Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

  Three months at Charlotte’s was more than enough, so they found a small apartment a few blocks away. It was too close to Charlotte’s for Arlo’s taste, but his mother was happy to have Charlotte nearby; she was his mother’s ballast in the city. Charlotte would drop by with corn bread and chili, and though Arlo could have done without the company, he wasn’t one to turn down free food.

  But the real thing that happened in San Francisco was that he got into one of the good public high schools. School, that sphinx: he finally unlocked the puzzle. He used the tricks he’d been taught to decode words, only they didn’t feel like tricks any longer; they were simply how he read. He was thriving at school, but if his father knew about his success—he would make sure he didn’t—he would claim it as his own. There emerged in Arlo a battle between his wish to succeed—he would show his father, once and for all—and his wish to fail: he would show his father that way, too.

  He graduated from high school because he was too smart to fail. The summer after he graduated, he worked at a Wendy’s in downtown Oakland. He hated the job, but he wanted a photo of himself in his Wendy’s uniform to send to his father. On the back of the photo he wrote, I graduated from high school, and he dropped the photo in the mail.

  It was enough to imagine his father opening the envelope. That alone was sufficient for him to endure the work, knowing that every time he flipped a burger his father was thinking of him flipping that burger. While Professor Spence Robin was presiding over the most popular English lecture on campus, his son Arlo was working the microphone at the Wendy’s drive-thru. Arlo was on his feet all day, and he smelled of cow fat and pig fat. But he could endure any humiliation as long as his father was tethered to him in his misery.

  He stayed the summer at Wendy’s and into the fall, long enough to get his first raise and to understand that, as much as it must have pained his father to have a son working at Wendy’s, it pained Arlo even more to be that son.

  So he quit his job. When he was seven, he’d helped rewire his mother’s transistor radio. Now he was assisting UC Berkeley and San Francisco State students with their computer problems. Before long, he was being hired by young professionals in the East and South Bays. He worked out of his mother’s apartment on Guerrero Street, but soon the space became too small, and he opened an office above a taqueria, from which free food was delivered in exchange for computer help and troubleshooting with technology. His business grew and grew, and he branched out into the more lucrative field of programming. Soon he was working at Yahoo.

  But he was growing restless again. So he left Yahoo and broke his lease. He bought a one-way plane ticket to Asia.

  “When will you be back?” his mother said.

  “Maybe six months. Maybe never.”

  “I’ll miss you, Arlo.”

  At least he kissed his mother goodbye before he left. He hadn’t talked to his father in six months, and he didn’t even tell him he was leaving.

  24

  Sarah was a sophomore at Reed, standing in line for coffee one morning, when the man behind her said, “I heard a rumor you went to this school.”

  She just stared at him. “Arlo?”

  “Aren’t you going to hug me?”

  She hesitated, then gave him a hug. She hadn’t seen him since that morning six years ago, when his mother picked him up in a cab. The world had evolved, and her relationship with Arlo had devolved in kind: long periods of no communication followed by much shorter periods of communication, after which she wondered whether they should have communicated in the first place. Every time they planned to get together, Arlo backed out.

  Arlo had grown into his body. His hair, auburn like their father’s, was cropped short. He was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt, and he had the beginnings of a goatee. She’d forgotten how handsome he was. Or maybe it was just that he was her brother, so she hadn’t noticed. “Look at you,” she said. “You’ve learned to like coffee.”

  “It’s Portland,” he reminded her. “If I didn’t like coffee, I’d get deported.” Also, he said, he’d been trying to sleep as little as possible.

  “But you used to love sleep.”

  He shrugged as if to say he still loved sleep but he’d learned to love other things more.

  “Arlo, you hold yourself the same way you used to. I recognize your walk.”

  He looked at her dubiously. “Would I recognize your walk?”

  “Let’s see.” She trafficked across the café and back.

  “Nope,” he said. “I don’t recognize your walk.”

  She felt strangely disappointed. Maybe he was just taunting her. He’d always been good at that. “Come,” she said. “I’ll introduce you to my dog.” She untied Kingsley from a post. He thumped his tail against her leg, then thumped his tail against Arlo’s leg; soon he was sniffing her brother’s sneakers.

  “Way to a man’s heart,” Arlo said, “but can I give you some brotherly advice? You should never leave a dog tied up. I had half a mind to steal him. He’s a handsome creature.”

  “Thank you,” she said, but then she felt foolish: Arlo wasn’t saying she was a handsome creature. “Listen,” she said, “if you want a dog, you don’t need to steal one. There are thousands just waiting for a good home.”

  “But I don’t have a good home.”

  For an instant she wondered whether Arlo might be homeless. But he looked carefully groomed, and despite having claimed he’d dispensed with sleep, he appeared well rested.

  “Seriously, I rarely spend two nights in a row under the same roof.”

  “Are you an itinerant worker?”

  “After a fashion. What about you?”

  “Am I an itinerant worker?” She was a college student, which was closer to being an itinerant worker than she’d have liked to think. She moved from library to library and class to class; sometimes she made pit stops in the dining hall. “I’m a sophomore at Reed. Or a second-year, as they now call it.”

  “So as not to sound sophomoric?”

  “So as not to call the first-years freshmen. Speaking of which, I’m going to be late for my next class. Animal studies. If only I could bring this animal along.” She let go of Kingsley’s leash, and again he sniffed Arlo’s sneakers. “So, busy person, how will you be spending your busy day?”

  “I thought I’d check out the alma mater.”

  “Wait a second,” she said. “You went to Reed?”

  A tinge of indignation colored Arlo’s face. Not for the first time, she saw how quickly he turned defensive. She said, “I just figured college was beneath you.”

  “College is beneath me. I went to Reed the same way Steve Jobs went to Reed. I dropped out after a semester.”

  “So you’re one of the millions of people who think they’re going to be the next Steve Jobs?”

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m off for the day. How about I watch your dog while you go to class. I can show him old haunts.”

  “You were here for a semester and you have old haunts?”

  “He can show me old haunts.”

  “The thing is, I’ll be gone all afternoon.”

  “In that case, sign me up.” Arlo spoke like someone people succumbed to, and so it was best to relent sooner and avoid all the fuss.

  “My address is on his collar,” she said. She handed Arlo the leash, and then she was gone, leaving Kingsley with her brother.

  * * *

  —

  The sky was dark when she got back to her building, and when Kingsley saw her he nearly escaped his leash.

  “He missed you terribly,” Arlo said. “All day long he’s been talking about you.”

  “Do you have time for dinner?” she said. “There’s a good restaurant nearby. My treat.”

  She took him upstairs to meet her housemates, but then she realized she’d never told them ab
out him. And Arlo, perhaps sensing this, said, “I’m Sarah’s long-lost cousin,” and he shook her housemates’ hands.

  At the restaurant, they ordered a bottle of wine, and through the haze of candlelight her reflection swayed in the glass. “Arlo, you’re all grown up.”

  “I was always the grown-up compared to you.”

  He was right: he was her big brother. Yet she’d always considered herself older than he was. Now he’d caught up, maybe even surpassed her.

  Their food came: the steak for Arlo, the eggplant for her. “Listen,” she said, “you didn’t have to say you were my long-lost cousin. I’m not embarrassed by you.”

  “And I’m not embarrassed by you.”

  “Touché,” she said. What a strange phrase, she thought, long-lost cousin, when she considered cousins almost automatically long lost. She recalled that visit to Stanley’s, how hard Arlo had worked to plan the get-together, how disappointed he’d been.

  It was raining outside. A man speared his umbrella at the sky while the cars came fast around the bend, spraying water at him. She had heard the reports about Portland weather, but when she visited Reed her senior year of high school it had been a sunny April day and the trees were blossoming, and campus was bathed in an almost heavenly light. That, as much as anything, was why she’d chosen Reed. How ill equipped she’d been to determine her future, to decide anything at all. “Jesus, Arlo, all I know is you dropped out of college and you’re good with dogs. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  So he told her about Iowa and San Francisco, how he finally solved the riddle of school. “I got a fifteen hundred on my SAT.”

  “Jesus, Arlo, that’s better than I did.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No,” she said, though she was.

  “Those tests are stupid.”

  “A lot of things are stupid, but you do them anyway.”

  “Not me.”

  “Except you did. You took that test.”

  “And I failed it.”

  “I thought you said you got a fifteen hundred.”

  “My official score was a five forty.” Acing things and failing things, Arlo said: it was the story of his life. He’d taken the SAT and answered nearly all the questions correctly: six wrong on verbal and three wrong on math. In each section, he intentionally skipped a question so that he filled in the wrong bubble. The answer to the first question he put in line two, the answer to the second question he put in line three, all the way until the end of the section. For a fee of $9.25, he was sent a copy of the test he’d taken so he could match up his answers with the correct ones. He was able to calculate his true score, the one he would have gotten if he’d filled in the proper bubbles.

  “Jesus, Arlo. That’s insane.”

  He shrugged. He’d been living in Asia, he explained, but eventually it was time to come home. Apple was everywhere, and it was true: he was determined to be the next Steve Jobs. The first step, he decided, was to drop out of Reed, but in order to drop out of Reed, he had to go there. So he flew home. When he touched down at PDX, he went straight to the airport barbershop, where, in preparation for the interview he hadn’t scheduled, he got a haircut, his first in a year.

  “You just showed up at admissions?” Sarah said.

  “Posture,” he said. “It’s what gets you across the threshold and into the room.” He told the dean of admissions about his travels in Asia and about his time in San Francisco as a programmer. He mentioned his poor SAT score, though not about having filled in the wrong bubbles: he wasn’t there to make excuses. He saw an SAT prep book on the shelf, and he offered to take a practice test right there. He made a deal with the dean: if he got a perfect score, the dean would let him in. “And that’s how I ended up at Reed.”

  “Well, that’s quite a story,” Sarah said.

  “It’s not just a story. It’s true.”

  “Tell me something,” she said. “You went to Reed just to drop out?”

  “I can read Dante on my own time. The world was calling me.”

  “And what has the world taught you?”

  “That I no longer want to be the next Steve Jobs. I’m happy to be the first Arlo Zackheim. I’m back at Yahoo now, but I’m thinking of starting my own company. Suffice it to say, no one has to worry about me anymore.”

  “I was never worried about you.” It was true. She had always known he would find his way.

  “I’m going to be rich,” he said.

  “Is that how you’re going to thumb your nose at Dad? By making money?”

  “It’s as good a way as any.”

  “Have you told him this?”

  Arlo shook his head. “It’s been a while since we spoke.”

  She’d gathered as much, but she was still sorry.

  “It’s for the better,” he said. “We weren’t meant to get along.”

  What did that mean? They were father and son: of course they were meant to get along. And if they didn’t get along, they were meant to try harder. His relationship with Arlo was the great failure of her father’s life, and at the simple mention of his name, he would make that precipitous drop into melancholy.

  “And do you want to know the crazy thing? Keeping my distance hasn’t done me any good.” Even here, Arlo said, he was looking out at the street, thinking that if his father were eating at this restaurant he would ask to be seated away from the window. Why did it drive him crazy that his father didn’t want strangers to see him eat the way other people didn’t want strangers to see them go to the bathroom? “I’m going to make a lot of money,” he said, “but Dad will still look down at me, because if I’m not going to be a literature professor or a historian or a classicist—if I’m not going to do something no one gives a fuck about—I might as well be a plumber. When we’d be up a creek without plumbers. Dad counts on his toilet being unclogged so he can look down on people who unclog toilets.”

  “I didn’t realize you were going into the toilet business.”

  “What I’m saying is, I can’t eat a meal without thinking about Dad.”

  “Parents are burdens.”

  “He’s earned the right to be a burden on you. Do you know how long I lived under his roof? Six hundred and thirty-one nights.”

  “You counted?”

  “You’ve lived almost as long on this campus.”

  “Dad’s proud of you,” she said. “You’re his son.”

  “He doesn’t even know what Yahoo is.”

  “Then educate him.”

  Arlo shook his head.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “There’s regret on both sides. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. You could still be in touch.”

  “My mother doesn’t want me to be in touch.”

  “Your mother? What are you, Arlo, six years old?”

  “I have obligations to her. She raised me.”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “I was miserable after you left. I thought about you constantly that first year.”

  “It’s easy to miss someone when they’re gone. You were a jerk to me.”

  “You were a jerk to me, too.”

  Arlo leaned across the table so that the candle flame flickered just inches from his shirt. For a second she thought he would combust; for a second she wanted him to. “Jesus, Arlo, I was a teenager.” She was still only twenty, barely past being a teenager now.

  Then she said it—said it before she knew she was going to say it. “Why did you chop off my hair?” She’d been waiting to ask him this question for years, even as she hadn’t realized she’d been waiting to ask it.

  “It’s a good question,” he said, but even now, six years later, he didn’t have a good response. He’d scared Sarah by doing what he’d done, but he’d scared himself eve
n more. The things he was capable of. Leaving New York for the last time, he was already rewriting what had happened. That night at the club, Sarah may not have been twenty-one yet, but already at fourteen she had the connivance of adulthood. She’d set him up, he told himself. And when he cut off her hair, she’d set him up, too.

  Now he had a question of his own. Why didn’t she say anything at the time? Because what still haunted him was her composure. I cut my hair. I’ve always wanted it short. Her refusal to acknowledge what he’d done, as if he didn’t exist at all. That was what he found most chilling. “Were you trying to freak me out?”

  Sarah laughed. She wished she were as poised as that. A memory came to her from when Arlo had been living with them, her mother reminding her that Arlo had had a hard life, that for years he’d been living with his feckless mother. There was something about that word, feckless, that startled her; to this day it sent shivers down her back. She felt guilty for the life she had, as if in coming along she’d taken Arlo’s life away, as if life were a meal and she’d eaten more than her fair share of it. It was always food they competed over, and she thought this again at the restaurant, watching Arlo wolf down his dessert.

  When the bill came, Arlo reached for it. She’d said dinner would be on her, but even that he wouldn’t give her.

  When they got to her apartment, the sky opened up. Rain was falling down her brother’s face, and he looked both louche and fragile standing there, allowing himself to get wet.

  “So this is it?” she said. “I don’t see you again for another six years?”