The book of us, p.14
The Book of Us, page 14
“Glad to hear it.” David King reached out for Noah’s hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Greene. Have we met before? Bruce has just a few friends. Only three girls ever drop by, and a boy, once, recently.”
“Master Walker Jones, somewhat shy and reactive, but with real potential,” said Bruce.
“Really? He was here?” asked Noah.
“Twice.”
“It seems you were just leaving?” asked Mrs. King.
“Yes.”
She smiled. “Well, we won’t keep you. It is a pleasure for me to meet you too.” She shook his hand, hers cold and moist. She leaned toward him as she did so and said in a low voice. “He gets anxious sometimes after people visit.”
He seems fine to me, thought Noah, but he didn’t say anything, just nodded his head.
“Dinner is more than ready,” said Angelica, motioning toward the dining room.
“Well,” said Mr. King, “say goodbye to your friend, Brucie, and let’s eat! I’m starved!” They headed off down the hallway, both looking back toward their son. He ignored them, opened the front door, and stepped outside with Noah.
“You’ll need a coat out —” they heard Gwyneth King say, before she was cut off by the closing of the big front door.
“Oh, it is cold outside, colder than a witch’s —” said Bruce, wrapping himself up in his own arms.
“You didn’t need to come out.”
“Your coat is awfully thin, Noah Greene.”
“I have a warmer one at home. I’m fine, though. You had better get back inside.”
“I wanted to thank you for coming over and talking to me, on a myriad of subjects.”
“It was my pleasure. Can we do it again?”
“Again? You want to come over again?”
“On one condition.”
“That I do not tell Miranda Owens?”
“Yes.”
“I like that condition. I think I kind of love you now, Noah Greene.” With that, he flung the door open and entered the house on the run, slamming the big entrance behind him with a smack.
Noah stood on the veranda in the cold for a long time just staring at the door.
When he got back onto the street, he didn’t turn east to go home, but instead headed the other way toward Constance and Miranda’s neighborhood. He knew Constance would likely be at dinner now, but he didn’t care. Maybe it was a bit much to not text her before showing up on her doorstep again. It had been weird enough the first time. He took out his phone and found Constance’s number.
Can I drop by to c u?
What?!
Just for a sec.
For what?!
Apologize.
For, like, yr life?
I’m here.
There was no response. Though that wasn’t a “yes,” it wasn’t a “no chance” either. After he rang the bell on the Marks’ front entrance, he heard another discussion, which quickly became an argument, about who should answer the door. The voices came from deep within the house. They were eating, as he had suspected.
The entrance jarred open. “You again?” said Mario,55 who was obviously not pleased about having drawn the chore of getting the door more than once in two days.
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Can I speak with your sister, please?”
“She’s eating.”
“Sorry about that too, but it’s important.”
“I’ll see what she says. She’s a girl, remember that.”
Mario closed the door on him and it didn’t open again for a good two minutes. Noah could hear another discussion going on, this time between mother and daughter. When Constance came to the door, her mother was standing down the hallway, watching.
“Make it quick,” said Constance.
“I want to apologize in person for the last time I was here. That was wrong. I get that. It was stupid.”
“Okay. Goodbye.” She started to close the door, but he pressed his hand up against it to keep it from shutting all the way.
“I would like to come back for another visit. On one condition.”
“You are making the conditions? Look, dude, I haven’t even said you could —”
“That you don’t tell Miranda.”
She narrowed her eyes and examined him.
“Two conditions, actually,” continued Noah. “The other is that you tell her what I did the first time, pretending to be a good guy, but really coming over to do something that would impress her. Tell her I haven’t changed, that whatever it was that made me say that awful thing about her is still where I’m at.”
Constance kept staring at him. “And,” she finally said, “your reasons for wanting to drop by here in the future?”
“To talk. Really. Just to try to be friends.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you.”
She closed the door, a puzzled look on her face.
* * *
54 Subjects ranged from the color of John and Hank Green’s eyes to how to tie a Windsor knot, backwards, to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s degrees and where he earned them, to the population of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in every census from 1901 until the present. I’ll mention a few more later, in Bruce’s words, to do it all justice.
55 Love this guy.
14
Better Me
Noah stopped going to the school weight room the next day. Instead, he started working out at home in his bedroom. They had two old dumbbells and one barbell with a rusty bar. He did some research online and set up a program for himself, one that wasn’t calculated just to make his body look good, but was a healthy way to exercise too.
An uneventful Christmas came and went, during which he spent most of the holidays with his father, apart from a quick trip to Walker’s house on Christmas Day at the insistence of his parents.
By the new year, he had a schedule for his exercising, weekly visits with Constance, Bruce, and Walker, and volunteer work helping newly arrived immigrants to read.56 (He met the latter at the local Tim Hortons restaurant, where he knew Miranda never went.) Even with all that, he still managed to get in time for homework, basketball practice and games (during which he probably now passed the ball way too much), and, of course, a great deal of reading.
It took two weeks for Constance to allow him to stop by again and the first time he was there, she limited the visit to five minutes. Within a month, though, he was coming to the Marks’ place regularly and he and Constance often talked so long that they lost track of time. They never once spoke of Miranda. He told her about his life and she told him about hers, and both were surprised to discover how little they really knew about each other. Constance, Noah discovered, was a caring and generous person, one who had had a terrible tragedy in her life that affected her outlook. He was shocked to hear himself telling her his innermost problems and fears, and at how good it made him feel to unearth them to this, in the end, actually non-judgmental girl.
Constance also mentioned Walker Jones often during their talks. Noah could tell that she liked Walk, from what she said, and that he seemed to like her too. It struck Noah that in a strange way, even though they were so different, they were perfect friends — one so outwardly sure of herself and decisive and the other unsure, but both of them insecure underneath. Constance wanted people to respect others. Both she and Walk craved respect. They were, in a way, two people in need of each other.
Bruce King turned out to be a good guy too, not just a strange little nerd whose personality you could put into a labeled box. Noah learned more about Bruce’s rarely present, yet helicoptering mother and father under whose misguided parenting the boy was actually doing as well as he possibly could. Noah got Brew’s conversation to slow down a little, and his need for fact-eruptions to lessen somewhat, and they came to like the times when they hung out together and said nothing. Noah even got Bruce to come out to play ball in Walker’s driveway with the two of them and when Bruce hit his first long-range jumper, the celebration was something to behold.
And even though Noah kept crossing off the days on his calendar, and looking across the months to May 22, he stopped searching for Miranda every time he walked down the hallways at school. He didn’t know if she noticed. He didn’t care. Or at least, that was what he told himself.
He recorded it all in his novel. Every morning, before he did anything else, he sat at his desk and wrote for an hour. It was a strange thing: as he wrote, he knew there was something wrong with his conduct in the story, and not just in the early chapters. In some ways, there was something wrong with why he was writing it. He didn’t want Miranda to know that he was truly trying to be a better person … and yet he did. The novel itself betrayed his true feelings.57 His whole life had become about May 22. What would she say? Would she be able to tell that he had changed? Would his changes be enough? Would Miranda Owens agree to go to the prom with Noah Greene?
The story, though, had a good arc. It had that interest in the “what happens next” thing that it seemed to him was in all good novels and it was moving toward an anticipated climax. Any engaged reader would want to know what Miranda Owens was going to say. It made Noah think about how life was like a novel, or at least a play, like Shakespeare said. We all play roles. All our lives have narrative, storylines. He wondered where in the world this narrative was leading him. He wondered if his novel’s conclusion would break his heart.
He kept reading the books Miranda had often talked about — the ones that impressed her. He read them all the way through, of course. He read all the novels in his Contemporary Literature course too, from cover to cover. The class was going to look into Infinite Jest on February 25. He circled that day on his calendar. He tried to read at least fifty pages of the big novel every night. It continued to be confusing, funny, and sad. It continued to have a massive number of characters in what seemed to be a massive number of plot lines. Some of the footnotes58 were long, stretching over several pages. He kept flipping back and forth from story to notes, working hard.
When he finally got to the end of the book, he had a strange sensation. He wasn’t sure what had happened. In fact, he was sure that Wallace had written it so there was no ending at all (since life was like that, at least while you were living it). If there was an ending, it was one that Noah couldn’t figure out. And yet, he loved it, and he knew, deep inside, what it was about … though he couldn’t articulate it. The best that he could come up with was that it was about life, about now, even though it was written quite a few years ago … and it was about him.
* * *
When February 25 arrived, Noah was well prepared. The students had been asked to read as much of Infinite Jest as they could, fifty pages being the minimum. That got them into the story (or stories) a little and into a number of the endnotes. The first thing Mr. Mitchell asked them to do that day was be honest and indicate how far they had gotten. A couple of kids hadn’t been able to ready fifty pages. Many had stopped at fifty. A few had been able to get past one hundred. And Miranda, of course, had read the entire book. Again. She said so without any undue pride, not in a quiet voice but not loud either. Noah knew that she had actually read it twice before this course even began — she had told him so on her veranda that beautiful night long ago — and had simply re-read it to refresh her mind this year. She could have easily told the class that.
When it came his time to say how much he had read, he said that he had not been able to get past the first page … or at least that was what he had planned to say; what he actually heard himself declaring, almost involuntarily, as if his former self had momentarily possessed him, was that he had read it all. He said so in an attitude that was exactly like Miranda’s. He tried not to slide his eyes in her direction as he spoke.
The discussion of what they had read went better. Noah let the others talk, even when he knew what they were saying was wrong. He simply interjected here and there to clarify what happened at certain points in the story. Miranda did the same, though she elaborated. In the end, Mr. Mitchell asked Miranda and Noah to stand up together in front of the class and tell the others what they thought of the novel. It was awkward. They stood there, girl and boy, their shoulders a foot apart. It was the closest he had been to her since they had broken up. Miranda never wore perfume, didn’t believe in it, but she had a soap that she used, satsuma, and its fragrance, a sort of heavenly orange, had always made him feel wonderful. He stood beside her, that fragrance engulfing him: the scent of Miranda Owens.59 He couldn’t touch her, though, maybe never would again. It was like being within inches of everything you wanted but not being able to reach for it. He remembered there was a Greek myth about that.60 The only good thing about this awkward moment from Noah’s standpoint was that Miranda looked down at the floor too when she wasn’t talking. It meant she felt something. What, exactly, he didn’t know, but at least it was something, and that was amazing to him. Maybe May 22 was going to be a good day after all.
Miranda spoke well, of course, discussing the novel as a “prescient work of art written before the twenty-first century and yet predicting much of it” that tells “a good deal about modern western culture and about humanity itself.” She gave examples. She said it was funny too, which both made her very happy and very sad. Then it was Noah’s turn.
It seemed like there was drop-dead silence for a long time after he was asked to speak. His heart was pounding. He wasn’t sure, but it appeared to him that Miranda had slightly turned her head and was looking at him.
“It … it seems to me that Miranda is right,” he said in a shaky voice. “I didn’t really understand the book. It is very complicated.” He went and sat down quickly, leaving her alone in front of the class. The most remarkable thing happened when he looked up at her from his desk: she was staring back at him. Their eyes met, truly met for more than an instant. For the first time in many months, there wasn’t indifference in her expression and there wasn’t hatred either.
His essay about Infinite Jest was a whole different story. He let loose. He unloaded everything he felt about the novel in the most insightful way he could. He talked about the use of footnotes (though he was careful to call them endnotes), how they broke up the regular way of telling a story and allowed the narrative to be different, made you think about stories themselves, made you work at reading the novel, literally work as you turned back and forth, instead of just being thoughtlessly entertained. He wrote of how the use of notes was also indicative of something that was going on throughout the novel — an imitation of the way the human mind works, with its myriad thoughts happening simultaneously, instead of the false idea in most novels that human beings always thought in simple, straight lines. He wrote of how the subtext was about many things, but mainly perhaps about our modern world of constant entertainment, its “prevalence” so “ubiquitous” that life had become entertainment. There were screens, phone-sized and larger everywhere, and apparently so-called “great” novels were just entertainment too these days. The film Infinite Jest in Infinite Jest drove that point home: the movie that entertained anyone who watched it so thoroughly that they were unable to do anything but keep watching it. He mentioned how today people spent so much time entertaining themselves. The novel, though, was also about the burgeoning mental illness all around us, our nearly endemic problem with anxiety, drugs of many kinds in our drug-filled world, the environment, and about politics and power. It also revealed how we are often so far from the truth about ourselves, how we have lost who we really are.
Mr. Mitchell let him know that he wanted to speak with him two days after the essays were handed in. Mitchell had given back all the others, except Noah’s. Class was over. Miranda was the last person to leave the room. She didn’t even glance back as she left.
“Have a seat,” said Mr. Mitchell. He motioned to a desk. It just happened to be Miranda’s. Noah sat down. He could feel her warmth, like a hug, and smell the Satsuma.
“Is there something wrong with my essay?” Noah blurted out.
“No. No, there’s nothing wrong with it, to say the least. It is extraordinary. In fact, I am giving you 100 percent. I have never done that before for an English essay. I don’t believe 100 percent is possible in the arts. You deserve this, though. You —”
“So, it’s the top mark, higher than Miranda’s?”
Mitchell smiled. “Yes, higher than Miranda Owens’, though she wrote a wonderful piece too.”
Noah couldn’t stop a grin.61
Mitchell frowned. “That’s not the reaction I was looking for.”
Noah turned red. “Sorry,” he said in a small voice.
“You know, Noah, you don’t need to judge yourself by others or always try to impress … I know about your situation at home, how you look after your father.” He pointed to Noah’s head. “There is a great deal to be admired inside there.” He motioned toward Noah’s chest. “And in there too. Remember that.”
* * *
56 I know this all sounds like “goody-two-shoes” crap and sucky, but it’s what I did. Sometimes people think they are too cool to be nice. I know I did.
57 That’s what novels do, it seems to me.
58 Though, again, they are technically endnotes … thought I’d use this foot-note to note that.
59 I hope that doesn’t sound too weird, or creepy. It was what was really happening, though.
60 Couldn’t find it.
61 Yeah, I actually did that.
15
Penultimate
Noah worked hard on his novel and on his conduct over the next three months. He wrote every night — thinking about the sort of story Miranda admired and trying to make his like that. He was motivated by the idea that she would be surprised at the ingenuity of this gift to her.62 The character in the story truly loved Miranda Owens. In a way, it was an ode to her.
