“‘AND IF THINE EYE OFFEND THEE, pluck it out.’ That’s from the Sermon on the Mount, of course. The Book of Matthew. Chapter eighteen, verse nine.”
Carlton’s voice bounced around the huge chapel. He was on this little stage like those cherry pickers that electrical workers stand in, only with wooden carvings on the bucket. I’d been in a church only three or four times, as a little kid, when Mom and Dad were together. But this one smelled just like the one in New York ten years ago. Sort of dead.
“Now, do we really believe that Jesus was suggesting that a man whose eyes have coveted another’s wife should blind himself? Was Our Savior actually encouraging the sinner to pluck out his own eye?”
“Eeew,” said the girl in the pew in front of me: Lucy, the blonde from history. It was eight forty-five, right after Sunday breakfast. I was dying for anything from the Starbucks on Seventy-Eighth and Lex, where Luke would be meeting a few other kids about five hours from now, after they all woke up.
The seating was alphabetical. I was in a small, two-seat pew up against a stone wall, beneath a large stained-glass window of a saint who didn’t look happy. The kid next to me was the Korean kid from English class. The first week in class, he hadn’t said a word. The only time he’d moved was to catch Jarvis’s marker. If his eyes hadn’t been open, you’d have thought he was sleeping.
“. . . Or was Jesus’s message more figurative, do you think?” Carlton said. “Isn’t it likelier that the Son of God was speaking metaphorically? And so, as we assemble on a glorious Sunday morning two millennia later, I ask, what can we learn from His words today?”
Staring straight ahead, the Korean kid suddenly whispered, “We can learn that, verily and forsooth, we must continuously wander in bountiful gratitudosity through the Holy Plains of hallowed St. Oakhurst Hallshire-on-New-Hampshire-downs, casting neither seed nor sin against the righteous hallowed sod. Amen.”
I looked at him. He didn’t look back. He kept talking, though, just loud enough for me and the girl and guy in front of us to hear.
“But, O Lord, let us not take for granted the holy fish sticks and the plentiful French fries and the limitless tartar sauce. Nor shall we overlook those female faculty for whom we are eternally lustful. For all of which, O Lord, we remain eternally grateful. All the best, sincerely, et cetera, amen.”
Slowly, the kid turned his face and looked at me. “Sam,” he whispered.
“What?”
“They call me Sam.”
“That’s your name?”
“No, but Oak prefers we all be Western,” he said, straight-faced, looking back toward the pulpit. “And I’m a Sammy Davis Jr. fan.”
Lucy turned around. Suddenly I had all these stupid thoughts: Did I have bed head? Did my tie match my shirt? Did I care whether she cared? Nope. She was sort of cardboardy. But eye candy tastes good no matter what it’s made of, right?
“. . . that it is not only a sin to commit an improper act, but to think of doing so. The message? Turn toward the good, turn away from temptation.” Now Carlton’s voice went from preacher to headmaster. “And, as I’m sure some of you see where I’m going with this, you must ignore the temptation of looking at anyone’s paper but your own. Whether that paper is on the next desk or on the internet.”
“Ah—the Gospels of Google,” whispered Sam. “Our annual Plagiarism Parable. Interesting. Last year it was Revelations.”
“You’ll be hearing from the dean on this in detail,” Carlton droned on, “tomorrow, at our annual ethics orientation. Mandatory attendance. Just keep in mind that cut-and-paste scholarship is something we take very seriously at Oakhurst Hall. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“And foreskinned,” said Sam, deadpan, just loud enough to make Lucy giggle.
The organ swung into a hymn. We all shot to our feet, me last. Sam opened a hymnbook and began to sing. Like everyone, he seemed to have a great voice. I grabbed a hymnal with a cracked red-leather binding from the shelf in the back of Lucy’s pew and joined in. And out of the blue, I started feeling the Gothic vibe of the song, and the heaviness of the melody, and the way the damned minor-key seriousness hit me over the head: how sometimes music can make you feel like nothing else does. The notes hit your brain in a place reserved just for hearing music. Right up to the “ah-men,” with its descending half note.
As bells started to ring from the tower, I peeled off into the aisle, but Sam grabbed my jacket sleeve. Apparently you had to leave the place in order. As Lucy passed my pew, she said, without looking at me, “You were flat.”
• • •
“So what’s with the plagiarism thing?” I asked Sam. We were walking back up to the main campus on a winding pathway bordered by well-trimmed bushes.
“Last year a Korean kid put a few paragraphs from On the Road into a short story,” he said. “Not like your teacher wouldn’t notice that suddenly you were writing like Jack Kerouac on speed, right? But they let it go. Jarvis convinced the dean that you gotta give us some leeway. The Korean clan. The year before, he even got them to stop giving us demerits for speaking Korean in the hallways.”
Sam turned to extend his hand for me to shake. He was smiling for the first time, like the Michelin Man. “Glad to meet you officially. I’m Sang-Ook Lim, member of the tortured Korean subculture, Northeastern Prep School branch.”
“Jack Lefferts,” I said. “Member of the overprivileged American branch. New York division.”
“I’ve met members of your tribe before,” Sam said. “They are plentiful here.”
“So why’s it tougher on you guys?” I said, and we started to walk again.
“The Ivies have a Korea quota, right?” said Sam. “They definitely want to fill it, ’cause we’re supposed to be superstudents. But no college wants to have more Koreans than honkies. We have to get straight A’s to get one of the slots. Pile up the extracurriculars, play in the symphony, tutor inner-city kids in Concord. I’m treasurer of the Campus Organic Garden Club. And if I myself don’t get into Harvard, my best option will be to pluck out my own eyes and jump into the River Han. That’s in the middle of soulless Seoul. Without the MBA, how can I possibly manage the food biz back home?”
“Your family has a grocery store?”
“You could say that. My family owns, like, all the food in Korea, or something. If you ever need a deal on six billion bucks’ worth of soybeans, text my dad.” He laughed. Then, out of the blue, he said, “So what’d you think about the Man’s sermon?”
This caught me off guard. I hadn’t given it much thought. “If he means I can’t think about Lucy while he’s babbling, I can’t agree.”
“Better stay away from that one, son,” Sam said. “That’s the varsity quarterback’s babe. Vic Madden’s a god. The girl is a Muffy.”
“A what?”
“What, you never read The Preppy Handbook? It’s required in Seoul schools before they ship us here to be indoctrinated. Muffy. Biff. The perfect prepazoids.”
“Like I’d have a chance with Lucy anyway.” Like Caroline didn’t blow her away, anyway.
“Hell,” Sam said. “That wasn’t even the best story about plucking out your eyes. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Roger Corman, 1963. Ray Milland invents X-ray vision, but seeing everything drives him insane—it’s too much to take. Like, raw humanity is too gross. So he pulls his eyeballs out. Awesome. Check it out between your Hopper lessons.”
“How do you know I play piano?”
“You’re new meat.” His face erupted into a happy cupcake kind of look. “Everyone knows everything about you. Including how you’re gonna give Mario Miles a run for his money for the First Piano slot. Or, to put it another way, everyone hopes you’re gonna give Miles a run for his money.”
“How come?” I said. “Is he an asshole?”
“Nah. Just a kid with an IQ of about 400, with the scholarship chip on his shoulder and about eleven learning disabilities they haven’t even invented yet. He doesn’t run with a pack. It makes everyone else think he’s weird.”
• • •
Josh caught up with me after dinner. “Forget the homework tonight, stud. Time for your audition for the band.” Sounded good.
“If this was a string quartet, they’d give us our own practice room. Hell, we’d have our own faculty adviser,” my roommate said, leading me through a back door of the arts building with a key he wasn’t supposed to have. In a practice room stuffed with extra chairs and music stands that no one supposedly used, a tall kid with blond hair just long enough to meet the hair code was fingering the neck of his bass. Simon Ridgway was randomly bopping the tom-tom of the drum kit: I guess the wiseass had passed Josh’s audition.
“Danny, Simon, this is Jack the Piano Man,” Josh said, lighting a joint. He took a hit, and started passing it around. I passed. Then I sat down at a thirties Steinway upright. It had chipped keys and stains on the wood, but a Steinway’s still a Steinway. When I tried a few chords, it was like the keys were smiling back at me.
Josh strummed some simple chords on his guitar, and the other two kids fell into the rhythm. I picked up on the chord progression, but I didn’t add much to the tune.
“You have a real nice touch,” Danny said, but his eyes were darting around the room. Then Simon started this mean hard snap on the drums, and Josh ripped some power chords, and Danny added a heavy bass. I couldn’t add anything, and their mini jam died out. So I began to play the first thing that came to my mind: a simple, minor chord progression from a Schubert thing from seventh grade that sort of sounded just like Danny’s bass line.
“That’s from Fantasy for Four Hands, right?” Danny said. “Second movement?”
“You play classical?”
He smiled. “Naw, my dad used to write music textbooks. I dug the pictures of the old guys. I wasn’t a gamer like everyone else, so I started teaching myself some of what they wrote. Played a little piano til I heard Jack Bruce playing for Cream. Got bit by the bass and never looked back. Going for Berklee. Let’s try it again.”
I repeated the Schubert, and in a weird way, it sounded like a good fit, just the chords playing with Danny’s bass line. Simon put down his sticks and picked up some brushes and began to massage his snare. Josh waterfalled a bunch of quiet lead notes. All of a sudden, we were playing something.
Then I shifted into a different progression, using some sort of lizard-brain-muscle-memory from all the years of music-theory classes—but not a predictable one; sort of a progression you couldn’t see coming. The other guys fell into step with it really quickly. And they could play.
A minute later, we were actually . . . composing something. On the other hand, they were all stoned by now, and the thing we were trying to write just died on the vine.
“I think we have the beginnings of something there,” Josh said, and he was right: that was all we had. But instead of trying again, he lit another joint.
This time Danny passed too. “That octave figure you played, with the tritones?” he said to me. “I expected fifths. Very cool. Now let’s try making it a little spookier.” He started up the bass line again, only with a few new minor-key digressions, playing with the timing. And this time, for a full three minutes, the thing sounded as if it made sense. Then we all went off down our own paths for a few seconds, but somehow, we all veered back to the same place, to a nice ending. It was like going through the rapids on some river on Outward Bound, where after you go through the ruffly stuff, you land in a calm pool.
Josh was smiling his stoner smile. “Who says it all has to be rock, right? I was getting sort of tired of Nirvana anyway.”
• • •
“Jack’s on the football team,” Josh said as we all walked back. “Boy wonder.”
“JV,” I said.
“Seriously?” Danny said. “You sure don’t look like a meatstick to me. Your neck isn’t wider than your head. And I sure hope you don’t dip.”
I’d tried dipping once, and puked into the flowers in the middle of Park Avenue.
“Madden? The quarterback?” said Josh. “Guy dips so much he had to have his gums scraped three times last season. At least foliage doesn’t turn your gums black.”
“What about you?” I asked Simon.
“Sports? Midnight sledding. As soon as the snow hits, I’m gonna borrow a cafeteria tray and hit the backside of the mountain.”
“Just don’t get frostbite on your fingers,” Josh said. “We need them on the snare. Lead with your head.”