The Expectations Page 3
People began calling the furnace the Dragon. Because of the Dragon, SJS could play anywhere, but opposing players could almost never play the game dictated by the SJS courts.
Price promised five hundred dollars to any of his players who could beat the slowest member of the crew team in a 2,000-meter erg piece (“twenty-five cents per meter”), and twice he had to pay. No other school brought players into that kind of fitness, and the kids who couldn’t tolerate emergency signals singing through their nervous systems dropped off the team.
Success begat success, and the best players from Brooklyn Heights and Philadelphia wanted to play for St. James. Price recruited in a way that seemed to other coaches ruthless and a little pathetic. It was just high school squash, after all.
Price seemed to hover over the school, outside the dull interchange of classes and homework, something more elemental to the school’s enduring idea of itself and its cold-water New England beginnings. When people mentioned him, he seemed more like the chapel or library than like a private citizen.
By the mid-eighties the team started calling itself the Tide. Before matches they would huddle together and chant over and over, “You can’t stay dry, the Tide is rolling in, the Tide is rolling in, the Tide is rolling in. You can’t stay dry, the Tide is rolling in…”
When Ben was mediocre at hardball, he had always hoped to be part of the Tide but knew that he would be toward the bottom of the ladder, maybe even JV. Kids at tournaments nudged each other when Price showed up, scouting, and some of them played worse under the pressure of his scrutiny.
Then, at the beginning of Teddy’s fifth-form year, the year Ben started seventh grade, a chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling of Court 4 and knocked a player’s racquet out of his hand. St. James’s American courts went overnight from being classic to being embarrassingly out-of-date, and Ben’s dad had found his project. He and a group of other squash alumni promised to raise six million dollars to finally replace the furnace, and to convert the facility to wide International softball courts.
So when the 1994 Junior Championships were at Harvard on International courts, Manley Price came to watch, and after Ben walked off the court after not dropping a game in the semifinals, Price was there at the Poland Spring cooler. Ben nodded in recognition and smiled but he was still too out of breath to say anything, almost thankful that nervousness didn’t have anywhere inside him to reside. He filled a paper cup with water and sipped from it as Price stood right there wearing a small, extremely intense smile.
Ben stepped a bit away from the cooler so that the two of them could have a thin buffer of privacy. Price clearly wanted to say something, and Ben looked at the man’s face, dug through with creases, his wheat-colored sweater with holes at the hem and right forearm, his sticking-up hair like a cropped tassel out of an ear of corn.
Price took two fingers and poked Ben in the chest.
“You,” he said.
Ben pretended to be still too winded to speak. He just smiled as though there had been some good joke and sipped from the water cup again.
“You have it. The Long Streak is going to be a preamble to you.” Ben smelled Price’s breath, like leaves long on the ground. Price hadn’t taken his eyes from Ben’s, and Ben nodded curtly, hoping it looked polite, appreciative of this thing Price had said that Ben was now realizing was extravagant praise, praise almost beyond imagining. It felt like the kind of reality-dream you have just between wakefulness and sleep.
“You can kill, can’t you? Right now they’re just dying for you, so it’s hard for me to tell. You have to answer this for me: If there’s someone just as good as you are, or even a little better, can you go right to the inside with him? Can you go there and kill him?”
Ben nodded because that’s what was being asked of him and Price smiled, all the lines in his face coming together, his eyes gleaming slots.
“Take care of yourself—start that application.” And then Price turned and walked away as though he had forgotten about Ben completely.
Did Ben know how to kill? It had really only been six months that he had been winning, when overpowering his opponents felt inevitable. If he could have described it, he would have said that he loved letting some energy pass through him as unopposed as possible. Was that killing? Was murder part of that energy? The other Um Club kids came up to him. What did Price say? What did he want to know?
That night after winning the final—turning to the crowd and seeing them all looking at him, not even hearing their applause but taking the weight of their gaze—Ben told his dad that Price had said hello.
“Was he excited?” Ben’s dad asked.
“Yeah. He was really nice. I mean, I think I might play pretty high up there.”
His dad hugged him and Ben could feel him restraining himself from hugging too tightly. Ben wished Teddy had been there to see it. But, also, he was glad that Teddy was with friends spring skiing in Vail.
And so, as though it were blossoming just for him, the new St. James squash center was finished the summer before Ben’s first year: twelve International courts, ASB brand, the building’s interior totally remade without changing the staid brick exterior. When the architect had finished the plans, Ben’s dad spread them over the dining room table and the family ate in the kitchen for three weeks. He would finally and permanently hold his own against his brother Russell.
And now on the first day of school, as Ben and his dad in a medium sweat set down the last box, they nodded to each other in agreement to go look at the new courts. Ben had expected his dad to be shuddering with excitement, but still he was quiet, and Ben guessed that he was worried about leaving, or maybe he was afraid of meeting an experience that he’d anticipated for too long.
In the bright heat they walked up to the giant furnace, furry with rust, now bolted down on a ten-foot-by-ten-foot concrete slab in front of the courts building. It looked like the sire of ancient mechanical bulls. Below it, on a sloped granite block, a bronze plaque.
THE DRAGON
1935–1993
ST. JAMES SQUASH
The two of them went inside the courts, still not speaking maybe from reverence, and after they had admired the two stadium courts below the bank of carpeted steps, they came back out into the obliterating light and walked very slowly to the dorm amid all the other students and adults moving around them. Ben realized that part of him had expected that Price would be living in the courts.
“Parents always stay too long on the first day,” his dad said, smiling to Ben. “That’s the problem.” So there on the Hawley doorstep, with two kids carrying in a futon frame behind them, Ben hugged his father goodbye. They came apart and his dad had his lips pressed together, and then the Volvo accelerated neatly out of the parking lot, and Ben’s connection to the outside world was broken.
2. These Spotted Tigers
BEN TURNED BACK TO THE DORM, FACING IT BY HIMSELF NOW, and then considered his roommate. Just conceiving of the two of them sitting together after check-in, talking about wherever the kid was from, dulled Ben’s sudden pervading homesickness.
Ben’s Old Boy, the student assigned to shepherd him through the first few days, showed up with a firm handshake and introduced himself as Avery. He was sorry he hadn’t been there to help move stuff. Avery was a rower with acne that was going to scar, and he seemed somehow proud to be sweating. They went over to the rectory to shake hands with Mr. Aston, the school’s new Rector. (Aston would have been called the Headmaster at another private school, but St. James had kept the word “Rector” from its religious beginnings.) Then Avery took Ben to get his school ID made. Avery dropped him back at Hawley and said he’d see Ben at Seated Meal that night.
Ben walked into the dorm. He pushed open the second-floor fire door with its broad chicken-wire window and walked down the hallway, looking at his ID and moving his thumb over the photo. He wished he weren’t so thin; there were light shadows under his cheekbones. Ben didn’t know that his nickname in Juniors wa
s “the Sliver.”
As he put the ID in his pocket, he saw that the door to 24 was slightly ajar. Even though he didn’t hear anything, he anticipated that the kid would like the Allman Brothers and so he almost seemed to hear the Allman Brothers. But then he saw that the drawing of the Great Auk was gone from the door. From inside the room he now heard a drawn-out, grating metallic screech and a rhythmic pounding. He came up to the room’s threshold and saw that the door was held open with a gray rubber wedge. He stood looking into the room for several seconds before anyone noticed him.
The dark-skinned boy in a plum dress shirt sat at one of the room’s desks, his dry lips slightly parted, looking down at the welcome-packet map of the school. A bed was in pieces against the far wall, and two very slim, short men in dark coveralls were building something. One man knelt over a chop saw cutting a two-by-four and the other nailed a piece of two-by-four to the wall.
As Ben looked at this boy’s face, it seemed entirely clear, easy, and Ben realized that his own face, which he was trying to keep so implacable, was instead every moment betraying his doubt and fear, his desperate anticipation, and his tremendous effort to conceal his doubt and fear and anticipation. Even as Ben knew with finality that this was his roommate, he was also convinced that this kid was in the wrong room.
The worker kneeling over the chop saw noticed Ben first. He looked up, then stood and let his hands come to his sides in a vaguely military way. “Hello,” the man said very deliberately to Ben while looking at the boy at the desk. The other worker turned around and automatically held the hammer in front of him with both hands.
The boy lifted his gaze from the map and looked at Ben as though he had just come out of a cellar into the warm sun. Most of the time, when Ben met new people, it didn’t occur to him right away whether he liked them or not; he almost always only thought of whether they liked him. But Ben knew that this kid was going to like him, and even without any intention to take advantage of that fact, he felt cruel. The boy stood up quickly and the chair teetered on its back legs. The nearer worker made a move to steady it, but after an instant it rocked back upright.
“Ben! You are Ben! I’m Ahmed! Ahmed Al-Khaled.”
“Ahmed, hi!”
They shook hands, and when the time came to let go, Ahmed kept holding on with a grip that was at once tight and girlish. He was plump but not heavy.
“I looked at your picture in the student directory.” His accent was British, but lightly so, as though each word had just come out of its packaging.
“I composed letters to you but I could not finish them properly.” Ahmed vocalized his p’s slightly so that they sounded more like b’s, and there was a slight flutter in each of his r’s. “You are just the roommate I had imagined, just what I had hoped for.”
Ahmed saw Ben’s stillness, his gray eyes and careful smile, and it seemed so much more appropriate than the overflowingness of home. But also there was surprising worry in Ben.
“Good, yeah,” said Ben, and finally managed to get his hand free. He looked at the workers and what was happening to the room, and Ahmed followed his gaze. He looked back to Ben and then seemed to realize that something needed to be said. “Ah—Ben, this is Hector and…Benito?” The man who was Benito nodded, and both workmen smiled to reveal compromised teeth.
Then Ben saw them looking past him toward the door. Ben knew immediately that it was something bad, and he turned to find three kids at the doorway looking in with incredulous smiles. Ben turned back to the room and saw what they saw. Framed photos of the school—a bright red maple tree in front of the chapel, the main Kuyper Library from across the pond at sunset, a crew shell in the early morning mist—hung perfectly centered on each wall. Ben’s NAD stereo components and Klipsch speakers had been moved, and in their place stood a black lacquered stand with a sleek Bang & Olufsen slide-apart CD player on it, flanked by chest-high pole speakers.
The picture of the Great Auk was laid on top of Ben’s stereo components. There was no mistaking that Hector and Benito were servants.
Ben turned back to Ahmed, whose expression of happy anticipation had hardly changed, and who now looked to the doorway as though to welcome everyone. Ben expected the other kids to just walk into the room and take things roughly in their hands and laugh. One kid in a green UVM hat pointed and said, “Oh my god, look.” Ben looked. It was a gargantuan burgundy tufted-leather sofa with bright brass upholstery nails. He imagined Hector and Benito carrying it up the stairs with Ahmed giving a fountain of directions while the tendons in their necks stood out. Two more kids appeared in the doorway and began to gawk.
Ben turned to the kids and put on a dismissive smile, then kicked the wedge away and closed the door. He turned back around and gestured toward the tools and two-by-four pieces. “What’s this stuff for?”
“You lift the bed and you can put the desk underneath. We can have maximum space. We can do the same for you,” Ahmed went on, gesturing to the workers with a short sweep of his hand as though presenting them to Ben as a gift. His smile seemed to ache with the effort of making everything ideal.
“I’m…okay. Thanks, though.”
Ahmed’s smile was extinguished. “The work is unpleasant. Perhaps we can go to the Den and sit and get to know each other better while the work is finished.” He smiled again.
“Why did you take down my poster?”
“These photographs are beautiful.”
Ben looked at the two workers, whose faces were at once anxious and disengaged. They wanted the interaction between the two boys to end so that they could finish the work.
“Perhaps we can go to the Den and get to know each other better while the work is finished,” Ahmed said again. Ben knew that the Den’s snack bar would be closed now and the room deserted.
“I think I’m just going to walk around for a while and say hi to some friends.” Ben didn’t want to look at Ahmed’s face as he said this. He pretended to look all around for anything he might need before he left. “I’ll be back at five to get dressed for Seated, so…” He didn’t have the brazenness to say, “so everything better be finished by then.” Ben nodded to Hector and Benito.
“I am so looking forward to this year,” said Ahmed.
Again there seemed to be only sincerity in his face. Ahmed smiled, and he saw Ben place the gift of this smile to one side.
“Me too,” said Ben. He turned away.
Ben turned the door handle slowly and peeked out. The hallway was empty.
When Ben was out in the hall, with its smell of commercial cleaning products and hardly noticeable mildew, he was taken over by homesickness. He wanted to live with someone like Tim Green; it would have been fine not to be really that cool. He imagined a whole year sharing a room with this person, and the prospect of never feeling at ease made him come close to crying. He had the right to feel at ease.
At the end of the hallway he shoved open the fire door and let gravity take him down the stairs in two- and three-step drops. He started walking toward the school’s power plant at the far southwest end of campus. Someone was playing the carillon in the chapel tower, and Ben could just decipher the plodding tunes. Between hymns came waggish versions of the Inspector Gadget theme and “I Saw Her Standing There.” When Ben passed anyone on the path he looked straight down at the toe of each shoe as it came forward. Every time he looked up or came around a corner he thought it would be Hutch.
Ben couldn’t remember how Tim Green had joined the Um Club crew. He was from the neighborhood right next to Chip’s, two-level Colonials one after the other. The differences were there. Tim and Tim’s dad wore T-shirts from 5k runs, there were pitchers of sun tea on the front walk, no one came to cut the lawn or mulch the garden beds. There wasn’t enough room in Tim’s backyard to really huck a Frisbee, and so they walked to the little reservoir near the house or stood on the quiet street.
Once when Ben’s mom was dropping him off at Tim’s house, she said, “I can’t stand houses this close
together. Everyone can watch each other’s TV.” And in fact one time after dark when Ben and Tim were walking back from the reservoir field, Ben saw synchronized changes of light through the darkened windows of three adjacent houses.
Tim was a good guitar player and Ben had taken piano lessons, and so when they were tired of playing squash they’d migrate back to Tim’s house and jam in Tim’s bedroom, Ben on the shitty Casio keyboard. None of it really mattered, and so it was the easiest time. Ben had thought that all those shapeless hours would be redeemed when he met the kid who would become his best friend at boarding school.
It occurred to him that he still hadn’t seen Price, either, and even though Ben had only been on campus for a few hours he had a mild guilt and a companion sense that Price knew he had arrived, knew his location, even, and was deliberately withholding his presence until the most correct occasion.
When Ben came back to Hawley about an hour later, all the construction equipment was gone, a Persian-style carpet covered the center of the floor, and Ahmed’s bed hung five feet up the wall with his desk underneath.
Ahmed sat on the leather couch, which had been set beneath the room’s windows. He was wearing white boxer shorts and a white undershirt snug around his belly. Ben looked from Ahmed to the other end of the room and saw that his bed had been lofted as well.
“Wait, why did you do that to my bed?”
“You said it was okay.”
“I said I was okay without it!”
“It is better.”
“Ahmed, where are you from?”
“From Dubai. I hope you will visit!” As he said this, Ahmed worried about the idea of Ben actually visiting.
Ben stuck the tack back into the door as hard as he could and rehung the Great Auk. He went off to the shower, and through his rage he worried that some upper-former would want the shower. He had never heard the word “Dubai” before. He returned to the room, and Ahmed went to the bathroom in his waffle robe and thong sandals (Ben couldn’t imagine him calling them “flip-flops”), carrying a wire basket of shampoos and soaps whose brands Ben didn’t recognize.