And there wasn’t anything to do. I’d tried, twice. Once with Natalie. Once with the car. And neither try had worked. There was no way to change things. I wouldn’t get bit again. If I couldn’t make a friend, OK, I’d get along without. If I couldn’t absentmindedly drive off a cliff and kill myself, OK, I’d stay alive. One attempt had been just as stupid as the other.
I knew my mother was worried about me, but it didn’t bother me much. What she wanted for me was to be (1) alive, (2) normal. I was alive, and I was doing pretty much everything she wanted me to do. If it didn’t produce normality, it ought to at least produce a pretty good fifty-year imitation of it. She also wanted me to be (3) happy, but that rabbit I could not produce out of the hat for her. I didn’t do any crazy things, or sulk, or quarrel, or go on drugs, or refuse to eat her cookies and pies, or join the American Communist Party, or anything. I just stayed in my own room a lot and kept to myself, and I’d always pretty much done that. So she figured I couldn’t be too unhappy; it was just a mood. I know she knew it had something to do with Natalie Field. As I said, my mother is a highly intelligent person. But all that could be labelled, after all, as puppy love, growing pains, perfectly normal.
My father, who didn’t really know what he wanted for me, was more worried about me than she was, though I don’t know if he knew it. I knew it from the way he talked to me. Sort of formal and uncertain. He didn’t know what to say to me any more. And I didn’t know what to say to him. And neither of us could do anything about it. But what did it really matter anyhow?
One thing I did was take a lot of showers. You can be really alone in the shower with the water running loud and a lot of steam and fog. I also went to a lot of movies with Mike and Jason. Sometimes I borrowed dad’s car for going to the movies. We had both figured it was important that I drive again as soon as possible, so that I wouldn’t get uptight. It wasn’t easy—for him or me—the first couple of times, but it worked out fine (maybe this is one purpose of selective amnesia) , and it was a sort of ray of hope for him. Maybe Owen wasn’t a total loss. After all, a lot of teen-age boys wreck cars. It’s almost a virile kind of thing to have done.
One thing I couldn’t do, though, was homework. It was just too pointless. I’d always been able to get by when I was bored with a course by just sort of throwing words around and dazzling the teachers; but now I was bored even with the math course I had, and you can’t get by in math by throwing words around. I just stopped doing the assignments, and I cut the tests. Advanced math courses are small, and the teacher noticed right away and tried to say something about it to me; but I just said, “Yeah,” and mumbled. There’s nothing a teacher can do, really. In my other courses, they were so used to me being good that they didn’t notice I wasn’t being good any more; so long as I showed up in class they assumed I was the same as always. And I didn’t cut much. I would have, because school drove me crazy, not so much the classes as the halls full of people all talking to each other, and the way they watch you walk past and so on; but what else was there to do? If I stayed home, my mother was there, and I couldn’t walk around the city all day.
So March went by and most of April went by. All fog. Fog and movies.
I was walking home from school one afternoon by one of my variant routes, and passed the First Congregational Church. A sign outside it announced that Friday night there would be the spring performance of the Civic Orchestra, Leila Bone, soprano, works by Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Antonio Vivaldi, and Natalie Field.
It’s a beautiful name: Field. I see the curve of a field on a summer-colored hill, under the sky. Or the long furrows on a winter field, dark brown, throwing shadows in the long sunlight.
It hurt a lot. It hurt incredibly much, and not a clean hurt either, because half of it was envy, the lowest kind of envy. But no matter how low I got, and it was unbelievable to me how low it was, still there were a couple of things I couldn’t do.
One of them was, I couldn’t not go to hear the first public performance of compositions by Natalie Field.
So as I walked on past the church, I already knew I had to go. But the idea of going, and going alone, of course, was part of the hurt. It seemed like the end of something. It was the last thing I had to do that meant anything, and it was just left over from the time before, when things used to mean something. After it, there wouldn’t be anything left to do. Ever.
I got home, and the mail had come. There was a letter for me from the admissions office of MIT. My mother had left it out on the chest in the like the end of something. It was the last thing I took it up to my room and read it. It said I had been admitted, and they would give me a full tuition scholarship. I should at least have felt a little proud or, what’s the word, vindicated, but I didn’t. It made no difference whatever. The scholarship was still way short of what it would cost to get to Massachusetts and live there and pay all the costs, and anyhow I wasn’t going there. I was supposed to answer within ten days, but I just stuck the letter into the drawer of the desk and forgot about it. I mean I really did forget about it. It just didn’t mean anything.
Jason wanted to go to a show Friday night, but I said I was doing something with my parents; and I told them that I was going to the show with Jason. I was doing a lot of lying like that. Just dumb lies that didn’t hurt anybody or make any big difference; it was just easier to tell lies about things than to tell the truth. If I told Jason I didn’t want to go to a show, he would have argued. If I told either him or my parents that I was going to hear this concert at a church, they would have thought it was a funny thing to do, and I was sick and tired of always being the only person who ever did funny things. They might even have noticed the sign then and seen Natalie’s name, and that was none of their business. And Jason might have come with me, because he was so bored he’d do almost anything so long as there was somebody to do it with. So it was a lot easier to lie about it. If you lied about enough things, then everybody else got involved in the fog, too, and they couldn’t see you, or touch you at all.
I felt very peculiar going there, Friday night. It was late April and one of the first warm nights, warm and windy, all the flowers out in the gardens, and clouds blowing across the stars. Walking to the church I felt dizzy. You know that feeling where you seem to have done something before? Well, this was just the opposite. It was as if I’d never seen any of the streets before, though I walked them twice a day, five days a week. Everything was different. I felt like a stranger in the late evening in a strange city. It was frightening, but I liked it too, in a way. I thought, what if none of the people in the houses I passed and the cars passing me were speaking English, what if they were all speaking some language I didn’t know, and this was really a foreign city I had never seen before, and I only thought I’d lived here all my life because I was going crazy.
I looked at things, the trees, the houses, the way a tourist would, and it really seemed to be true, I’d never seen them before. The wind kept blowing in my face.
When I got to the church and other people were going in, I felt very nervous and irritable. I sort of crept in. I would have gone on all fours if I could have, so as to be less visible. It was a big old church, mostly wood, hollow and dark and high inside. Since I’d never been in it, it was easy to keep up the feeling of being a total stranger, a foreigner. There were quite a lot of people there and more coming in, but I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t know where Natalie would sit, probably down in front, so I took a seat at the end of a pew in the last row, clear across the church from where the people came in, behind a pillar, as inconspicuous a place as I could find. I didn’t want to see or be seen. I wanted to be alone. The only people I saw that I knew even by sight were two girls from school, maybe friends of Natalie’s.