The weary look had returned to Bruno’s face, tempered perhaps by heat, or sadness. He took the cup and downed the espresso in a single draught. And then, oddly (because Bruno never touched anyone), he patted Jenny’s hand. “You will figure it out, is all I mean to say.”
CLAGGART’S EYES, moist and brown and rimmed with amethyst, were able to grow to a size that made the rest of him seem pitiably small and defenseless, and to project the purest distillate of melancholy—a melancholy from which only Jenny could save him, he would have claimed, had he had the power of speech. Every night, arriving home, she found him cowering under the U-bend of the toilet. His face furrowed, intelligent beneath its fur. The eyes sorrowed at her; at the door; at her again. She wanted to collapse on the couch, but whatever wraith had let him out that first time was no longer on hand, and invariably she surrendered. “Okay, hang on.” Perhaps selflessness would earn her a reprieve from grief.
Seven o’clock was some kind of citywide dogwalking hour, when hordes of ostensibly autonomous individuals, still in permutations of professional attire, rushed out of their co-ops tugged by leashes taut as waterskiers’ ropes, at the other end of which, straining like hairy engines, were spaniels, shih tzus, bichons frises. Jenny would just as soon have waited until later, avoided the butt-sniffing do-si-do that followed each time Claggart encountered another animal, the entanglement of leashes and compulsory good cheer, the conspicuousness with which she then had to hover over him with a baggie as he choosily chose a place to evacuate, so that no one would mistake her for one of them, the vast negligent army of dog-owners who left every sidewalk a mound of desiccated doo. Better, like the Puerto Rican guy from around the corner with his awful Chihuahua, to wait until midnight, to let the dog go where it went and leave it—an assertion of freedom she secretly saluted. But she needed to get to bed as soon as possible, because despite what she told Bruno, he was right: she’d contracted insomnia.
It wasn’t falling asleep that was the problem; one floor up from the avenue, where a dump truck’s unsecured tailgate could sound like an exploding shell, she’d gotten used to keeping a pillow over her head. But something inside kept rousing her hours before dawn. The bedsheet clung like a greasy bag. Her pulse thrummed in her head, a cloud of importunate bees. She would have said she’d been having a nightmare, but she couldn’t remember having dreamt about anything. The sleeping pills Bruno’s Dr. Feelgood eventually prescribed only made her more anxious. The major risk was you stopped breathing.
It might help her calm down, she thought, if she knew how long she’d have to wait for the sky to get light outside, so she bought a new clock-radio: a cheap, squat, vaguely toadish thing with a face that glowed when the batteries were in. Which just went to show how little Jenny knew about insomnia. What the glowing clock did, actually, was help her track how many hours it was taking her to fall back asleep, while the radio part got her hooked on an early-a.m. program called Gestalt Therapy. She recognized the form, or formlessness, from her hitch in college radio, and was fascinated despite herself by this fellow practitioner still beating his head against human foibles. But recognition wasn’t the same thing as rest.
Then came the morning walk, slaloming among the strollers. They appeared in clusters, as if by prior accord: fat white babies lounging like satraps in conveyances of aluminum, canvas, and elastic. The silence of these children gave her the creeps. And she resented the women who pushed them, their modish footwear, their secret reservoirs of income, their breasts swollen into the likenesses of fruit. The petit-bourgeoises. The Bettys, she used to call them, for short. This resentment, though, had begun to seem less political than she’d hoped. It was the resentment of the eight-year-old who wanted to be picked for kickball at recess, if not first, then at least not last. Anyway, the Bettys seemed not to see her, or the city dying around them. Spring was at its peak, and they moved toward the park’s cruddy grass like sun maids, two or three abreast, singing hymns of fecundity.
It was at this point that Jenny began to contemplate the likelihood that she was not gifted with any special world-historical mission or insight, that she’d never been any different from—by which it seemed she’d meant “better than”—anyone else. At nineteen, she’d built a whole belief system around the premise that there were two kinds of people, those who fought for a better world and those who only wanted what everybody else did. Now there seemed to be just one kind of person, inching from the former column to the latter. Indeed, she’d begun to see a peculiar symmetry between the Marxist narrative of progress to which she still wanted to subscribe and that of triumphal capitalism. That is, they seemed equally fantastic. Maybe she’d been a rube to believe in anything but the blind ontic quest to ensure one’s genes survived. And if there were an Invisible Hand, its finger would have been wagging at her; she never should have gotten her own leash tangled with a middle-aged alcoholic’s. But at least there was Claggart. “Come on, puppy,” she’d say, and would lead him gently away from the fancy treebox he’d been sizing up for a deposit. They were wronged parties, both of them, and whatever this thing was, they were in it together now.
53
CORRIDORS GONE DARK after the last bell; the puddled light of trophycases; the squeak of sneakers on a gym floor; corkboard announcements stirred by cross-breezes; vapors of ammonia; summer like a flash of thigh beyond a janitor-propped door … so this, Keith thought, was what six grand a year got you. It took him a while to find the Lower School, and really he only knew he’d arrived there when he spotted Regan in a small plastic chair at the hallway’s far end. One leg, crossed over the other, bobbed impatiently in the air. But what did she want him to do? He’d had a two-thirty phone conference with the U.S. Attorney’s office to set ground rules for an actual sit-down. Not that he could tell her that. She held her head stiff when he bent to kiss her cheek.
“Sorry,” he said. “Traffic. You look terrific.”
It was true; a little jolt of jealousy shot through him whenever he saw her leading a press conference on TV. She’d taken up running, Cate had said. She was still in work clothes now, signifying, perhaps, her willingness to drop pressing business and race uptown for the sake of the kids. Though in fact she could have been an hour late and no one at the school, with its Hamilton-Sweeney Memorial Library, would have said anything. And if Regan was always the Virtuous One, the Punctual One, what did that leave for Keith, except irresponsibility?
There being only the one chair, he leaned against the wall to wait. She obviously didn’t want to talk, but he had to assume he’d been summoned here, two weeks before final exams, because of Will. He’d been so withdrawn lately. Though it was hard to establish a basis for comparison. Once, during the dark years—or what he’d thought were the dark years—Keith had gone out to run some errands, completely forgetting Will was even in the apartment. Returning, he heard a noise from the bedroom, and stuck his head in to find his son sitting on the floor, utterly absorbed in some megalopolis he was engineering out of tinkertoys. In this, as in so much else, the boy took after his mother. Keith was thinking about the affinities between self-effacement and self-assertion when the door to Regan’s left opened. “Miss Spence will see you now.”
“Why’d you wait out there?” he murmured, following Regan into a beautifully appointed waiting area. Eames chairs surrounded a table of austere and vaguely Nordic wooden toys. Their names would be impacted, diacritical: Jûngjø. Fërndl. On the wall a white canvas held a single blot of red, menstrual in exactly the same way the toys were Swedish. Even the secretary was cute, but given the various givens, checking her out would have been a mistake.
She’d wanted to present a united front, said his wife.
“You sure you weren’t just trying to rub in that I was late?”
Before she could answer, they were being pushed—metaphorically, of course—into an inner office.
The headmistress was not the one he’d been expecting … not, at any rate, the portly old lady with whom he’d clink
ed glasses at a Hamilton-Sweeney gala long ago. She’d been whatever was the female equivalent of avuncular, and he’d felt so good about entrusting his son to her that he’d written out a donation to the annual fund the very next day. But that event, along with the rest of the early ’70s, seemed sunk now beneath layers of tawny hilarity, like a waterlogged cherry at the bottom of a champagne flute, and the woman resettling herself behind the desk was, by contrast, a string bean. Her office was lit by a half-dozen floor lamps, as if direct light would have turned her to dust. And according to the stenciling on the door, she was not the Headmistress, but the Head of School. Each school—Lower and Upper—must have had its own Sturmbannführer, under the supreme command of that jolly fat dowager whose company he wished for now.
Transitions being for the intellectually frivolous, Miss Spence turned to Keith. “I’m sure Regan has told you,” she said, “I asked you both here today to discuss your son.”
“Amazing kid, isn’t he?” Keith said. “And you’ve done a great job with him. We’re thinking one more year and he’ll be ready for Groton.”
“One of us is thinking,” Regan interjected. This had become another bone of contention; he’d decided boarding school might be just the thing to pull Will out of himself, the camaraderie of early manhood, the sense of being liked and likeable that never really goes away. In the New England of Keith’s imagination, it was always autumn, always football season, auburn light from over the Berkshires raking long shadows of uprights across the manicured fields …
“These obviously are decisions to be made, important ones for William’s future,” said Miss Spence.
“Will,” Keith said. “William’s his uncle.”
“But what we’re here to focus on today is the present.” She slid a document across the desk. “As you’ve no doubt heard, they’ve been reading Shakespeare in his English class. I wanted to share with you a recent assignment.”
Her neutrality of tone could not disguise the fact that she was about to criticize his son; Keith’s impulse was to defend, to argue. “What is this, Hamlet? Seems like a heavy lift for sixth grade.”
“Rigor is what we offer here, Mr. Lamplighter. You’d find they follow a similar curriculum at Groton.”
The paper had been typed, with few obvious errors, on the old Remington that had gone missing from Keith’s study after Regan had moved out (along with, it seemed, everything else that had made home home). He recognized the crooked z, the number 1 used for lowercase ls to get around the broken key, the faint ghost of a t that haunted every g. , ran the title. And above that in red pen: . Regan made only a token attempt to peer over his shoulder. As he asked for a few minutes to read, Keith’s heart was in his throat; he had a distinct feeling of being ambushed.
In addition to being well-typed, the essay was surprisingly well-written. The sentences were blunt and lucid, yet the argument was intricate. According to his son, Hamlet had been misunderstood for centuries. Its protagonist was the victim of “outrageous fortune” only to the extent that the audience took his word for it. What if, on the contrary, Hamlet was a kind of unreliable soliloquist, hiding from us—and perhaps from himself—the full range of his homicidal impulses? That is, what if Hamlet had gotten exactly what he wanted? The plot, far from being a farrago of hems and haws, might be seen as a series of wish-fulfillments. And in this resided the play’s uncanniness: each act hinges on a death the hero has secretly longed for. For Examp1e, Will wrote,
The murder of the father, which my research says is Ham1et’s big conf1ict, in fact so1ves a bigger one. Looking at the textua1 evidence supp1ied by his subjects and his widow, O1d Ham1et was a terrib1e sovereign and husband. (Let’s not dwe11 on his fai1ings as a father, but p1ease note the huge gui1t trip he 1ays on his son.)
Keith skipped ahead.
Say Ham1et knows it’s Po1onius behind the curtain? The “accident” removes both a person who wou1d punish him for def1owering Ophe1ia and the pressure to make her “honest” (i.e., a wife). Throughout the p1ay, there’s a part of Ham1et that shrinks from women’s natura1 whorishness. We can see this when
Will had been experimenting with comments like this about women on recent visits to the old apartment. Almost as if he wanted to see what his dad would say. Keith knew this to be divorce static, deviations from the boy’s gentle and Regan-like mean, but when he’d heard Will one day, on the phone with some friend of his, refer to his mother as a bitch, he’d grabbed his beautiful smooth little aristocratic chin and insisted that if he was looking for someone to be mad at, he should be mad at him. At Keith.
Ophe1ia’s 1ike the inverse of Gertrude. Ham1et becomes more obsessed with her the more she ho1ds back what he wants. Once she gives up her “virtue,” he gets bored. So Ophe1ia’s suicide frees him to not have to fee1 gui1ty anymore about his own horniness. It wou1d be a stretch to say Ham1et ki11s her, but in her death a11 his repressed wishes come together––punishment, purity, ob1ivion––in a symbo1ic “conf1ict” that removes any rea1-1ife obstac1e he might have to dea1 with. Which may be why it’s on1y a hop of a few scenes to the so1ution of the other “prob1ems.” Or rather, to the p1aywright waving his wand to make them go away. In conc1usion, if we 1ook at the origina1 Greek meaning of the term “hero”––“chosen of the gods”––Ham1et emerges as one, despite because of his apparent passivity. Or wou1dn’t you say that if he wants exact1y what he gets, he must get exact1y what he wants?
Keith continued to stare at the page, puzzled. When he raised his head, finally, both women were looking at him as if he were the one who’d written it. He forced a smile. “Well, I think it’s safe to say it’s not plagiarized.” The string bean asked if he didn’t find it unsettling. He scanned her face for subtext, but found none, which freed him to be irritated. “It’s an argument. Isn’t that the point of the exercise?”
She leaned back in her chair. “There is an attitude toward women here that his teacher and I find frankly disturbing.”
Funny that she should say this; the impression he’d got was of an absolute contempt for men. Selfish, careless, predatory men. “I can assure you, Will has nothing but respect for women. He’s a sweet, sweet boy.”
“Intelligent, too,” Miss Spence said. “He was probably hoping you’d see this.”
Grudgingly, because it felt like giving up, Keith admitted that, yes, he could see that.
“The question is, what is he trying to communicate?”
“I think what Miss Spence is saying is we need to do more to address his feelings about what’s going on at home,” Regan said. By we, she meant you, to which Keith wanted to say, Well, you’re the one who asked for a separation. But it already felt as if they were sitting here in nothing but their underwear, baring their slackening waistlines and winter-pale skin to the impassive Head of School.
“I’ll talk to him, Regan. I’ll take care of it.” Regan searched his face. “I swear.”
Sometimes, Miss Spence was saying, it was hard for grown-ups to remember how delicate children could be. Keith hated the way she said “grown-ups.” Also the way she kept referring to Will as a child. She talked, in fact, as if he himself were a child. Over-enunciating, gesturing with her prehensile hands. “Next year is a placement year, and without more continuity between home and school in terms of helping him emotionally through what may be a difficult time, we’re frankly concerned he may not be ready for the rigors of Upper School.”
“Are you kidding? Have you seen his Stanford-Binet? Besides, the freaking library—”
Regan jumped in. “Okay. That’s enough. You heard my husband. He’ll talk to him.”
Miss Spence appeared to have tasted something sour. He imagined her face freezing this way, but this was probably just the kind of misogyny she’d been getting at. He had the uncomfortable sense she’d turned her teacher-vision on him, and could see everything.
It was with gratitude, then, that he followed Regan back outside minutes later, into damp fresh early June. To anyone watching t
he front of the school, they would have seemed like routine parents on a routine visit, except that Regan kept slightly ahead, tapping down the steps in her black pumps. He touched her arm. “Hey. I appreciate your standing up for me in there.”
Only then did he see the blood rising in her cheeks. “Did you think I … You embarrassed me, that’s why. Honestly, sometimes it’s like you’re the teenager, Keith.”
“She’s overreacting. He’s a great kid.”
“He’s been a great kid. There’s a certain kind of kid like this, people love him, but he hits thirteen and—”
“He’s not going to turn into your brother.” She turned a shade redder. He tried to steer them back onto more familiar ground. “Honestly, I really do wonder if boarding school wouldn’t do him a world of good. And then it would give him a decent shot at Harvard—”
“You think Harvard is what I care about right now?”
“Of course not,” he said. “I’m only saying … Obviously, what we care about is if he’s happy.”
“Well? Does he seem happy to you?”
In fact, the opposite. Last week, out the window, Keith had watched Will skateboarding down on the street. And only at that distance, cutting sloppy ellipses between parked cars, the wind in his too-long hair, had he seemed to cut loose. At the boarding school, he could be free to feel the thing he felt down on the street—free from the spectacle of his grandfather’s case, free from the depressing custody visits, free from the toxic presence of Keith himself. He was willing to deprive himself of his son, if it meant allowing Will to stay young a little longer. Or did he simply want to escape from the sense that Will, too, could somehow see inside him? “No, I guess he doesn’t,” he said.
“Then don’t try to sell me on this, please.”
“I don’t understand the hard line here.”
“William went to boarding school. You know that.” She seemed on the verge of saying more, but was Regan, and so held on to herself.
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