2
She had cracked the window in front of the sink; its breeze was cold.
She blew her nose into a napkin that was lightly dotted with blood.
“You’re up early,” she said, and returned to scanning the broadsheet.
I helped myself to a bowl of graham crackers and then poured whole milk over it—a Tanner Potts specialty.
I ate, staring at Gwyneth intently.
Her concentration was total; occasionally, she sniffled.
After a few more minutes of reading, she took her plate to the window, raised farther the sash, and smoked one more cigarette.
The view was an east-facing alley, a back-of-the-building, streetless one, and into this void she ashed.
Afterward, she scraped her plate into the trash, then rinsed it under the faucet and placed it on the dish rack.
“Good night,” she said, and excused herself to her room.
The clock above the rear entrance read 8:26.
If I didn’t leave now, I’d be late.
At Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Third Street I looked downtown and then dejectedly headed north.
I entered Central Park just above the Seventy-Ninth Street transverse, past the Met, the Temple of Dendur visible through its wall of glass and silent in the morning light.
I merged onto the bridle path running alongside the reservoir.
A beautiful woman on horseback cantered past me, prettier even than Gwyneth.
It was gray and windy, the air damp and promising either rain or sun, it was not yet clear.
Exiting the park, I rode uptown again, on Central Park West, to school.
When I entered the building, there was Coach Kepplemen, waiting for me on the pews.
He had been sitting as he had at the sports award assembly, his ankle, which he held in his hand, at rest atop his knee and his foot flapping.
At the sight of me he smiled with unguarded fondness, an expression that, I realize now, signaled a surprised happiness, a relief or amazement that I had showed up—that any of us did—in the first place, which elicited, of all things, sympathy from me.
Then he got up without further acknowledgment and walked the long hallway, ahead of me, as always, toward the wrestling gym, his preferred place for us to practice on Saturdays—though on these weekends he never turned on the room’s overhead lights, choosing also to roll on the practice mats, which lay against the same wall as the double doors, so that we were hidden from view.
Even if you’d gotten on your toes to peek through one of the small porthole windows, you couldn’t have seen us.
He was already dressed for our session, in wrestling shoes and a T-shirt, but also, I noticed, wearing shorts.
I hated when Kepplemen wore shorts; he had neither a jockstrap nor underwear beneath these, ever.
When we drilled, I could feel everything.
And even though it was only the beginning of December, with three full months left in the season, I suffered the tiniest itch for wrestling to be over.
Later, at home, Dad still hadn’t put away the challah French toast and Canadian bacon.
I wasn’t hungry but upon arrival ate a second breakfast, which Dad insisted on reheating, even the syrup.
I had seconds of that too.
I didn’t understand why I did this to myself.
It would make cutting weight this week hellish.
The sweat from my workout was overlaid with the sweat from my ride home, and my wind-dried neck was salty with the perspiration and the smell of Kepplemen’s cologne.
Dad and Mom were seated on the couch, dividing the New York Times between them, their faces hidden behind Arts however, what made it more magical than the others was its cone-shaped roof.
I meant to see the room beneath it with my own eyes.
Hindsight reveals several important things about our social lives as city children in a city that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists.
Monied parents like the Adlers left town on the weekends for second homes in Litchfield or the Hamptons, but in their mildly dissociative and benignly neglectful fashion they neither insisted their children join them nor cared much what they did in their absence.
Their kids might, as they not entirely untruthfully warned their parents, have “a few people over”; these gatherings might, as was the case of Roy’s party, swell to a number closer to a hundred.
However, the fact that these parties were tacitly condoned often gave them a distinctly adult feel.
They were sedate, intimate: music played but wasn’t blasting; several pizzas had been ordered and sat atop the vast kitchen’s island, but with paper plates and napkins provided.
“Beer,” as Roy indicated to Cliff, Tanner, and me when we entered this vast space, “is in the fridge and the cooler”—the former double-doored and restaurant-sized, the latter an ice-filled galvanized steel tub.
No one was hell-bent on property destruction or put their shoes on the furniture.
There was a fire going in the Masterpiece Theatre living room.
It was all more Apollonian than Dionysian, and it exemplified the distinctly Neverland quality to how we partied.
As was the case with Gwyneth, spending all night out at Studio 54, we were impersonating the adults it seemed we knew only from afar.
Which didn’t mean I didn’t have an agenda.
I snooped, but not inappropriately.
I was determined to see the top floor.
I was hung up on this, I cannot say why, perhaps because the building was as famous to me as any Upper West Side landmark: the Beresford, for instance, with its three octagonal towers overlooking Central Park, where Oren was now, at the apartment of his new best friend, Matt; or the Dakota, with its decorative iron railing surrounding it, of the bearded Wise Man framed by two dragons, the figures repeating at intervals like sentries.
But given the fact that Roy was a senior and our wrestling team’s captain, I asked for his permission, to which he replied, after clinking beer cans with me, “I think there are already people up there.” So as not to appear overeager, I took my time.
Juniors and seniors were gathered in the wood-paneled living room, grouped in loose cliques around the fire, standing by the mantel, seated on the couch and accent chairs.
I spotted the members of the lacrosse team, also the preppy swimmers.
Wrestling captain Santoro, who sat with Lisa Mullins on his lap, raised his beer in greeting, and I raised mine in response.
Seated around the dining room table, as if they were having a work meeting, were the techies, a group of computer lab regulars and math geeks and drama stagehands: Marc Mason, Todd Wexworth, and Hogi Hyun, plus middle schoolers Chip Colson and Jason Taylor.
The walnut staircase I ascended was magnificent, its decorative newel an eagle, its banisters and railings as brown as braised beef, its thick runner a deep green, as soft beneath my feet as the treads were solid.
Worthy of note and attributable to a combination of my dimness and youth: I did not associate such palatial digs with wealth any greater than what the Pottses possessed, I being no Oren and entirely incurious about how the world worked.
I just thought such domiciles—with their abstract paintings of three colorful lines or sculptures of men so long-legged and long-torsoed they looked like upside-down Ys—were a lot bigger than my own.
The second floor’s hallways were dark, though light shined from a room with pocket doors, revealing a dedicated TV room as well as a second fireplace (this even more magical than the existence of a first one) in which a fire was also roaring.
Roaring on the floor, a lion skin rug.
Rob Dolinski, one of Boyd’s most popular seniors, was seated on the couch.
If he’d had even a scintilla of interest in acting he’d have been a star, his wattage was that powerful.
He wore a blazer and a sharp pair of corduroys.
His hair was slicked back with sculpting gel and caught the firelight.
On his left and right were the pair of gorgeous senior girls from whom he was inseparable: Andrea Oppenheimer and Sophie Evans.
The trio passed a joint among themselves.
“Are you lost?” Dolinski asked, and pointing to myself, I replied, “Just taking the tour.” “You want a hit?” he offered, and held out the roach.
“No thank you,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “if you change your mind,” and then, with the spliff, indicated the pair of ladies, as if he were offering them instead of the dope: “There’s plenty to go around.” In response, I continued my tour, pretending to admire the photographs on the mantel, the painting of black-and-white squiggles, sprays, and splashes above the fireplace, excusing myself immediately afterward for fear of getting contact high.
“Be seeing you,” Dolinski said, with a confidence approaching certitude.
Roy’s room was on the third floor.
It was no bigger than the one I shared with Oren, but it did have its own bathroom and a view of Central Park.
From this height, and through the leafless trees, the reservoir—dotted by the light poles palely illuminating its cinder track—was its own bluey emptiness on this almost moonless night, while the park’s winding walkways and roadways, lit by the same white lights, appeared streaked with incandescent bands that resembled snow.
Beyond it, as brilliantly orange as the fireplace’s embers, glowed the great wall of Fifth Avenue’s facades.
Still, it was not the vantage that impressed me so much as the decor—the incontrovertible Royness of the space that I studied.
Atop his dresser, he had repurposed a shopping crate to stand his multiple wrestling trophies and hang his many medals, and like Gwyneth’s collage, I coveted the idea for the case—that someone so young might commemorate himself thus—as much as the hardware.
Above his desk, framed posters for Apocalypse Now and The Warriors, which I also associated with Roy, he being possessed of a cool toughness to which I aspired.
Like Mom, Roy also had an impressive bookshelf; however, his was tall and narrow and organized, so far as I could tell, by genre, blocks of science fiction and fantasy, none of which I had read ( The Man in the High Castle, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a ton of Carlos Castaneda).
Included among these was a cluster of Stephen King, Tolkien, the Dune trilogy, these giving on to Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, The Crying of Lot 49, plus Franny and Zooey , Nine Stories , and The Catcher in the Rye .
Such a library shamed me.
These books were like tickets for entry to a club to which it seemed I was somehow not intelligent enough to be admitted, that demanded concentration I did not seem to have at my disposal.
My mother looked up at me from such books and then back to the page.
I felt this lack.
This failure.
(Last summer, Cliff had tackled the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, by choice.)
I wanted to be someone like Roy, for whom these books seemed like bricks on which his self was built; whose identity was fashioned of the same stone as his home’s cantilevered corbels, of the same brass of his wrestling medals; refined in the same fires whose smoke filled these chimneys and that forged the silver and gold of his picture frames.
In one such photograph, I picked out Roy, on a dock somewhere, during a recent late-summer idyll, behind which a stately country house sat, Roy standing amid his enormous family—cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents—who seemed, in spite of their sprawling Deuteronomy, to be straight out of central casting.
Put another way, they appeared the opposite of actors, enjoying, in their unposed and unselfconscious cohesion, a closeness I feared that my family did not.
I heard girls’ voices in the hallway.
From the base of the stairs, I could see the room I’d sought to visit.
But several girls from my class were congregated in a bedroom adjacent to where I now stood, most notably my lab partner, Deb Peryton, who smiled at me, invitingly, so I smiled back and then joined her.
They had the forty-five of The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” playing and were chatting over the music.
“We were talking about the scariest movie we’ve ever seen,” she said to me.
“Mine was Jaws. ”
Deb was wearing a black turtleneck and the same lip gloss as the night we’d kissed.
“My dad took my brother and me to see Dressed to Kill. ”
“I thought that had an X rating.”
“It was R,” I said.
“My brother and I were holding hands by the end of it.”
“If you take me to see The Shining, ” Deb said, “I’ll hold your hand.”
“I’ll hold your hand now if you come upstairs and see the top floor.”
“Oh my gosh,” Deb said.
“It’s like an aerie up there—”
But now Cliffnotes, who appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my wrist and yanked me into the hallway.
“Pilchard is here,” he said, and pulled me after him.
On the first floor, Cliff banged on the closet door beneath the stairs and to the occupants inside said, “Pilchard is here,” and Tanner emerged with flush-faced Justine Keaton, who smoothed out her sweater and hurried past us.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Pilchard’s in the kitchen,” Cliff said to Tanner, as if that also answered my question.
Tanner rubbed his hands together like he was about to eat a meal.
In the kitchen, Cliff made a beeline for the fridge while Tanner, who had spotted Pilchard by the island, grabbed him by the back of the neck, pushed him into the corner of the dining nook, and took the seat next to him.
Cliff placed a six-pack on the table and shouldered up next to Pilchard on the other side.
He nodded that I join him, and I hesitated.
He smacked the bench and I sat.
When Tanner and Cliff snowballed like this, there was no stopping them.
At which point Roy Adler appeared with two rocks glasses: one brimmed with Scotch, another contained a single quarter.
He had a cigar in his mouth.
“It’s my understanding,” he said, “you boys have a matter to resolve.”
“We do?” Pilchard asked.
“Oh yes,” Tanner said, as if Pilchard’s father had sued his family too.
He was a big believer in blind loyalty, especially if it ended in violence.
Roy placed the empty glass with the quarter in the middle of the table.
Seated higher than all of us on a barstool, he ashed from this purchase into a golden tray, tapping the cigar so forcefully it sounded like a doctor percussing a chest.
He took on, I thought, a princely sort of appearance, wetly sucking at the head till the tip glowed and then sending out three perfect white rings, which I watched widen until, with what smoke was left in his lungs, he blew a tight stream through their tornadic outline so that they disappeared.
“You start,” Cliff said to Pilchard.
He had already cracked a beer and was filling the glass.
Tiny Pilchard, mackerel-eyed and full-lipped, tried to gamely play along.
“Nah, you go first,” he said.
It was both an obvious stalling tactic and, somewhat sadly, an expression of gratitude for being included in our game.
“No,” Cliff said, and pushed both the glass and the coin closer, “ you go.”
Pilchard took the quarter, placed it on the bridge of his nose, and released.
It rolled and bounced on the table, tink ing against the highball’s rim, then spinning until Cliffnotes stopped it with his finger.
Taking the coin between his thumb and index finger, Cliffnotes bounced it on its flat side.
We watched it arc and then clatter into the glass.
He pointed his elbow at Pilchard.
“Drink,” Cliff said.
Pilchard chugged his beer until the quarter slid into his mouth, and before he’d even finished the suds, Cliff took it and refilled it.
Cliff missed, then passed the quarter to Tanner, who, with a no-look bounce, sank the quarter again and pointed his elbow at Pilchard.
“Drink,” he said.
When he missed, he passed the glass to me, and I missed, intentionally, and passed the glass to Roy, who balanced the cigar on the table’s edge and, after he sank the coin, picked up the stogie and pointed it at Cliff.
“Drink,” he commanded.
Cliff drank, Roy missed, Pilchard sank, hit Tanner, missed, and then Cliff landed two in a row, firing an elbow at Pilchard each time.
Pilchard burped loudly between each glass.
When Cliff’s streak ended, he slid the quarter to Tanner, who once again tagged Pilchard.
He was pausing between swallows now, contemplating the glass’s level, raising it above his head to consider it from underneath.
“Hurry up already,” Cliff said.
There were three more rounds of this.
Pilchard was laughing now.
“Come on, guys,” he said.
But he didn’t have the courage to quit.
Had he found it, Cliff wouldn’t have allowed him to leave anyway.
Within thirty minutes Pilchard was red-eyed and semiconscious, his chin drooping to his chest and lids heavy, at which point Tanner said, “He’s crocked.”
Pilchard said, “I don’t feel so good.”
Roy said, “No hurling on the premises, please.”
Cliff, satisfied but not satiated, said to all of us, “Pick him up and follow me.”
I looked at Roy for a lifeline, but he bit the cigar in his teeth and, before excusing himself, said, “You kids don’t stay out too late.”
The moment the cold air hit us on Central Park West, Pilchard jackknifed at the waist and vomited profusely.
Bent double, palms to knees, he moaned after expunging and said, “Sorry about that.” He wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand and then spit a couple of times.
He was so wrecked he then tipped forward, but Tanner caught his underarm and Cliff lifted him by the other so that he didn’t fall into his own sick, upon which Pilchard seized and barfed several more times.
“Can someone get me home, please?” Pilchard asked.
Cliffnotes leaned down and, after bunching Simon’s bangs in his fist to lift his head, looked into his swimming eyes.
“Hey, buddy,” he said, “don’t you worry, we’ll get you where you need to be.”
I said, “Enough, man, he’s toast.”
“Are you gonna puss out on me?” Cliff said.
“Typical,” Tanner said.
“Can you just tell me what we’re doing?”
Allegiances had shifted.
Tanner and Cliff were a duo now.
They had a plan and loyalty dictated I go along with it, and this made me angry and glum.
Cliff hailed a cab.
Tanner grabbed the door’s handle before the vehicle had even stopped.
Like a cop, he palmed Pilchard’s head and pushed him in first, slid next to him, and then rolled down the window.
He shoved Pilchard’s chin on top of the glass.
I slid next to Tanner.
Cliff, after closing the door, said to the cabbie, “Columbus Circle, please.”
The driver hesitated to pull his flag.
“That’s not even a fare,” he said, and craned his neck around.
He considered Pilchard through the plastic partition.
Cliff stuffed a five in the money slot and smacked it closed.
“Just drive,” he said.
“He better not puke in my cab,” the driver said.
Pilchard did barf the moment we exited the taxi, spraying the street’s subway grates with tomato and cheese and then falling face-first, the odor from his guts wafting on the updraft.
Tanner dipped into a fireman’s carry and, with Pilchard on his shoulder, followed Cliff, who marched up the Paramount movie theater’s steps.
Raging Bull silently coursed its circumference via hundreds of bulbs, a magical marquee that made the title appear to travel its shape like a ticker.
“Where are we going?” I asked Cliff.
Tanner said, “Just keep up.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m leaving.”
“Then fucking go home,” Cliff said.
From this elevated landing, all of Columbus Circle came into view.
The wind, barreling down Broadway, seemed churned by the roundabout’s traffic, as if funneled by the GW building, and then whipped past the Coliseum— Ringling Bros.
and Barnum his eyelids peeled open.
“Do you know where you are?” Cliff asked.
Pilchard considered Cliff for a moment and smiled.
He said, “We’re at a party.”
Cliff said, “Do you know who I am?”
Pilchard reached out and tousled Cliff’s hair, then shook his head.
Cliff said, “You tried to hurt my family.”
Pilchard replied, “I didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Do you want to know where I’m sending you?”
And as if on cue, the conductor said, “This is the A train express.
Next stop, One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street.” By which time he’d backed off the car.
“Uptown, motherfucker.”