by Paul Cody
High school might be a tiny bit better than middle school, but not by much.
So I did all this redundant adolescent bullshit such as got tattoos and pierced my ears, nose, belly button, and nipples, but I stopped short of labia. That, even drunk, was too personal. I colored my hair different by the month—red, purple, white-blond, blue—shaved half my head, wore as much leather as possible and boots with four-inch heels, and sneered a good deal.
I smoked filterless Camels and Lucky Strikes, and fucked many boys, and slept with some girls to see what it was like, and listened to baroque music because rock ’n’ roll was for kids.
I admit. I was mostly full of shit. But what was an Ithaca kid from a moderately well-off family to do? Dad was an anesthesiologist, Mom taught gender studies at Ithaca College, and they barely blinked. They brought me to doctors, and I swear, it’s kind of bleakly funny, in a way—but I was diagnosed at various times as OCD, ADD, narcissistic personality disorder, depressed, bipolar II, and several others I can’t recall. The one they missed is the one they hand out at college graduations: B.A. Bad attitude. Or S.B. Spoiled brat. Or just plain B. Bored.
I mean, I had friends, I liked to do things, I played the cello for six or seven years, and that got me going on the baroque. I loved to run and hike, and I love our dog, Hagrid, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but like every other kid, I loved Harry Potter, and read all of them three times.
Then I started to realize that the characters were pretty broadly drawn. Like Dudley, the fat cousin, and Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, who were so unrelentingly odious, and the Weasleys, who were always such lovely people, poor but honest, and Crabbe and Goyle and Malfoy, who were so predictably noxious and bullying.
I started to think, Plllleeeaaassse. Get me out of here.
I tried Jack Kerouac, who you were supposed to love, and thought, WTF? Then I read what Truman Capote said of him, that this wasn’t writing; this was typing. I laughed like hell, and read In Cold Blood, which I loved.
I discovered James M. Cain, the great master of American noir. I read The Postman Always Rings Twice, and thought, Mother of God. This is hot. Then Double Indemnity. I taped a quote from Phyllis over my desk at home:
“Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness.”
I thought when I first read that, Yeah. Oh, God, I know that feeling.
So, this was supposed to be about Levon, and I could tell you a lot about Levon. I’ve known him forever. I think we were in the same kindergarten class at Fall Creek, and I’ve kind of known him since birth. Sometimes he’s driven me crazy, because I’ve been crushing on him almost forever, or half of forever, and sometimes he’s made me so fucking mad because he’s so withdrawn, and so isolated. Then you’d see him at moments, say with Avery, or Anna, or earlier in the fall with Sam, and he’d seem so normal and charming, and just really, really fucking attractive.
Then you’d go just a little bit near, and the merest touch, the smallest word, and he’d draw inside himself like one of those flowers. The flytrap. Only he’d trap you outside.
I’ve known Susan a long time too, mostly from a distance, but I tell you, she’s the crazy one. She seems so normal, so smart, so beautiful. But I’ve heard shit over the years, seen shit, and there was very weird stuff going on there.
Like leaving him home alone entire weekends, when he was six or something. Never really letting him have kids over to his house to play. And his father. He knows nothing about his father. His father might be Charlie Manson, for God’s sake. Or one of these psychos Susan studies in maxi-max prisons.
And when Levon just cleaned that big asshole’s clock at lunch at the beginning of sixth grade—and I was there; I saw it; it was fucking amazing—and Levon left school for the year. Kids said, Yeah, see. He’s got some psycho, serious badass blood. His mom’s trying to protect him from killing someone.
After he left sixth grade, and I think it was September, October, he was supposedly homeschooled for the year. I heard his mother let the pediatrician put him on some antidepressant, or some kind of drug, and he saw one psychiatrist one time so he could get certified to come to the Clock School. He got some more meds. But otherwise she wouldn’t let the shrinks or psychologists near him.
Because she knows better. She’s a brain expert.
And that’s the incredible thing I see over and over in this town with professors and doctors. That really, really smart people can often be incredibly stupid.
The thing is, they are smart, often really smart. But it’s like some doctors. They don’t listen. They ask you a few questions, and then they think they know, because they’re trained to read symptoms. But they often don’t know, because they’re in a hurry, and they’re not in your skin. Or so many professors, who may be the world’s leading experts on bees or ancient Greek architecture, or they’ve won the Nobel Prize in physics or economics—their kid’s a crack addict and they don’t know, or they buy a rear-wheel-drive Benz in Ithaca, which is all but useless in the snow and ice, or they dump their good and sensible wife or husband of twenty-five years to marry an obvious gold-digging bimbo who’s into reading tea leaves, and they’re sure they’re just so smart.
I’ve seen this over and over. It’s like a sitcom, only it’s kind of sad too. ’Cause it fucks their kids up as well. I mean, not all doctors and faculty are like this. I overstate to make my point, but you’d sort of assume very smart people would be sensible, but that’s very far from the truth.
Plus you throw in the arrogance, and you have some seriously fucked-up individuals, who have done major damage to their kids.
And mark my words. Though she looks good, talks a good game, and is well-known in her field, Susan Grady has done a major number on Levon. I don’t know why. But I know a little of the how—isolation and superiority. We are better than everyone else, therefore we must be separate. We are separate, therefore we are superior.
But the truth is, if you’re gifted, unusual, superior in that way, you need even more than regular people not to be isolated. You need to be grounded, need to be around other people, need to stay in touch.
Which brings me to Sam, who I have to admit I hated purely on instinct at first. Super-rich, prissy, gorgeous, standoffish. Then I heard she was paired with my boy Levon on this mysterious project, and I loathed her.
But I gotta say, she grew on me. I heard about the hospitals, I saw how hurt she’d been, how very badly damaged. And she had this innate grace and kindness. I may look like a thug, but I sense these things. And I heard, I don’t know where exactly, that she had a rich bitch mother who she loathed and who sounded as crazy in some ways as Susan. Do-nothing, shop-in-the-big-city, Benz-driving witch from very old Boston money.
Then I started hoping, maybe she’d reach him. Someone had to. Meg had a chance. Maybe the two of them, Meg and Sam. Who knows.
Me, I’m taking the gap year. Maybe move to the city, maybe move to the country, work on an organic farm. Though I guess you can’t smoke cigs there. Which sucks.
But let’s face it. Three quarters of me is full of shit. Is an act. Is smoke and mirrors. But at least I know it. And I still love Phyllis, floating in her scarlet shroud at night.
Time, as they always fucking say, as it’s ticking away like a bomb, will tell.
Twenty-four
Levon
I was gonna turn eighteen December 23, two days before Christmas, not that we ever did much for Christmas. I had always begged Susan for a Christmas tree, and a few times, when I was very young, we got a small fir tree in a small black tub at Wegmans and put a motley string of lights around it. And we did do presents.
She made a big deal of my birthday—made the cake, did the candles, and had lots of presents. But no parties, and I don’t thi
nk I ever went to other kids’ parties, though I was usually invited.
Most years, from age six or seven, we flew to Kansas on the twenty-second or twenty-third, and did the holidays with the Gradys. They lived in a big house in some fairly fancy suburb somewhere northwest of Kansas City. My grandfather is tall and kind of cheerful in this dry way, which always surprised me for a guy who spent his days with corpses and blood-splatter patterns, and possible time of death according to body heat and stomach content. My grandmother is medium height, and must once have been quite striking, and seemed quietly normal, if there ever is such a thing. She still wore dresses around the house, and pearls, even when cooking, and she was funny, in this wry way.
My uncles are both doctors, older than Susan, and had kids of their own, my cousins—two were either surgeons or training to be surgeons, and there was one cousin nobody talked about who had been in and out of rehabs for heroin and crack addiction. Her name was Wendy, and she was tall and quiet and really blond and really gracious the few times I saw her, and always wore long sleeves and long pants, even when we were there in the summer.
In mid-December I got into Cornell ED, early decision, and so did Sam and a few other people we knew. Mom was pretty happy about that, and I was too, because I had no great desire to leave town or go to Brown. I kind of guessed I’d live on campus, at first, in a single, if I could get one.
Then I started worrying about money. How would we pay for this? We got half off tuition because Susan was an employee, but when the financial aid letter came, it said the family was still responsible for over $45,000 a year.
Susan was never a big saver, and I thought, Are we gonna have to take out a huge loan?
You don’t have to worry about that, she said.
We were sitting in the front room.
Is grandpa gonna lend us money? Are we gonna win the lottery?
Susan was avoiding my eyes. She looked like she was squirming, something I’d never seen.
What? I said. For fuck’s sake, tell me.
I never swore, and she looked like she’d been slapped.
Okay, you prick, she said, and I felt slapped. Because your father has been saving since before you were born, and he has about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for you.
My father?
She was white-faced.
My father? I said again.
She nodded.
Darth Vader? I asked. Or he who must not be named? Or Charlie fucking Manson? Where the fuck was this coming from? After eighteen years of not a word about this mystery man, he miraculously shows up like the Lone fucking Ranger. I was white with rage.
Don’t be silly, she said.
Don’t be silly. Don’t be fucking silly, I said. Who’s been silly for eighteen years? Who created this huge fucking mystery? “You can’t know.” “It’ll never do you any good.” And this man, this monster you created in my mind, has been quietly saving, month by month, so his son could go to college. What the fuck?
Don’t be dramatic, Levon. And stop saying fuck.
But she was actually shaking. She was trembling all over, and she began to tear up, something I know I had never seen.
Why’d you do this, Susan? What’s the big mystery? Why’d you have to create this huge fucking void in my mind and fill it with an ogre? What was the point?
She stayed quiet.
I don’t even know his name.
You didn’t need to know his name. There was no need.
Maybe for you. What about me? Maybe I needed to know his name.
I’ll tell you his name on your birthday, in Kansas.
I’m not going to Kansas.
You’re what?
Not going to Kansas.
You can’t stay here alone.
Are you joking? Are you shitting me? ’Cause I’ve never been in the house alone? I’ve been doing that since I was six.
What will you do?
What do I ever do?
She looked over at me, and she was not wet-eyed anymore, and the color had returned to her face.
Your grandparents will be disappointed.
Tell them I have a school project I have to work on.
You sure you want to do this?
What?
Stay home.
Yes. It’ll be good for me.
I looked straight at her.
And I want to know my father’s name.
She looked away from me. She looked across the room at a Jackson Pollock print. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the floor, and then she looked back at me.
His name is Trevor Towns. He’s a physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He’s very well known in his field. We were graduate students at Chicago together. We had one very brief tryst, shortly before we graduated.
I sat, stunned. I didn’t move or say anything for a long time. After a minute, or five minutes, Susan stood up, came over to me, kissed me on the cheek, said, I love you, and left the room.
I sat for a long time.
I thought for a long time. Of Trevor Towns, this physicist. I thought about how from before the time I was born, he had been putting money away so that I could go to college. And he didn’t know me any more than I knew him, as far as I knew. Maybe he didn’t know my name, and had never even seen a picture of me. Maybe Susan treated him in this matter the way she treated me.
I spent the next few days on the computer, googling Trevor Towns. There were hundreds of hits. He was the Ruth T. Olin chair of physics at Case Western, and his specialty, as far as I could tell, was light. There were dozens and dozens of references to him, to papers he had written, awards he had won. There were even some of his papers online, about fractals and prisms, and the possibility that there could, in theory, be even more dimensions to light than wave and particle if we had the means to heat or cool light, or somehow speed it up or slow it down, fracture or bend it, use prisms and a long series of complex, powerful mirrors, or subject it to severe gravity.
I didn’t really get any of it. There were lots of complex equations and strange diagrams, and he seemed to co-author a number of papers with two professors, one at Caltech and another at Yale.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, had been born in East Anglia, UK, graduated from Manchester University in the UK, then earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1996, when he assumed his position as assistant professor at Case Western. He was married and had a daughter.
I clicked on images, and holy shit! There he was. He looked a lot like me. Or rather, I looked a lot like him. Tall, with unruly hair that was curlier and darker than mine, the same nose and mouth and ears, even similar glasses, but his looked a bit darker and heavier, the lenses thicker. There were shots of him at a podium, receiving or giving out a plaque, some award, of him lecturing, of him in front of a whiteboard with crazy huge equations. There were pics of him with students, apparently at receptions, with colleagues, because they all looked like science people, in a coat and tie, in another pic in a short-sleeved shirt, and he had surprisingly powerful forearms, a farmer’s forearms.
I kept looking, and reading. I checked if he had a Facebook page, but he didn’t, then if there was a Wikipedia article about him, and there was.
I kept closing my computer, and lying on my futon, and thinking, What was Susan thinking? What could she possibly have been meaning to do? Surely she was afraid of something, or ashamed, but Susan was not one for shame or fear.
And now what was I gonna do?
Go to school and say, Hey, guess what? I have a father, and he’s an interesting guy. Some kind of big deal in physics.
Meanwhile, the semester was winding down; Ithaca was emptying out, the way it did every winter break, starting around mid-December, and every summer. The students would start to leave, and by the twentieth of December or so, the town became slow and sleepy and silent and lovely. It became something different entirely. The few winter breaks I’d spent here had been gorgeous, quiet, almost
holy. Hours could go by, and not a single car would pass on North Tioga Street, where we lived.
I hadn’t spoken to Susan since the night of the big revelation. She’d asked me a few times if I was okay, and I’d nodded. She nodded, got almost teary once or twice.
She left early for the 5:45 flight on my birthday, and said she’d get a cab. She’d hugged me hard the night before. She said, You’re eighteen. You can vote now.
She said she’d call, then said good night, and she looked sad.
She had left me a wrapped package and an envelope on the dining room table that I found when I woke up around ten on my birthday. The package was this beautiful black mackintosh coat I’d been wanting, and it was XL Tall. It fit perfectly, was pure wool, and the back and shoulders had been treated to resist rain and snow. The card was an Ansel Adams winter scene. Happy Birthday, Sweetheart, she wrote. With much love; signed, Susan. And there were five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills inside. Beaucoup bucks. A whole new level of cash.
I wandered around the house, from room to room to room. I put some music on, first Radiohead, then the Smiths, then I had this urge for some sacred music. I put Mozart’s Requiem on, and turned it up loud.
I’m an atheist, I suppose, but I’ve always loved sacred music. Bach and Beethoven’s Masses, Purcell, even the great early English composer Thomas Tallis, who composed masses and used polyphonic voices that made my spine shiver.
I felt weird, and wondered if I should try some of Susan’s booze. But the little drinking I’d tried had always made me dizzy and kind of sick. Then I went to the medicine cabinet in the second-floor bathroom. There were about a half dozen amber pill containers. There was sertraline, which I somehow knew was her antidepressant, and amoxicillin, an antibiotic. But there were three containers that had the controlled substance warning, and I knew that meant they were the interesting ones. They could give you a buzz. One was alprazolam. Take one tablet at bedtime for insomnia. Another was clonazepam. Take one tablet as needed for anxiety. And the third was hydrocodone. Take one tablet as needed for pain.