Orchard (9780062974761)

by Hopen, David

  “Sophia,” I called out, just before she’d reached the end of the hallway and turned out of sight. It took her several seconds to face me, but in her movement—confident, agile, lovely—I realized that she’d known all along I’d break, that she’d never doubted the depth of my desire. “I can postpone dinner.”

  I sent Kayla a vague text: something about a last-minute biology quiz, an emergency study session. And then, for the first time in many long weeks, Sophia and I left the Academy together, this time through a side door.

  * * *

  WE WENT TO HER HOUSE. She snuck white wine from her kitchen, put a finger to her lips, led me up a narrow glass staircase under a solitary skylight. Her house was so big, she whispered, that no one would know I was there if we were quiet. Slightly drunk, gasping for air. Her hands combing my hair, her mouth in my ears. Heavy breathing: her fingers down my chest, my lips on the nape of her neck, all light escaping the room. Sharp, wonderful, this world of impossible desire, a world where everything was free, lonely, expanded, where all else was forgotten. I held her to my chest, my head buried in her neck, her legs entangled in mine. This was the happiest I could hope to be, I told myself. Nothing could match this moment.

  We fell into dazed sleep, time suspended and spectacular. I woke eventually to the sound of tears, her body curved against mine. She held my fingers, tracing circles over her stomach. Her chest rose, fell slowly. I didn’t move.

  “Sophia.”

  Silence. Insensate darkness. It was late, nearly eight. My parents would be looking for me. Kayla must’ve called furiously. Sophia kept tracing circles.

  “I got into Juilliard today.”

  I gripped her body. “That’s incredible, Soph, that’s—” She didn’t stir. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  I leaned forward, put my lips to her cheek. “You should be happy.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you want to celebrate?”

  “I haven’t told anyone but you.”

  “Not your parents?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You’re scared what they’ll say?”

  The circles stopped. “Music has its penalty,” she said, half of her face buried in her pillow, the other half obscured by the growing dark. “Great music happens only when things are broken, doesn’t it seem that way? Is that what I want my life to be?”

  Quiet shadows separated us, even as we were pressed together, skin to skin, flesh to flesh. “Soph?”

  “Hamlet.”

  “Why’d you make me do it?”

  “I’ve never made you do anything,” she said.

  “You knew if you asked I’d have no choice. You knew I’d do whatever you wanted.”

  She took my right hand in her own, lowered my left down her thigh. “The more we suffer, Ari, the more we inflict.”

  I kissed the back of her head, pulled away. I dressed in the dark and slipped out into the street.

  * * *

  MY FINAL THREE DECISIONS CAME the next day. Amherst said no. Princeton, a laughable prospect, wasn’t even available to check; its server had crashed from too many thousands of hopeful teenagers checking simultaneously. This left me with NYU, my last hope. I trembled slightly punching in my personal code, which I’d forgotten and had to reset. I closed my eyes before accessing the decision page. I took a deep breath, offered a quick prayer and, slowly, opened the page:

  Dear Mr. Eden,

  The admissions committee at New York University has carefully considered your application and supporting credentials, and it is with regret that we must inform you we are unable to offer you admission this year.

  I smiled weakly, moved to my desk to open Oliver’s scotch. I took a long pull, wiping my mouth with my cast. Then I took the contents of my desk—books, loose-leaf papers, graded tests, folders, binders, pens, all of it—and, in one fell swoop, launched everything against the wall.

  * * *

  HAVING BEEN A STUDENT AT Kol Neshama for only one year, still uncertain whether the Academy had expanded or collapsed my universe, I was torn throughout our final days of school between never wanting to leave and never wanting to return. Teachers said their goodbyes, wished us luck on finals, claimed we’d go on to accomplish great futures. (Most of us, at least; Dr. Flowers made it clear I need not bother keeping in touch.) Rabbi Feldman urged us never to cease viewing him as a lifelong rebbe, told us he looked forward to dancing at our weddings. Dr. Porter, struggling to conjure pleasantries, insisted we were a group that meant well and that sometimes that was all that counted. Mr. Harold implored us to take down his home address and write often. (“No email,” he explained too loudly. “I won’t let my grandchildren make one for me. Give me ink or give me death. Well, not yet, though. No death yet.”) Mrs. Hartman, always the stoic, bade farewell one final time in her singular style: “Parting is indeed such sweet sorrow, but I’m afraid I’m not one to make a spectacle of it, lest I kill thee with much cherishing.”

  * * *

  WE HAD OUR FINAL SESSION with Rabbi Bloom. He wanted to conclude with The Natural History of Religion. We talked mostly about the moral and emotional components of theology, or, as Oliver put it, eyes unabashedly red, “what we get out of the goddamn thing.”

  “Ernest Becker,” Rabbi Bloom said hoarsely, under the weather, “claimed religion solved the problem of death.”

  “No small problem,” Noah said.

  “Freud, more bleakly, claimed the whole thing was nothing but a way to repress our most violent desires. Rav Soloveitchik, through his Adam I, claimed we worship because we long for vastness.” He gave a worn smile. “Enter Hume, the naturalist. What did he chalk the whole thing up to?”

  “Emotion,” I said. I looked over to the empty chair where Evan typically sat. In his absence, a power vacuum had formed. For much of the year, I wanted to be the one sitting there, dominating, the one to whom all deferred. Now, I no longer had any desire for Evan’s spotlight.

  “Of what sort?” Rabbi Bloom asked.

  “Fear,” I said.

  “Right where we started.” Rabbi Bloom dabbed his nose with a handkerchief. “Fear of our future. Fear of our weaknesses. Fear of our potential. Fear of what we desire. Now, I admit Hume took this in a direction I’m not too fond of, blaming religion for all sorts of unpleasant consequences. Competition. Intolerance. Dishonesty. An utter misunderstanding of moral truth. Was he right? I can’t rule it out definitively. He was, after all, a smarter man than I.”

  “And a nut,” Amir said. “Definitely a nut.”

  “True,” Rabbi Bloom said. “And yet, he’s on to something: our monotheistic drive stems not from our desire to control but from our desire to feel.”

  “Feel what?” Noah asked.

  “Everything.” He turned to a highlighted passage in his book. “What influences us most is what Hume deems the ‘ordinary affections of human life.’ Our concern for our well-being. Our anxiety over what our futures hold. Our desire for romance and respect and happiness. Our fear of dying. Our hunger for food, for money, for comfort. Do you see?” He nodded to himself without waiting for an answer. “As we stumble on through the many events that make up human life, agitated and scared and laughing and trembling and crying and loving, we arrive at an epiphany: ‘And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.’”

  “So you’re saying what?” Oliver asked gruffly. “That we made the whole thing up? That all this effort is one big farce?”

  “It is and it isn’t,” Rabbi Bloom said. “God is someone—something—we’ll always need. He is the adversary against which we rage and the comfort for which we yearn. We need Him when we need something larger than ourselves to thank and something larger than ourselves to blame. We need Him to feel as if we’re not alone, and we need Him to feel as if our aloneness isn’t our fault. We need Him when we rejoice, when we want happiness, peace, quiet, but we also need Him
when we mourn, when we experience dread, loss, insanity.” He paused, looking to the empty chair. “We need Him more than He needs us. And that, I think, is what it all amounts to. So did we make Him up?” He shrugged, closing his copy of Hume, giving an exhausted smile. “Does it matter?”

  * * *

  KAYLA DROVE OVER AFTER SCHOOL. I’d been waiting for our inevitable confrontation: I never apologized for canceling on her, I’d allowed her texts and calls to remain largely unanswered, I’d blown her off in school. She wore an oversized sweater, her hair in a ponytail. When the door to my room was closed I offered scotch. She declined. I poured one for myself.

  “You’re drinking an awful lot,” she observed.

  I sat beside her on my bed. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “I don’t know exactly what you’re trying to prove. That you’re unhappy?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know, either.”

  “Ari.”

  I didn’t answer. I put my head against her shoulder. She didn’t shake me off.

  “Why didn’t you ever really care if this worked?”

  “That’s wrong,” I said, buried in her sweater. “Of course I cared.”

  “I don’t think I believe that anymore.”

  “But it did work,” I pointed out, “for a while, at least.”

  She smiled sadly. “Sure. While I deluded myself.”

  I straightened, leaning against my wall. “I hope you don’t mean that.”

  “But that’s what happens, isn’t it? All of us, everybody, we fool ourselves into believing someone loves us the way we love them.”

  An awful pause, during which all I could think of was Edward, in The Good Soldier, failing to love Leonora. But she had not for him a touch of magnetism. I suppose, really, he did not love her because she was never mournful . . .

  “It’s just”—Kayla continued, undeterred, hands together on her lap—“you were different in the beginning. More innocent, yes, shockingly naïve, endearingly naïve, but you had—I don’t know, you just had more substance.” The way she was speaking reminded me of someone else. Even her pauses seemed deliberate.

  “Right. And now? What am I now?”

  A nod, a gritted smile.

  I sipped my drink. “Damned like everyone else?”

  “No. Because I don’t care how badly you want to be, you’ll never really be like the others.”

  We looked around absently. “The other night,” I said, setting my drink to my floor, “when I had to cancel dinner?”

  She closed her eyes. “Do I want this vocalized, Ari?”

  “I was with Sophia.”

  “And by with her you mean—”

  A buzzing started in my eardrums. My voice was just a sequence of nebulous noise, absent of meaning. “I’m sorry, Kayla.”

  She nodded, she left.

  * * *

  WE HEARD NOTHING FROM EVAN. Noah tried visiting the rehab center but was told guests weren’t yet permitted. Amir called half a dozen times, only to be rebuffed. Oliver tried sending “a gift basket of sorts”; an administrator informed him that Evan was not interested in receiving gifts at this time. I made no such effort, panicked as I was at the thought of eventually being confronted, by Evan and by the others, about what I’d done.

  My arm was healing well. Dr. Friedman told me I could have the cast removed after finals. Would the cast impede my academic performance? Would I require a medical note? No, thanks, I told him. It didn’t much matter.

  I wasted my study days, as I knew I would. With no collegiate plans on the horizon, I was growing alarmingly indifferent not merely to my grades but to my consciously self-destructive behavior. Instead of preparing during our free week I read Faust. I went for drives with Sophia—to the beach and back—when she needed time away from her books. I sleepwalked through basketball practices. I ambled across the street to smoke, devour Cynthia’s baking, hit golf balls. I joined Oliver at Three Amigos, where his waitress friend brought us pitcher after pitcher of Rolling Rock until we staggered out, the afternoon shimmering with Florida heat, and had to call Rebecca to retrieve us. (We first tried Amir, who, boarded up studying, promptly hung up on us, his mother howling in the background.) Nighttime came, and I had an increasingly difficult time willing myself into sleep, particularly if I wasn’t high before bed.

  And then: examinations were upon us. Biology was a train wreck; I spent much of the test doodling and at one point caught Sophia’s eyes and snorted. I raced happily through Gemara, suffered through math, impatiently endured history (“Explain the factors precipitating the 351 CE Jewish revolt against Governor Constantius Gallus”). AP English Literature, at least, was entertaining, concluding with an essay on “The Pity of the Leaves.” As I handed in my exam, I realized, somewhat disconcertingly, I’d circled one line three times: just to let him know / How dead they were.

  When I finished Hebrew, my last exam, I found Rabbi Bloom at my locker. He hadn’t been texting or reading while waiting, I noticed, but motionless, entirely lost in thought. “Mr. Eden,” he said kindly, glancing up as I joined him. “How’d the final test of your high school career treat you?”

  The thought of offering even one more lie nauseated me. “Poorly.”

  He laughed. “Refreshing honesty, but worry not. It’ll work out. These things do, don’t they?”

  I unlocked my locker, though only after a bit of a struggle. “Right, maybe.”

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, “you did quite well in my class.”

  “Since when do we get official grades for that?”

  “Don’t you think you deserve them? I daresay the reading load was as intensive as the alternatives.”

  “More interesting, too.”

  He fixed his tie, eyed the hallway. It was empty. “I was hoping for a quick word.”

  I shut my locker. “Your office?”

  “We’re fine here.”

  I put down my backpack. Donny emerged from a nearby classroom and walked toward us, hands plunged suspiciously into his pockets. When he spotted Rabbi Bloom, he smiled superficially, hastening the other way. “I want to begin by saying that I know there are things you’re keeping to yourself, but I do hope you’ll share them with me when you feel ready.”

  “I—yes, of course.”

  “Right.” He smiled pleasantly, cleared his throat. “The other thing I have to say is that Stanford called to inform me that Mr. Stark’s admission is now formally under review. They requested a full report of documented disciplinary action within twenty-four hours.”

  “God,” was all I managed, aware of a tightening in my chest.

  “I assume you know why I’m telling you this?”

  I failed to return his gaze. “I—no, I don’t.”

  “It’s because I trust your moral intuition. And it’s because you happen to be the only other person in the entire world who knows what happened that evening.”

  “But I don’t think I do, actually,” I said, scarcely getting the words out. “It was such a blur, you know, it all happened so quickly, I don’t—”

  “Ari,” he said, dropping his voice once more, playing with the knot of his tie, “I’ve spoken with Mr. Stark.”

  A momentary spell of dizziness, air leaking from the hallway. “But then—why hasn’t he told anyone else? I mean, nobody else knows, do they?”

  “From what I can discern, he has no interest in bringing to light the details of the courtroom. Maybe it’s pride, or stubbornness or amor fati. But in my view? I think you did what he wanted.”

  I pawed nervously at my chin. “You think he wanted me to say that to the judge?”

  “I think he wanted you to fight back.” His voice softened to a whisper. “Anyway, what you did was not only blameless, given your position, but beneficial for Mr. Stark in the long run. I know I disappointed him earlier this year, but he needs help. Real help. And this, right now, is his best chance to recognize that. To be away from his father, from his friends, from me, from Ms.
Winter”—at this mention of Sophia we each blushed, finding reason to avoid each other’s eyes—“and to reflect on how best to heal from the suffering he’s been subjected to, suffering no one should have to face, especially that young. Without you, Mr. Eden, I’m afraid he’d—well, he’d never give himself that opportunity.”

  “Right, well.” I nodded awkwardly. “I do appreciate that.”

  “Now, to address the other question at hand. I can’t make my decision about what to do about Stanford without knowing whether you can forgive him. Whether you can envision trusting him again. Because that, I believe, tells me everything I need to know.”

  Whatever happened on the boat had already come to pass. I was fine, Evan was fine. The world trudged onward, nobody suspected anything truly malevolent, I myself hardly did any longer. Trauma had given way to normalcy: studying, examinations, the splintering of relationships, the imminent arrival of graduation. How many more times would I even see Evan or the others again? I wondered whether refusing to forgive him signified nothing more than a desire to maintain a connection to Zion Hills, whether viewing the boat incident as anything other than an accident was merely a means of distracting myself from a bleaker alternative: that I wasn’t special, that my life’s biggest catastrophe was profoundly mundane. “I don’t know yet.”

  He placed a hand on my shoulder. “You may not want to hear this now, you may not want to hear it for a long time, in fact, but you and Evan share many things, not least of which is an overpowering thirst to understand the world around you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll never see it.” I said so with unintended defiance. “As much as he likes trying to convince me otherwise.”

  “One can share certain traits without being alike, Ari. Much to your advantage, I might add. But sharing an extreme intellectual appetite, for instance, is no evil thing. And I say all this not to push you back into friendship, but to tell you that Evan relies on you, more than you realize.”

  I didn’t bother stifling my laugh. “You think he relies on me?”

  “Perhaps this manifests perilously at the moment,” Rabbi Bloom said, “but he considers you a rival with a unique capacity to get under his skin. And in time, I’m confident, the day will come when you two might need each other.”