He finally had no choice but to tell her in the winter of Teddy’s last year at SJS. But even then, after he had sold all the good stuff to bail out what had been bought on leverage, after the businesses he had tried to salvage so people didn’t lose their livelihoods went under anyway, after she answered the house phone and angry people asked for Mr. Harold Weeks—even then she couldn’t fully disdain him, she couldn’t just walk away in scorn, because she had gloriously let go of balancing her own checkbook six weeks into married life. Her father would have said she should never have put down her bone-familiar worry.
But Harry still needed his own family to be wrong. They had always said maybe he should just get into sales, make the most of his sheepdog smile. He needed to multiply his talents the way they were all able to.
There in the back field, none of that changed the horror she had considering Ben unprotected up in New Hampshire.
“So we go on financial aid,” she said. “We have some uncomfortable Thanksgivings. The least we can do is endure some discomfort for his sake. He’s up there thinking about it, and we’re just leaving him to that.”
“I know.”
“I could leave the program, get a job.”
“You’re so close. Leaving now would be perverse.”
She loved him for that. It felt so good to be serious about something for a change, to read every book in the footnotes of the papers she loved, to chase down gaps in her knowledge and obliterate them. To have discipline and rigor come naturally to her was now a fundamental joy in her life.
“If I tell St. James that I’m waiting to flip the land for a shopping center, they’re going to put us on financial aid right away. I know how ridiculous it sounds. I know how ridiculous it is.”
“Aid doesn’t have to be forever. This deal pays off, we start paying again. We pay for the year we missed.”
“But to my family, we’ll always be on financial aid. They’ll always pick up every check. They’ll just be so happy they were right.”
She wanted to shout at him that she didn’t care about that, it didn’t hold up against Ben’s fear, but she knew it wouldn’t get him to do what she wanted.
“You’re a better father than Russell. You’ve been a wonderful husband to me. You’re a good friend…”
He laughed. “To have them know I’ve left us so exposed.”
It took her a moment to say it. “You have, though.”
“But it’s close, it’s almost there. The rezoning is a technicality. There’s already a ton of interest in the resale.”
He turned to look at her. “Please talk to Ben. Please let him know that I’m close, that when this happens, SJS will be taken care of. You’ll get an academic job, and I’ll take the rest of this money and invest it. I’ll build from there. My mistake until now has been investing in brick-and-mortar stuff, stuff where the roof leaks. Tech is frictionless.”
“We can’t let him keep suffering.”
“We’re almost there. We are.”
“It’s really December first?”
And so Helen exhaled there on the phone with Ben.
“I truly believe it’s going to work out. Let me do the worrying, okay? Concentrate on stuff up there.” She said they would try to come up before Thanksgiving.
I love you. I love you too.
Ahmed had talked about how excited his father was for Parents’ Weekend, and, despite the buzz cut, he wanted his father to see the school. But then that Wednesday Ahmed got the news that there had been a collapse in negotiations that required his father at a last-minute session in London. He had said he would try to fly in for the Sunday afternoon. Ahmed stopped tidying their room.
“Maybe others with parents not here could come to dinner with us,” Ahmed said after they had both brushed their teeth.
“I’m going out with Hutch and Evan’s parents,” said Ben. He hadn’t yet asked Hutch and Evan what they were doing. Ben managed to end up at dinner with the two of them most days after his soccer and their football practice, and a few nights a week they studied together in the library, but he had had to make up an excuse to get out of another trip to town with them. Two separate times Ben had seen Hutch and a few other guys heading into the woods, maybe to drink, maybe to smoke pot, maybe just to be somewhere faculty couldn’t see.
“Okay. I will see who else there is. Or go to Boston.”
Ben tried to hear whether Ahmed was angling for an invitation to his nonexistent dinner. But Ahmed just took his butter-yellow shirt from where it lay across the back of his desk chair and inserted the wide wooden hanger first into one shoulder, then the other, and hung it up in the closet exactly the way he did every night.
Then one morning the campus was full of unfamiliar adults. Many parents thought the grounds didn’t look as lush as in years past. The chapel lawn—such a long expanse of grass that it seemed to be a portrait of the school’s soul—had several prominent yellow patches. The black paint on a few of the streetlamps along Middle School Pond was flaking.
They couldn’t know that Aston had made sure six sunken gullies in the red-brick pathways were fixed and the Math Building was finally repainted. Several panes in the chapel’s stained-glass window depicting the rise of Lazarus had blown loose in a late-summer windstorm, and the school had brought in a specialist from Wisconsin to repair it. Aston kept reminding everyone about the new squash courts: had they seen the old boiler out front that used to dramatically overheat the courts? And had they seen the raw patch of the pool building site? If everything went according to plan, the pool would be finished in eighteen months.
Ahmed and two other foreign students—Rolf Unger from yearbook and Hideo—banded together out of necessity, and Ahmed said he was going to take them to Lupo, an Italian restaurant. Ben thought it would be in Boston again. Then he saw Ahmed on the couch flipping through a glossy brochure filled with photos of planes from a company called Let’s Jet.
“Where are you going?”
Ahmed said, “New York. It is not too far.”
“You’re going by yourself?”
“Mr. Rafsanjani is meeting us there.”
“Who’s that?”
“He works for our family.”
Ben went with Hutch and Evan’s parents to the Wagon Wheel in town, and Hutch’s white-blond mother had too much to drink and said several times, “Well, your friend Ben is just the absolute cutest. I want to put him in my pocket! Another ice cream, just in a dish this time? He’s about to disappear.”
Hutch’s father assessed the group. He said things like, “Have you thought that out to its end point?” or “Would you explain further?” and Hutch would grow quiet.
Back at the dorm after check-in, Ben went to Hideo’s room and found him lying back on his bed with his eyes closed and all the lights on. He said Ahmed had refused wine because of haraam but insisted the other two have whatever the sommelier recommended, and Hideo had ordered a bottle of Barolo by himself. The chaperone had smiled and agreed.
Hideo had the chaperone’s heavy business card on his desk.
S. OLIVER RAFSANJANI
EXTENSION OF THE HAND OF
Sheik Abdul Rahman bin-Mohammed
bin-Faisal Al-Khaled
+44-XXX-XX-XX-XX
+971-4XX-XXX-XXXX
“Ahmed insisted on ordering for us,” Hideo said. “He read that the bluefin tuna at this restaurant was ‘world-class,’ and so he would not let us get anything but that.”
Ben didn’t say anything for a while. “Was it good, though?”
Hideo didn’t answer right away. “It was so good.”
The next day, the campus was newly empty.
* * *
On a beautiful day, JV soccer was beating St. George’s 2–0, and Ben tried clumsily to take the ball from a clumsy forward with scalded red cheeks. Together they fractured what Ben would later learn was his fibula, the non-weight-bearing bone of his lower leg. Ben lay on his back looking up at the bright, placid sky, and the St. George
’s kid stood nearby with his hands on his hips as though trying to figure out how to start an uncooperative machine. The turf was cold through the back of Ben’s jersey. He wasn’t feeling much pain but knew he couldn’t get up.
Mr. Falwell, the trainer, trundled onto the field with his orange plastic toolbox, and Ben looked at the common direction of all the hairs in his orange mustache and smelled his halitosis. He heard the chips of voices from the other fields and didn’t resent those kids for continuing despite his emergency. He wondered what Alice was doing.
Ben hopped off the field with his arms over Mr. Falwell’s and Greg Shelby’s necks. Both teams and the small crowd applauded, and it felt good to be admired for bearing up well under pain.
Mr. Falwell wrapped Ben’s leg in an air cast, and the team came up and patted him on the shoulder or neck and said he’d played tough. Ben stood on new crutches in the good-game-good-game line, and eventually the kid with the flushed cheeks came to him.
“Get well soon, all right?”
“Fuck you,” Ben said quietly enough so that only the two of them could hear it.
Mr. Falwell drove Ben to the hospital, and after a two-hour wait they put him in a hard cast and discharged him. On the way back to campus, Mr. Falwell smiled.
“Well, at least you get the cart.”
“The cart?”
“The golf cart.”
“There’s a golf cart?”
“Really? Sometimes I think kids get injured on purpose just to get the golf cart. A girl’s father bought it a few years ago when she tore her ACL.”
They drove to a shed behind the hockey rink. Mr. Falwell squinted at a tambourine-size ring of keys in the dark and tried three before he got the right one. Surrounded by shovels, extension cords, and a snowblower sat the golf cart, facing away from them as though in a bad mood. The key was in the ignition. Mr. Falwell sat, turned it on, and deftly backed it out of the shed as though he had spent a lot of time practicing by himself. Ben stood leaning on the crutches with his leg tucked up slightly, his hip flexor already starting to get tired. The cart was an ordinary little two-seater, just like the one his dad had let him drive the two times they had played golf with his squash buddies. Light grime filled the capillaries of the white vinyl seats, the hubs had some leaves and sand stuck to them, but otherwise the thing looked very good.
Mr. Falwell said, “You’ve driven one of these?” Ben nodded and they waved goodbye.
Now Ben cruised toward the Den with his cast glowing on and off in the passing streetlamps. People stopped and watched. Usually Ben would have been nervous to go to the Den alone and he always worried about spending money there, but now he didn’t have a choice because he hadn’t had dinner and the Dish was closed.
Before he got there he had three people on the cart with him: Diana Hayes, Tim DuPont, and Freddy Planchon, all sixth- or hard fifth-formers. Ben parked, clicked down the top of the brake pedal, and crutched in as the older kids held the door for him, and then he was answering questions about the game and whether it hurt and how long he was going to have the cast on. Hutch was there, without Evan, and Ben saw him trying to draw close to participate. Ben couldn’t carry a tray and crutch at the same time, so people asked him what he wanted. When he offered money they waved it away.
The Den thrummed. Ben didn’t have to determine the dynamics of the crowd. He just watched everyone slip along, moving from one end of the room to the other: guys wrenching the Street Fighter joysticks, boys timing when they went up to order food so they could stand behind pretty girls, staff behind the counter taking baskets out of the deep fryer and accepting money at the register seemingly without much resentment, as though these tasks were a decent way to spend time.
The sixth-formers sat on the fabric couches at the far end with their friends fanned around them, the big plate glass windows reflecting it all and enlarging the space. All the clusters of kids seemed to be part of some unthinking biological process, and Ben had his place as a chip of bone or a wad of cartilage, and he stayed still and let people come up to him, and he could answer every one of their questions and seem gracious for asking questions back.
He had told the St. George’s kid to go fuck himself. He described the heat of the cast as it set. Some of Hutch’s friends, a few of them girls, were laughing and he didn’t have to guess when to laugh. Yeah, Ahmed was okay, and it seemed like Ennis was going to get away with it. He wished Alice were there but he was glad he wouldn’t have to perform for her.
And then it was time for check-in, and Ben laughed at all the clamoring for rides, Hutch included, and he ended up taking three sixth-formers who basically made it not a choice. In the cool air, overtaking all the surprised walkers, Ben was suddenly struggling to keep his head up. It was a fantastic feeling, because he knew that tonight he could finally release himself from the effort of trying to go to sleep.
He would open the window so the room would get cool. He’d hop over to the bunk and haul himself up and fold the blankets back and lie down, feeling the strange weight take his leg as though it were being pulled underwater. He’d answer a few of Ahmed’s questions. They wouldn’t mention the slight victim’s kinship they might have now, they’d just stop talking. Ahmed would get down to turn off the light. Ben would let sleep seep up into him like oil from the ground, and he’d sleep dark and well, at last.
* * *
Again he sat in the basement, now warm with the water pumping to all the clanking radiators. His heavy leg was stretched in front of him as he sat on the same chair and dialed the same number, hoping for his dad. They now had something else to talk about. It was his dad who picked up.
“Oh my god, kid, do you need us to come up?” His voice sounded okay.
“I’m all right. It’s just a little harder to get around. They gave me a golf cart, though, which is cool.”
“Nice!”
Ben paused. His dad wasn’t going to keep talking.
“It’s almost fun, though. Like, it’s a hassle and it hurt, but it’s sort of an event, you know? Like it’s…people have been nice. It’s not just the same routine.” He wanted his dad to ask him what he meant.
“Got it.”
Harry’s distraction galloped through the phone to Ben. How could his father fail to relate to a broken leg’s sense of occasion?
Their family had at one time seemed almost to fetishize the sense of occasion. When Ben’s mom got her master’s degree, they came home after the ceremony and all four of them packed into the kitchen pantry. Teddy slid the pocket door closed behind them. Ben’s dad held a bottle of champagne, and they had to stand close enough together that Ben felt its condensation through his sleeve.
Ben got to pull the foil strip from around the cork. Teddy untwisted the wire cage. From the toolbox Mom had brought the plastic squeeze bottle of chalk, and she applied the funnel tip to the bare cork. Once it had a medium layer of blue chalk, she rubbed it lightly into the top of the cork with her thumb.
Ben’s dad held the bottle for her, and she took hold of the cork, holding it still, and he began to turn the bottle slowly in a way that struck Ben now, as he recalled it, as sensual, almost obscene.
Ben braced himself but still wasn’t prepared, and the cork thunked against the ceiling. His mom stepped up on the little stool and reached up and circled the new mark. In her easy tight letters she wrote “6/2/90—HTW MA.”
Around it spread a constellation of older blue marks, circled and lettered for graduations, sports wins or graceful losses, the births of nieces and nephews, round-number birthdays.
But they hadn’t gone into the pantry when Ben had gotten into St. James, he realized. Or when Teddy got into Kenyon.
His dad expressed his concern about the broken leg again, and said he’d have Mom make lemon squares and start a care package and send it up. She was at a thesis meeting.
“Are you okay up there?”
His father’s voice needed him to say yes.
“Yeah,” said Ben.
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“I’ll have Mom call you when she’s back. I love you, kiddo.”
* * *
Upper-formers were starting to remember Ben’s name. Suddenly it was a little easier to be generous to Ahmed. They drove to Chapel together a few days a week, Ahmed always wearing Marlboro Racing, and Ben even let him drive once or twice. Now when Ben sat with Hutch and the rest at lunch, he caught more of the inside jokes. A lot of afternoons Ben would take people out to practice, then sit on the sidelines and watch the team do passing drills or throw-ins or Indian Line runs, but soon that was boring. He drove past the club soccer fields, and from far away Ahmed with his buzz cut looked almost tough.
But eventually Ben didn’t go to practice at all, and two thirty to five thirty was a strange empty time. He knew he could probably find fifth- and sixth-formers smoking pot in their dorm rooms. Against his will he started longing to go to the courts and play.
Without all the kids, the campus was like an expanse of calm water. If he left St. James, would the water smooth over again as soon as his cab pulled away?
After lunch one Thursday, Hutch handed him a crutch and said overboldly, “I’m going to bag prac, man. Let’s do something in the cart.”
“Cool. Yeah, there’s totally something black market about driving around when everyone else is at practice.”
“Totally. Behind the library at two thirty?”
“Sweet.”
Ben forced himself to delay until 2:35 before driving up, and Hutch was there waiting. They drove through a cold, hanging fog just shy of rain.
A lot of times Ben just drove out to the blinking traffic light at the edge of campus and back. By now he could tell where the school’s hold on the landscape started to drift: the fields on each side of the road would begin to look half shorn instead of either rigorously cut or intentionally wild. There might be an empty soda can or a Lay’s bag or a nip bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the bracken.
“What do you want to do?” Ben asked.
“What do you usually do?”
The Expectations Page 14