WHEN WE FINALLY GOT TO NEW HAMPSHIRE, it was dark and rainy. We drove up the long Oakhurst Hall driveway past a rusty, curved iron wall standing in the middle of a field. “That is a terrific Serra,” my dad said. This meant that the wall was made by a famous artist, although I thought it looked like part of a building that had fallen down.
The cars in the lot next to St. John Hall, the main castle of the place, looked like big silver and black beetles. A couple of limos in front of the big wooden doors were too cool for parking. A soaking-wet blue and gold Oakhurst Hall banner stretched over the entrance, roped at each end to weird lion gargoyles that were laughing and snarling at the same time, like they were in on a joke no one else got. A bell somewhere droned one deep note, again and again.
Very cheery.
The walls of the dining room had a lot of oil portraits of old headmasters who all had dogs next to them. None of the people or the dogs were smiling. I stood in this long line for registration. My parents had been sent somewhere to listen to the dean explain the school rules.
I was nervous, probably because I still wasn’t sure why they’d taken me. I mean, there had to be better piano players. My best guess was that Dad had told them he’d donate a mil toward a second hockey rink or something.
It sure wasn’t my interview last spring, with a guy wearing a yellow tie with blue lacrosse sticks on it. His name was Mr. McGregor, but he said I could call him Phil. I didn’t. He was sitting in a blue leather wing-backed chair, and his teeth were too white. A pile of files was stacked on his desk. Out the window, kids were playing touch football down on a quad bordered by an old iron fence painted black. I wanted to be in that game. The fireplace crackled, though, and I liked that part.
When Phil asked me what my hobbies were, all I could come up with was “running around the Reservoir in Central Park.” This was kind of true, because after school, when home wasn’t where I wanted to be, I’d run around the Reservoir and try to pass everyone, until I couldn’t run anymore and it was dark and you could see the lights of the buildings on all sides of the park like jewels.
My dad never believed me when I showed up sweating after dark and said I’d been running. But then, I never believed him when he said that all the families his company shoved out of their neighborhoods were “fairly compensated.” There wasn’t a lot we agreed on.
I hadn’t wanted to tell McGregor that I played the piano, because saying the piano was a hobby wasn’t fair to my piano. It was more than a hobby. The real reason I liked it was that when I was playing the piano, I wasn’t thinking. Just feeling. Or trying to find the right song to make me feel the right way. Which I thought was sort of what Zen Buddhism was supposed to be, only with a soundtrack.
But I could tell Phil was getting bored, so I said, “I play the piano pretty well, too.” This seemed to wake him up a little.
“Want to know something funny?” he asked. In my experience, that means that whatever someone is about to say isn’t funny. “I had a band at St. Lawrence. Lead guitar! We covered Lynyrd Skynyrd. Hard to believe, huh?”
Well, hard to believe anyone would want to cover Skynyrd, yeah. Then I lied about being on the squash ladder, and McGregor said something like, “Business is conducted on the golf course, but the real important decisions are made on the squash court.”
The rest of my file was probably teachers saying “Jack is still finding himself.” As if anyone had ever told me where to look.
But maybe this place would be a good place to start, I had thought, when I left McGregor’s office, because this girl with long brown hair wearing gray everything except for a pearl necklace, waiting to go in next, gave me a shy smile and looked away.
She had so definitely looked. This didn’t happen a lot. Back at the U, girls sort of looked through me. I didn’t think I was bad looking, but I didn’t have any of those sharp angles people talked about, like cheekbones on models or the noses on Roman statues.
It’s hard to describe what I look like, because I don’t look like anything. I could be a police artist’s composite sketch of the kid everyone is trying to find, only there’s no chance in hell of finding him, because in the picture there’s fuzziness all over the edges and details. No there there.
Maybe here, though, there’d be something there. Like that girl in gray.