“This happens every day until you wrestle.” Again the knuckles met his sternum, and with each syllable they dug in. “Every. Day.”
They stood up off him, one of them punched open the door and they were all gone into the cold.
Ben turned on his side and lay there, pulling in air and trying to make his arms work. Eventually he could stand, and he made his way up the stairs and came into dark, empty room 24 and let the bags slide to the floor.
When Ahmed arrived, he shook Ben’s hand tightly and said his parents hadn’t minded his short hair when he told them that the soccer team all did it together.
* * *
Three days later Ben found Markson as he was leaving the Dish. They walked out together into the chastening dusk.
“Do you know anything else about the tuition situation?” Ben asked.
“Not a ton new. My understanding is that if they don’t get a check before January first they’ll move you to financial aid for the new year.”
Without discussing it they started walking down from the Dish toward the library. Before he lost momentum, Ben said he thought he might want to quit squash.
“Okay,” said Markson, much less surprised than Ben thought he would be. “How come?”
“Just, like, why does Ahmed have to play squash? Why can’t he do something else?”
“Ahmed?”
“Yeah. He could choose any other sport, but he just has to be right on me all the time.”
“Well, maybe he can’t just play another sport.”
“What do you mean can’t?”
“For you, maybe for us, squash might be fun and interesting and what we played because we weren’t on the hockey team,” Markson said. “But for a lot of the world, you can get out of a bad neighborhood by being good at squash. My roommate in college was from Chennai, in India, and he was playing a different game than the other kids on the team. It’s like basketball in LA or Baltimore. If you go to Mexico or Egypt or India or Pakistan, that’s what the level of competition is like. Like survival. You get out by playing squash.”
“I guess. But it’s not like Ahmed has to lift himself out of poverty.”
“Right, but also in those places it’s the way for the recently successful to move to a higher social position. If you’re a Pakistani family that’s gotten rich by, I don’t know, making and selling bricks, then how do you become respectable? How do you get to be around the people who’ve created ‘society’ there? British people. How do you gain prestige? You drill, and you get really good. It’s fucked up and imperialistic, but it’s how it is.”
“I just need some distance.”
“Really? That doesn’t seem like enough of a reason. What else would you do in the winter?”
Ben had already agreed. The day before he had showed up to wrestling practice in squash shorts and a T-shirt and gone right into drills on the dense mats.
“I was thinking about wrestling.”
“Wrestling! Huh.”
For a moment Ben sensed how strange it was for an adult to be having a serious conversation about what sport a fourteen-year-old was going to play in the winter. They walked up on the footbridge across the meandering channel between Sluice Pond and Library Pond, and the sound of their footsteps traveled over the water and back.
“Why wrestling?”
There had been a few seconds toward the end of that first wrestling practice the day before, when Ben had landed flat on his back and was confused not to be able to pull air into his lungs. He tried and no air came in. He saw the spokes of light extending from each lamp fixture on the gym ceiling and the fans turning languidly through the light. He was utterly trapped in his experience, asphyxiating there with his mouth and nose clear, and so at that moment, nothing in the past or future troubled him at all. All his school dread, all his family worry, anything related to money, everything relented in the bare effort to get his diaphragm to stop spasming and draw in air. Followed by the crashing joy of then being able to breathe.
“It seems more direct or something. No racquet and ball and stuff in between. Just you and the other guy.”
“I think it could be a great idea for you to wrestle.”
“Really?” Ben had wanted Markson to object.
“Definitely.” Markson turned to face him there at the end of the bridge, and they stopped. Someone walking by them wouldn’t have been able to hear. “Listen, I respect Manley Price. I respect most of his methods. But what he did at that practice, making you play Colin like that, it was…I had some questions. I just think it wouldn’t be bad for you to have a wider orbit from him.”
“Okay.”
Now Markson seemed to want to dispel the earlier seriousness. “Have you looked at the Companion at all? At ‘Decision-Making’?”
“Yeah, a little.” Ben laughed. “I need a peaceful and steadfast heart, that’s for sure.”
“Does it seem useful?”
“It seems good. But, I don’t know…”
Markson nodded, waiting. His patience seemed sincere.
“It seems good if you’re trying to decide something. But what if the person reading it doesn’t have a decision to make? Doesn’t get to make a decision?”
“Doesn’t get to?”
Ben paused. “Like what to do when you can’t change something that’s happening?”
“Hm, yeah.”
Ben waited for him to say something about deciding how to handle things you can’t control.
But he said, “I know what you mean. That’s not easy.”
Ben almost pitied him.
They continued walking toward the library, now past the corner that Ben had skidded around in the cart, and along the pond with the chapel in front of them. It rang three Westminster quarters, and Markson half sang the last “bong, bong, bong, bonngggg.” Up the rise was Calder House, where Markson was the junior faculty member, and eventually Ben slowed down to let Markson go in.
“Don’t worry about squash, Ben. Life is long.”
* * *
“I don’t want you to wrestle,” said Ahmed.
“What?”
“Underhill played squash.”
“Dude, I don’t give a shit what Underhill did!”
“But he brought players to Dubai! The first real players. From England, and Australia.”
“I’m not telling you that you can’t play, Ahmed. I just don’t want to play.”
“But that is not the way it is supposed to go.”
“There is no ‘way it’s supposed to go.’ This is just how it’s going.”
Ben had officially changed sports with the Athletic Office. He had called home and told his dad. His dad didn’t blow up, but instead just said, “I think it would be a shame, but you have to make your own choices.” Ben couldn’t decide whether this was an unforgivable abdication of limits-setting or exactly what a good parent was supposed to do.
And then, inevitably, Price found him in the hallway of the Schoolhouse. He gripped the shoulder strap of Ben’s backpack and pulled him with surprising ease into an empty classroom.
“Sit,” said Price.
Ben stayed standing but let his book bag drop to the floor and leaned carefully against a chalkboard.
“Squash lets you out,” Price said. “Don’t you feel that? Isn’t it a relief?”
Ben stayed quiet, but he had remembered that feeling of going down the stadium steps toward the court, as though all his impediments had forgotten him. He could feel Price pressing him to make eye contact, but Ben kept looking at the end of the closest chair leg, where it met the floor. “I just need time away.”
“Is it about your dad? About the courts?”
Ben shrugged. He wanted to convey how simple wrestling seemed.
“All that stuff about your dad, about money, it’s all incidental. It’s all just tissue paper getting between you and what comes out when you play.”
Ben shrugged again.
“I asked you before whether you could kill. Tha
t sounds frightening, but ‘killing’ is just another way of saying ‘getting to the last, indivisible grain of experience and acting there.’ Instead of deferring, instead of postponing, saying ‘maybe next time, maybe I’ll do what I need to do in the next struggle,’ you stay in that moment and do what you have to do. If you avoid that, if you avoid learning how to kill like that, you may as well already be dead.”
“But that’s the reason I want to do something else.” Still Ben kept his eyes to himself. “Something where there’s no history. I’ve been waiting for so long to get to school, but so much has gone wrong that I still feel like I’m not here.”
“Ben,” Price said. “Ben.” Now he looked into those eyes.
“History, the money stuff, that isn’t why you’re hiding. You would have looked for another reason. You’ll always find a reason to stay hidden unless you decide you don’t want to be hidden anymore. You can’t wait for things to be ideal.”
Ben stayed quiet.
“You only have a few chances in life to be great. And it’s something you learn. If you step away from this now…Why would you want to practice avoiding greatness?”
Ben picked up his backpack and moved toward the door. Price didn’t stop him.
“You don’t want me at the courts if I don’t want to be there. You’ve chased other kids away.” Ben looked full into Price’s startled face. He walked back into the hallway.
* * *
And then, almost blessedly, every wrestling practice was a humiliation, a confusion of limbs and a string of unknowable forces that left him on his back unable to move again and again and again and again. Of course Ben was frustrated, but there was also a relief that no one really cared how he did; no one could expect him to be good. The other newbs on the team—Dave, Eben, Anoop, and Matt—tried to help him along but had their own struggles to worry about. Ben flung himself into every practice. He dove after exhaustion, both absorbed in and detached from his effort. Simon started hassling him about his weight; he was no good to the team if he couldn’t make weight. Coach Weber worked one-on-one with him. Ben could sense that he missed having Ennis on the team.
Ahmed turned out to be upsettingly decent at squash. He was calm and diligent, hitting ball after ball against the wall of Court 12 after practice, never expecting too much from himself. Even though he was a little heavy, he had a good sense of where the ball was going to be, and he was very flexible and able to take longish strides, and so, to the despair of the players around him, he started beating guys with ambitions of playing varsity. When he lost a point he just moved on to the next one, always just making sure he got the ball back and reasonably close to the wall, and sooner or later his opponent would mishit the ball or try too complex a shot and hit the tin. Eventually his opponent would lose himself in a rage and hardly be able to see. People began to fear playing Ahmed, not because he himself was fearsome, but because the prospect of losing to him was so humiliating. They would freeze up and Ahmed would win.
Every time Ben passed the Dragon now he seemed to see it anew. It wasn’t aggressive or abusive or mean. It just seemed to see underneath Ben’s new wrestling persona. And maybe so did everyone else: Hutch and Evan, Alice, Markson, everyone.
Ben considered all the time he had put into squash, all the ad hoc afternoons he had just stayed at the Um Club hitting out of inertia, all the time other people had invested in him so that he could be excellent at this thing. Human beings are so often ridiculous, petty, confused, bored, scattered, ugly, wasteful, a detriment. Through a combination of luck and dedication, Ben had been able, in this one limited way, to defy all that, to be directed and efficient. He could access and create beauty without any of the embarrassing attention-seeking that other kinds of beauty required. He had adapted to the task; the task itself had shaped him so that his own will didn’t botch the job.
The Dragon—this other thing supremely shaped by the simple task of generating heat—stood there stating its own past purpose, constantly reminding Ben of the potential he was shirking.
On any given day Ben would become distracted—absorbed in a class, studying for pre-Christmas exams, waiting to see Alice in the halls, talking about other girls with Hutch—but before Seated he would start heading back to Hawley. Then, just as he turned toward the quad, he knew the Dragon would be there standing in the cold.
And behind it, the building that his father had lavished so much money on. Lavished his effort by drawing money from other people in order to build it. The Dragon was nothing but itself, an ultimately useful and dependable object, now set out on a block with its use ablated. But the courts had been built on leverage, a whopping overextension, and they still hadn’t peeled off the stickers from the Andersen windows.
* * *
The Thursday before the first meet, the wrestling upper-formers brought together the wrestling newbs, the wets. Every year as initiation they had to pull a prank, and the other wets had been thinking about it all year. Every suggestion was ruled lame. Until Ben said, “What about the Dragon?”
Everyone’s eyes went wide.
“Totally,” said Simon. “Totally.”
Ben thought, TP it?
“We could spray-paint it,” said Matt. “Like, write graffiti on it.”
“Whoa,” said Simon. “Whoa, that would be so intense.”
“Wait, spray-paint it?” said Ben.
“You’re doing it, Weeksy,” said Simon. “You’re the one who has to come up with what it’s going to say.”
The next night Ben sat alone on the bottom step of the Hawley stairwell near the back door. He hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner, and he had spent all day spitting into a cup to get to 132. Now that he was here on the steps, studying earlier that night for his geometry exam seemed like a luxury. All the wets were supposed to congregate behind the courts at one a.m., then do the tag and disperse. With luck it would not be known to all. It was 12:53.
Ben was sure that security’s Land Rover would materialize around the corner and skid to a stop as soon as the Hawley door closed behind him. More than anything, Ben didn’t want to be the only wet to get caught, the only one so clueless and lame. He didn’t want to have Snake Eyes turn him around and put his hands on the hood like a perp on TV. Or to sit in the passenger seat of the Land Rover, all the other wets hidden carefully nearby, seeing his pallor in the reading lights of the car as Snake Eyes wrote up his report. Then the school would solve everything by just kicking him out. Ben wanted to stay inside, to lie in bed and look up at his glow-in-the-dark crumbs.
It was time. He put his face up to the cold window panel. He didn’t see anyone. Slowly he pressed down the crossbar. The latch retracted, no alarm bell went off, the door swung out and the cold air came freely into the entryway.
Ben put his head through the opening and looked outside while keeping his feet on the inside tile. Would that be considered cruising? Up by the courts he saw a dark shape pass under a lamp. Even in that quarter of a second he registered the shape as Matt. They were all going to be there without him. He had to go. Through curtains of dread he stepped all the way out the door, and then remembered that it would lock behind him. He stood there holding the door open, second after second, looking for something to prop it with. All he had in his pocket was a Bic Cristal pen, so he held it down at the bottom of the frame and let the weight of the door gently come against it. Spending so much time on the bright stoop was going to get him caught.
He jogged down the steps and then back against the wall of Hawley, out of the light. Now he felt safer. He could hear wind passing through the bare trees. The crickets or toads were long gone, and so other than the wind he couldn’t hear anything, and he knew that the motor of the Land Rover would clearly give itself away. If it came by he would just get over to the bushes along each building and lie down, and there would be no way for Snake Eyes to see him.
And then, with an almost audible rushing, he felt his awareness cover the campus, gathering around the PO and the Schoolhouse, s
preading across the playing fields and against the chapel, from the hedges surrounding the school entrance to the long road to the crew boathouse. He could be anywhere. And if they caught him, good. They couldn’t put him on financial aid; he wouldn’t have to worry about Russell and the rest of the family; feeling like prey would be finished. He would see Alice one last time. He would have a reason to go see her, and he would finally have nothing to hide from her.
He jogged slowly from the side of Hawley to the side of Smith House, the same design as Hawley but oriented east-west instead of north-south. He stood under a darkened window. Not more than five feet away was some safe, sleeping girl. Across the back grass was Paige House, all dark, and somewhere inside she was sleeping.
The next leg, from Smith to the woods behind the courts, was the riskiest. It would take him under two streetlamps, past the Dragon, and then into the darkness against the building. He thought he could hear wets back there, but he couldn’t be sure. Now, frustratingly, he was scared of getting caught again. He listened for the Land Rover but didn’t hear anything, and so he jogged across the lane, through the light. His feet scratched loudly on the blacktop and then were quieter on the dirt of the path to the Dish. Ben ducked off the path and was safe.
Behind the courts were Eben, Matt, and Dave. Their faces were scared and smiling. They didn’t say anything. Only Anoop was missing. The purple backpack with the spray cans was there for them, just as Simon had said it would be. Matt unzipped the bag slowly, quietly, and they saw three cans of white paint and three of red, the school colors. Ben still had no idea what they were supposed to write.
They all heard huge stomping footsteps, and Anoop came sprinting up. With wild, terrified eyes he turned and sat in the fallen leaves with his back to the wall. He closed his eyes and his chest leapt as he tried to catch his breath. Eben whispered, “Don’t run so hard. It’s more important to stay quiet and alert than to go fast. Did Snake Eyes see you?”
The Expectations Page 18