Ordinary People (11 page)

Worry and a bad marriage. Beth was joking. She said she had been joking. It had been seven years since Ray’s affair with Lynn. Seven years since Nancy had packed up the girls and gone to her parents in Oklahoma, and Ray, wild with grief, had come charging into the office to tell him.

“How could I have been so stupid, Cal? How could I have been so selfish, thinking I had it so tough, having to come home to a squalling baby every night? She’s gone, Call She left me! What the hell am I going to do without her?”

Well, things change; people change. Lynn had left, and Nancy had come back, and they had moved out of their apartment and bought the big house in Glencoe. And surely Nancy is not the type of woman to live with somebody she doesn’t love “for the sake of the children.” No illusion there. They are still married; therefore, they are happy. But he sees the point she had been making. Depending upon the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.

He wants so much to believe that all is well. But, then, if it is, why does he keep taking pulses, and looking for signs?

The front door opens. He hears the familiar sounds, of his feet scuffing the doormat, of the hangers clanging against each other in the closet as he hangs up his jacket.

“Hi. You’re late tonight.”

“Am I?” He looks at his watch. “Yeah, a little. Hey, it’s snowing.”

“Is it? Must have just started.”

“Yeah, it looks nice.” He sits down, and Cal hands him the sports section. “You finished? Thanks.”

“How’s it going?”

“Fine. Great. He gave back the trig quiz today. I got an A on it.”

“Great. Terrific.”

“Well,” he says and shrugs, “it was just a quiz.”

But a gift. To have offered it is to show that it must have value for the giver, also.

“That your first A this semester?”

He looks up from the paper. “Yeah. I’m getting back in the swing of things, huh?” He grins.

So truth is in a certain feeling of permanence that presses around the moment. They are ordinary people, after all. For a time they had entered the world of the newspaper statistic; a world where any measure you took to feel better was temporary, at best, but that is over. This is permanent. It must be.

Beth comes in from the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready.”

Conrad puts the paper down. “I’m coming. Just have to wash my hands.”

“Didn’t you just take a shower?”

He grins again. “Forgot to wash my hands.”

Cal laughs. “Tricky.”

At first he was afraid that the hours after school would drag, but they do not. He fills them with studying, at school, or in town, at the library. The old building is comfortable and secluded and dark, with its narrow stained-glass windows and soft leather chairs. He can stay there until five-thirty and make it home on time. Or else he walks, keeping an eye on his watch, checking the time. Down Deerpath, past the Presbyterian church to the north campus of Lake Forest, where he can sit on a park bench and watch the birds. Nut-hatches, creepers, chickadees, grosbeaks (he bought himself a bird book, and is learning to identify them) go sedately and earnestly about their business, which is eating. He carries envelopes of sunflower seeds in his jacket pockets. He has his own Life List.

This month he has another activity. Christmas shopping. He wanders through the stores of the U-shaped, outdoor mall admiring the piles of merchandise in the windows—sweaters, shirts, gloves, scarves, jewelry, sports equipment, shoes—the monotonous beauty of wealth. Crystal wine goblets on red velvet. Onyx chess sets. Japanese cameras. Golf clubs. Books. Undaunted, the traditional Christmas scene-stealers—carders, coaches and horses, shepherds, angels, wise men, kings —do battle in the same windows, with the tainted goods that surround them.
Good for you. Fight the good fight.
He is not daunted, either. Christmas means gifts, and he puts his money down with the rest; says, “Have a nice Christmas,” when he is handed his packages. “You, too,” they say.

Before class one morning, Lazenby corners him at his locker. “What happened? Salan says you quit.”

He nods curtly.

“Why?”

The halls are teeming with people. Mild frenzy. Two minutes before the final bell.

“I felt like it,” he says. “It was a bore.”

“Some reason.”

He doesn’t answer; busies himself with rummaging in his locker for his chemistry book. Lazenby leans an elbow against the wall. “Con, is something the matter?”

“What d’you mean?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs his shoulders, looking worried. Big, blond, sincere-type. When he was in the hospital, Lazenby wrote him his only letter, told him the scores of the Cubs and White Sox games; at the bottom of the page, “I miss you, man.” He had read it a million times before he finally threw it away.

“Listen, don’t worry,” Conrad says. “Everything’s fine.”

“I don’t know, man. You’ve been acting funny lately.”

It trips the lever on the thing he meant
not
to say. “Laze, take my advice. You hang around with flakes, you get flaky.”

“Shit, I knew that was it. Well, why you pissed at me?”

“I’m not pissed!”

“Ah, Connie. I
know
you.” He tries a grin. “Look, I’m sorry. I’d be pissed, too, but you shouldn’t have quit—”

“That’s not why! Man, I said it was a fucking bore.” He slams his locker closed, giving the lock a savage twist as he walks away. Lazenby falls into step beside him.

“Wait a minute, listen, will ya? I talked to Salan and he says—”

“Well, quit talking to people!” he snaps. “Leave me alone!”

The bell rings shrilly over their heads. They stare at each other.

“Ah, shit,” Lazenby says. “The hell with you.”

A hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he has been punched—
Never mind screw him screw them all they were Buck’s friends anyway
—he walks on to class, feeling nothing.

 

 

“So, what does your dad say about it?” Berger asks.

He sighs. “I haven’t told him yet.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. The timing isn’t right. He sweats everything so much. He’ll just worry about it.”

“So you haven’t told anybody? Your mother?”

“My mother? No. Listen, my mother and I do not connect, I told you that before.”

“So, does that bother you?”

“No. Why should it?”

Berger shrugs. “I don’t know. Some people it might bother, that’s all.”

“My mother is a very private person,” he says. “We don’t ride the same bus. Who does? What do you have in common with your mother? Surface junk—brush your teeth, clean your room, get good grades. My mother—” He stops. Careful, careful. “People have a right to be the way they are,” he says.

“Noble thought,” Berger says. “So how’s it going? You feeling better since you’re not swimming?”

“I guess.” He picks, with his thumbnail, at the wooden arm of the chair.

“Sleeping better?”

“I jack off a lot. It helps.”

Berger grins. “So what else is new?”

He slides down to the end of his spine, his legs stretched in front of him, staring at the floor. Over his shoulder, the clock ticks loudly.

“Come on, kiddo,” Berger prods gently. “Something’s on your mind today.”

“Nothing’s new, nothing’s on my mind. I don’t think anything. I don’t feel anything.” Abruptly he sits up. “I oughta go home.”

Berger nods. “Maybe so. What is it that you don’t feel, huh? Anger? Sadness? Any of the twenty-eight flavors?”

A tiny seed opens slowly inside his mind. In the hospital the seed would grow and begin to produce thick, shiny leaves with fibrous veins running through them. More leaves to come. Like tiny, curled up fists they will hit at him. He tightens his grip on the arms of the chair. The wood is sticky and wet under his hands. He wets his lips nervously. “What time is it?”

“Lots of time,” Berger says. The eyes are fixed on him, a tender and compelling blue. “Hey. Remember the contract we got? You wanted to have more control. You see any connection here, between control and this —what’ll we call it—lack of feeling?”

He closes his eyes. A jungle in there, inside his head. He opens them quickly. “I didn’t say I never feel things. I feel things.”

“When?”

“Sometimes.”

“You gonna give me the famine, wars, violence-in-the-streets business again?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Come on, kiddo, I’m doing all the work here. I thought you told me you didn’t like to play games.”

“I don’t. I’m not. I don’t know what you want.”

“Then, I’ll tell you. I want you to leave ‘I don’t know’ out there on the table with the magazines, okay?”

“And what if I don’t have an answer? You want me to make one up?”

“Yeah, that’d be nice. Make me one up right now, about how you’ve turned yourself inside out and the overwhelming evidence is that there are no feelings in there no-how.”

“I said I have feelings.”

Berger sighs. “Now you have ’em, now you don’t. Get it together, Jarrett.”

“Why are you hassling me? Why are you trying to get me mad?”

“Are you mad?”

“No!”

Berger sits back in the chair. “Now that,” he says, “is a lie. You are mad as hell. You don’t like to be pushed. So why don’t you do something?”

“What?”

“Geez, I don’t know! Tell me to fuck off, go to hell, something!”

“Fuck off,” he says. “Go to hell.”

Berger laughs. “Glory, what feeling. When’s the last time you got really mad?”

He says, carefully, “When it comes, there’s always too much of it. I don’t know how to handle it.”

“Sure, I know,” Berger says. “It’s a closet full of junk. You open the door and everything falls out.”

“No,” he says. “There’s a guy in the closet. I don’t even know him, that’s the problem.”

“Only way you’re ever gonna get to know him,” Berger says, “is to let him out now and then. Along with the boots, and tennis rackets, stale bread, whatever you got stored up there. You go through it, you sort it out, you throw some of it away. Then you stack up the rest, nice and neat. Next time it won’t be such a big deal.”

“I don’t have the energy,” he says.

“Kiddo, you got any idea how much energy it takes to hold the door closed like you do? That’s power. Your own personal power and nobody else’s.”

“Sometimes,” he says, “when you let yourself feel, all you feel is lousy.”

Berger nods. “Maybe you gotta feel lousy sometime, in order to feel better. A little advice, kiddo, about feeling. Don’t think too much about it. And don’t expect it always to tickle.”

 

 

On another shopping trip after school, with his head somewhere else, he sidesteps a puddle, nearly walking into someone coming the other way.

“Oh,” she says. “Hi. How’re you?”

Embarrassed, he mumbles an apology; then looks at her. It is Jeannine.

“What’re you doing up here?” she asks. “I thought the swim team practiced until six.”

“They do,” he says.

“I thought you were swimming.”

“I used to,” he says. “I don’t any more.”

“Oh. Don’t you swim as well as you sing?”

“What?”

She laughs. “Just kidding. I’m getting to know your voice now. You’re the tenor who stays on pitch.”

He takes it as a reprimand. She should not be able to hear him above the others. “I’ll sing softer tomorrow.”

“No. You know, you ought to be doing the solo in that Russian thing. You have much better tone than Ron.”

The voice of authority. He knows about her: that she has applied for a music scholarship to the University of Michigan, that she takes private voice lessons, that Faughnan is in love with her ability. He has stood in the back of the auditorium after class, listening to her practice, while Miriam Gleason accompanies her on the piano and Faughnan stands next to her, stopping her in the middle of a phrase, instructing her. She nods her head, gravely; goes back and repeats, all the time looking as if she is the music itself, and she is small and grave and beautiful; her hair shimmers under the stage lights; her eyelashes are light-gold crescents.

“You want to have a Coke?” he blurts out suddenly.

She hesitates. “Sure. Fine.”

They walk along the street together and she fills the spaces easily with words while he, amazed and dumb-struck at what he has just done, struggles with the overwhelming problems confronting him: where will he take her? what will they talk about?

“—kinds of music that I like. He’s the most
classical-minded
teacher, don’t you think?”

Not Pasquesi’s.
It is always crowded after school; filled with people that he knows, and yet, doesn’t know any more. The windows are opaque with the steam of bodies. Just walking by the place reinforces his sense of separation.

“There’s a place up around the corner,” he says.

“Fine. It’s nearer to my house. I have to be home by four-thirty. My brother doesn’t have a key.”

She looks up at him. Clear, blue eyes. Like someone else’s. With a start, he recognizes them. Berger’s eyes. Weird.

Inside the small, nearly empty coffee shop (it is not an in-place, obviously), she loosens her coat; slips out of it. She is wearing a gold-and-yellow-striped sweater, a gold chain around her neck. He cannot look directly at her, focuses his eyes slightly to the left of her face.

“Well,” she says, “I’m doing all the talking. What kinds of music do
you
like?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Modern jazz. Folk rock. Whatever’s around, I guess.”

“You don’t like classical?”

“I’m not too familiar with it.”

“Do you know baroque? Telemann? Ortiz?”

“No. Tell me about them. Telemann and who?”