, peddling dumb jokes about how grody our refrigerator was, or about the way our dog wiggled her butt when she walked. We would cackle as Maggie shimmied around the kitchen, with an eleven-year-old dancer's grace, pretending to be the dog.

*   *   *

A year earlier, just before I started ninth grade, Courtney had handed me a piece of filler paper spritzed with Anaïs Anaïs. It contained a list of
HIGH SCHOOL DOS AND DON'TS ACCORDING TO MOI (COURTNEY ATHERTON):

1. Do shower daily, or twice daily in the case of severe B.O.

2. Neither a borrower (of my clothing) nor a lender be.

3. Don't stare at junior or senior boys even if you think they're cute (trust me they're all retarded).

4. Don't put any personal info about yourself in writing, even if it's a note to a friend.

5. Do take time for General Foods International Coffees. Ahhhh.

6. If life hands you lemons, stuff your bra with them! The Atherton females need ALL the help they can get.

I saved the note in my desk drawer. The boundary between us was always shifting, some days it was all tra-la-la and trips to Peoples Drug for no reason but to buy candy and Wet n Wild lipstick, but then the next day or week it was like she didn't even see me, or like she thought I was the dumbest creature she'd ever come across. And there were times when I was the one who snapped at her, sick of all her achievements, her useless superiority, her advice.