What she told Buddy, the art teacher, was that she slipped. She told her friends she jumped. The truth, Ann knows, is not quite either. Her body was lifted off the top bleacher at school last Friday, propelled by a morphous desire with invisible hands. Morphous (she is studying for the SATs): having a specified shape or form. Examples: Cone, cylinder, snowflake, egg. Coral reef. Chicken bone. Desire. This desire had clear fingers, which cupped her heart the way a magician cups a dove before flinging it into the air. It scares her a little, even now, four days later; that’s how much she had no control. It was like all those times you’re looking out over the edge of a balcony thinking, “What if I can’t fight the urge to jump?” and of course you never do jump, some little primitive, vestigial switch inside your body prevents you from ever doing so—only last Friday hers malfunctioned. But, oh, it was exhilarating. For a moment (this is her gorgeous, frightening secret), she was airborne, she is certain: the air held her up. Like a lover in a black-and-white movie. A lover’s arms and zero gravity. She really believes this happened.
Then she was crumpled on the hardwood floor of what had been a hundred years earlier a ballroom and was now the Big Room, a sort of gymnasium-cum-auditorium, and Malcolm Choy was looping an arm around her back and between the soft part of her arm and her breast. Malcolm is a senior, beautiful and remote, and everyone Ann knows has a crush on him. He is lean, the color of a Heath Bar, with forearms and cheekbones as unrealistically defined as if inked in a comic book. He is part Chinese and part Trinidadian. He wears his heavy black hair parted in the middle, sometimes tucked behind his ears, and an elephant’s-hair bracelet on his right wrist. He is swoon material, and utterly tranquil.
Last year, the great fad among a certain highly charged and visible group of Prospect School students had been bisexuality, the Prospect School version of which had mostly boiled down, among the girls, to wearing lots of Hanes underwear for men and kissing one another on the mouth upon arrival at school every morning. Among the boys, the most lasting and surprising by-product had been the forging of several intimate and platonic relationships with girls. But this year, the new height of hipness is asexuality, as exemplified by no one better than Malcolm Choy, with his kindly smile and smooth muscles and maddening monk’s air. He exudes the absence of need. He makes Ann pant.
It was his entrance into the Big Room that ignited the urge that propelled Ann off the bleachers, where she’d been dangling her legs sideways off the edge of the uppermost level, waiting for Winter Concert auditions to begin. He’d come in the doorway, a drum under each arm, and, glancing around, met her gaze. Her heart had gone off like a cap gun. All she could do then was fly, so she did. For one extended unclocked moment, she sprung aloft, and then Denise Escobar shrieked and two dozen pairs of eyes looked up, buoying her, a miraculous Anna-bird with straight hair streaming, and then she landed much too hard on both heels, and was saying, “Shit. Ahh—shit,” her face pink with excitement and shock and her eyes wet and bright with pain.
But, miracle of miracles, it was Malcolm Choy who helped her rise, and Malcolm Choy’s hard Heath Bar (bare!) arm against which she, finding she could not put weight on her feet, fell. It would have been nice if Malcolm Choy had then swooped her up, one arm below her shoulder blades, the other under the bend of her knees, and transported her, pressed against his warm black T-shirt, to the office, and waited there with her while the ambulance was called. In fact it was Buddy, the faculty member in charge of Winter Concert, who interceded at this point. Buddy is small of stature and has a famously bad back; he sent a freshman into the art room for his padded swivel chair, and in this Ann was wheeled, haphazardly, to the office, while Malcolm, no doubt, set up his conga drums.
Now the phone rings, and it’s the doorman saying her teacher is in the lobby. Her teacher! Ann forgot. She is wearing her Curious George pajamas and has Peppermint Blues nail polish on all twenty nails, and her hair is still in the braids she made last night, which is to say wisps sticking out in every direction. Around her on the red couch are strewn books, magazines, sections of the paper, manicure things, a virtually empty tube of Pringles, a sports bottle of water, the remote, the phone, a set of feminist Tarot cards and accompanying instruction book, a toy periscope, a Discman, a plate with a crust of grilled cheese on it, a magnifying mirror, tweezers, a bag of Tootsie Rolls and corresponding candy wrappers, and Killycot, the stuffed camel she’s had since she was one. “Send her up, please,” says Ann. She buries Killycot beneath the afghan.
The Jameses’ apartment, except for bedrooms and bathroom, is entirely open space, with a series of red-painted posts where walls have been knocked down. It hasn’t rooms so much as areas. When the door opens, Ann says, “I’m over here,” and waves Esker toward the living area, which is arranged before the French doors leading onto the balcony. This is the system for letting people in, because she can’t get up. She’s in not one but two non-weight-bearing casts. The wheelchair is parked by the couch like some mute, shiny houseguest, super-polite and oppressive, along with the slide board she’s supposed to use for maneuvering herself in and out, but Ann is so far fearful of attempting this operation alone.
Esker nears, her mouth set disapprovingly. “Your doorman gives out the key?” she says by way of greeting, holding up the item in question. It glints.
“He has to. I can’t get up, and it’s better than leaving it unlocked.”
Esker takes in couch-ridden Ann. Both feet are done up in bright-blue air casts like express-mail parcels. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, though. How does he know I’m who I say?”
Ann considers this delightedly. Intrigue! “Maybe we should have a password.” Then all she wants to do is think up a good password—“Leg-o’ mutton . . . Gilgamesh . . . Hamper . . .”—but Esker is standing there with her slight frown, and her briefcase, and her coat on, glistening a little with rain or melted snow. Ann never realized how small Esker is. She looks grimly out of place, like someone in a Magritte painting. “Oh,” says Ann. “Sit anywhere. Hello.”
“Hello,” says Esker, setting her briefcase on the cherry coffee table. “What do I do with this?” The key.
“You have to keep it so you can bring it back downstairs. You can’t forget. Don’t let me let you forget.”
Esker takes off her coat and sits on the leather ottoman. She surveys hastily the large, unconventional apartment, drags her briefcase into her lap, cocks her chin at Ann. “So what did you do to yourself, anyway?”
Ann shuffles the versions in her head. There is something in Esker’s tea-brown gaze that looks so perceptive Ann gets flustered, more so than when she explained it to Buddy, or the emergency-room people, or her friends, or even her father, and what comes out is, “I got pushed off the bleachers in the Big Room.”
“Pushed?”
“Accidentally. Nudged.”
Something passes over Esker’s face.
“I was kind of nudged from the inside. I mean, pretty stupid, I know, forget it,” she says, suddenly overcome by embarrassment. Besieged by embarrassment. This has been happening lately: moments of high self-consciousness, an absurd, almost paralyzing sense of detail. Moments when she wants to dodge under the covers and be seven. Her neck is heating, and her cheeks. Ann picks up Seventeen and actually holds it in front of her face for a minute.
“Hello,” says Esker.
Ann says something that sounds a lot like “Whew!” and fans herself with the magazine and throws it back into the heap. Outside the French doors the world is gray, too gray to see Governors Island or even the East River; it’s all gray pea soup out there. Graypea. Grapey. Shut up, brain. Water clanks in the pipes. Esker is doing the absurd thing of waiting patiently for Ann to return. Not quizzical, not frowning, not smiling. She just waits.
“It’s funny for you to make a house call,” says Ann brightly. “I feel like in Little Women or something.”
“Why Little Women?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I never read it. Just—you know, Jane Eyre or something.”
Esker smiles a little and sips an audible portion of air, as if about to pursue something, but then she only opens a small hinged case and slides her glasses on. They have rather heavy black frames. Ann has more than once had the impression that Esker doesn’t really need them to see. Her hair, indifferently cut, not long, not short, suggests the color and texture of a paper bag. Her mouth is soft, her chin sharp. Her neck is a surprisingly elegant column. “Have you had any other teachers by yet?”
“No. I think only you’re coming.”
“Really! Why?”
“That’s all I wanted.”
Eyebrows up. “Why?”
“I mean, not you, but math.”
Esker nods, still inquiring.
“Well, because. The SCEEs are at the end of January, and I registered for the math one.”
SCEEs are Special College Entrance Exams, an elite national testing service designed—as Rhada once put it, with a somewhat lewd lip-licking gesture—to extract the creamiest of the cream of the crop. Esker is more than a little repulsed by it, this increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer. Uses like these give numbers a bad name. Still, The Prospect School gives no grades, only written evaluations, so its college-bound students (99 to 100 percent of any given year’s graduating class, as Florence is wont to stress at every opportunity) feel particular pressure to rack up actual numerical scores.
“I see,” says Esker. Of course Ann would want to take the mathski (mathski, litski, chemski, bioski—they’re known among the students by their Iron Curtain–sounding pet names). Esker wouldn’t call Ann James a math prodigy, but that’s because she doesn’t use the word “prodigy.” She’s had students whose work has been cleaner, quicker, more precise and direct than Ann’s, but she’s never had anyone with Ann’s capacity to play with math, with Ann’s understanding of math as something creative, amusing, unpredictable. She regards this student, perched sort of luminously on the red couch with her ratty pigtails and chicly childish pajamas and big blue clown-shoe air casts, and she is struck, as she has been before, on several occasions at school, but more so now, here in Ann’s own apartment, by an alarming and unprovoked wave of tender feeling. She pulls her engagement calendar from her briefcase, appears to consult it. “I can come once a week, if you like, until you’re better. Or until the SCEE. Will you be on your feet by then?”
Ann squinches her face, shrugs. The resident in the emergency room had been very festive, prattling charmingly in his Brazilian accent as he fit the braces (which she wore for twenty-four hours, before getting the casts), very gently, onto her swollen feet and ankles, informing her that most people who incurred bilateral calcaneal fractures were petty burglars who, surprised in the act, had jumped out of windows trying to flee. “It’s very ironic!” he’d declared. “Society then gets that person off their feet for at least three or four weeks!” Ann had wondered whether this qualified as irony. Irony: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. Falling instead of fleeing. Flying instead of falling. Flying into Malcolm Choy’s arms. That would have been ironic. What she’d said to the resident was, “Three or four weeks—is that how long I’ll have to wear casts?” and he had assured her, festively, “At least!”
“I hope so,” she tells Esker now. “With crutches if nothing else.”
“Okay, lady. Let’s work, then.” Esker hauls a fat textbook out of her briefcase. “By the way, what are we listening to?”
Amahl and the Night Visitors has been looping all afternoon on the stereo, and the shepherds have just begun joyously calling to one another.
Ann beams and says the title. It is her happy music. But Esker freely grimaces. “Can we kill it? I can’t work with noise in the background.” Ann isn’t offended. Esker’s rudeness—is that the right word?—has a certain purity, is kind of exquisite, so that Ann finds herself stimulated by it, alert to see where it might lead. She aims the remote and halts the music.
The silence that zooms into the room triggers for Ann a new wave of high, singing embarrassment. There’s nothing untoward here—is there? She checks: nothing to be embarrassed about (except the stupid leap that landed her here in the first place). Yet, in this moment, every little thing stands out unbearably: the flat planes of Esker’s forearms emerging from her pushed-up sleeves, the tooth-dented colored pencils she’s laid on the coffee table, the lump of Killycot against Ann’s hip, oh, everything—the red-painted posts holding up the stupid ceiling, the slow-milling dust motes, the feel of air going back and forth through her nostrils. It’s as if the dull pretense of ordinariness that normally coats and tempers each object has been stripped. Everything is gigantic and exposed, a throbbing signpost of itself.
She hasn’t tried to tell anybody about these moments, doesn’t know whether they’re shared by others, whether they’re visible on her face. Esker is regarding her closely, the tea eyes keen and unreadable.
“Ready to work?” Esker flips open the textbook. A word problem about surface area and regularity accompanied by an etching of a coral reef.
The room grows very dark as they work; neither one notices. They scratch fast, messy equations and plot graphs. On the ottoman, a woman with paper-bag hair and long clean fingers, eyes bright behind their lenses with the task at hand. On the couch, Curious Georged and Peppermint Bluesed, a hobbled and forthright girl, grateful at this moment to be so difficultly consumed.