Fall (15 page)

How
is
your math he says like he wants to know seriously.

Ok.

Work on your math he says. Math is the language of the future. All this English Spanish French is going to look pretty silly in a hundred years. We will all be speaking in ones and zeros.

100 I’m thinking.

I spit.

Stop spitting he says.

In a hundred years we’ll be dead I say. Two zeros.

The future is to be prepared against he says.

It’s Fall who’s good at math I say.

Fall.

Yeah.

Good for her. She’s a catch he says.

He doesn’t know her. I want him to know her. Fall says Your dad scares me.

We’re jogging.

I want to ask if he ever wanted to breathe in the life of life because I know there’s always life and the breathing’s so much fun I want to eat something.

I want to ask if he ever feels stupid, who cares.

I want to ask if he knows what we looked like when I held his hand and he bought me the bat in Boston. I can see him and maybe
he can see me but I can’t see myself and that’s why memory’s not true. And I want to say so and I want to know sometimes why it’s hard to talk.

And I run faster and he keeps up and it’s a quiet competition and the air’s getting clean in my head, I’m smarter. And his face is hard to see. And when you shine your light on someone you can look and not be seen. And I think about a foreign house with another country’s light shining through the window.

I think of watching with one bright eye.

I don’t think the world is small.

I can’t he says.

We stop and he rubs his knees.

S
HE CAME UP
to the Flats and stood in the doorway of our room, an unimaginable thing. Girls were simply not allowed to be at the door of a boy’s room.

Julius was gated—confined to the school—for three weeks for soaking Ant. The Coke and the water had damaged the carpet, Ant was injured, so the school took it seriously, and Julius never said I was involved.

Fall was smiling, at ease, joking about the fact that Julius was gated. He lay on the bunk above, I imagine with his hands on his head, bemoaning his punishment, while I sat up, below, my head leaning forward, joking along with Fall and more nervous and excited than I had ever thought possible. I was vibrating.

Julius said, “I need to piss,” and Fall said, “Nice.” She looked at me like she was apologizing for her vulgar friend. He left the room, and somehow I controlled my nerves enough to say, “I fell off the top bunk once in my sleep.” It was somewhat out of the blue, but I wanted her to know me and she seemed perfectly comfortable.

“Ouch,” she said.

“I’d been dreaming I was in the circus and I think I did a handstand on the bed, and I woke up when my spine came down on the corner of the desk.”

She said “ouch” again with genuine concern.

And I laughed.

“Hey, Noel,” she said. “Since J is stuck here for three weeks, I wanted to get him something for the room. Like a present.” She
asked if there was anything he particularly needed, and I remember for a moment thinking, with jealousy in my heart, that it was I who needed. Julius needed nothing.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe you could help,” she said. She suggested that I go shopping with her.

“Tomorrow? After school?”

I felt like it was the moment that had brightened every dark night, the moment I had ritually re-fantasized for years while in bed to give myself hope. Somehow, through all that ritual and replaying, I had implicitly acknowledged that it would never actually happen, but now there she was inviting me to go out with her alone.

“Sure,” I said.

Julius walked back into the room saying, “Sure what?”

“I asked Noel if he would help Sarah with Shakespeare,” Fall said.

He looked at me with his sly smiling face, suggesting I might have an opportunity for something with Sarah.

I looked at Fall with silent complicity and had my first real taste of the thrill of betrayal, the joy of setting out down the wrong dark path. I looked at Julius again and genuinely admired his face. He always had such humour and purity in his eyes. And I thought about how he would clean my back before bed and say, “Your back’s getting big.” He was kind.

My bones felt fluorescent. Friendship, love, betrayal, promise. The energy of that room becoming something bright inside me.

Fall said, “Sarah can meet you in the library, tomorrow at four o’clock.”

I undid the top button of my shirt and loosened my tie. I also untucked my shirt a little. But I wore a coat and scarf which covered my shirt and tie.

Fall was waiting outside the library and said we should take a bus to the Centrepiece Mall. I had resolved to be more silent than talkative, in case of later regret. We walked across the playing fields
to catch the bus and all I said over that long stretch of grass was: “It’s cold.” I couldn’t look at her, even when we were sitting across the aisle of the bus from each other. It seemed to me that we were fifty of the chosen, being driven to our heaven. I looked at no one, simply assumed that for inscrutable reasons everyone was gathered on that bus to be taken where everything was given.

I followed her off the bus.

She asked if I went to the mall much and I thought about saying it was a disgusting carnival of vanity and artificial need. I said, “Not much.”

“I hate it,” she said. “If we do this quick, maybe we can get a coffee.” She asked me if I knew Café Wim. I said I didn’t, and she said, “It’s like Whim with a W but no H and it’s called Wim like Vim with a V.”

I said I understood.

We were in the mall and I was always conscious of how far apart our shoulders were.

“I was thinking about buying J a cardigan,” she said.

I tried to picture it.

“I’m joking,” she said.

I said I had been thinking that I would like to buy Julius something, too. Something about feeling slightly guilty about going shopping with Fall had augmented my sense of friendship with Julius, had brought out a keener realization of how much more I wanted to be his friend.

“Julius is great,” I said. She looked at me. After our long walk across the fields I realized she was generally quiet. We shared a look now that said we both admired Julius. We liked each other for admiring Julius. She felt closer to me for my admiration of Julius, and admired me, and her curiosity about me was heightened because I said that Julius was great. It was all there in her eyes.

“So maybe there’s something both of you can use in the room,” she said.

I never had quite as much money as everyone else in the school, certainly less than Julius and Fall. My father’s salary as a diplomat
was modest—he lived well abroad and I was at St. Ebury all because the government paid for everything. If he hadn’t been overseas we would have lived in a middling house somewhere and I would have attended a middling school.

“I don’t want to buy anything too big,” I said. “I don’t think he’s that great.”

She got distracted by a store she liked and looked in for a moment. She paused at the door and looked concerned, then smiled and kept walking. “Sometimes I’m bad at shopping for other people. I see stuff I want to buy for myself and then I remember what I’m supposed to be doing and I feel, like: guilty?”

She occasionally struck me as younger than she looked. But there was suddenly a charge to our outing, some sort of quickening, as though we were both now alive to the fact that we were out of the school and that there was some sort of potential for ourselves, not just for Julius. Even though we were in another building with forced air and bright lights, there was suddenly some sort of greater possibility than we ever had at school. This was the world. Clothing, couches, jewellery, magazines, food, music, movies.

We wandered without saying much at all, but our wandering itself was eloquent. It seemed we each knew where the other was drawn and we were always respectful of space. I thought it would have been risky to get any closer. She said at one point that she couldn’t believe how big I had become over the past year.

“I brought you here for ideas, Noel, come on!”

“I think I was surprised to discover how nice Julius is,” I said.

She was quiet for a while and then said, “He’s fantastic.”

I thought it was good that she said that.

I thought about how wonderful it was that two strangers were shopping for someone else, both involved in something bigger than or beyond themselves, as though Julius was our religion. He brought us together and the three of us would thrive in the name of his benefit.

And I ached for something.

“What should we buy?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

I ached for something with throat-felt force, with innocence and purity, as though my motivating heart could ignore the complications of friendship, the obstacles of bone and convention and contradictory limbs. Somewhere within was a desire that knew nothing but itself. I ached like the sky aches for blue.

“Something you could both use,” she said.

We were in a shop selling kitchenware. I separated myself from her and looked around. I realized the utility of getting something that Julius could enjoy in the room; something that I could enjoy with him so we could have each other’s company; something that would keep him in the room, because keeping him in the room, whether I was with him or not, meant keeping him away from Fall.

I suggested a coffee pot and she said, “I’ll buy the Bodum, you buy a kettle.”

I found an inexpensive black kettle and Fall found a very expensive Bodum.

She said she
loved
having coffee with Julius. “He’s like a kid with cake. He gets all excited, then he crashes. And you’ll have to deal with that,” she said.

She used a credit card, I paid with cash.

My father, after many years of “shame,” told me what it was like to grow old with an ugly past: how life ensured that sometimes one could forget, but that regret would surprise and harass the mind like Banquo’s ghost.

He was a terrible snob, my father, so concerned with what other people thought. I remember writing him letters from St. Ebury and receiving such absurd bourgeois advice from his replies. “It’s more correct to say napkin than serviette. Read Waugh and Mitford.” And when I told him about Julius he emphasized the privilege of rooming with the American ambassador’s son. He told me to foster that connection. He really knew nothing about me.

I remember feeling grown-up, shopping for that kettle.

We went to a magazine store where she bought a
Vogue
for her mother. “It’s something she expects,” she said. “I don’t know if we have time for coffee,” she said. I said I thought we did.

Café Wim was a block away from the mall. It was full of young people in black.

It was a common experience to feel older than other students because we wore suits and ties, but there were times, like that evening at Café Wim, when the uniforms had the opposite effect. I felt unsophisticated and part of a club or a team that I did not want to belong to. Fall seemed to fit in immediately.

She was still quite quiet and it was making me more nervous. I wanted to talk about everything that had never been talked about.

I tried to keep my eye under control. Sometimes looking down and then up can make the eyelid do its rhythmic spasm.

The
Vogue
she’d bought her mother was on the table and she was resting her forearms across it. There was the faintest mole on her wrist. I thought about how Julius must know that mole. Then I thought that he possibly didn’t, that there were probably a hundred aspects of her beauty that he wouldn’t notice because his eyes were not as open as mine. I even thought that she probably didn’t know his body as well as I knew it, and also that loved ones could identify bodies by marks like her mole, no matter how disfigured the body may be by death.

I had actually not drunk much coffee at that point in my life and remember thinking it was bitter. I was finding her silence difficult. She was looking at me in a pleasant way, but I found it hard to look her in the eye. I wondered whether she was simply as eager as I was to avoid small talk or whether she was somehow uncomfortable. I barely dared to think she might be shy around me.

“Mom has read every issue of
Vogue
as long as I have lived,” she said. “I started buying it for her when I was thirteen. Like a bonding thing. Now she expects it.”

She had a way of smiling while she talked.

“Ever read it?”

“No.”

“There’s actually nothing to read. It’s like: Countess, you know, von Something had a party last year and this is what everyone was wearing. Otherwise it’s just pictures.”

“Right.”

It’s hard to convey her manner. After she spoke there were such long silences. She would keep looking at me, but there was no indication that she wanted me to say anything, no real sign of self-consciousness on her part. She wasn’t aloof, she didn’t seem vain or over-confident. I never got the impression that she didn’t care about what I had to say. I think she simply expected nothing from me. We could communicate or not. I’ve tried so often to see the world through her eyes. I know that café looked different to her than it did to me.

“That’s what I like about this place. People are stylish, right, but they’re not
Vogue
readers. There’s style, and then there’s caring a lot about what other people think. If you want to know who wore what at the countess’s party, it’s because you care a lot about what other people think, right? Usually people here aren’t looking around, caring what other people are thinking. Definitely not the girls.”

I looked around. She was by far the most beautiful girl in that room.

“The women in here all seem really cool. No pretending, you know? I think girls pretend less than guys do, anyway. Even if we don’t always stay friends, I think girls are honest,” she said.

I looked her in the eye. Then I looked away. “All the guys are looking at you,” I said.