“I’m sorry,” I said.
Max removed his cap and rubbed his bald head.
“It’s just that,” I said, “you’d make a pretty decent dad.”
“Get to bed, kid,” he said and called the elevator for me.
I brought the sable coat upstairs, the fur warm and soft in my arms. I laid the coat down on my bed and slept on top of it that night. What Caroline didn’t know was the very thing I’d been unable to confront. The horrible thing I’d done to Cal.
I awoke with mom’s sable coat wrapped around my waist. A faun, a half man. Though I wasn’t one for remembering my dreams, away from Bellingham I’d had the chance to dream of Aidan. Vivid images of her swimming, treading away from me, her head bobbing like a buoy, the viscous water, dragging her down. Aidan strained to stay afloat while I stood on the shore watching.
Aidan had said that the two most important things in life were knowing what you wanted and understanding what you were afraid of. “Fear and desire,” she said. “That’s the key.”
Though I resisted the thought, I knew it was possible that Aidan had killed herself. I wanted to believe that she hadn’t. I feared that she had. I wondered what sadness might have convinced her to walk into the water. Wondered if it was the same sadness that had compelled Cal. I couldn’t help but connect Cal’s and Aidan’s deaths. Together they were like a pair of binary stars, two lights so close and so bright they blended into one. Despite Caroline’s reassurances, I understood that I was responsible for my best friend ending his life. It was my fault that Cal had lost hope. Losing Aidan made me feel as though I hadn’t learned anything.
Just before New Year’s Eve, my fake cousin Ginger called and left a message on the answering machine inviting me to a party downtown. I rarely ventured below Central Park South but, for Ginger, I decided to make an exception. I had to replay the message several times to get the address of the bar. She claimed that the place was a kind of speakeasy. That I would need to press a buzzer and when asked to identify myself, say, “I am the prince of Paraguay.”
Ginger hadn’t mentioned her baby, but I figured she’d already given birth. I was excited for her. Glad she had something to celebrate.
The bar was in the West Village, uncharted territory for me. I braved the subway, then stumbled around before finding the place, an old brick carriage house. Aidan had asked me about certain nightclubs, Tunnel and the Limelight, and was stunned to learn that I almost never went downtown. “That’s another world,” I said. “Not my scene.”
Inside the speakeasy, boughs of pink and blue lights swung from the ceiling, low enough that I could reach up and touch the warm bulbs. I’d worn a jacket and tie, but most of the men were dressed in tuxedos with ironic glittery bow ties and matching cummerbunds. Women shimmied around the tight quarters in spangled cocktail gowns. It was an older postcollege crowd, and I was happy to be the youngest at the party. Making my way over to the mahogany bar, I saw Ginger swiveling on a stool and nodding at the bartender. Ginger wore a black beaded flapper dress with a silver slip underneath. When she saw me, she jumped off her stool, kissed me on both cheeks, and told everyone sitting at the bar that I was her Tiger. Her belly was gone and she toasted me with her champagne flute. I asked after her baby. “How’s your little lamb?”
Ginger handed me a bottle of Perrier-Jouët, ordering me to have a drink.
All around us people were dancing, toasting, locking lips, declaring their resolutions, and scheming to get laid. It was the wrong atmosphere for what Ginger had to tell me, precisely why she’d chosen it.
Three weeks before she was due to deliver, Ginger noticed that her baby had stopped kicking. “Everything inside of me went quiet and cold.”
She told me about the drive to the hospital, how Dill ran three red lights, how her mother, Miriam, claimed that losing the baby was for the best.
“The doctors couldn’t give me a reason. ‘Inexplicable.’ But I wonder”—Ginger leaned in close—“what if I’m poison? What if my baby never had a chance?”
Ginger’s face sparkled, the result of some cosmetic powder, but I told her that she was glowing and beautiful. “You’re not poisonous,” I said.
Ginger shielded her arms against her belly, still feeling the rupture, the missing life. There was nothing I could say to make her loss any easier to bear. “You’re going to be a beautiful mother.”
“You know they make you deliver the baby.” Ginger rubbed her eyes, smudging her mascara. “Stillborn. That’s what they call it.”
Without thinking, I said something stupid, something I immediately wanted to retract. “Was it a boy or a girl?”
Ginger patted my arm and excused herself. It was noisy in the bar and I hoped that she hadn’t heard my dumb question. She took her time and I grew anxious, but she returned with a fresh coat of pink lipstick and more of her shimmering gold powder. “Champers,” she said to the bartender. “We need more champagne.”
The bar filled with smoke and dancing bodies. Ginger knew everyone at the party. Men kept coming over to check on her and ask about me. Ginger told them that at the stroke of midnight she and I were going to board a catamaran and set sail out of New York Harbor. “Where are you headed?” one of the men asked. “Wherever the trade winds take us,” Ginger said. She kissed these men on their cheeks and waved them away. At one point in the night, she leaned over and whispered, “Tell me if you see anything you like.”
She wanted to hear how I was doing. I shrugged, said that I was okay, then surprised myself by telling Ginger, “I lost somebody.”
I described how Aidan and I had sneaked in and out of windows. How we swam at night. “I haven’t felt that close to anyone since Cal.” I told Ginger that Aidan reminded me of her. And it was true. They shared a similar beauty and eccentricity. Ginger smiled. It seemed unfair of me to tell Ginger of my loss while she was still reeling from her own, but my story energized her. She wanted to help me. When I said, “I’m the one who’s poisonous,” she disagreed, pushing me on, eager to hear my theories about what might have happened at Race’s. Ginger knew the type of guys I was talking about. “Reckless boys,” she said, “and their reckless ways.”
“You know,” I said, “when you’ve done something terrible, something you regret, it gives you this special insight, like you can detect other people’s bad behavior.”
“Like you can tell when someone’s guilty because you feel your own guilt.”
“Exactly. Every time I see Race, I recognize something in him, something I feel within myself. Something rotten.”
Ginger rubbed my shoulders. “We’re quite a festive duo. I think we need a few spins on the dance floor.”
We danced a little and drank a lot. Trying to forget the past year of our lives.
I was happy to hear that Ginger had left her mother’s house and rented an apartment in SoHo. She was thinking of taking classes at NYU. “Second chances, fresh starts. That’s what life keeps dealing me.”
The night had come to an end, our new year about to begin. There were no taxis outside the bar, and I insisted on walking Ginger back to her apartment. Despite conventional wisdom, Cal and I always believed that we could see the stars at night in Manhattan. Ginger pointed up and said, “Orion will guide us home.” Drunk and warm from champagne, we trundled along the icy sidewalks, the streets still filled with revelers. “I forgot to thank you,” Ginger said.
“For what?” I asked.
“For convincing me to do that deal with Riegel. It’s helping Dill. He’s working with that fellow Hiro, helping him amass his own art collection. Dill might even open up his own gallery.”
“So Riegel came through,” I said. “Go figure.”
“I’m not surprised. All your dear brother has ever wanted is to turn a profit. Once when we were kids, my dad offered Riegel twenty dollars to rake the seaweed off our beach. Riegel took the money, then paid some local kid four dollars to do the actual work.”
“Your dad must have loved that.�
��
“He roared with laughter, then hunted down the local kid and gave him a hundred bucks.”
I clutched Ginger’s arm. “I miss your dad.”
“We should take out his sloop this summer. Since he died, it’s how I feel close to him. When I’m on the water, I can hear Dad in the wind, yelling at me to luff the mainsail.”
The buildings were dark enough that I could see Vega, the brightest star in Lyra. I said, “I miss so many people.”
“It’s how we know we’re alive,” Ginger said. “We grieve the dead.”
FOURTEEN
My second week back at Bellingham, we had our first snow. Several white inches accumulated by midmorning with the promise of an even heavier storm to follow. After lunch, I stood outside Astor packing snowballs and targeting underclassmen. Kriffo and Stuyvie joined me, and together we watched as the girls in their dress code skirts slipped, slid, and fell on the icy paths. We called out numbers rating their wipeouts. “Nice long johns,” Kriffo joked. “Definite 8.5 on the Richter scale.” Tazewell joined us, and I asked if they were going to haze any of the sophomores that night. None of them had heard about the tradition of tying sophomores up to the columns in their pajamas after the first snow. They all liked the way it sounded. “We’ve been too easy on the underclassmen,” Tazewell said. “It’s time we exert some seniorprivileges.”
We made a loose plan to wake up early that morning and raid Wee House. “Do you think Race would be up for this?” I asked.
“Good call,” said Stuyvie. “It’s just his sort of thing.”
Earlier in the day, during Chapel, Windsor had announced that Mr. Guy would be retiring at the end of the school year. I was surprised. Figured that Mr. Guy would hold on to the bitter end. That he’d heart attack while delivering a lecture on the Potsdam Conference. It occurred to me that Mr. Guy was still pissed about Dean Warr undermining his authority. I would have been. After the announcement, Windsor encouraged Mr. Guy to say a few words, and all of us stood up and applauded as he made his hunched way up to the microphone. He thanked us for the ovation and said that after almost fifty years, he was finally ready to graduate from high school. It seemed like a terrible waste, to have spent an entire lifetime at Bellingham. What had he learned, I wondered, and what had the school given him for all of his trouble? When I first met him he had an almost invisible hearing aid. Now he wore bulky pink plugs that stuck out comically from both ears. The new hearing aids whistled as Mr. Guy returned to his seat.
Chester was not back yet, but he’d promised to return before Spring Break. We’d talked on the phone several times. His physical therapy had gone well and he hoped to rejoin the tennis team. He asked if I’d finished reading the book he’d lent me, The Motion of Light in Water. I hadn’t even read the first page. I didn’t want to admit this failure so I lied that I’d started the book and that it was really moving that his father’s friend was clearly a great talent. “Glad you’re liking it,” he said. My comments had been so vague that if I’d been Chester, I would have quizzed me, forced me to reveal my lie. But Chester was happy to believe I was telling the truth. I tore through my room that night trying to locate the book. I’d outwitted myself. In the hopes of keeping the book neat and preserved, I’d put it in a special place that I had since forgotten.
As I searched through my desk and dresser, I noticed that my picture of Cal was also missing. It wasn’t tucked in the corner of my mirror. This made me even more agitated. I went through all of my drawers, clothes, and sheets and tried to remember the last time I’d seen the picture. Brizzey, I thought. Brizzey swiped the photo. I was furious with myself for not noticing sooner.
Before sunrise, on the morning after the first snowstorm, I met Race, Kriffo, and Tazewell outside the Old Boathouse. I’d borrowed some nylon rope from the New Boathouse and was ready to get fancy with my knots.
“Where’s Stuyvie?” I asked.
“He’s sitting this one out,” Race said. “Ever since his suspension he’s gotten chickenshit. Sends his regrets.”
Race wore a bright orange parka and mirrored sunglasses. He kept his hood down, his ears turning crimson from the cold. The knee- deep snow was topped by a crust of glassy ice. We trudged through the loud crunching snow blinded by the sun’s early morning glare. Tazewell kept complaining about his nuts being frozen. When Kriffo offered him his scarf, Taze accused his pal of being a pussy. “What, are we playing dress-up now?” The slightest kindness a sign of weakness. Kriffo wore a puffy down coat, green ski cap, and purple plastic gloves. He looked as though he’d been inflated, his arms filled with helium. Frost glistened on the trees. I could feel my cheeks redden in the cold. Our breath made diamonds in the air.
The plan was to grab four guys from Wee House. Any four guys would do. “All of those kids are skinny fuckers,” Race said. “I don’t think their balls have dropped.”
“Should we let them put their shoes on?” Kriffo asked.
“What are you, the fashion police?” Taze buttoned the top button on his pea coat. “The whole point is for them to get hazed.”
Kriffo seemed concerned about frostbite. I explained that we’d be tying the boys to the column shafts and that they’d at least be under the shelter of the colonnade and not up to their ankles in snow. This put Kriffo at ease. Race handed out rolls of duct tape, unstrapping the silver adhesive and demonstrating how we might secure the boys’ hands and feet. “We can tape their mouths shut first so they don’t alert Mr. Snopes.”
Mr. Snopes taught biology. A middle-aged man who had clearly stayed too long at the fair. He’d missed his chance to leave Bellingham for a better gig and now had to make due with his bachelor life. He coached the girls’ lacrosse team and for this reason alone was considered a perv. Nadia planned on playing lacrosse in the spring. She told me that the girls on the team were always spreading rumors about Snopes giving them the eye or accidentally wandering into the girls’ locker room. My bet was that he’d built up a tolerance, an immunity to their charms. That he’d spent so many bus trips listening to them gossip and complain that he’d long ceased finding teenaged girls attractive.
By the time we got to Wee House, some of us decided that it might be best to hijack two students. That four guys would be too much to wrangle. “Two is totally manageable,” Kriffo said. “We each grab a pair of arms and legs.”
Race was disappointed. He felt that two didn’t make enough of a statement. Four was ideal but three at least sent a message. Three was a better spectacle. I agreed with Race. Deep down, I wasn’t certain that I could manage even half a kid, never mind an entire fifteen-year- old on my own. I’d smoked a lot of cigarettes in New York and was already having a hard time just shoeing through the snow.
None of the lights were on in Wee House. Mr. Snopes lived on the first floor in the back of the dorm. We decided to hit the first two rooms, both doubles right near the entrance. It was Race’s idea that we tape the boys’ mouths first, then strap their wrists and feet. Right before we blitzkrieged the rooms, Kriffo whispered, “What if these guys have morning wood?”
“Why?” Race asked. “Would you like to fuck them?”
Taping someone’s mouth shut turned out to be harder than I’d anticipated. My target popped the tape from his lips with his tongue and let out a yelp. I quickly placed my hand over his mouth only to have him bite my palm. As the kid fought me, I wound a tight band of tape around his entire head. Then I flipped the guy over and taped his wrists behind his back. Race taped his kid’s hands in the front and seemed to regret it. “Your way is better,” he said as we sneaked out of Wee House. Kriffo and Tazewell took longer and emerged with only one victim between them.
“What happened?” Race asked.
“The other one was naked,” Tazewell said. “Even I have a heart.” Race seemed visibly disappointed. Kriffo was relieved that our
three captives had all gone to sleep in thick wool socks. We cut a messy path through the snow over to the headmaster’s house, li
ke the world’s most uncoordinated dog-sledding crew. From there, I made quick work of strapping each boy against a thick white column. I’d planned on using a fancy buntline and clove hitch, but in the end I settled for a series of tight constrictor knots. The four of us stood back and admired our handiwork. I didn’t know any of the boys’ names. They all had greasy hair and scrawny bodies. One wore camouflage flannel pajamas. “I can’t see you,” Race joked while slapping the kid’s arms. The other two boys had on boxer shorts. One was lucky enough to have worn a Cornell sweatshirt, but the other stood shivering in a flimsy white T-shirt, choose life printed in black block letters on his chest. All three looked terrified.
Tazewell complained that we didn’t have a camera. He worried that we’d have no record of our masterpiece. I pulled out my Instamatic and the guys cheered softly as I snapped pictures of them modeling with their prey. “You guys got shafted,” Race whispered.
The sun was coming up, and it seemed like a good time to haul ass. All three boys shook, a deep fear emerging in their eyes as they realized we were going to leave them. Running away, I looked back at the columns. I thought of Diana’s father, who had introduced me to this tradition, wondered if he was getting any better. Then I remembered being bound up in a carpet at Kensington, remembered the laughter as my assailants rolled me down a hill. I wanted to explain to these three sophomores that there was a larger purpose, an actual point to this abuse. My hope was that Race, Taze, and Kriffo would begin to trust me, begin to feel bonded to me. I’d tied up three strangers in the hopes of building other ties.
Nadia had been especially happy to see me. Greeting me in the Dining Hall our first day back, she gave me a big hug, handed me a gift. “It’s from my mother,” she said. “A thank-you for being so nice to me.” It was a tie, a Ferragamo tie. Pink sailboats on a field of blue. The sort of thing a banker would wear. It was a very thoughtful and expensive gift and without anything to give her in return, I kissed Nadia on the lips right there in the middle of dinner.
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