Luminous Airplanes (11 page)
After the storm wiped Adventure from Kerem’s computer, I lived in a state of excited inaction, as though, like the Heathkit, I lacked instructions about what to do next. I avoided Kerem and didn’t go to town to look for his friends. It didn’t even occur to me to find Shelley again. I was consumed by the feeling that something was going to happen, something wonderful, but because I knew it was going to happen I wanted to put it off just a little longer.
“Aren’t you getting behind in your studies?” my grandmother asked.
“We’re taking a break,” I said.
“Oh, a break,” she repeated, as though this were even less plausible than my studies had been in the first place. “Well, a few days away from the Regenzeit boy won’t do you any harm.”
Then it turned out that I had waited too long, and the glorious something I’d been waiting for was no longer mine to enjoy. Mrs. Regenzeit telephoned my grandfather to inform him that Kerem had been arrested for smoking marijuana in the cemetery, that I might be involved too, because I’d been spending so much time with her son, and that she was
peaced
as hell. “All right,” my grandfather said stiffly, and hung up the phone while Mrs. Regenzeit was still talking. His dislike for the Regenzeits, his outrage at the implication that I could have been responsible for corrupting one of them, and his astonishment at Mrs. Regenzeit’s indelicacy in breaking a ten years’ silence just to tell him so, all together convinced my grandfather that the whole business was the fault of the perfidious Turks. He warned me about falling in with bad company, and told me how important it was to find out what people were really like before you put your trust in them. It was like choosing antiques, he said, some people looked good on the outside but when you opened them up you saw there was just nothing you could do, whereas other people, who didn’t look so good, could be fixed up, and would, with a little work, become solid, usable friends. He patted the arm of the chair on which he sat. It gave a solid, usable thump. It was all I could do not to remind him that he hadn’t fixed the chair; it had come into the house via my grandmother’s sister, who had donated it because there wasn’t a decent place in the whole house to sit. He forbade me to see Kerem again and that was all.
peaced
as hell. “All right,” my grandfather said stiffly, and hung up the phone while Mrs. Regenzeit was still talking. His dislike for the Regenzeits, his outrage at the implication that I could have been responsible for corrupting one of them, and his astonishment at Mrs. Regenzeit’s indelicacy in breaking a ten years’ silence just to tell him so, all together convinced my grandfather that the whole business was the fault of the perfidious Turks. He warned me about falling in with bad company, and told me how important it was to find out what people were really like before you put your trust in them. It was like choosing antiques, he said, some people looked good on the outside but when you opened them up you saw there was just nothing you could do, whereas other people, who didn’t look so good, could be fixed up, and would, with a little work, become solid, usable friends. He patted the arm of the chair on which he sat. It gave a solid, usable thump. It was all I could do not to remind him that he hadn’t fixed the chair; it had come into the house via my grandmother’s sister, who had donated it because there wasn’t a decent place in the whole house to sit. He forbade me to see Kerem again and that was all.
My grandmother was less convinced of my innocence, and her reproaches were harder to endure. When I said something in her presence, even if it was the most innocent and matter-of-fact statement, for example, that I wasn’t going to the lake because the radio said it would rain, she seemed to break what I had said into its component parts to determine whether the statement was worthy of her trust. If the clouds overhead convinced her that I was justified in staying indoors, or if she happened to have heard the same weather report, she would nod hesitantly, as though she were taking a chance on me despite her better judgment. If, on the other hand, the weather looked fair from where she stood, my grandmother would only shrug, as though to say, who knows what you will do, you, who doesn’t tell us the truth?
I began to understand certain things my mothers had said about my grandmother. Sometimes, at the end of their frequent though brief conversations, Celeste would grind the telephone receiver back into its cradle and cry out, “That unforgiving so-and-so!” Then it would be Marie’s job to tease from her an account of what had gone wrong, an account that always began the same way, “This time she’s really lost her mind!” I used to think this was just Celeste being her angry self, but that summer I wondered what it would have been like to have my grandmother for a mother, to be the object, again and again, of her shrug. It was no wonder my mothers ran away from Thebes, I realized, and in fact, my mothers’ hardness, their self-containedness, their unwillingness to give out information, especially with respect to Richard Ente, all made more sense to me now that I knew what doubt my grandmother was capable of. Her shrug explained my mothers, and it taught me everything I had left to learn about heredity. And heredity, naturally, made me think of Richard Ente. Was it possible that traces of him remained in the people—me—who he had left behind?
One day, when the forecast was fair, and I had no reason in the world not to go to the lake with my uncle, I turned to Charles and asked, “Why did my father run away from Thebes?”
Charles sighed as though he had been expecting the question for a long time. He rolled onto his stomach, baring the tattoo on his right shoulder,
Je te frapperai sans colère
. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but you have to keep it to yourself. Promise?”
Je te frapperai sans colère
. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but you have to keep it to yourself. Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Just between you and me, then, your father told me he was going to discover America.”
“America,” I repeated, amazed. We had studied the discovery of America in our history class the year before, and I knew that Christopher Columbus was an Italian, and that he had named the continent for another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, which, I thought, meant that really it should be called Vespuccia. I said so in class and got laughed at, and afterward Ronald Kaplan taunted me,
Ve-spooge-ia,
the land of spooge, and I’d been embarrassed. Then something about Leif Eriksson and the Vikings who had perhaps discovered another part of it. My father didn’t fit into either of these stories, so I guessed that Charles meant some other kind of discovery, or maybe some other America, a continent with the same name as ours that nobody had discovered yet, which was a thrilling idea but not probable, given the size of continents and the advanced state of geographical knowledge.
Ve-spooge-ia,
the land of spooge, and I’d been embarrassed. Then something about Leif Eriksson and the Vikings who had perhaps discovered another part of it. My father didn’t fit into either of these stories, so I guessed that Charles meant some other kind of discovery, or maybe some other America, a continent with the same name as ours that nobody had discovered yet, which was a thrilling idea but not probable, given the size of continents and the advanced state of geographical knowledge.
“Did he discover it?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Charles said. “Maybe he did.”
My father had gone to discover America. It’s just the kind of thing an aging hippie might have said before hitting the road, circa 1970, but to me it had a different force: not that of truth, but that of myth. I stood up, brushed the sand from my legs and dove into the lake, down as far as I could go, beneath the children whose legs hung down like dark branches from the silver overhead.
Charles’s secret was about to get me into a lot of trouble, but I didn’t know it and in fact I had other things on my mind. A few days after our trip to the lake, I went home to New York and found my mothers changed. Celeste wore a cardigan and pants, like an old man; she’d pulled her hair back into a bun, uncovering the whole of a face that looked more and more like my grandfather’s, big, waxy and serious. Marie, meanwhile, had permed her hair into loose curls, and, what I found even more shocking, wore dark-red lipstick that made her look like a film star from the 1940s.
“What happened to your lips?” I asked.
Celeste laughed.
Marie was working for
S
now, as an assistant to the Quick Styles editor, and already something of the magazine’s glamour had been transferred to her, in the form of narrow black skirts that she bought from the designers at a discount, and little jars of beauty products which she got for free and arranged on the bathroom sink, where the potions of imaginary powers had once stood guard. In the medicine cabinet, there was a small, round beige plastic case, whose purpose I wouldn’t have been able to guess, except that next to it lay a tube of contraceptive jelly, crinkled at the bottom. A new kind of potion for a new kind of life. Celeste, meanwhile, had given up talking.
S
now, as an assistant to the Quick Styles editor, and already something of the magazine’s glamour had been transferred to her, in the form of narrow black skirts that she bought from the designers at a discount, and little jars of beauty products which she got for free and arranged on the bathroom sink, where the potions of imaginary powers had once stood guard. In the medicine cabinet, there was a small, round beige plastic case, whose purpose I wouldn’t have been able to guess, except that next to it lay a tube of contraceptive jelly, crinkled at the bottom. A new kind of potion for a new kind of life. Celeste, meanwhile, had given up talking.
“Did you have a good summer?” I asked her, but it was Marie who answered, “Comme ci, comme ça, you know? Up and down. Celeste hasn’t been working.” Celeste, not work? But she was always working. Something tremendous must have happened while I was away, a reversal of my mothers’ polarity, so that Marie was now leading the way, and Celeste trailed behind.
I was so puzzled by my mothers that it didn’t occur to me that my perspective on them might have changed also, and I was surprised when Marie asked me at dinner, “What happened to you?”
“To me?” I squeaked.
“It looks like you did a lot of growing up this summer.”
“Not really,” I mumbled. “I was just hanging around.” I was afraid the Celestes would mention the lies I’d told my grandparents, but they never did. Either they didn’t know about them, or they’d dismissed them as nonsense from my grandmother, the unforgiving so-and-so.
“Hanging around with a girl, I bet,” said Marie.
“No,” I lied, “just with Kerem.”
“The Regenzeit boy?” Celeste said. “Hm.”
“Anyway, you look older,” Marie said. “I like the way you’re doing your hair.” I’d experimented with gel, in imitation of Kerem.
“Thanks,” I said. “I like your hair, too.”
“Ha!” said Celeste.
Marie blushed and touched her curls. “The magazine did it for free.”
As soon as the meal was over I fled to my room and put on one of the cassettes I’d dubbed from Kerem. After a few minutes Celeste opened my door and stuck her head in.
“What’s that music?” she asked.
“Dead Kennedys.”
“Hm,” said Celeste, and closed my door again.
It was as though my mothers no longer had any idea what to do with me, as though they were a childless couple taking in an orphan, a child who belonged only to a mystery. I was a mystery, I had been kissed, my father had discovered America, and in this exalted state I began my seventh and final year at—or as I sometimes thought,
in
—Nederland.
in
—Nederland.
The Nederland School for Boys was founded by the Dutch a long time ago. How long ago, exactly, was a subject for perpetual inquiry by the school librarian, an enormous shiny man who looked very much like Thomas Nast’s caricatures of Boss Tweed, and who discovered, once or twice a decade, a document that proved the school had been founded at an earlier date than anyone had dared to guess. With due ceremony the year on the school’s coat of arms was changed and the Board of Trustees ordered new letterhead for the staff. Occasionally this led to incongruities, as when Nederland celebrated its 350th and 375th anniversaries only two years apart. My mothers were invited to both galas, and the school’s pretensions became, for a while, one of their favorite jokes. In a few years Nederland would be older than New York, older than the New World, older, probably, than the rock it was built on. I laughed with the Celestes, but with the consciousness of being wronged: they were the ones who had chosen the school for me in the first place. I think they sent me to Nederland because it was close to our apartment, twenty blocks down West End Avenue; also, and more to the point, I started first grade at a happy moment in the seventies when Nederland’s trustees, moved by the protests of some upperclassmen and recent alumni, raised scholarship money for underprivileged students. My mothers were poor but not unsavory, I did well on the entrance exam and the end of the story was that I went to school practically for free, provided that I kept my grades up and posed yearly for a special group photograph.
My last year there began as every year did, with an assembly in the Great Hall, which was what Nederland called its auditorium, where our principal, Mr. Van Horn, a grim homunculus who might for all we knew have been as old as the school itself, amplified for us on the motto,
Recht Maakt Maakt,
or Justice Is Our Strength, and on the importance of correct behavior generally. We, clean, chilly and newly awed by the gloom of the Great Hall and the red banners that hung from the ceiling, celebrating NEDERLAND AT 375, behaved correctly for about as long as the assembly lasted, then we were released to our homerooms and began the important business of sizing one another up. Who posed a new threat? Who had something new to offer? The truth was that most of us had been at Nederland since the first grade, and we already knew more or less everything we could expect from one another. We were like characters on a long-running soap opera, who are required to display the same personalities for so long that they stop being personalities at all, and become mere functions, guidelines for the production of dialogue in the style of X or Y. August Waxman, who had been the fastest runner in the third grade, fished for something in his nose; next to him Andrew Ames, honor student, drew insane rabbits in the margins of a blank notebook. David Metzger had finally convinced his parents to let him grow his hair long, like the singer of Def Leppard, whose name I forget but who has certainly not been forgotten by David Metzger, wherever he is now. Ronald Kaplan and Gideon Peel, indistinct, indistinguishable, had spent the summer in the Hamptons and said they’d both got laid. “Right,” sneered John De Luca, who had curly black hairs on the backs of his knuckles, “more like you fucked each other up the ass.” There it was,
ass
and
fuck
in the same sentence, a sign that the gloves were once again off. The rituals had all been observed; Mr. Fitch could yell at us to be silent and the year could begin.
Recht Maakt Maakt,
or Justice Is Our Strength, and on the importance of correct behavior generally. We, clean, chilly and newly awed by the gloom of the Great Hall and the red banners that hung from the ceiling, celebrating NEDERLAND AT 375, behaved correctly for about as long as the assembly lasted, then we were released to our homerooms and began the important business of sizing one another up. Who posed a new threat? Who had something new to offer? The truth was that most of us had been at Nederland since the first grade, and we already knew more or less everything we could expect from one another. We were like characters on a long-running soap opera, who are required to display the same personalities for so long that they stop being personalities at all, and become mere functions, guidelines for the production of dialogue in the style of X or Y. August Waxman, who had been the fastest runner in the third grade, fished for something in his nose; next to him Andrew Ames, honor student, drew insane rabbits in the margins of a blank notebook. David Metzger had finally convinced his parents to let him grow his hair long, like the singer of Def Leppard, whose name I forget but who has certainly not been forgotten by David Metzger, wherever he is now. Ronald Kaplan and Gideon Peel, indistinct, indistinguishable, had spent the summer in the Hamptons and said they’d both got laid. “Right,” sneered John De Luca, who had curly black hairs on the backs of his knuckles, “more like you fucked each other up the ass.” There it was,
ass
and
fuck
in the same sentence, a sign that the gloves were once again off. The rituals had all been observed; Mr. Fitch could yell at us to be silent and the year could begin.
Actually two things marked the year as different from the ones that had come before: we had American history with Mr. Savage, and I discovered Nederland’s computer room. The two strands which, twined each around the other, would occupy the next twenty years of my life, presented themselves almost simultaneously, maybe even on the same day, but at first I understood the importance of only one of them. The computer room was housed in the basement of the New Building, formerly a residential hotel, which the school had purchased in the sixties and renovated in a fantasia of Formica panels and fluorescent lights. The computer room was down there because no one knew, yet, how important computers would be, whether they would spread, like coeducation, or dwindle, like civics and home ec. Still, the trustees had approved the purchase of a magnificent machine, an Alpha Micro with ten terminals and eighty megabytes of storage, which seemed like enough room for all the information in the world, although now you could emulate five hundred such machines at once on a cheap laptop. There was a dot-matrix printer and a staggering stack of manuals, thousands of pages of instructions, all written in a language that presupposed that you already knew how to do the thing you were trying to learn. As soon as I found my way to that low, stuffy basement, I knew that I wanted to re-create Adventure on a vastly larger scale, a world of words without end. But it was beyond my ability to make even the smallest part of my world appear on the other side of the terminal’s dull glass. I had typed Adventure in from a book, and although I figured out many things about how the program worked in the course of getting it to run, the ideas behind it remained completely mysterious to me. I was like a caveman who had, by dint of banging, repaired an automobile, and now set out to build himself a new car. With a great deal of effort I could make nonworking replicas of some features of the original, a seat, a wheel, a grinding sound, but no matter how well I made these things they wouldn’t add up to a vehicle, or take me anywhere.
One day I came home late and Celeste, who was home already, told me that I was looking serious, which was the highest compliment she ever paid anyone. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Working on the computer.”
“Hm,” said Celeste. She mistrusted computers herself and had very little idea how they worked. “Well, it looks like you’re doing it seriously.”
I threw myself on my bed. I didn’t feel serious, only consumed, exhausted, permanently puzzled. At dinner Celeste asked me questions about programming, which even someone who knew more about it than I did might have found difficult to answer. “How does the computer know what you want?” I tried to explain that it wasn’t about what you wanted, you had to say things just so. “But what if you mean one thing, and the computer means another?” Impossible; all the words in computer language had fixed meanings. “The words, all right, but what about the sentences?” I dodged, I ducked, I grunted Keremishly. I was a caveman, but Celeste refused to believe it. No matter what I said, she nodded gravely and asked another question.
By the time we came to dessert, even Marie could see that I’d run out of answers, and she tried, out of pity, I think, to change the subject. “You won’t ever guess what happened at the magazine today,” she began, but Celeste interrupted, “Hold on. This computer thing is serious, and I think we should take it seriously.”
Celeste’s faith in me was steep and sharp. She gave me a book called
Algorithmic Programming in Structured BASIC.
“For every logical function
f
,” the preface began, and that was as far as I got. In retrospect it seems clear that Celeste was using me to leapfrog over her sister, who was, she feared, getting ahead of her, her sister whose new clothes she mocked because they were only a
fashion uniform
, her sister who was making money, her sister who was invited to
media events
where she made friends with
media people
, with
sheep
, with
those Ivy League bitches
who ran New York. At the time, I knew only that Celeste’s confidence was hard to take, almost as hard as her doubt had been. I wanted to be the person she believed in, but I was constantly afraid she would figure out that I was not that person, I was no kind of programmer, I was a caveman, banging stones together and grunting in something that wasn’t a language yet, not even to me.
Algorithmic Programming in Structured BASIC.
“For every logical function
f
,” the preface began, and that was as far as I got. In retrospect it seems clear that Celeste was using me to leapfrog over her sister, who was, she feared, getting ahead of her, her sister whose new clothes she mocked because they were only a
fashion uniform
, her sister who was making money, her sister who was invited to
media events
where she made friends with
media people
, with
sheep
, with
those Ivy League bitches
who ran New York. At the time, I knew only that Celeste’s confidence was hard to take, almost as hard as her doubt had been. I wanted to be the person she believed in, but I was constantly afraid she would figure out that I was not that person, I was no kind of programmer, I was a caveman, banging stones together and grunting in something that wasn’t a language yet, not even to me.
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