Fall (3 page)

The longer people lingered in the bathroom, the more senior they were, usually, and the more comfortable they were with being naked. At the start of the year there were always a few new guys who wore bathing suits while they showered. They waited their turn, got quickly into the shower, faced the wall so their backs were turned to everyone waiting, got out as quickly as they got in. After a week or two they would answer the question in different ways.

“Why do you wear a bathing suit in the shower?”

“It’s warmer.”

“Why do you wear a bathing suit in the shower?”

“That’s what I wear at home.”

And then they would start going naked.

Everyone’s sleepy eyes wandered into the hot fog every morning. They found the radiator, they found the showers, they found the penises of everyone else on the wing. The sad wet mushroom belongs to Chris. The blue-white thing in the nest of red belongs to Archie the Scot. The half-hard penis from morning dreams, so big that it almost touches his neighbour’s leg when he turns around, is the belonging of Carlos and if Chuck sees it half hard once more, he said, he’s going to stomp on it and break its back so it never grows again.

You looked at everyone’s, but when you were in the shower you never saw anyone looking.

Edward wore a bathing suit for his first shower. On their way back to their room Edward’s new roommates were trying to whip
him with their wet towels. They were new to the technique so they were weakly hitting the air instead of snapping at Edward’s skin. They were practising; and Edward was trying to figure out how to react. His towel was wrapped tightly around his waist, getting dyed blue by his wet new bathing suit and he was laughing like someone who has to choose laughing instead of fighting back.

Julius came out of our room in his towel, watched the young ones running down the hall, and wandered into the bathroom later than everyone. He timed it every morning so he never had to wait for the shower, and showered as long as he liked.

He was a chart of what the body should be.

We watched him in his towel.

At the end of the first full day of school after everyone’s lights were out, Julius lay on the bottom bunk and said to me, “I’m beat from practice, man, goodnight.”

He was a messy guy, but he tried to change. For the first few weeks he left his soccer clothes strewn around the room. Socks so wet with sweat that the carpet was damp when he eventually picked them up.

“This room smells like balls and an armpit,” said Chuck, and Ant said, “Whose balls does it smell like?”

Julius would scoop up his clothes eventually, fill pillowcases with them and throw them in the closet for laundry day, but the smell lingered until someone came in and said it stank. Julius tried to be more tidy.

He could fill a room with his presence, but if you looked closely sometimes you could see he was somewhere else.

On the second night of school, after the lights went out, Julius looked up at the underside of the bunk above and said, “I was talking to someone who said your dad’s ambassador to Australia or something.”

“Consul General.”

“Okay.”

“Mmm.”

“I’m so fuckin’ tired, man, goodnight.”

Julius’s father was the U.S. ambassador to Canada. His residence was in Sutton, a seven-minute walk from the school, but he insisted that Julius be a boarder. Julius could go home whenever he wanted, but theoretically the rules of the school said you couldn’t go off campus during the week and could only leave on weekends if you had somewhere to sign out to. Julius went home most weekends, even though his father wanted him to integrate with the students at St. Ebury as much as possible—to become part of the culture.

His father’s time in Canada may be remembered for its curtailment. And he was unusual in some ways. A widower—a single ambassador in the days when the probity of being single no longer existed. He was outspoken, but as I look back through articles I kept he was also frequently misquoted and misrepresented. Perhaps I’m inclined to sympathize. I was a stranger to him, but was essentially responsible for his departure.

I am reading an article at the moment that says there are men listening to the noises of submarines. The men are in England, the submarines in the Arctic. The men are Canadian, the submarines Russian and American. I can see the men wearing earphones, straining their ears to hear muted signals; sounds bouncing off the ocean floor, telling secrets they do not mean to tell.

I remember every night, every detail. The early days of love. There was a strange quiet on the third night. Prep was at 7:30 and there wasn’t a noise for two hours except of pages turning and pens dropping on desks. Two hours later the lights stayed dim, and most boarders started getting ready for bed. All the new students were yearning for a routine, trying to keep the strangeness from growing. If they could be quiet, do homework, keep to themselves, go to bed, they wouldn’t have to be so aware of how odd it was to be living with
eighty-four friends and strangers—they could pretend they were on their own. One mood could settle on everyone.

Julius propped up his algebra book first, stared at it like a possible enemy, let it rest again, open, copied some problems, worked for half an hour. He sighed. He stretched and yawned a silent roar. He closed the algebra book, took down
Philosophical Analysis
from the shelf above his desk and opened it for the first time with a sort of delicate ceremony. He blew out his cheeks, turned a page, looked at me, closed the book. He took down Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, in the modern English version that he wasn’t supposed to read.

When prep was over he turned to me and said, “Farts can be funny things to write stories about,” and then he farted.

He disappeared until it was time for bed, and then, back in the room in the dark, he said to the bunk above, “Australia?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

“Bright.”

“But you’re Canadian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Diplomat’s kid. Same here. American.”

“I know.”

“Were you there this summer?”

“Winter. It’s upside down.”

Julius was quiet for a while, like he was figuring something out.

“So in Australia I’d be on the top bunk,” he said.

“That’s right. And your pants would be over your arms.”

“Right.”

There were long silences in those rooms sometimes when one would wait to see if the other was falling asleep or was thinking of something to say.

“I saw a picture of Australia once,” said Julius. “A beach. And sky. And a girl.”

There was another long silence.

Everyone was in their bunks, suspended on different planes in the dark, conversation going upward, from the bottom bunk to the
top, to the roof. Sometimes there would be understanding. Sometimes the one on the top would roll to the side, look down at the bottom and say, “Really?” Sometimes we were corpses in drawers, dreaming up.

“Can a woman ever really be on top in Australia?”

“I know one who was,” I said to the roof.

I’d been working out for over a year. By that September I could bench-press 225 pounds. Julius later said that when the bar was halfway up, my eye would open and swell, open and swell, like something that kept trying to be born. He never shied away from it. He said “shit” in a tone of admiration when I held 215 pounds above my head. The military press, weight pushed high, arms up straight in heavy victory. Once, he said, “You should see yourself.”

In the first week I made a start on the
Iliad
, among other things. I read a lot during the week—after school, after dinner, during prep. After prep I went to the weight room. I liked going to bed with a mind full of someone else’s words and my muscles full of blood. I don’t think I really analyzed it at the time—I simply got into that routine and liked it.

The sameness of each day somehow never gathered into a blur. The beginning of every year in boarding school holds a sense that something, this year, has to be different. I’m wandering the same halls, I’m restricted to the same things, but I’m older, bigger, smarter, and something has to change. A new knot in the tie, a conversation with someone you’d never talked to before—things like that would distinguish each day. The potential for anything to be truly different was so limited that tiny things would make a day stand out.

Julius was gone for the rest of that week. He hadn’t left school, but he always disappeared after prep and came back to the room after Lights Out. He said “Hey, man” in the mornings when I was brushing my teeth. I kicked his soccer clothes to the side of the room, hoping he would notice that they bothered me.

Sometimes even though I exhausted myself with weights and was too tired to read I would still be awake after Lights Out. Usually at around midnight, once the Duty Master was settled in his own room, there would be a small storm of noises somewhere on the Flats. Pranks were one of the first signs that friendships were being made. You could hear footsteps thundering down the hall upstairs and you would know that at least two new roommates were getting along well enough to disturb the sleep of someone in another room—usually someone who hadn’t made any friends yet.

On the first Thursday I heard a huge bang, water splashing, a shout, and at least four feet banging down the hall. Someone upstairs had been doused with water, and because I heard no more noise I knew that whoever had been doused did not retaliate.

When you sleep at home you normally don’t expect to be awakened by strangers throwing buckets of cold water on you. The kid was probably in shock, had no idea what to do. When it happens the first time, you don’t realize that you can retaliate; and he probably had no one in his room who was willing to help him get back at the others.

I was thinking of what it was like to sleep on a wet mattress when Julius came quietly through the door. When the Duty Master came around for Lights Out I had told him that Julius was in the bathroom, but I didn’t know where he really was. A smell of cigarette smoke sneaked in behind him. I could tell he was trying to be quiet, and I couldn’t decide whether to tell him I was awake or not.

I thought for a second that all the noise upstairs might have woken up the Duty Master, that he would come around inspecting rooms and find Julius there undressing and would know that he had been outside. I realized that if that happened I would probably get in trouble as well for covering for Julius. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t mind getting in trouble with him.

But there was silence upstairs now and silence down the halls— just Julius taking his clothes off, the noise of the coins in his pockets. He sniffed, then sucked back the mucus in his throat and said “sorry” very softly. He turned on the water to brush his teeth and
said “sorry” again after he finished, and said “sorry” after he banged what was probably his knee on the bed below before crawling into it. I decided to whisper, “It’s okay, man, I’m awake.”

He said, “Oh,” and then again, “sorry.”

In the morning I was dressed and sitting on the top bunk, reading. Julius was late and was frantically tying his tie, his wet hair dripping onto the silk and soaking his collar. He asked me if I was going to the party.

“What party?” I said.

“Tomorrow night at Brown’s.”

Jeffrey Brown was the son of the mayor of Sutton.

“No,” I said.

I was waiting for him to say “Why not?”; maybe I was expecting him to invite me. I had my excuses lined up.

He didn’t say anything more about it.

I hopped down from the bed because it was 8:29. Julius asked me if I was going to Chapel. I made a noise to suggest I had no choice in the matter. Julius said, “Let’s go,” and it was the first time we went down to Chapel together.

 

Susan

Harper

Jess

Mathilda

Julie

Sarah

Fall

 

Those were the girls who were in the mind of the entire wanting world. The bathrooms and beds were humming with them.

Some of them had boyfriends when the year first started, but every new year was full of hope for change.

For boarders there wasn’t much opportunity for seeing someone who didn’t go to St. Ebury. The day-boys had other chances with their evenings and weekends free. They had neighbours’ daughters, friends of family, girls from other schools.

Even seeing someone from school was hard enough if you lived there. Most of the girls weren’t boarders. The greatest luck you could have as a boarder was to have somewhere to sign out to on the weekend—a relative’s place or some willing guardian’s. There were a few boarders like Julius whose parents lived somewhere in the city. The luckiest were those who could sign out to a place where the guardian didn’t actually know or care what you were doing. Julius’s dad cared but he was often out of town. Ant’s aunt lived in Paris most of the year. As long as the school had a phone number, they rarely checked to see if you were actually being looked after.

If you could sign out on the weekend, you might at least have a chance to see day-girls outside of school. Boarders could leave grounds on the weekend during the day, but they had to be back early and in bed by ten or eleven o’clock. The most a date could be was an afternoon movie and a coffee. The day-students would get together on weekends for parties almost every week and girls from other schools would often go. Only a handful of boarders would ever get to be there.

The Flats got so quiet so soon. By five o’clock on a Friday even the boarders who hadn’t signed out would be away somewhere until curfew, desperately breathing in the freedom of being off school grounds. The younger grades usually went to the Centrepiece Mall, where kids from downtown schools went—and there was always a story about someone from St. Ebury who had forgotten to change out of his uniform and was beaten up for being a private-school fag. There were a few arcades, one music venue that let you in as long as you were over sixteen; and otherwise there was just the opportunity to hang out and look at other people. I got the sleeves ripped off my jacket once at the Centrepiece Mall but I was able to find a tailor in the mall who could fix it right away.