any of the other extremely depressing foreign films we had watched in Mrs. Lebowitz’s class).
Mrs. Lebowitz looked at me so long I felt uncomfortable. Then she adjusted her bright red eyeglasses and said: “Well, most of what we do in European Cinema is pretty heavy. Which is why I’m thinking maybe you’d like to sit in on one of my seminars for film majors. ‘Screwball Comedies of the Thirties’ or maybe even ‘Silent Cinema.’ We do Dr. Caligari but also a lot of Buster Keaton, a lot of Charlie Chaplin—chaos, you know, but in a non-threatening framework. Life-affirming stuff.”
“Maybe,” I said. But I had no intention of burdening myself with even one scrap of extra work, no matter how life-affirming in nature. For—from almost the moment I’d gotten in the door—the deceptive burst of energy by which I had clawed my way into the Early College program had collapsed. Its lavish offerings left me unmoved; I had no desire to exert myself one bit more than I absolutely had to. All I wanted was to scrape by.
Consequently, the enthusiastic welcome of my teachers soon began to wane into resignation and a sort of vague, impersonal regret. I was not seeking out challenges, developing my skills, expanding my horizons, utilizing the many resources available to me. I was not, as Susanna had delicately put it, adjusting to the program. In fact—increasingly as the term wore on, as my teachers slowly distanced themselves and a more resentful note began to surface (“the academic opportunities offered do not seem to spur Theodore to greater efforts, on any front”) I grew more and more suspicious that the only reason I’d been allowed into the program at all was because of “the tragedy.” Someone had flagged my application in the admissions office, passed it to an administrator, my God, this poor kid, victim of terrorism, blah blah blah, school has a responsibility, how many places do we have left, do you think we can fit him in? Almost certainly I had ruined the life of some deserving brainiac out in the Bronx—some poor clarinet-playing loser in the projects who was still getting beaten up for his algebra homework, who was going to end up punching tickets in a tollbooth instead of teaching fluid mechanics at Cal Tech because I’d taken his or her rightful place.
Clearly a mistake had been made. “Theodore participates very little in class and appears to have no desire to expend any more attention on his studies than absolutely necessary,” wrote my French professor, in a scathing midterm report that—in the absence of any closely supervising adult—no one saw but me. “It is to be hoped that his failures will drive him to prove himself so that he may profit from his situation in the second half of the term.”
But I had no desire to profit from my situation, even less to prove myself. Like an amnesiac I roamed the streets and (instead of doing my homework, or attending my language lab, or joining any of the clubs to which I had been invited) rode the subway out to purgatorial end-of-the-line neighborhoods where I wandered alone among bodegas and hair-weave emporiums. But soon I lost interest even in my newfound mobility—hundreds of miles of track, riding just for the hell of it—and instead, like a stone sinking soundlessly into deep water, lost myself in idlework down in Hobie’s basement, a welcoming drowsiness beneath the sidewalk where I was insulated from the city blare and all the airborne bristle of office towers and skyscrapers, where I was happy to polish table-tops and listen to classical music on WNYC for hours on end.
After all: what did I care about passé composé or the works of Turgenev? Was it wrong, wanting to sleep late with the covers over my head and wander around a peaceful house with old seashells in drawers and wicker baskets of folded upholstery fabric stored under the parlor secretary, sunset falling in drastic coral spokes through the fanlight over the front door? Before long, between school and workshop, I had slipped into a sort of forgetful doze, a skewed, dreamlike version of my former life where I walked familiar streets yet lived in unfamiliar circumstances, among different faces; and though often walking to school I thought of my old, lost life with my mother—Canal Street Station, lighted bins of flowers at the Korean market, anything could trigger it—it was as if a black curtain had come down on my life in