House Rules Read online

  I decided to go to law school, for the same reason everyone else goes to law school: because I had no idea what else to do.

  I'll be a good lawyer. Maybe even a great one. But here I am, at twenty-eight, and my secret fear is that I'm going to be just another guy who spends his whole life making money by doing something he's never really loved

  to do.

  I have just put the vacuum back in the closet when there is a tentative knock at the door. A man stands there in Carhartt coveralls, feeding the seam of a black wool cap through his hands. He reeks of smoke.

  --Can I help you?|| I ask.

  --I'm looking for the lawyer?||

  --That's me.|| On the couch, Thor begins to growl. I shoot him a dirty glance. If he starts scaring away my potential clients, he'll be homeless.

  --Really?|| the man says, peering at me. --You don't look old enough to be a lawyer.||

  --I'm twenty-eight,|| I say. --Wanna see my driver's license?||

  --No, no,|| the man says. --I, uh, I got a problem.||

  I usher him into the office, closing the door behind him. --Why don't you have a seat, Mr. ...||

  --Esch,|| he says, settling down. --Homer Esch. I was out in my backyard this morning burning brush and the fire got out of control.|| He looks up at me as I sit down at my desk. --It kind of burned down my neighbor's house.||

  --Kind of? Or did?||

  --Did.|| He juts out his jaw. --I had a burn permit, though.||

  --Great.|| I write that down on a legal pad: LICENSED TO BURN. --Were there any casualties?||

  --No. They don't live there no more. They built another house across the field. This was just a shed, pretty much. My neighbor swears he's suing me for every penny he put into that place. That's why I came to you. You're the first lawyer I found who's open on a Sunday.||

  --Right. Well. I may have to do a little research before I can take your case,|| I say, but I'm thinking: He burned the guy's house down. There's no way to win this one.

  Esch takes a photograph out of the inner pocket of his coveralls and pushes it across the table. --You can see the place in the background here, behind my wife. My neighbor says it's twenty-five thousand dollars I'll have to pay out.||

  I glance at the photo. Calling this place a shed is generous. Me, I'd have said shack.

  --Mr. Esch,|| I say, --I think we can definitely get that down to fifteen.||

  Jacob

  Here are all the reasons I hate Mark, the boyfriend Jess has had since last September.

  1. He makes her cry sometimes.

  2. Once, I saw bruises on her side, and I think he's the one who gave them to her.

  3. He always wears a big orange Bengals sweatshirt.

  4. He calls me Chief, when I have explained multiple times that my name is Jacob.

  5. He thinks I am retarded, even though the diagnosis of mental retardation is reserved for people who score lower than 70 on an IQ test, and I myself have scored 162. In my opinion, the very fact that Mark doesn't know this diagnostic criterion suggests that he's a lot closer to actual retardation than I am.

  6. Last month I saw Mark in CVS with some other guys when Jess was not around. I said hello, but he pretended that he did not know me. When I told Jess and she confronted him, he denied it. Which means that he is both a hypocrite and a liar.

  I was not expecting him to be at today's lesson, and for that reason I start to feel out of control right away, even though being with Jess usually calms me down. The best way I can describe it is like being in the path of a flash flood. You might be able to sense that a catastrophe is imminent; you might feel the faintest mist on your face. But even when you see that wall of water rushing toward you, you know you are powerless to budge an inch.

  --Jacob!|| Jess says, as soon as I walk in, but I see Mark across the room sitting in a booth, and just like that, I can hardly even hear her voice.

  --What's he doing here?||

  --You know he's my boyfriend, Jacob. And he wanted to come today. To help.||

  Right. And I want to be drawn and quartered, just for giggles.

  Jess links her arm through mine. It took me a while to get used to that, and to the perfume she wears, which isn't very strong but to me smelled like an overdose of flowers.

  --It's going to be fine,|| she says. --Besides, we said we're going to work on being friendly to people we don't know, right?||

  --I know Mark,|| I reply. --And I don't like him.||

  --But I do. And part of being social means being civil to someone you don't like.||

  --That's stupid. It's a huge world. Why not get up and walk away?||

  --Because that's rude,|| Jess explains.

  --I think it's rude to stick a smile on your face and pretend you like talking to someone when in reality you'd rather be sticking bamboo slivers under your fingernails.||

  Jess laughs. --Jacob, one day, when we wake up in the world of the Painfully Honest, you can be my tutor.||

  A man comes down the stairs that lead up from the entryway of the pizza place. He has a dog on a leash, a miniature poodle. I step into his path and start patting the dog.

  --Thor! Down!|| he says, but the dog doesn't listen.

  --Did you know poodles aren't French? In fact the name poodle comes from the German word Pudel, which is short for Pudelhund, or splashing dog. The breed used to be a water dog.||

  --I didn't know that,|| the man says.

  I do, because before I used to study forensics, I studied dogs. --A poodle took Best in Show at Westminster in 2002,|| I add.

  --Right. Well, this poodle's going to take a whiz if I don't get him outside,|| the man says, and he pushes past me.

  --Jacob,|| Jess says, --you don't just accost someone and start rattling off facts.||

  --He was interested in poodles! He has one!||

  --Right, but you could have started off by saying, Hey, that's a really cute dog.'||

  I snort. --That's not informative at all.||

  --No, but it's polite ...||

  At first, when Jess and I started working together, I used to call her a few days before our lesson just to make sure it was still on--that she wasn't sick, or expecting to have some kind of emergency. I'd call whenever I was obsessing about it, and sometimes that was three in the morning. If she didn't pick up her cell phone, I'd freak out. Once, I called the police to report her missing, and it turned out that she was just at some party.

  Eventually, we agreed that I would call her at 10:00 P.M. on Thursdays. Since I meet with her on Sundays and Tuesdays, that means I don't have to spend four days out of touch and worrying.

  This week she moved out of her dorm room and into a professor's house. She is babysitting for the house, which sounds like an immense waste of time, because it's not as if the house is going to touch the stove if it's hot or eat something poisonous or fall down its own stairs. She will be there for the semester, so next week we are going to meet there for our lesson. In my wallet I have the address, and the phone number, and a special map she's drawn, but I'm a little nervous about it. It will probably smell like someone else, instead of Jess and flowers. Plus I have no idea what it looks like yet, and I hate surprises.

  Jess is beautiful, although she says this was not always the case. She lost a lot of weight two years ago after she had an operation. I've seen pictures of her before, when she was obese. She says that's why she wants to work with kids whose disabilities make them targets--because she remembers being one, too. In the pictures, she looks like Jess, but hidden inside someone larger and puffier. Now, she is curvy, but only in the right places.

  She has blond hair that is always straight, although she has to work hard to make that happen. I have watched her use this contraption called a flat iron that looks like a sandwich press but actually sizzles her curly, wet hair and turns it smooth and silky. When she walks into a room, people look right at her, which I really like, because it means they are not looking at me.

  Lately I have been thinking that maybe
she should be my girlfriend.

  It makes sense:

  1. She has seen me wear the same shirt twice in a row and doesn't make a big deal about it.

  2. She is getting a master's degree in education, and is writing an enormous paper about Asperger's syndrome, so I am hands-on research for her.

  3. She is the only girl, other than my mother, who can put her hand on my arm to get my attention without making me want to jump out of my skin.

  4. She ties her hair back into a ponytail without me even having to ask.

  5. She is allergic to mangoes and I don't like them.

  6. I could call her whenever I want, not just Thursdays.

  7. I would treat her so much better than Mark.

  And of course, the most important reason of all:

  8. If I had a girlfriend, I'd appear to be more normal.

  --Come on,|| Jess says, tapping me on the shoulder. --You and I have work to do. Your mom says this place has a gluten-free pizza. They make it on some kind of special crust.||

  I know what love is. When you find the person you are supposed to love, bells ring and fireworks go off in your head and you can't find words to speak and you think about her all the time. When you find the person you are supposed to love, you will know by staring deeply into her eyes.

  Well, that's a deal breaker for me.

  It is hard for me to explain why it is so difficult to look into people's eyes. Imagine what it would be like if someone sliced your chest with a scalpel and rummaged around inside you, squeezing your heart and lungs and kidneys. That level of complete invasion is what it feels like when I make eye contact. The reason I choose not to look at people is that I don't think it's polite to rifle through someone's thoughts, and the eyes might as well be glass windows, they're that transparent.

  I know what love is, but only theoretically. I don't feel it the way other people do.

  Instead, I dissect it: Oh, my mother is putting her arms around me and telling me how proud she is of me. She is offering me her last French fry even though I know she wants it. If p then q. If she acts this way, then she must love me.

  Jess spends time with me that she could otherwise spend with Mark. She doesn't get angry with me, except for the time when I took all the clothes out of her closet in her dorm room and tried to organize them like mine. She watches CrimeBusters when we are together, although the sight of blood makes her faint.

  If p then q.

  Maybe I'll tell Jess my idea today. And she will say yes to being my girlfriend and I will never have to see Mark again.

  In psychoanalytic theory there is a phenomenon called transference. The therapist becomes a blank screen, onto which the patient projects some incident or feeling that began in childhood. For example, a patient who spends sessions silent might be asked by the therapist if there is a reason she doesn't feel comfortable making free associations. Is it because she is afraid the therapist will find her comments stupid? And then, lo and behold, the patient breaks down. That's what my father used to call me. Stupid. Suddenly, with the dam broken, the patient will begin to recall all sorts of repressed childhood memories.

  My mother never called me stupid; however, it would not be a far reach for someone to look at my feelings for Jess and assume that, in the context of our relationship as tutor and pupil, I am not in love.

  I'm just in transference.

  --A medium gluten-free pizza,|| I say to the mountainous woman at the cash register, who is Greek. If she's Greek, why does she have an Italian restaurant?

  Jess nudges me.

  --Please,|| I add.

  --Eye contact,|| Jess murmurs.

  I force myself to look at the woman. She has hair growing on her upper lip.

  --Please,|| I repeat, and I hand her the money.

  She gives me back my change. --I'll bring it over when it's ready,|| the woman says, and she turns back to the wide mouth of the oven. She sticks an enormous paddle inside, like a tongue, and pulls out a calzone.

  --So how's school going?|| Jess asks.

  --It's okay.||

  --Did you do your homework?||

  She doesn't mean my academic homework, which I always do. She means my social skills homework. I grimace, thinking about our last lesson. --Not quite.||

  --Jacob, you promised.||

  --I didn't promise. I said I would try to strike up a conversation with someone my own age, and I did.||

  --Well, that's great!|| Jess says. --What happened?||

  I had been in the library at the bank of computers, and there was a kid sitting next to me. Owen is in my Advanced Placement physics class. He is really quiet and very smart, and if you ask me, he has a little bit of Asperger's in him. It's like gaydar; I can tell.

  For fun, I had been on a search engine researching fracture pattern interpretation in the skull, and how you can differentiate between blunt-force trauma and ballistic trauma using concentric fractures, and that factoid seemed to be the perfect opening salvo for a conversation. But I remembered Jess saying that not everyone is wowed by someone who's the human equivalent of a Snapple cap. So instead, I said this: Me: Are you going to take the AP test in May?

  Owen: I don't know. I guess.

  Me (snickering): Well, I sure hope they don't find semen!

  Owen: What the hell?

  Me: An AP test--acid phosphatase test--it's used with a forensic light source to test for presumptive semen. It's not as conclusive as DNA, but then again, when you get a rapist who's had a vasectomy, there won't be any sperm, and if an AP test and a 530-nanometer trispot is all you've got--

  Owen: Get the fuck away from me, freak.

  Jess has gone all red in the face. --The good news,|| she says evenly, --is that you tried to initiate a conversation. That's a really big step. The fact that you chose to discuss semen is unfortunate, but still.||

  By now we have reached the table in the back where Mark is waiting for us. He is chewing gum with his mouth wide open, and wearing that stupid orange sweatshirt. --Hey, Chief,|| he says.

  I shake my head and take a step backward. That sweatshirt, he wasn't wearing it when I first saw him. I bet he put it on on purpose, because he knows I don't like it.

  --Mark,|| Jess says, after glancing at me, --the sweatshirt. Take it off.||

  He grins at her. --But it's more fun when you do it, baby,|| he says, and he grabs Jess and tugs her into the booth, practically onto his lap.

  Let me just come out and say I don't get the sex thing. I don't understand why someone like Mark, who seems completely hell-bent on exchanging bodily fluids with Jess, isn't equally excited to talk about the fact that snot, bleach, and horseradish can all give you false positives for blood during presumptive tests. And I don't understand why neurotypical guys are obsessed with girl breasts. I think it would be an enormous pain to have those sticking out in front of you all the time.

  Fortunately, Mark does take off the orange sweatshirt, and Jess folds it up and puts it on the seat where I can't see it. It's bad enough just knowing it's there, frankly. --You get me mushroom?|| Mark asks.

  --You know Jacob isn't a fan of mushroom ...||

  There is a lot I'd do for Jess, but not mushrooms. Even if they're touching the crust on the far side of the pizza, I might have to vomit.

  She pulls her cell phone out of her pocket and sets it on the table. It is pink and has my name and number programmed into it. It might be the only cell phone that has my name in it. Even my mother's cell phone lists our number as HOME.

  I stare down at the table, still thinking about Mark's sweatshirt.

  --Mark,|| Jess says, sliding his hand out of the back of her shirt. --Come on. We're in public.|| Then she addresses me. --Jacob, while we're waiting for the food, let's practice.||

  Practice waiting? I don't really need to. I'm fairly proficient at it.

  --When there's a lull in the conversation, you can toss out a topic that gets people talking again.||

  --Yeah,|| Mark says. --Like: Chicken nuggets
are neither chicken nor nuggets.

  Discuss.||

  --You're not helping,|| Jess mutters. --Are you looking forward to anything this week in school, Jacob?||

  Sure. Rampant dismissal and abject humiliation. In other words, the usual.

  --In physics I have to explain gravity to the rest of the class,|| I say. --The grade's half on content and half on creativity, and I think I've found the perfect solution.||

  It took me a while to think of this, and then when I did I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before.

  --I'm going to drop my pants,|| I tell her.

  Mark bursts out laughing, and for a second, I think maybe I've misjudged him.

  --Jacob,|| Jess says, --you will not drop your pants.||

  --It completely explains Newton's law--||

  --I don't care if it explains the meaning of life! Think about how inappropriate that would be. Not only would you embarrass your teacher and make him angry but you'd be teased by other students for doing it.||

  --I don't know, Jess ... you know what they say about guys with long IEPs ...,||

  Mark says.

  --Well, you don't have an IEP,|| Jess answers, smiling. --So there goes that theory.||

  --You know it, baby.||

  I have no idea what they're talking about.

  When Jess is my girlfriend, we will eat pizza without mushrooms every Sunday. I'll show her how to enhance the contrast of fingerprints on packing tape, and I will let her read my CrimeBusters journals. She'll confide that she has quirks, too, like the fact that she has a tail that she keeps hidden under her jeans.

  Okay, maybe not a tail. No one really wants a girlfriend with a tail.

  --I have something to talk about,|| I say. My heart starts pounding, and my palms are sweaty. I analyze this the way Dr. Henry Lee would analyze any other piece of forensic evidence and store it away for the future: Asking girls out can cause changes to the cardiovascular system. --I would like to know, Jess, if you would like to accompany me to a movie this Friday night.||

  --Oh, Jacob--well done! We haven't practiced that in a whole month!||

  --On Thursday I'll know what's playing. I can look it up on Moviefone.com.|| I fold my napkin into eighths. --I could go out on Saturday instead if it's better for you.|| There is a CrimeBusters marathon, but I am willing to make a sacrifice. Surely that will show her how serious I am about this relationship.