In the Land of the Living (18 page)

When he was standing in the grass, he tossed the Blue Book into the air and chopped at it with the aluminum bat. The book dropped noiselessly onto the grass. He tossed the course guide up again and leveled his swing and clipped the book but it just spun in place and then flopped on the grass again more or less intact. He tossed it up a third time and that time he nailed it right in the spine with his bat, and the pages of the Blue Book sprayed across the yard like flames from a flamethrower.

(This was probably what Jack James meant about not contributing in the right manner.)

“That’s right!” Leo shouted. “I’m a nutcase!” He thought of Poppy Bush pounding his glove at second base or whatever position he played. “Hurray for dear old Eli, dear old Eli! Hear, hear!”

It took a while for his heart rate to return to normal. He peeled open the sticky door to the house and wiped his face off with a wet paper towel.

He sat down on the couch, feeling indecent and sweaty in the cold pure air of the house, and he called up his uncle Harvey, who had gone to Yale.

He told it like this: here’s a wacky thing that happened today. Uncle Harvey listened and then there was a pause.

“Well, are you going to consider it?” Harvey said.

Leo laughed. “Of course not. I already threw the letter in the garbage.”

“I think you should consider it.”

He was not about to consider it.

He was not.

But that night buildings and strange landscapes occupied his mind. He saw Harkness Tower black with dusk, many-steepled with striving ornaments like the missiles on a ship flying heavenward, and he heard its lovely bells with their cold metal tones, each one different like colors assorted on an autumn day. He saw dark stained glass divided by muntins delicate as dark winter branches dividing a Connecticut dusk. He smelled the chimney smoke floating over the unlit courtyard. Michigan’s clock tower had hardly any ornament. Its buildings were giant and modular, pharaoh tombs drenched in freezing sunshine. They were public works, Himalaya-sized post offices, train stations that dwarfed their own trees.

Grief: never what it is, an envelope that used to hold airplane tickets.

Half an hour before he had to get up. An unwelcome arc of light lit the wall and the bureau. They had no shades or curtains, as though they lived in a cavern, but the cavern was a century-old stone Tudor gatehouse with battlements on top and the naked window looked onto the blood-tinted stone of the Yale History of Art building. The room smelled of the cologne and shaving cream on the bureau under the window, fresh, like a bathroom after a shower. Reaching his hands out of windows whose sashes were barely opened: a dream. He was wrested from its dilatory time-flow.

Soon Corey, Leo’s roommate, would leap up from the lower bunk with undepressive brio, then go to the cassette deck, which was the first place the sun alit every morning, and he’d slap a tape in and stride on to the bathroom, prongs of sleep-matted hair nodding like the leaves of a plant (Corey was the only male he’d ever known to use hairspray, but then Leo’s friends were the sort who watched
V: The Final Battle
on New Year’s Eve). Seven-thirty was coming down like a train. Leo’s heart bumped hard against his ribs, he squirmed in the rugae of his upset sheets, and he thought of the miles of ugly highway and empty airspace between New Haven and home, between New Haven and Ann Arbor, where Michelle was now marching around campus on her work-study job, unhappily stapling posters on bulletin boards, or sleeping, posters under her bed. He kept a portrait she’d made of herself behind the bureau and when he was alone he held it sometimes in his lap and stared at it.

It was a Tuesday. There would be standard enthalpies of reaction in the chemistry class in Frankenstein’s castle up on the hill, Descartes in the chapel with stained glass, and
Waiting for Godot
around the corner in Linsly-Chittenden with the mummified old professor with sagging male breasts. A rock, a tree, nothingness.

In the Vanderbilt courtyard a fusillade of cold rain drubbed the cobblestones. He had no umbrella.

The Yale grounds crew were hauling trash bags out of the Dumpsters under the archway; their blue Yale garbage truck beeped and beeped. Yale, Yale, Yale. The name was everywhere on campus, name-branding everything, the garbage trucks, the blue uniforms of the dining hall servers, the campus police. Nothing common and generic, everything
Yale
.

He passed through the arch onto Old Campus. The arch was supposed to be on the other side; someone had dug the foundation backward and they’d had to build Vanderbilt Hall with its back turned to the rest of the school. He turned around to look at Vanderbilt’s steep fortress wall, from which prep school assholes launched water balloons at you as you crossed the Old Campus green to Battell Chapel on Yom Kippur, dressed up in your blue blazer and striped tie, one of two in your closet, both of which Philip had bought for him at the Peer Gordon men’s store at Fairmount Circle.

But there he was, where he had dreamed of being, Yale-Valhalla, hall of the slain warriors, the place where he might have knelt beside his father’s ghost and drunk the bright-green mead from the bowls at Mory’s. He wasn’t good enough, they said, but he went to Yale anyway, to the land of giants, so high above the rest of the mortal world that the blood turned blue and all the squirrels grew gray-blue coats, and even in summer the ghost squirrels skittered across dead leaves and up the bark of gray trees. Yale’s leaf-strewn arches opened onto a monkish quiet and the halls of its colleges a monkish dim light. Future presidents and information barons walked the stones, sorting themselves according to suit and rank and playing practical jokes on outsiders. It was not meant for him in any way; the blue fifty-foot-long hundred-thousand-dollar Persian rug stretched in the foyer outside the Berkeley dining hall seemed to reject his footsteps. (It had probably been stolen directly from the Ottomans by Elihu Yale but like an admissions officer had by now come to lie at Yale’s feet with servility, complacency, pride.
I would not let just any feet tread and mash my face, for I am a Yale rug, and only Yalies may tread and mash my face with their stank, gum-tarred shoes, because it is Yale stank, and Yale gum.
) The dining hall was still and dim behind the glass with a World War I plaque on the wall to honor the slain Yalies of Berkeley College, and below it, on an antique sideboard, there were sterling coffeepots polished to mirrors, and the master of the college, the professor of French history who was so annoyed with him when he said he wanted to transfer to Michigan, seated there beside the undergrads who had really gotten in, their elbows reflected in the dark lacquer of the tables, all dwarfed by soaring stone and chandeliers. There was never anyone in the foyer—only someone talking quietly on the phone in the dimly lit alcove with the pay phone. No one played the grand piano.

He thought of his father at Harvard, in Cambridge. He thought of it in winter. On a winter night with five inches of slush in the streets, his father would buy his books in the warm light of the bookstore, stacked to the ceiling with Henry James and Marcel Proust, unread novels as warm and long as hours in the L and B at Yale. The faces before the shelves would glow yellow over the table lamps, and those outside in the cold slush would envy them. They’d stop, even, and peer in through the snow sifting down the latticed windows from the cold lead sky.

His father’s name was typewritten in places, in the mailroom, at the registrar, on letters from the dean with a Harvard crest stamped in the corner. In his mind, he saw his father’s mail in the mailbox with the official letters:
I-S-I-D-O-R-E A-U-B-E-R-O-N.

At Yale, all the names of the freshmen were typewritten in their mailbox windows, except Leo’s, which was handwritten.

He had failed his father.

Leo sat in cold sunlight in the huge granite quadrangle outside the Beinecke Rare Book library. Its 250 slabs of Vermont marble were white on the outside, but within, where the stone filtered the light that fell on the written treasures of the world, the marble glowed with veins of perfect gold (other frequencies of the visible spectrum, regretfully, were turned away). “How is my second mix coming?” he wrote. Michelle had given him a mix of her favorite music and used a Miró reproduction as the album cover for the cassette. She’d probably cut the picture from a library book, but he didn’t want to know. “It takes years to find the nerve to be apart from what you’ve done, to find the truth inside yourself, and not depend on anyone.…” That was her favorite song.

In the afternoons, on his black Panasonic CD player, he played Squeeze, which she’d introduced to him along with the Cure and the Smiths and other girl music, and he looked out the window of the common room at the blood-tinted stone of the History of Art building. Michelle was in the art school at Michigan. She said the shadows on her lithograph were meant to interact. The arc of the shadow of the bench enclosed the shadow of the girl.

Every night, he sat in the hall, away from his roommates with the phone hot on his ear and the pulling green phone cord tethering him to the base of the closed door.

“What’s up, freak?” she said, happy, chewing. “I’m eating Reese’s, sorry.”

“Help,” he said.

She swallowed, and she said, “No, no, no. Noooooo.”

Then he would wander upstairs into the dim feminine lair of the Asian girls, green-and-blue paisley sheets draped over futons and hung up on the wall, posters of the Cure and Morrissey, Enya playing while they studied equilibrium constants. Or he’d go study and quickly fall asleep in the L and B, where identical green leather chairs lined every wall (having passed from cow to chair without ever leaving the herd), their solid bones nailed with tarnished copper. The students read and slept in the chairs with their feet up on the wooden shelves, toes of their socks against the spines of the books. He admired, feared, hated every soul in the room. Corey said he was a misanthrope. Well, he had always been. He had failed in pursuit of a great destiny.

Corey said there was an undergrad production of
Hamlet,
and a girl in their doorway in Vanderbilt was acting in it. Corey was always on his way someplace. He never sat still, and he always invited Leo to come along. They went to the play on the night that the ground war began in Kuwait. They’d seen the bombs glowing green over Baghdad on Corey’s antenna TV. “Here I am all safe and sound in New Haven,” Leo said, “while they’re fighting a war.”

“Uh, safe and sound? In
New Haven?
” Corey said. “Those girls in Durfee got a bullet hole in their ceiling.”

“Hang on,” Leo said, “I see someone.”

“Leo!” the Hillel rabbi called out. It was strange to hear anyone call his name. The chances of it were low anywhere in the entire city of New Haven. “Hey, Leo!”

Leo stood as the rabbi came over to him. The rabbi grabbed him by both shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” Leo said.

“What am I doing here? What are
you
doing here? You should be in the cast!”

“Which part?” Leo said.

“What do you mean, which part? Hamlet!”

The rabbi had gone to Yale a long time ago with his uncle Harvey. Leo liked the rabbi. For a rabbi, he was very undoctrinaire. They went for walks sometimes and Leo had told him about the letter from Jack James, and the rabbi said Jack James was an old drunk. On one of their walks, when a homeless person asked for money, the rabbi had stopped and emptied his pockets of change, and then shrugged and said, “Sometimes I give and sometimes I don’t.”

“I’ll get the key to that tearoom for you!” the rabbi said, and pointed at Leo as he turned and went back to his seat.

Leo sat down again.

“I don’t know why he always calls me,” Leo said, embarrassed.

“I think he thinks you’re going to kill yourself,” Corey said, and laughed. He often laughed at tragic things.

The play began. Hamlet wore a black turtleneck and sat on a black cube. The black cube sat on an empty, dusty black dance floor. When the ghost of King Hamlet entered, they lit the actor’s face from below with a green filter, and a cool chalk-smelling mist slunk over the black floor from pails of dry ice. The actors spoke their lines flawlessly, and in scenes of high dudgeon they tore at their Renaissance costumes, their feet drummed the stage, their spittle seemed to catch fire as it sprayed across the stage lights. It was the best performance of Shakespeare Leo had ever seen.

The faintest inklings of rebellion in his heart. Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in his cocoon at eleven years. That is dying intestate, with one’s will folded against the breast like flightless wings.

And the next day in Yale Station, the freshman mailroom in the basement of Wright Hall, Leo ran into the kid who played Laertes. The kid had had a nonspeaking part in the movie
Dead Poets Society
. Laertes had big bright blue eyes, and an inverted pyramid of blond hair just like a
Doonesbury
character.

“I saw you in
Hamlet,
” Leo said. “That sword fight was amazing. How did you do that? Was it improvised?”

Laertes gave a false and dramatic laugh, then cut his face dead, and said, “Yes, all improvised.” Then he suddenly looked bored. “I’m fucking with you,” he said. He stared at Leo, and Leo felt his mind very slow in tracking the changes of this quick-witted sarcasm.

The performance had been strong. The actor was mentally strong. Was confidence the same as strength? People hated weakness because it made them feel guilty. Laertes looked hateful.
Why the fuck are you staring at me?
Perhaps they would fight.

“Big guy?” Laertes said, and pointed at Leo. “You’re standing in front of my mailbox.”

Just the week before, Corey had said, “Is nothing ever trivial to you?”

“I concede,” Leo said, “that trivia is a theoretical possibility.”

“But not a real phenomenon?” Corey had said.

“Life is a battle royale,” Leo said. “Here, at least.”