The Ethical Assassin

by David Liss

  He’d had countless bad ideas- that I should get new clothes no more than every two years, that I should wait until I turned sixteen before getting a learner’s permit, that I should clean out the barbecue each time he used it so the best pieces of charcoal could be salvaged for reuse. This one filled me with the most resentment, because when I came in from the garage, covered with sweat and soot, nostrils caked with black powder, coughing up gray phlegm, I found it impossible to deny the Dickensian bleakness of my life.

  The first good idea came the summer after my freshman year in high school. Andy Roman had married my mother six years earlier, and I had been gaining weight steadily ever since. My mother said nothing while her son went from skinny to husky to fat, said nothing while I carted away bags of Oreos and boxes of doughnuts to my room to eat during solitary marathon sessions of Happy Days and Good Times reruns. The apathy, I later learned, originated from the heroic quantities of Valium she took. I thought she was simply inclined to sleepiness and partial to naps. I accepted that some people napped between breakfast and lunch and then after lunch until it was time to start making dinner.

  If Andy knew about her little pill fixation- and he must have- he didn’t show much concern. Despite her fogginess, in which my mother sometimes wandered from room to room, clutching a plastic soup ladle or pot holder while searching for something she couldn’t quite recall, she managed to clean the house and make his meals- and that was all Andy required.

  On occasion he’d try to interest her in his obsession with my increasing weight, but my mother just shrugged and muttered observations about growing boys. He wasn’t having it, and one day he announced that he would take care of it if she wouldn’t. Taking care of it marked the beginning of a disciplined regimen of derision to help slim me down. But six months of calling me Big Booty and helpful suggestions that I get off my fat butt and go outside and play in the fresh air and sunshine failed to achieve significant results, so in a rare moment of intellectual retrenching, he took on a new approach.

  “Time for a serious talk,” he said to me over breakfast one morning. My mother, staring at us through the slits of her eyes, had already announced that she was going to lie down, so it was just me and Andy.

  He was then in his mid-fifties, fifteen years older than my mother and looking like a man taking a nosedive into senior citizenship. He was jowly and liver spotted and had heavy bags under his cloudy green eyes. Despite his harsh assessment of me, he was himself a good thirty pounds overweight. Most of his head still had decent coverage, but what he had was gray and thinning and too long for a man of his age. He played golf with the ceaseless intensity of a Florida lawyer, which he was, and constant exposure to the sun gave his skin the look of an overbaked apple. However, he came from a generation that believed you could never be too tan, and pachyderm skin was far preferable to the shame of pallor.

  Andy pushed up his black-rimmed bifocals over his nose, which had become noticeably bulbous in the last two years. “I know you want to go away to college when you graduate high school,” he said. “But let’s face it. Everyone wants to go away, and what’s so great about you that anyplace decent should let you in? Am I right?”

  Less than a year earlier, I had realized, in a kind of aesthetic epiphany, that I hated Florida. I hated the heat, I hated the white shoes and white belts, I hated the golf and the tennis and the beaches and the run-down art deco buildings that smelled of old people and the palm trees and the rednecks and the loud transplanted northerners and the clueless Canadians who visited during the winter and the unremarkable sadness of the poor, mostly black, people who fished for their dinner in the stagnant canals. I hated the crabgrass and the sandy vacant lots and poisonous snakes and deadly walking catfish and dog-eating alligators, the unavoidable sharp-spored plants and gargantuan palmetto bugs and fist-size spiders and swarming fire ants and the rest of the tropical mutants that daily reminded us that human beings had no business living here. All of which I knew, on some fundamental but unarticulated level, meant that I hated my life and I wanted a new one. I’d been talking ever since about going away to college, going far away, as though the intervening three years were only a mild obstacle.

  “You need to think about how you’re going to convince them you’re not just another loser,” Andy said. He had both his elbows on the white oval breakfast table, and he was practically leaning into his microwaved pancake-and-sausage breakfast.

  “I know you don’t want to hear it,” he said now, “but what you ought to do is join the track team next year. Your grades have been all right”- I had a 3.9 average, which I personally thought was beyond all right-“and being on the school paper is fine, I guess, but athletics really round out your application. And you want them to think you’re well-rounded, but not in the way you are now.” He inflated his cheeks. “You want them to look at your stuff and think, There’s a real go-getter, not, There’s a big lardo. They probably already have enough of those.”

  I understood at once why Andy suggested track, and in a vague way, I was grateful for it. Team sports were not going to get me very far, not after the fifth grade’s disastrous experiment with softball. Track, on the other hand, offered certain advantages. It was essentially a solitary sport played in proximity to others. No one was relying on me not to fuck up, at least not in the same way they would if a pop-up to right field came my way. “And, sure,” Andy said, “it’s not like you’ve ever been good at running or anything, but with a summer’s worth of hard work you could at least be good enough to be the worst guy on the team.”

  Our house on Terrapin Way encircled a man-made pond in which nameless fish, brightly colored frogs, lumpy-billed ducks, and the occasional itinerant gator made a home, and Andy announced that he had tracked the circumference of the surrounding road at exactly one-half mile. “So, here’s the deal,” he said, tapping one manicured nail against his fork. “We’re going to practice. Between now and when school starts, I’ll give you a dollar for every mile you can run and ten dollars for every five consecutive miles you can run.”

  It had seemed like a nice offer. Hell, if I’m going to be honest, it was a truly generous offer, a rare moment of inspired stepparenting, though I understood it was also about Andy wanting to show just how right he was. Nevertheless, it was a good deal, even though I had never done well with running. In gym class, when the instructor sent us to do laps, I was always the first to surrender into a walk, to hold my cramping side while the other kids whisked passed me, glancing back with contempt. The money might provide motivation for me to improve my prowess, but there was something humiliating in being offered money to do what other kids could do freely and easily.

  So I declined. I didn’t want to go out there and sweat while Andy watched me struggle to put a half mile under my belt. I didn’t want to go huffing past the house while Andy shouted an inevitable, “Keep it going, Big Booty!”

  The thing was, I wanted to lose weight. I wanted to diet, but I’d been unable to do so because committing to a weight loss program would be like telling Andy that he’d been right, that it was okay that he’d been calling me Fatty and Lard Butt and Butterball all those months.

  I knew this track business was a way out. Andy had brought it up only once, which meant going along with it was still more or less uncharged. I could diet while training but pass off the diet as a new way of eating to get in shape. And I could never accept a dime of his money for any of this. I needed to keep Andy out of my slimming.

  There was no way I was going to go running around Terrapin Way. Far too many kids from school lived in Hibiscus Gardens, our subdivision, and a few even lived in houses around the pond, and I didn’t want them watching- not until I could run with ease, not until I could do five miles. I needed the shield of success, since they also enjoyed calling me Fatty and Butterball, though they went with Lard Ass instead of Lard Butt, not being restrained by a stepparent’s sense of decorum. Instead of hitting the road right away, I went to my room, put on my sneaker
s, turned on the radio, and jogged in place. At first I couldn’t do more than ten minutes, then fifteen. Within a week I could do half an hour, and after a week of that I figured I was ready for actual laps.

  I imagined my triumphant return to school, looking slim and fit, snappy in the new clothes Andy would have to pay for since the old ones would be too big, were getting too big already. The bullies would now have to find someone else to pick on.

  I never really believed it, nor should I have. That sort of transformation is the staple of Hollywood teen movies but never allowed in real life. In the movies, the ugly girl gets new clothes and a new haircut, removes her glasses, and-gasp!- she’s the most popular girl in school. In real life, when we bottom-feeders try to rise above our station, they pull us down, cut off our limbs, and stick us in a box. Even though I returned that September as fit as any healthy tenth grader, they still called me Lard Ass and continued to do so until I graduated.

  But the fantasy was motivation enough. I started running laps while Andy was at work and my mother was off doing errands. I didn’t want them to know. Not until I could run five miles without stopping. Doing so turned out to be a lot easier than I would have thought, and six weeks after my first solitary jog, I told Andy I was ready to try out for track next year.

  “Fine,” he said with an embarrassed shrug. It was clear that he regretted having offered me the money and now wanted to make it as difficult as possible for me to raise the subject.

  As it turned out, I did fairly well at track. I made the team and acquitted myself reasonably well at matches. I didn’t excel at speed, but I was good at endurance, and in some of the longer races I could outlast some of my opponents well enough to score a third, and occasionally a second, place. It would be good enough to help me get into college, and I wasn’t even the slowest guy on the team.

  ***

  The second good idea came a little more than half a year later, during the winter break of my sophomore year. I had been lying on my bed, reading, when the knock came at the door. It was a good two hours after dinner, and I could hear the TV going from the family room, where my mother would have nodded off on the couch, the still life with apples needlepoint pattern she’d been working on for the past nine months in her lap.

  Andy didn’t wait for an answer. He opened the door and stuck his head inside. “What’s going on in here? Anything naughty?”

  I sat up and folded the book open to my spot. Andy said nothing for a moment, just leaned against the doorjamb, grinning fiercely. His thick-framed rectangular glasses had slid down his ballooning nose.

  “I think,” Andy announced, “you should set your sights on an Ivy League school. Harvard or Yale, preferably, but Princeton or Columbia will do in a pinch. I guess even Brown or Dartmouth, if you had to.” Andy had gone to the University of Florida himself, and to a local university of no national reputation for his law degree, but he seemed to feel he knew a lot about the intricacies of the Ivys.

  “Of course,” he added, “we know we can’t rely on your father to help with the money.”

  My father was living somewhere in Jamaica now, where he worked as a tourist scuba-diving guide and, if overheard conversations could be trusted, smoked prodigious quantities of marijuana. I imagined him sitting on a beach in a circle of glassy-eyed Rastafarians, puffing lazily on a cigar-thick joint. Some of my friends had discovered reggae, but I couldn’t stand the political yearnings of Bob Marley, the ganja-fueled rage of Peter Tosh, the self-aggrandizing toasts of Yellowman- not when my father was off living the life of a white rasta. Besides, he had entirely given up on paying child support, and I hadn’t heard from him in two years, when he’d placed a drunken call on a warm April afternoon to wish me a happy fifteenth birthday. I was thirteen at the time and had been so since January.

  “So maybe it doesn’t make sense to go to a place like that,” I proposed. I was confused, and presenting a counterargument seemed like the best way to draw out Andy’s game. “I mean, if it’s so expensive.” Going to an Ivy League school had never occurred to me. I’d always believed them reserved for the movie-star handsome and privileged, charming boys and girls with trust funds and easy grins and ruddy complexions from effortless afternoons on the ski slopes.

  “If you keep your grades up and you do well on your SATs,” Andy prophesied, “you should be able to get a decent financial aid package. Plus this business I set up for you with the track team should help. They’ll cut you a deal and you’ll take out some loans. And if all of that doesn’t cover everything,” he announced magnanimously, “we’ll work something out.”

  The seed was planted. I’d always thought of myself as smart, had always thought of myself as capable of doing smart-person things- but going to Harvard or Yale, that was far out of reach, like becoming an astronaut or ambassador to France. Still, Andy had suggested it, and now I wanted it. I wanted the opportunities an Ivy League degree would provide. I could become an important historian or direct movies and go into politics. Once it was on the table, I knew it was the way out, the way to a genuinely non-Floridian future.

  The next summer, while visiting my grandparents in New Jersey, I had made arrangements to take a look at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale over the course of three separate weekends. When I went to Columbia ’s Upper West Side campus, it was my first trip to New York City, despite the annual visit to my grandparents, who lived a light-traffic forty-five-minute drive away in Bergen County. I had been instantly seduced by the city and by the campus, and I left with no doubt that Columbia was where I wanted to go.

  In fact, the moment the car crossed the George Washington Bridge, I knew that New York was the place that I must have always known about in the hidden recesses of my mind. Maybe I had already absorbed New York from television and movies. I must have seen the city depicted on the screen countless times, but it never signified much of anything but some kind of foreign and urban landscape. In reality, on the ground, with the noise and people and the gum-stained sidewalks littered with trash and teeming with the homeless, it seemed to me something else entirely. I had discovered the anti-Florida.

  “ Columbia ’s all right,” Andy had assured me, “and if that’s the only place you can get in, fine. But it shouldn’t be your first choice. Harvard should be your first choice.” He folded his arms authoritatively, though the closest he’d ever been to Harvard was Logan Airport to change planes.

  As it turned out, it didn’t much matter, since Yale, Harvard, and Princeton all said no. Columbia said yes, as had, improbably, Berkeley and my safety: the University of Florida. When I received the admission on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I ran to tell Andy, who was resting on his recliner in the family room, watching golf on television.

  “ Columbia,” he observed. “At least that’s something after getting the thumbs-down from Harvard and Yale.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” I said. I paced around, too excited to hold still, even for an instant. “Man, living in New York. It’s going to be so cool.”

  Andy’s face went long, a sure sign things were about to turn sour. He shook his head as he geared himself up to piss on my cornflakes. “You might want to think twice about this. University of Florida is a good school. If you go to New York, you’ll probably get mugged.”

  “There’s millions of people. They can’t all get mugged.”

  “Some people will, but you won’t? Is that it? What, you think you’re exempt?”

  “I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.”

  “Well, I got a pretty good education at U of F,” Andy said. “What’s good enough for me isn’t good enough for you?”

  “I don’t want to go to Florida. I want to go to Columbia. You’re the one who told me I should go to an Ivy.”

  Andy shrugged and looked over my shoulder to watch someone miss a three-foot putt. “And it was a fine idea. And you did try. I’m just saying that you may not want to go to Columbia. Harvard or Yale, sure. But they already said no. Maybe they saw
something in your application and they realized you’re not Ivy material. Isn’t it kind of beneath your dignity to let Columbia have you as sloppy seconds?”

  “That is so far beyond stupid that I don’t even know the word for it.”

  “If you had a better vocabulary, maybe Harvard would have let you in. I think a state school education is much better. You don’t want to become an Ivy League snob, do you?”

  There was no way I was going to let him talk me out of it. The thing about Columbia was that no one would know me there. Unlike the University of Florida, Columbia would not have anyone from my high school or my neighborhood. Most people, when I told them where I was applying, thought I meant South Carolina. When I got there, I would no longer be the loser who had once been fat- I would be whoever I said I was. It was not only an escape from Florida, it was a clean break, maybe the cleanest break I would ever get, could ever hope for. And I knew I wasn’t going to squander it.

  The day of graduation, while I’d been drinking orange soda with relatives at my house before going out with friends, one of whose cousins was having a party, Andy took me aside.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve been looking over the application material for Columbia. Maybe this isn’t the best time, but I don’t see how you can afford it. Even with the financial aid and the loans, you’re going to need another seven thousand dollars a year. That’s almost thirty thousand dollars. Where are you going to get that?”

  I looked at the floor. “You said you’d help me out.”

  “And I have, haven’t I?” I didn’t ask how, since it would invariably turn into a “food on the table, clothes on my back” kind of thing, and I wasn’t interested. “Come on now, Lem. I’m not your father. Your father is off smoking wacky weed and chasing topless natives. Uga buga,” he added, bulging his eyes. “Maybe he should pay for it. Have you even asked him?”

  “I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”