So began several weeks in which Naomi and I talked almost every day. She had questions from our previous conversation that she’d thought about the night before; I had things I realized I’d forgotten to tell her during our evening apart. It was strange how quickly the time passed when we were together. It made me hurry to meet her. I could not get from school to her car fast enough. The Columbus Avenue bus took forever and then, once I was in the Mercedes, the three-block drive from Juilliard to the Dead Street seemed endless. Fall in full swing now, the trees in Lincoln Towers’ green space shed their leaves; beneath awnings, the heat lamps shined on passing pedestrians and conferred on them an orange rotisserie glow. With November’s approach, there was an entirely different quality to the light that on overcast days imparted to the sky a color closer to granite, to the Hudson an even more forbidding opacity, a solidity, as if ore might be transmuted to liquid not by heat but rather cold. Naomi parked; we hurried to the back seat; we pretended we were rushing because of the frigid gusts off the water, which made my tie ripple and stiffen and Naomi’s skirt snap. The doors slammed shut. Silence again. Often, we began to speak simultaneously. “You first,” Naomi said. At some point, after what seemed like only minutes later, she’d glance at her watch and, with a tone close to regret, say, “I’m afraid we’ve run out of time,” and my disappointment bordered on frustration, because it felt as if I was on the verge of something, of articulating a solution to a problem I could not name. It was this speechlessness at this moment that I found upsetting, a distress that Naomi seized on, and I allowed. She slid down in the seat; I did as well. With the back of her finger she might trace the line from my ear’s lobe to my lips. She regarded me with an expression somewhere between wonder and caution, between curiosity and fear. She liked to kiss my eyes next, which I closed; she kissed her way toward the edge of my mouth, until I finally kissed her back. She sometimes took my hand nearest her hip and firmly pressed it to her knee, indicating that I was to touch her there—that I could, if I wished, lift her skirt’s edge; that I was to feel her feeling my fingertips’ progress along her thigh—and I confess this frightened me. Until, as a gentle means of pausing us, as both bookmark and interruption but now more in imitation of restraint, the wordless sounds she made became laughter. There was a feline growl to it, which didn’t completely hide her nervousness and touched my heart. It was the only moment I thought she was acting.
Home soon and Mom had made dinner—tonight it was baked pork chops with mustard and rosemary and Rice-A-Roni, “the San Francisco treat,” Dad said hungrily as he took his seat to my left, though he couldn’t help shoot himself a look in the adjacent wall’s mirrors, which I always faced, and subtly suck in his gut. Oren, sitting across from him, duly noted this and, rolling his eyes, shook his head in private disgust. Mom, who sat directly across from me, blocked my reflection. “How was your day?” she asked. “Anything to report?”
“Not really,” I said, and—this still amazes me—I believed it.
Dad had already picked up his pork chop by its bone’s tips and was chomping away.
“What are you going as for Halloween?” I asked my brother, because I hadn’t given it a thought.
“Like I’m going to let you bite my style.”
Of course, if disguise is your natural state, coming up with a costume is no easy matter.
“How,” Naomi asked me one of these afternoons, “did you get started acting? Was it because of your father?” And I couldn’t help it—I imitated the long stress on the word’s first syllable—fa-tha—which made her laugh and then play-slap me. I told her about my first television appearance. It took place at my elementary school, P.S. 59, when I was in Miss Epstein’s second grade class. She was an older lady, in her sixties. Even then Miss Epstein seemed a throwback: pearled cat-eyed glasses, schoolmarmish and severe in her wool dresses and white tights. Her heavy shoes clopped ominously as she patrolled our aisles. It was not unusual for her to rap my knuckles with a metal-edged ruler after I made a wisecrack.
On this particular morning, there came a knock at our classroom door. A young man entered, consulted a clipboard, and then called my name. I stood slowly, unsure if I was in trouble. When I looked to Miss Epstein for a sign, she flushed, clearly in on the game. “Well go,” she finally said.
The stranger led me downstairs to the library. Someone had taped black construction paper over the door’s window. The stranger knocked three times and then entered. The room had been entirely rearranged: its tables and chairs neatly stacked in the far corner. Thick black electrical cords snaked to a soundboard and a pair of klieg lights—the latter made the air stuffy and were aimed at a student’s desk, where the stranger ordered me to sit. Having grown up around an actor-father, I knew a set when I saw one and kept quiet. I faced a false wall that climbed almost to the ceiling, before which stood a director’s chair. A man got up from it to introduce himself. Over his shoulder I could see a small cutaway in the wood, flush against which was the camera’s lens, whose aperture narrowed, widened, and then went still.
The man, whom I immediately recognized, was Allen Funt, the host of Candid Camera. He wore a light blue shirt with a paisley design, cerulean paramecia swimming across the shiny fabric. His pants were as white as his teeth and within a single shade of the band of hair above his high forehead. He bent toward me, with his hands on his knees, and pitched his voice low.
“We’re gonna have a talk, you and me, okay?” he said. “I’m gonna sit in that chair”—he wrapped his arm around his chest, pointing behind him, though he never took his eyes from mine—“and you just relax. Sound like a plan?”
I knew what was happening, just not what to expect. But I wanted to be on the show. So I nodded.
“Say whatever’s on your mind,” Funt added, and smiled. His teeth were fantastic, separate unto him, like furniture in his mouth. He returned to his seat. “So, Griffin, tell me something about yourself. You like baseball? Who’s your favorite team?”
“The Yankees.”
“What about football? Jets fan?”
“Giants.”
“Follow the fights? You a Frazier or Foreman guy?”
“I like Muhammad Ali.”
“Float like a butterfly…” Funt said, and pointed at me.
“Sting like a bee,” I replied, taking his cue.
“Think you can make up rhymes like that?”
“Sure,” I said.
And then Muhammad Ali appeared next to me. There’d been another student’s chair off camera, and Ali reached between his legs to take the small seat in hand and scoot up close. This action should have been awkward, but he glided soundlessly across the floor, moving with the frictionless ease I’ve come to recognize in all superior athletes, mere exertion something they deign to do, lest it sap energy they need to call upon later. He was wearing boxing shoes and a pair of shorts that read Everlast at the waistband, but nothing else. I detected a hint of glee as he stared me down. Even though I’d been ready for a surprise, I was not prepared to see the champ, and my reaction, in acting parlance, was big.
“Rhyme better than me?” Ali said. “I’m the greatest poet on the planet, ain’t met my peer. Got fists of thunder, a tongue like Shakespeare.”
And then he leaned forward, so that the effect was of a face arriving from far away.
“We gonna have a battle of wits,” he said.
Ali jumped up and raised his fists, hopping soundlessly, and then waved me from my seat. I obeyed, mirroring his moves, bobbing and weaving. I feinted a few punches and, in response, Ali fired several jabs, their speed so strobic it made me slightly sick. His arms were absurdly long. Retracted, they appeared mantis-like. Ali continued to rhyme:
“Knocked out Liston in the third, stunned Foreman in Zaire. Beat Frazier so bad he cried for a…” He cupped a hand to his ear.
“Year!” I said.
“Good!” he cried. “Now you.”
“Fake with my left, punch with my right. Ain’t losing to the champ without a…”
“Fight!” Ali said. He dropped his guard and then shook his head in mock defeat. He held out an open palm. “Give me five.”
I slapped his hand, and he pulled me into a hug. He asked me my name, and when I told him his eyes widened.
“The mythological creature,” he said. “Guardian of great treasures. What’re you protecting, boy?”
I hadn’t given it a thought. But by now Funt was up, applauding, and he inserted himself between us.
“Great stuff, Muhammad,” he said. “Absolutely priceless.”
The man with the clipboard took my elbow and led me toward the door. When I looked back, Funt, who was still talking to the champ, checked over his shoulder to see whether I was within earshot. At that moment, Ali slit his eyes and shook his fist at me, this a secret sign of our allegiance. I nodded, disingenuously, and felt something akin to shame.
“You want to explore that a bit?” Naomi asked me.
I considered her question for a moment. “It was like I was on Funt’s team instead of Ali’s.”
“Like you were colluding.”
I told her I didn’t know what that meant.
“Cooperating,” she said, “but in secret.”
A word can open a world. I thought of how I’d thrown Andy Axelrod under the bus on set several weeks ago. Was it because he never listened to me? Because when we talked, he made me disappear? Funt behavior, all the way. Whereas I wanted to be like the champ, someone who in person was exactly like Ali—a rare thing indeed. How to become my opposite?
“As for what you’re protecting,” Naomi said, “I think we both know the answer to that.”
Being baffled, and safely allowed to be so, I remained silent.
“Yourself, silly.”
I had questions. But by now, Naomi had pushed her sleeve’s cuff back to check her watch. She leaned over to kiss my neck, close to my clavicle, and this caress sent a charge down my spine that zammed to the soles of my feet. “Maybe,” she whispered, “we pick up with this tomorrow.”
During those afternoons Naomi and I spent together, the order of operations was always the same: talk first, touch afterward. I had initially thought of the latter as something I owed her, like the check Dad wrote to Elliott at the end of our sessions, the one he folded and sometimes asked me to hand him when we were done, as if I were the one paying the good doctor. But this was changing.
After my Candid Camera segment aired, Dad made me an appointment at the Billy Kidd Talent Agency. There was no discussion about it. He simply showed up at school one afternoon—a rare occurrence, since Oren and I went to and fro on our own—explaining only that there was someone he wanted me to meet. Chronology dictates his real motivation: we’d just moved back to Lincoln Towers and were struggling. Why not enlist a little help? Brent Bixby, the company’s founder and sole employee, ran the business out of a single-room office overlooking Coliseum Books on West Fifty-Seventh Street. He gave me some commercial sides. Unwilling to play along, I robotically read my lines. “Mr. Owl,” I said, deadpan, “how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” My reluctance should be no mystery. It was one thing to want to be on Candid Camera, quite another to risk being exposed. I would step into the open on my terms.
“That’s fine,” Brent said. He took back the script and suggested we chat. He folded his hands on his desk and refused to speak. We stared at each other for a while. Brent had a wooden impassivity and a perfect goatee. If he’d wrapped a turban around his head, he’d have been a dead ringer for Zoltar, the coin-operated swami that gave your fortune at the arcade. On his giant desk, there was a telephone on whose face several cubed buttons flashed, a sight I found profoundly distracting when it burbled: Who had he left on hold? The desk’s corner was anchored by a Rolodex so big it required a hand crank, the only thing I was sure Brent would grab should the building ever catch fire. All four walls were crowded with kids’ headshots, the subjects posed and in costume: The quarterback, in a number twelve jersey, smiling as he prepared to make a pass. The redhead with Pippi Longstocking braids sticking out beneath her straw hat, a giant swirled lollipop held close to her lips. The young tough in a leather jacket, its collar popped, leaning against a wall while he glared at the camera. I felt an overwhelming urge to scratch out their eyes, like the defaced ads I saw on the subway, and was reminded of one of Elliott’s favorite aphorisms: “Those who annoy us the most remind us of ourselves.”
“What’s with all the stupid pictures?” I asked. My bluntness shocked me. Behind me I heard Dad laugh.
Brent mulled my question. “So that when I get a call from a casting agent for a certain type of kid, I know which horse to pick.”
“I’m not a horse,” I said.
Brent shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said, “but this is a race.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Attention.”
While I squinted, considering this, a smile flickered across Brent’s mouth.
“You’re hired,” he said.
Dad told me to wait in the hallway while he and Brent signed papers, though he intentionally left the door ajar. He was a big believer that an overheard conversation was more authentic than a direct one. “He’s got the gift,” he said, “he’s in the moment.”
But Brent, who had even less patience for the talent’s parents than the kid, replied, “I’ll be in touch.”
My talent, if it could be called that—my gift, which Brent and my father had immediately recognized—was for naturalism. Down the road, as my list of professional credits grew, it would require almost no effort, in dramas like E. G. Marshall’s Radio Mystery Theater, to play a child possessed by a demon—to speak, that is, through my own mouth as if I were inhabited by another being. To weep over my father’s body after he was assassinated at the end of The Talon Effect. To deliver commercial taglines with total conviction: Boy, I’d say, this is good-tasting tuna, before I was made to spit the mouthfuls of bread and fish into a garbage can after each take. To bear witness, with growing shock in the shot’s background, to the woman playing my homemaker mom toss her broom aside and then run her fingers over her lips, her hands over her dress, and make the same moaning sounds Naomi sometimes did when we kissed. When I eat a York Peppermint Pattie, she said, I get the sensation that a cool breeze is blowing through my hair. And across my long white dress. Oh. Oh. To fake faking it. To be at a twice remove. I could cry at will but feel nothing, feel everything but give nothing away. I did not connect it to the fire at the time, to that walk from Al and Neal’s apartment to our destroyed home, but the transformation felt morphological, so that as I moved through the world in this near-perfect disguise, I felt as if I had just a bit of extra time to process things, could exert the slightest delay while I took stock of any situation before showing my hand.
What was odd was that the only time it happened with Naomi was when we were physical with each other.
“Touch it,” she ordered. We had already moved to the back seat.
I placed my hand on her lap. If fur were on the verge of becoming liquid; if, like cotton candy, it might delicately melt in my mouth, that was what the material felt like. She’d laid her stole over her legs, so that I might run my fingers through it. “This is Russian sable,” she said. “The most expensive kind there is.”
She placed her palm over mine; her hand was cold and dry. Sometimes, as now, I was aware of how much my company meant to her, and the feeling was as weighty as the garment, as nearly suffocating as it was pleasant, and my discomfort, which won out today, was like the first night we met, so I felt an overwhelming urge to flee.
“Did Sam buy you this?” I asked, not completely innocently.
Naomi released my hand, cleared her throat. “He did.”
“What about your necklace?”
“That too.”
“What about the car?”
“That’s all me, mister.”
“Do you think he’d be jealous if he knew about us?” I asked. Sometimes, when we were together, I was certain he’d appear on the street and accuse us of terrible things.
“If he noticed my existence, then maybe.”
She considered me for a moment. I considered Naomi, arms crossed and back pressed against her door.
“Is there anything about us to know?” she asked.
I shrugged. I was not sure I could say.
“Is this what you really want to talk about?” she asked.
I petted the sable again. “My grandfather was a furrier,” I offered.
At this, Naomi visibly relaxed. Took my cue. “Whose side?”
“My dad’s.”
“What was he like?”
“I never met him. He and my grandma lived in California. He died when I was four.”
“Do you know where he was from?”
“Hungary.”
“What about your grandmother?”
“From Russia.”
“Is she still alive?”
“She lives in Los Angeles. We don’t see her much.”
“Was your father not close with them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I heard my parents fighting about him once.”
“Tell me,” Naomi said.
It happened after I applied to matriculate into Boyd’s seventh grade class. I’d been acting for five years by then and treated my interview like another audition. Mom, who’d escorted me, was invited into Mr. McElmore’s office at the interview’s start. It was located in the Old School, like some Gothic dream out of Tolkien, giving on to the New School, the modern wing. McElmore was the head of admissions, and he chatted up Mom, obviously charmed. After Mom mentioned she was getting a master’s in American literature, he told her he also taught senior English, and they nearly forgot me while discussing names from the spines crowding his office’s bookshelf. Mom’s brown hair was pulled back, her smart black sleeveless dress showing off her dancer’s arms, her high heels accentuating her ballerina’s calves, eyeliner bringing out her irises’ deep blue. At times such as these, I was made aware of how beautiful she was. Mom’s outfit somehow signaled the interview’s seriousness—I could tell she was nervous—though she gave me no preparation beforehand or on the bus ride there, except that I should “be myself.”
“It was lovely to meet you,” McElmore said to her, and then escorted her to his door, touching the small of her back before indicating the couch outside. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Griffin and I will have a chat.”
What was I thinking, then, when McElmore asked me about my acting career, and I slipped into obvious shtick? “I gotta tell ya,” I said, outer-borough-ing my accent and standing, without asking permission, to take off my blazer, unclip my tie, and then roll up my sleeves, as if the head of admissions and I were about to have a fight. “I’m not comfortable in this monkey suit. I’m used to wearing clothes that are more relaxed.” I unbuttoned my collar and, after sitting again, made a great show of cracking my neck. “Now,” I said, “what was your question?”
McElmore chuckled. “I was wondering if you ever suffered from stage fright,” he said. His broad mustache was shaped like a whale’s fluke; there were even whales on his bow tie. A port wine birthmark splashed across his cheek. He could barely hide a smile behind his steepled fingers, which he touched to his lips as I talked about the challenges of learning my lines and sharing a dressing room with John Belushi.
The fight between my parents happened soon after my acceptance letter arrived—one of their arguments that I could hear as I rose in the elevator, that grew louder as I stepped into our hallway, that made me slow-walk to our door and ensured, as I quietly turned my key in the lock and then snuck into my room, that I might eavesdrop on them in complete secrecy.
“All those synagogues your father sent you marching off to,” Mom said. “All those weekends in Brooklyn or Queens. ‘Here’s a quarter, Shel, buy yourself some lunch, but only if they don’t feed you there. And don’t leave without getting paid.’ ”
“Oh please.”
“What does Elliott think about you making your son another little cantor?”
“He’s already signed a contract.”
“Break it.”
“Even if I could, I can’t. Don’t you understand, Lily? I’m short, all right? I haven’t got it.”
For a long time, my mother was quiet.
My father lowered his voice. “I can’t do it alone,” he confessed. “When are you going to get that through your head?”
It was, I realize now, their central conflict, the problem they were always talking around. Mom, hunkered down—she’d been a professional dancer and now taught children ballet at Carnegie Hall in the afternoons. It left her mornings to study, to write her papers and take classes, and “that’s my contribution,” I often caught her saying to Dad, “that’s my training.” “Your mother,” Dad said to me after one of these fights—I’d ask him while we walked to the grocery store why she didn’t get a different job—“isn’t corporate material.”
Mom, Dad, and I had a talk that night. This was formal business, conducted in our living room. I sat on the sofa, my parents across from me.
“Your father has something to tell you,” Mom said, and gave Dad the floor.
Dad sat forward. His voice’s register: very serious. His role: somber patriarch. Nothing he was about to say was anything he wanted to. “Your mother and I are thrilled about your new school. As you should be. Because it’s a very big step, in your development. But it’s also a major financial commitment.”
“Which you should be aware of,” Mom said.
“So that you’re invested,” Dad said.
“In your education,” Mom said. “In your future.”
“What we’re telling you,” Dad said, “is that you’re going to be making a contribution. That part of the money you earn as an actor will go toward your tuition. Do you understand?”
It was difficult to tell if this was a request for my permission or an announcement.
“What if I don’t?” I asked.
“Understand?” Dad asked.
“Make a contribution.”
Dad looked at Mom, not without some alarm; Mom shrugged at this response, as if to say, I told you. Dad unclasped his hands and clapped them back together. When he made big gestures like these, he reminded me of William Shatner. Billions, I could imagine him saying, billions and billions of galaxies. “Then I guess we’ll have to find other means.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. Because in a way I didn’t understand, I felt like I’d gotten my answer.
Naomi’s car was dark now. To my right the West Side Highway winked and pulsed. With the windows up, its flashes were silent, like heat lightning. We’d finished talking some time ago. Naomi sat there, thinking. She had unbuttoned several buttons of my shirt and lightly dragged her fingernails over my chest. It made me so hard my penis was sore. I’d have enjoyed it more if I wasn’t so afraid she’d notice.
“Your little brother,” Naomi said. “How come he goes to a different school?”
Shame banished my boner. “He didn’t get in,” I said.
“Really? He seems so smart.”
“He is. But I’m not.”
“What kind of nonsense are you talking?”
My guilt surrounding this subject was as heavy as cement shoes. “I got bad grades in middle school. Mom said they thought Oren would perform just as poorly. So they didn’t admit him.”
“Why would she tell you something like that?”
I turned my chest from her and buttoned my shirt. “Mom never lies.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I said, “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not yours either.”
I watched out the window. The West Side Highway flashed its Morse code, and Naomi sighed.
“Do you like it?” she finally asked. When I looked at her questioningly, she said, “Acting.”
I had to think about this for a moment. “Sometimes,” I said.
“When?”
“When I know my lines. I’ll do things, in a scene, that are smart or funny. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I know more than I do. Than when I’m me.”
“For example?”
“How I might act,” I said, “if a gun was pointed at me. Or if I could fly.”
“And that’s the fun part?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“When don’t you like it?”
I shrugged again. “When I can’t keep up. When I don’t want to. When it gets in the way of everything else, like wrestling.”
“And then what do you think?”
“I think,” I said, “that it’s never going to change.”
“Yes,” Naomi said, and sat up. “Exactly. It’s never going to change, Griffin. So the question you have to ask yourself is: Can you live with that?”
It was one of those moments when I was struck mute. She cleared my hair from my eyes and smiled. Then she caught sight of her watch.
“Oy,” she said. “Look at me, late for the kids.” She turned to exit the back seat and then paused. She leaned in and bit my lip, gently. “It means a lot to me, just FYI, you being such an open book. Most men I’ve known, they’re the exact opposite.”
At the end of October, with the fall athletic season having just come to a close, it was time for Boyd’s sports award assembly. And since Kepplemen was also the varsity cross-country coach, it meant that he had to give a speech summing up the team’s results in front of the entire school, after which he read the names of everyone who’d lettered. He sat onstage, his usually mussed salt-and-pepper hair slick and combed, all dressed up in a suit and tie, except for his wrestling shoes—a signal to those of us on the team that the real season, the one that really mattered, was about to start.
At its conclusion, we were each grabbing our book bags from where we’d slung them beneath the front hall pews. We were off to class even though the bell had not yet rung, and during this dispersal, Kepplemen intercepted me in the front hall and said, “I have something for you.”
He was already walking ahead of me, toward the school’s exit, and nodded for me to follow. I tugged at my bag’s strap, readjusting it, and then slung it beneath the pew and hurried after him. He was out the front doors now, hanging a right. At the corner, he turned right again, south on Central Park West, briefly disappearing from my sight, turning east a block later, on Ninety-Fifth Street. I knew we were going to his apartment.
Several other wrestlers had been there. It was Cliffnotes who’d described it best: it was like being in a hamper, perhaps because there were clothes strewn everywhere: an odor of still-damp socks and, perhaps because of all the cross-country practices in Central Park, the loam of mud and tang of long-dried dog shit adhered to spikes. The building had several units dedicated to faculty, and Kepplemen’s apartment was on the eighth floor. It was a one-bedroom with a small kitchen and dining alcove, whose outstanding feature was its north-facing view of the low-slung skyline, which I gazed on when we arrived, above which a very light cloud fled, and below, the Boyd Astroturf, on whose gleaming green the lower school kids now played: the boys in their navy-blue uniform shirts and corduroy pants; the girls in their blue-and-green cardigans and skirts, shouting their high calls. I watched their games from the pair of open windows: Nerf football, wiffle ball, tag. Eight stories below and the children sounded so far away and proximate, remote and magically near, I imagined if I’d whispered, Nice catch, the boy who’d just made it might shield his eyes and look up toward where I stood.
Kepplemen nudged my arm with something blunt. It was a rolled-up magazine, which I took and uncoiled: Wrestling USA. I perused its cover: an action photo of one wrestler executing a perfect hip toss. He had hold of his opponent’s head and arm; the latter’s feet were pointed toward the ceiling while the former was also airborne with the throw’s force. Before I could express my appreciation, Kepplemen, already unknotting his tie, said, “A subscription’s been mailed to you.” And when I looked up from the cover again, Kepplemen handed me another package. It was still in its mailing envelope. I tossed the magazine onto his large bed. It was the only thing kempt in the room. Even its blanket had hospital corners. He said, “Open it,” and his expression was strange. It was not exactly expectant; there was an aspect to it of apology, as if the gift’s contents contained incriminating information he’d been ordered to reveal. I tore open the package, wanting to get this over with. I was already late for class. Kepplemen removed his blazer and tossed it onto the nearby chairback. It missed and fell into a heap on the floor. I was through the clear plastic now; Kepplemen removed his tie. I pulled a pair of neoprene kneepads from the wrapping; Kepplemen had by now pulled his shirttails from his pants. They were in Boyd’s colors, gold at the knees and blue at the thigh; he was toeing off his shoes. “A starter needs proper equipment,” he said. When I thanked him, he said, “Try them on.” He’d removed his trousers but not his briefs. He was changing into his athletic clothes, I hoped. When I told him I would, he shrugged. “Try them now,” he said, unbuttoning his collar, “in case I have to send them back.”
I did not tell Naomi about this. Nor did I tell anyone how after I’d removed my pants and slid on the kneepads, how after executing, at Kepplemen’s urging, a couple of practice shots to test their fit, after a tap of his knuckle to my chin and a playful slap and then some hand fighting, I found myself holding Kepplemen in a headlock on his bed, staring at the magazine’s cover as he groaned beneath me. I torqued his neck, pressing his arm over his nose so that he labored to breathe. His ankle had hooked mine. His body spooned my hip and thigh, affixed. There followed a feeling of tremendous suction, of all space between us removed. I noticed that both wrestlers in the photo wore red shoes, that these matched their singlets’ color, the Illinois wrestler had an I on his chest, the other an OU. At which point Kepplemen jerked once, twice, violently, against my length, groaning, and then he went rigid. During these several hundred heartbeats we lay tensed, and the only sound, before he went limp, were his teeth chattering.
Later, as I hurried out, Kepplemen said he would see me soon. He was pulling on his sweatpants behind me. I did not turn to face him. The morning’s light from his windows made the hallway seem dimmer when his door closed. At the elevator bank and then on the short walk around the block, I flipped through the magazine. I did not take my eyes off it until I arrived back at school, where I threw it into the garbage before entering Miss Sullens’s class.
“You’re late,” she said.
That afternoon, instead of heading straight home, I tarried. I got off the bus at Eighty-Sixth Street to kill time at West Side Comics. I walked two blocks downtown to Tom’s Pizzeria and bought a slice. I got change and then played Asteroids for a solid hour. I caught the bus again but got off at the stop before mine, walking west on Sixty-Seventh Street, circumventing Juilliard. I spotted Naomi’s car up the block, after I’d safely crossed Amsterdam Avenue. I could neither bear the expectation on Naomi’s face when I took my seat nor her expression of joy. When I returned to the apartment and no one was home, I climbed into my top bunk and reveled in the silence, pretending, with some guilt, that everyone in my family had died and I, unbeknownst to anyone, not even the doorman, lived here all alone, and it made me feel strangely at peace.
But later that week, my discomfort inexplicably banished, I was thrilled to spot her car. I hopped in the passenger seat, and she hugged me, hard. “Where have you got off to?” she asked. “I was getting so worried I almost called your mother.” We raced to the Dead Street, as if we were late for an appointment. She cut the engine and held up her finger; she reached in back and produced a gift-wrapped box, which she placed on my lap. “Open it,” Naomi said.
I lifted the top and peeled aside the tissue paper. It was three neckties in patterns that were Willy Wonka colorful—of lighthouses, of tiny fish, of hundreds of little H’s.
“Those are Hermès,” she said. “It’s a French brand. Do you like them?” When I said yes, she asked if I would put one on. “Do you know how to tie a Windsor knot?” she asked. When I said I didn’t she put one around her neck and told me to copy her. “I used to tie my father’s,” she said, and pulled down the visor to regard herself, chin up, in its tiny mirror. I did the same. “Sometimes I tie Sam’s,” she said, as if to assure me she loved him. When we were finished, we sat in the back seat together, each with a tie around our neck. “I like the idea of you wearing something I gave you.” When I told her I did too, she said, “But maybe keep those at school.”
Which I did. In my locker. Next to the kneepads.
I didn’t see Naomi the next evening. It was the wrap party for The Nuclear Family’s fourth season, and I had asked my lab partner, Deb Peryton, to go with me.
The party was held at an event space next to the Rockefeller Rink. The oval, recently iced, and shining whitely through the windows, wasn’t open to skaters yet. The gilded statue of Prometheus presided over this. There was a buffet, and, after dinner, a projection screen was set up, and they rolled Tom’s outtake reel and set of pranks, which Deb thought were hilarious, and I thanked God they didn’t include my duping of Andy, since his wife was not only in attendance but sat at the table with us. As a congratulatory gift for a fourth season, I was given a brass Tiffany table clock, as bright as the statue outside, whose face cover swiveled into a stand and was engraved with the NBC peacock. Deb and I didn’t have much to say to each other. It was strange how much easier it was talking to Naomi than to her. Was I unlearning how to talk to girls my own age? I was relieved when Kevin Savage, who was the show’s heartthrob and could tell my date was going poorly, asked her to disco dance. Dad had given me money for cab fare home, and because Deb lived on the Upper East Side, I told the driver—also according to Dad’s advice—to drop her off first.
“I really liked the DJ,” Deb said when we arrived at her building. “And the outtakes of you were funny.” Before she got out, she added, “Thanks for taking me. I’ve never gone out on a school night before.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “this is where I get out.”
Then she leaned forward and kissed me. It was a long kiss, a surprisingly sweet kiss, far less probing, less hungry, than Naomi’s. With the utmost delicacy, she touched her tongue to mine. Her lips tasted like the strawberry lip balm she’d applied when we first got in the cab.
“See you in lab tomorrow,” she said, and then exited.
In the rearview mirror, the cabdriver caught my eye and winked.
The next day, for no reason I understood, I felt compelled to tell Naomi about the date the moment we parked.
“Well,” Naomi asked, “is she your girlfriend now?” She said this with just a hint of pettiness. I was not prepared for how much it hurt her.
When I said she wasn’t, Naomi added, “I think I’m jealous. Which is crazy, I know.”
When I said she shouldn’t be, she asked, “Why’s that?”
I considered her question. When I spoke, I did not recognize my voice. “I don’t talk to her like you.”
“No?”
“I don’t talk to anyone like this,” I added. Which was true.
In response, her face went through a moon phase: first, a sort of frown, her lower lip pressed forward, as if she might cry; followed by a smile that was warm and blooming; and finally, an expression that was slit-eyed and wicked.
“Kiss me like you did her,” she ordered.
This I knew how to do. We kissed for a long time in the dark.
“Oh,” she said, finally pressing herself away from me, “it’s so nice to feel desire.”
When I did not respond, she said, “What’s on your mind? Got somewhere else you need to be?”
No, I said, but I had something to tell her. I had been keeping the news like a secret. Tonight, I explained, would probably be the last time we’d see each other for a while. “Oh?” she said, and in a tone of concern asked, “Why is that?”
“Because Friday night is Halloween,” I continued, “and on Monday, wrestling season begins.” Practice ran until six, I said, and she and her girls would be headed home by then.
“Huh,” Naomi said.
She was watching me, I could feel it, but I refused to look at her, lest she see my relief.
“Have you decided what you’re gonna dress as?” she asked, too brightly, to change the subject. “It’s probably your last year to trick-or-treat, I’m guessing.”
“I’m going as Peter Proton,” I said. The symbolism was not lost on me. Nor, I knew, on her. “I should get home.”
“I’ll drop you off,” she said, and hurried to adjust in her seat to face the wheel.
“That’s okay,” I said before she turned the key, “I’ll walk.”
“Well,” she said, “good luck with your season.”
“Thank you,” I said, which felt like not enough somehow, and I exited the car.
When Naomi turned east at the end of the block, she was going fast enough that her tires squealed.
Flash-forward several weeks. It is a Thursday in mid-November. On one hand, I can count every meal I’ve eaten since Monday. The rest of Boyd Prep’s varsity and I are standing in our locker room with the Riverdale wrestling team. It is our season’s first dual meet. We have formed two lines for weigh-ins. We are arranged from lightest to heaviest before the scale. Some of us are in our underwear; some are naked. We do not speak. There’s a reverence that attends moments like this one. Even Kepplemen, who is formally dressed—blazer, tie, black loafers—pitches his voice so low it barely overtakes the hum of the fluorescents. We study one another’s bodies. Some boys have acne on their chests. Some have sprouted chest hair. Some are hairy as fathers. Some are studies in disproportion, with outsized forearms or hypertrophic calves. Others are as ribbed as the Christ. The opposing coach says his competitor’s name and weight class, which Kepplemen writes on a sheet, and then the boy steps onto the scale. He does this as we all do, delicately, respectfully, carefully, as if the Detecto’s platform were an altar.
The boy I’m to wrestle is so big compared with me, his back so wide and shoulders so broad and musculature so comparatively developed, it seems impossible we are the same weight. And then there is his name. “James Polk,” says his coach. “One hundred and twenty-one pounds.” Kepplemen, who sets the scale, nods at him with great respect; it is almost a bow, as if he actually were the president. Polk steps on. He tucks his chin into his neck and stares at the balance with such concentration it appears as if he’s trying to control it with telekinesis. In spite of his size, it does not budge.
The wrestling gym is a space just off the cafeteria, low-ceilinged and half its size. As the home team, we make our entrance second. We race through the room’s double doors and then circle the mat’s ring several times. Next we do our warm-ups, led by our captains. We count out our stretches and calisthenics, so loudly they are like war cries. Ten rows of foldout chairs are full, and there is standing room only at the back. Parents are in attendance. Girls from every grade. Teachers as well: Miss Sullens, Mr. Damiano, Mr. McElmore, Mr. McQuarrie, even Mr. Fistly. At 121 pounds, I am fifth up. Two matches ahead of mine, I retreat to the practice mat and shoot single-leg takedowns, fire stand-up escapes, and execute sprawls, hoping my heart, which seems made of tissue paper, might settle into a more even rhythm.
Something thunderous and final occurs behind me, at which point Kepplemen calls out my name and waves me over. I snap my headgear’s chin strap and run to face him. The crowd is going apeshit. Coach screams something about “moving, always be moving,” and smacks each ear guard and then slaps my face. My spit is as pasty as Elmer’s glue. I feel a nearly uncontrollable urge to pee. Before I step onto the mat, the three captains—Pat Santoro, Roy Adler, and Brian Dolph—huddle around me to bark advice, which I do not hear, and then push me toward the ref. I give a final look over my shoulder. I am loosed and untouchable. Kepplemen suddenly seems tiny. Naomi is not in the audience. The gym is raucous; the cacophony is a kind of silence. The ref gives me a green anklet that I fasten. Polk stands at the mat’s center and I am directed to shake his hand. Then the ref blows his whistle.
Polk takes me down. It occurs with blinding suddenness, like having a trapdoor open beneath you. As quickly, I pull a switch, a move that reverses our positions. It is half instinct, half desperation. It is perfect. From a great distance, I hear the crowd roar. With my arm wrapped around his waist, I chop at Polk’s elbow. It is as stiff as a parking meter’s pole. I pull at him with all my strength. He feels as big as a sofa. I cannot say what happens next, but he rolls, we roll, and it feels as if I have been launched in the air. I find myself on my back. How soft and pliant I suddenly am. How relaxed. I have never taken the time to stare at our gym’s overhead lights, which, I now notice, are housed in metal cages. Riverdale’s team, out of their chairs now and on their hands and knees, pound the mat, chanting “pin, pin, pin” in unison, until the ref, on his belly perpendicular to me, with great finality, slaps the mat too. He takes our wrists as soon as I stand and then raises Polk’s arm in victory.
The captains are huddled around me again. In the row of chairs, I see Miss Sullens, who sits next to McElmore. She nods at me and then gets up to leave. Kepplemen is already giving Tanner a pep talk before he takes the mat.
“You did great,” the captains say, “that switch you pulled was amazing, he was a two-time state champion, you never had a chance.”
I sit through the meet’s conclusion, blind to the proceedings, crushed but utterly elated. I replay the match with perfect recall. Was this what my father meant about being in the moment?
Nothing in my life ever felt so real.