8
THE BLESSED HEART ACADEMY HEADMASTER could be seen lately taking short, plodding walks along Venetian Village’s lone street, usually around sunset, shuffling his great heft carefully and gingerly, as if his legs could, at any moment, shatter. The cane he walked with was a recent acquisition, and the headmaster seemed to enjoy how regal it made him look. It was actually pretty incredible how his stooped body and painful-looking limp could be improved so much by the simple addition of a cane. Now he seemed nobly impaired. Like a war hero. The cane’s shaft was made of oak and stained to a rich ebony. A pearl handle was attached to the top by a pewter collar etched with patterns of fleur-de-lis. Neighbors were relieved at the addition of the cane because it made the headmaster’s pain not quite so visibly obvious, and so they did not feel required to ask him how he felt, and thus they did not have to endure yet another conversation about the Sickness. This was a topic that had frankly run itself dry in the last six months. The headmaster had by now told all his neighbors about the Sickness, the mysterious affliction that no doctor could diagnose and no medicine could cure. The symptoms were well-known up and down the block: tightness in his chest; shallow breathing; profuse sweating; uncontrollable salivation; abdominal cramps; blurry vision; fatigue; lethargy; general allover weakness; headache; dizziness; loss of appetite; slow heartbeat; and an odd involuntary twitching and rippling of the muscles just under his skin that he would horribly show to neighbors if it flared up while they were talking. The spells came either in the middle of the day or in the middle of the night, lasting roughly four to six hours before magically ceasing on their own. He was shockingly candid and personal about the details of his condition. He spoke in that manner of people experiencing catastrophic illness, how the illness eclipsed previous gentlemanly notions of modesty and privacy. He told people how confusing it was, priority-wise, when he needed to vomit and diarrhea at the same time. The neighbors nodded and smiled tightly and tried not to betray how awful this was to listen to, because their children—and indeed all the children of Venetian Village—attended Blessed Heart Academy, and it was widely known that the headmaster could pull some serious strings. One phone call from him to the dean of admissions at Princeton or Yale or Harvard or Stanford could improve a child’s chances by about a thousand percent. Everyone knew this, so they suffered the headmaster’s long and vivid descriptions of medical procedures and bodily effluence because they thought of it as a kind of investment in their child’s education and future. So yes, they knew about his many trips to various expensive specialists, allergists, oncologists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists, his MRIs and CT scans and unpleasant organ biopsies. He made the same joke every time about how the best money he’d spent so far was on his cane. (It was, as canes go, breathtakingly beautiful, the neighbors had to agree.) He maintained that the best medicine was being active and outdoors, thus his evening walks and twice-daily soaks—once in the morning, once at night—in his backyard saltwater hot tub, which he said was one of the few joys left in his life.
Some of the less charitable neighbors insisted privately that the reason for his evening walks wasn’t health but the opportunity to complain for an hour like the goddamn sympathy-seeking tyrant he really was. They would not tell this to anyone else, maybe a spouse but that’s it, because they knew how selfish and insensitive and callous it sounded, that the headmaster was genuinely sick with a mysterious illness that caused a terrific amount of pain and mental anguish, and yet they were the ones who felt like victims, they were the ones who felt aggrieved, because they were forced to listen to it. And sometimes on these nights they felt under siege, attending to the headmaster for sixty tedious minutes before getting rid of him and retiring to their entertainment rooms to try to squeeze some enjoyment out of what was left of the evening. They turned on the television and saw some news story about another goddamn humanitarian crisis, another goddamn civil war in some godforsaken place, and saw images of wounded people or starving children and felt a bright, bitter anger at the children for invading and ruining the only moments of relaxation and “me time” the neighbors had all day. The neighbors would get a little indignant here, about how their own lives were hard too, and yet nobody heard them complaining about it. Everyone had problems—why couldn’t they just quietly deal with them? On their own? With a bit of self-respect? Why did they have to get everyone else involved? It’s not like the neighbors could do anything. It’s not like civil wars were their fault.
Of course, they would never say this out loud. And the headmaster never suspected they thought this. But some of his most proximate neighbors had taken to leaving the lights off and sitting around in the dusky darkness until they saw him pass by. Others arranged early dinners out at restaurants at prime headmaster-walking times. Certain homes down the block had perfected a system of total avoidance, which was why the headmaster sometimes made it all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac and knocked on the Fall household door and asked to come in for some coffee, which was what happened the first time Samuel was allowed to spend the night at Bishop’s house.
His first sleepover. Samuel’s dad drove him and was plainly stunned when they pulled up to Venetian Village’s large front copper gates.
“Your friend lives here?” he said. Samuel nodded.
The security guard at the gate asked to see Henry’s license, asked him to fill out a form, sign a waiver, and explain the nature of his visit.
“We’re not going to the White House,” he told the guard. It was not a joke. There was venom in his voice.
“Do you have any collateral?” the guard asked.
“What?”
“You have not been preapproved, so I’ll need some collateral. To insure against damages or violations.”
“What do you think I’m going to do?”
“It’s policy. Do you have a credit card?”
“I’m not going to give you my credit card.”
“It’s only temporary. Like I said, for collateral purposes.”
“I’m just dropping off my son.”
“You’re leaving your son? Okay, that will do.”
“For what?”
“For collateral.”
The guard actually followed them in a golf cart, and Henry delivered Samuel to the Fall house with a brief hug, said “Be good” and “Call me if you need me,” and then glared pure hatred at the security guard as he got back into his car. Samuel watched as both his father and the golf cart disappeared up Via Veneto. He held his backpack, which contained some overnight clothes and, at the bottom, the cassette tape he’d bought at the mall for Bethany.
Tonight he would give her the present.
They were all there—Bishop, Bethany, their parents—they were all waiting, in the same room, which Samuel had never seen before, all of them inhabiting the same space at the same time. And another person too, at the piano, Samuel recognized him: the headmaster. The same headmaster who had expelled Bishop from Blessed Heart Academy now sat taking up all the space on the bench in front of the family’s B?sendorfer baby grand.
“Hi there,” Samuel said, to nobody in particular, to the aggregate mass of them.
“So you’re the friend from the new school?” the headmaster said.
Samuel nodded.
“It’s good to see he’s fitting in,” the headmaster said. This remark was made about Bishop, but it was made to Bishop’s father. Bishop sat in an upholstered antique wooden chair and looked small. It was as if the headmaster’s large presence had colonized the room. He was one of those men whose body exactly matched his disposition. His voice was big. His body was big. He sat bigly, his legs far apart and his chest puffed out.
Bishop inhabited the farthest seat from the headmaster, arms crossed, feet under him, a tight little angry ball. He leaned so far back in his chair it seemed he wanted to physically dissolve into it. Bethany sat nearer the piano, perfectly upright, as she always did, on the edge of her chair, ankles crossed, hands in her lap.
“Back to it!” the headmaster said. He swiveled to face the piano and placed a hand on the keys. “Now don’t cheat.”
Bethany turned her head away from the piano and looked directly at Samuel. His chest seized, her stare carried such voltage. He fought the urge to look away.
The headmaster pounded a single note on the piano, a strong, dark, low note that Samuel could feel in his body.
“That’s an A,” Bethany said.
“Correct!” the headmaster said. “Again.”
Another note, this time near the top of the keyboard, a delicate plink.
“That’s C,” Bethany said. She still stared at Samuel, expressionless.
“Right again!” the headmaster said. “Let’s make it more challenging.”
He hit three keys at once, and what came out was dissonant and ugly. It sounded like what an infant might do bashing the piano incoherently. Bethany’s stare seemed to disengage for a moment—it was as if her consciousness receded, the way her eyes went glassy and remote. But then she came back and said, “B flat, C, C sharp.”
“That’s amazing!” the headmaster said, clapping.
“Can I go?” Bishop said.
“I’m sorry?” his father said. “What was that?”
“Can I go?” Bishop said.
“Maybe if you learn to ask correctly.”
And here Bishop finally raised his head and met his father’s eyes. They held each other’s gaze like that for an uncomfortable few seconds. “May I please be excused?” Bishop said.
“Yes you may.”
In the game room it was clear Bishop did not want to talk. He jammed Missile Command into the Atari. He sat stone-faced and quiet while he shot rockets out of the air. Then Bishop grew agitated and said “Fuck this, let’s watch a movie,” and he started a film they’d seen several times before, about a group of teenagers who defend their town from a surprise Russian invasion. They were about twenty minutes into the movie when Bethany opened the door and slipped in.
“He’s gone,” she said.
“Good.”
Samuel could not believe how much his stomach flopped whenever he saw her up close. Even now, when he felt seriously conflicted about his presence here, when Bishop transparently wanted to be alone and Samuel didn’t know what to do with himself and had been wondering if he should call his father and go back home, even through all this Samuel felt elated when Bethany entered the room. It was as if she erased every lesser thing. Samuel had to bat away his impulses to touch her, to muss up her hair or punch her in the arm or flick her earlobe or any of the other juvenile maneuvers boys do to terrorize the girls they love, maneuvers that were really meant to bring them into physical contact the only way they knew how: brutally, like little barbarians. But Samuel knew enough to know this was not a good long-term strategy, so he sat there heavy and still on his usual beanbag chair and hoped Bethany would sit next to him.
“He’s an asshole,” Bishop said. “A fat fucking asshole.”
“I know,” Bethany said.
“Why do they let him in the house?”
“Because he’s the headmaster. But also? Because he’s sick.”
“That’s ironic.”
“He wouldn’t be out walking around if he weren’t sick.”
“If there’s a word for that, it’s ironic.”
“You’re not listening,” Bethany said. “You wouldn’t see him if he weren’t sick.”
Bishop sat up and frowned at his sister. “Just what are you trying to say?”
Bethany stood there with her hands behind her back, chewing or biting the inside of her cheek the way she did when she was concentrating real hard. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail. Her eyes were so fiercely green. She was wearing a yellow sundress that gradually turned white at the bottom.
“I’m pointing out a fact,” Bethany said. “If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t go for these walks, and then you wouldn’t have to see him.”
“I don’t think I like where this is going.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Samuel said.
“Nothing,” they said in twin-like unison.
The three of them watched the rest of the movie in an edgy silence, watched as the American teens successfully fought off the Russian aggressors, and the triumphant ending of the movie was not nearly as triumphant as it usually felt because the room was overflowing with some weird tension and unspoken conflict, and it felt to Samuel like he was back home having dinner with his parents while they were going through one of their moments, and when the movie finished the kids were told to get ready for bed, and so they washed up and brushed their teeth and changed into their pajamas and Samuel was led to the guest bedroom. And just before they were told to turn off their lights, Bethany softly knocked on the door and poked her head in his room and said, “Good night.”
“Good night,” he said.
She looked at him and lingered there a moment like she had something else to say.
“What were you doing?” Samuel said. “Earlier. With the piano.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Parlor tricks.”
“You were performing?”
“Sort of. I can hear things. People think it’s special. My parents like to show it off.”
“What things?”
“Notes, pitches, vibrations.”
“From the piano?”
“From everything. The piano is easiest because all the sounds have names. But really from everything.”
“What do you mean, from everything?”
“Every sound is actually many sounds put together,” she said. “Triads and harmonics. Tones and overtones.”
“I don’t get it.”
“A knock on the wall. A tap on a glass bottle. Birdsong. Tires on the street. The phone ringing. The dishwasher running. There’s music in everything.”
“You hear music from all that?”
“Our phone is a little sharp,” she said. “It’s awful, every time it rings.”
Samuel tapped on the wall, listening. “I only hear a thud.”
“There’s a lot more than a thud. Listen. Try to separate the sounds.” She knocked sharply on the doorframe. “There’s the sound made by the wood, but the wood is not a constant density, so it makes a few different pitches, very close together.” She knocked again. “Then there’s the sound of the glue, the surrounding wall, the hum of the air inside the wall.”
“You hear all that?”
“It’s there. You add it up and it sounds like a thud. It’s a very brown noise. Like if you melted all the colors in the crayon box, this is the sound you’d get.”
“I don’t hear any of that.”
“It’s harder to hear out in the world. A piano is tempered. A house is not.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Mostly it’s annoying.”
“Why?”