Undercover (2 page)

J
ILLY IS NOT SOMEONE who would stop and watch the trees. She hangs with the Luscious Juniors crowd; you put them all together, and it’s a clothes store. They know style like I know words. They walk, and there’s a breeze. It was hard on Jilly when I moved up from middle school—she made it easier by pretending I didn’t exist. I learn at lightning speed. Now the only time Jilly and I say hello in the hall is when there’s no one there except for us, which, for the record, never happens. I’m the one thing and she’s the other, and I do not cramp her style.

The girls in my grade keep their distance, too, and for me that doesn’t matter. I don’t mess with them, I don’t score with gossip, I don’t steal the lead in the school play, which, by the way, was
West Side Story
last school year. I’m not ever going to bump someone from a party list, because I’m on no one’s roster. I don’t even hang in the margins hoping for some kind of attention, and ever since Margie and I decided in eighth grade that we wouldn’t be best friends anymore, I’ve kept my own best counsel. I’m the kind of girl you’d want for your boyfriend’s science partner, and if once in a while my mug shows up as Student of the Month, that steals nobody’s thunder.

I slipped Karl the best lines I had written for Sue when we were dumping trash from our trays in the cafeteria. The bell was ringing. I’d looked around before I approached him to make sure no one had seen, and he stuffed my lines directly into his pocket without even taking a look. “Thanks, Elisa,” he mumbled.

“Yeah.”

“Is this all I need?”

“You’ve got the starter kit, Karl. You’re golden.” With the second bell blaring, Karl went off. I slipped my hands into my empty pockets and went the other way.

A few days later I was at my locker collecting stuff for math when I noticed Theo Moses of Honors English standing beside me. He wasn’t doing much, just standing there, hands in his pocket, sort of trying to get my attention but doing an awkward job of it.

“What’s up?” I finally asked him, because it was weird with him just hovering there, not talking.

“Nothing much.” Theo shrugged.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “I’ve got math.” And because math is a whole hallway in one direction and a turn and half a second hallway in another, I slammed my locker shut and started walking. “Numbers aren’t my thing,” I said to Theo, though
I shouldn’t have felt, usually do not feel, the need for any explaining. “I get to class early.”

“Wait up,” Theo said, and despite himself he started to hurry, switching his backpack from his right shoulder to his left so he could cut the crowd more quickly. He’d hung a furry blue monkey on a key chain from his belt, and it was jiggling with his hustling. He’d gelled his short blond hair straight up in the front and had a gold dot earring in his supremely ordinary right lobe.

“Elisa,” he said, and again I asked him, “What?” and this time he said, “I heard—Karl told me—about, you know, the notes and stuff.”

“Have a girl problem, Theo?” I asked. Because I was precisely one turn and half a hallway from math now, and we were running out of time, and because sometimes, like Dad says, you have to move your clients along. Name the issue. Cut directly to the chase.

“It’s not a
problem
,” Theo said, the words coming out between his teeth in a snarly way that made him
sound both embarrassed and threatening. How spikelike, I thought, is his hair?

“An opportunity then?” I asked, like I knew my father would.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Who is she?”

“This is between you and me, right?” Theo said, as if we were best friends or blood relations, as if I knew a single thing about him beyond the fact that it was a big, wide stretch for him to be in Honors anything. Theo was an only child, I knew that. He played lacrosse, a bruisers’ game. He had a bunch of guys who high-fived him, and girls who idly watched him. He was nothing special, Theo. Not until you looked at him.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure.” Just like that, because who cares?

“Lila,” Theo whispered. “I’m in love with Lila.”

“But—” I started, and then stopped. This is America, after all. Free market. Free will. Theo didn’t have a chance with Lila, but was that supposed to
matter to me? I give out poems, not love advice. I do what I’m asked, no more. Lila’s only going for seniors these days, I didn’t say. Lila’s only ever going to be with the captain of the basketball team.

“So you can help?” Theo pressed, for we had reached Mr. Marcoroon’s door and there was an equation on the board I’d have to sit down and answer soon. He looked so—I don’t know—vulnerable. He touched the dot on his ear, half smiled. Karl by this time had become Mr. Sue. Theo knew results when he saw them.

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever, Theo. You can pick up the goods at my locker tomorrow, before the bell.”

I
HAD TO THINK. I had to go right back out to my pond and think. Because what is it about the world’s Lilas that testosterone thinks it sees? Long, dark hair and tiny feet: I give her that. Eyelashes long, thin, and tangly as spider legs. A way of saying nothing that has everyone guessing what she thinks. A permanent, genetic smile inscribed upon her face.

She could never go undercover, the lovely Lila, and because of that she had my sympathy. Boys watched her constantly. Girls watched her, too—growing their hair out long in Lila style, dressing
their feet in shoes a size too small, wetting their lashes with globs of Vaseline, as if that could ever add to their allure. She was defenseless against her own beauty. She could never show up anywhere and just be. Never be anything but a walking, high-gloss ad for the ultimate epitome of pretty.

“Lord above,” I said to myself as I sat on the rickety dock at the pond, which was clearer that day, less agitated, more full of sky. The same hawk was up high and the air was acorn ripe and the marble girl was still reading her book, hadn’t turned a single page in all this time. I wondered how it felt, to be sunk for all eternity.

Lila, Lila, Lila, I thought. And Theo, Theo, Theo. You’d have to be a calculus genius to make that equation work. Did he think his furry monkey was enough to catch her eye? Did he suppose she’d want to touch his spiky hair? Finger his gold ear dot? Whatever made Theo think he had a chance with her? Lacrosse was not basketball, never would be.

None of my existing metaphors would do. None
of the goods in my Stash O’ Nature box. None of the poems in my head. Some subjects flat-out stump you, no matter how smart you are, and when that happens, Dad says, take a breather. I closed my eyes. I opened them. A leaf was falling from up high, and it was drifting down. It fell at last upon the pond and was drawn, by some secret force, toward the marble girl with the marble book upon her knees.

Track the changes, Dad had said, but the thing is: You can’t count all the leaves. You can’t name all the colors. You can feel the autumn coming, though, and in that turning there is mystery.
Lila.
I practiced Theo’s note in my head.
Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting toward you.

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER I gave Theo the Lila note, I saw them walking down the hall with their hands laced tight together. She was bending toward him, murmuring something, and he was earnest beyond earnest, leaning just so close and listening. You’d think each stand-up-straight hair on Theo’s head was an antenna. You’d think his mouth was a third eye, the way it was watching all her talking. Even his little blue monkey wasn’t dancing so hard. It was as if the two new lovebirds were all wrapped up in a filmy bubble or stuck inside their own Ziploc bag.

Whatever, I thought. Whatever. Because, like Dad says, we consultants don’t do what we do for gratitude. We do it because it’s an outlet for our talent, because solving problems is a form of exercise; we’re just sharpening our skills for some future something of importance. Clients are the last people on earth who could ever be counted on for thanks. Dad says they always think, somehow, that if actually pressed, they could do the work themselves—fix the company, heal what’s broken. Write the poem.

Fifth period was coming on, and fifth period was Honors English, Honors English being the one class I share with Theo. We’d been working on plays all semester long, and today’s play was by a French guy—Edmond Rostand. I’d never heard of him, and I wasn’t in the mood to care, and when Dr. Charmin began her context speech, I found my thoughts flitting up, around, and else-where—toward my dad, who had flown off to San Francisco that morning; toward the pond and the
marble girl inside the pond; toward Theo, sitting three rows up and two people over, looking like half a person now, without his beloved Lila. I wasn’t dialing into the lecture at all until I heard Dr. Charmin quoting from some critic: “‘The great characteristic of Rostand’s attitude towards the world he lives in consists of two things: a conviction of the necessity of what has recently been called “the lyric life,” and a feeling that the average man fails to appreciate this necessity.’”

The average man fails to appreciate the lyric life.
Well, I thought. What else is new?

By now Dr. Charmin was on a roll, going on in her sentimental fashion. “Rostand was a man,” she was saying, “who dared, at the early age of twenty-nine, to write a five-act drama in verse. A man whose work is as important to our understanding of ourselves and of language as Shakespeare ever was.” Dr. Charmin had a sob-up-in-her-throat way of speaking and blond hair that was much too blond for her pale skin. You
had to fight your way through her love of language for the facts.

Still, she had gotten my attention, or rather this playwright Rostand had, and now I picked up the dog-eared, faded-to-gray play pamphlet that had been left on every one of our desks.
Cyrano de Bergerac
the play was called, and even as Dr. Charmin continued, I was flipping the pages, scooping up phrases, seeing what I could see for myself. “She’s beautiful / as a peach amused with strawberries,” I read. “So cool / that merely to see her is to enrheum the heart.” Peaches amused with strawberries, I made a Note to Self. Enrheum, I thought. Be sure to look it up. And then there was this passage that would have caught anybody’s eye, about the hero’s fabulously gigantic nose—a Ninth World Wonder of some sort:

Who knew that the shape and size of noses was a subject contemplated and lyrically translated by very famous playwrights? Who knew, for that matter, that peaches had the capacity, despite their pitted hearts, to grow bedazzled and amused?

“We’ll be reading
Cyrano de Bergerac
to one another,” Dr. Charmin was saying. “We’ll be thinking about chivalry and humility, self-sacrifice and love, identity and appearance, loyalty and yearning. We’ll be asking these questions throughout: Tragedy? Or comedy? What is the emotional legacy of this play?” And then without further ado, as they say, Dr. Charmin doled out the parts—the multiple marquis, the officers, the sisters,
the porter, a musketeer, a bore, Christian de Neuvillette, Ragueneau, Le Bret, Cyrano de Bergerac, and—to me, the ordinary girl in the back of the room—the object of all male desire, Roxane.

N
OVEMBER’S DAYS are shorter than October’s. The sun hangs that much lower in the sky, and the clouds, when there are clouds, are dense. Out by the pond only the steadfast birds remained—the black birds that I like to call ravens for effect but that are, in point of fact, mere backyard crows. “Where are you going?” my mother sometimes asked me. But mostly she did not. I opened the door, and I was gone.

Dad was, as he said, in a bad place with his work. Stuart Small, the San Francisco client, was a nuisance. No matter what Dad did, Small wanted
more—wanted everything Dad knew and thought and then some. Every few days or so the guy would forget what he had originally commissioned, or change his mind, or fail to implement Dad’s strategy, and then that would be Dad’s fault—this failure to remember, this failure to act—and Dad would have to start all over again. “Working for pennies,” Dad would say. “Working for peanuts and a long, tall glass of pain.”

“You’re supposed to be your own boss,” Mom would say to Dad on the telephone at night. “And the front doorknob is broken and the back sliding screen door is off its track, and isn’t that your job too? To be here with your family? To fix things? Whom do you love, Robert? What and whom? Make up your mind.” And then my mom would stop and say she was sorry. Yes, she would say. Yes, she understood. Dad would say something to make her laugh, and she’d tell him that she loved him, and then he’d make her blush.

But the night before, the talk hadn’t ended with
love, and when Mom hung up, she was crying. There were clear streaks down her powdery foundation. Her lips had lost their painted color and were two thin, pale-blue lines. Jilly was sprawled across the family-room couch, a nighttime soap opera turned on. “Mom,” she said, offering up her ginger ale, “come here and watch,” for this was Jilly’s way, which was the way she’d learned from Mom: When bad things happen, grab a drink and an old worn blanket and lie yourself right down.

I went to the pond to think. I went to the pond, and no one found me, and when I came home nobody wondered where I’d been, or at least nobody asked. Most of the leaves of autumn were already on the ground, except for a few yellow flags here and there. There was a raven in most every tree, but not a single hawk to be found, and the sky was poked to bits with the nakedness of trees. The color of the day was the color of a storm that had chosen not to come.

You could think of the dock as one long rickety
stair that perched above the pond. You could think of sitting there all afternoon with your feet hinged down, watching the changeless girl in her autumn world, bright fallen leaves paddling over her head. I thought of all the things she must have seen and all she could not say. About the mansions that once had been and the people who had lived in them, all gone now. About how nobody but me had laid claim to the pond, at least not that particular autumn.

I thought about Dad. I thought about the hills he said he climbed every day and the famous people he saw in their everyday clothes and how trolleys supposedly went up and down with people hanging out their windows. I thought about the big granite wedge that was Stuart Small’s building. Dad said the granite had a copper sparkle to it, and that no matter where you went inside the place, you felt like you’d been gleamed. Stuart Small was a little man who wore elevating shoes, Dad said. He’d shaved his head to give himself stature. He’d been
buying other companies as a way of getting big, and now everything was cracking at the seams. Dad was there because Small needed advice, and that was Dad’s forte—advising. Dad took thoughts that were messy and he made them neat. He drew out clear lines between choices. You could ask him what might happen and he’d paint a picture for you. You could tell him you were worried, and he’d listen.

Which is why I wished that Dad were back—because he’d know what to do with Lila’s Theo, which was, by the way, what everyone now called him; he was that possessed. He was Lila’s Theo, and he was at her side morning, noon, and probably night—between classes and in the lunchroom and, whenever weather permitted, on the sloping turf of the school’s front yard, a place we all called Romance Hill. Romance Hill is where new lovers go to announce their loverhood. It’s like taking out an ad on
The New York Times
’s front page.

Except, in the quiet before school actually began, before Lila’s bus had turned up in the line, I had
Theo to myself, or he had me. All I ever had to do was show up at my locker, and there he’d be, sort of prowling around, wanting to talk but not wanting to talk, wanting my advice and also wishing he didn’t need it.

“Elisa,” he’d say.

“What?” I’d answer.

“You have something?”

And because he couldn’t say it, I tried to make him. Sometimes that’s the only power you have. “Something like a poem, you mean?”

“Something like that.”

“Something for Lila?”

“Come on, Elisa.”

“Yeah, sure.” I’d shrug, handing him the latest rendition of love on a balled-up piece of paper. I’d watch his face as he read.

And that was our ritual. That was our thing. The poems themselves were like little nothing poems—two-line metaphors with no real beat, no lasting magic, just something Theo could slip into the girl’s
locker before her bus dropped her at school. The poems made Lila sweet for Theo. They made her turn her liquid eyes on him, walk beside him on her tiny feet, wrap her hand up tight in his.

I knew the work was lame, but Lila didn’t, and that’s what mattered, at least to Theo, who would take the words and rewrite them as his own and slink off down the hall, his little blue monkey dancing. I’d tell myself it was nothing, pretend it was as easy as it had always been, but the truth was I was
growing weary. Language is not a bottomless well, and also—it gets tedious, being on love’s lookout for others.

Besides that, Theo was a client like no other, needing something jazzy and new every day. My other clients had only ever needed a line or two, and then they would take it from there. But Lila, I was learning, was insatiable—had Theo dangling from some kind of love-poem string. She needed adoration. She needed it in words. She needed it daily. The situation was headed for trouble. And now when David asked for help, I had to tell him I was booked. When Lyle needed attitude, I said, “Go watch some movies.” I didn’t know how to cut the cord with Theo. I’d started feeling sorry for him, and how I hated that, and also: Theo was kind of cute. Yes, you had to look at him up close to notice, but then you really did.

I kicked my feet out over the dock and watched the shadows. I looked up at the birds in the trees and wished I could fly. I saw that the sun was
setting, but I was too tired to move, and I’d come up empty of metaphors. Dad would have known what to do, I was sure. Or at least he would have listened, if I’d cared to talk it through. But it was San Francisco where he was and November where I sat, and I was growing chilled to the bone.