It was during that final fall, on a trip to the chain bookstore outside town to pick up scripts for Taxi Driver and Rocky and Chinatown and Jaws, that Will spotted an LSAT prep book on his way to the checkout counter, and dispassionately added it to his stack for good measure. The morning of the exam, he assured those he recognized that law school wasn’t something he’d actually pursue, it was just to see, just to cross his Ts—just like everybody else was probably doing there, right? But at Christmas, after returning from an early-morning surf beneath the flight path, he logged in to the test portal and discovered he’d scored a 174.
He knew at once that it was a mistake. That his exam must’ve been exchanged with someone else’s. He’d never sniffed 174 on the practice tests. He’d never approached the ninety-ninth percentile in anything in his life. Some poor someone out there was scratching his or her head, wondering what he or she had done to deserve such an inexplicably compromised fate. As compared to Will, that walking embodiment of the benefit of the doubt, who tempted himself in that instant to believe that maybe, just maybe, he’d earned it—and that he was maybe even destined to succeed in life after all.
He had been blessed from the beginning, he knew. Born at the beach. With the salt, the light, the perpetual glory. The three-bedroom house with the stucco veneer, a ten-minute walk from the ocean. That little house. That little porch. The screens on the windows and the screens on the doors. The brown carpet. The yellow kitchen. The shed with the tool bins. The work truck parked out front. The drawers stuffed with VHS tapes. The video-store membership card like a key to the kingdom. They had spring, summer, fall, and winter. Rain, Camp, Fire, and Fog—their seasons, his seasons growing up. His father worked outside year-round in Red Wing boots and Gramicci shorts. His mother lived in a comfort zone of three or four degrees Fahrenheit. He built houses and she sold them. They had one child. Lucky him. Lucky Will. It had been the case all along.
And now, after so much searching, he had found his escape pod. No more failed attempts at the things that were too hard—that he had no business trying, that he was just too not-good-enough at. He knew enough about movies to know that they were simply the dreams of a naive teen skater with a camcorder and a video-store card. And he hadn’t even yet met the someone whose knowledge—whose understanding of what it really took, of what it really was to be great—would put him and his knowing-ness to further shame. He felt fortunate then, so early on in life, to understand the difference between what was possible for him, and what wasn’t. He felt fortunate that even at twenty-one he could see himself the way he truly was. He would go to law school. He would be a lawyer. And he would be good at it.
Those were the last days before Whitney. The days before love and law school and internships, and the public defender in New Haven, and the First Amendment firm in Washington, and then ultimately back to New York. He worked in magazines now. Or at least for magazines. Advising on libel and defamation, but mostly processing contracts. What must we do to not get sued? was the question often presented to Will—along with an attached contract and a claim by a contractor, or a manuscript and a quote from the litigious founder of a sham start-up.
He had liked it fine at first. The stakes. The peripheral yet critical work helping to prop up a fragile American institution. And he had had a handle on it for a while, too. Steady. Cool. Californian. But two and a half years of pressure and volume had squeezed him, deadened him. Heat and acid congealing right there between his throat and his heart. He’d been in the job for just thirty months. Not long enough to quit—he couldn’t quit. But it had been longer than he could remember since a day at the office had not placed that anvil on his chest. The braided symptoms of anxiety and rage.
On recent working weekends, Will had marveled emptily at the uncanny scale of the computer-generated splotches of color on the lobby mural. Standing there slack, with a tossed salad in a plastic trough, Will would slip deeply into the mural while the jaw he inherited from his father pulsed tensely in his cheeks. He would just hang there, hating every inch of the fucking thing, then crash through the mechanical arm near the security desk
