by Hopen, David
He laughed. “You’ll find it a bit different here, I think. We tend to have a bigger appetite than Torah . . . what’d you say it was?”
“Temimah.”
“Right. That. All boys, wasn’t it?”
I grimaced at how quickly he sized me up. “Unfortunately,” I said, attempting to salvage some semblance of self-respect.
“I don’t know how I’d survive in a school like that. Go stir-crazy, probably.” He rubbed his bicep. “Come, let me introduce you.”
Nervously, I followed him to the edge of the marble-tiled pool. Two girls swam over. “Ladies,” Noah said, “meet Ari Eden. Ari, this is my girlfriend Rebecca Nadler, and this is not my girlfriend, Sophia Winter.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Hello,” Rebecca said, swimming toward me to offer her hand. When Noah shot her a warning look, she retreated, improvising with a warm wave. She was tall and athletic looking, with brown, curly hair, big teeth and wide features. My eyes, however, were fixed firmly on Sophia, treading silently by the edge: dark hair, milk-white skin, a sharp, slightly angular nose, wiry arms, cerulean eyes.
Noah slapped my back: I’d been staring too long.
“Where’d you move from?” Rebecca was looking at me curiously.
“Brooklyn.”
“New York—everything’s beautiful there, isn’t it?”
My life in New York, I wanted to admit, was anything but beautiful. Instead, I did the socially acceptable thing and nodded.
“I just think it’s way too hot down here. I’m desperate to move north one day, even though I know Noah will never leave his parents. Ain’t that right, kid?” She grabbed his wrist, dragging him back toward the pool. Laughing, Noah allowed himself to topple over into the water. They resurfaced, Rebecca on his back, her arms around his neck. I stood awkwardly as they groped each other. Water lapped the bottom of my pants, drenching my black New Balance sneakers, though I didn’t dare move. I attempted an agreeable smile.
“You’ll get used to it,” Sophia said, drifting closer. “They have a difficult time keeping their hands off each other.” As she spoke, I allowed myself to occupy those sky-blue irises, which, more than the blazing Florida sun, reduced me to a nervous sweat. I became conscious suddenly of how often I was blinking, of how my jaw was unhinged. “They’ve been together since sixth grade.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It is, but I’ve known her since we were four. Which means,” she paused theatrically, “I enjoy the distinct honor of serving as perpetual third wheel.”
“It’s really an issue—we just can’t get rid of her.” Noah gathered water into his mouth and squirted in Rebecca’s direction. She responded by directing tidal waves at his face. “Maybe we’ll pawn her off on you?”
Sophia smiled uneasily, pushing wet strands of hair from her forehead. Still treading in place, she looked away toward the green over the fence. Something dark, for the slightest moment, passed through her eyes.
“You wouldn’t mind, would you? I mean, she’s a beauty,” Rebecca said, lounging now on Noah’s shoulders, “isn’t she, Ari?”
My cheeks turned an outrageous red. Yes, I wanted to say, yes, she was gorgeous, unquestionably the most gorgeous human being I’d ever seen. Instead, I mumbled incoherently, refocusing my attention to the dirt on my shoes. When I looked up again, I noticed that Sophia’s gaze had returned to me. “Won’t you be coming in?”
“No,” I said stupidly. “I don’t have a bathing suit. And actually I’ve got to go soon . . . still settling into the new house—”
She laughed dismissively. “They don’t do much coed swimming in Brooklyn, I suppose.” She swept back her hair, glided toward me and, looking up daringly, presented her hand. Blinking, hesitating for a fraction of a moment, I accepted, helped her out of the pool, ignoring how outrageously close I was to her body, how water splashed from her chin and neck and stomach and hips and landed on my clothing, trying desperately not to stare as she walked to her lounge chair and dried herself, focusing my vision instead on the gold bracelet, engraved with faint treble clefs, on her left wrist. Sophia Winter was the first girl I’d ever touched.
On her chair sat a copy of Pale Fire. I’d been mailed the same copy as summer reading. “Are you liking it?” I asked, eager to veer the conversation away from my glaring social deficiencies.
“Meeting you?” She grabbed a towel from a chaise lounge and wiped her face. “I’d say it’s been perfectly unremarkable, wouldn’t you?”
“Nabokov,” I said, pointing to the book.
She seemed amused I so much as knew how to pronounce his name. “You’ve heard of it?”
“I read it last month. So yes.”
“That’s an odd coincidence.”
“Doubtful. It was for school.”
“Which school?”
“Kol Neshama?”
“Oh. I thought you were a senior.”
“I am.”
She draped her towel over her shoulders, like a cape, and adjusted her black bathing suit. “The Academy doesn’t take transfers for senior year.”
“Yeah, that’s right, actually,” Noah said. “Remember that kid Stevie Glass? He tried switching in for senior year and they didn’t let him. And he was supposed to be pretty bright.”
I shrugged. I imagined arriving for my first day of school, only to be informed that some error had been made, that I was never, in fact, accepted. “Well, I’m pretty sure they took me.”
Sophia continued to dry herself, wrapping the towel around her waist, wringing water from her hair. I knew immediately that I’d memorize every detail of her face. “So how’d you do it?”
“I applied.”
“That much I pieced together.”
“They liked my essay, I guess.” The application process had been fairly unmemorable, largely informational, with the exception of one prompt: “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” (Mary Wollstonecraft) Discuss in 2–10 pages. It was the first research project I’d ever had and I rather enjoyed writing it. I mailed in eight pages, titled: “‘Immortal Longings’: Human Yearning in Literature and in Gemara Berachot Lamed Amud Aleph.”
Sophia made no attempt to hide her shock. “So you’re telling me you not only somehow secured a place in Kol Neshama but you’re also taking AP Lit?”
“I didn’t swim much in Brooklyn,” I said, “but I did an awful lot of reading.”
Her hands went to her hips. She had a way of downturning her mouth that made my insides freeze. “Well, then. What’d you think of Pale Fire?”
Noah smirked from the pool. “Check out these scholars.”
“It was weird,” I said. “But I liked it.”
“Really? Because it tries too hard. I don’t like when books resort to beating you over the head—Kafka excluded. It’s a sign of imaginative inadequacy on the part of the author. Not to mention the whole thing is too, I don’t know, voyeuristic for my liking.” I knew she was, less than subtly, putting me in my place. “Maybe my appreciation would be deepened if I’d get around to reading Timon of Athens.”
“Timon of who?” Rebecca asked.
“Of whom,” Noah added. Rebecca socked him.
“It’s where Nabokov got the title,” Sophia said. “The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” I said. “That’s like claiming you need to first read Hamlet to understand it.”
The slender muscles underlining her arms and shoulders contracted. “Why Hamlet?”
“What’s the line? ‘The glowworm shows the matin to be near, / And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.’ It’s just as much of a reference, isn’t it?”
“I could be losing it in my old age,” Noah said, “but did you actually just quote Shakespeare at my pool?”
“This all seems like an unnecessary fixation with fire,” Rebecca said. “Let’s move
on, maybe?”
“I’m only saying,” I said, reddening, “it’d be just as valuable to thumb through Hamlet if you’re trying to find helpful source material for Pale Fire. Which is to say, I guess, they’re equally unimportant and you’d be lost reading either.”
She looked at me so that I couldn’t tell whether she was studying me or looking beyond me entirely. “I’d be lost?”
“No, of course not,” I stuttered, “not you specifically, I meant someone would be—”
“I suppose you’ve read Timon of Athens, too, just for kicks?”
“No,” I said, embarrassed. “Not yet.”
“The Brooklynite next door,” Rebecca laughed. “Shakespearean automaton.”
“Christ,” Noah said. “For papers I go to Sophia or Evan”—at this latter name Rebecca slapped him under the pool and Sophia looked away—“but now maybe I should be taking my talents across the street.”
I was unsure whether to feel a twinge of pride at impressing them or a surge of embarrassment at revealing what I assumed to be the only thing less cool than hailing from Borough Park: being a lover of Shakespeare.
“Aryeh,” my father called from the distance. He looked physically wounded finding me beside a bikini-clad Sophia. My mother trailed him, chatting with Noah’s mother, a tall, well-dressed woman. “We’re leaving now.”
“Nice to meet you, neighbor,” Noah said, eyeing my father.
“Well, then.” Sophia offered her hand again. I took it, even with my father staring. “You’re not overly dull to spar with, are you?”
“Neither are you.” My voice wavered. Her hand was hot in mine.
“I’ll be seeing you, Hamlet.”
Breathless, I stumbled through something disjointed—an unnatural laugh, a hasty goodbye—and joined my parents.
* * *
RESTLESS DAYS FOLLOWED, DAYS SPENT unpacking, arranging my room, organizing my books. In Brooklyn, these books, nabbed at street fairs, thrift stores, dusty antique shops, were my escape. To master such works, I convinced myself, would be to achieve a sort of abstract intelligence, knowledge that softened melancholy, knowledge that isolated me from isolation itself. As a teenager, I’d allowed the piles lining my bedroom to multiply so that they spilled out into the rest of the house, overtaking the kitchen table or displacing some of my father’s sefarim. “‘Be warned,’” my father grunted, evicting Roth from prime real estate in our new living room, cramming mishnayot back into our bookshelves, “‘the making of many books is without limit, and much study is a wearying of the flesh!’” And so, instead of exploring my new town, I busied myself with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, all the while allowing myself occasional glances out my front window at the mansion across the street, plotting furiously how I was possibly to overcome the impenetrable barrier separating me from the lives of Noah, Rebecca and the arresting Sophia Winter.
My opportunity came sooner than expected. Three days after the barbecue, I received an unexpected visitor.
“Sup, neighbor?” Noah said, nearly too large for my doorframe. “You busy?”
No one was home: my mother and father were each at their first day of work. I invited him in, offered him a drink.
“Have any Blue Moon?”
I imagined my father coming home from work and nursing a beer over light Talmud study. “Afraid not.”
“That’s all right. Water’ll do.” I served him a glass and joined him at my kitchen counter. “Nice place,” he said casually.
“You should’ve seen my old house. It was half the size.”
“That right?” He took a sip, looked about the kitchen. “You guys finished unpacking?”
“More or less.” There were still a few small boxes lying around, but my mother had been superhuman in her effort to immediately tidy the house. My father and I had pitched in, following instructions when ordered, but mostly we loitered, organizing our belongings and acclimating to our new quarters.
“Enjoy yourself the other day?”
“Yeah,” I said hurriedly. “It was great.” A beat. “Was nice of you to have us.”
“My parents love hosting. They say the house is a waste if we don’t fill it with people.” He said this without the slightest trace of arrogance. “By the way, Rebs said she enjoyed meeting you and to say hi.”
“Same, yeah, she was really great.”
“And how’d you like Sophia? Was quite the literary peacock dance you guys had.”
I scratched my chin, trying madly to appear unflustered. “Yeah, that was—interesting.”
“Extremely.” He winked, took a long sip of water, wiped his mouth. “Anyway, I was wondering if I might take you up on that offer for essay help.” I’d made no such offer, I nearly reminded him. “Have you written that Pale Fire analysis yet?”
I had, in fact. I was so eager for serious learning that I wrote it in July. “Yes.”
“In that case”—he reached into his pocket and handed me folded pages—“mind looking this over? It’s still kind of, you know, rough.”
I unfolded the paper and gave it a glance.
“I feel really bad asking, it’s just I need to make certain my grades are high off the bat, what with recruiting and all starting up. Plus Evan”—the name from the pool—“isn’t around yet, he’s in Europe or South America or wherever the hell he is, I can’t keep track, and Rebs doesn’t want me bothering Sophia, and Amir, well you don’t know him yet either, but he can be a bit of a cutthroat, by which I mean he can be a massive cutthroat, especially now that application season is upon us. And it seems like you know this stuff cold—”
“It’s no problem,” I said.
His face lit up. “You sure? If it’s a pain in the ass then don’t worry. Seriously.”
“I don’t mind. I just can’t promise I’ll be any good.”
“That I don’t buy,” he said, finishing most of his water and standing. I walked him to the door. “In my experience, people who quote Hamlet extemporaneously know a thing or two about smoothing out their buddy’s paper.”
“You really don’t understand what sort of school I come from.”
“Anything helps, really. The whole thing was over my head, to tell you the truth.” He pounded my fist. “So, you busy tonight?”
“Um, no, don’t think so.”
“Why don’t you come out with us? Lisa Niman’s having a party. She’s really sweet. Maybe you’ve already seen her around town? Her hair stands out, super red, usually dyed with streaks of purple or silver or something crazy like that. Rebelling against the whole ginger thing, she likes to joke.”
“The what?”
“Sorry, I promise I didn’t mean ‘ginger’ offensively.” He paused. “God, your girlfriend is a redhead, isn’t she?”
“What? No.”
He laughed deeply, just like his father. “Rebecca likes to remind me that I have a special gift for inserting my foot right in my mouth. You don’t, for the record, have a girlfriend, do you?”
This seemed profoundly unnecessary to ask. “No.”
“Good to keep in mind. Come to think of it, maybe you should go for Niman?”
“I don’t know,” I stuttered.
He grinned. “Anyway, she has an open house tonight. Her parents are both chiropractors, and they’re out of town at some chiropractor convention in Atlanta, which sounds much less believable when said aloud but she claims that’s the story.” He thought this over. “Whatever, unimportant. What’s important is that Niman is having a party, and I thought this’d be a good way to break you in.”
I scrambled for an excuse. Did I need to learn with my father? Help with unpacking? “Well, I—”
“No protesting. Come meet people.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Great. You have your own car?”
I didn’t. We had two cars shipped from Brooklyn, an old Honda Civic and a Nissan Versa, one for my mother, one for my father. I never minded this, seeing as I rarely drove in New York—where would I p
ossibly go, save the library?—but figured showing up on bike to this party would be absolutely socially unacceptable. “No,” I said, ashamed.
“Cool, you’ll ride with me. You do own a cellphone, don’t you?”
“I do.”
He handed me his iPhone and had me punch in my number. “Great. Eight o’clock?”
“I—what do I tell my parents?” I asked before I could help myself.
The famous Harris laugh. “Tell them you’re with me, or that you have an ice cream party or whatever you guys did in Brooklyn.” He slapped my shoulder and headed back across the street.
* * *
“I’M TELLING YOU,” MY MOTHER gushed over dinner, delighting over her first day of her new job, “these kids are just radically different.”
My father helped himself to another ladleful of meat sauce. “What does that mean?”
“Well, for starters, they’re light-years ahead of the fourth graders I’ve always taught, even though these cuties are only in the second grade. That’s not hyperbole, Yaakov. Light-years. The way they read, spell, do long division. Half of them know where they want to go to college and have political opinions. I mean, did I ever even have a fourth-grader at Torah Temimah who knew the name of the president?”
“Shlomo Mandelbaum,” I said, twirling my pasta. “He definitely knew what was flying.”
“Good point. That’s one, then.”
“Interesting,” my father said. “It’s very important to understand the secular world. But surely there are trade-offs. Probably they can’t learn Chumash as well, for example.”
“I don’t know,” my mother said. Her fork was down. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, especially if their parents think it counts as speaking a foreign language. They’ve had tutors from the time they were born. They’re almost too precocious. They’re angels when it comes to schoolwork, though they really dislike davening. I had one kid try punting a football during Alenu. I don’t understand what that’s all about.”