Other Plans (6 page)

“He's a good-looking boy,” his mother continued. “Almost too good-looking.”

Too good-looking for what? he asked himself. He admired Keith's looks, thought him extraordinary in all ways. No one else looked like Keith. He recognized a certain truth in what his mother had said about being too good-looking. And began to notice and take notes.

Girls collected at Keith's approach, voices shrill and strident as they clamored for his attention. They milled about, pushing and shoving one another in mock combat, hoping, no doubt, to fall wounded at Keith's feet; wounded and swooning, in need of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. If they'd asked Keith for his autograph, he, John Hollander, wouldn't have been surprised. Maybe that was the way it was to walk down the street with Woody. To walk side by side with a luminary whose light obscured other lights. He was not offended by his own lack of notice. When people made a fuss over him, it would be because of a play he'd written, or a great, hilarious film he'd not only directed but also written and starred in. A triple-threat man, not unlike W. Allen.

Last year, a boy two classes ahead of them had called Keith “pretty boy,” and then said it again, right there in the hall. Keith had punched out the kid, knocked him down all on his own. John had been at soccer practice and not there to help. Next day, reinforced by two bulky brothers, the older kid had waylaid Keith and jumped him. Three against one. Keith wound up with a purple bruise under his eye and two loose teeth.

“Next time they'd better bring the whole family,” was all Keith had said.

“He's very conceited, isn't he, John?” his sister, Leslie, had said after she met Keith for the first time. “I can't stand conceited people.”

“No, he's not,” he'd defended his friend. “Can he help it if he's handsome and well-built?”

“So are you, sugar,” Leslie had cried, pulling him to his feet. She was teaching him to dance disco and it took every ounce of his energy to keep up with her. Leslie was a dancing fool, a madwoman on the dance floor.

“Abandon yourself!” she kept hollering. “Lose your inhibitions! Let yourself go! And for God's sake, John, quit looking at your feet!”

That was his trouble. He was always looking at his feet. The subject of Keith had never come up again.

5

Keith showed up halfway through history class. Walking jauntily up to Mr. Simons's desk, he handed over a note, doubtless written in his mother's handwriting, which he'd become adept at copying. Simons read it without comment, nodded curtly at Keith, the go-ahead for him to park his carcass.

After class, they headed for study hall. “Gleason didn't say anything,” he said, containing his curiosity. “I guess he didn't even notice you were among the missing.”

“That's my forceful personality,” Keith said. “I'm missed immediately. I got things settled down. She's asleep. The doc gave her a shot. Said it should keep her quiet until I get home. He thinks it would be a good idea if she went to her drying-out place again. For a week or two, he says.” Keith spoke in a detached way, as if none of this were important.

He wanted to ask what had set Keith's mother off when she'd been doing so well. But he had learned from experience. It was better if Keith volunteered information. One direct question and he'd clam up: Keith would tell when he felt like telling.

“My father's getting married next week,” Keith said abruptly. “And you know what?” Keith's voice and face betrayed a rare excitement. “He wants me to be best man. Get that. Best man for my own father! It's my official coming of age, right? Some guys get a new car, some get shares of stock. Me, I get to be my father's best man. How about that?”

An answer was expected of him. “Great,” he said, trying to imagine himself as his father's best man. Trying to be enthusiastic. “That's really something.”

It was all right. Keith was off and running, as excited as he would ever be. “My father said he's sending a friend's plane for me. An eight-passenger Cessna. Then he asked to speak to my mother. Like an ass, I should've said she was out, in the can, anything. Instead”—Keith's face was suddenly wiped clean of all emotion, as if an eraser had been drawn across it—“instead, I put her on the phone, and that's when the shit hit the fan. She said I couldn't go. She said it was March, exam time, that I couldn't miss school, that the whole thing was ridiculous, out of the question. So then my father said if necessary, he'd come up and personally escort me down to Palm Beach. He'd come to the school and explain the situation to Gleason, who he was sure would understand.

“Then she said, ‘You try it, buster. Just you try it,' and they were off on one of their better donnybrooks.” Keith stopped walking, faced him. The sky seemed very close, resting on the treetops. Wind slithered slyly, looking for a place to light. Neither of them wore parkas or gloves. He felt like walking, wanted to get inside somewhere it was warm. But Keith hadn't finished his story. He hugged himself, wanting to hear, not wanting to, knowing there would be no happy ending.

“They fight over me like two dogs over a bone.” Keith threw wide his arms. “I can't believe it. It's not me they want so much as they want an excuse to hurt each other. That I know. It's not me. I used to think it was but it's not. I'm the weapon each one of them uses to get back at the other.” They walked slowly up the steps to the study hall. “The upshot is they wind up screaming at each other long distance. Expensive screaming, huh?”

He stayed quiet and tried to look understanding. He was very cold. And weary, so weary. As if what Keith was saying had happened to him and not to Keith.

“So then of course she had to have a little drink to calm herself down.” Keith held the door open and he walked into the study hall, a decrepit, somewhat battered building on the school grounds. The hall was thinly carpeted, long and narrow and dark. Four rooms led directly off it, each identically equipped with Salvation Army furniture. The heating was inadequate, a unifying feature of all buildings at St. Mark's.

“So that was that.” Keith ran a finger across his throat. “One drink is suicide. She can't have one. She's got to have eight. A minimum of eight. I wonder if my father did that on purpose. Told her about getting married and wanting me to be best man, I mean. Just to get her going.” Keith looked at him with glittering eyes.

He turned away, shocked, and said, “He wouldn't do that, would he?”

“I wouldn't be surprised. You should've seen the guy she dragged home last night.” Keith bounded from one subject to another with astonishing ease. “His neck was bigger around than my waist. A regular Dallas Cowboy.”

“What happened? Did they arrest the guy or what?”

“He took after one of the cops, and they both tackled him. Lucky for them he was drunk, or he'd have wiped up the pavement with them. The neighbors had a real show. They were hanging out of the windows like a circus had come to town.” Keith's voice was full of bitterness. “It'll give those old crones something to chew over for weeks. Who knows? We might get evicted.” Keith and his mother lived in an apartment whose walls were thin. Through them could be heard a symphony of flushing toilets, domestic arguments, TV explosions, gunfire. It was not a place for secrets.

“Those drying-out joints run into big bucks,” Keith said. A door opened at the end of the hall. They scuttled into the lavatory. He washed his hands in hot water, trying to warm them, avoiding the sight of his own face in the mirror. He knew better than to offer anything other than his ear and his attention. He'd learned the hard way. The last time this kind of thing had happened, he'd made the mistake of offering advice. Keith had turned tense, his manner chilly. Keith didn't want advice, he wanted someone to unload his troubles on, someone he could trust not to tell. And he was that person. He didn't mind. Keith knew he'd keep his lip buttoned. He and Keith were friends. That was what friends were for.

“I could always knock myself off,” he heard Keith say over the sound of running water. “Then she could collect my life insurance and be in fat city for about ten minutes.”

“You've got life insurance?” he asked, amazed. “I thought only parents and old people had life insurance.”

“My father was in insurance before he got into real estate,” Keith said. “He messes around with a lot of different jobs. He gets bored easily. Anyway, for my birthday when I was nine, or maybe ten, he gave me a policy as a present. I'm worth twenty-five thou on the hoof. About right for one good night on the town. Or one good week in the bin.” Keith laughed his short, humorless laugh.

As they went out into the hall, the bell rang. Mrs. Arthur was there, clapping her hands, sending her dewlaps dancing.

“Order, boys, order!” she sang out in her gravelly voice. Rumor had it that Mrs. Arthur owed her exalted position as study hall head to the fact she was making it with Mr. Gleason, headmaster of St. Mark's. Mr. Gleason was Dickensian in appearance, his elongated body wrapped in ancient tweeds, his cheeks hollowed by debauchery. He affected a stick while walking about the grounds. His dog even looked like the Hound of the Baskervilles. His arms and legs and nose were all very long and thin; Keith had christened him Spider.

Mr. Gleason was all right, actually. His smile was kind. He carried a perpetual musty odor with him, as if his pockets were filled with long-forgotten possessions in need of an airing. He had one front tooth that protruded just far enough to make closing his mouth all the way an impossibility.

“Keith Madigan!” Mrs. Arthur trilled, herding them into an empty room. “You sit there and you, John, sit on the other side of the room. I have to keep you two apart.” Mrs. Arthur twinkled at them. “You're as chatty as a couple of girls.” Mrs. Arthur was infatuated with the sound of her own voice. She had been the sixth-grade English teacher, and every once in a while, with her eyes misting over and chest thrust forward, she'd start reciting Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess,” no matter that the class had been discussing Rudyard Kipling or even Walt Whitman.

“She had a heart—how shall I say—too soon made glad, too easily impressed,” Mrs. Arthur told one and all. “My Last Duchess” was a poem about a crappy old duke describing his late wife whose portrait hung on his castle wall. It was Mrs. Arthur's favorite poem. And, as she emoted, the entire sixth grade—numb and uncomprehending, rosy faces lifted to the fluorescent light like hothouse flowers seeking the sun—was thinking its own thoughts, playing its own games.

This state of affairs, like all good things, did not last. Soon there was a new English teacher, a stiff, bowlegged young man with a bushy mustache that completely hid his mouth, leading to the rumor that he was toothless as a result of a social disease. This no-nonsense young man taught them the parts of speech, the art of diagramming a sentence, and rendered the amazing information that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This was heavy going compared to what had been dished out prior to this, and they didn't know what to make of it.

All in all, the sixth grade preferred Mrs. Arthur, who had expected nothing more of them than their undivided attention as she gave herself freely to her captive audience. And after a brief spell the young English teacher with the bushy mustache left St. Mark's and became a teller in a bank and eventually rose to the rank of a vice-president, where he was lost forever to the parts of speech and the parsing of sentences.

After study hall ended, he and Keith trudged silently toward the gym. A crust had formed on the snow. Gray and filthy, it crunched dismally under their feet.

“Who's your father marrying?” he asked.

“Some rich, gorgeous dame,” Keith drawled. “He doesn't know any other kind. I'll tell you what she looks like.” Abruptly, Keith came to a halt. “She's got these gigantic knockers.” He gestured extravagantly, outlining the knockers. “And she's a blonde, maybe a redhead, probably in her twenties. She reads the
Wall Street Journal
and the
National Enquirer
and she dresses all in the same color. All pink, all lavender, whatever. And before my father goes out with her, he has a massage and a facial and a manicure and he holds in his stomach and holds up his head so his chins disappear and he dances up a storm. He said she could give Brooke Shields a run for her money.” Keith hunched his shoulders down into his sweater. “I didn't even know he knew who Brooke Shields was. Usually he sticks with the golden oldies. He gets the hots over Tuesday Weld, for Christ's sake.” Keith kicked savagely at the snow.

“My father and I are having a confrontation tonight,” he blurted, not having planned to tell Keith anything about it. He was better at listening to Keith's problems than Keith was at listening to his. “At eight o'clock sharp we square off. He's sitting me down to hand out the same old crap. He wants the skinny on what I'm doing with my life, what my plans are for the future. Christ, you'd think I was pushing forty and still living off him. I'm only a callow youth. I'm only sixteen, Daddy. That's what I'm going to give him.”

To his utter dismay, he felt his eyes fill with tears. He drew his shirt sleeve across his face, pretending it was part of the act.

“Tell him to put it on tape,” Keith said in a bored voice. “That way, he can play it back when he's in a lecturing mood.”

“Oh, I just tune out. I know all the dialogue.” He imitated his father. ‘“John, you've got to pull up your socks. Get your act together. Buckle down. Follow through.' All that.”

“Fathers are full of bullshit,” Keith said. “Just because they're fathers doesn't mean they've got the answers. Keep that in mind next time he lays you out and stomps on you. They don't know an awful lot more than we do. They just pretend, they fake a lot. One thing about my old man, he doesn't hand me any bullshit. He knows I won't buy it. Besides,” Keith smiled a little, “with his track record, how can he let me have it between the eyes?”