Fall (20 page)

I never gave him her letter and he never saw her, and instead of confrontation that night he offered that one innocent question, “Have you seen Fall?”

My feet were cold. I had been walking through the snow, around the parks and embassies of Sutton, wondering how to undo what’s done.

I hated everyone on my walk, every huge house I looked into. I felt like such a fool to have revealed myself to her; I hated the look on her face.

I didn’t think about how she actually was when I left her, I thought about how she would be when I saw her again.

On my way back to St. Ebury I slipped near the front of the school and fell into a bush. It scratched my hands and face.

“Easy with the noise,” said Julius.

I was banging drawers shut in the dark as I undressed. I got into bed beneath him.

“People were looking for you,” he said.

“So.”

“I covered for you. I said you were sick at dinner and you were helping someone at prep.”

“I’ve never missed dinner or prep in my life,” I said.

We didn’t say anything more to each other.

In the morning my hands and face looked worse than I had expected. One of the scratches was deep enough that I still have this faint scar, just here beside my ear.

“I fell into a bush,” I said. I was in the mirror, in front of him for a change. I could tell he was impatient and wanted to use the sink, but I swelled my back and spent a long time swishing the toothpaste and saliva in my mouth before I spat.

I kept to myself through the day. I skipped lunch. I went straight to the weight room after school and stayed there for hours. Julius came in at one point and asked if I had seen Fall. I said I hadn’t.

“I wonder where she’s limping to,” he said.

Whenever he tried to talk during prep that night I would answer as tersely as possible. Christmas exams were approaching so I had a good excuse to be studying diligently. But I couldn’t concentrate on words in books. Letters looked like snapped twigs, a fractured record of whatever life had dragged across them.

Julius left after prep, I assumed to go for a smoke. He went looking for Fall. When he came back to the room he realized I had turned the lights out early. He turned them on.

“I went to Fall’s room,” he said. “Nobody’s seen her.” It felt like he was confronting me but he was only slightly breathless as he undressed. He looked rather skinny to me. He hadn’t lifted weights in a couple of weeks. “Maybe she stayed home,” he said. “Foot up on the couch.”

He sometimes fixed his hair before bed. I found it risibly vain.

“Turn the lights out,” I said.

Julius put his hands on my shoulders after breakfast the next morning. “Let’s have coffee,” he said. He wanted me to meet him in the room after school.

We had had coffee from his new pot a couple of times during his gating. Our routine was that I would boil the kettle I had bought him and he would put the coffee in the pot. I would pour the water, he would depress the plunger. I had suggested the routine.

I met him in the room and filled the kettle at the sink. I was expecting him to say something about Fall, and again instead of being nervous I was angry.

Julius liked to put more coffee in each time to see how much we could abide without grimacing. I didn’t enjoy it.

I wondered whether he would notice my sullenness, whether he would be looking for signs or changes in my behaviour, but as usual he was oblivious.

“I called Fall’s mom’s place but nobody answered. I keep looking for Sarah to see if she knows anything but I can’t find her, either. Every time I try to go over to the Girls’ Flats some fuckin’ Master says, ‘Where are you going?’ They think I’m still gated.”

“This coffee is disgusting,” I said.

“Another cup?”

“No.”

“But you haven’t seen her for sure?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I can’t remember if her mom was going away. Maybe she was going to Cuba.”

I didn’t want to stay sitting there with him. The taste of bad coffee always reminds me of that afternoon, that mixture of disquiet and bitter revulsion.

“I saw her,” said Ant.

“Did you?” said Julius. “Where?”

“I saw her.”

“He has that dumb smile,” said Chuck. “He’s gonna tell a joke.”

“What’s the joke?” said Julius.

“No joke,” said Ant. “I have a dumb smile. Chuck has a fat gut. Noel here has a, uh, has a tight jacket. Chuck was stating the facts. Chuck was being a fat journalist.”

“Did you fuckin’ see her or not?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe in the library.”

Julius left the room.

“What’s so fuckin’ serious about not finding Fall?”

Chuck left the room.

“What’s up with those two?” said Ant.

“I don’t know what the fuck Ant was talking about. And I saw Sarah. She said none of Fall’s stuff was gone. She didn’t pack a bag. Don’t you think if she went to her mom’s place she would have packed a bag?”

“I don’t know.”

“I need your help, man.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know. I’m stuck. I’ve gotta vacuum another fuckin’ apartment tomorrow. They caught me smoking. Will you look for her?”

“Well,” I said. “She’s not in school. Why would I know where to look?”

“Maybe she’ll show up tomorrow. Maybe I could give you one more note to give her.”

“You can give it to her yourself.”

“I’ve gotta clean a fuckin’ apartment.”

He looked so childish and querulous.

“Leave the note on my desk,” I said.

I read the note.

It was touching.

I threw it out.

I tried quite rigorously to keep my last sight of Fall from my mind. I have a habit of thinking of something I find cleansing whenever unpleasant memories arise. Swimming in Australia once, I was caught in a cloud of sea nettles. I felt stings all over my body and face, but there was something benign in the pain. I was stung into a refreshed awareness of myself, of my body alone. I try to conjure that sensation whenever I don’t want to be afraid.

Teachers began to ask questions about Fall in class. Has anybody seen her? Is she away? Some of them became urgent.

A few students had been known to be whisked away for family trips at odd times of the year, a sort of noblesse oblige among parents which the school would silently indulge. In Algebra, Mr. Staples said that he would try to contact her mother after she missed three classes.

Julius and I worked out once together that week. I spotted him on the bench press and I subtly resisted his press instead of helping him. When he couldn’t push the bar any further I suddenly changed from push to pull and slammed the bar home on the rack. It was quite satisfying. I also pressed thirty percent more weight than he had when it was my turn.

He enlisted Chuck’s help because he had access to a car. I spent more time with Ant. Chuck had a brother in town whose car Chuck could borrow. He said they would drive out to Fall’s mum’s place, since Julius was never able to reach her mother by phone.

Ant stole a bottle of single-malt from his aunt. He and I drank it on a Thursday night in the weight room and I vomited in a corner of the gym in the most dizzying beautiful darkness. I avoided my room; Ant and I went down to the weight room after midnight. We sat under the fluorescent lights, he on the flat bench, I a few
feet away on the bench I used for sit-ups. It was a tiny space and we barely had to reach forward to pass the bottle to each other. We talked about anger and did not understand each other. I think now about adolescent conversations and how often connection was a matter of gesture. As in diplomacy there was no genuine understanding, just a body language that acknowledged we would respect each other broadly while we were close.

I think nonetheless of the intensity of those gestures: how the more we drank the closer we felt despite our minimal similarity. Close enough for Ant to declare that he had never expected to become my friend. Close enough for him to clasp my shoulder warmly, for him not to care if our shoes knocked together as we shifted.

My head started spinning after little more than an hour. Ant had heard how much I could push on the military press. I tried 215 pounds and could only do three repetitions. Ant said that when you work out drunk you always think you’re stronger than you are.

I thought about strength. I thought about what happened with Fall, and I tried to think of the sea nettles, but it made me aware of my body in the wrong way, and that is when my head started spinning.

I stood up often and Ant would put his arm around me, saying, “Are you all right, man?” Out in the unlit gym I threw up in the corner, shouting as I did so. Ant kept telling me to be quieter but I loved the opportunity to shout. It was so dark I could just make out the basketball hoop near where I threw up. I loved thinking that a room is defined by what one fills it with. By day this is a gym; right now it’s a toilet.

I had been loud coming back to the room, so Julius was loud getting ready in the morning. He said I was going to miss Chapel and I said I didn’t care. I slept through my first class and thought about signing myself into the infirmary, but I realized that once the vomit was discovered my being in the nurse’s care would amount to a confession. I wasn’t ill, I was only tired. I wanted to hide. My dreams were lit by white.

The weekend was coming. Fall was called for in English class and several people knowingly said “she’s sick.”

I longed for Friday night, to spend as much time over the weekend as I could away from the room. I avoided Julius completely.

Friday was a warm day.

“Her eyeliner is totally sitting on the shelf. You know, the little shelf under the mirror? Maybe you guys don’t have that?”

“Yeah.”

“She doesn’t go anywhere without her eyeliner.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Julius.

He and Sarah were talking on the porch below the latticed beams at the front of the school.

“Nothing’s packed,” she said.

“It’s weird,” he said.

“I bet her mom’s taken her away. Cuba or something.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll look for her bathing suit. She has so many clothes though, right? She has doubles of everything at home. But not her bathing suit. I think. Does she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re supposed to be her boyfriend.”

“I don’t swim with her.”

“If she’s sick she probably wouldn’t want her eyeliner. She cuddles up like a ball, like a little kitten. So cute. Her mom’s weird anyway, right? I could see her taking Fall away and not telling anyone.”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s bossy,” Sarah said. “She bosses Fall around. She plays emotional games with her. And when she comes into the room. Has Fall told you?”

“Maybe.”

“She’ll come to pick up Fall or take us out to dinner or whatever and she’ll totally play this game, like she’s our boss but she’s one of us. She’s given me the creeps a couple of times. Has Fall told you?”

“I don’t know.”

“She tells us to clean up the room, and this one time she picks up a pair of my, like, panties, and she doesn’t sniff them exactly, but she kind of loves them in a weird way. Then she said, “My daughter went to New York when she was your age.” And it gave me the creeps that night, like I was supposed to be Fall’s sister at dinner or something.”

“Right.”

“Anyways. And she’s told Fall, ‘One day we might have to move and you’ll have to say goodbye to everything.’”

“Really?”

“She hasn’t told you? You’re her boyfriend. She says
don’t get used to anything
.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard her . . .”

“So maybe they’ve moved.”

“No way.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m worried. She hasn’t talked to either of us.”

I took a black sweater belonging to Julius and I went to Café Wim. I brought a notebook and pen along, and I wrote down the conversation between Julius and Sarah as I remembered it.

I thought about what Sarah had said about Fall’s mother. Taking someone away in recognition of the fact that things can be taken away. I thought about evasion and avenues of escape.

Had I become myself by avoiding others? I thought of myself as detached, as bookish, as some sort of precociously wise fringedweller who could be safe from the ugliness of the world through cunning and evasion. The most I ever wondered was whether that detachment was entirely voluntary. Perhaps I existed on the fringe because that’s where others kept me; perhaps my past of having few friends had not been entirely my choice.

I must have cut a philosophical figure in the café, with my pen and black sweater. I saw a young man staring at me. I felt self-conscious and wanted to feel the bone in his nose give way. When I returned to school at twelve-thirty the Duty Master said, “You should have
been in bed at midnight.” I stared at him and said nothing as I walked toward my room.

They tried to make us men, I thought. We wore suits. We were old enough to vote. We were better educated than others our age in the city, had a sense of humanism that would have been unknown to most eighteen-year-olds. We knew creeds and notions of honour. There were quotes from Milton and Tennyson on the windows of our chapel. There was none of that bulletin-board inspiration one finds at other schools—the slogans pinned to felt, the wordplay nonsense from the Church of the Daily Platitude. When I revisit the written principles and traditions of our school, there is little I disagree with, little I would not hold up as a model for all human beings to consider.

But all those rules. The schedules, the conventions, the not being allowed to walk through certain doors. We were childish to follow them and childish to break them. They were rules which we could do nothing with, hollow laws that left me so ill-prepared for the throb of blood or the animal choices that truly guided my life.

Now I follow rules endlessly. I describe them daily. Rules and guiding principles are created only after mistakes are made. I knew the rules of the school, and I was very much in the middle of my mistake.

When Fall did not appear for Chapel on Sunday her House Mistress got formally involved. It turned out that her mother was in fact unreachable. Messages were left and not returned. Julius and Chuck drove out together to look at the house and it was dark. No one was there, no sign of a car. It was assumed that Fall and her mother had gone on a trip.