At the Bottom of Everything(5)

But Thomas was unshameable. He sat there now with his trumpet in his lap, not even pretending to play. Most of us (I, definitely) would have been trembling, and then would have gone home and practiced until our lips ached. But Thomas had actual confidence, actual contempt. What could Mr. Adams possibly do to him now? Thomas would never have to worry about being yelled at again.

The minutes after the bell, which we all spent disassembling our instruments and chatting and loudly closing and latching our cases, were always chaotic, but now they had an extra edge, because we were all hoping for some sort of final confrontation. Either Mr. Adams would apologize again, or Thomas would tell him that he was going right up to the principal’s office. Mr. Adams, shuffling sheet music on the piano top, had the look of someone waiting for bad news.

But Thomas, with all our eyes on him, just clicked his case shut, stood up, and, for reasons I’ve never understood, turned to me. “Well,” he said, “that could have worked out a lot worse, huh?” And he walked out into the hall.

That was, I think, the moment when he became interesting to me. I hadn’t known there was any lightness in him, hadn’t known that, along with his brain, he was set apart from the rest of us by a sense that what happened in school wasn’t nearly so serious as we thought. I also hadn’t known that there could be forms of rebellion subtler than setting your farts on fire or drawing boobs on the back of your hand. I put my drumsticks away and walked out of the room next to Thomas. I had an inkling (which I would give a considerable amount to go back and tell myself not to heed) that I may have had him entirely wrong.





The thing I wanted most, during my months of suffering over Claire (the thing other than Claire herself), was to be distracted, and for some reason the person who was best at distracting me was an eight-year-old tutee named Nicholas.

He lived on one of those absurdly beautiful cobblestone blocks in Georgetown, in a row house with a heavy front door that made it impossible to know whether your doorbell ring had sounded. My tutoring boss, an overcaffeinated woman named Barbara, had warned me that he’d scared off a couple of tutors before me, but by then I was accepting just about every assignment she offered, since it meant being out of the apartment.

A housekeeper, Maria, answered the door that first time, smiling to apologize for her English, and led me up the stairs. The house inside felt like a daguerreotype. There was a parlor with a pair of dark green couches and a giant chipping mirror over the mantel; all the windows ran on rusty chains; the floorboards had nails that kept snagging my socks. I thought that Nicholas’s problem might be a kind of Secret Garden feebleness—withered legs, Victorian snottiness.

My first sight of him was as a snub-nosed face barely poking past the edge of a stars-and-comets blanket. “Dios mío,” Maria said, pulling the door closed behind her. When I said hi he growled, “I hate tutors. Go away. Now,” and turned to face the wall.

I sighed and sat down on his low red desk chair (for some reason I always overacted Mr. Rogers–ishly around kids that young), and said that I was sorry he was upset and that I’d be right here when he felt like doing some work.

“I don’t care.”

“That’s fine.”

“So go away!”

After half an hour Maria came back in, folding a bath towel, and said, “Sorry, he no working today. You come Thursday, OK? I tell papi.”

Thursday was the same as Tuesday, and so was the Tuesday after that, so for three afternoons I sat at his miniature desk watching it get dark outside, drawing interlocking cubes on scratch paper. Boulder-like patience/indifference was one of the few benefits of my misery that fall. Sometimes Nicholas’s little brother, Teddy, appeared in the doorway holding a half-built Lego airplane or a PSP, wanting to know if Nicholas would answer one tiny question. Sometimes Maria brought in the portable phone and it would be one of his parents, uselessly insisting that he get up right this instant or else.

At some point on the fourth afternoon like this, he broke. A couple of times per session I’d been saying things like, “It’s just too bad, because I was hoping someone could remind me who that Star Wars guy was with the red face and the little horns …” (his bed frame was covered in Star Wars stickers). Now, on a wet Thursday afternoon at the end of November, he finally said, in a voice that made clear that he was only calling a time-out from sulking, “Darth Maul.”

“Hmm?”

“Darth Maul. The red guy’s name is Darth Maul. And he’s a Sith lord.”

By the end of that afternoon he was sitting up, throwing back his covers, asking if I’d hand him his binder of cards. He didn’t hate tutors half as much as he hated the idea of someone going through life not knowing about the entire episodes of Star Wars that existed only as comic books.