“I suppose you’ve read Timon of Athens, too, just for kicks?”
“No,” I said, embarrassed. “Not yet.”
“The Brooklynite next door,” Rebecca laughed. “Shakespearean automaton.”
“Christ,” Noah said. “For papers I go to Sophia or Evan”—at this latter name Rebecca slapped him under the pool and Sophia looked away—“but now maybe I should be taking my talents across the street.”
I was unsure whether to feel a twinge of pride at impressing them or a surge of embarrassment at revealing what I assumed to be the only thing less cool than hailing from Borough Park: being a lover of Shakespeare.
“Aryeh,” my father called from the distance. He looked physically wounded finding me beside a bikini-clad Sophia. My mother trailed him, chatting with Noah’s mother, a tall, well-dressed woman. “We’re leaving now.”
“Nice to meet you, neighbor,” Noah said, eyeing my father.
“Well, then.” Sophia offered her hand again. I took it, even with my father staring. “You’re not overly dull to spar with, are you?”
“Neither are you.” My voice wavered. Her hand was hot in mine.
“I’ll be seeing you, Hamlet.”
Breathless, I stumbled through something disjointed—an unnatural laugh, a hasty goodbye—and joined my parents.
* * *
RESTLESS DAYS FOLLOWED, DAYS SPENT unpacking, arranging my room, organizing my books. In Brooklyn, these books, nabbed at street fairs, thrift stores, dusty antique shops, were my escape. To master such works, I convinced myself, would be to achieve a sort of abstract intelligence, knowledge that softened melancholy, knowledge that isolated me from isolation itself. As a teenager, I’d allowed the piles lining my bedroom to multiply so that they spilled out into the rest of the house, overtaking the kitchen table or displacing some of my father’s sefarim. “‘Be warned,’” my father grunted, evicting Roth from prime real estate in our new living room, cramming mishnayot back into our bookshelves, “‘the making of many books is without limit, and much study is a wearying of the flesh!’” And so, instead of exploring my new town, I busied myself with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, all the while allowing myself occasional glances out my front window at the mansion across the street, plotting furiously how I was possibly to overcome the impenetrable barrier separating me from the lives of Noah, Rebecca and the arresting Sophia Winter.
My opportunity came sooner than expected. Three days after the barbecue, I received an unexpected visitor.
“Sup, neighbor?” Noah said, nearly too large for my doorframe. “You busy?”
No one was home: my mother and father were each at their first day of work. I invited him in, offered him a drink.
“Have any Blue Moon?”
I imagined my father coming home from work and nursing a beer over light Talmud study. “Afraid not.”
“That’s all right. Water’ll do.” I served him a glass and joined him at my kitchen counter. “Nice place,” he said casually.
“You should’ve seen my old house. It was half the size.”
“That right?” He took a sip, looked about the kitchen. “You guys finished unpacking?”
“More or less.” There were still a few small boxes lying around, but my mother had been superhuman in her effort to immediately tidy the house. My father and I had pitched in, following instructions when ordered, but mostly we loitered, organizing our belongings and acclimating to our new quarters.
“Enjoy yourself the other day?”
“Yeah,” I said hurriedly. “It was great.” A beat. “Was nice of you to have us.”
“My parents love hosting. They say the house is a waste if we don’t fill it with people.” He said this without the slightest trace of arrogance. “By the way, Rebs said she enjoyed meeting you and to say hi.”
“Same, yeah, she was really great.”
“And how’d you like Sophia? Was quite the literary peacock dance you guys had.”
I scratched my chin, trying madly to appear unflustered. “Yeah, that was—interesting.”
“Extremely.” He winked, took a long sip of water, wiped his mouth. “Anyway, I was wondering if I might take you up on that offer for essay help.” I’d made no such offer, I nearly reminded him. “Have you written that Pale Fire analysis yet?”
I had, in fact. I was so eager for serious learning that I wrote it in July. “Yes.”
“In that case”—he reached into his pocket and handed me folded pages—“mind looking this over? It’s still kind of, you know, rough.”
I unfolded the paper and gave it a glance.
“I feel really bad asking, it’s just I need to make certain my grades are high off the bat, what with recruiting and all starting up. Plus Evan”—the name from the pool—“isn’t around yet, he’s in Europe or South America or wherever the hell he is, I can’t keep track, and Rebs doesn’t want me bothering Sophia, and Amir, well you don’t know him yet either, but he can be a bit of a cutthroat, by which I mean he can be a massive cutthroat, especially now that application season is upon us. And it seems like you know this stuff cold—”
“It’s no problem,” I said.
His face lit up. “You sure? If it’s a pain in the ass then don’t worry. Seriously.”
“I don’t mind. I just can’t promise I’ll be any good.”
“That I don’t buy,” he said, finishing most of his water and standing. I walked him to the door. “In my experience, people who quote Hamlet extemporaneously know a thing or two about smoothing out their buddy’s paper.”
“You really don’t understand what sort of school I come from.”
“Anything helps, really. The whole thing was over my head, to tell you the truth.” He pounded my fist. “So, you busy tonight?”
“Um, no, don’t think so.”
“Why don’t you come out with us? Lisa Niman’s having a party. She’s really sweet. Maybe you’ve already seen her around town? Her hair stands out, super red, usually dyed with streaks of purple or silver or something crazy like that. Rebelling against the whole ginger thing, she likes to joke.”
“The what?”
“Sorry, I promise I didn’t mean ‘ginger’ offensively.” He paused. “God, your girlfriend is a redhead, isn’t she?”
“What? No.”
He laughed deeply, just like his father. “Rebecca likes to remind me that I have a special gift for inserting my foot right in my mouth. You don’t, for the record, have a girlfriend, do you?”
This seemed profoundly unnecessary to ask. “No.”
“Good to keep in mind. Come to think of it, maybe you should go for Niman?”
“I don’t know,” I stuttered.
He grinned. “Anyway, she has an open house tonight. Her parents are both chiropractors, and they’re out of town at some chiropractor convention in Atlanta, which sounds much less believable when said aloud but she claims that’s the story.” He thought this over. “Whatever, unimportant. What’s important is that Niman is having a party, and I thought this’d be a good way to break you in.”