The Grief of Others (20 page)

“Oh, so
that’s
how it’s gonna be,” the man said to the dog, and they squared off against each other.

It was a hackneyed routine that remained somehow fresh, and Jess, who had recognized them both, did not suppress a laugh. At the sound the man turned toward her, shading his eyes. He looked hesitant, then surprised.

What was his name? Greg, Gregory? They’d sat in the kitchen together for a long time, the day she’d arrived. His presence had mitigated, in a way, the awkwardness of her own unexpected arrival. Was it Jordan?

Oh, well: “Hi!” she called, waving. She snatched up her clogs, began walking toward him. “It’s Jess.We met”—jabbing a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the Ryries’ house and enjoying, even as the words flew out of her mouth unbidden, the absurdity of the statement—“over tea and Biscuit.”

M
itosis.”
Ms. Nuñez put the word on the board as she spoke, the chalk clacking as if impatient. She was young, new to teaching this year (as she’d jauntily and perhaps unwisely announced to Paul’s seventh-grade Life Science class on the first day of school last September), and had actually turned out to be pretty decent, except for her oddly hyped-up tempo. She talked twice as fast as anyone Paul had ever met, as though she’d taken to heart some mentor’s warning that unless she did everything with Internet-era velocity she’d risk losing the kids’ attention.

“Mitosis,” she repeated, “is the process by which autosomal cells reproduce. So. What’s ‘autosomal’?”

When no one responded, she added this word to the board, the chalk flashing with such urgency that the final result was legible only by broad stretch of the imagination. Ms. Nuñez whipped back around to face the class. She wore her hair slicked so tight it looked painted on, except at the back, where her ponytail bobbed and swung.

“Autosomal: meaning the non-sex chromosomes. Okay? So mitosis is how cells reproduce asexually.” She enunciated the last word deliberately, thereby eliciting smirks and laughter, as Ms. Nuñez, green or not, had to have known she would. She shook her head and rolled her eyes, pretending exasperation. But she’d warmed them up, brought them to attention, and on some level Paul understood she’d thrown in sex in order to ingratiate herself, to grease the wheels of teacher-student rapport. He didn’t really fault her for it. In a weird way, she got his sympathy whenever she pulled something like this, some transparent effort to remind them she was hip. Still, he couldn’t help regretting that she’d held the door so irresistibly open to rejoinders.

Here it came now, so predictable Paul could almost laugh, a jibe from Stephen Boyd, speaking low enough that his remark didn’t carry all the way to the front, loud enough to set off a staccato burst of snorts and giggles around the desks in back: “That’s how Ryrie’s parents had him.”

“That’s mean,” chided a girl, but admiringly.

The worst part was that the comment—which a year earlier would have blindsided him—only confirmed what had become his regular status, the miserable part he now played, the costume he wore through the halls of school like a heavy, invisible cloak. At least Paul’s desk was toward the front of the classroom, so he could pretend not to have heard. He frowned intently at his book, as though contemplating a particularly challenging passage. But one comment was never enough.

“That’s how Ryrie’s parents do it every night,” said Noah Prager, speaking for some reason in a television-cowboy drawl. He was a Stephen Boyd wannabe, but meaner than Boyd and lacking the charm; short, with an overdeveloped set of biceps and pecs to compensate. He shifted into a disgusting, whispery falsetto—“Oh. Oh! Oh-hh-hh!”—presumably simulating the sounds Paul’s mother (or worse, father) made during sex.

Paul’s heart thumped; his temples throbbed. He made his face dead stone, made his eyes dead fucking shit, drilled them straight ahead at the board.

“Noah, you’re such an asshole,” whispered someone—Fiona Conley, Paul guessed—and the sniggers flared up again and died out.

At the front of the room Ms. Nuñez was continuing blithely, sailing along on her newly fortified confidence. “A lot of your own body’s cells reproduce this way.We’re talking skin cells, hair cells, stomach cells, heart . . .” As she spoke she set up a series of cardboard diagrams on the chalk ledge: INTERPHASE, PROPHASE, METAPHASE, ANAPHASE, TELOPHASE, CYTOKINESIS.

Then she spun around and started waving her hand in the air. “But, Ms. Nuñez, Ms. Nuñez, how does this occur?” she said, in a kind of parody that achieved moderate success: she received polite laughter from the first couple of rows. After a moment’s delay, however, she hit the jackpot in the form of Noah Prager singing out from the back in a faithful echo of her own eager cadence, “But, Ms. Nuñez, Ms. Nuñez, how does this occur?” He did this in a way that managed to suggest equally that he was her co-conspirator in the joke and that he was mocking her attempt at humor.

“Ah, Mr. Prager,” she replied, “I’m glad you asked. Open your binders, people. New heading: ‘The Six Stages of Mitosis.’”

Beneath the generalized shuffling and flipping open of twenty-eight binders, Paul heard Prager mutter, “He’s fucking gay, anyway,” and then the same female voice, Fiona Conley’s, retort sanctimoniously, “
So
? That doesn’t mean you should make
fun
of people,” and it was the retort more than the crack—the retort that seemed to assume the veracity of the crack—that defeated him utterly, withering whatever shred of dignity he’d hoped to convey, even to himself.

Ms. Nuñez began to lecture. At first Paul took fastidious notes—not out of any scholarly impulse, but in an effort to appear thoroughly engrossed in the lesson and therefore oblivious to the words being traded behind his back. Baptiste wasn’t in this class, and Paul was grateful. He didn’t know whether Baptiste had heard any of this particular breed of comments, which had started up and multiplied over the past several weeks, the odd “faggot” or “homo” tossed with appalling casualness his way. He’d become used to other epithets, digs at his weight or his general unpopularity, but the references to sexual orientation were new. They made the earlier insults seem almost benign in comparison, and Paul worried about the effect they might have on his and Baptiste’s friendship, should Baptiste become aware of them.

On two occasions during their friendship Paul had heard a racist slur directed at Baptiste. “Jesus Christ, another shitskin.” An older boy from another school had said it at a track meet when the Nyack team had filed into their locker room. It had taken Paul a moment to figure out that the comment was directed specifically at Baptiste and that it referred to his color.The kid, a towering specimen of advanced puberty, had muttered it in a low voice, with apparently sincere revulsion: more damaging than if it had been delivered with spiteful glee.

The other time it had been a pair of quite small elementary school girls, cute in their dresses and patterned socks, sitting on the wall in front of the post office, next to a baby stroller, swinging their legs and singing with impunity, “Happy birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a Haitian and you smell like one, too.” Both times Paul’s stomach had turned, and he’d wondered sweatily whether or not to comment. Both times he’d ultimately deferred to Baptiste’s own silence, interpreting it as Baptiste’s wish for how he, too, would respond. Yet afterward, both times, he’d been haunted by the worry that Baptiste had not wanted his silence, that there might in fact be nothing dignified in it.

On Friday the only periods the friends had together were art and lunch. Lunch was next. Paul stole a glance at the clock. All the school’s clocks were an hour off, no one having yet adjusted them for daylight saving time. Its long hand juddered forward one audible notch. Twenty-six minutes left in the period. He smelled, or imagined he could, lunch: The school tuna (pinker, wetter, sweeter than at home), the school lettuce (iceberg, shredded noodle-thin), the school fries (skinny, hard, greasy). The sandwich rolls (dry, almost scratchy). The school disinfectant (a kind of inorganic citrus, acrid yet not altogether unpleasant), which provided the olfactory backdrop for every lunch period and which, alone, could stimulate Paul’s appetite.

His stomach rumbled and he scuffed his shoes on the floor in an effort to mask the sounds. There was the pain of being ridiculed, which was the pain of knowing yourself to be despised for an isolated moment, and there was the pain of anticipating ridicule, which was the pain of knowing yourself to be the object of ongoing contempt.

He swallowed, and ground his teeth against tears, the effort to contain which made his head ache. He needed something beyond this room on which to focus, something to transport him from this place. Jess. Two Jesses, superimposed: the starry teenager he remembered from that long-ago summer at Cabruda Lake, and the plainer, more ambiguous figure she cut now. So that in his head he saw her simultaneously long-haired and shorn, slender and plump, quick and languid, teasing and decorous. She at once wore braces on her teeth and none; viewed the world unmediated and through lenses. Which was the true Jess, which the false? It felt that way, as though one version was a guise and the other genuine. Behind one lay the promise of his highest hopes for himself; behind the other, the explicit dashing of those hopes.

All week he’d largely avoided her, even while wishing she would seek him out, single him out for attention, indicate in some way that she remembered him as he’d been: the torpedo she’d shot, toes pointed, through the water; the willing accompanist who’d strummed her guitar while she fingered the chords; her companion in the hammock as dusk fell and they pointed out to each other with their fingers the evening’s first bats.

“How long is she staying?” he’d asked last night, as they’d all been eating supper. The kitchen table did not easily accommodate five; they had to remember to keep their elbows tucked in, and still they wound up jostling one another.

“That’s rude,” his mother said.

He knew it was rude. But, “What?” he said, “I’m not allowed to be curious?”

“It’s okay,” Jess told his mother. “Not long,” she told Paul.

His mother had lain down her fork and knife. “You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

“Thanks.”

“Really.We’d love you to—stay.”

His father had reached over and squeezed his mother’s shoulder, and it was far beyond Paul why this should have made him feel bad.

“Thanks,” Jess said again. “I’m not sure the feeling’s unanimous.” She smiled at Paul, though, almost conspiratorially, and did not seem the least concerned.

Paul struggled not to betray himself. He bent over his plate, pretending to cut a piece of lettuce and hoping his fallen bangs masked his blush. “It’s immaterial,” he assured her. “This isn’t a democracy.”

“Paul!” snapped his father.

But Jess laughed.

“I apologize,” Paul mumbled. “May I please be excused?”

He’d retreated to his room in near-giddy confusion. His parents might’ve been shocked at his rudeness, but with this rudeness, if that’s what it was, he’d successfully captured Jess’s attention; better, had made her laugh.

He did not think Stephen Boyd or Noah Prager would have been able to accomplish this. In some sort of contest—if only it had been public! if only it held currency in the arena of middle school!—he was capable of besting them.

F
or the second time in less than two weeks a daughter of John Ryrie’s was riding in his car. Gordie nearly made the observation out loud, but checked himself, turning, instead, to glance at her. Jess smiled back, her teeth gleaming apple-white, as if this were all perfectly normal, confirming Gordie’s sense that he was incapable of judging normalcy.

His palms were sweaty on the wheel. Certainly, he was a bit giddy, a bit revved by the unexpected turn of events. What his dad would’ve called
in a froth
. “What are you all in a froth about, then, eh?” Imagine how surprised his dad would’ve been to learn it had to do with a girl. Behind him, Ebie whined, panted a moment, then closed her jaws as if in forbearance.

He’d been encouraged by Jess’s friendliness in the park. Never mind that she kept calling him Jordie (he hadn’t managed to correct her), she’d known right away who he was. She’d been the one, actually, to initiate contact. Well: as far as
Jess
knew, she’d been the one to initiate contact.That was what mattered.

In fact he’d taken Ebie walking in Memorial Park several times over the past ten days, at calculatedly varied times, in hopes of “running into” any of the Ryries. He’d spotted Jess that morning first thing on arrival, and if he’d had any doubts that it was she, Ebie dispelled them by trotting right over, tail awag in recognition. He’d called her sharply away, mortified to think the dog’s forwardness might be construed as his own.

And then, although he’d observed from the corner of his eye Jess prop herself on her elbows and study them, Gordie had pretended not to recognize her: he’d given Ebie all his attention, immersed himself in this game of stick throwing with unusual intensity, the result being every aspect of it felt foolish, artificial.
Here I am, athletic and good-natured. Here I am, loving my dog, who loves me. Here I am, lovable.
Despite the knowledge that he was straining, that the whole thing was a bit of a charade, what singing good fortune he’d felt in his heart.To be noticed, to be aware of being watched, was like having a long thirst slaked. And she did watch, he saw. Once, she laughed. He felt elated and ashamed. It was very like another time he’d successfully gained notice through contrivance: last year when he’d tripped over a root in the woods in front of Hugh Chaudhuri.

Hugh Chaudhuri was built like Gordie, short and lean, with dark hair he wore shaggy and glossy dark eyes that had the power to melt anyone, girl or guy. His androgyny was undeniably part of his appeal, even as it added to Gordie’s confusion about his own proclivities. There’d been a drinking party in the woods—Gordie’s virgin foray into that kind of thing, the unsanctioned gatherings high schoolers held in locations lacking proper addresses (“the rez,” “the Hook,” “behind the tennis courts”). The invitation had come about by fluke: some people talking about it in the hall before industrial arts, where Gordie, too, had gathered, waiting for the previous class to be let out; Hugh mentioning he had room in his car for one more. He’d looked right at Gordie as he said it, smiled just so with his Junior Mint eyes, and minor explosions detonated throughout Gordie’s bloodstream. Was that the signal you wanted to be kissed? Gordie did not know what he wanted, but he had gone along, only to be disappointed later when he found himself consigned to the periphery of the gathering. The group, when they arrived, seemed already enmeshed, as though they shared a kind of fascinating, impenetrable history, forged long before Gordie had entertained even a flicker of desire to join. He’d stood at the edge of the schnappspassing, lighter-flicking activity, pretending to enjoy the encoded dialogue, taking a long swig each time a bottle was inadvertently passed his way, trying in vain to think of something witty or admirable to say.