The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  “I’m having lunch with O’K-Kane,” Jordan said abruptly. This was either a boast or a confession; Scott couldn’t tell which.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He wants to talk about the spring musical.” Last year the drama club had mounted a lavish production of Camelot, which Scott remembered as the longest three hours of his life. Sitting in the darkened auditorium next to Penny, he’d felt nothing but sympathy for Jordan, who’d done his best with a tone-deaf Guenevere and a fifteen-year-old Arthur, hunched and mortified in his gray beard and baby-powdered hair. But to Scott’s astonishment, the play had been a hit. The Parents’ Association loved it, and Jordan was O’Kane’s new favorite. Jordan! A sniveling kid whose desk was littered with toys: a plastic Slinky, Silly Putty, nostalgic reissues of items Scott had actually played with as a child. Half a dozen comic-book heroes, rendered in plastic, were arranged along the perimeter. Early on, to be friendly, Scott had feigned interest: Is that Aquaman?

  Aquaman? Jordan repeated. How old are you, anyway? Nah, those are the Transmatics.

  Sure, the Transmatics, Scott mumbled, feeling like an idiot even though he wasn’t the one playing with dolls.

  Now he wondered if it was this, his very childishness, that made Jordan so popular with the students—who, Scott imagined, knew all the Transmatics, had watched them every Saturday morning while eating their Cocoa Puffs, or some hipper, more current sugary cereal he was too middle-aged to know about. Every lunch period, and again after the final bell, students lined up in the hallway outside their office, waiting to see Mr. Funk. No one ever came to see Mr. McKotch. It was perverse for Scott to feel rejected, since the mere sight of his students irked him beyond reason. At the same time, he knew that Rick O’Kane noticed which teachers had developed a rapport (“made the connection”) with students.

  Scott’s own desk was awash in papers. He pushed some aside and sat. Office hours were his only chance to check e-mail; at home, Penny was camped out at the computer all evening—doing what, he couldn’t imagine.

  His in-box was clogged with spam (Drugs from Canada! Young Danish girls show you everything!), a message from O’Kane—“Holiday Bulletin,” undoubtedly bullshit—and a typically brief one from his sister.

  Hi, Scotty, I’m leaving tomorrow, landing in Boston in the afternoon. Wish me luck with Dad. Holly Jolly safe travels! See you at Mom’s. xoxo Gwen.

  He was always taken aback by the breezy, affectionate tone of her e-mails. When he saw her at his mother’s on Christmas Eve, there would be no x, and definitely no o; he wouldn’t even get a handshake. Only their mother was allowed to hug Gwen, an uncomfortable spectacle: his sister rigid and blushing, as though it pained her to be touched.

  Jesus, his family. In twenty-four hours he’d be on the road to Concord, knocking off the miles in Penny’s wood-paneled minivan, the humiliating vehicle of his premature middle age. Immediately upon arrival, he would be reminded of his own indecency. Last Christmas, as they’d crossed the threshold of his childhood home, Scott had noticed, too late, the pink wad of Juicy Bubble in Penny’s mouth. He had never in his life seen his mother chew gum.

  This year, like every year, Paulette would be waiting—nervous as a cat, ready to follow the kids around the house with a whisk broom, reminding them what not to touch. His brother would already have arrived, his silver Mercedes—the same model Rick O’Kane drove—parked in the driveway. It was the cleanest car Scott had ever ridden in, free of floor debris and mysterious, aging-food odors. Conclusive proof that neither the car nor Billy himself—calm, affable, impeccably dressed—ever came within ten feet of a child.

  In the parlor a fire would be lit; his mother would open a bottle of champagne. For most of the evening Gwen would be silent, her eyes meeting Billy’s in irritation or amusement. At least once—mysteriously, inappropriately—they would fall out laughing, for reasons they never bothered to explain. It had been this way for as long as Scott could remember, his brother and sister a united front against their parents. They treated Scott as an afterthought. Little had changed since the neighborhood ball games of their childhood. He remembered a particular summer, Gwen ten and scrappy, Billy a year older, already a star athlete. Himself a seven-year-old nuisance, allowed to bat under the condition that his outs and runs didn’t count. And that was the way Scott still felt around his family: his efforts simply didn’t register. His presence was tolerated, an obligation of blood; but ultimately he did not count. This would be his third Christmas in New England, yet he’d never been invited to join Gwen at their father’s house in Cambridge. You have school, Penny reminded him. The kids too. We wouldn’t be able to make it anyway. But to Scott this was beside the point.

  “When do you leave for the holiday?” Jordan asked. He zipped open the backpack he used instead of a briefcase. It was the same pack the students carried.

  “Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be with all the other assholes idling on the Mass Pike. You?”

  “Driving into the city X-mas morning, while all the kiddies are home opening their presents. Alex’s cokehead roommate is having a party.” Alex was a production assistant at Fox television and, supposedly, Jordan’s girlfriend, though the gender-neutral name made Scott suspicious.

  “Cool,” Scott said casually, as if he wouldn’t have killed to be at a party with somebody’s cokehead roommate instead of freezing in Concord with his wife and kids; no matter how many times he asked, his mother refused to turn up the heat. He’d hear about it all the way back to Gatwick: Penny complaining that the kids caught colds every Christmas, that she herself felt a sore throat coming on. The house isn’t that cold, Scott would argue, feeling compelled to defend his mother, her Yankee parsimony. Though they’d be halfway back to Gatwick before feeling returned to his feet.

  He glanced at the computer screen. A new message had appeared in his in-box: HAPPY XMAS, read the Subject line, YOU SON OF A BITCH. Even without looking Scott knew the return address: crook@lelandbrothers.com. Scott’s very own cokehead roommate: for a lifethreatening year and a half, he and Carter Rook had cohabited—shared habits—at Stirling College, first in the dorms, later in an odorous basement suite at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house. Their friendship had survived pledge week, hell week, finals week, and all manner of chemical excess. Now they stayed in touch with occasional phone calls and vulgar e-mails, forwarded jokes, and links to porn sites. Carter lived in Princeton with his wife, Beth—the girl he’d dated all through Stirling—and their two children. He worked in the city as a trader and spent half his life sitting on the train. A year ago Scott had driven down to Princeton for a visit. He was awed by Carter’s massive house, the silky sheets on the king-size guest bed, the Beamer and Range Rover parked in the three-car garage. I could get used to this, he thought. Beth had remained beautiful, her blond hair in the same silvery page boy she’d worn in college, her body long and slender in a printed sundress. She’d greeted him warmly and, he thought, normally, as though she didn’t remember (maybe she didn’t) their one drunken grope in the Kap Sig basement. “Come back again,” she’d told him as he was leaving. “Bring your wife and kids.”

  “They don’t travel well,” he’d answered, not really joking; but Beth had dissolved into giggles, a flush spreading over her cheeks, her throat, her freckled chest. That’s nice, Scott thought, watching her. I could get used to that too. The feeling haunted him all the way back to Gatwick. He hadn’t visited Princeton since.

  He opened the e-mail.

  Merry Xmas, shithead! Another year gone by. When can you come down for a visit?

  Beth found this little tidbit online. Thought it might interest you. Cheers! Carter

  Scott clicked on the link and found himself directed to a Web site.

  SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES WINNERS—The jury and audience award winners were announced tonight at the closing ceremonies of the festival in Park City, Utah.

  Scott frowned. He’d expected jokes or political satire—Carter was a cheerful fascist—or at lea
st porn. Scott had nothing against independent filmmaking; he simply never thought about it. It seemed extremely unlikely that Carter Rook did either.

  Scott read on. Prizes had been given to feature films, short subjects, animated shorts. The Grand Jury Prize in the documentary competition was given to The Women of Kosovo, directed and produced by Jane Frayne.

  Scott stopped reading. In the distance the bell rang.

  “McKotch?” Jordan stood over his desk. “You all right, man?”

  “Fine,” said Scott, blinking.

  “That was, um, the bell for first period?”

  “Oh. Right.” Scott glanced again at his screen, the plain first name, the rhyming surname. He gathered up an armload of blue books and headed out the door.

  JANE FRAYNE had been his first love, though he’d understood this only later. This was, he saw now, a hallmark of his character: the failure to see what anything meant until it was gone forever. Other people knew when they were in love, and behaved accordingly. Carter Rook had told him freshman year that Beth was the girl he would marry. At the time Scott had found this outrageous. How can you possibly know? he’d demanded, laughing. Inwardly, though, he’d felt a strange panic.

  Dude, said Carter. I just know.

  At the time—and even now—Scott found such certitude unimaginable. Beth had been a pretty girl, one of the prettiest. But pretty enough to keep Carter interested forever? Enough to compensate for the incalculable truckloads of prettiness—hundreds of girls, thousands—he’d be swearing off for good?

  These were his thoughts in the winter of 1986, when he first met Jane Frayne. It was his second semester at Stirling, his safety school; in his entire time there, he never thought of it any other way. The Ivies had rejected him summarily. He doubted anyone had read his application essays, “What I Bring to the Harvard (Yale, Dartmouth) Community,” and “My Dinner with Hunter S. Thompson,” the historical figure he’d most wanted to meet. You do know that Thompson is still alive, his college adviser, Mr. Woodruff, said dryly, barely glancing at the essay. Why should that matter? Scott countered, cocky to the end. But results suggested that Woodruff had been right. He was rejected despite the letters of recommendation from his dad’s MIT colleagues (though with Scott’s C’s in calculus, chemistry, and physics, who could take those seriously?). From his safety school came months of silence. To be expected, according to Woodruff. Colleges mailed the first round of acceptances early, but most of those students ended up going elsewhere, leaving plenty of empty slots. Stirling awarded financial aid in March, which cost the endowment a bundle. By April they’d be eager for a few paying customers like Scott.

  Knowing this, he’d arrived at Stirling with an attitude. The school was small—two thousand students—the campus postcard perfect, a movie director’s idea of what a college should look like: gray limestone buildings arranged around a quadrangle, grassy lawns bordered by flagstone pathways, the tallest trees Scott had ever seen. (The trees figured strongly in his memory of the place. Beech? Chestnut? It shamed him to realize he didn’t know. Back then he hadn’t paid attention to such things.)

  He scoped out the campus. To his surprise, the upper classes contained a good number of Pearse grads, fellow losers who’d also, apparently, picked Stirling as their safety. The Pearse guys were clustered on certain sports teams—soccer, lacrosse—and in a particular fraternity, Kappa Sigma. Dimly he recognized their faces, though more likely it came down to clothes and haircuts, ways of speaking, the posters hanging in dorm rooms. Details that hadn’t been so obvious at Pearse, where everybody was more or less the same.

  The Stirling students were a different crowd: small-town kids from Pennsylvania and Ohio and Maryland, louder, tougher ones from New Jersey and Long Island. Scott gravitated to the Kap Sig house, to play beer pong or smoke weed—he’d brought a sizable bag from home—with guys who seemed familiar, like cousins he saw once a year. Finally free of his family, he felt an intoxicating sense of possibility. His whole life he’d been the least interesting McKotch, the least important; but here nobody had heard of his freakish sister; his genius father; his handsome, overachieving brother. Strutting across campus with Carter Rook, he felt that all of Stirling noticed him. The 1986 yearbook ran a candid photo of Scott in his long coat and RayBans and Chuck Taylor Cons, his curly hair shaggy and tied back with a bandanna. What a dipshit, he would think later, staring at the photo, but at the time he’d walked with a swagger, proud of his style. And it worked: the Stirling girls couldn’t get enough of him. He could have a different one every weekend, if he wanted. And he nearly always wanted.

  He met Jane Frayne in a class called Shakespeare on Film, which she’d chosen because she was interested in screenwriting and Scott had chosen for the reading list (how could there be one, if all the Shakespeare was on film?). They were the only freshmen in the class, which—officially, anyway—had several prerequisites. Jane had written to the department chair requesting an exemption. Scott had simply shown up. He lurked outside the English building before the first class, waiting for the professor to arrive. Hey, he said when he spotted the guy. Is this class full?

  The professor, an aging hippie named Dennis Gilligan, opened the folder he carried and glanced at a list. “Nope,” he said. “You’re in.” (Years later—as a night student at Cal State, where every class seemed to fill in the first hour of registration—Scott appreciated how remarkable this was.)

  He sat in the back of the room, next to a Kap Sig named Darrell Reed. Reed was an English major, odd for a fraternity guy, and captain of the swim team. His clothes, like his room back at the house, smelled of chlorine and feet. The class met Monday evenings. Night classes were unusual at Stirling, Gilligan explained, but it was sacrilegious to watch movies before dark. This prompted a murmur of female laughter from up front, which Scott found vaguely irritating.

  “Faggot,” Darrell Reed muttered, echoing his thoughts.

  Gilligan was good looking, and every girl in the class seemed to hang on his words. One in particular, a dark-haired girl with very black eyebrows, sat directly in front of Gilligan’s desk, where the guy perched with cloying casualness. She arrived early for class and was always the first to leave, charging out the door as if the building were on fire. Scott had noticed her the first day—because of the eyebrows, which made her look angry, and because she never shut up. Her questions—musing, discursive—could take up half the class, and by the time she finished speaking, she had usually answered them herself. This provoked whispering among the girls and rude comments from the boys, though Scott didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. At Pearse everyone had spoken in class, even those, like Scott, who rarely did the reading assignment. He’d learned early that enthusiastic participation was a better defense than silence, even if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  But this girl did know what she was talking about. She could have taught Shakespeare on Film herself. Once, after they’d suffered through Orson Welles’s adaptation of Othello, she’d delivered a manic soliloquy on the camera work: was there a contextual purpose to Welles’s use of chiaroscuro? Or was he simply showing off?

  In his notebook, Scott wrote the word chiaroscuro.

  “What are you writing?” said Darrell Reed, glancing at Scott’s notebook. “She’s not the teacher. She’s a fucking freshman.”

  “She’s hot,” said Scott.

  He angled his desk to see the girl better. She had a compelling profile: straight nose, sharp chin. Everything about her seemed smart and precise. He resolved to chat her up later, but the moment class ended, she bolted for the door. She tore down the hall and out of the building at a speed he found comical. Jesus, he thought. Where’s the fire?

  He spotted her again a day later, crossing the quad at the same blistering speed. “Wait up,” he called, jogging behind her. She seemed not to hear. “You. Shakespeare on Film.”

  Finally she turned.

  “Jesus, where’s the fire?” He fell into step beside her.
“You always walk this fast?”

  “Pretty much.” A smile flashed across her face. The smile had a furtive quality, as though she were surprised to find herself amused.

  “You’re in Shakespeare on Film?” she said. “Why don’t I recognize you?”

  “I sit in the back,” he said.

  “Oh. You’re one of those.” Again the smile. “Dennis is great, isn’t he?”

  Dennis. Gilligan’s face lit up whenever Jane spoke in class; the guy fell all over himself to agree with her: That’s an astute observation, Jane. Jane makes an excellent point.

  “He’s a dickweed,” Scott said. “Why are you so into Shakespeare?”

  “I like the tragedies. The comedies I could take or leave.” She explained how, at the age of ten, she had portrayed the son of Macduff in an off-Broadway production, died violently on stage each night in a Prince Valiant haircut. “He has killed me, Mother,” she deadpanned, raising one black eyebrow.

  “You were in a play?”

  “My parents are actors. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “No kidding,” Scott said smoothly, as though he found this unremarkable. “TV or movies? Anything I might have seen?”

  “Ever watch The Magic Factory when you were a kid?”

  “Sure.” It was one of the few television shows his mother had sanctioned, because it was educational and free of commercials.

  “My dad was Larry.”

  “No way.” He stared at her. The Larry character had appeared in a variety of sketches, most involving puppets. Scott remembered, now, that he’d had the same intense dark eyebrows as his daughter.

  “He’s classically trained, you know? At night he’d play Jason in Medea. Then spend all day with those asinine puppets. Plus it was public TV, so the resids are next to nothing.” Larry traveled for much of the year, she explained, teaching and directing, acting in summer productions. Jane and her mother, a soap opera actress, lived in New York.