Everything Happens Today (14 page)

“I saw you holding hands. Are you gay lovers?”

“Wes won't have me. Says I'm too fat.”

“You're not fat. You're an awesome possum. I don't know what you see in Wes, though. He's so . . . so . . . ”

“I know what you mean, but he's not. He's actually a very cool dude. You should appreciate him more.”

“Oh, I
appreciate
him. I appreciate him so terribly terribly. But he's still a spazz.”

“I don't know. I guess I see something in him that nobody else does. Or almost nobody else. I mean, I've only known Wes three years, but we were best friends the day we met. Didn't you ever feel that way about anybody, Nors?”

“Bobby says, ‘Can I get you a hankie, princess?'”

“I'll take that as a no. Too bad, we could have had a radical future together, you and me.”

“You don't want to see the movie with us?”

“I'd sooner eat sweetbreads. Anyway, I have work to do. I'm serious though—you gotta tell me what that quote means, Wesbo. I've got a paper due on Wednesday. Stay beautiful, Nors.”

Wes and Nora watched James disappear into the crowd, then Nora took Wes by the hand and pulled him into the movie house. He bought her some popcorn and a diet soda, and they took their seats in the half-empty theater just as the previews were coming on. Wes sank into his seat, put his feet up on the back of the seat in front of him, and lowered his chin onto his knuckles. He was still thinking about Elliot Smith.

Wes had an idea about people who had died. He had this idea that we live behind the thinnest veil that prevents us from seeing the world as it really is, and that the very moment you die the veil is stripped away and you see and understand instantly and with perfect clarity every mistake you ever made and all the unhappiness that infused your life and infuses the lives of everyone you had known, of everyone who has ever lived. And then you spin around, you want to run right back and set it all right, share the good news with everyone—you've just died that very second and you don't realize that it's already too late to make up for it. It had been so close, so tantalizingly right before your eyes your entire life, and maybe even in rare moments when you had been filled with inexplicable sadness or compassion you had even caught the briefest glimpse of it, but you had never tried, or never tried hard enough, to push through it when it might have made a difference. Elliot Smith must have felt that way right after he'd died with that kitchen knife in his chest. Wes had never known anyone who had committed suicide, but James had had an uncle who had done it and whose memory haunted his life a little. James had adored his uncle, who was his mother's youngest brother and only ten years older than James himself. They'd been incredibly close, and the uncle had even lived with James's family for several years when James was little. This uncle was passionate and unpredictable, he was always exploding in fits of rage, but James knew—because the uncle had explained it to him at great length, and also just because—that his anger was born of pure love. But because he was so demanding, and most especially of those he claimed to love, nobody was ever pure or honest enough for James's uncle, and he had ended up cutting himself off from everyone around him. It turned out, too—which James could not possibly have known as a little kid—that his uncle was severely depressive and constantly going on and off his medication. In the end, he'd gone away to live by himself in southern France and stopped communicating with his family, and James had thought that he, too, had somehow betrayed his uncle by being dishonest or not loving enough, and when the news came that his uncle had killed himself it had been two years since James had last seen or heard from him. Wes often thought of James's uncle, because there was something in James's account of him that reminded him of his own father—certainly not the romantic idealism, and not the utter loneliness of his situation either, but the anger that, by rights, should have been expressed as love. There was hardly anything to choose between them, the love and the anger, but James's uncle and Wes's father had just missed coming down on the right side of the divide, and it had destroyed their lives. And Wes often thought of that moment when, with the gun still hot in his mouth, James's dead uncle had woken up to the truth and slapped his forehead in exasperation at his own stupidity, but it was too late, and what a mess he had left behind. Wes thought that it was probably too late for his father, too; he had invested too much already in all the paraphernalia that the blind need to get around in this world—but more than anything in the world this was what Wes hoped to avoid in his own life. Not the suicide, but that horrible, irremediable feeling that it would have been so easy to do so much better than you did, and to be kinder and more generous to those who deserved your kindness and generosity, and you hadn't done it.

Wes looked up from his knuckles to see that the movie had already begun. He had missed the first few minutes in his reveries, but it seemed to be about some irresistibly handsome and charming guy who was paid by other men to date their recalcitrant girlfriends and behave so obnoxiously that the girlfriends would go running back to their boyfriends, chastened and grateful. Within minutes Wes was able to forecast the entire plot, and also to determine that the movie was completely inappropriate for Nora. He looked around to see if there was anybody else in the audience as young as her, but there only seemed to be teenage girls in large groups and middle-aged men by themselves. On the screen, the gigolo guy was walking through a bar full of beautiful women, every one of whom turned in their seats to watch him pass and make nakedly lewd eye contact. Since the gigolo guy's best friend had already showed himself to be a well-intentioned, pure-hearted nerd, it stood to reason that he would eventually ask the gigolo to perform his services on the girl he was in love with and that the gigolo would, in turn, fall in love with the best friend's girl and experience a life-altering conversion that he would have to spend the rest of the movie extricating himself from. But why, Wes asked himself in despair, did the movies always have to hammer home the point that women are attracted to selfish, shallow dicks? It was such a bad lesson for Nora to learn, and besides it wasn't true. Even at Dalton, the jocks had to behave kindly and sensitively if they wanted a crack at the finest chicks, and plenty of brainy, bookish guys had girlfriends, even if they weren't always on the a-list. Wes didn't think Delia was attracted to bad boys, though in truth he'd never known her to date anyone and had never met anyone who had dated her. And then, look at Lucy—she could have her choice of any boy at school, and probably not a few of their dads if she wanted, and she'd chosen him, Wes.

“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. “What time is it?”

“Shhh,” Nora said without taking her eyes from the screen or the straw from her lips.

“I've gotta go.”

Nora turned to him with a look of alarm. “You can't go! What about me?”

“I've got to meet someone. I totally forgot. I've got to do it.”

“Wes!”

“You can stay. I'll meet you downstairs at the foot of the escalator when the movie's over. Just don't talk to anybody. If anyone tries to sit next to you, move over next to those girls over there, okay?”

“Wes!”

“I'm really sorry, cookie. I've got to run.”

Wes was not half-way down the escalator when he felt the phone vibrating in his back pocket. Without breaking stride, he pulled it out. It was Delia calling, and it was 2:54. Wes went to push the “ignore” button but his finger changed its mind and pushed “answer” instead. He put the phone to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it's Delia.”

“Oh hey.”

“Did you get my message?”

“No, what message?”

“I left you a message earlier. You didn't get it?”

“What did it say?”

“Well, I was wondering if you wanted to hang out later?”

“When?”

“Like, tonight, maybe?”

“Can't do it. Too much work, and I'm making dinner for my mom.”

“Oh. Did you have a good time last night?”

“Hmm.”

“I missed you. I mean, we talked and everything, but you seemed a little out of it. I really wanted to talk to you. What happened to you?”

“I went home early. I wasn't feeling so good. What did you want to talk about?”

“Oh whatever. You free tomorrow?”

“Probably. Maybe. It'll depend on how my paper goes. Can I call you in the morning?”

“Yeah, sure. I'd really like to see you.”

“Me too. I'll call you.”

Wes had to stop to catch his breath, even though he had not been running. It was not at all like Delia to want to just “hang out.” When had she ever called him just to hang out? Could it possibly be a coincidence that she had done it for the first time ever today of all days? He wondered what she knew about last night, and if she was only playing innocent. Some people might think of that as being manipulative, but Wes thought it was the considerate thing to do, and in any case as far as she was concerned he had nothing to hide. It would be surprising, a little odd even, if she hadn't caught at least a whiff of the gossip that must have been spreading all day, but then again she'd always been a little aloof from the life of the school, as if her mind were already somewhere in the future, at Yale or Brown or whatever Ivy was sure to accept her, a place where she could finally study philosophy and religion among her intellectual peers. So Wes thought it quite possible, after all, that she had not heard a thing, at least not yet. And if she had heard something, as she was eventually sure to do, how would she react? She might be happy for him, but more likely she would find it a little distasteful and sordid. She might be a little disappointed in him, and then shrug her shoulders and dismiss it as typical boyish behavior, and think that she might have been wrong about Wes, that he wasn't so different from everybody else after all. There were strictures in Buddhism for sure, the importance of self-control and resisting unhealthy distractions, but Wes was pretty sure those mostly applied to monks and nuns; even so it seemed almost impossible to imagine that she could hear of what he had done and think of him in the same way afterwards.

He remembered the weekend she had invited him to her family's house in the dunes at Napeague. Not long after they had first talked at the drug-awareness circle, she had approached him in the hallway and handed him a kind of beginner's handbook of Buddhism. He had read it straight through the night and returned it to her the next day with a request for more. After that, he had in effect become her student, ploughing through her reading lists, asking pointed questions, just skeptical enough to show that he was taking it all very seriously but careful never to come across jaded or cynical. He had even sat in on one of her classes, taught by a famous master who only came to the city from Boston once a month. Wes genuinely enjoyed the learning and tried to incorporate some of the most simple tenets of the discipline, such as mindfulness and basic meditation techniques, into his daily schedule, but always plagued by a nagging sense that he might be doing it all just to impress her or ingratiate himself. After all, he did intend to allow her to seduce and deflower him, whenever she felt the time was right.

When he was little, Wes had thought he was very rich because his family lived in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. No other pupil at his local elementary school, not one, had lived in a house. But when he went to Dalton on scholarship, he found that he was not rich at all, and that until then he hadn't even known what it meant to be rich. His father explained that when they'd bought the house with a down-payment out of his first advance, long before Wes was born, that part of the Village close to the water had still been an isolated and kind of scary neighborhood, and real estate there had been cheap. And even though Wes's mom had inherited a shitload of money when her parents died—money that made it possible for their grandchildren to attend fancy private schools and for their daughter to be attended by a live-in aide now that she was sick—they could never afford to make the same move today. So in his early days at Dalton Wes had had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about money issues and did not necessarily encourage downtown play dates or sleepovers because his home was kind of run-down and ratty compared to theirs. By the same token, he had been reluctant to accept invitations to weekend homes in the Hamptons or Litchfield County. Having grown up closely observing his father, he already knew what it felt like to be torn between contempt and envy, and he didn't necessarily need it rubbed in his face. But there was never a moment's hesitation about accepting Delia's offer.

It was a fine Indian summer Saturday morning when Wes took an early jitney to Amagansett and Delia met him in the family Mercedes station wagon. On the ten-minute drive, she was at pains to downplay the house. It was just a ramshackle old cottage, she said, bought decades earlier when Napeague was nowhere. Theodore Roosevelt had lived in it when the Rough Riders were stationed in Montauk, but then it had been picked up and transported by barge to its current location. It was really nothing, she insisted, but it was in a beautiful spot. Wes played along, sharing his own family story about living in a beautiful house they could never afford if they had to buy it today, but he knew she was snowing him, and he appreciated it. There weren't many girls at Dalton who would go to the same trouble. The car turned into a development of ugly, modern beach houses on tiny, sand-swept plots arranged in a grid. For a moment Wes wondered if Delia had actually been telling the truth about the modesty of her house, but then the road ended and she pulled into a driveway overgrown with wisteria and beach plum, and when she removed the key from the ignition the roar of the surf was the only sound to be heard.