The Expectations

by Alexander Tilney

  From his shin an impulse leapt through him. Everyone in the gallery saw it. Ben tipped the ball off the frame of his racquet. He straightened up and tested his weight again and felt slightly sick, the pain now a duller thudding, and he held out his hand to Colin, who seemed to mirror his chalk face.

  “I think it might be a little too soon.”

  Colin nodded.

  “But it’s going to be great to play for real when I’m back.”

  Colin looked at Ben’s chest as they finished shaking hands, and Ben now let his eyes come up to all the faces behind the court, and all of them together were like churning water. Ahmed couldn’t control a wince. Rory was in thrall. Everyone else was turning between disgust and bloodlust. Ben looked at Price again, who was placid.

  Ben left the court. He looked back and saw the long black marks from the tread of the boot arcing all across the pristine floor.

  * * *

  The JV soccer season ended (Milton winning 1–0, leaving SJS at 5-5-1 and ineligible for the playoffs), the girls’ varsity field hockey team went on to lose to Belmont Hill in the semifinals of the ISL championships, and then it was Thanksgiving. Hutch was going home to New York, Ahmed was going to London to meet his family.

  “What should I tell them?” Ahmed said, palming his longer buzz cut.

  “Everyone on the soccer team was doing it,” said Ben.

  Ahmed smiled. “When we get back, maybe people will forget a little of Ennis.” They gave each other a short wave.

  Ben kept hoping to run into Alice before he left, but instead he went by Hutch’s room to say goodbye. “I heard Ahmed’s playing squash!” said Hutch. “Dude, quit trying to like be St. James!” he laughed, and Ben shook his head. They clasped hands and exchanged a backslap hug.

  Ben’s mom met him at the Connecticut bus drop-off Sunday afternoon and he clunked down the steps in his heavy gray-plastic boot. The leg still throbbed off and on but it wasn’t terrible. His slice of a face looked happy to see her, and they hugged tightly for what became longer than usual.

  She smelled the unfamiliar school detergent from his clothes, and his torso was a little longer but still as thin. She felt retroactively even more protective of him, unsure how she could let him go back to school after break. Teddy was arriving the following day. When they got home, Harry was driving in at the same time, and he honked the horn and jumped out to hug Ben.

  The house, his room, it was all exactly the same, but it seemed to him that he’d been away for a year. His parents realized they didn’t have what they needed for dinner—steak and celery for stir-fry—and Ben’s mom asked him and his dad to go to the supermarket.

  Ben waited until they were driving back from the Waldbaum’s to say it.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah?” he said, as though he had no idea. Ben came up to the edge, and pushed himself over. “I know about the tuition situation. My advisor told me.” Ben outlined what they had discussed, but he didn’t ask how this could have happened.

  After he finished they were quiet. Ben saw weather traveling across his father’s face.

  “Hey,” said Ben, “maybe we’ll just say I didn’t like it up there. It wasn’t for me. We could say I wanted to be home, didn’t like being so far away, and I could go to Leaford High. We could do it that way.”

  Ben’s dad kept his eyes on the road. He cleared his throat to speak but wasn’t able to start.

  “Really,” Ben continued, “the family wouldn’t have to know, and maybe we could think about it again in a year or a couple years—”

  “This thing on the West Coast,” Harry suddenly began. “There’s been a lot of buyer interest in this land, and the sale should happen before the end of the year. This is a good one. We’ll be back on course.” Harry checked Ben’s eyes for an instant but it was an instant when he was looking forward. Ben wore the same fixated frown that Russell so often had.

  Harry remembered looking into the study when he was eight or ten, seeing Russell in there with their father on a late-fall afternoon, the desk lamp on. The two of them sat leaning over the desk, and Russell lifted and turned the thin, gray page of what they were reading. Harry would learn later that it was the Value Line Investment Survey. With the light shining through you could see the print from the other side of the page.

  After first glancing in at them, Harry sat to one side of the doorway with his back against the wall, and the sound of their voices carried out to him. He heard Russell’s voice rising with a question, and their father’s voice answered in a new tone, a tone that took this question seriously.

  Later Harry found his brother reading the Value Line on his own, not ostentatiously on the living room couch but in his own room on his bed. Soon Russell had made his way through years of archived issues, writing out moot predictions for a certain stock and then checking its performance in the airless lines of the newspaper’s tables.

  After a few months their father brought Harry in for the same sessions, and Harry looked at the price-to-earnings ratios and the dividend yields and hoped he could match Russell’s answers. He grasped the concepts, his father asked him questions, and he thought about it and gave responses that were eventually right, but he was ready to go when the sessions were over. He would leave a copy of the Value Line on his bedside table but it would sit there while he went through issues of MAD and Sports Illustrated, and Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe and White Fang.

  How quickly did the family start calling Russell “the Killer” and Harry “the Cloud”? What would they have called Harry if he had been the older brother? If Russell wrote sonnets or baked bread?

  Sometimes Harry thought that if he had grown up with a different kind of family enterprise—biologists or artists—he would have gone a different way, but after college he went to Harvard Business School like his father and brother, and afterward took a job at Morgan Stanley as a kind of further education. If someone had asked him, he would have said it was challenging and interesting and most people couldn’t say that about their work.

  This was when he met Helen, at a party while visiting friends in Boston in the business school class behind his. He could feel his friends’ curiosity about life in the real world, casting him as the young lion. If Helen noticed this, they still somehow ended up talking about books in the kitchen.

  After they were married, while he was still working at Morgan Stanley, he and his friend Van from business school made a string of significant investments whose success seemed to be telling him something: he was only the Cloud because they called him that.

  So he and Van left their jobs and went into business together. Harry spent more time with his young family. His office at home was different from his father’s study—the desk and shelves and walls were white.

  He and Van seemed to complement each other well: Harry enjoyed getting on the phone with analysts and the management of the companies they were researching, and Van relentlessly went through every contract, every earnings report, triple-checking the formulas in their models.

  But without the bank salary, Harry needed investments to go well. That need wouldn’t let up, it often kept him from sleeping, and Van, who could tolerate the uncertainty more easily, began to set aside time to talk Harry through his second-guessing. Harry couldn’t let go of the times they had sold too soon or the times they had decided to pass on a good thing.

  Then Van was recruited for the computer trading effort back at Morgan Stanley. Harry was happy for his friend. He began investing in real estate and mining and oil refining, assets he could see with his own eyes that Van had always vetoed as too hard to sell when the time came, and despite his anxiety Harry started borrowing to take advantage of a few opportunities too good to pass up. And then in 1990, when oil spiked and the economy went into recession, Harry was caught out. Russell meanwhile had timed the change perfectly.

  Harry had to keep reminding himself that this was actually happening to him—every time the phone rang he expected good news but it
was someone else he owed. And at the same time there was a sense of justice, that finally someone had put a finger straight into a gap in a wall that Harry had been trying to cover over since he was twelve years old at his father’s desk.

  Now in the car Ben was asking a question. He asked it again: “What exactly is the thing out there?”

  Harry waited to straighten out of a turn before he answered.

  “It’s a series of retail areas.”

  “Retail areas?”

  “Some land outside of San Bernardino, in Southern California, became available in an estate sale. It’s not commercial land yet, but it’s being rezoned soon. So there’s a good opportunity to serve an existing demand for more retail.”

  “Like shopping plazas?”

  Ben’s dad didn’t answer immediately. “There’s a lot of demand.”

  Ben thought of the way his mother stiffened subtly when they had to go to Turner’s Corner or Silver Way to rent videos or do the grocery shopping or find him a pair of pants. Always keeping part of herself elsewhere, always just getting through the shopping-center time, keeping her real self saved for the ocean and the dinner table. As though her contempt for these strips kept their family anchored into the correct order of things.

  Ben remembered the friendly disdain he had felt for Ahmed’s family getting their start in cigarettes. While Ahmed was telling him about it, he had felt swaddled in the rightness of his family: sailmaking and vulcanized rubber and public leadership. But now, provided the plan worked at all, his father would be remaking himself with strip malls.

  Ben wanted to ask how long it would be until there was money coming in, but his dad was still talking.

  “They’ve been really receptive out there. We’ll be able to resell the land to a commercial developer. Okay? By New Year’s we’ll be set.”

  The next morning his dad picked Teddy up at the airport. As soon as Teddy came into the kitchen, Ben saw again how much he resembled their parents, fair like them; Ben’s darker aspect apparently came from Helen’s father. Teddy tested him with his familiar mischievous eyes, but his hug was sincere, as though he needed the contact. Ben could feel the slight padding he had gained.

  ”They beating the shit out of you up there?” He drew his leg back as though to kick Ben in the bad shin and laughed.

  Ben looked at Teddy over the dinner table that night and thought about him walking to the squash courts filled with dread. He wanted to see Teddy’s face if he said Price’s name out loud. But he stayed quiet. Teddy mentioned Preston and Sammy from SJS and Will and Sean from home, and Ben wondered how he was keeping in touch with all of them.

  On Tuesday, Ben thought about calling Tim or some of the other Um Club kids to hit, but after playing Colin he didn’t feel like getting on court in the boot. So he studied for his exams and reread “Decision-Making,” hoping to come up with some suggestions for improvement for Markson. They should change all the “boys” to “students.” But that would be the first thing Markson would do. As he read back over his notes from bio, Ben found himself wondering where in their house the rolled-up architectural plans for the squash courts might be.

  His mom came home from a meeting with her advisor. After she had taken a bath and was sitting in her robe with a glass of wine, reading People as a break from her dissertation, Ben asked her about what his dad had said in the car. She put the glass on the coffee table with the small fold-up wings.

  “We’ve got to trust him, Ben.”

  Ben wanted to ask, “Do you trust him?” but he thought he wouldn’t be able to tolerate her looking away.

  “Okay. All right. You’re right.”

  The next day she started to prepare the Thanksgiving meal. All of the thousands of kitchen tasks made Helen think of her mother, patiently teaching her how to stretch leftovers, how to salvage a spoiled apple and let down hems.

  Helen had always been neat and presentable, and so she was allowed to help at Pritchard’s school dances with the girls from Sawyer-Monclair. Helen would look at the girls so unlike her sisters as they passed in the half-light, their dresses with depths of tulle, their regular pearls and high heels and solid hanging curls. Their faces expected only bright things that Helen knew they would get.

  One afternoon, her sister Anne caught the sleeve of her calico school dress on the front gate and opened a two-inch tear. Their mother held up the exhausted dress and then took Anne to Spencer’s in town, where they bought a new one, a white muslin with small raised dots along the sleeves. Helen waited a week, and then with one leg of Orin’s scissors worked a hole open at the front of her own school dress, and brought it to her mother in distress about catching it on the window latch. Her mother told her to sew it up again. After Helen was finished, her mother picked the stitches out, saying the repair had to be invisible. She made Helen redo it three more times.

  Ben helped his mom make the Thanksgiving meal, watching her clean spinach and strip celery stalks off the bulb. Teddy had been out with friends from home until just before dawn and then slept until three, but he helped set the table for Thanksgiving dinner. They had a crisp-skinned turkey, no men came to roll up the carpets, and the only thing that could have possibly been a sign was the curling corner of the wallpaper in the hallway bathroom.

  After two days the leftovers were finished, and so they ordered pizza. Ben and his mom drove to the little shopping plaza to pick it up. Just like San Bernardino but colder. They came out with the warm box into the hard early dusk, Ben pulling his boot along past the Supercuts and the Lemongrass Grill, and he saw a pocket of kids collected next to the McDonald’s.

  Ben had noticed them when he and his mom had walked from the car to the pizza place, but now coming back he looked more carefully. Immediately he discerned the leader. He wore a baseball cap with a triangular logo Ben didn’t recognize, and the cap’s brim was completely flat. That flatness seemed not only incorrect, but a fuck you to the way Ben knew hat brims should look: like the narrow end of an egg, like the top half of a zero. The boy was bony, with light acne and ragged blond hair showing beneath the hat. He was dressed in a loose red-and-black-plaid shirt over black jeans torn at both knees and flat-soled black high-tops. All the other kids were wearing the same clothes, but everything was more right on him. A bright chain hung from his belt loop back to what must have been his wallet.

  This blond kid leaned against the dirty McDonald’s wall as though he couldn’t have kept upright without it. He smiled under sleepy eyes and looked like he was slowly telling the story of what had made him so thrillingly exhausted.

  Three girls sat shoulder to shoulder on a low concrete parking space stopper, their chins on their knees, shivering and waiting to laugh at things he said. Another boy leaned sideways against the same wall, listening to him. Two other guys were doing skateboard tricks nearby. One of them tried some kind of jump, the board clattered away, and before he picked it up, he glanced at the guy on the wall.

  Ben looked at everyone orbiting around that one kid. So tired, so uninterested in going to St. James, so thoroughly unconcerned with making his action accord with God’s will. In that kid’s system, you wore your hat with a flat brim.

  What if Ben went to their school? What if he had to learn their slang, make their jokes, learn what the stickers on their skateboards meant?

  And what if he was part of their system for so long that something changed? What if eventually Ben became someone who believed in wearing his hat with a flat brim? Could he become someone who took in that flatness and saw it as correct? Before Ahmed had seen Marlboro Racing, what did he think hat brims should look like?

  Ben climbed into the car with the spreading smell of the pizza, and suddenly so badly wanted to see his friend Tim. They could do something other than play squash. He saw Price’s face smiling after setting Ben and Colin against each other like insects in a jar, and he wanted to be with someone again who didn’t want anything from him, whom he didn’t have to impress, who would be convinced that he was
seeing the real Ben, who trusted Ben’s history of worthwhileness.

  But he had to go back the next day. Maybe he’d call over Christmas. He briefly thought about Nina, but that felt much too far gone.

  Then it was time for his dad to drive him to the Connecticut bus. Ben’s right calf was thinner than his left, almost straight from his ankle to his knee, but his leg didn’t hurt anymore. He left the plastic boot at the bottom of his bedroom closet. He and Teddy hugged again, but this time they were both already preoccupied with going back.

  9. The Actuator

  BEN GINGERLY WALKED BACK TO HAWLEY WITH HIS BAGS. HE wanted to see Markson again. He wanted to dispute a few parts of the Companion. Even though he had just gotten off a bus full of other students, it seemed in the cold and the coming dusk that he was in private, that if he stopped on the path and started talking loudly to himself, no one would hear him. He wondered whether Alice was back yet.

  He pulled open the back door to Hawley. The entryway light was out and he thought he should mention it to Dennett.

  The door closed behind him and a shape moved from his right into his ribs and slammed him into the wall and he dropped his bags, and then he was on his back on the floor. There were three people there, one kneeling on each of his arms and one sitting on his legs. He was scared they would rebreak his healing leg, but both legs hurt just the same. The shape on his right arm unzipped Ben’s jacket and Ben felt knuckle edges pressing into his sternum. Ben spasmed in the floor’s grit and he pulled his arms and legs in as hard as he could and the kid on the right slipped slightly, and he managed to twist his right arm free for long enough to punch the person on his other arm weakly. Immediately that arm was back on the floor under two shins, and no matter how hard he pulled, he stayed pinned, and a breathless voice came up to his ear.