I also felt profoundly out of place. I didn’t belong at Exeter, though I couldn’t exactly express why. Part of it was money. I was there on an academic scholarship, not because I had connections or power. I was there to be a nerd, though I was also there to escape my mother, or else I was there to stop being myself and somehow become a character in a novel, only I had not become a character in a novel, even as everyone around me appeared to have successfully done so. I alone, of all my peers, had remained homely and real, and I assumed that this was transparently obvious to everyone.
The things that had happened to Grandma Sylvia hadn’t happened to me, and yet they altered me. In high school, that SS officer and my grandmother hovered just outside the realm of the visible, giving the lie to the grand glory that was Exeter, the easy confidence of those brick buildings, those Latin inscriptions, the beautiful children of powerful men scuttling up and down marble staircases in their blazers, laughing in dining halls over jokes that were no more insightful or interesting than the jokes told in any school cafeteria anywhere in America, but which were confused and amplified by the self-importance of youth and money. I did not feel self-important. I was not capable of it, even though in retrospect I can see that there was a kind of morbid egocentricity to the way I held myself apart.
I indulged the ghostlike feeling that would sometimes come over me even when I was with a group of people, in the locker room after wrestling practice, in the common room of my dorm. In the midst of raucous laughter or the most absurd pseudo-philosophical argument, I could become suddenly silent, pulled away to some other non-real space that I associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with the gas chambers.
What Sylvia had lived was a life. What I was living was some sort of cheap knockoff of a life. Never would anything as exciting, as epic, as painful, as important happen to me. What was worse was that I worried that if I ever were put in the same sort of situations as my grandmother, I would fail miserably. It is embarrassing for a young man to grow up feeling his grandmother was more of a man than he, but the idea of fighting Nazis hand to hand in the forests of Poland terrified me. Not only was my life a cheap knockoff of the past, I was a cheap knockoff of a person.
And so I studied Russian, wrestled, told jokes, and ate gross amounts of Top Ramen at night with my friend Taisei, a boy from Tokyo whose parents had unfathomable amounts of money. I quietly and hungrily read the poems I was assigned in English class, and sometimes got choked up in my room, smoking a forbidden cigarette out the window, thinking about my grandmother. If the other guys were thinking about such things, they did not let me know it. And so my isolation felt as simple and complete as the snow.
But from the moment I met Kat, everything was hypercharged, overly vivid, awkward, frantic. There was no chance for me to hold myself apart, I was plunged into reality like being shoved into a swimming pool. Kat often made fun of me, and yet she kept wanting to see me. After a week of awkwardly crossing paths (I was following her around), she began inviting me to do homework with her in the library, a wonderful brick building with huge open spaces designed by Louis Kahn. That library always made me feel like we were hiding inside some kind of puzzle toy built for giants.
She knew of an old abandoned bathroom on the basement floor of the Academy Building, which she could pry open with her ID card and which we used as our secret hangout. The knowledge of this secret room, which was filled with huge, basketball-size dust bunnies and housed a collection of broken radiators in one corner, was a secret passed down through her dorm, Amen. Amen girls were reputed to be weird and prudish, but perhaps this was because they kept their wonderful bathroom a secret. Only one girl in each grade was told about the bathroom, and that year it had been Katya, who had elected to tell no one but me. She would give me hand jobs with peach-scented lotion while I read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” out loud in the echoing silence.
She was a maddening girl, prone to eating baby food out of jars with a tiny spoon and defending the possibility of extraterrestrials. The walls of her room were papered in images of Marilyn Monroe. She convinced me to sneak out one night and meet her in the woods where we tried to get high on a bottle of Robitussin. I remember she had stolen a red carnation from one of the tables in the dining hall, and she was wearing the wilted thing tucked behind one ear, the red hyper-vivid against her dark hair in the moonlight. We did not get high, just felt terrible and sick, but she let me kiss her for more than an hour, standing in the woods, swaying with the trees, and I remember I had my hands on her rib cage and I could feel the little pull and push of her bones as she breathed in and out. “Lucas,” she would say, “you are mine. Tell me you are mine.”
“I am yours,” I would say, flabbergasted by the drama of those words. Life was finally happening to me. Everything else had been a dry run, a dress rehearsal for this.
—
“That lady was totally into you,” Vera said at dinner. “Can I order a beer?”
We had decided to try out the Belgian place that was the ground floor of our apartment building.
“You shouldn’t drink alcohol on your meds,” I said.
“Mom lets me.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “And that lady wasn’t into me.”
“Was too,” Vera said. “And I approve. Anyone is better than Amanda.”
I was flustered. What had been bad about Amanda? I had been unaware that Vera even had an opinion. “Well, Amanda and I aren’t seeing each other anymore,” I said.
“Good. When did that happen?”
“A few months ago.”
“Way to keep me in the loop. Was it mutual?” she asked.
I shrugged. I hadn’t told her because she’d had enough going on in her life at the time. And it had been mutual in the sense that I had slowly begun to feel like I was suffocating to death but was unwilling to do anything about it until finally Amanda broke up with me for not having proposed marriage to her in a timely fashion. Actually, my arguments as it was happening were all fairly rationaclass="underline" If we weren’t ready to have kids, there was no point in getting married. The wedding industry was a mega scam, it was just a way to get people to spend money they didn’t have. Maybe she wanted a wedding more than she wanted me, blah, blah. But the sheer relief I felt once it was over made me understand that she had been right all along. I hadn’t wanted to marry her. It was a crushing kind of realization, really. I was thirty-five and unmarried. It seemed indicative of something pretty damning, even though I wasn’t sure exactly what the damning thing was.
“Well, you could do way better,” Vera said. “She was younger than you and everything, but she was kinda fat.”
I sighed. “This is one of the areas,” I said, “where the fact that you are only seventeen is really pertinent, because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Vera laughed, clearly delighted to have someone to spar with. “Oh, I don’t? Explain it to me.”
“I don’t even want to. The amount you don’t understand is just—” I made a motion like my head was exploding.
“Oh, I get it!” she said. “You like them chubby!”
Against my will, I blushed flame red. I don’t think I had blushed so hard since I was eleven or twelve years old.