We Are Not Ourselves(159)

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Sergei stayed until she got home from work on Friday. She might have been able to give him less than nine hundred a week, but she wanted to convey the gravity of the job in the pay, and she was taking this man from his home, his wife, even if Nadya said he was happy to get away.

Sergei’s main job was to cook Ed’s meals and keep him company. Friday evenings were awkward; the transactional nature of the relationship couldn’t be avoided. She counted out a pile of fifties and handed them over in a folded stack, avoiding Sergei’s eyes. Some Fridays he finished watching a program with Ed before departing. Others, he was waiting by the door when she arrived. Even when he seemed content to chat, he didn’t speak much, owing to his poor command of English. In that respect, he and Ed made a good pair. She imagined them grunting at each other like cavemen when she wasn’t there. It wasn’t the worst thought in the world. She may have had to act disgusted if it happened around her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t take private delight in the idea of it.





76


His mother wondered what he was still doing there, why he hadn’t gone back to school. The truth was, he was okay thinking of himself as a screwup, but he wasn’t comfortable thinking of himself as a sociopath. To just leave like that, to turn his back utterly—this would be too much for him to take. He wanted to think he was a better person than that, so he stuck around. He told his mother that he would be there to help when he could but that he didn’t want to be primarily responsible for his father, and she told him not to bother. Eventually he just said he was sticking around because he didn’t want to go back to Chicago for the summer.

? ? ?

One morning over breakfast he told his mother that he was going to go in to see his old teacher, Mr. Corso.

“That’s nice,” she said in the flat tone she’d assumed for talking to him now that he’d made his decision.

“I thought I could get some direction from him. Maybe he could help me figure a few things out.”

“That’s not something you go to your teacher for,” she said, abandoning her flat affect. “That’s something you bring to your father. He’s still your father.”

“I don’t know what I’d say to him. I don’t know how I’d explain any of it.”

“What are you planning to say to your teacher, then?”

“Mr. Corso knows how to figure things out fast.”

“There’s no one who figures things out faster than your father.”

“Come on, Mom. Dad’s not himself.”

“Your father is still the person to go to with this. I don’t care how great Mr. Corso is. Is he King Solomon? Is he Marcus Aurelius? If not, then you talk to your father. He’s still here.”

? ? ?

They sat in Mr. Corso’s trophy-stuffed office, surrounded by photos of past teams and Mr. Corso standing with students who’d made good—a prominent attorney, a major Hollywood executive. He wasn’t sure what he was there for—support, direction, or just to be near the man for a while. Connell remembered seeing ex-students in Mr. Corso’s office when he was a student. It wasn’t hard to understand why they returned even decades later. Mr. Corso was the kind of man who knew how to cook a perfect steak at his summer house in Breezy Point and explain why Dostoyevsky beat Tolstoy on points after ten rounds. If all of life was a competition for Mr. Corso, somehow he seemed to draft everyone around him for his team.

“I still can’t believe you quit playing ball,” Mr. Corso said, leaning back into the red leather of his chair with his hands locked behind his head. “An arm like yours. And to join the army that talks you to death.”

Mr. Corso hadn’t stopped needling him since his sophomore year, when, just before baseball season started, Connell decided to switch to debate. Mr. Corso liked to argue over ideas almost as much as Mr. Kotowski, Connell’s debate coach, did, but after school he assisted the varsity baseball coach, strategizing on the bench as he crunched sunflower seeds. He had a friendly rivalry with Mr. Kotowski, who had stamped generations of students with his trademark brand of razor-edged hyperarticulateness, and who, Mr. Corso liked to grumble, mined his freshman speech class for prospects. Between them, they seemed to divide the world.

“I declared an English major,” Connell said. “I wanted to thank you. You had a lot to do with that.”

Mr. Corso laughed and rocked in his chair, the springs creaking beneath his weight. “Don’t come crying to me in twenty years when you look at your bank statement.”

He shifted forward, knitting his hands together at the front end of his desk. Connell could see the pink dots of his peeling tan. His eyes were keen and probing, soft brows hovering above them. His craggy, pockmarked face gave him extra gravity and toughness. Connell spent his sophomore year afraid of Mr. Corso, after he quit baseball, but when it was time to pick his senior elective he chose Mr. Corso’s modernist literature class. After a semester of Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom, and The Sound and the Fury, what Connell remembered best were those bits of fatherly wisdom Mr. Corso slipped into his lessons. One time he explained the impact supply and demand had on pricing by asking them to imagine approaching a hot dog vendor with a lone dog floating in his cart as rain began to fall. “What do you think he’d take for it?” Connell remembered him asking. “You think the price of things is chiseled into tablets handed down from a cloud?”