Kitabı oxu: «Zoology»

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This book is about last summer. I’ll start before David saved me, though, when I was still living at home. I should have been in school, or in an apartment of my own, or teaching English in a village somewhere with noisy outdoor markets and old women who walked bent under piles of horsehair blankets. Instead I was in Chevy Chase. I slept every night under the same green baseball sheets I’d been sleeping under my entire life, the furnace clanking and chugging behind its door, and woke up every morning to Olive whining to be let in.

I’d started a semester at American—just a twelve-minute drive from home—and I’d been getting three Ds and a C. I kept thinking that someone would warn me if I was really getting myself into trouble, and then they did. When I got home for Thanksgiving Mom handed me a skinny envelope with the AU stamp. There was a letter inside from Dean Popkin telling me to take some time off and come back as a freshman next fall. He’d signed it, Have a restful year.

“Henry,” Mom said, reading over my shoulder, “is this a joke?” She sounded like it really might be.

Dad said, “Well, you know what? You may just not be a scholar. There’s no shame in that—or else I should be ashamed myself. Fall comes around again, we’ll see if you’re ready to give it another go. But in the meantime, this is not just going to be time to loaf. Let’s get you to work.”

So every morning, for all those months at home, I walked with Dad the five minutes up Cumberland to Somerset, my old elementary school. It was like working in a Museum of Me. Here were these same yellow hallways with their same sour-mop smell, and the library with the hard orange carpet and wooden boxes of golf pencils, and the brown tile bathrooms with their squeaking sinks and empty paper towel machines.

And here was Principal Morrow with his pink head and wobbly walk. And mean, round Mrs. Kenner, who used to always say, “Do I come into your living room and put my feet up on the sofa?” (I used to picture her living in our classroom, reading The Book of Knowledge at her desk, making her dinner at the sink where we rinsed the paintbrushes.) And looking small and pale now, here was Mr. Lebby, who had lost half of his left ring finger in a woodshop accident as a kid. He was the only teacher I ever had who picked me out as a favorite—when I was in fifth grade we used to stand around by the coat hooks during recess and talk about the Bullets, my opinions all stolen from Dad and so more important to me than if they’d been mine. The first time he saw me back, standing by the water fountain on the second floor, we had a fumbly hug and then he stood there with wet eyes saying, “Well.” But after that what could he really do? By January he and everyone else I used to know just nodded at me in the halls. I peed in the urinals that came up to my knees, and pledged allegiance along with thirty droning voices, and, in a trance of boredom between classes, I held a piece of paper over an air vent to make it float like a magic carpet.

I ate the cafeteria food for lunch. Holding a maroon admit one ticket that could have come off the roll I kept in my desk in third grade, I’d wait in line, having to work not to feel like part of the nervous elementary school nuttiness around me. Seventy-pound boys would prowl, making tough faces, looking to butt or back-butt, and four-foot girls with headbands—they could have been the same girls I’d gone to school with—would either let them in, quiet lawbreakers, or else raise their hands for the lunchroom monitor.

When I was a student there, Mrs. Moore, the gray-toothed lunch lady, would Magic Marker a symbol on the back of one Styrofoam tray each holiday—a heart on Valentine’s Day, a clover on St. Patrick’s Day, a pumpkin on Halloween—and in the second before you turned your tray over your brain would go quiet. You got to go first in line the next day if you got the marked tray, I think, but the point was the feeling: The whole day turned into a lottery when you knew one of those trays was out there. But Mrs. Moore died of lung cancer when I was in eighth grade (Dad brought home a newsletter with a smiling picture of her on the back, over 1932‒1997), and the trays they used now were made of hard brown plastic.

I’d eat the chicken pot pies and tuna melts and square pizzas in the art room, looking out at the kids stampeding around the basketball court, feeling a combination of sleepiness and hopelessness and boredom as particular to school as the smell of uncapped markers. New teachers would sometimes come sit with me, hoping to talk about apartments or what college I’d gone to, but eventually word seemed to get out that I wasn’t really one of them. I’d gotten lost in my life, I kept thinking, and now here—like someone lost in the woods—I’d walked right back to where I’d started.

Between classes, when I didn’t want to sit with Dad in the teachers’ lounge, I’d wander. That dark little staircase between Mrs. Rivini’s room and the computer room, where I once saw Teddy Montel kiss Sarah Sylver, dipping her like they were dancing. The Sharing and Caring room, with its posters covered in crinkly plastic and its taped-up beanbag chairs and its boxes and boxes of tissues. I’d run into Mr. Bale, the black turtle-looking janitor who once was in a commercial for the D.C. Lottery, and every time he saw me, every single time, he’d laugh and shake his head.

Dad taught six classes a day, forty-four minutes each, and I was his assistant. The kids called me Mr. Henry, so we’d know they weren’t talking to Dad, and it seems now like most of what I did for those five months was set up the xylophones. I can smell the spray we used to clean them if I picture pulling them out of the closet, the dark one the size of an oven, the little metal ones with corners that cut my hands, the long ones that made nice plunking sounds when the bars fell off. And all those classes of kids, Rachel and Lauren and Andy and Peter, with high voices and clean floppy hair and scrapes on their knees, always crying for reasons too painful for them to explain, and raising their hands to tell me their mallets didn’t work, and lining up for bathroom breaks. And the foreign kids, Gabor and Amir and Evelina and Nico. Dad used a special slow voice when he talked to them, and usually they were the strangest, quietest kids in the room, full of bizarre stories and languages that came out, when their brothers or parents finally picked them up at the end of the day, like the babble of people who’ve been possessed. (But they’re all foreign kids, I’d sometimes think—every one of them got to the world less than a decade ago.)

Dad seemed older when he was teaching than he did any other time, sitting on his tall stool with his elbows on his knees, treating every class like they ought to think about dropping out of school to concentrate full-time on their music. “If anybody wants to come in and play during recess, lunch, or after school, tell me and I’ll stick around as long as you feel like staying. I see a lot of talent here, a scary amount of talent.”

When I had him—when I was one of the little kids who loved shouting “Boo!” during the Halloween song—every music class was such a joy that all my weeks would aim straight for those Thursday mornings, the way other kids’ weeks aimed for Friday afternoons. Having him was like being the son of an actor or a politician, but even more electric because I wasn’t allowed to act like I was his son. I’d sit cross-legged on my mat, grinning, stuffed with secret power. At the end of the period I’d rush up to the front and stand there owning him while he packed away his music. From the piano bench now, though, I saw him the way the rest of the kids must have: an old man with huge glasses and gray hair and a loose belly who didn’t seem to really listen to the questions people asked him.

Walking home in the afternoon, getting waved across Dorset by a crossing guard with a bright orange belt, he’d say, “You’re a hell of a sport, listening to this rinky-dink stuff all day. You’re going to put in some work, and people one day are going to be bragging you were their teacher.”

Mom was less sure. Whenever Dad called me a musician, she looked down and starting paying angry attention to whatever she was doing. We sent little signals of hate and stubbornness to each other whenever she walked past me watching TV, or napping on the couch, or doing anything that wasn’t pretending to plan on going back to college. Before she went up to bed to read each night, she’d put a hand on my shoulder, tired from all the quiet fighting, and almost say something but then not.

My leaving school was only the latest thing to disappoint her, the easiest thing to put a name to. She’s always been dreamy, private, a little fed up with everyone she knows. She’ll sometimes let bits of complaints slip—“How long has your father lived here and he still doesn’t know where the can opener goes?” “If Uncle Walter doesn’t want to be alone, then he should do something about it”—but they just feel like spoonfuls from a bath. She doesn’t belong on the East Coast, she’s not interested in the women in Chevy Chase, she feels cheated that she’s fifty and all she’s done is raise children (and furious when she senses someone thinking that all she’s done is raise children). She has dark tea bags under her eyes, and for three, four hours a day she’ll sit in her blue chair and read the Post, looking disappointed. When she’s reading about politics she talks to the paper—“Unexpected by you, maybe,” “Oh, ho, ho, you are an idiot”—but if you ask her what she means she doesn’t answer. She clips her favorite “Doonesbury”s and uses them as bookmarks.

When she was twenty-one she took a bus from San Francisco to D.C. for a protest. She got arrested and put in the Redskins stadium for the night with thousands of other people, and sitting next to her on the field were four loudmouthed friends with beards and sweaters. They were in a jazz band, they told her, and the shortest, shyest one—the one who laughed like he had to think about it, who offered her his coat when she started to fall asleep—was Dad. She stayed in their house after they got out, and Dad convinced her to come on tour for a couple of months. She’d been looking for a reason not to go home.

She spent almost a year driving with them to clubs in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Delaware, even a few in Miami, only sleeping in the D.C. house a couple of nights a week. “I felt like an outlaw,” she says now, “sitting around smoky bars at three in the morning. It was divine.” But when the bassist quit to get married, Mom decided to go to nursing school. She loved doctors’ offices, loved medicine, loved the idea of spending her days so busy and helpful and serious. But at the end of her first year she got pregnant with David, and that summer, after explaining to everyone she knew how women went through nursing school pregnant all the time, she dropped out. (She still has her medical books in a box downstairs, though, all of them heavy and covered in furry dust. When I was in fifth grade I used to sneak down to read the part in Human Biology on orgasms—“… a series of involuntary muscular contractions followed by …”—and I’d go back up feeling as if I’d been downstairs with a prostitute.)

Dad had been managing a sheet music store in Georgetown while she was in school, and a few years after she dropped out he got a job teaching music to seventh graders in Gaithersburg. At night, instead of practicing, he’d stay up working on his lesson plans. “Those who can, do,” he likes to say. “I don’t kid myself about it.” Sometimes he actually sounds sad when he says it, but usually he sounds like he’s just trying to be modest, and hoping you’ll realize he’s just trying to be modest. Mom says—and you can see Dad wince whenever she says it—that she knew he’d teach for the rest of his life the minute he came home from his first day in the classroom. “You certainly don’t do it as a get-rich-quick scheme,” he says, but the truth is he doesn’t need a get-rich-quick scheme. When he and Mom were in their thirties, just before I was born, they inherited a lot of money from Dad’s parents. Mom, still good with a thermometer, still quick with cool washcloths, never got back to work.

In the pictures from when she was in her twenties she’s smiling, sitting on a porch I don’t recognize holding a cigarette, or standing in front of a mirror with Dad’s sax around her neck, looking like a girl who might make me nervous. Her hair was still all brown then and her skin didn’t hang and she liked to wear long, silvery earrings. Sometimes she sang with Dad’s band. When I was little, before she was sad or maybe just before I realized she was sad, she used to sit on the edge of the rocking chair next to my bed and lean over me, singing in her whisperiest voice.

But now her happiest moments, or at least the ones she cared most about, came on Sunday nights when David would call from New York. She’d be ready with questions about a new show at the Whitney, or a new Spanish restaurant in Soho. “Will you get the phone?” she’d say, not moving. “Will you please get the phone? Someone get … that … phone! God damn it.” On the damn she’d clap her hands and stand up. Once she’d convinced herself that at least one Elinsky had lived well that week, she’d hand me the phone, still hot from her ear. After a minute he’d say, “I’m beat, man, I’ve got to get to bed. I got up at five this morning, and then tonight we went twelve innings. Completely fucking brain-dead ump. My guys were getting reamed out there.”

My brother, a resident in dermatology, lived with his girlfriend, Lucy, in her parents’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her parents weren’t there, though—they lived in a house with a fountain in Connecticut and only came to the city for birthdays and operas. Lucy has a doughy face that gets flushed after half a glass of wine or a few minutes without air-conditioning, and a long, pale body she likes to show off. She’s a painter, but I don’t think she’s ever sold a painting to anyone who isn’t related to her or a close friend. Her parents put together a show for her in their house once—David sent us the catalog—and the paintings all had names like Never/Always and Music for Trilobites. Never/Always is about September 11, David says, and it’s just a long red line on an all-blue canvas. When David first started dating her he really was doing all the things Mom wished he was—on weekends he took cooking classes and went for walks through the Met—and he bought two of Lucy’s paintings to hang above his bed. When my parents talked about her, before David moved into her apartment, Dad just called her “the artist.” He said it teasingly, pretending not to have learned her name, and so Mom, for reasons having as much to do with Dad as with Lucy, started saying it respectfully, the way you’d say “the judge” or “the senator.”

She and David came home this year for a weekend at the beginning of June, and that’s when David invited me to come to New York. Lucy brought gifts for both of my parents and me—they were just cubes of wood, a little bigger than sugar cubes, each side painted a different color. When Dad unwrapped his cube he tilted his head back to look through the reading half of his lenses and said, “Wow,” each time he turned it. She’d forgotten that Walter lived with us, so she rushed out to the car and came back with a blank cube, and while we talked on the front porch she sat there painting it with her “travel set,” as careful as a Christmas elf.

OK, I’ve never liked her. And not just because she’s pretty enough to make my mouth dry or because David gets to have sex with her every night, but those things certainly don’t help. I try not to think very much about how many girlfriends I’ve had, but: one. Two if you count Lisa Gabardine. David’s life didn’t used to be like this—sharing slices of cake after dinner, picking out necklaces for Valentine’s Day, going to bed-and-breakfasts in Pennsylvania with hot tubs on the porch. On Friday nights when he was in high school he’d take me to the movies and we’d have to sit in the back of the theater so nobody in his grade would see him. He hid a stack of greasy Penthouses underneath his rock collection. At night he closed his door and made radio shows on his stereo—I’d hear him through the wall trying to sound booming. He met Lucy at a gallery opening just after he moved to New York, and she was only his second serious girlfriend. She’d turned him into the kind of guy who owns shoes for every occasion. When he’s eating she’ll lean over and wipe the corner of his mouth, and he just keeps on talking.

During dinner out at the table on the patio she sat making a face like she was straining not to look at her watch. She only perked up when Dad asked about the paintings she’d been doing lately, forests full of trees with shiny black leaves. “I don’t really know what they’re ‘about,’” she said, “in the sense of if I were writing a paper or something. I just want them to … well, capture what I saw, I guess. David and I were on the train up to Connecticut—did he tell you this already?—and we passed a graveyard behind some woods, and after that I just kept thinking about those dead people climbing up through the roots.” Dad—who’d said, “Well, they aren’t how I’d paint it,” the first time he’d seen Lucy’s catalog—turned to me now and thumped the table. “You see?” he said. “That’s art. Taking life and turning it inside out. I love it.” I’d put on too much bug spray before we went out, and besides my lips being numb, every bite I took had a dark green hint of poison.

After dinner Dad handed each of us a DoveBar (Olive barked and leaped up for Lucy’s), and while Mom and Dad tried to get her inside, and while Walter stood by the fence and looked sad, David said to me, “Lucy and I have a proposition for you.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Move in with us. Come live in our second bedroom for a little.”

“Even just a month or two, we’re thinking, could be really fun,” Lucy said.

“I can’t stand thinking of you here losing your mind.” And then quietly, “Doesn’t being here just depress you?”

My throat filled with tear-snot, my heart ached and seemed to lean out of my chest—it was as if David had yanked away a sheet and shown me, for the first time, the real wreck of my year.

“Could I come next week?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Tomorrow?”

He laughed and said the job he had in mind for me—he knew someone at the Central Park Zoo—wouldn’t be able to start for a few weeks. I said thank-you so many times that he finally said, “I get it. You’re welcome. Shut up.”

Now that I knew I wouldn’t have to put up with them, the hundred little shames of home felt unbearable. Having to answer, again and again, “Oh, just taking some time off right now.” And all the Sundays when the sun would set and I’d realize that I hadn’t even put pants on. Or the lunches that summer when Uncle Walter and I would sit together not talking at the kitchen table and even he’d seem worried for me. Lately he’d been knocking on my door some evenings (did he wait for the sound of my bed creaking?) to ask if I felt like coming downstairs to talk. And when I said OK, when I pulled up my pants and gritted my teeth and stomped down to the living room, he wouldn’t even have anything to say, he just liked having me around.

Walter has never gotten married, and he’s never had a real job, so when I was ten he came to live in our basement bedroom. It was first going to be for a month, then for a year, and then we all stopped talking about it. He makes his bed every morning, drinks tea that tastes like hot water, keeps his five shirts folded and clean. His room looks like a hotel room between guests. He inherited just as much money as Dad did when my grandparents died, so even without a job he could live in a place of his own, but Walter alone is too depressing to think about. He’s a balder, skinnier, sadder version of Dad—a failure who thinks, or pretends to think, that he’s chosen this life, that he’s living out some principled decision too obvious to explain. Being cheap is part of it. On the wall of his shower he keeps dried strings of dental floss, used and waiting to be used again. His clothes all smell sweet like cigars, even though he’s never smoked, and he’s got a permanent squint, Dad says because of how much he used to read. When I was home I’d go up into the office where he works, since it was right next to my room, and if it was eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon, he’d be snoring in his chair. “Quit sneaking up on me,” he’d say. “I can’t get anything done when you’re always poking your head in.”

Dad once said that when they were growing up, everyone thought Walter was going to be either a senator or a surgeon, but for three years now he’s been writing a self-help book. “He’ll be his own best customer,” Mom likes to say. At least once a month Walter ends dinner in tears. He’ll be talking, ordinary as can be, and then while he tries to get some word out his lip will start to shake. You hope at first it’s just a twitch, but then he’s looking down, and soon his eyes are red and full and he’s gripping his fork too hard. Usually it’s about being lonely, but just about anything can do it. How Olive never asks for anything from us, a sick kid he saw at Safeway, how lucky he is to be part of such an incredible family. The one topic that’s always safe—the one topic guaranteed to cheer him up, even—is spine care. He’s never had a mood so far gone that it can’t be set right by someone saying, “See, even when I try standing with my head up like this, after a while my back starts hurting again right down here.”

Within five seconds his eyes are dry and he’s standing up slowly from the table, pushing you gently against the wall. “But of course your back hurts,” he says. “You aren’t changing how you hold your shoulders. Standing like that’s an assault. Here. Now. Shoulders back. No, like this. Now try walking around like that.” He’ll sit down with a shy smile, and for a few minutes he’ll be as proud as a kid after a talent show. When I was little he gave massages part-time at the Rockville Sport & Health Club. Even now, fifteen years after he gave his last professional massage, at any moment during the day he might appear behind me and start kneading my shoulders.

Before I’d finished my DoveBar, I’d already moved in with David. I’d keep my saxophone in the corner, and I’d practice every night, do theory exercises on the subway. Whenever I learned a new song, I’d come out and play it for David and Lucy and any neighbors who were over having cocktails. I’d knock packs of cigarettes against my palm outside of bars and get drunk on drinks with real mint in them. David and I would go for walks at night and we’d talk strategy for his team, whether they should maybe move this guy to cleanup and that guy out to center field. I’d start getting gigs and David would take the drums back up and someone, some fan or writer, years from now, would say, “And it never would have happened at all if Henry hadn’t failed out of school.”

* * *

When I told Dad that I was moving he took off his glasses and covered his eyes. You would have thought I’d told him Olive had died. But then he said, “You know what, that’s great news. You’re going to love New York. That’s all I want, for my boys to be happy and together and for you to go give something an honest try. The kids’ll miss you, but you’re no music teacher, I know that. It’s like making Larry Bird teach PE.”

Mom hated the idea of me in New York, and for a few days she just sulked whenever it came up. Finally, after Dad had been bugging her at dinner one night, she said, “If this was part of a plan for school then OK. But the fact that he flunks out and we reward him—”

“I’m not rewarding him,” Dad said. “He’s deciding to move, and we’re not imprisoning him. Is that a reward?”

“Stop,” she said. “You’re being a shit and you know it.” She turned to me, still carrying her anger at Dad. “We’re not going to pay for you to have a year-round summer. That’s not the deal.”

“It is summer, for Christ’s sake,” Dad said, mostly to himself, and stood up from the table making more noise with his chair than he had to.

“Go to hell. Henry, promise me you’re not blowing off school.” So I promised, and I did the dishes while Mom looked mad at the TV and Dad and Walter finished their chess game from the night before. Olive stood wagging nervously next to me, sensing some change or just wondering if I’d hand her scraps.

The next morning I took my coin box to the bank and, while everyone behind me glanced at the clock and gave each other looks, I cashed it in for $143.56. With that I went shopping at the Banana Republic on Wisconsin—the air in the store is so fresh and leather-smelling that just walking in makes you feel more handsome. A pretty black saleswoman with a gap in her teeth came up to me at the mirror and said, “You look good. I think that shirt is you.” So I got two of them, and I walked out feeling something I hadn’t felt since I was about nine. It used to be that when I’d buy sneakers (at the Foot Locker in Mazza Gallerie, just across Western), I’d leave the store, laces tight, feeling strong and quick and full of new potential I couldn’t quite get my mind around. On the walk home from Banana Republic I bobbled my shopping bag in one hand and gave happy little nods to every woman I passed.

That night Walter pulled me into the den and made me sit down on the couch next to him. It was after ten, and Mom and Dad were already in bed. He put his hot hand on top of mine. “Henry, you’ve been so unhappy for so long. Watching you’s been very painful for me. I hope you understand the chance you’re getting.” He squeezed my hand. In certain moods his voice is much deeper than you’d expect it to be—a cello full of sad advice. “Don’t take what your brother’s offered lightly. Remember—for David’s sake, but especially for Lucy’s—that you’ve got to stay damn near invisible. If you throw a Q-tip out and miss, don’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll pick it up tomorrow morning.’ You’ve got to pick it up now, even if it’s freezing cold and you’re cozy in bed. And don’t”—Were his eyebrows reaching out? Was his lower lip starting to shake? Finish! Finish! Please finish!—“don’t let yourself get stuck in feeling blue. Just your expression lately, I was telling your father, it’s felt like watching you give up.” And now he’d infected me! To keep from crying I pretended to have just noticed Olive lying next to me. “We love you so, so much, kiddo. Your father wants for you to be happy more than he wants anything. I do too. I mean that.” I stood up, feeling like I’d either been diagnosed with cancer or cured, and for a second, before I shook Walter off, he looked like he might kiss my hand.

* * *

Before I left I needed to break up with Wendy. It was something I’d known I had to do for months, but now I had a reason to do it. A reason better than not liking her. Wendy was the only person from high school that I still saw. She lived at home in Bethesda with her parents, just a ten-minute walk away, and—no matter how old we got, no matter how little encouragement I gave her—she’d always had a crush on me. Always since eighth grade, when she was a shy, pimply-foreheaded new girl from Long Island. She talked too loud and played with her toes in class. She asked me her very first week at school if I wanted to go see Dr. Giggles with her that Friday, and I lied that I couldn’t because I had to go over to dinner at my grandfather’s. I was lonely and embarrassed and I felt like she might be making fun of me in a way I wasn’t following. But she wasn’t. Later she found out I didn’t have a grandfather, and for the rest of the year she followed me around saying that I had to make it up to her, teasing but serious.

I never made it up to her during high school, but in winter, after being home alone for a few months, I called her. The best part of my weeks at home, until then, would be going to pick up fajitas from Rio Grande, imagining while I waited for my food that it was an apartment full of friends I was going back to and not my parents and Walter. One Friday in December I’d gone to the bar in Adams Morgan where the kids from my dorm at American went, but I ended up standing by the bathroom the whole night talking to the little brother of a guy I didn’t know, worrying that someone would ask me why I’d moved out. Suddenly Wendy—who I’d hugged at graduation and thought I might be saying good-bye to forever—seemed like my oldest friend.

And besides, I wasn’t feeling especially choosy. I looked defeated and fat-faced to myself whenever I walked past a mirror, and the idea that Wendy might look at me and see someone completely different seemed too incredible not to test. I spent all of high school pretending to look through my bag when Wendy walked by, waiting for someone who looked like a girl from a music video to fall in love with me, and all I got out of it was a prom night with Abbey Budder asking if I’d mind having the limo drop her off at her friend’s party. David says, and I think he’s probably right, that girls are like boxing: You’ve got to stay in your weight class or you’ll get flattened.

Wendy told me she was working part-time at a Starbucks downtown and the rest of the time she was acting, which meant taking acting classes at the Leland Rec Center. She’d deferred a year from the University of Wisconsin—she was hoping she’d have enough luck acting that she could stretch it into more than a year. I asked her when her next play was, and that was all it took. “You want to come? Seriously? It’s kind of stupid, but I like my part. Sit in the front left so I can see you.”