The Expectations Page 4

  When he came back, Ahmed started to lay out his Brioni suit, his John Lobb shoes, one of the shirts he had had made on Jermyn Street, the blue-and-pink Hermès tie. As each item came out he expected Ben to nod and commend him on his knowledge and discernment, the same way you hope a record-store clerk will nod at the albums you bring to the register.

  But Ben silently pulled on his khakis slightly frayed at the cuffs and a blue Oxford shirt, picked out the red tie with small blue paisleys, and from his duffel unfolded the blue blazer his mom had gotten him at Marshalls. He slipped on his dark brown docksiders.

  Ben couldn’t have named the brands Ahmed was wearing, but he felt a mixture of tenderness and disdain that Ahmed was so flagrantly overdressing. Ben had a sense of proportion. Things were abundant with his family and their friends—houses with wide terraces or a folly cupola, tennis courts, a swimming pool here and there—but there was always a sense that they were minor-nice, that Greenwich and New York City were serious fancy in a way that Sudbury, Connecticut, would always be looking up to. But there was also pride in this, the pride of understatement, of the just-less-than-shiny genteel. Some important connection needed to be maintained to the Calvinist Yankee, the reuser of tea bags and the constant lowerer of the thermostat. His uncle Russell was a little too much. Caviar and good wine were correct for Ben’s family once or twice a year as a celebration, but besides that there was intentionality in Triscuits and Cabot cheddar.

  Ben’s family had rented a house on Nantucket for decades, but the bigger and bigger houses that had started to grow there were bad, vulgar; even the idea of owning a thing that you only used for three weeks a year was dangerously wasteful.

  And still, it had been important for Ben and Teddy to experience London and Paris and Rome and Athens, and so they went. It was important for Ben to learn the piano, and so they had a Steinway and weekly lessons before he let serious piano fade away. Even if you were able to afford a Mercedes or a BMW, anything more than a Volvo or maybe an Audi was gauche. It was important to the Weekses to have their sons know the difference, for Teddy to go to Gold & Silver if he wanted to, but also for Teddy to work as a landscaper in the summers to learn the value of an education. The Weekses ate Ben & Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch, cooked from The Silver Palate. They had a cleaning lady, but the idea of live-in help was from an earlier time; it would be a bad error now. Ben’s day school had put off repairing the roof of the auditorium for two years, but they still insisted on a semiformal dress code every day including Fridays, and so Ben now tied his tie with hasty facility.

  When Ben slid its knot lightly against his collar button and pulled on his blazer, Ahmed was still standing in bare feet with each sleeve of his French-cuff shirt extending past his hand like a neutered dog’s plastic cone. He used a lint roller to remove specks of sawdust from the charcoal pinstripe suit jacket he had hung over the back of his desk chair.

  “We’ve got to go, Ahmed.”

  “Yes—I will just button these”—he raised both cuffs—“and I will be down.”

  All the Hawley third-form boys—ninth graders in the outside world—waited in the common room to walk over together to the Dish for Seated Meal, and no one talked. The Head of House, Mr. Dennett, stood near the entryway in a boxy blue blazer and thick-soled shoes. Dennett tried to hang jokes on the students closest to him, but they just laughed politely.

  As far as Ben could tell, almost everyone in the dorm was there and Ahmed was still missing.

  “Hey, are you Teddy Weeks’s brother?” This was whispered to him by a tall blond kid whose collar left a half-inch gap all the way around his neck.

  “Yeah?” Ben whispered this, too, but the kids close to them could obviously hear, and Ben thought that if they could just speak in normal voices then other people in the room would start talking and everyone would have more privacy amid the general noise.

  “He graduated last spring, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “So he’s your brother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard he wrote like a five-hundred-page novel in two weeks and then had to be institutionalized.”

  “No, that’s not true.”

  The blond kid frowned at Ben as though he were in no position to disprove stories about his brother. Having Teddy as a brother was an asset; Ben should have felt like Teddy was an asset. All of the kids around them were listening now.

  Another blond boy leaned in from where he stood next to the faux-wood-sided television. “I heard he got two girls pregnant in two weeks and the school had to pay for secret abortions.” The boy was slight enough to look like a grade schooler. “Is that true?” he asked Ben.

  “I don’t know. I never heard that.”

  The first blond again: “I heard Teddy unscrewed his Lava lamp and poured the wax blob in some newb’s plant, and when the kid asked what it was, Teddy told him the Head of House’s daughter had given herself an abortion in the bathroom and stashed the deformed fetus in the plant.”

  “No shit?” said the smaller blond, laughing, and by now Mr. Dennett was looking over at them. Dennett’s face was now either blank or edging into a scowl. Was he upset that they were talking? Or did he hear “Head of House” and think the kids were talking about him? Or was he looking at Ben just because he was potentially as big a personality as Teddy? Ben wished he could just make it known that he was number one Under-15.

  “Who’s missing?” asked Dennett, and he counted the boys in pairs. He looked down at his clipboard and then up at Ben.

  “Hey, Ben, looks like Ahmed is the last one. Can you go bring him down? We gotta go in exactly”—he looked at his Ironman digital watch—“one minute if we’re not gonna be late.”

  “He said he was going to be right—”

  Ben sprinted up the stairs with hatred coursing through his legs. He hauled open the fire door and smacked down the hallway in his hard shoes. He pushed the door open and beheld Ahmed, sitting on the couch still in the undone shirt and boxers, patiently feeding a cuff link through the holes in the shirt’s left cuff.

  He looked up and nodded, then leaned back over his work and said, “Sometimes it goes through right away, and sometimes it is like threading a needle with a noodle.” He looked up again and smiled at the assonance.

  “Ahmed, what are you doing? Everyone’s waiting for you downstairs!”

  Ahmed snapped straight, and with his cuffs flapping, he hurried to the trousers over the back of his chair. Ben sprinted back down the hall and through the fire door, then leaned over the banister and shouted down, “He’s almost ready, we’ll be right there!”

  Dennett called back, “Listen, you know where the Dish is, right? You’re at table eight in the Middle Dining Hall and Ahmed is table fourteen in Lower, okay?”

  Ben wanted to keen and run after them, but the idea of Ahmed wandering alone through the empty campus pained him. He ran back to the room to find Ahmed with a long shoehorn gently lowering his heel into a light brown shoe. Ben looked out the window and saw the thinning troops of girls in white and black moving across the grass and out of sight.

  “Ahmed…”

  Finally they were going down the stairs. Ben hit the crossbar of the exit door and they moved out into the slow air. The bottom edge of the sun was at the tree line. The campus was as empty as a public square after a bomb scare.

  “Oh, it is so beautiful here. My brothers should be able to see this place!”

  With each step, Ahmed seemed to savor pressing up onto the ball of each foot. His right hand swung away from him as though he were a farmer in a poem casting seeds into a furrow. Ben walked faster and almost pulled Ahmed along as they headed onto the path around the pond. The trees closed in around them.

  “I am sure they would not start without us.”

  “Five hundred people are not going to stop dinner for the two of us, Ahmed.”

  Ahmed had to break into a two-step trot every ten steps or so to keep up. The early-dusk light reflected off th
e pond through long, slim evergreens, and it was as though the scene were mocking Ben with its placidity. They emerged from the path and jogged up a short set of stairs onto the brick path leading to the Dish. The Dish—officially the Dining Quarters but no one called it that—resembled the quad dorms in its English Gothic style and brick-and-stone complexion, but it was forty years older and forty years more refined. Slate roofs reached down into sleek gargoyles, the windows were tall grids of small leaded panes, and the tunnel passage to the entrance went under a two-story archway. The two of them came to the twelve-foot-high oak entry doors.

  Ben took hold of the wrought-iron hoop handle—as thick as a garden hose and as big around as a small pie plate—and leaned his weight back against it. The wide hinges moved smoothly and Ahmed stepped through. They jogged down the long hallway to the dining hall, shoes clacking on the smooth brick floor, past Gothic-arch windows on one side and oak panels listing graduating-class names on the other. Fingers had passed over the famous names until they had been rubbed shiny. Soon they heard the surf of dining hall voices.

  Ben reminded Ahmed where he was sitting and went to find his own table, where they were already halfway through the main course. The other kids and the two faculty members smiled to him, but Ben was warm with embarrassment and tried not to make any more of a spectacle of himself.

  In the common room after dinner Ben searched the thrumming, glossy crowd, and finally over by the coffee tureens he saw Hutch’s lion head.

  Hutch had the conviction of his own rightness around him, and Ben made his way over, leaving the other kids from his table as they all looked for somewhere else to adhere to. It seemed to take Hutch a second before he recognized Ben, almost as though he were performing the delay, but then he smiled and they clasped hands and hugged briefly, shoulders only.

  Hutch felt Ben’s dense, thin torso, which had always seemed off to him. Was Ben just kind of blank or was some important part of him elsewhere, someplace he judged better than this place? Hutch had occasionally wondered whether Ben thought Tongaheewin was kind of lame.

  They both got coffee from the high silver urns, then Hutch walked back to the group he had been standing with and introduced Ben to Evan, his shorter, dark-haired roommate, who had gone to school with him in Locust Valley on Long Island. Their parents had called and arranged for them to room together. Soon there was a group of six—Todd, Mark, and Kyle were all in Woodruff with Hutch and Evan. They had all heard about Ahmed’s servants, and that was all they wanted to talk about.

  “Who fucking does that?” Hutch seemed to be asking Ben directly, asking Ben to join in his outrage. Ahmed had violated something important to Hutch, and it was important to him that everyone agree.

  Evan provided the necessary idea. “Does he think this is his fucking fiefdom?”

  Ben wanted to tell them about the clearness of Ahmed’s face, how little guile…But instead he opened his mouth to start describing the couch and the pictures and the stereo. Before he could start speaking he felt a sharp hand at his elbow.

  Ben turned, alarmed that it could be Ahmed, but even from the firmness of the touch he knew it wasn’t him. He found instead a boy just shorter than him with dense red freckles all across his face and hair the color of his freckles. The boy wore a blinking smile. It was Rory, from Juniors, a year older but not a great player and not cool.

  “Ben!”

  Ben smiled and raised his eyebrows, feeling behind him the other group of guys waiting to see if this new conversation was worth their time.

  “Hey, Rory.”

  “I was so worried that SJS was going to suck this year because we’re switching to softball! And Cole Quinlan got in a car accident at grad parties. But I saw you at Nationals. Dude, we can still keep the Tide rolling.”

  Ben began to cherish the idea of the other guys being impressed by his squash reputation before Hutch had a chance to laugh at it.

  But he couldn’t turn around to explain, and Rory made no overture to the rest of them, and then Ben heard Hutch start talking confidingly to the others, and that group closed up behind him and it was just this kid and Ben now.

  “Is Price here?” Ben asked. “I haven’t seen him yet.”

  Rory half laughed. “Price only comes to Seated Meal when he wants to come to Seated Meal. He’ll find you, don’t worry.” Ben gave a small smile. “Dude, we’re starting captain’s practices tomorrow. I can’t wait to see you play. I can’t fucking wait.”

  * * *

  After Aston turned his Vespers address to the first-year students—“Being new can be difficult, but being new also allows one to see things more clearly than at any other time…”—Ben receded into his thoughts like an animal into its own fur.

  Here he was, finally. Rehearsal was over. The chapel was easily four stories high, its ceiling vaulted in deep, dark wood, chandeliers hanging down like giant brass thistles, each wall an acre of stained glass. How could you depict the crease at the corner of a lamb’s mouth in glass? Long parallel wooden pews ran the length of the building on either side of a center aisle facing in, letting the school see itself. New students in the first row, more senior students on the elevated rows behind, faculty along the walls in shallow mini-thrones. Ben knew that Price was in here somewhere but he couldn’t see him in any of the seats along the far wall in either direction. Maybe Price was sitting behind him.

  The huge space was illuminated for this first night by white candles on slender wooden posts that fit over the slanted hymnal rests in front of each pew, and the points of flame formed lines that seemed to converge down the length of the space. When the student body had grown beyond the capacity of the chapel in the 1930s, the school didn’t cram folding chairs at the end of the nave or decide to take fewer students. Instead it broke the back wall free, mounted it on railroad tracks, rolled it back thirty yards, and built the necessary connecting walls and ceilings and stained glass and pews. Wealth hadn’t needed to explain itself to anyone.

  Coming in, Ben had been handed a slim unlit taper with a paper hilt, and now he held the candle across his lap. All the third-formers, the newbs, looked indirectly at each other across the aisle, seeing the nervous and the self-assured, the girls like ships and the girls like finches. Which will be my friends? Which of the boys could be the boy?

  If Ben just stayed on track, took the challenges presented to him and prevailed over them, then he would be on the correct course. It felt like he was still watching himself be here, but all he had to do was wait and it would feel right. This place was for him. All the times at Sidney when he had almost overcome his discomfort and surrendered to their dances or running down the hallways, he had reassured himself about his hesitancy, his withdrawal, by reminding himself that all the same stuff would happen at St. James, and would happen better there, with all rightness.

  In the low plush light of the chapel he looked at and away from the pretty girls and again at the cusp-pretty girls. Would they come watch him play? There was Hutch in the front row down toward the Rector’s place.

  They paused and sang “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Ben thought about God. Hymns like this didn’t do anything to convince Ben of God’s reality, but he loved them anyway. Even if so much of his life had been spent getting the plain cheese at Park Ave. Pizza in the strip near their house, or driving by the sound barriers and sumac along I-84, or at Strawberries looking at CDs, or at TJ Maxx with his mom looking for dress shoes, these hymns seemed to arise from where his real life should have been spent, in the forest or collecting blackberries near the red tobacco barns, and he recognized the rightness of these hymns in a way that made him resent having to experience the tawdry, good-enough things of the 1990s. The hymns felt sewed into the clothes of his personhood, their texture not only the best-feeling on his skin but also emphasizing the plastic fibers of Blockbuster and A Current Affair and Milli Vanilli against his neck. He sang this hymn, quietly yes, but with a pang in his chest.

  As Aston went on, the candleglow
seemed to induce prayer hypnosis, but Ben hadn’t ever really known what people meant when they said “to pray.” It seemed like sitting in the lap of the grandest imaginable shopping-mall Santa, asking for things.

  Ben looked up and imagined the workmen carving all this wood, setting all the glass, hanging the massive doors, moving the bricks from the truck. That work seemed real. It seemed real for a kid his age to lift bricks into a wheelbarrow.

  The prayers and the hymns blurred, the light like warm snow. One of the Chapel Wardens approached Aston with a lit taper, and Aston held his candle wick above the flame, then turned and lit the candles of three students and the nearest faculty member. The flame was passed from one to another, and slowly the light spread until it came to Ben, and soon all the candles were lit, a meniscus of light swelling up into the deep space. Ben thought he heard Aston making some metaphor about spreading light. Aston asked them to stand and line up together to walk out, oldest students first. He asked third-formers to remain. He made more comments about discovery and self-discovery.

  “Have a wonderful year,” Aston said to them. “Go out into the school that is now yours!” They filed toward the exit, Ben smiling to the kids around him and keeping an eye out for Price but with no one saying anything. The doors opened into an alley of old students, who whooped all together as the first girls left the mouth of the chapel entrance into the night. Everyone walked out, and the shouting older students plunged into the line of newbs to hug them and lift them off the ground. The air was cooling fast but it still had the day’s warmth in it, and after the chapel’s stillness, just the turning breeze seemed wild to Ben. He thought he felt what he was supposed to feel. The older students were hamming it up, screaming and jumping up and down, but they meant it, too, and Ben wanted to be part of this, where it would matter if you were missing. Ben saw a line of wax run down a boy’s blazer sleeve.