Hooked (3 page)

“I feel like I’ve seen shades in that building that were five-eighths of the way down,” I said as we both stopped to find our gloves.

“That would be hard to believe, Thea.”

“Well, I think I have,” I said. “Actually, I’m sure of it now. I have.”

“Well, why don’t we go verify that?”

“We’re twenty blocks away.”

“It’ll be worth the trip. Let’s make it interesting. If there is one shade not in its rightful place—high, medium or low—it’s five dollars. For you.”

“Okay, deal.”

“All right, then,” he said, straightening up with purpose. “We’ll be there in no time.”

It felt like we were crossing Antarctica. I had no hat and my ears burned. We barely said a word, it was so cold, and I didn’t want to complain. When we got to the Seagram Building, we went up the steps and stood in the middle of the plaza.

“There, I see one,” I said. “The shades are three-quarters down. Six floors up, four from the left. We have to stand back a little.”

“Jeez, you’re right,” he said, surprised. “How did this happen?”

“It must be busted.” I held out my hand as he fished for the five.

“I appreciate that deep respect for order, I must say,” he said, slapping it into my hand. “Philip Johnson, he liked things in their place.”

We stood there for a long time, freezing our asses off. It was so beautiful—the ceilings on every floor were illuminated, rich, deep blocks of orange. All those squares, hovering over all the private conversations about God knows what that I would never know about, all I would never know. Will was looking up at the top of the building, pensive and still, a smile frozen on his face. Finally he turned to me and I knew what he was going to do, so I stood still and waited, letting the fantastic terror of those tiny milliseconds crawl through me as his cold face came to mine. Everything that had been moving around us—the revolving door pouring out late-night stragglers, the Poland Spring truck plowing its way through the avenue traffic—everything seemed to come to a halt, as if we were all in a weird game of freeze dance. I felt incredibly grown up and hoisted out of my life, kissing him in his black coat, a shock of black in the orange haze. He stood back, slowly stamping his feet as I cupped my ears and blew into my gloves.

“It was Mies van der Rohe,” I said. “He was the guy who designed it.”

“Really?” he asked, not minding being corrected. “Well, maybe Johnson helped.”

We got a cab back to my house and he walked me to my door.

“Want to meet my mom?” I asked nervously, hoping she was wearing something other than that dumb yoga tank with the stick figure of the guy doing a sun salutation.

“Not tonight.” He winked, taking my hands.

More kisses in our dim, carpeted hallway, quiet except for the echoing wind in the elevator shaft. Who were his friends? I wondered. Why me? Did he like tall, thin girls? Because I was tall but not exactly thin, and I wasn’t sure he’d realized that yet. We kissed and kissed, that new kissing you could do forever. I wondered how long my turn with him would last.

“I want to make this,” I said as I sat on Vanessa’s bed in her large, powder-blue bedroom. I handed her an old photo I’d found of me standing on the beach on Charter Island in a red, white and blue bikini.

“Look at you!” Vanessa said, examining it. “What a cutie. How old were you?”

“Sixish,” I said, peering at it next to her.

“You look like you have a big boat sponge or, like, a gigantic maxi-pad under your crotch,” she said, and she was right. The bikini bottom sagged in the crotch because the suit was made of crocheted wool. When it was wet, it would stay cold on my skin and never, ever dry. I remembered it being incredibly itchy, but there was something about it I absolutely loved, and looking at the picture reminded me of how much I loved it.

“My grandmother made it for me,” I said. “She made blankets mostly, in hideous mustard tones, but she made the bikini, too. I wish she’d made more.” I grabbed the photo out of Vanessa’s hands. “I remember her taking that picture so clearly. We were on the beach on Charter and it was really early in the morning. We were hiding from my parents after some giant brawl in the middle of the night, after Dad got bombed and called Mom a shit-hair.”

Vanessa burst out laughing. “What the hell is a shit-hair?” she asked, reaching over me to a yellow apple on her desk. “Are they dumber than shit-heads? Meaner? Ted, man, he’s got a way with words. Thank God he quit the hooch. Now we just need to find him a together young lady.” She bit into the apple, spinning it around between her thumb and index finger. “I’m officially off Snickers. I think I’m turning diabetic.”

“Do you think I could find a pattern for the bikini?” I asked, tapping the photo.

“I can’t imagine who would publish a pattern for something like that,” she said, pulling an old canvas tote out of her closet.

“Well, I can,” I said. “People are weird.”

“Why don’t you start with a scarf and see how it goes?”

“I don’t want to do a scarf.”

“I don’t wanna,” Vanessa whined. Her black bra strap burrowed into her shoulder and she shoved it to the side. Vanessa had big, beautiful boobs. No points, just circles. “Now, if I’m going to show you, you cannot get frustrated.” I sat up against the wall and she moved next to me, pressing a gray, metal crochet hook into my hand. It was thin and cold and I liked the way it felt.

“I won’t, I promise,” I said.

She fished around in the bag and pulled out a large, messy pile of dark purple yarn. Then she yanked a line off it and took the hook from me. “The first thing you’ve got to do is cast on, which is basically a series of little knots, also known as chains. Repeat after me … 
chains.
” She did the first two, then moved my fingers around the hook until I got it.

“Do about thirty for a scarf. You want it long and skinny, right?” Her head knocked against mine while she watched, and I could feel her breath on my hands. “Tell me about last night. What’s he like? Is he all Arthur Miller–tortured or is he normal?” She lifted my index finger and bent it, like it was a piece of Play-Doh, farther down the hook.

“Vanessa, I like him so much it’s freaking me out,” I said, clutching the loop that hung precariously from the hook.

“Be specific,” Vanessa implored. “What was the place like?”

“Dark and steak-housey, and sort of desolate and empty.”

“Sounds
awful
,” she said, holding my elbow out as I tried another chain.

“He’s a little weird,” I admitted.

“How?”

“Well, his family sounds pretty out there. His dad works two days a year and spends the rest of the time going to movies, and his mother’s got a degree in public health management, whatever that is, but he says she spends all of her time baking and leafing through old magazines.”

“Weird!” Vanessa exclaimed, intrigued.

I remembered to bring the yarn around from the back of the hook, thinking of Will’s face, his body, his stillness. “I feel sick,” I said. “Is he going to call me?”

“Don’t go rexy on me,” she said, turning the hook toward my chest.

“I won’t.”

“Or bulimic. You better not.” She took another bite of her apple and chewed loudly. “He’ll call. Then you’ll ’bandon me for the boy. Perfect, you’re getting it. Do a few more and then we’ll start the first row.” She dropped her apple on the bed, where it made a wet stain on her quilt, and fished in the bag for another hook, this one with a square of flecked beige hanging off it.

“Ooh, what’s that?” I asked enviously.

“I just started it.” She spread the chains across the hook proudly. “It’s going to be a sweater.”

“How come you get to do a sweater and all’s I get to do is this crap scarf?”

“God, Thea, you’re
so
impatient.” She rolled her eyes dramatically.

“Do you think when I’m done with this boring eighties scarf, I’ll be able to do the bikini?” I asked.

“Let’s jump off that bridge when we get to it,” she said with a sigh.

By the end of March of my junior year, I had a life-ruining B average. I’d finished the first semester in December with a B-plus, not great compared to everyone else but good enough for me and, more importantly, good enough for Dad.

Dad was forever dreaming up ways in which I could be improved. That was the secret to our relationship. It’s what kept him interested.

I went to a “specialized high school” for math and science geeks, but I hated math and was terrible at it. If Dad hadn’t quizzed me for a year with those little flash cards held up to his chin, I never would have gotten in. Even though I always majorly screwed up in math, I was usually able to offset it with As or A-pluses in English and history and dumb, extraneous classes like metal shop. But by the end of March of my junior year, I had a B-plus in biochemistry, a C-plus in geometry, a measly B in English and a B-plus in history. I was screwed.

The problem was, I’d stopped doing homework. Will was a second-semester senior and had none, so it became too hard to face mine. I didn’t want to do homework. I wanted to be with him. We took long walks after school to the East Village for French fries, or to a café between our place and Dad’s, where we drank hot chocolate and lounged for hours on the black velvet couch in the back. The homework was always there, the obscure stress of not doing it getting louder and louder as the afternoons wore on.

When the March grades came in, Mom called Dad and he cornered me at one of our Wednesday-night dinners.

“Look, Thea, you need to try harder,” he said, yanking his tie loose. “You’re a junior. This is your most important year, for Christ’s sake. The grades at the end of this semester are crucial. This is it, kiddo, you know that. You’ve got to get it back up to at least a B-plus. At
least
! I don’t know what’s going on—Mom says you’ve got some new boyfriend. Maybe you’re going through something, but you’ve got to try harder.”

“I
am
trying,” I squealed, pissed that Mom had told him about Will.

“What’s the situation with the tutors?” he asked, curling his hands into problem-solving fists.

“I’m going to Binder for biochem and geometry.”

“He does both?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“How often do you go?”

“Once a week. We do an hour on each.”

“That’s it?” he demanded, shoving his glasses up the bridge of his thin, narrow nose.

“That’s
enough.
” I thought of Mr. Binder sitting at his dining room table in his boiling hot apartment, waiting for me in his yellow undershirt. How my elbows would get sore from leaning on his lace tablecloth. If Will, science-fair-finalist Will, found out I had a tutor, I thought, he would realize what a dumbass I truly was and that would be it. Game over. I had a fantasy of going to some progressive private school where my homework would be to read
Madame Bovary
and to create and perform an interpretive dance based on it. But Dad believed in public education. “If you don’t go, who will?” he said. He actually believed that if he sent his daughter to public school, other investment bankers would follow.

“Well, I’ll say it once again, this semester is crucial, Thea,” he said, pausing with his hands in the air.

“I know, I know,” I said, watching him chew. He always looked like he was grinding his teeth rather than eating.

“So what’s your first choice these days?” Dad asked, taking a roll from the basket in front of us.

“I don’t know,” I said, relieved he’d changed the subject but annoyed at his lame, forced switch to the aspirational, his fallback. “I’m thinking it might be good to stay in New York.”

“What about Wesleyan?” Dad had gone to Wesleyan. We both knew it was rapidly becoming a pipe dream, given my plummeting grades, but he liked to dream.

“I’m a New Yorker. A city girl. I think I’d get bored.”

“Hardly,” he said.

“NYU’s still within my reach if I do well on the SATs. And I’d be close to home.”

He threw salt from the shaker onto his roll in jerky bursts, as though the salt weren’t coming out.

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s get cracking on the grades so we have some options, shall we?”

“ ‘Let’s’? I believe it’s ‘You get cracking, Thea.’ Last I checked, you’ve been out of school for, like, decades?”

He took a deep breath, as though trying to suppress some deep, white-collar rage he felt toward me and my lack of ambition. “You know, Mommy never finished school,” he said.

“Yeah, but who cares? She ran her own business.”

“I think she suffered for it,” he said. “She’s savvy but undisciplined. That, in my mind, is a result of not having a good, solid education. I don’t want you traveling down that route.”

“None of her friends in Gloucester went to college. If you’re smart and creative, it’s a waste of time.”

“Not exactly,” he said, his left eye twitching slightly, as if he were imparting some secret knowledge he wasn’t supposed to. During moments like those, hearing his tight, confined sentences and comparing them to Mom’s loud rush of words, I wondered how they ever got together in the first place.

I sat back, tossing my napkin onto my plate, knowing how much Dad hated seeing dirty napkins on plates. “I should get home,” I said. “I have tons of homework.”

“Let’s get you home, then,” Dad said, wincing at the napkin or me, I couldn’t tell.

Mom went to a real estate conference over a long weekend in May. I was supposed to stay at Dad’s, but I’d neglected to mention to her that Dad was going to be at a banking conference in Bermuda, and they didn’t bother checking with each other anymore.

“Who is it?” I asked, even though the doorman had already told me on the intercom.

“It’s the plumber,” Will answered in a low monotone. “I’ve come to fix the sink.” He jumped just a little when I opened the door, and it occurred to me that he was nervous too.

It was weird having a boy in our white, fluffy-kitten apartment. Mom rarely had any men over. Alex, her married, veiny-templed boyfriend, occasionally. But Alex was so wimpy, slithering into her room like it was a hole in the wall, like a mouse fleeing danger. Will was different. A foreign mass our house had to reconcile itself with. We sat down on the living room couch and he picked up Mom’s long strand of wooden beads, spinning them around on his finger.