Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn (28 page)

_{it's not the bet}

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, an hour before leaving for New York with Nicholas, Gid pays a visit to the mail
room, annoyed with himself as he goes. There hasn't been a response from Molly yet, so why should there be one
today? The mail room has that bustling, pre-vacation feeling. Everyone is red-cheeked and happy and carrying a
large duffel bag.

But there is an envelope. It's red, like Molly's coat. This makes Gid optimistic. He tears into it.
Gideon. It's not the bet Molly.

Gideon winces. Couldn't it have been something just good or bad? Something he could hang a real mood on?

A few hours later, Gideon sits on the Amtrak in the window seat. Nicholas is next to him, asleep, still attracting
a lot of attention. Prep school girls and college girls too
—the hot ones in their heels and jeans and the shlumpy ones
padding around in sweats and PJs—keep passing back and forth. They've clearly been sent by their friends to
check him out, because they're all trying not to smile. The prep school girls tuck their embarrassed but excited faces
into the placards of Fair Isle sweaters. The college girls just leer. The lucky asshole. He gets attention even when
he's asleep. If I looked like that, all these girls wouldn't ignore me, Gid thinks, i would never have had the bet made
about me. I would be going out with a girl like Pilar. And I wouldn't have been forced to be mean to Molly McGarry.

Come on, Gideon! Do you really believe you've been forced? He doesn't. He knows that the bet and he and
the guys at some point all have become one. He just knows he didn't start it.

He presses the recline button and sinks back to think about whether starting something and not stopping it are
the same thing.

"Excuse me." Gid turns to see a putty-faced man, dandruff dusting the shoulders of his shiny black suit. "This

is a brand-new laptop. Watch it." Gideon hikes his seat back up, only halfway. The man fidgets and makes annoyed
noises. Gid watches the cold, rocky shoreline of Connecticut, remembering a Discovery Channel special he
watched in which some tribe in the deep forests of Brazil had to dedicate most of their waking hours to some
ridiculously unpleasant, disgusting, and dangerous task
—like the only food they ate was some venomous beetle that
had to be picked out from the teeth of a charging animal, or they lived in huts that could only be held together with
nails from some metal that could only be forged on the hottest day of the year. And after showing these miserable
creatures and their hideous engagements with mere survival, the narrator said in a detached, matter-of-fact, and
creepily drawn-out voice, "This is their wooooorld. They live under theeeese terms." And that just settled it. Well, in a
weird way, it did.

I have my world, Gideon thinks, comforted by the tap-tap of laptop keys behind him. I have my terms.

Another Fair Isle-sweater girl walks by. She looks right through him, fixating on Nicholas instead. Gid feels no
anger. She lives under her terms.

"You've been to New York before, right?" Nicholas asks as they pull into Penn Station. Gid feels important in
the bustle of people arranging to get off the train.

"Yeah," he says. "I mean, I've been to, like, Radio City Music Hall and the Empire State Building."

"That's not New York, honey." A white-haired woman is popping out the wheels and handle on a black rollaway.
She's carrying a canvas bag printed with the phrase WNYC:
Exercise Your Mind.
"New York is about jazz, art,
cafes. You'll show him the real city. Some real nights on the town," she says, winking at Nicholas and then waddling
off, duck-footed in rain boots.

"The real city," Nicholas says. "Those kind of people are so annoying. When they opened a Gap in the Village,
she probably cried."

They take the subway, which is exciting and different. Gideon's heard a lot of weird things about the subway,
how it's all homeless people just trying to rip diamonds off your neck and out of your ears, and is surprised to see
mostly quiet, orderly people reading books or staring straight ahead. The ride takes just a few minutes.

They emerge to dusk and the pulse of Christmas lights, and Gid nods, contented, beginning to relax, feeling a
buoyant anticipation he can't quite place.

I think I know what it is. I love staying with my friends' parents. Other people's parents are almost always great.
They give you food. They have different stuff than your family, usually better. And otherwise, they basically ignore
you. It's heaven. And Nicholas only has a mother. Single parents are always nicer than both parents. Single parents
want to please you.

On the short walk to Nicholas's apartment Gid observes that this neighborhood seems to be almost entirely
populated by doormen and old men and women, the women frowning in tweed, the men bleary-eyed in trench coats,
walking small dogs. Most of the buildings are beautiful, with giant windows, draped with sumptuous amounts of pine

boughs and red ribbons. A few, though, the newer ones, are white, ugly, and look like cruise ships, set upright from
bow to stern. "Where are we?" Gid asks.

"This," Nicholas says ominously, "is Park Avenue. The heart of the Upper East Side."

A neatly dressed pretty girl about their age walks by wearing a red coat. Gideon thinks about Molly and her note. It's not the bet. It's sick-making and reassuring all at once. It's not the bet. What does this mean? That she
hated him all along? No, she liked him. Her face when she talked to him, she always looked so happy.

I'm glad to see he's trying to work it out logically. Thinking. It's good for teenage boys to remember to think,
because otherwise they just won't.

Okay, so when he told her about the bet, she didn't seem that upset. Right? Is he dreaming this? He heard
about an artist once who tape-recorded all of his conversations. Maybe he should start doing that? It's not the bet.
"Not the bet," he says out loud.

Nicholas groans. "Why are you thinking about the bet right now? Molly's not even here. Take a break."

Easy for him to say.

Then they're turning in to Nicholas's building, walking under a gated stone archway attended by a blue-suited
doorman who calls out, "Nicholas!" He's white-haired and his uniform stretches tightly over his short, squat body.
"Staying in trouble?"

Nicholas walks over to him and shakes his hand. "How's it going, Kenny?"

"I can't complain," Kenny says, patting his stomach. "At least not to the tenants!" He barks out a laugh that
follows them into an enormous courtyard. Its expanse is dizzying. It's the size of a football field, with turrets in the
corners and little stone outbuildings manned by more blue-suited doormen, some with clipboards, some talking on
phones. It looks more like a medieval fortress than an apartment building. "You live here?" Gid asks. Nicholas's flat
reply, "Yes, all my life," warns him that he should probably keep his amazement to himself.

Yet another blue-suited doorman greets them in the elevator, which is some gloriously rich wood, with brass fixtures polished to a mind-bending shine. He presses a button reading PHC. Penthouse C. Gid smiles to himself.
Penthouse City!

"This is your real mom, right?" Gid says.

Nicholas nods. "If we were going to my stepmother's right now, I would be acting like a total asshole:'

Gideon has always hoped Nicholas had some awareness of taking out his stress and anger on other people.
This comment fills him with tenderness.

The elevator door opens. Advancing toward them, a white Pekingese beside her, is a slimly upright,
strenuously youthful brunette. She takes Nicholas's face into her hands. "Darling," she says. She kisses one cheek,
then the next. Then she stands back and regards Gideon.

"I'm Gideon," he says when he feels he has been stared at too long to not speak. "I live with Nicholas."

"Oh, Gideon!" She clasps Gideon's hand. The dog turns in excited circles. "You must be so thrilled to be in
New York!" She bends down and ruffles the dog's head. "Who's Mommy's baby? Who is Mommy's baby bear!"

Dinner is order-in Chinese food. Gid stuffs himself. There are two different kinds of noodles, shrimp with
broccoli, spare ribs, and, for Nicholas, some wet, unappetizing tofu thing. His mother's filled up the refrigerator with
distilled water and jugs of green tea. She just sits there beaming and watching her son eat, now and then picking a
few strings of vegetable from the crevice of an egg roll. Gid can't remember when he's seen someone look so
happy.

And parental love is a powerful thing, because Nicholas seems happy too. The relaxed glow on his face is
something new.

Afterward they go into a little paneled room dominated by a flat-screen TV. Nicholas lets him man the remote.
"Where did your mother go?" Gid asks. He flips past the Powerpuff Girls, beefy-faced guys in suits, squirrels
running up a tree.

Nicholas shrugs. "She takes the dog out. She wanders around."

So she's in training to become one of those old people that walks around the Upper East Side.

"She looks so young," Gid says. What he really means is, she looks weird.

Nicholas nods. "She works out for, like, three hours a day," he says. "She wants to get married again."

"Do you think she will?"

Nicholas walks to the door and shuts it carefully. "No," he says quietly, as if his mother could hear him in the
streets. "No one wants to marry an old lady."

"She's not old," Gid says.

"She's not young either," Nicholas says. "I mean, she has wrinkles and she has to take calcium. And
Metamucil."

Gid can't argue with this. They watch a show about tuna-fishing off of Japan. Some old British guy interviews
Japanese fishermen, and one appears to get angry with him. There are subtitles. "We are not trying to do anything
wrong. We are just doing what we know how to do. What we must do. What other option do we have?"

Gideon nods sagely. "This is their world," he says. "They live under these terms."

Nicholas smiles. He seems to understand.

"Hey," Gid says suddenly. "Show me a picture of your sister."

Nicholas's sister is at boarding school in Switzerland. She's not coming home for the holiday. Nicholas pulls
out a couple of drawers, leafs through some albums, and hands Gideon a short stack of photographs. God. She is

beautiful, a girl version of Nicholas. Electric blue eyes (scary husky!), dark hair, a ripe, naturally red mouth. She's
prettier, actually, than he is good-looking.

"So level with me," Gid says. "Does
she
like Cullen?"

Tm sorry to say that she does. I am the sole reason they haven't gotten together yet."

Gid smiles inside. If he wins the bet, he will become part of an important historical moment in their friendship.

Gideon gets his very own room. Mrs. Westerbeck shows it to him with much fluttering apology. "It's very small,
but I think you'll be comfortable. At least I hope so!" The room isn't large, but Gid finds the Danish modern sofa bed,
Japanese prints on the wall, and giant windows overlooking the median of Park Avenue completely luxurious.

"Now, shall we leave these drapes open?" She opens them. "Or closed?" She closes them. "What do we

think?"

"It's okay," Gid says. "I can figure it out."

Mrs. Westerbeck's whole body deflates.

"Why don't you open them, then?"

Her body inflates again. "Fine," she says. With a flourish, she sends each drape sailing off to the edges of the
window. Gid smiles at her, sharing in her small delight.

It's so cute how sweet he can be. And so sweet how cute he can be. I make myself sick. But seriously, he
could tell that she wanted to fix the drapes for him, and he let her. Most guys wouldn't have picked up on that, and if
they had, they would have thought she was just a lunatic. But Gid understands. She's in her element. And he knows
how much he likes to be in his.

Gid notices a black-and-white photo sitting next to his bedside table of a man who looks like Nicholas. It must be Nicholas's dad. He looks away from it, but Mrs. Westerbeck grabs it up. "Tom," she says. "Nicholas's dad. Right
after we got married. I met him on a blind date, my very last month at Vassar. 1 remember thinking, Oh, my, what a
catch! What a wonderful man."

God, Gid thinks, maybe I should set her up with my dad. But he would be so uncomfortable here. He'd feel like
he was going to break something.