The Perfect Order of Things Read Free Page B

looking for my key, but when I turned to wave I could see from his face in the car window that he understood exactly how I felt but that in five minutes he wouldn’t be thinking about it anymore. On his way, no doubt, to Clarissa’s house. Her parents, she’d mentioned earlier, were at a film festival in San Sebastian.
    When I awoke in the morning, birds chirping outside my window, the room bathed in yellow sunlight (the wrong kind, the too-early kind), I hovered for a second the way you do, on the verge of remembering: a corpse you can almost make out in the mud. Oh yes, that . A foul taste in my mouth, my head aching from the beer as if I had an arrow clean through both temples. My girlfriend gone.
    I tried to get back to sleep, but like a diver with an air pocket in his suit (she’s gone!) I couldn’t get back under the surface. (How awful it is, more than forty years later, to recall those moments.)
    I lay for I don’t know how long staring at a crack in the ceiling over my head, a long, lightning-shaped crack, the kind you see over a lake in the summer. And the events of the previous evening, the girl in the red sweater, the Ferris wheel, Bill Cardelle looking down at his loafers, seemed, at the same time, nightmarish and inevitable. As if a handful of cards had been thrown in the air and come down in their precise numerical order. While I was lying there, too stunned to do much except stare at the crack in the ceiling and plan to go downstairs to brush my teeth but unwilling to leave my bed, as if by my moving, and with that movement officially beginning the day, the situation would only become realer , I heard, for the first time since I arrived at my uncle’s, a knock on my bedroom door.
    “Yes?”
    The door opened, my father came in, and the horror of everything, the unfairness of it, tumbled over me like a stack of wooden chairs. I’d forgotten: fresh from the hospital, determined to make up for “lost time” and “bad behaviour,” he had made a plan to take me clothes shopping for the new school year.
    In his little blue Morris, we drove uptown, passing on the way the deep ravine on the other side of which I could see Clarissa’s white apartment building where, I imagined, in her parents’ giant white bed, the silk curtains stirring just so (like the hair on Bill’s forehead), the two of them, Clarissa and a boy with blood on his cheeks, stirred, side by side, in their sleep.
    I watched the ravine retreat in the mirror and we turned onto Eglinton, still too bright in that awful summer sunshine, and went into Beatty’s Store for Young Gentlemen.
    It was a day that went on forever. Perhaps, to this day even, the longest of my life. My father, shaky like all alcoholics about their “former” behaviour, asked me questions as if reading from a manual. My answers barely interested him, except for one. “I hear that you have a beautiful girlfriend.” We bought a blazer, which had to be fitted, grey flannels, which had to be measured, button-down shirts, a belt, a house tie, a school tie, gym socks, dress socks; it went on and on and on; at one point, excusing myself to try on a sleeveless grey sweater, I went into the dressing room, closed the door, sat down with my back to the mirror, and wept into my hand.
    Two weeks later, I went into boarding in the same squat brick building I now stood in front of. A boarder! One of those guys, along with the chronic masturbators and pimple squeezers and unloved children whose parents plied the civil service in Nairobi or Senegal or East Timor. Those dandruffy, never-have-a-date, sad sack pooches you saw doing their homework on a Friday night! All my life, all my friends, we were “day boys,” we went home after school, we took off our ties, we watched television, we slept in on Saturday mornings and we never went to church. But that, too, was gone now. My parents (could they have made a worse decision?) sold our house in the city, other people lived there now,