In the Land of the Living (17 page)

“Well, first of all, you did pretty well—I was there,” Aunt Jenny said. “And second of all, I’m not sure other kids are as happy as you think. I get to hear in my work what they say when their social masks are off, and I can tell you, everybody has to struggle. Everybody has to struggle just with being a person.”

“Well, that’s true,” his mother said.

“You know what I think: his thing with Harvard and Yale is an identification. It’s an identification with Isidore instead of the opposite, and he’ll have to figure it out. He thinks he wants to
be
Isidore, but what he really is, is just a son that wants his father back. He wants his father so he doesn’t have to feel everything he feels about his father being dead. And he would have had to figure this out regardless of where he went to college.”

Leo had heard enough. He almost left right then but then his mother began to say more about him and he couldn’t stop himself from listening:

“That may be, but he hasn’t figured it out yet,” his mother said. “And he’s like a keg of TNT. He’s going to explode when he finds out. And in the end it always comes back to it being his fault. Like he should’ve done better, he should’ve known better, he should’ve been stronger. And then—”

Jesus, his mother was really worried about him. (She also knew him very well.)

“A conscience like that is what
makes
you into a powder keg,” Aunt Jenny said. “It’s what makes you driven to control everything, and to be the biggest and the best all the time. That’s what you do when your conscience makes you feel infinitesimally small. He’ll figure it out. It’s up to him.”

That was all he could take. It was easy for her to say, since she went to Yale! (God, was he totally fucking insane or what?) Leo went back up the stairs slowly and quietly and came back down stomping the steps as noisily as he could. He would show them he wasn’t upset about not getting into Yale. He would act surprised, but not upset. He would have a sense of humor about it. There was still Harvard, after all, or if it came to that, Princeton. His high school career had not yet burst into outright flames, though there was a strong odor of scorch in the air now, he had to admit.

When he entered the living room his mom stood up and came toward him with red eyes and held out two thin envelopes. One was from Yale and the other was from Harvard. He saw the blue vein in the thin-looking naked wrist of the hand that held the envelopes, which were already open. Poor hand. Poor vein. The hand and the vein were the reason he’d wanted to get into Harvard and Yale in the first place, to make his mother happy and proud, like the mothers of people who went to Harvard and Yale, instead of defenseless and sad, to safeguard her from cancer and doom and mediocre human susceptibility, and buoy her with his lionhearted powers of flight and imagination.

“Jesus, I thought Grammy was dead,” Leo said.

They didn’t laugh. Aunt Jenny seemed to be looking at his sweatshirt with
YALE
at the breast. It occurred to him that he’d been wearing it compulsively in the last month, perhaps even every day, the same way that he used to like to wear the sea-green frayed surgical shirt that his uncle Ollie had given him when he was seven.

Harvard, too? He wanted to scream into somebody’s face, anybody’s face,
“I’ll show you, you stupid fuckers!”
but instead he kept himself perfectly still.

It occurred to Leo that he shouldn’t have written Philip’s name down on his Harvard application. But it was too late now. Philip had adopted him and it had seemed wrong and ungrateful not to put him down in the space where it said: Father. But he should have just put his dead father down in that space to make it clear. He hadn’t thought he needed the help of his father’s legacy. He didn’t
want
that help. How could they reject a kid who was first in his class (or would have been, had they weighted journalism the same as band)?
This would never have happened if his father had been alive
. All that outlining and memorizing and all those problem sets, all his “conceptualizations,” as he called them, and all the furious exercise of his “integrative intelligence,” his insatiable hunger for final answers and relentless pursuit of them, and all his savage battles for supremacy with Geetha Gurubhagavatula and John Posey De Polignac and Susan Fishman and the other AP wolf cubs on this most significant of all battlegrounds—knowledge of the real world—all of that would have paid off. He would be headed, if not to Yale, then at least to Harvard. Or he should have applied somewhere else he wanted to go besides Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. He should have ignored Philip and applied to Columbia and fulfilled his legacy there if he was going to use Philip’s name on his applications.

“Well, there are children dying in Africa, for Christ’s sake,” Leo said, trying to sound nonchalant. But what he was really thinking was:
I don’t care whether this is important in the grand scheme of things or whether I’m important in the grand scheme of things. The grand scheme of things doesn’t give a shit about me or my mom and dad and my brother and I don’t give a motherfucking shit about it. I don’t care what I deserve. I don’t give a fuck about Africa. I care about my father, my line, my greatness, and I will stamp my will on this mediocre earth whether anybody likes it or not, now get the fuck out of my way before I break your fucking skulls.
But he said again, “There are people dying right now, for no reason whatsoever, as we speak! People dying everywhere! What does a thing like this matter by comparison with that?”

He went to the junk drawer and got out a long pair of gold-plated scissors blotched with rust. Philip had once cut a ribbon with them in Tucson. Leo went upstairs then, and pulled off the sweatshirt that said
YALE
at the breast, pulled it off so fast that it pulled his Cleveland Indians T-shirt off with it, and he stabbed the sweatshirt and the T-shirt both with the gold scissors and stabbed them again. He shoved the rusty gold-plated scissors into the first stab wound and cut the
YALE
letters out of the sweatshirt. He tore the rectangle of cloth with the
YALE
letters in his teeth. Then he put the sweatshirt back on over his bare chest and the next day wore it to school, too, with the hole in it, right over his heart.

He said it was no big deal, even though his nipple was hanging out.

Mack didn’t come to his graduation. He said he couldn’t make it.

Leo said, “Why not?”

Mack said, “I’m busy, okay?”

“
O
-kay.”

Mack seemed to think this was a moment for him to be brave and stand up to some institutional evil in his life, though Leo didn’t know what evil it was.

“You honestly should not be asking me that,” Mack said. “Mom already asked me what I was doing. It’s not your business what I’m doing and it’s not her business, either. I don’t want to be judged.” All of a sudden Mack was breathing quick and shallow, and he swallowed once and then swallowed again. “You guys have this agenda, but I don’t have to go along with it.”

“Okay, Mack, okay.”

“Don’t act like it’s abnormal for me not to go to your graduation. You always act like I’m abnormal and you have all the answers, and I’m sick of it.”

“What would be abnormal about it? You went out with your friends instead of coming out for my birthday, so why would you come to this? I assume the Changs are having a cookout or something?”

“This is so typical of you. You and Mom are always imposing these expectations on me. You act like everybody normally goes to their brother’s graduation. You don’t know what’s normal and you don’t know what’s abnormal about you and me.”

“Okay, forget I asked, Mack,” Leo said, and pulled at the hole in his Yale sweatshirt. “Do whatever you gotta do. Sorry I asked.”

So he guessed Mack could just go and fuck himself. He supposed Mack had his own troubles, his own reckoning with the past and with the absences in his life. But Mack had not been interested in the least expression of brotherhood for years now and if Mack wished that he didn’t have a brother, then Leo would fulfill that wish, he would in fact use Mack’s skull like a basketball hoop and slam-dunk that fact right into it and Mack could just go fuck himself.
You think you’re the only one who can handle an icicle? You think you don’t need me? Well, let’s see. You have no fucking idea what you’re in for, Mack. You better wear your fucking mittens around me from now on, ’cause if you’re not there for me, then I’m not there for you, and it’s going to be cold. Good luck in your grand future with all your devoted friends, I’m sure the Changs will take real good care of you through all your major life events, you dick.

And he tossed Mack away like a beloved old shirt that’s finally shrunk too much or is torn beyond repair. He would expunge Mack even from his dreams if he could help it.

Summer came. Michelle came. Mack was gone.

At the very end of the summer, days before he’d be leaving to attend the University of Michigan, another letter from Yale arrived. That powder-blue “Y” with its just-so serifs like spandrels on a Gothic arch: he still loved it just a little. This letter was none too thick either, but its envelope was cut from paper of a heavier-than-usual weight. There was a crest on it too with a big red “X,” which in Leo’s case meant, he guessed, fuck you, go home. Above the big red “X,” there was an image of an open book with Hebrew letters saying
Urim v’tumim
. As a child, he thought Yale was “Jewish”! But he didn’t know what these letters meant as he looked at them now, and he felt quite sure they were not deployed in the way Jews had intended but rather had been stolen and repurposed like the art collections of the dead Jews of Vienna. The letter read:

It was the first Leo had heard of this.

He went to the bathroom to throw the letter away.

But when he stood in front of himself, and saw the blue polo shirt he had on, he thought of people dressing themselves in the morning: whatever my grievances with others, I agree to shop in the same stores as everybody else and put my socks and shirt on in the morning one foot, one arm at a time. He thought of his naïve and hopeful cooperation with everything he’d been asked to do in high school and how little fun he’d had, how much he hated his life, and he blew up:

“Are you fucking kidding, you sanctimonious
bootlicker
—”

“Leo?” his mother called out. Chair legs grunted on the kitchen floor. He met his mother in the dining room and waved the letter at her.

“This midget Jack James quit his fucking tacky, insignificant job to keep me out of Yale.
Me, Leo Auberon!
” He pounded his chest. “When I would give my life for Truth and Beauty! Have practically already given it! And they accepted whatsherface with the 1100 SAT—because she was a second-rate swimmer! She couldn’t even
spell
‘hypocrite’!”

“What did you say?”

“I need to get out of here.” Leo squeezed the letter in one fist and held it up as if watching Jack James’s blood wring out of the letter and run down his forearm, then stormed past his mother into the kitchen. He mashed the letter between his palms and spiked it into the kitchen garbage can, which, he noticed for the first time in years, was an old diaper pail with the outlines of a teddy bear on it, stamped into the plastic.

“I look stupid?” he yelled down into the garbage can. “I look like a fool spiking a ball of Yale stationery? Because the ball is so lightweight and made a little pathetic puny rattle in the bottom of the trash? Yeah? Well, watch this!”

He went to the mudroom and took the Yale “Blue Book” off the lid of the bin full of boots and gloves, where the book had sat since last spring—it left behind a white rectangle in the dust. He opened the course guide to savor one last time all its delicious course titles printed in that Yale font of refined serifs, and pulled an aluminum baseball bat from the heap of sports equipment. The door to the yard stuck in the muggy August heat and when it opened it made a sound like a live branch ripped from a tree.