Love Is Both Wave and Particle
Page 15
I’d bet that at least a quarter, maybe a third, of the kids in the Ithaca City School District were on some kind of psychiatric med—Adderall or Ritalin, Prozac or Effexor or something—so how could you say anybody, any kid, was normal?
But Levon had always been in a category all his own. So physically beautiful, so brilliant, but so withdrawn, so alone and friendless, and that mother, Susan, Ms. Expert in psycho killers, and the secret of his father, which must have really eaten away at him. And never going out. Just being alone in that house, and never going to parties.
But gradually, almost without anyone noticing, Levon was becoming different, as though they’d found a new med for him, though I was pretty sure this had nothing to do with meds. Susan would not have allowed that.
Levon was walking around as though he had oil in his joints. Before he moved kind of stiffly, as though everything was rusty and tense, but now he was looser, more flowing. And you’d hear his laugh, and you’d see him in the halls, stopping to talk to people, and you’d actually see him smile a lot. And that was something I noticed last.
Levon’s smile. He had beautiful, perfect white teeth, and I realized I’d hardly seen them in all the years, because he so rarely opened his mouth, and he almost never smiled. And he had this wonderful, infectious smile. Where not only did his beautiful teeth show, but you’d see the smile in his eyes, in his whole face. And he was so damned handsome.
It was also the way he’d sit down with people at lunch. The way he made little jokes and comments, which were always really smart and sly. And I think other people noticed too.
It was like our crown prince was emerging from his cocoon.
I speculated, of course, because that’s what I do. That’s my nature and it’s my job, in a way. And I had to think of two things, two things that were related.
Sam Vash, and this big secret project with Meg and Sam. They were doing something that was getting to him. Doing something that was getting very deeply at his soul, if there is such a thing. Because Meg was the kind of teacher who could do that. And she was putting a lot of time into this project, and she was spending a ton of time, behind closed doors, with them.
Plus, the beautiful Sam Vash. Our new queen and princess. So smart and poised and vulnerable, all at the same time. If I liked girls, I’d certainly fall in love with her.
I’d see them together quite a bit. Talking, sitting in one of the small study rooms, next to each other on a couch. And several times, I saw them walking on the streets of Fall Creek, near the school. Talking, their heads kind of close together, and one time when they were walking, Sam was holding Levon by the arm. There is just no way you would have seen something like that a year ago, or five or ten years ago. Levon didn’t touch people. People didn’t touch Levon.
I was pretty sure something was going on between them, but I had absolutely no confirmation from anyone. Anna, who was pretty tight with Sam, swore it was nothing, and you’d think she’d be the first to know.
But the biggest thing for me happened one afternoon, late in the day, after school was over, and I was doing stuff in the library. I came out into the hall, and Levon was walking toward me.
In this flirty, jokey way, I said, Hey, gorgeous.
He stopped in front of me. Then he hugged me. This huge hug, where he actually lifted me off my feet, and said, Oh, Avery. Our Avery.
Then set me gently down.
He was at least five inches taller than me and about ten times as strong, and I remember thinking, If only.
Then we each walked on, and I thought, That is not the same Levon Grady I’ve known for a dozen years.
And I was dying, just dying, to know what in the name of heaven was going on.
Twenty-nine
Levon
The cold kept on and on and on. We’d have a day or two when it would get warm, and just when you thought it had to break, when you thought it had to get into the twenties or, impossibly, into the thirties, it stayed down in the single digits, or maybe in the low double digits. Eleven, twelve, sometimes even fourteen or fifteen. And at night, always near or below zero. And these absurd windchill factors.
I stayed home and thought about my parents. I did my meetings with Meg and Sam, exchanged a few emails with Trevor, because that’s what we decided I should call him.
I wasn’t sure what was going on with Sam and me. She spent the night, we had a lovely night, one of the loveliest nights of my life, and then the morning after Christmas, she had to go back home.
I didn’t know what it meant exactly. I thought about what Trevor had said about light and love. Maybe I loved Sam. I certainly cared very deeply for her. She moved me. And I thought she felt the same way about me. We had coffee together, and a few times we went for walks, but mostly I did what I always did, which was go to school and stay home, only it was made worse by this terrible tension between me and Susan. I spoke to her now, but the dynamic had changed. She no longer had a power over me, and I didn’t really want to be around her. I kept to my room.
Sometimes I had lunch with Sam, along with Anna, and Avery and Noah and Sierra, and various other seniors. Even though it was still only late February then, we were starting to feel the end of things. All these years together, and soon, bang: all over. Even Sam, who’d only been here six months, was getting that. Anticipatory nostalgia.
With Trevor, we had settled into this once-a-week-or-so email routine. Back and forth. We had decided not to talk on the phone yet, not for a while, maybe not till summer. And we had decided that we wouldn’t meet—and we definitely wanted to meet—until late in the year. Maybe at Thanksgiving or Christmas. He said I was taking in so much, and there was the project, and graduation, and Cornell. He didn’t want to upset the applecart. We had scads and scads of time.
I liked some of his expressions.
By March, we had a few days in the upper teens and twenties, and I went to Sam’s almost by accident, and her mom and dad were both there, and it was a really cool house, almost like a large, really large English cottage off Cayuga Heights Road. She had to pick up a notebook because she’d left some writing she had to show me in it. She pulled into the driveway, and said come in, and I remember thinking, I’ve never met multimillionaires.
Come say hello, she said.
I think it was Thursday, and the cars were not fancy, though there was an Austin Mini that was bright red, and inside the house was very cool. Spacious, and very tasteful, but comfortable and lived-in, and her dad was wearing two wool sweaters, and said, Hello, Levon, and smiled and shook my hand, and then he said, They weren’t kidding about these Ithaca winters, were they?
I said, This is way worse than usual. I mean, even for here.
He said, Come in, and waved me toward the living room, and this graceful woman rose, and she reminded me a little of Susan, though not so intense, and she said, Levon? Am I right?
Glad to meet you, I said, and was thinking to myself, My, but you sound normal, don’t you?
She said, This is a terrible thing to do, but my word, you’re a handsome, hunky boy, and we’ve heard so much about you.
Oh, Mom, for God’s sake, Sam said. Do you have to embarrass both of us? Are you that clueless?
And her dad said, He seems to be holding up well.
I asked how they were liking Ithaca, and Nathan—he said to call him Nathan—said they really liked Ithaca, and Vera said Ithaca was terrific. She said, Forgive the phrase, but Ithaca is gorges.
It was as though I was acting like a normal person, or practicing to act like a normal person, and doing it, but watching myself at the same time. Thinking, from outside myself, Look at Levon. He seems perfectly normal, with a pretty good set of social skills.
Meeting Sam’s parents made me think about Susan. I had been writing about her, of course, and sharing it with Meg and Sam but no one else. Seeing Sam with her parents made me understand her in a whole new way. And I thought it would be interesting to show Sam Susan.
Finally I
asked her if she wanted to bite the bullet, and come meet Susan, and she said, Sure, more quickly than I thought she would, given everything I’d been writing about her lately. Susan, at that time, still didn’t know about all my emails with Trevor, as far as I knew.
I brought Sam home after school in early March, I think the second week, and it had actually reached the low thirties that day. We walked over from school at lunch, which was maybe four or five blocks, and Sam had her hair in these beautiful blond braids, and she wore a kind of loose blue beret, and when we got inside the front door I called, Susan, and she said, Yes, from the back of the first floor.
We walked through the long hallway and living room, to the kitchen, a short hallway and bathroom, then a dining room that was all unpainted wood and windows, and because Sam was with me I was suddenly seeing it with new eyes. It was very sparse and almost Danish. It looked onto the backyard, which was all trees, and an unpainted gray barn.
Susan stood up from the table, and it was very strange. She was wearing slippers, and I said, This is Sam, and Susan smiled, and they shook hands, and Susan said, Susan, and it was one of the oddest moments of my life. My mother did not seem to know quite what to do. It was like Susan was unmoored, something I’d never seen, but Susan had not been quite the same Susan ever since Christmas.
Sam said, It’s nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you, and Susan said, Yes. Thank you. You’re doing this secret project with Levon.
Very hush-hush, I said.
Meg, Sam said, has sworn us to secrecy. Said the project could not happen without absolute confidentiality.
So I understand, Susan said.
Sam was wearing boots, and she was nearly as tall as my mother. And it seemed suddenly, with Sam in the room, that my mother was not nearly so formidable.
Would you like some coffee? Tea? Susan finally said.
Thank you, no, Sam said.
We backed into the kitchen.
Yogurt? Fruit? I asked.
Of course, Sam said.
Sam seemed to be rallying.
This is your first year in Ithaca? Susan said.
Yes.
You must love our salubrious winters.
Sam laughed. I’ve gotta say, she said, it’s been a very impressive winter.
They’re not always this bad, Susan said. And you’re from Boston?
Yes. My dad worked for Fidelity Investments, in IT security, then he worked for the Harvard Corporation. Then I fell apart, and he now works for Cornell, mostly for institutional investing, for IT security, and he teaches a little at the Johnson School. He’s very interested in NGOs.
Nathan Vash? Susan asked. I was reading about him. New faculty. Very interesting. Walked away from the fast track.
I kind of forced his hand a little.
Really?
Mom, I said.
We sat down at the table with yogurt and apples and cheese and tea.
And you’re in neurobiology? Sam said.
Yes, Susan said. The human brain. The holy grail. And I know less, I fear, than I did twenty years ago.
Or you know what you don’t know, Sam said, which is more than you knew twenty years ago.
Susan laughed.
That’s one way of putting it, and I suppose that’s true. We know what we don’t know, and that puts us a little ahead of where we were.
We were sitting at the table in the back room. Sam and I were eating fruit and yogurt, and I was drinking tea. Susan got up to pour herself more coffee, and when she came back, she sat down across from Sam.
If you don’t mind my asking, Susan said, you said you kind of forced your dad’s hand, your mother and dad’s hand, I presume. What did you mean by that?
Sam swallowed, and I could see her hesitate. They had sent me off to boarding school, she said, where I did not want to be at all—it was really my grandparents’ decision—and in the first week, I made a pretty serious suicide attempt. I tried to leave the world. I kind of felt as though I was dying anyway.
Sam unbuckled the strap of her watch, and laid the inside of her left wrist—facing up—on the table. There was a white scar, about an inch and a half long, slightly jagged in the middle, with white dots on each side where the stitches had gone in and out. Even though I knew about that night, I had never seen the scar before.
Oh, child, my mother whispered, and she did something I never would have expected. She picked Sam’s wrist up in her hand, and gently and slowly, ran her thumb over the scar.
Poor baby, she said, I’m so terribly sorry.
There were tears in her eyes.
You were how old? Susan asked.
Sixteen.
I’m so sorry, Susan said.
She laid Sam’s wrist back down on the table.
Forgive me, Susan said. I don’t know what—
Oh, no, please, Sam said. You’re a mom. You have a kid the same age. It’s—it’s just when you feel trapped, you’re cornered and you’re not thinking.
Sam rebuckled her watch.
Now it’s this thing I cover with time. Like. Time heals. Time passes, she said.
So you didn’t stay at Groton?
God, no. She laughed. I spent from September to December at McLean, and then January to May at Austen Riggs, in the Berkshires. That was my academic year. Shock treatment to begin with, and then by the end of the year I was getting tutored by Smith and Mount Holyoke students. Reading The Magic Mountain and The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Portrait of a Lady. It was kind of a spring of the James brothers, not far from the Mount, where Henry James visited Edith Wharton. About a mile from where Melville wrote Moby-Dick. Enchanted hills.
That’s some year, Susan said.
I had been silent this whole time because I was dumbfounded. Believe it or not, it looked as though Susan was a little enchanted with Sam Vash.
And this program with Meg, Susan said, it sounds very mysterious, very top secret, for-eyes-only, as the movies used to say.
They both laughed.
You got me there, Professor, Sam said.
Susan, please.
We’re just not supposed to say, right, Levon?
I shook my head.
Meg would have our heads and our souls, I said.
We had to get back to school, and as we left, Susan did something else that was unusual. She asked Sam to come back and have dinner with us, and she leaned over and hugged her. Not a perfunctory hug, but a long, hard hug. A hold-you-to-the-earth hug.
Walking back to school, Sam said, That wasn’t anything like what I’d expected.
Me either.
What happened?
I hardly know. But I think she fell a little in love with you. You moved her. You touched her heart.
She was so kind, Sam said.
She’s capable of kindness, I guess. And it made me feel the irony, of how Sam immediately elicited Susan’s empathy. Maybe Sam’s frankness just threw her.
Then it occurred to me, maybe for the first time in my life, that maybe Susan was lonely, that behind the immense confidence there was some small part of her that was a small child, crouched in a corner, more than a little bit scared. It was strange to even think of her that way, but maybe that happened as you got older. Your parents were not omnipotent. They might even deserve our compassion sometimes. It was something I needed to give more thought.
When we got back to school, Avery and Sierra and Anna were at the butt-smoking bench. Somehow, the clouds had broken, at least momentarily, and the sun was shining, pushing the temps up close to thirty, maybe even higher. We sat down, and Avery immediately started in.
Two, three weeks till college letter day, he said. All the colleges said they reported by April 15, but in fact, most of them mailed their application decisions by late March, or very early April. The end is near, he said, then he quickly turned to Sam and me. Which meant it was time to come clean, were we or weren’t we? He needed to be the first to know, were we an item? Lovers? Nearly lovers?
r /> And you, he turned to Anna. You, my dear, and she smiled, and sipped from a bottle of green tea. She looked at Sam, and Sam looked at her, and just for a second, I thought I saw something. A flicker, a shadow of a reflection of a smile.
Avery, love, Anna said. You’ll always, ever, cross my weaving heart, be the very first. And as for you, handsome, she said to me, how’s every little thing? Are you in love yet?
I didn’t even blush. I took a sip of my drink, and looked at the sky that almost threatened spring.
Thirty
Ron
The school year resumed two days after New Year’s Day, on a Wednesday, which meant, of course, that it would be a very short week. The kids seemed both tired and excited, and outside it was bitterly, bitterly cold. During the night before, the radio had said we had reached a low of minus seven, and the high that day was supposed to be four degrees. This was the second winter in a row where the temperatures were unusually low, even for Ithaca.
Somehow, I had thought that because a year ago it had been such a harsh winter we would get off easier this year, but it was not looking to be that way, and as it turned out, that second winter would be even more severe.
A friend of mine often joked that she had started to take the weather personally.
But being back among the students was always energizing, and always, always interesting.
I had been doing this work as a school psychologist for more than forty years, and by rights, I suppose, I should have retired, should have given way to younger blood. Taken up fishing or watercolors. But Holly, my wife, was dead ten years then, and what was I to do? Sit home and wither?
And I found the students at the Clock School more challenging, more interesting, more involving to work with than any I had worked with in my long, long career. I felt too that the students liked and felt comfortable with me. As though I was a nonjudgmental grandfather. Too old to get angry, and old enough to have seen and heard most everything. I thought, vaguely, that I’d give it until I was seventy.