At the Bottom of Everything(27)

It took Thomas a month or two to realize what was happening, and it may have taken me some time too. He’d stand waiting for me near the front steps where we usually met to walk to the bus stop and I’d wait inside, talking to baseball people in the lounge, until I’d see him leave. Or he’d call my house at night (I had my own line, so it only rang on the flat red-and-black phone in my room) and, after some number of tries, I’d just turn the ringer off. I did go over to his house a handful of times that fall, but I’d do everything I could to steer us away from talking about what had happened. I told him (I made sure, when we took walks now, that we walked up Macomb, away from Connecticut) about a girl named Ellen who I was starting to date. I had him explain to me in as much detail as he could what his mom’s case against a real estate developer was about. Once in the middle of something I was saying about baseball (Thomas pretended, periodically, to be interested in learning what all the statistics meant), he said, “Just so you know, I looked her up the other day.”

“Who?” I said. Inside me a hundred knives flew from their knife blocks. He ignored me.

“She went to Sidwell. Her parents live like five houses from Amy Crowley. Her brother’s in med school at Hopkins.”

“Why would I want to know this?”

“I think it’s important. We can’t just pretend that …”

I told him I absolutely could just pretend and, as soon as we were back in front of his house, I told him I had to go.

Another afternoon (it must have been the weekend, because his parents were home) we’d been up in his room and I went downstairs to pee, which meant walking past Richard’s office. Richard usually spent his weekends at his desk, wearing reading glasses on the end of his nose, staring at his ancient gray computer. As I walked past I heard him say, “Psst, Adam, hey, come in here for a minute.”

If robots ever become capable of meaningful communication with people, I think tone of voice, the density of information in it, is going to be one of the last things they master. I understood right away, by a kind of overheartiness, that Richard was embarrassed about whatever he was going to say to me, and, by the suddenness of how he called my name, that he’d been looking for an opportunity to have this conversation for a while. I also knew he didn’t know anything about the accident—that would have been in his voice too—but still my legs went cold.

I sat down on the same corduroy armchair where I’d sat on a dozen other weekend afternoons getting help on English papers, under the white-framed window and the picture of Sally lifting baby Thomas onto a hay bale. On those English-paper afternoons Richard would sit reading, cross-legged, the tip of his pen hovering over the page, and I’d count rooftops through the window, feeling as if I were waiting for a wizard to cast a spell on me. Now he sat forward in his chair, his hands on his knees, and he’d just started to say “So” when he stood up to push the door shut.

“Do you think—there isn’t, ah, any way I know not to feel a bit as if I’m accosting you here—but do you think there’s anything going on with Thomas, from your vantage point? I know he’s always going to present to Sally and me with the humble-scholar routine, but lately I’m getting something else, as a kind of bass line, maybe an angry vibe? Or shame? I don’t want you to feel under the Stasi’s lamp here—if you’d rather not talk about it just say so and I’ll go back to agonizing at my desk, which maybe I should have done from the beginning.”

No, I said, I hadn’t really noticed anything. Maybe it was just that there was more pressure now at school (as sophomores we’d started having monthly meetings with college counselors), or maybe it was just social stuff (by which I knew Richard would understand that I meant girlfriends and parties). As I was sitting there I thought: I’ve never lied to one of Thomas’s parents like this before. It’s so easy and so sad.

“I’d wondered how the whole ascetic thing was playing at school,” Richard said. “And the trouble is I know where it comes from—you see old pictures of me and I’ve got this scowl, this kind of one-pointed, I’m-much-too-serious-for-happiness look, and now here it all comes again and I just don’t know how somebody gets out of it except to grow up. Which seems OK until your kid’s the one suffering. Well, he’ll figure it out. Thanks for indulging me. And look, without getting too concerned-adult-putting-his-arm-around-you here, think about trying to convince him to come along to a party or something the next time you go. He’s not as set in stone about all this as he thinks he is. He could really use you.”