In the Land of the Living (19 page)

“Here? Where? Yale?”

“Earth.”

Couldn’t you just say “Thank you,” Laertes? Is that too much to ask, Laertes?
Laertes evidently liked himself quite a bit. And why not? He was in fact a good actor and a quick wit and he’d gotten into Yale and been in a movie and his prospects looked mighty good. He would probably be a person of some importance, if not substance, given his talents. He was already famous, wasn’t he? But couldn’t he—
shouldn’t he
—have assumed he’d been standing before an equal? Or perhaps someone much greater than he—undoubtedly in substance—but perhaps in importance as well? Leo had paid Laertes a compliment and Laertes had condescended to him. He wished to say to this complacency and arrogance:

Laertes, with your fatuous view of the future—life is a battle royale. And I will win. Let’s meet again before these same mailboxes in twenty years and draw our swords once more. If I am still alive.

But anything he said to Laertes seemed artificial, because at heart he knew that he only twisted and turned to tell himself he was good when he felt he wasn’t, and the only sort of person who feels he’s no good has a broken will and is therefore, in fact, no good. Yale had broken his will. Laertes was a winner and he was a loser.

Back at Vanderbilt, Leo went into his room and shut the door and beat on the door with his fists. He ripped Corey’s plastic hooks off the door, spilling all the ties on the floor.

His roommate from Sri Lanka knocked on the door. “Leo? What’s the matter?”

“The matter is that Yale is complete bullshit,” Leo said. “The matter is that this place isn’t a training ground, it’s a finishing school, and it’s not for the great talents of the future, it’s for the
children
of the great talents of the
past!
” He said it, and he almost believed it. But it didn’t do anything for that pernicious sense of failure that had dogged him since the previous spring.

“Are you going to go on again about Yale?”

College, and hence his entire life, was turning out to be a disaster. He had even shoved Michelle in a restaurant, and gone to see a psychiatrist, who was always late for their appointments and never talked about anything of relevance: only about conscience, when all that mattered was whether he was in fact any good or was worthless like the dean of admissions had said.

After Corey’s birthday, Leo tried to begin again. And in truth, Leo and Corey had got along quite well. When Leo was sick, Corey brought him soup and Gatorade; on Corey’s birthday, Leo wrote a note to apologize for the broken tie rack and gave Corey a red-and-brown striped tie (Corey was too truthful to say he liked it); and toward the end of the winter, when there was a huge snowstorm, Corey announced that they were going to get drunk and go to the Berkeley Screw Your Roommate Dance. Before the dance they read each other Trivial Pursuit questions and did a shot each time they got one wrong.

“How many eyes does an oyster have?” Corey said.

Leo was drunk by the end of the first card.

Wind lacerated the Old Campus snowdrifts, scoured and sculpted the snow in long rifts and canyons. Brilliant dark swords of ice hung from the gutters in darkness.

At the dance they drank watery beer. The girl was plain-looking, but funny, and he might have kissed her, but all he wanted was to go to Ann Arbor, to the South Quad dorm with its long institutional halls and stereo music and the sound of anonymous hair dryers and the smell of girls’ shampoo. In South Quad, the football players pulled the fire alarms every single Friday and Saturday night, and every single Friday and Saturday night, the fire department would come and the RAs really made everyone evacuate their rooms and they all stood in the freezing vestibules and laughed about it and one time when he was staying there in Michelle’s room, everyone started whistling the theme to
The Bridge on the River Kwai.

At the end of the dance, Leo drank all the half-empty water glasses at the table, but he couldn’t uncross his eyes.

When they returned to the snow field and the dark sea winds blasting against the church stone, he screamed. “Fuck you!” he screamed at the hanging swords of ice and the lampposts shining on the frigid beetle-back of the ice. A window slid open far across Old Campus and a voice faintly shouted back: “Fuck
you!
” In the common room, Leo kicked over the chair that sat before the ancient fireplace.

“Well, if that’s how you hold your liquor,” Corey said, “I see why you didn’t want to drink,” and he pulled off his tie. Leo couldn’t help it; he was filled with admiration for his friend, the drunk Jewish genius of Nashville.

The cold air grew damp, the streets wet with melted ice. He hated everyone; he hated himself. Leo crossed Old Campus for the cocktail party, looking up at the deaf stone facades and ivy. Instead of victory, his father looked down at him and saw a failure who couldn’t get into Yale and then, worse, humiliated himself with the most petty, ridiculous, broken-willed, and unmanly behavior. It seemed as though things had gone down a bad road, gone very far, and this was a last chance to make it work. The air was chilly and bright, and the grass was growing again. He knew a few people who would be there. Their names were Champion Harkness Killingworth, George Herbert Walker Bush, Fighting Bantam of the Army, Michael Gupta, Michael Chang, Michael Schwartz, Michael Ajayi, William Goodenough Pearse, Kenneth “Brownie” Brownridge-Brown, King Richard II, Winslow Nellius Pubert Potchcontrol Groton, and Dunster Neaves Cushing Lenonrind Bottlebook Scrambledeggs Milk Vaginahorn.

The room was packed with Yale boys in blue blazers drinking vodka and cranberry juice. Tall windows lit up the conspicuous dust whirling all around them while they stayed put in their blazers. The senior swimming star was there. Why would a straight male senior hang around a bunch of freshmen unless he was looking for girls? There were no girls here. Was he actually networking? He sang not just for a singing group, but for the
Whiffenpoofs
. (Under other circumstances he might have found it endearingly earnest that a school prized its singing groups more than its fraternities, and that the gemstone among them was something called in all seriousness the fucking Whiffenpoofs.) Champion Killingworth did not remember him. But another upperclassman whom he sort of knew, who had gone to his high school, invited him to play Ultimate Frisbee (Yalies loved Ultimate Frisbee). He said no thanks and left.

He went out onto Old Campus and around the Battell Chapel flowerbeds, where the daffodils were already poking through, then to College Street. He headed north, away.

Winter was ending and the days getting longer, but it smelled like fall and brown leaves were glued to the curb. The bright, heatless light caused him a shiver. He had walked past the giant cemetery four days a week on his way to Science Hill but he’d never been inside. He paced over the cracked sidewalk toward Prospect Street.

He stopped and pulled out his appointment book. To do:

He crossed the street and from there he could see the arch over the entrance to the Grove Street Cemetery. He passed his psychology professor, wearing sunglasses, probably going to measure whether people who are shown pictures of dogs remember dogs better than cats. Then that would be called the Dog Remembrance Effect. But it should be called the Waste of Grant Money Effect. What a fucking idiot.

Michelle had come for the last time. Leo’s next trip to the New Haven airport would be to fly home to Cleveland. There were only two sliding doors at the airport and the one that led to the tarmac made a sound of tortured, dry ball bearings. Then you waited and you heard the turbines make a
yeeeen
sound in a high-pitched crescendo from the runway. Then the plane taking off, and the thunderclaps galloping up into the air and away. Then she was gone.

At the end of the summer, before college began, when everyone was disappearing, when time was flowing over a cliff like a waterfall, Michelle and Leo had sat in front of her mother’s house on the small and overgrown lawn. Michelle couldn’t find the easel she had used in high school.

“I can’t believe it’s over already,” Leo had said. “Almost time to leave for good.”

“I feel like it was summer for a year,” Michelle said. “God, I missed a weekend shift just to come get the stupid easel.” Michelle said her mother saved all her old school stuff, especially paintings and drawings. Michelle’s sketches from fourth grade were still up on the refrigerator: precise, realistic renderings, in No. 2 Faber-Castell school-supply pencil it looked like, of a stuffed finch from the spooky taxidermy rooms in the Museum of Natural History. But her mother had chucked the easel, just like she’d put Michelle’s cat to sleep. She was crazy, Michelle said. Michelle’s room was apparently all redone too, the bed moved out, the wallpaper stripped. Leo had only seen the room once or twice because Michelle said it was too messy to let him inside.

“What happens when we die, do you think?” he’d asked her.

“Nothing. We disappear.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep.”

“But you don’t want to talk about this,” he’d said.

“Nope,” she’d said. “Be happy, Leo.”

Then he had cried.

“Do you have the time? Do you have the time?” An old woman with crooked teeth and unwashed hair, humped over on a New Haven mailbox, wheezing, exhausted. Leo stared at his cheap Swatch and felt he couldn’t read it, some anxiety attack he always got when people asked him the time.

“Five thirty-five,” he said finally.
Out of my brain on the five-fifteen.…

He began to pull the letter to the Yale registrar out of his backpack, but the exhausted woman stayed slumped over the mailbox there, wheezing away. He put the letter in the backpack again.

It was the end of something. The new ideas of spring in the air seemed to refer backward, not forward, to springtimes gone and long ago. A beginning was an ending. Ends of summers. In the dining room with the pine table the size of a yacht in the house by the ocean at Amagansett that Philip had bought, there was a ship’s clock that ran fast, an heirloom inherited from his dead grandfather and namesake Leo Neuwalder. Dinging ceaselessly and advancing too fast, like life, charming and jingling with mini-knells, announcing, “Time is running out.” Marking time with dings just audible in every room of the house.

The last summer was gone. How he had feared the end of their vacation in Amagansett! Fog all the way down the beach, gray day, coolish, glasses misting and unmisting, terns flapping, skimming low over the waves, fishing. “I think you could catch a fish now if you tried,” Leo said. He remembered saying it and thinking,
This moment will soon be long gone,
and now it was. Few umbrellas. Gray houses embanked behind a hundred yards of dune grass, and windows in the houses that were mirrors full of ocean sky.

He and his cousins walked down the long pebble-strewn drive across the street to get to the beach—cars had cleared the pebbles from under the paths of the tires so two strips of gray-black pavement showed through. A papyrus-brown hive of wasps hung in the tree along the road. The weather was always hot when you walked there. It never rained on that road. Because you were going to the beach and would not have gone if it had been raining. They passed through a verdant tunnel behind a hedge. Prickers grew up in the path after Philip’s cousin, another Zajac, another builder, who owned the house beside the path, separated from his wife. The tunnel opened out from under a tree limb to the path through the dunes. There was a secluded pool there that no one ever seemed to use. There was a cast-iron statue of an eagle on a pedestal rising somewhere out of the green-black brush. The sedge tickled the ankles as you walked down. Then you dropped folded chairs in the sand.

Face on the sand, on the plain of miniature bright dunes, where derelict skate cases and crab claws lay half-embedded, crab exoskeletons dead but with a lilac bloom and shiny like the skin of an eggplant. He’d invented his own aphorisms one day on the beach, like this:

His brother and half of his cousins and Aunt Anne and Uncle Ollie left three days early.

The door to the porch hall hung open, and the lights in the rooms off the porch were out. It was quiet in the house. Leo won at Boggle, Uncle Harvey was mad, Leo was nervous to have made his uncle mad. The unused darkness from the living room turned the dining room half-dark. The CD player played Peter, Paul, and Mary.
If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone.…
The music was like looking at the picture of his young dead father at Harvard in the red jute shirt or one of Aunt Jenny at Yale—the picture in the navy peacoat on York Street in New Haven. The music was like a hot day on the campus of Yale outside the building with the classroom of cracked plaster and latticed glass all cracked, the building by the private tearoom that the rabbi was going to get him into. At Thanksgiving Leo had told Uncle Harvey that he’d made friends with the rabbi and that had pleased his uncle, but when he said that the rabbi hated Yale when he was a student there, the light in Uncle Harvey’s big hale face dimmed a little.

He could remember very distinctly when half the group left before he did at the end of the summer. He had trudged alone to his bedroom then. Mack’s bed was empty, still unmade. He felt deserted, sorrowful, hopeless. Afraid of insanity, like some evil hallucination would divorce itself from the world of dreams and burst forth into the room, because the world wasn’t making much sense, the world where we die.

On the last night, the smaller group, a huddle of survivors, sat together on the deck. In the vaporous darkness above, a few stars proved they existed, then disappeared. Philip carried out glasses of wine on a tray and pea pods with black sesame seeds. Leo tried to be festive and lit a cigar, which was slightly embarrassing to do with his elders. The air was too cold to sit out. The wood under his bare feet was damp, and Leo felt rotten, afraid of being laughed at, and he said someone should find out what “bad chemicals” were in the pool. Didn’t anyone care what the “bad chemicals” were? Uncle Harvey said, “I’ll tell you what, Leo. I’ll give you the number, and you call and find out about it.”