Earlier that morning, I’d been woken by Dad’s soft whistle, a several-note trill from my earliest childhood that could instantly rouse me from deepest sleep. My clock read 4:55. He waited by my top bunk while I rearranged my pillows and, once I sat up, handed me coffee, which he’d made au lait, with three sugars, the way I liked it.
“Here you go, boychik,” he whispered, and, before returning to the kitchen, added, “I’ve got your breakfast going.”
On my comforter there lay everything I’d left unfinished: Romeo and Juliet, Act III partially read; my lab report on boiling points and surface tension, incomplete; my algebra textbook open, this afternoon’s quiz unstudied for. My mind cast forward, searching the next ten hours for time, discrete stretches when I might finish these tasks before each came due, one’s completion paradoxically pushing me further back from the next, as if the day were somehow expanding from the middle and might never end.
“All set?” Dad asked when I took my seat at the dining table. He was holding a pan of scrambled eggs. He nodded toward the math I’d brought to review, though I knew his question wasn’t referring to that.
“Ready,” I lied.
“How’re you getting there?”
“I thought I’d grab the bus.”
Dad checked his watch, then shrugged, mildly irritated. He hated the idea of my possibly being late. “The train’s faster.”
This was exactly why I preferred the bus. It was still dark when I arrived at the Columbus Avenue stop, and the vehicle’s illuminated interior seemed to float toward me. Through the bus’s tall windshield, I noted its handrails narrowing toward its tail and resembling a whale’s ribbed gullet. Upon boarding, I walked to the back and took the corner seat, and then slid open the window so that the breeze might mitigate the diesel fumes. I opened my book bag, considering all the things I could study in the meantime. I pulled out Romeo and Juliet and was about to commence reading, when one of my lines came to me in its entirety: A proton is a subatomic particle with a positive electric charge and mass slightly less than that of a neutron.
I placed the play on the empty seat next to me and took out today’s shooting script. I studied it for a couple of stops and then promptly fell asleep.
We taped The Nuclear Family at NBC Studios, in Rockefeller Center, on the 8H soundstage, where they did Saturday Night Live. This was our fourth season. The show had been a hit. In a normal year, from June through August, I lived at 30 Rock from dawn till dusk, but come September, once school had started, I was on call two or three mornings a week, shooting for half days but never past lunch, until we wrapped—sometimes as late as the last week of October, when we ceded the space to the SNL cast. This schedule had been put in place two years ago, when I entered seventh grade, built into my contract at my mother’s insistence, after I’d been accepted to Boyd Preparatory Academy, an Upper West Side private school, so as not to, in her words, “interfere with my education.” The intention was laughable, especially with the current season in turmoil because of the actors’ strike, which had just resolved. We’d been in rehearsal since the beginning of the month in an effort to complete the final few episodes at warp speed. These past few weeks, I’d missed more school than usual and was drowning.
On these mornings my routine never deviated. I stopped by my dressing room, dropped off my book bag, and hurried to costume. Alison, who ran that department, greeted me in a husky voice that was neither too friendly nor too warm—“Good morning, kid” was all she’d say. She was seated at her sewing table reading the Times, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking. She glanced at me over her bifocals, nodded toward my costume on the hanging rack, and then returned to the paper. When not in his super suit, Peter Proton wore a short-sleeved button-down, a pocket protector quivered with pens, and suspenders decorated with physics equations that yanked my already too-high cuffs above my ankles and, due to a malfunction I hadn’t noticed until this season and was terribly self-conscious about, revealed the outline of my balls.
“Can we fix this?” I asked Alison. I was standing before her three-faced mirror while she made adjustments. With my hands I indicated my crotch’s protuberant, cloven hoof.
“Tom likes it,” she said, referring to the director. This was her way of ensuring someone else always had to say no. She placed my Groucho Marx specs on my face and then let out my pants’ waist. My growth spurt, raging since the spring—I’d shot up four inches—showed no signs of slowing, and when Alison struggled to button the collar of my widened neck, she mumbled, around a mouthful of straight pins, “You’re absolutely killing me.”
I had to hurry to hair and makeup. Nicole dealt with me first, silently daubing my cheeks with base and then lining my eyes until they stood out so vividly my caked face seemed to hover just above my skin. After she handed me off, Freddie roughly affixed my wig to its cap and then teased its blown-back curls into an even more shocked shape. He did this with a fist to his hip, his comb tugging at my head, swiveling me by my shoulders with pointed disregard.
Liz always managed to appear just before we finished.
She could’ve been Naomi’s younger, prettier sister. She wore large glasses, their lenses as round and thick as a soda bottle’s base, so that when she removed them to rub her eyes or pinch her nose’s bridge—as she often did in my presence—it made her face appear to shrink. She wore her hair in a Dorothy Hamill bob, but her clothes were as revealing as a male skater’s unitard: painted-on Jordache jeans and tight-fitting designer tees—today’s read Pizza Eaters Make Better Lovers. Both she and Naomi had the same gummy smile, but Liz’s teeth jutted slightly forward. Standing before me now, she held open an enormous black binder containing the day’s shooting script.
“Well?” she asked.
“I think I’ve got it.” I didn’t want her to embarrass me in front of Freddie and Nicole.
Liz fed me a line.
“Maybe if we started from the top,” I said.
“That was the top,” she replied.
Freddie mushed his mouth in his hand and shook his head.
“You don’t know any of this, do you?” Liz said.
When I didn’t answer, she snapped her binder closed. “I’ll tell Tom we’re going to need more time.” Then she marched off to our usual spot.
This was in the middle of the soundstage, on a pair of director’s chairs, these placed off camera before the set of Central High’s physics classroom. The space was brightly illuminated amid a pool of darkness. 8H was hangar-sized, so vast I’d once enjoyed a memorable game of catch with Kevin Savage—he played Central High’s quarterback—the pair of us threading a Nerf football beneath the lighting racks and hanging cable wires, through set windows and over their walls, each of us calling our throw’s path like shots in pool, until Ken Wakanata the cameraman put a stop to our game and then cursed me out. “Hey, fuckwit. Knock down one of those Fresnels and you’ll get someone killed.” He spared Kevin the lashing, even when he came to my aid, but to whom would I complain about the injustice? “He should know better,” Ken told him, and then stormed off.
Now I approached Liz unseen and, for a moment, I paused to relish the silence. The soundstage was as quiet as a submarine. It was muffled by the velvet curtains lining its walls, the balcony’s empty seats adding to the bunkered effect. Thunderstorms might be raging outside, a hurricane making landfall, but here you’d be completely insulated from such weather. It confounded my inner clock. Hours crept by but months evaporated, from June through August the twilit sky was the same purple as the dawn’s, the only evidence any time had passed the stifling heat, the sun’s light now stored in the asphalt and radiating up instead of shining down, my own core temperature similarly elevated, but by rage at yet another summer lost.
Liz sat in one of the director’s chairs with her arms crossed, her binder open across her lap. She popped her high-heeled shoe against her heel.
It might’ve helped me learn my part a bit faster if Liz supplied some emotion. Instead, she delivered her lines in a relentless monotone. Her disdain for me exceeded anyone else’s in the cast or crew and had been a constant since the show’s inception, so that my fantasies about her proceeded not from lust but rather a desire for her kindness. “From the top,” she said each time I drew a blank. My shame was intense and my concentration shot. After I flubbed another line, Liz said, “Take a look at who’s waiting on you. It’s selfish and it’s unprofessional.”
“Hey,” Andy said to her. “Ease up a bit.”
Andy Axelrod, who played my dad, appeared before us, wearing his Nate Neutron costume. He was carrying his fishbowl helmet beneath his arm, his super suit silver and puffy as an astronaut’s. Inset on his chest were his initials, enclosed by the overlapping Bohr model ovals.
“How about I finish up?” he offered Liz. Then he smiled at me reassuringly. “It’s our scene, after all.”
Liz said, “Be my guest.”
When Andy sat, his suit aspirated and gave off a farty odor, like skin beneath a plaster cast. His freckled pate, hot from the lights, shined beneath his comb-over. We rehearsed for fifteen minutes, and when it was clear I had my lines down, Andy patted my knee and said, “Look, Griffin, I know you’ve got a lot going on. But try to keep in mind that these people get here early just for you. Get my drift?”
I did. “Thanks for sticking up for me,” I said.
“That’s what dads are for.”
Andy was the person with whom I spent the most time on set. Elyse Baxter, who played my mom, avoided both of us. For the twenty-somethings in featured roles as high school students and archvillains, Andy was probably too close to the age and appearance of the fathers most of them had moved to the city to get away from, while I was like their annoying little brother. We were both shunned in our own ways, although Andy was invited to laugh at bloopers; if he broke character to lighten the mood or improvise when a scene was going poorly, it was appreciated. Because I had not earned such freedoms, my wandering off script was met with disapproval. And while I recognized that we’d been lumped together, I was not always ungrateful for his company. We discussed sports and movies, and, like Elliott, Andy waded into current events and politics while I pretended to listen—although after Liz reappeared to check on our progress and then shimmy off, he returned to his favorite subject.
“My God,” he said, and leaned toward me, “the tits on that woman.” He lowered his voice. “I’d like a slice of her pie.”
It was at this moment that I noticed Jack Terry, our soundman, silently roll up behind us on the crane and, from the basket, lower his boom until it hovered just out of view. He caught my eye, tapped his headphones to indicate the mic was hot, and then winked.
“What about Noreen?” I asked. She played the captain of Central High’s cheerleading squad. “She’s just as pretty.”
“Not if you’re an ass man,” Andy said.
“My dad says Elyse still has a dancer’s figure.”
“Only if he means a whirling dervish,” Andy replied. “Nope, her gifts are strictly oral. Which reminds me of a joke. What do you call a woman who can suck a golf ball through a garden hose?”
I shrugged.
“Gifted.”
Chuckling, Andy reached out to squeeze my shoulder, shaking his head. “Son, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You fuck your brains out. I mean it. Chase tail until you’re fifty, then think of settling down. Are you still a virgin?”
I tilted my hand side to side as if to say, More or less.
“Let me give you a piece of advice. You want to get in a girl’s pants, the next time you go on a date, you take her to a nice place—chichi, low-lit, you spare no expense. I’m talking appetizers, entrées, and dessert. The works. You pull out her chair when it’s time to leave, give her your arm when you walk her home, and at her door you be the perfect gentleman. You kiss her on the cheek, a little tongue if she’s interested, but that’s all. Say good night, and here’s the most important part: do not call her for two weeks. Tell her you were busy, you lost her number, it doesn’t matter. But you go radio silent like that, and she’ll be so frantic trying to figure out what she did wrong she will be your sex slave afterward.”
I nodded as I considered his counsel, catching, out of the corner of my eye, Jack’s A-OK gesture.
“Remember,” Andy said. “Two kinds of men succeed with women: those who love them and those who hate them.”
At this, I perked up. “Which are you?”
“I despise them. Except my wife, of course.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“Twenty years. She’s coming to the wrap party next week,” Andy said, and then elbowed me. “Word on the street is that Tom’s gonna share a prank he’s played on the cast. Got any intel on that?”
Jack raised his boom, giving me the thumbs-up while the crane silently backed into the darkness. Tom’s voice came over the PA. In the background, the control room was raucous with laughter.
“Gentlemen,” Tom said, “places in five.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Andy.
“Sorry for the holdup,” I told Tom.
“My dear boy,” he answered, “you are completely forgiven.”
Because I was late to school, I took a cab instead of the bus. It was nearly eleven, third period was ending. If traffic kept moving, I’d make it to English—my favorite class. We took the Avenue of the Americas north. I had my window down, and when we hung the left on Central Park South, I saw several horse-drawn carriages lining the entrance. Attending them was the earthy smell of manure mixed with the smoke of almonds from the vendor’s cart, a waft that seemed to name the season. I decided to skim the end of Act III of Romeo and Juliet, but just before I searched my book bag, we swung around Columbus Circle, and I spotted, on my right, my father, sitting on the edge of the Maine National Monument’s pool, next to a beautiful woman, to whom he spoke very heatedly. Because of the speed and the fact that my eye followed them amid the pedestrians and traffic, they came into vivid focus: the woman, raven-haired, heavily made up, sitting with her elbows on her knees, staring into the distance and frowning while Dad lividly gestured. Were they having a fight? Before I could begin to marvel at the odds of this happenstance—of seeing him, of all people, at this moment—before I could even process what he was doing with this person and by the time we were several blocks past them, I realized I’d left my copy of the play on the bus. For the second time in a week. Miss Sullens, my teacher, would kill me. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and whispered, “Why, why, why,” until we arrived at Boyd Prep.
I was in a rush. But Mr. Kepplemen, my wrestling coach, intercepted me the moment I was through the upper school foyer’s second set of glass doors. In greeting, he pressed his hand to my cheek and pulled my temple toward his so that they lightly touched.
“When’s your next free period?” he asked.
“Fifth,” I replied. I was late for fourth period, but no matter. If English was my favorite class, wrestling was my life. And with the season beginning in November, I had all the time for Kepplemen in the world.
“Meet me in the lockers then,” Kepplemen said. “Lineups,” he added, and shook his finger at me, “to discuss.”
I told him, “For sure,” and, released, broke into a run that was partly to make up time, partly excitement at the prospect of a starting position on the varsity.
Any happiness I felt was obliterated the moment I entered the classroom.
The discussion stopped as if I’d been its subject—I had, it turned out. The act of removing my binder was attended by a mysterious suspense, which Miss Sullens dispelled by approaching my desk. She held my paper in hand and returned this facedown. She taught class in the round, and everyone watched as I registered its grade and comment, written in red capitals and visible through the loose leaf: Fail—see me afterward. Cliffnotes, my best friend—he was seated across from me—nodded toward Simon Pilchard, to his right, incriminatingly, which cleared up nothing. For the period’s remainder I sat slumped and stunned, plunged, as I was, in silence, breaking only when the bell finally rang.
Miss Sullens directed me to her office, a series of three cubicles. She started in on me the moment she took a seat. “I’d be remiss,” Miss Sullens said, her cheeks aflame, “if I didn’t tell you I feel betrayed.”
I was thankful my back was to the door, because even though I didn’t know what I’d done, I admired Miss Sullens so much that tears filled my eyes.
“And the disappointment…” she said, and then paused. “The utter embarrassment was compounded by the fact that I began class by reading your paragraph aloud. Because it was exemplary, so far as I was concerned. A model. And I was about to give it the highest possible grade when someone pointed out that you’d plagiarized.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. I had no clue what “plagiarized” meant.
Miss Sullens pinched my essay between her fingers and placed it on her desk between us. Then she opened her copy of Romeo and Juliet to the summary preceding Act II.
“This says”—and in the paperback she pointed to a double-underlined sentence—“ ‘Meanwhile, Romeo has succeeded in leaping over the Capulets’ garden wall and is hiding beneath Juliet’s balcony.’ You write, ‘Romeo, meanwhile, is hiding beneath Juliet’s balcony after leaping over the garden wall of the Capulets.’ ”
My eyes darted between both pieces of writing. “But I rearranged the words.”
Still holding the book, Miss Sullens shook her head and considered me for a moment. “Griffin,” she finally said, “you tried to pass off these thoughts as your own. People get expelled for this. There is no more serious offense in academics. Do you understand?”
“I didn’t know,” I said. This was the absolute truth. I had always done this.
Miss Sullens sighed and then sat up straight. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman. The ends of her hair were roughly cut, as if with safety scissors. I could not meet her eyes. Instead, I looked over her shoulder, at the framed picture on her desk I’d often wondered about, of her sailing on a small outrigger, in northeastern waters the color of iron, with a woman who appeared to be her sister. Was this why her lips were so freckled? Miss Sullens lowered her voice. “I believe you,” she said to me. “But that doesn’t excuse it.” The second bell rang. “You’ll fail this assignment and rewrite it.” She got up. “We’ll discuss this further, but right now I have another class.”
Cliffnotes was waiting for me outside. “Are you in trouble?” he asked.
We started walking down the empty hallway. I wasn’t sure how to answer, “trouble” being more of an environment in which I existed than a temporary state. Even now I was late to meet Coach Kepplemen.
Cliff cupped his hand to tame his cowlick; his inner lips, permanently scabbed by his orthodontia, shined wetly. “It was Simon Pilchard,” he said. “He ratted you out.”
We stopped.
“When Miss Sullens read your essay, he raised his hand and told her he didn’t know we could use the summary like that.”
“No shit.”
“You gonna fuck him up?”
“Something royal.”
“Ready for math?”
“No.”
“I’m free now if you want my help.”
“Later,” I said. “Coach Kepplemen wants to talk lineups.”
“Catch you on the rebound,” Cliff said.
We did our secret handshake, double slaps high low plus thumb snaps, and then I jetted.
In the locker room, Coach Kepplemen said, “Let’s check your weight.”
He had a carny’s eye for our mass, and he liked to amaze us by accurately picking a number before the Detecto scale rendered its exact judgment. He slid the larger poise’s tooth into the hundred-pound groove. Then he pushed the smaller one so that it hissed along the top beam till he tapped it, at thirty, to a stop. I stepped onto the platform. The balance rose, inexorably, bouncing once, twice, and then settling to a stop: 130 pounds. Kepplemen’s eyes, wide-set and watery, were gloomy with disappointment. Before he could ask, I stepped off, dropping my drawers in the same motion, and, back on the scale, exhaled so hard my shoulders hunched.
Kepplemen shrugged, shook his head. His nose, long and broad at the bridge, dominated his face. He had covered his mouth with his hand in a sign of concern, and this made his prominent beak seem larger.
“It’s just a pound,” I said.
He shook his head. “Swain,” he said. He meant Frank Swain, a junior. “He’s sucking down from one thirty-five.” I couldn’t beat Frank on my best day.
I bit my fingernail, spit it out. The balance didn’t move.
“What if I dropped to one twenty-one?”
Kepplemen brightened. “Can you make it?”
“Is the slot open?”
Kepplemen nodded. “It’s all yours.”
“Not a problem then.” My confidence, my willingness to cut the weight, lightened Kepplemen’s mood. Before I could bend to pull on my briefs, he collected the hair at my scruff and gave me a loving shake. He eyeballed me—we were the same height—from head to toe. “Christ, Griffin, you’re so fucking big. How much have you grown since last season?”
“Four inches.” I was five-ten now, though I hadn’t filled out. Over Labor Day, when my father and I had gone to Brooks Brothers for my back-to-school shopping, there was no containing his frustration. “You can’t keep me in clothes,” I said to Kepplemen, parroting Dad when he’d complained to the tailor.
Relieved, Kepplemen said, “We’re set,” and I nodded, thrilled. A starting position! As if to sign the agreement, he reached out and palmed both my ears, gently knocked my forehead to his. Then he left while I got dressed.
I hurried to find my friends. In the few minutes before fifth period ended and lunch began, people congregated in the upper school’s long front hallway, which was lined with pews on which we sat in our respective cliques. I spotted Simon Pilchard. Seated, he was circled by three friends. He was also a wrestler—tiny, a ninety-eight-pounder. There was no faculty present, so I walked over, broke through their ring, and cuffed Pilchard’s forehead with my palm’s heel, knocking his skull against the wall.
“The hell, Griffin?” Pilchard said.
“That’s for English,” I said, and then joined my friends at the pew across from them. Cliffnotes stood, check-swinging a baseball bat. He was a die-hard Yankees fan. The World Series had just ended, and although he was happy Kansas City had lost—they’d beat the Bronx Bombers in the pennant—he was mourning the season’s conclusion. Tanner Potts, my other best friend, was seated before him, tossing a wadded piece of paper in the air and catching it.
“Just talked to Kepplemen,” I said to them. “I’m starting.”
“No way,” Cliff said, and took his stance. “What weight?”
I sat next to Tanner. “One twenty-one.”
Tanner said, “Have you got that to cut?”
“I’d drop to one-fifteen if I had to.”
“That wasn’t the question,” Tanner said, and tossed the wad toward Cliff.
Cliff swung the bat and hit a line drive. Pilchard, who was walking up behind him—to apologize, I figured, or explain himself—caught the barrel right on the nose.
It sounded like a light bulb bursting. Pilchard cupped his face in both hands. Blood dribbled down his chin. He turned in a circle, taking a handful of paper towels from Cliff, who’d raced to the bathroom. Miss Sullens, who was walking by, suggested he come with her to the nurse’s office. They departed soon after, Pilchard with his head tilted ceilingward, Miss Sullens leading him by the elbow.
Tanner, who had neither moved nor reacted during the episode, said, “That’s broken.”
Cliff took this as blame; his voice rose an octave. “He walked right up behind me!”
The bell rang for lunch.
“I’ll meet you guys there,” he said glumly. “I should probably go see how Pilchard’s doing.”
My mood had lightened. My sorrow over Miss Sullens spent, my starting slot secured, I felt a great load lift. I still had an algebra quiz to bomb, but I was for all intents and purposes back in sync with Boyd’s rhythms, the reset button pressed. After eating, I went to the locker room to weigh myself again. Nine pounds to lose, if I didn’t count what I’d just gained at lunch. I considered my naked self in the full-length mirror. Stoked, I did a couple of bicep flexes. I thought about Naomi dreamily for a moment, about seeing her this afternoon and telling her my news—that things were looking up! Then I heard the bell ring and cursed. After dressing, I raced to get my book bag and then ran to Introductory Physical Science. The second bell rang before I arrived. Miss Brodsky, who had a quicker fuse than any upper school teacher, paused her instructions to the class. Already mid-lab, she greeted me with “Why?” and when I began to explain she cut me off with “Enough” and then ordered me—“There”—to my station.
Cowed, I took my stool next to my lab partner, Deb Peryton. She shook her head at me and tsk-tsked. She regularly wore baggy, knitted turtlenecks that hid her figure, but she also liked to wear dusty-pink lipstick on lips I sometimes imagined kissing. She frowned at me, coyly. “Nice of you to join us,” she said. Here I was, late again, and as usual failing to pull my weight. But Deb was either not immune to my charms or took a special kind of pity on me. She was also a science whiz, thank God, and because our lab grade was a shared one, she let me copy from her notebook whenever necessary, a task I hurriedly began. We were comparing the boiling points of various liquids, and our test tubes—Bunsen burners blackening their bases—bubbled merrily, the white smoke thickly rising from their tops like Newark’s industrial chimneys.
At the station across from ours, Tanner was showing off for Justine Keaton. “Ready for a magic trick?” he said to her. From a wash bottle, he squeezed some burner fuel into his cupped hand. Justine pressed her shoulder to his while she stared at his palm. “Watch closely,” Tanner said, as if she weren’t already. He lit and then touched a match to the pool, upon which the liquid burst into a small cloud of flame that immediately disappeared. Justine jumped, covering her mouth while she laughed. “Presto,” Tanner said.
For Deb’s enjoyment I attempted the same stunt. “Check this out,” I told her, and began to fill my palm with the fluid, a few runnels coursing down my wrist and covering the back of my hand.
Deb leaned back. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she said.
“Abracadabra,” I said, and tapped a struck match to my palm.
Cuff to fingertips, my entire hand ignited. I screamed, then jumped from my stool, furiously beating the appendage against my leg until the conflagration was put out.
Miss Brodsky hurried over and was now bent double with me, looking with real concern as I examined my hand. She was holding a fire extinguisher. “Are you all right?” she asked.
The hair on my fingers was singed off, but the skin, now a brightening pink, was undamaged. I nodded.
“You’re sure?” she said.
“Positive,” I answered, and, taking a deep breath, stood up straight. Everyone was staring at us.
“Good,” she replied, and then her expression darkened. “Now go explain yourself to Mr. Fistly.”
I made the long walk to Mr. Fistly’s office. When I arrived, I addressed myself to Miss Abbasi, the upper school secretary. “Is Mr. Fistly in?” I asked, as if we had a scheduled meeting. Miss Abbasi’s ear for inflection was remarkable; she gave a dismissive nod in his door’s direction, not a word more articulate than the disappointment she conveyed in that look and gesture: that I was back, that I remained on the radar, that I never learned.
Mr. Fistly kept his office lamp-lit, eschewing the overhead lights—it was an office for a reader. Along with his administrative duties, he taught a select British lit seminar. For those privileged students who intentionally found their way here to chat about, say, Gulliver’s Travels (a favorite of his, I’d overheard), who were offered a seat across from his desk or perhaps on his couch, beside his wingback chair, where my parents and I had been called in to meet with him at the semester’s start to discuss, in his words, “my inherently unique challenges” given my “middling middle school performance” and my “professional obligations,” I imagined it was a very pleasant place to pass the time.
Upon entering, the rules of the exchange were inviolate: I was required to report exactly why I’d come and precisely what I’d done. He would tolerate no diminishment of my crime and absolutely no excuse. Film acting, my father liked to say, was all in the eyes, and while I incriminated myself, Fistly steadily gazed at me. His wavy reddish hair had the sculpted firmness of something detachable, like a barrister’s wig. His large nose was pronouncedly hooked, more menacing because of the pride he took in its raptor-like prominence. He twiddled his thumbs while I talked. He studied me. He even chuckled when I got to my combustible moment—a breathy laugh that revealed his very long, straight teeth, though his brows remained frozen. Toward the end of my account, he began to flush in anticipation of his response, which, I realized, he’d been formulating ahead of my conclusion, and this high coloring, intensified by his chronic razor burn, blurred the line between fury and delight, for he was smiling when he spoke.
“In all my years in education,” Fistly began, “I’ve found I cannot help but engage in what one might call a Darwinian specification of students. This is not merely a categorization of certain types, like ‘jock’ or ‘nerd,’ but also an enumeration of their inherent qualities. It makes one more appreciative of Shakespeare’s genius, he having comprehensively cataloged all of creation’s characters, fool to king. Speaking of fools, I have always been fascinated by the class clown, by his desperate need to be the center of attention. The sadly neurotic way he shifts everyone’s focus back to himself, in spite of the vital information his teacher is working so hard to impart. Now listen to me”—Fistly chuckled—“going on with my tiny observations, selfishly keeping you from learning science. Forcing you to lose more ground and making your already woeful academic standing more woeful still. Does that sort of behavior seem…familiar? You will serve detention this Saturday.”
Math class, toward day’s end, was where I took my final licks. After negotiating the first five problems with relative ease—these no different from our practice problems but for the numbers—there came that moment when I arrived at the sixth question, where I inevitably stumbled as I collected the variable terms and then dropped them so that they spilled everywhere. I could spend all day in this classroom and never realize its solution. I was also, I noticed, the only person sitting up. I gazed upon everyone’s humped backs, listened to their pencil point taps, their eraser squeaks, the methodical tick of the clock, and what was clear to me, first and foremost, was that Fistly was right. I was losing more ground. My situation was unsustainable. And I prayed for a way out.
There was a knock at the door. Miss Abbasi entered, quietly apologized to the teacher for the intrusion, and then handed me a note.
Call Your Agent.
You Have an Audition This Afternoon.
Love, Dad
Things couldn’t go on like this. Not in November. Not once wrestling season started.
How to lose acting from this equation?
And then, with a cold certainty that strong math students must enjoy, it dawned on me I could subtract this term, at least for a while.
I turned in my quiz and, showing Mr. Graff the note, left the classroom and made straight for the school’s pay phone in the front hall. When I called my father at his studio, I managed to contain my fury.
“It’s a big deal,” Dad said of my upcoming audition, “reading for a director like Paul Mazursky.”
I didn’t know who that was. “How long will you be at your office?” I asked.
“I have a booking at three.”
While I tried to get my breathing under control, he said, “Everything okay?”
I told him I was fine. I said goodbye and then called Brent, my agent, who told me who Mazursky was, that he’d liked my work in The Talon Effect, and then he gave me the audition’s address and time.
“Can you schedule it for earlier?” I asked.
“No can do,” Brent said.
“Can you call my school and tell them I have to leave now?”
“What happened, Griff? Dog eat your homework again?”
“Something like that.”
“Hey,” Brent said, “whatever the talent needs.”
I rejoined my math class already in progress and made a great show of listening. Within five minutes, Miss Abbasi reappeared and, excusing herself to Mr. Graff once more, handed me the note, which I in turn gave to my teacher.
I hopped the bus on Columbus Avenue downtown. It was almost two. I could catch my dad before he left his studio for his appointment. Traffic was light, and the vehicle, bashing over each pothole, made a great crash along its length, as if its scalloped steel siding might at any moment shake loose. This in-between time, before schools let out and the rush hour began, was stirring somehow. There were few pedestrians visible, and with the rest at work it was as if the city belonged to me. Because the bus was nearly empty, I had a clear view out all the windows, side to front, so I stood in the aisle’s center and stretched out my arms to grab the straps, pretending that I was flying. The driver skipped two stops, gathering speed. We could see the streetlights change from red to green as far south as Seventy-Ninth, even below the planetarium, and we shared a private, communal giddiness—this rare break from the bus’s halting progress and maybe from our own—our thoughts so perfectly aligned that he caught my eye in his giant rearview mirror and smiled. And when it was finally time to get off, I let the force transferred from the brakes carry me forward, palming the poles to slow my fall all the way to the front.
My father rented a small studio next to the Carnegie Deli. It was where he gave voice lessons, one of his side jobs, and took photographs (he’d taken the majority of his students’ headshots), a skill he’d learned in the navy. On the space’s far wall, he’d tacked a collection of their portraits to some pegboard so that the collage resembled an audience. Sometimes, on my bike rides home from elementary school, I made it a point to surprise my father and stop by, an interruption he rarely appreciated. Before knocking, a courtesy I also regularly neglected, I liked to listen to him teach from the hallway. The vocal exercises were sung to rising or falling scales, their tempo matched to a consonant’s hardness or a syllable’s length—words that taken together sounded like looping nonsense poems (ma may me my mo moo ma) designed to develop enunciation (fee fi foh foo fum), the phrases moving up each key until arriving at a register too high for the singer’s bass or too low for their soprano, upon which they cracked into disharmony. There might be laughter after this—Dad’s, the student’s, or both—followed by some muted, technical instruction, perhaps even a demonstration by my father. These moments always made me proud, for his ability so obviously exceeded his pupils’, and just before the resumption of the exercise I would enter unannounced—as I did now, since he was alone.
He greeted my appearance with bewilderment and looked at me questioningly, perhaps because he registered my anger. I had rehearsed our conversation on my ride here, steeling myself, and now pressed my advantage.
“How much longer do I have to do this?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The Nuclear Family. Acting. Everything.”
We’d had this fight before. It didn’t take long for him to get his balance back. “Until your obligation is fulfilled.”
“Are you talking about my contract? The season ends next week.”
“We’ll see if they want to renew.”
“What if I don’t want to renew?”
“It’s not time to worry about that yet.”
“I can’t do both anymore.” I said this more pleadingly than I’d have liked. “I’ve tried.”
At this, Dad stood, although the upright piano was still between us. “You listen to me,” he said. “I don’t need to remind you how expensive your school is. Not to mention the fact that your grades these past two years have been unacceptable. Your mother and I expect them to improve. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“I’ll pull you.”
I had anticipated this move. He’d used it many times.
“Where were you this morning?” I asked. “I called you here and then at home.”
Dad screwed up his expression.
“I called you around eleven,” I said, bluffing.
“I was in a recording session,” Dad said. “At BBD&O.”
“No, you weren’t. I saw you. On Columbus Circle. With a woman.” I scanned his wall of faces and then pointed to the headshot. “Her,” I said.
My father’s eye twitched. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He was a terrible liar.
“Wrestling season ends in February,” I said. “No more auditions until then.”
My father stuck out his lower lip and shrugged. It was an ambiguous gesture.
“Do we have a deal?” I asked.
“Deal,” he said, and, like a conductor disappearing back into the pit, took his seat.
On the verge of becoming a man, there are times when I relished being a boy. Now, for instance, in the back seat of Naomi’s car. Having concluded my story, I leaned into her outstretched arms, burying my wet face in her neck. “Oh, baby,” she said, rocking me side to side. “You had a really bad day.” Memory being what it is, I often wonder how I actually told her this tale. I’m sure it was more rudimentary, disorganized. That I’d hopped from one point of frustration to the next, so that it sounded like a list of complaints about a life that was unmanageable: I couldn’t keep up with acting, with school; I’d disappointed Miss Sullens, I couldn’t disappoint Coach; my father didn’t care. What I do remember is this: when I’d finally calmed down, after Naomi took my cheeks in her palms and then kissed the corners of my eyes and pressed her lips to the edge of mine and I finally kissed her back—she suddenly stopped us. She made a great show of the effort this cost her as she gathered herself, although the effort was no act. And then she asked me a very simple question, one that revealed a key detail I’d left out and constituted the knot from which I could not figure out how to untangle myself.
“Why don’t you just quit?” Naomi whispered. “The show, acting, all of it.”
“Don’t you understand?” I said, as if it were obvious. “I pay for my private school.”