Lost Between Houses (18 page)

But just when you’re about to go down for the count, something always seems to happen. One day I was coming out of the breakfast hall and this English teacher, Dick Ainsworth, stopped me. He was a skinny guy in a grey suit with black hair and black-rimmed glasses, he looked like a pool shark. But he was one of those teachers who gave a shit, sitting on the edge of his desk after school talking to kids, getting them all to write poetry.

So he stopped me in the hall and said, “Albright, you look like you’re going to explode this morning.”

“I’ll make it to lunch,” I said. Which he pretended to find très clever.

“You know,” he whispered, looking around like we were in danger of being overheard, “I think you’ve got brains to burn.”

Sometimes someone does that for you; you’re going down for the third time and they just reach over the side of the boat and grab you by the hair. That’s what that guy, Dick Ainsworth, did that day. It just sent me
sailing,
like I was some kind of romantic character in a novel and all this had a point and it was going to be okay.

But that was the exception. Most of the time it was like being in
Lord of the Flies,
which, no shit, we were reading in English. Wild, eh? I don’t think they even got it. You know, like the irony. They’re always talking about the irony of this or the irony of that and then it comes along, the real thing, it just about poops on their shoes, and they miss it.

Yeah, that was some schedule we were on. Eight-thirty at night, we went for announcements, a little evening ritual where they got all seventy-five homos out of their rooms, plus me and E.K. of course, and herded us down into the dormitory basement and went over all the shit that had happened that day, you know, like we beat the Scadding House soccer team, or fucking
Andy Boyce finally got his tongue so far up Willie Orr’s ass that they gave him the Latin prize and a trip to New York where, no doubt, he was going to get something really big up his own ass.

“It’s a proven fact,” Psycho told us one night, “that better educated people are virgins when they marry.”

See what I mean? Like not only a great guy but an intellectual wizard as well. Up there in his robes, he looked like Mr Wilson, the fat guy in
Dennis the Menace.

But then Fitz, a haunted-looking kid, came suddenly to life and whispered, “Guess who wears the pants in
his
family?” But the room picked that very moment to go silent, and Psycho heard it. He came slowly over to Fitz, raised his hands to free them from the gown and then, really quickly, bent over and smacked him on both cheeks, like he was clapping his hands, only rapid fire, saying, in time with each smack, “Fitzgerald, for two cents I’d cane your ass off.”

A pricksucker of the first order, our Mr Schiller. Kind of guy you go back and visit forty years later, give him a good punch in the face for old times’ sake. I know I will.

Even on Sunday they wouldn’t leave you alone. Compulsory church. Unbelievable. If you haven’t noticed, the theory of all boarding schools is to keep you so busy all day you don’t have time to abuse yourself at night. Which shows you how much they know. Not to mention the gallons of saltpetre they poured all over our food. (I have this on very reliable authority.)

When my mother was a little squirt, my age I mean, she was sent off to school in France and they stuffed that church business down her throat three times a day. So by the time she had us she said, forget it. So I was like inches from a lifetime getaway when they got me. I guess they figured if they didn’t bore me to death during the week, they’d finish me off with church.

Speaking of my mom, she called me all the time and I was a total prick to her. I’d let my voice go all low and flat and not say fuck-all, you know, just one-word answers and I knew it was making her sick with guilt but I just couldn’t help myself. I really couldn’t. Once I even told her I was going to kill myself, which was kind of a shitty thing to say. But I wanted to punish somebody for putting me here.

I didn’t hear much from Harper but I can’t blame him. We were pretty sick of each other, that happened every summer, and this being his first year in college, he had lots of stuff on the go. Frat parties and getting wrecked. Still it’s funny sometimes how everyone vanishes at once, like turning on the light in the basement and all the bugs vamoose.

One night he called me from his room in residence. “Did you ever hear from that cunt, Scarlet?”

“Nope.”

“That’s a surprise.”

“Yeah really.”

“Something wrong with that bitch. Apart from having a fucked-up name.”

Perceptive guy, eh? Like really putting his finger on things.

“Still thinking about her all the time?” he asked, biting into an apple. Harper had a sort of irritating habit of asking personal questions if he was getting bored with the conversation. You know, to heat things up. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that it might make somebody uncomfortable.

“Nah,” I said. “Fuck it.” Which was not entirely the truth. Just hearing her name still gave me a jolt, like my whole body was suddenly under assault, heart pounding, sweaty underarms, and this funny sensation as if somebody had cracked an egg on my head and it was dripping down my face.
Maybe it was my
brains.
‘Cause I should have known better. I mean I knew she was a fucking monster but I still thought about her all the time.

One afternoon, I was down in Forest Hill Village and I ran into that skinny girl in the red sweater, Rachel, Scarlet’s pal from the Ex. I was extremely uptight, I mean I thought I was going to faint. It was like Scarlet was eavesdropping or something and I wanted her to hear that I was cool as a cuke. Next thing I knew we were having hamburgers at Fran’s. I took her to the same exact booth I used to sit in with Scarlet. It was a mistake though. Soon as I sat down that Beatles song, “It’s Only Love,” came on over the sound system and before too long the whole thing turned into a fucking nightmare. Rachel started in with a story about her parents and how they should have got divorced but they didn’t on account of her dad going to Minneapolis and getting in a car accident. I mean if there’s anything worse than somebody who tells you everything that happened in some movie, like
everything,
it’s someone who tells you a whole lot of stories about people you don’t know. Anyway I was feeling mighty lonely sitting there listening to her go on. What’s worse, she was one of those chicks that puts a curly-cue at the end of her sentences, like she’s asking a question. Like, are you telling me something, baby, or are you asking me?

“So what happened with Scarlet?’ she said finally. And right away I felt some fucking claw was locked on the back of my neck.

“We broke up.”

“Yeah, I heard,” she said. “I had a boyfriend like that once. You know everything was great but then we broke up. I think I threatened him? Some men don’t like strong girls. They want to wear the pants in the family?”

I must have got a sour look on my face because she suddenly switched gears.

“I’m worried about Scarlet. Like just a few nights before she went back to school? She called me up and asked if she could stay overnight. Except she wasn’t really going to stay overnight? She just wanted to tell her parents she was? It gave me a bad feeling.”

“Yeah?” I said, my appetite dead as a fucking doornail, the hamburger tasting like sawdust in my mouth.

“I have a feeling she was going to spend it at Mitch’s house? I had a boyfriend like that, he just wanted to do it all the time, like sometimes I’d just have to say, like, will you leave me
alone …”

“You know what?” I said after a moment, just as soon as I could get my burger back on the plate, “I have to get back to the boarding house. I forgot. I’m on duty.”

Just what I’d be on duty for is something she was too dumb to ask, but I hotfooted it back to the school, everything going really fast. Fortunately, it being Sunday, E.K. was out, and I just threw myself on the bed and stared at the ceiling, my head going like a frog in an egg beater.

It occurred to me, lying there, that maybe God had seen me that night on the hill with Margot, her sniffing her finger. There had to be
some
reason why this was happening to me. I mean this business with Rachel. I swear I could feel the hand of God in it. Like he’d taken time off from his other duties this fall to really stick it to me.

Late in the afternoon one day, I was walking along the fence near the south playing field, sun going down, and I was feeling sad but in a poetic kind of way. I could see myself out there, walking alone, and I kind of liked the picture. Anyway when I got back to my room I sat down at my desk and I started writing it down, all the things I felt, all the things that made me different from the other boys in the school. I put it all in a letter and I sent it to Arthur Deacon because, well, he was going into the
church, he seemed like a kind guy, he never took a pat of butter before the little kids and so on. So I slipped it under his door.

Next morning, I saw Deacon on the way to French lab. He dropped his eyes like he hadn’t seen me, and I thought
oh-oh.

Maybe that day, maybe the next, I forget, fucking E. K. wandered into the room and told me he’d just heard Arthur Deacon telling some guy in the tuck shop that I was a pseudo-intellectual. But hang on. It gets worse. I didn’t know what
pseudo
meant, I thought it was a
degree
of intellectual, you know like Esso Extra. I just blushed with pleasure, you know, like the word’s out, I’m a brainer, everybody knows it.

So when E.K. went out again, I snuck over to his big dictionary and took a peek. And that’s when I found out it’s a
phoney
intellectual. Well, it was a blow. I mean I sat down on the bed, the dictionary still in my hands, and stared out the window. Just sick with it, man, just sick with it.

After that, everything pissed me off, even the smallest stuff, like a guy walking down the same aisle in the library or standing too close behind me at the tuck shop at recess. Like back the fuck off man and stop breathing all over me. Or E.K. talking to a couple of Bishop Strachan girls on the front steps one day. He was coming on like the big man on campus, a real know-it-all, and I just couldn’t help myself.

“Hey E.K., is your sister still doing that trick with the donkey?” Picking on E.K, that was the bottom of the fucking barrel. But you got to be careful with guys like that, you know? I mean they seem all weak and eager to please and really fucking goofy but I’ve discovered that if you push them they can go off in your face like a hand grenade; it’s not just rats you don’t want to corner. So back in my room, E.K. came striding in like he was a prefect or something, looking dashing in a little brown
suit, hair combed neat and black, glistening, and he said, get this, “If you ever do that again, I’m going to beat you to death.”

Weird thing is, I knew not to smart-ass him back. He was at that nothing-to-lose place, and I flashed for a second on his body at nights getting into bed, all tense and muscular, not an ounce of fat on it. But I couldn’t let it go by either.

“Do you mean philosophically or literally?”

“I mean get yourself another scaramouch,” he said, sort of spitting it at me.

“What’s a scaramouch?”

“It’s somebody who makes people laugh.”

And in that second my opinion of E.K. changed completely. It’s too bad he had to scare me to make me stop fucking around with him. But that’s what happened. I mean for awhile, after he stormed out of the room, I found myself talking in my head about what an asshole he was, how I’d given him a break nobody else would, how I wasn’t going to be his friend any more, him snapping at me like that. Fuck him. Now he didn’t even have
me
for a friend. I found myself rehearsing things to say to him, how cold I was going to be. But when he came back into the room after announcements, still giving me the silent treatment, I could feel myself coming around, wanting to make up. I can’t stand tension, it makes my stomach go into a knot. So I apologized.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry for saying that thing about the donkey, but I don’t like being threatened, okay? It makes me very violent.”

I think he knew I just had to get something in there, otherwise it’d look like I was scared of him. And after awhile we started to shoot the shit about the usual stuff. But it stayed with me a few days, him scaring me like that. Sometimes I just felt like
bursting into tears, all the upset, and now this. Getting backed down by E.K. I mean, what’s next after that? Cleaning out urinals with your tongue.

Never mind church, I hate Sundays anyway. No matter where you are, even the country, you can smell a Sunday, everything dead and still, not a fucking soul in the streets. So to keep from shooting myself, I dropped down to see Harper in residence at Trinity College. It was just the neatest place, green ivy on the walls, kids walking around the quad talking about stuff, just exactly what you have in mind when you think about going to university. I went up the stairs into the hall porter’s office. He was going to give Harper a buzz but I asked him not to, I wanted to surprise him.

I didn’t knock. The door was a little bit open and I stuck my head slowly around it like a giraffe. He was lying on his bed reading a book and he just about croaked when he saw me. I mean he jumped like I’d shot him.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said, “you scared the shit out of me.”

I went in and sat down at the foot of the bed. We chatted for awhile about this frat house he was getting rushed for, but he started picking at a piece of dry skin on his lip, something he always did when he was worried.

“What’s up?” I said.

“They invited me over there for lunch yesterday. But afterwards nobody talked to me or anything. I just hung around for awhile, feeling like an asshole, and then I split. I think I blew it. Fuck.”

It was dinnertime pretty soon and he fished a black gown out of his cupboard, just like the one Psycho Schiller wears, and took me over to the dining room, this great big wooden place with a
high ceiling. Some of the guys, their robes were like in tatters, it was almost a prestige thing, like who could have the most fucked-up robe and still have it qualify. I met a guy over there, a divinity student with a long face. He was a big deal in residence because he was fucking a girl who was going out with some guy who was going to be prime minister. Which, let’s face it,
is
a big deal. I felt like I was talking to a celebrity, you know, very keen that he like me. I asked him all sorts of questions, which usually makes people like you. And another guy, with curly black hair, red lips, he looked like a fucking orangutan. But he was light-bulb smart, by which I mean that sometimes you meet somebody in the world and you feel yourself in the presence of a light bulb brighter than yours. I sort of like it, really, I mean it’s a little tiring, all that
reaching up,
but it sure keeps you on your toes. Best thing with those people is not to talk too much, that way you don’t commit yourself. One thing about being with smart people, though, is you never want to be anywhere else.