Paper Covers Rock (11 page)

The Mixer

I am one in a trail of boys streaming from the Birch School bus across the well-lit courtyard of St. Brigid, a girls’ school seventy miles away. At the table inside the heavy glass doors of the gym, two smiling middle-aged women wearing earplugs hand out name tags and markers. There are rules here (there are rules everywhere we ever go on a bus): no kissing on the dance floor, for example, and no one leaves the gym until eleven o’clock, when it’s time to get back on the bus. Only three hours to get down to the business of mixers, which is to get at least to second base, but I’m not in the mood. I find a corner with some light and remove Hemingway from the pocket of my sports coat. I scan the room for Miss Dovecott. She is standing with the other chaperones, some of them male—there are two other boys’ schools here—so I look around for anyone I know. Too dark. I decide to make a circle around the hardwood floor so maybe Miss Dovecott will take note of my swinging-single self.

In the middle of a crowd of dancers, a couple is kissing, seeing how long they can get away with it. The loud music precludes any sort of talking I might want to do with a St. Brigid girl, the well-groomed Ivory-soap type. When I bend down for a sip at the water fountain, someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s one of the Ivory girls, a small, gawky one. A couple of her friends are pointing at me and shaking their
hips in time to the song, “Get Down Tonight,” by KC & the Sunshine Band. “Would you like to dance?” she squeaks.

As horny as I am, I draw the line at girls who look twelve, have braces, and sound like Minnie Mouse. I tell Minnie I’m not feeling well. She nods. As I hurry away in the opposite direction, I slip, my ankle twisting in the penny loafers I am not used to, and even though the music is loud, I hear the girls’ mocking laughter, amplified for my benefit to show that they have gotten over being rejected by Goofy. I climb into a dark row of bleachers and watch Minnie and friends disappear into the crowd in the middle of the dance floor, where boys and girls become indistinguishable, faces bobbing up and down like part of a giant machine. I am playing it cool, but I sure as hell don’t feel it.

In a way, it isn’t that cool to go to mixers because it means you don’t have a girlfriend back home. It is fine if you’re a new boy, but after that, not nearly as cool, although you redeem yourself ever so slightly if you hook up with a fox or if your girlfriend attends the boarding school and you hang out with her all night in the bushes. Joe Bonnin has a younger sister at St. Brigid, and I wonder if I should go look for her. But what do I do if I find her? She’s not that foxy. I check my watch—8:36—and scan the room. When I see who is coming my way, I pull out
The Old Man and the Sea
, book in one hand, sore ankle in the other. I am massaging it absent-mindedly when Miss Dovecott sits down.

“Too much dancing already?” she says.

I laugh and tell her I tripped.

“Do you think you sprained it?”

“No, no,” I say, “it’s not that bad. Just twisted it. I’m kind of clumsy.”

She is smiling at me. “Have you started
In Our Time
yet?”

I lift up my paperback. “I couldn’t find it in the library, so I tried this one.”

“You can borrow my copy, then.”

“That would be great,” I say, and she smiles. “Hey, why aren’t you dancing?”

“That’s really not my job here tonight, is it?”

“I don’t know. Aren’t chaperones allowed a little fun every now and then?”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not a very good dancer.”

“Join the club.”

“What club is that?”

I pause, then shrug. “I don’t know, whatever you call the People Who Can’t Dance Club.”

“I think we can come up with a better name than that.”

“Okay. You go first.”

Miss Dovecott laughs. “You’re the creative one around here.”

“But you’re smarter than I am. You went to Princeton.” And my mind flashes to her sweatshirt tucked away in my room. “By the way, thank you for lending me your sweatshirt. I’ll return it to you after I wash it.”

“That’ll be fine,” she says.

And then, I go for it. “I liked wearing it,” I say.

She looks down at her feet and changes the subject. “Well, back to chaperoning.”

“Is it as boring as it looks?”

“Never boring,” she says. “Too many people to watch and talk to. Just a few minutes ago, the chaperone from St. Mark’s was telling me about a suicide at their school your freshman year.”

“Yeah, we had an assembly about it.”

“This teacher’s theory is that the boy took all those pills because he was struggling with his sexuality.” She pauses. “He might have been gay.”

“Huh,” I say, “they didn’t tell us that part. But you know how it is at boarding schools.”

“No, I didn’t go to one. How is it?”

“Rumor Central.”

“Well, any closed community is that way.”

“Was it like that at Princeton?”

“Are you trying to change the subject?”

“What subject?”

“You know, Alex, I have a theory.”

“Shoot.”

“My theory is that you boys plaster your walls with pinups because you feel the need to present yourselves as heterosexual.”

“Go on.”

“And, statistically, there has to be a small percentage of gay students at Birch.”

“Look, Miss Dovecott. Here’s the thing. If you go to a boys’ boarding school, people who don’t know the culture think you’re either gay or a troublemaker. I get tired of explaining that I don’t go to a military academy and that I’m not being punished for anything. Like this mother at the
pool where I worked last summer, when she found out I went to Birch, she said, ‘Well, you don’t seem like a bad kid.’ ”

“I know you’re not a bad kid.”

“But maybe I am. Maybe I ought to be at a military academy.”

“Why do you say that, Alex?”

“Because. Because I think I might feel better if somebody kicked my ass.”

“You feel guilty about Thomas,” she says.

“You’re damn right I do,” I say, and I sling
The Old Man and the Sea
to the darkest corner of the bleachers. “But I don’t want to talk about it, not with you, not with anybody.”

“I think I know why.”

I look at her sideways.

“Because the whole story hasn’t come to light yet.”

I am about to shit my pants, but I hear Glenn’s voice calming me down. Cool it, Stromm, cool it. “I’m not sure I follow you,” I say.

“I think we should wait and talk about this at school with Mr. Parkes, don’t you?” Miss Dovecott rises, looking in the direction of where I threw the book. “Before you get back on the bus,” she says, “make sure you pick up after yourself.”

Green Fields

My freshman year, the only thing I ever did at the river was wade into it and fish. The fact that it could be used for jumping into, for drinking alongside of, did not occur to me. Vodka? I barely knew it existed; my dad drank beer, and not even very much of it. I knew Michelangelo and Andy Warhol
existed, Monet and Manet, and I was tested on the difference between them, but if you had asked me the difference between Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam, I would have said one played baseball and the other basketball.

Glenn and I were paired together about a month into school by our art appreciation teacher to do a presentation on Jan Vermeer (an artist we should appreciate). I owe my friendship with Glenn to Vermeer because it was after that that Glenn took me in. He thought I was smarter than anyone else in the class. He couldn’t believe the stuff I noticed in the paintings, like how Vermeer painted a story behind the scene by inserting a single suggestion of movement in the stillness. I actually appreciated Vermeer, but I was not a fan of Monet or the impressionists—all that haze and suggestion. Glenn agreed wholeheartedly. He invited me swimming one night when there was Open Swim at the indoor pool, and we played water tag and Marco Polo with some other guys, and we all took turns doing silly jumps and dives off the board. Glenn was nicer back then, when he wasn’t suspicious of everybody and everything.

At the time, I didn’t know about all the bad things that water could hide. I considered water as something that made me feel otherworldly, like a dolphin or a sea turtle on a very long journey. Back when I had never even heard of this school, it was easy to pretend that the deep end of the public swimming pool was the Pacific Ocean.

The old man and the sea. The boy and the river. I can pretend all I want, but the fact is, I will never finish this book.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 4:30 P.M
.

Who the hell are the Manhattoes,
Her
-man? Did you make them up? Are they a tribe of crazies who live on some island? I live on an island. Hell, I
am
an island. I am a rock.

But a rock does feel pain. And an island cries often in the privacy of his own room. I am a big fan of Simon and Garfunkel, thanks to my dad; I grew up listening to their melancholy strains. Today’s pop music doesn’t interest me. Foreigner? REO Speedwagon? Give me a break.

Campus at one a.m. when almost no one is here is just plain weird. As the bus rolls up the drive, the cluster of stone buildings looks like the set of a horror movie—a sequel to
The Shining
, which is a damn scary movie. There now is your Insular City of Man. Mist shrouds the grass. The lamps along the sidewalk look disembodied from their posts, fuzzy balls of light, just enough to see by.

In my room, the books I left stacked on my desk have
something to say, but they aren’t talking. The photograph of me and my dad with our arms roped over one another’s shoulders was taken a lifetime ago. There is a fly at the window beating its brains against the glass. Poems buzz behind my worn-out eyes, but I don’t want to think about poems anymore, I don’t want to think about what my English teacher might have seen us doing at the river. I want to sleep with Haley’s sweatshirt. I want to sleep with Haley. I put on Simon and Garfunkel’s
Greatest Hits
album, and like a bridge over troubled water, I lay me down and picture the way I would touch her waist, trace the curve of her shoulders, put my mouth on her lips, her neck, her breasts, and, gently, within the sounds of silence, push inside her.

Faraway Betty

After his parents drop him back on campus late this morning, Glenn knocks on my door. I am at my desk, struggling with trigonometric equations.

“We were looking for you,” he says. “My mom and dad wanted to say hey.”

“I must have been in the library,” I say.

“I saw Miss Dovecott just now,” he tells me.

“Well, whoop-dee-friggin’-doo. I just saw Mr. Parkes.” I stopped by his apartment because I was afraid if I didn’t, Miss Dovecott would arrange a meeting for the three of us to talk about the day at the river. As they say, the best defense is a good offense: I told my advisor that I’d been feeling guilty but that I was working it out for myself on paper, which was helping a lot, and I needed time before I talked about it with anyone other than Reverend Black, but I did want to talk
about it with Mr. Parkes eventually, and I would let him know when I was ready.

“Yeah, so your girlfriend was in her classroom. I hope you don’t mind; I just stopped in to say hello.”

“Glenn,” I say, “what did you do?”

“Nothing, I swear. I just popped in to ask how she was doing. You know, up close, she’s not all that good-looking. She’s a Faraway Betty.”

“Whatever you say.”

“And she smells like mothballs.”

“It’s probably her sweater.”

“Have you ever noticed,” says Glenn, “how she dresses like a college student trying to pass herself off as a teacher?”

“Nope.” But I had noticed that her outfits were slightly out of whack—a button-down shirt and wrinkled khakis with a silk scarf or a string of pearls.

“I bet she’s a lesbian,” Glenn says.

“Get over yourself.”

“She dresses like a man. Most lesbos do.”

“Yeah, like you know a lot of lesbians.”

“I do, as a matter of fact. My mom’s best friend is a lesbian.”

“Maybe your mom’s a lesbian, too.”

“In your dreams.”

“Everson,” I say, “I can honestly say that I have never, ever dreamed about your mother.” She has bouffant hair and wears lots of gold jewelry.

“Well, I can’t say the same about yours. She’s a Fum.” (See? I told you.)

“Get out.”

“I never finished telling you what happened that night when I went for help on the Roethke poem.”

“So tell me.”

“She put her hand on my knee. When we were sitting there. She reached over and put her creepy lesbo hand on my knee.”

“You are such a liar.”

“I reported her,” Glenn said.

“What?”

“To Dean Mansfield.”

I am standing now. “Oh, my God. What were you thinking?”

“At least one of us is thinking.”

“He’s going to know you’re lying, and then we are screwed. He’s not going to take your word over a teacher’s.”

“Wanna bet?”

“I am out, Glenn. Seriously, leave me out of this.”

“Have you done the English homework for tomorrow?” I haven’t. “She’s smoking us out, Stromm. Miss Dovecott knows. You’ll see what I mean. The poem for Monday isn’t even in our book. Stevie Smith is British, not American. And a chick—probably a lesbo, with a name like Stevie. Which obviously Miss D failed to mention.”

“How do you know that?”

“I looked it up,” Glenn says. “In the
Dictionary of Literary Biography
. This is an American literature class, remember? Why would she have us read an English poem?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re the Poet Boy.”

“Leave, please.”

“Just wait. You’ll see what I mean.”

I don’t tell Glenn what Miss Dovecott said to me at the mixer—I never even tell him I went to the mixer in the first place—and I don’t read the poem on the handout until just now. “Not Waving but Drowning,” it’s called, about a man who drowns, but his friends think he’s waving. I try to hold my pen straight as I answer the questions asked of me. I try not to read the poem too many times because if I do, it will worm its sneaky way into my heart.