The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  “Wow,” said Scott, impressed. He was also a little winded—Jane hadn’t slowed her pace, and he was out of shape from a semester of heavy pot smoking. “I love the city. My brother goes to Columbia.” He rarely spoke of Billy, but at that moment couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I’m from Brooklyn,” she said. “It’s different.”

  “Sure,” said Scott, as though he knew anything about it.

  “Well, this is my stop.” They were approaching Lathrop Hall, a women-only dorm known as The Nunnery. They had crossed the campus in two minutes. Jane flashed her furtive smile. “It was nice meeting you—” She hesitated.

  “Scott,” he said.

  She stood facing him, her eyes level with his mouth. He could have kissed her eyelids, her fierce brow.

  “Scott. I’ll see you in class. Try sitting up front sometime.”

  He watched her go inside. Through the entryway windows he saw her sprint up to the second-floor landing. A moment later a light came on in a corner window. Standing there, a strange feeling washed over him. As though he himself were the dark room waiting. As though with the flip of a switch she had filled him with light.

  “TIME,” SAID Mr. McKotch. “Pens down, and pass them in.”

  Thirty heads lifted; thirty pairs of eyes met his. Usually he gave a minute’s warning to let them wrap things up, but today there was nothing to wrap. Most of the kids had stopped writing ten minutes ago. A few seemed never to have started.

  There was a general commotion as the blue books were passed to the front. Backpacks opened and closed. Thirty pairs of shoes headed for the door.

  “Have a good break,” Scott called after them. And then, feeling foolish: “Happy holidays.”

  Nobody responded. Scott arranged the exam booklets into a neat stack. He waited for the students to file out, then fought his way through the crowded corridor. The halls had been decked with religiously inclusive holiday decorations, long strands of tinsel in silver and red and blue. The effect was part patriotic, part aquatic, as if colonies of shiny algae had attached themselves to the walls. The students were more boisterous than usual, walking three or four abreast. Scott squeezed past them hastily. He was so intent on making his way through the crowd that he didn’t notice Rick O’Kane following him.

  “McKotch,” said O’Kane, clapping his shoulder. “What have you got there?”

  “Exams. The AP juniors.”

  O’Kane sighed, a long-suffering sigh. “Don’t you read your e-mail? No exams during Christmas week. School-wide policy.”

  Scott remembered then: “Holiday Bulletin.” “I must have missed it,” he said lamely. Another quality response.

  “Think, will you? How many students are traveling this week? Skiing, family vacations, whatever. The Parents’ Association requested specifically that we not schedule exams, and I told them it wouldn’t be a problem. I’m never going to hear the end of this.”

  “My mistake,” said Scott. “I’ll take the heat from the parents. Tell them it was my fault.”

  “Trust me,” said O’Kane. “I will.”

  Scott made his way to the front door. The parking lot was mayhem: dismiss them two hours early, and the kids went crazy. As Scott approached his Golf, he remembered the Beamer convertible he’d scraped with his door. Goddamnit. Damaging a student’s car was bad enough, but he’d been so flustered by seeing O’Kane that he hadn’t left a note.

  He quickened his pace. The student lot was already half empty; a long line of cars idled at the edge of the parking lot.

  From a distance he spotted his Golf. The spaces on either side were empty. As he approached, he saw a sheet of paper tucked under his windshield wiper. He recognized the childish handwriting, the green ballpoint pen wielded with such force that it nearly tore through the paper. These were the scratchings of Aaron Savitz, son of a local car dealer who’d given Rick O’Kane a deal on his Mercedes. Perhaps as a result, O’Kane had dismissed Scott’s complaints about the kid, a pudgy loudmouth who spewed sarcasm from the back row of his second-period juniors English. Early in the term, Aaron had aimed his ridicule at the few students who dared to raise their hands. Now the whole class had been shamed into silence.

  The note was a single sentence, scrawled on lined notebook paper.

  McKOTCH—YOUR CAR IS A PIECE OF SHIT. YOU OWE MY DAD 500 BUCKS.

  SCOTT COULD think of nothing more dispiriting, more deflating to the soul, than pulling into his driveway in the middle of the afternoon. The house—a low ranch with attached garage—faced west, and in the morning, gently lit from behind, it had a certain dignity. But with the afternoon sun nearly overhead, there was no ignoring the shoddiness of the construction, the cheap windows, the textured vinyl siding that tried to pass itself off, pathetically, as wood. Penny’s van was gone—where, he had no idea. The kids left for school at seven thirty, and returned home at three. What she did between those hours was a mystery to him.

  He parked and gathered a stack of manila folders from the passenger seat. The prospect of an empty house—an hour of blessed solitude—gladdened him ridiculously. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had the place to himself.

  But as he approached the front door, he could hear the television blaring. Penny was indeed at home; she had parked in the garage. Resentment prickled his skin. He braced the tower of folders against his sternum, then fumbled with the door. It opened directly into the living room, which meant that any visitor—any Jehovah’s Witness or deliveryman or Girl Scout selling cookies—was immediately confronted with the chaos of their lives. Toys littered the carpet. There were piles of magazines, children’s shoes, a basket of laundry waiting to be sorted. All this was usual. Unusually, a tripod was set up in the middle of the room.

  “Penny?” he called, looking for a place to set his folders. Finding none, he piled them on the floor.

  His wife came from the kitchen, the cordless phone at her ear, Jackie O., their aging Jack Russell terrier, yapping at her heels. Penny was barefoot, in shorts and a tank top; through the long Connecticut winter she kept the thermostat at seventy-eight degrees. Phone, she mouthed. Then pointed to the dog. Scott wondered how she could hear the other end of the conversation, between the barking and the television going full blast. He spotted the remote on the couch and hit the MUTE button.

  “DADDY!” His son came running down the hallway, head down like a billy goat’s. His head hit Scott square in the solar plexus.

  “Hey, buddy.” Scott took a step back to catch his breath. “What are you doing home from school?”

  “Miss Lister sent me home.” Ian leered up at Scott, his mouth sticky and unnaturally red.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Sucker.” He chewed loudly, the painful breaking sound of teeth crushing candy. At his last checkup he’d had four cavities, yet to be filled. At the follow-up appointment, he’d refused to open his mouth.

  Penny placed a hand over the receiver. “What happened to the TV?”

  “Why so loud?” Scott asked. “I couldn’t stand it.”

  “I was vacuuming.”

  He glanced at the carpet, the sofa surrounded by potato chip crumbs like a persistent dandruff.

  Ian circled his arms tightly around Scott’s hips. “I bet I can lift you,” he said, putting his weight into it.

  “Hush, buddy.” Scott disengaged himself. “They sent him home? What happened?”

  “More of the same.” Penny leaned over the couch, searching for the remote. The backs of her thighs were taut as a teenager’s. “This is getting out of hand. That Miss Lister needs to lighten up.”

  “I knocked over a desk,” Ian said proudly. “But it was an accident.” He placed his feet over Scott’s and grabbed his father’s hands.

  “Buddy, can you go play in your room for a minute? I need to talk to your mom.”

  Ian tugged at Scott’s arms, then placed his high-top sneakers on his father’s shins and leaned backward. “I’m going to climb you.”
It was a game he’d loved as a little boy, but was getting too big for. Scott feared pitching forward on his face, crushing his son beneath him.

  “Ian, get off me. I mean it.”

  The boy looked up at him, startled by the edge in his voice. Penny too looked surprised.

  “Go play in your room,” he said evenly. “I’ll be there in a minute, as soon as I’m done talking to your mom.”

  Ian stomped down the hall. In a moment they heard his bedroom door slam.

  “He was only playing,” Penny said. “He hasn’t seen you all day.” Said it, as always, as though Scott had failed her—by ever, even for purposes of earning a living, spending a moment away from her and the kids.

  “Half a day,” he said calmly. “Five hours. Penny, what the hell happened?”

  “I had to go pick him up, and now I have to make another trip back there to get Sabrina from practice. And somebody needs to take this dog out.”

  “In a minute. Did you talk to Miss Lister?”

  “Barely. She was in class when I got there. And she wouldn’t go into it over the phone.”

  “She didn’t tell you anything?”

  “Something about being disruptive. At least he didn’t bite anyone this time.” Penny found the remote and hit the VOLUME button. It was an ongoing struggle in their marriage: left to her own devices, she would turn on the television the moment she woke in the morning. Scott knew that while he was at work, three of their four television sets—in the bedroom, living room, and kitchen—played constantly, at considerable volume. Coming home in the evening was like walking into an appliance store. When he complained, Penny simply shrugged. I need to know what’s going on in the world, she insisted, though her taste ran toward talk shows and a program called Love Hollywood Style, which focused on the marital difficulties of celebrities he didn’t recognize.

  “Can you please turn that off?”

  “Just a second.” Penny stared at the screen.

  Scott took the remote from her hand and hit the OFF button. “Seriously, Pen. He knocked over a desk? How does that happen, exactly? He just stood up in the middle of class and knocked over a desk?”

  “I know: right? I’m not buying it either.” Penny settled on the couch. “Honey, not to be a nag, but in exactly one minute this dog is going to piss on the carpet.”

  HE MADE a slow circle around the cul-de-sac, idiotically named Canterbury Lane, the dead end where life had dropped him. Jackie O. tugged at her leash. The sky was low and heavy, promising snow. Somewhere under this same sky Jane Frayne was living furiously, effectively, each day a productive flurry of Frayneish pursuits. Scott imagined her filming, editing, stalking the downtrodden women of Kosovo and plying them with sensitive, insightful questions. He saw her fight her way through an airport in an occupied city—a grim Soviet-era airport, guarded by soldiers with machine guns. Jane would be oblivious to their leers and catcalls. She would move through the airport fierce and undeterred, all speed and grace.

  He’d been a second-semester sophomore when things fell apart, a breathtakingly fast denouement to what had started so promisingly a year before. By then he and Jane were dating, which at Stirling meant sex most nights, coffee and doughnuts the next morning in the cafeteria. There was a certain tension to this arrangement, with Jane harping periodically that they never did anything.

  What is there to do? Scott wondered. His days were genuinely full. He slept late, attended a class here and there, lingered after meals at the Kap Sig table, watching the girls at the salad bar. Occasionally, in the evening, he went to the library, where the Kap Sigs controlled several tables in the basement study room. If an exam were impending, he made halfhearted attempts at studying, borrowing the notes of some anal-retentive classmate who’d attended the lectures. Most nights he played pong or pool, smoked weed, and drank beer. He liked the taste of beer, the metallic tang. He could drink beer all night.

  Each weekend Kappa Sigma threw a party, which meant more people and different music, the kind that made girls get up and dance. At first Scott had enjoyed these gatherings, the wall-to-wall bodies, the certainty of hooking up with a girl he’d had his eye on—if not his first choice, then his second. But recently parties had come to depress him: the bathrooms redolent of beer-induced puking, the feverish pursuit happening all around him, of which he, shackled to a girlfriend, could no longer partake. Once, twice, when Jane was tied up in rehearsal, he’d succumbed to temptation. He hadn’t gone looking; in both cases, the girls had pursued him. He had simply taken what they offered.

  Afterward, dread consumed him. He weighed the odds that Jane would find out, and rehearsed what he’d say if she did. I was drunk. I barely remember it. This fear was not unlike the buried panic that sometimes woke him at night, a humming anxiety that mounted as the semester progressed. He’d ended his freshman year on academic probation and spent the summer eating shit from his father, who threatened him with the army if he didn’t get his act together. He got some play out of that story—the Kap Sig brothers found it hilarious—but Scott understood that a crisis was brewing. (It was a feeling that would dog him for the rest of his life, in dreams. Even as an old man he would sometimes return to Stirling during a late-afternoon nap, again a delinquent sophomore, a drunken Kap Sig with an econ paper due.)

  He started his sophomore year with lofty intentions: to attend classes, to smoke less pot. To focus his full attention on Jane, whose discipline and academic success—last semester she’d brought down a perfect 4.0—would surely be contagious.

  It struck him, now, as one of the great mysteries of the natural world that she had tolerated him at all. Beautiful Jane, her drive and intellect; Jane with enough energy to power a small city. What did she see in that inebriated joker with his struts and feints and loud opinions? He had loved her; more than that, he’d wanted to be her. (Still a dude, though.) To be the male version of Jane, humming with plans that would actually amount to something, alive and hopeful and destined for great things.

  In the end the worst had happened: back early from rehearsal, Jane had stopped by the Kap Sig house and found him in a corner of the social floor, feeling up a drunken freshman. In retrospect, he saw that it could have been worse. He and the girl were still standing. In another ten minutes he would have taken her down to the basement. Then Jane would have had something to scream about.

  Scott stopped periodically as Jackie O. nosed at drainage ditches, mailboxes, looking for a place to crap. In her old age she’d become particular about where she’d loose her bowels, evaluating each potential site against a mysterious checklist in her tiny brain. She seemed to prefer defecating at Loch Lomond Acres, an impulse Scott could understand. Its massive houses offended him, mainly because he felt invisible pressure to covet them: they were thirty years newer than his and Penny’s little bunker, and three times the size. Each was built on an eighth of an acre, leaving a backyard the size of a pool table. The low-end model—it had doubled in price since Misty Sanderson tried to sell it to them—had five bedrooms and four baths, a cathedral ceiling in the entryway and a showy spiral staircase. If you had money to burn, you could add Jacuzzi tubs, extra fireplaces, a stained-glass window in the entryway. The builders would pile on as many gewgaws as you could pay for. No design principles, or questions of taste, seemed to apply. The owners of one house had actually added a widow’s walk, high enough to offer a view of downtown Gatwick, with its glowing miles of chain restaurants and strip malls.

  Scott had been inside a Loch Lomond house only once, for a barbecue hosted by Penny’s friend Noelle Moss, who’d won the place in her divorce settlement. When he closed the front door with medium force, he felt the whole house shudder. Scott had worked, for a time, on union construction sites in La Jolla and Sacramento; he knew plenty about the shortcuts builders took. Walking home, fueled by gin, he found himself disparaging the house to Penny, and learned that it was impossible to explain why something was vulgar. You either saw it or you didn’t. Penny loved the oversi
ze bathtub with its gold-plated fixtures, the cavernous sitting room, fatuously called a Great Room, with the hollow acoustics of a squash court. “You could get lost in there,” she said delightedly. “There’s so much space.”

  “The rooms are big,” he allowed. “I’ll grant you that.” Their own house was a close fit; and as the kids got older the problem worsened. That year, with the whole family at home for the endless midyear break, Scott had nearly lost his mind. But there were ways—there had to be—to create a feeling of space without ostentation, without excess.

  Scott knew what a well-built house felt like. His childhood home in Concord was two hundred years old, still solid and handsome. Scott knew without anyone ever having explained it to him why plaster walls were superior to drywall, carved moldings to the cheap mass-produced stuff sold at Builder’s Depot. But Penny’s childhood had been spent in various sorts of Californian substandard housing: the shoddy duplex, the long series of apartment complexes. From ages fourteen to fifteen she’d actually lived in a roadside motel in Pasadena, where the second of her stepfathers worked as a night manager. For a brief time, early in their history, these facts had struck Scott as exotic, even romantic. Against this gritty western landscape, he imagined Penny as a little girl, a nubile teenager, never suspecting that somewhere in her future, Scott was waiting to rescue her. Years would pass before he met any of her scattered family, visited their grim habitats. Her crazy sister lived in a halfway house in Portland. For six months of the year, her mother and current stepfather rented a campsite in Nowhere, Arizona. The rest of the time, they crisscrossed the country in an enormous Winnebago.

  Understandable, then, that Penny could be impressed by a vinyl-sided tract house with paper walls and heated towel racks in the bathrooms. She simply didn’t know any better. In the spirit of a field trip, Scott walked her through his mother’s house in Concord, pointing out the high ceilings, the original oak floors; he wanted—and truly needed—her to see the difference. She agreed that the house was lovely, but when Scott went a step further and compared it to the monstrosities of Loch Lomond Acres, Penny simply smiled.