A Good and Happy Child (2 page)

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s okay,” you replied. “You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about. But,” you continued with a smile, “I can tell you right now from looking at you, there will be no need for Haldol.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Wanna bet?”

For a brief moment, tension crackled between us.

“Can we talk about the present instead?” I offered.

“Absolutely,” you said, sounding relieved.

We lapsed back into good manners and wrapped up the session. The fifty minutes had passed quickly. But I was distracted, as if I had an extra channel open, feeling a tide of memory pulling at me. Despite the momentary friction, or maybe because of it, I extended my hand
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and agreed to continue the visits. I liked you. You’re smart. As I walked out you stopped me.

“You say you enjoy writing in a journal,” you said, referring to a comment I’d made in passing.

“Yes.”

“Maybe you can write something for me. For us, here.”

“Okay.”

“Since I agree that our energies are best spent on the present, perhaps working on the past is something you can begin on your own. Start a notebook. Here, I’ll even give you one, to take away that opportunity for neurotic delay. . . .” You pulled down a couple of spiral notebooks from a shelf. “Same ones I use. Write me about that last therapy visit—

the one when you were eleven. You don’t have to show me anything. Okay?”

I took the pads.

“Yes, sure.” I found myself hoarse.

“Would you like a pen, too?”

“I think I can manage.”

“Good.” You held the door and smiled again. “I’m looking forward to working together.”

Outside, on the steps, the light had changed. Daylight quits so early in winter. The street was steeped in gloomy blue twilight. I should have known, walking into a therapist’s office, that I would emerge back onto the same street as if it were a different planet. I stopped for a moment. A woman in a black overcoat and fancy shoes clopped toward me. She carried a bulky shopping bag, and she brushed me as she passed so I was forced to catch my balance on the cast-iron rail. I opened my mouth to say something, but as she walked by, I realized I could not see her face, just a blur where a face should be, and my mouth hung open with the obnoxious
Watch it
stuck there. The street went quiet, the way it can in New York. I sank onto the stoop, with your notebooks in my hand, remembering rotten things. n o t e b o o k 1

Intellectual

There were three of them. Are names important? Toby, Byrd, and Dean. They were lined up against me uphill. I was standing with my back to the steep incline carrying an NFL lunchbox in one hand, and in the other, a French horn.

“Your dad died from VD, everybody knows that,” Dean taunted.

“Probably fucking a whore over there.”

“More like a sheep,” added Byrd. “Or a goat.”

“Oh, yeah—
goat dick,
” grinned Dean. “Your dick turns blue. Pus oozes out of the tip.”

“Then it falls off,” Byrd laughed.

“Your dad died with no dick, right?” continued Dean. “That’s how you knew.”

At this age, I was an awkward-phase test case: pudgy from a cookie addiction and zero exercise habits, little granny-style wire-frame spectacles that fit poorly and sent my blond hair up in tufts over both ears, and altogether disorganized. But the French horn exemplified everything. It was unwieldy, heavy, in a black carrying case shaped like a giant snail. I carried this load to school three times a week for band. The three other boys were also in band, but they played cooler instruments. Byrd, trumpet; Toby, snare drum; Dean, trombone. Playing in the band proved
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they weren’t hicks—the poor, twang-talking county folk who also attended Julius Patchett Middle School and who seldom took an interest in things like band. These guys were supposed to be my compatriots. Their fathers had known my father. But their fathers were members of a local fat-cat class of real-estate brokers, developers, and architects—men who were beginning to transform Preston into a polished nexus of the horse industry. Not eccentric professors with weird ideas about
beautiful
melodic instruments.
I was eleven years old, and my father had been dead for three months.

Until that afternoon I would have referred to Toby Van der Valk as my best friend, but it would have been a stretch. Toby was a chub like me. With white-blond hair, apple cheeks, a belly fed by an overattentive mother (he was an only child), and a tendency to trip, Toby was approachable, appealing. The previous summer at an Early College arts and crafts day camp, Toby and I had been inseparable. But when school resumed—and I joined his class after skipping from fifth grade to seventh, the result of test scores and a Gifted and Talented acceleration program—this friendship between fatties was subsumed by Toby’s prior obligations: to glamorous, golf-playing Byrd; to cruel Dean; to Toby’s own reputation within the clique as the entertaining clown. I, the new kid with the dead dad and the bad breath, did little to enhance his status. He tolerated me amiably but I could not steer his allegiance to me, and I was therefore continually stung by—up to now—small betrayals.

“Look at him, he’s about to cry.”

“My dad did not die from VD,” I said, choking on the words.

“Then why is everybody saying it?” remarked Byrd, grinning. Byrd was tall, broad, a golfer who entered tournaments with his father at the country club, and who was, I thought, pretty dumb. Even in bullying he was dumb. He smiled like this was a lark we would forget in an hour.

“Then what
did
he die of?” asked Dean. “He came home and saw your face.”

“Hu
blughh,
” Byrd made a barfing noise.

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9

Dean laughed. “Oh-my-god-my-son-is-so-ugly-hu
blughhhh.
”

“You guys are every bit as ugly as I am,” I said.

“Every bit.”

“Such an intellectual,” Dean pronounced, with withering contempt.

“In-tell-ec-tual,” sang Byrd.

This was their song for me. Once during gym, I jogged alongside Dean and Byrd.
What we’re doing now, jogging slowly, metabolizes fat. When
you run more quickly, that’s when you metabolize muscle and build
strength.
They exchanged mocking glances. I had heard my mother say it. She had probably read it in a magazine. I had no idea that what I was doing or saying was strange—it was the natural speech of my home. I wasn’t sure what these kids’ conversations with their parents were like, but at my house, when my father was alive, my parents got steamed at dinnertime arguing about the Counter-Reformation. Sometimes they would argue in German. My father taught me Latin and Greek and Old English etymologies over dinner, and during dessert, quizzed me about saints’ days.

My parents met in graduate school at Columbia University. Though it was fairly common to meet PhDs in a college town like Preston, with Early College and Fort Virginia at the center of local commerce and culture, I sensed that my parents took learning and scholarship more seriously than most. At my friends’ houses—even my friends whose parents were also professors—the television would be on, or the dad would play Nerf football in the backyard, or they would hike, or play tennis, or do yard work. Not my parents. My mother had her office; and my father had his study; and the house would be breathlessly quiet. My father would announce the end of the workday by abruptly cranking Mahler on his hi-fi; then would follow the rattling sounds of pans in the kitchen as my mother prepared dinner. No words passed between them. It was my duty to come home every day from school and read in my room. I also drew, with pencil, on sheets of my father’s typing paper. I drew elaborate, Rube Goldberg contraptions, or I copied scenes
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J u s t i n E v a n s

from Asterix comics or from the Mannerist prints my father had hung throughout the house—the beheading of Holofernes, a detail of Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement.
I remember re-creating in pencil the wrinkles of St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin, and my mother admiring how I used shadow on the folds.

So we may have been eccentric. My mother, absorbed in her writing, was not much at keeping house. Our kitchen was littered with crumbs. Under every ledge were dust mice; dirty towels licked over the edge of the wicker laundry basket dumped in our upstairs hallway for a hamper; grime coated the windows of the front hall. An impolite pal once told me bluntly, “Your house smells.” It was a meandering wood house built in the 1870s with rooms pointing off in many directions—

alcoves, attics, porches—with layers of white paint on the walls and doors, columns on the front porch, and inside, dozens of oriental rugs, shimmering designs in orange, blue, red, and white, all collecting mildew and dust. The walls were half decorated with my father’s print collection, the other half with photographs my mother preferred—

black and white angles on Bauhaus architecture, or Diane Arbus–type shots of freaky staring-eyed people in poor towns. It was a house halfway between this and that, between upper-middle-class luxuries and absentminded squalor. My father had been too distracted, while he was alive, to teach me about showering regularly, or that it was necessary to brush my teeth in the morning, elements that became more important when I was expelled from the garden, as it were, and thrust before my time into seventh grade, into the ring with the likes of Dean Pranz.

Dean Pranz was the son of a local real-estate developer, thicklimbed and strong, a gifted basketball player—the high scorer of the local junior team, frequently mentioned by name in the local papers—

with bushy black hair, wide-set, almost froggy, eyes, and a perpetual sulk. But he was not stupid. He could be funny and crafty and playful, performed a dozen “magic” tricks at a moment’s notice—“the dead man’s hand,” “the broken arm,” “zombie eyes”—and was a gifted a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

11

mimic; but he usually presented a face so gloomy and bored he might have been taking cough medicine from a patch. When I encountered Dean in school, and then befriended him, he would give me nicknames and horse around; then, just when I would begin to laugh, let loose, let myself get goofy like a pal does, I would turn around and find myself facing Dean, somber and sulking, nodding slowly and judgmentally at me, as if I had just confirmed his worst suspicions. What those suspicions were, I do not know. I couldn’t play basketball. I spoke like my parents. I smelled and had bad breath. I had befriended Toby Van der Valk, one of his gang, but to Dean I was an annoyance, and now he wanted me out. The look in his eyes told me as much.

And now he was inches away from my face.

The other boys had backed away and let Dean come forward. His face was transformed from his usual sulk into something different: alight, alive, and enjoying this spectacle, his place in center stage.

“I hate your guts,” he breathed.

We were so close, I could smell him. Musty, unbathed little-boy smell; the odor of corduroys and armpits and dirt. A ball of hate curled up hot and furious in my stomach as I stared back into Dean’s eyes. With what I felt was a war cry, but probably sounded like a yelp, I reared back with my right arm, pulled the French horn’s bulk behind me—then swung it at Dean. Dean leapt backward. The momentum of the French horn pulled me over. I fell heavily onto the pavement—

which was almost as painful as the howls of delighted laughter that followed.

To his credit, Toby asked me whether I was okay before he trailed Dean and Byrd down the hill.

“You have to admit, it was kind of funny,” he said, as he crouched over me.

“Let him alone,” was the last I heard from Dean. “He just wants attention.”

The entertainment was over; his voice had grown bored again.
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r r r

I opened our front door and heard the radio playing faintly downstairs. I knew without seeing my mother’s briefcase and jacket thrown over the chair that she had no classes and was in the basement writing. Suddenly my mother was included in my fury.
They hate me,
I thought to myself,
and she won’t even notice.
I raced to my bedroom and slammed the door. I leaned against it.
Will she hear it?
I asked myself.
Will my mother hear the
slamming door and know that I’m upset and come upstairs and check on me?

I waited, listening, but no sound came. I sagged. Of course she could not hear me. I went to my dresser. There, tucked under the socks, was the penknife my father had given me.
Every boy should have one.
I flipped open the long blade. I plunged the knife into the wood of my bookshelf. A half-dozen books tumbled to the floor.
My mother won’t hear that,
either,
I thought. I began to stab them. For one or two I only slashed the covers. But my eye landed on one, a thick hardcover, a library book. The cover was hard to penetrate. I needed to bring the knife over my head in order to force the knife through. The knife sank into the pages, two, three inches deep. I buried it to the red, plastic hilt. I repeated this action many times.

I heard a knock at the front door and looked up. I wondered how long I had been doing this. The book was in shreds. The knock came again, louder. Since my mother could not hear I would need to answer it. I stuffed the book under my mattress, but the blade of my Swiss Army knife was bent at the hilt and would not close. I stuffed it back into the drawer. Then I ran downstairs. Someone was already standing in the hall.

“I let myself in,” he said. “The door was open.”

It was Tom Harris.

Everyone called him that—Tom Harris—as if the names were stuck together. I never heard anybody refer to him in the third person as just Tom, not even my parents. When my father was alive, Tom Harris dined with us weekly. He had been my father’s best friend, his a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d