The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks Read online

  The table was always Matthew, Alpha, Dean, and Callum—and (more often than anyone particularly wanted her) Star. Most of the time they were joined by Elizabeth, Tristan, and Steve (both lacrosse players and relatively unimportant to this chronicle). The guys threw bread rolls and argued politics. They gossiped and talked sports and leaned so far back in their chairs it seemed certain that they would capsize—although they never did. They had more fun than anyone else in the room.

  Frankie was very happy.

  Her favorite quality of Matthew’s was his seeming immunity to embarrassment. For example, Alpha said something at dinner so ridiculous that Matthew snorted juice out his nose and down the front of his shirt. Anyone else Frankie knew would have blushed and stammered his way out of the caf as quickly as possible, changing his shirt immediately and praying never to speak of the apple juice snort ever again.

  But Matthew stood, raised his arms in victory, and proclaimed himself the grodiest human being in all of Alabaster, daring anyone to challenge him. “Come hither, come all. Rise to the challenge. See if you can top the Livingston Apple Juice Snort! We seriously doubt this supreme level of grodieness can be surpassed, but we invite you all to attempt it, and support you in your endeavors.”

  Dean tried making a pink mountain of ketchup and mashed potato, then licking it with his quite disgustingly long tongue—but was voted no match for the LAJS. Alpha made a farty noise with his armpit, but he too, was nowhere near grodie enough. “Public decency prevents me from being a true contender,” he said. “I do not concede defeat. I am too much of a good citizen to perform acts of serious grodieness while innocent underclassmen are attempting to eat their mystery meat.”

  Callum claimed he had no such inhibitions and proceeded to drop all his croutons into his orange juice and drain the glass.

  “That isn’t so much grodieness as self-punishment,” argued Matthew. “The person you’re grossing out is yourself. And you have to admit, that’s a remarkably poor strategy.”

  Callum conceded defeat, and they stood to clear their trays. Matthew put one hand low on Frankie’s back. She wouldn’t have thought she could feel attracted to a boy who had just sprayed apple juice out his nose, but she was.

  Later, however, she couldn’t help but notice that of the five people at the table (including Matthew), she was the only one whom no one had expected to do anything disgusting.

  Nor had she volunteered.

  As the weeks passed, Frankie began to see that although Matthew welcomed people into his world with surprising warmth—it didn’t occur to him to enter anyone else’s. She had to introduce him to Trish three times before he recognized her on his own, and he almost never came to Frankie’s dorm room. If he wanted her, he called and asked her to come out and meet him.

  He didn’t know any of Frankie’s Debate Club friends or the sophomores she hung out with from classes. He wasn’t curious about her family. He expected her to become part of his life, but he didn’t become part of hers.

  Lots of girls don’t notice when they are in this situation. They are so focused on their boyfriends that they don’t remember they had a life at all before their romances, so they don’t become upset that the boyfriend isn’t interested.

  Frankie did notice—but she wasn’t sure she cared. She had never felt a wild connection to the kids she was friendly with from freshman year. She was very fond of Trish, but Trish was wrapped up in Artie. And Frankie not only adored Matthew—she adored his world. He and his friends seemed . . . better than her and hers.

  Not because of money.

  Not because of popularity.

  Expensive clothes and high status had little effect on Frankie. But their money and popularity made life extremely easy for Matthew, Dean, Alpha, and Callum. They did not need to impress anyone and were therefore remarkably free from snarkiness, anxiety, and irksome aspirational behaviors, such as competition over grades and evaluation of one another’s clothing. They were not afraid to break the rules, because consequences rarely applied to them. They were free. They were silly. They were secure.

  Frankie and Matthew had been going out for two weeks when he first blew her off for Alpha. They were walking together after dinner, strolling down to the pond just to be somewhere pretty—the way people do when they are first going out—when Matthew’s cell rang.

  Instead of switching it off, as he had the first two weeks of their coupledom, Matthew flipped it open. “Hey, dog,” he said, then listened for a few minutes. Frankie could hear Alpha’s raspy tenor from the phone. “I gotta go,” Matthew said, hanging up and kissing Frankie on the cheek three times to show he was still crazy for her. “There’s a study session for calc.

  I spaced.”

  And he was gone.

  She stood beside the pond at dusk, all by herself.

  The second time and the third were the same. Alpha called and made some demand—and Matthew disappeared. Each time it was something Frankie could neither fight nor ask to attend: a senior study session, a newspaper meeting, fund-raising for the soccer team. But it was always Alpha who called, and Frankie wasn’t dumb.

  He was marking his territory.

  Matthew.

  Even more often, however, Alpha and the boys came to Matthew—so much so that it occasionally seemed to Frankie as if she were dating all of them at once. She and Matthew would be studying in the library or walking toward the caf for dinner, and the dogs would run up around them, laughing and jostling each other, loud and merry. Tristan would grab Frankie and swing her around (he was a big guy, rowing last on the heavy eight), while Callum would quiz her about girls he found attractive in the sophomore class. Or Alpha would insert himself between her and Matthew, reaching an arm around each of them as they walked, and she would be disconcerted by the heavy weight of his hand on her waist. Whatever she and Matthew had been discussing would fall away in favor of whatever Alpha wanted to talk about.

  Once, Matthew, Alpha, and Steve—on their way back from a soccer game—spotted Frankie on her way to meet Trish at the pool. They followed her and insisted on getting in the pool in their uniform shorts, all of them pushing each other in the diving section and doing cannonballs off the board.

  Trish kicked back and forth with Frankie for twenty minutes and then excused herself to take a shower. But Frankie heaved herself out of the lap pool and dove into the deep end with the boys.

  She didn’t mind them being there. Not then; not ever, really.

  Yes, she wanted to be alone with Matthew, but she loved the way the world lit up when the boys were around—loved how they bantered with one another, teased each other, talked with one another urgently. Like the best kind of family.

  Often, Matthew would take her hand when they appeared. Or touch her foot under the table, so she knew he was still thinking of her. And the dogs would mix juice and soda together, or quiz each other on dates for history, or draw ridiculous doodles in their notebooks, or make ornate paper airplanes instead of studying—and Frankie would be a part of it. Almost.

  THE NEGLECTED POSITIVE

  How does a person become the person she is? What are the factors in her culture, her childhood, her education, her religion, her economic stature, her sexual orientation, her race, her everyday interactions—what stimuli lead her to make choices other people will despise her for?

  This chronicle is an attempt to mark out the contributing elements in Frankie Landau-Banks’s character. What led her to do what she did: things she would later view with a curious mixture of hubris and regret. Frankie’s mental processes had been stimulated by Ms. Jensson’s lectures on the panopticon, her encounters with Alpha, her mother’s refusal to let her walk into town at the Jersey Shore, her observation of the joy Matthew took in rescuing her from her bicycle accident, and her anger at Dean for not remembering her. All these were factors in what happened next. And here is another:

  You will remember that Frankie was reading P. G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, for fun. She had left
it on the floor of the library the night she got the golf-course party invitation from Matthew, but the next day she went back and borrowed it. The book must not be discounted as an influence on her behavior, for a number of reasons.

  First, the young men in that and in many of Wodehouse’s other novels—several of which Frankie also read—are members of the Drones club. The Drones is a British gentlemen’s club populated by silly young blots with pockets full of money and too much free time. Unlike any of the other clubs described in this chronicle, the Drones has a permanent location. There is a swimming pool, a restaurant, and numerous lounges for smoking, drinking, and trading stories. Bertie Wooster, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, and all Wodehouse’s other characters forged their bonds at boarding school. They base many of their ethical and financial decisions (Shall I recommend him a bet? Lend him money? Ask him a favor?) upon whether a fellow is an old school chum—or not.

  The Drones are always up for fun. They steal policemen’s helmets, wager heavily on school sack races, trick one another into falling, fully-clothed, into swimming pools. And while they’re mostly too dim-witted to be future members of Parliament or editors of newspapers—and many of them are intermittently broke—they are well and firmly Old Boys.

  Second, Mr. Wodehouse is a prose stylist of such startling talent that Frankie nearly skipped around with glee when she first read some of his phrases. Until her discovery of Something Fresh on the top shelf of Ruth’s bookshelf one bored summer morning, Frankie’s leisure reading had consisted primarily of paperback mysteries she found on the spinning racks at the public library down the block from her house, and the short stories of Dorothy Parker. Wodehouse’s jubilant wordplay bore itself into her synapses like a worm into a fresh ear of corn.

  “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually being disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”

  —The Code of the Woosters

  Frankie read this line, one that Wodehouse fans love and repeat over and over to one another (though she didn’t know that then), and her mind began to whir.

  “Come kiss me,” she said to Matthew. They were in the library common room on a Sunday afternoon, studying. Frankie had finished what work she planned to do, and was reading Wodehouse to keep Matthew company.

  He got up from the desk, walked over to the couch on which she sat, and kissed her on the lips. There was no one else around.

  “Mmmm,” she whispered. “Now I’m gruntled.”

  “What?”

  “Gruntled. I was disgruntled before.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s drizzling, there’s nothing to do but study, the vending machine’s broken. You know, disgruntled.”

  “And now, you’re . . .”

  “Gruntled.”

  She had expected Matthew’s face to light at the new word, but he touched her chin lightly and said, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

  “What?” Frankie didn’t think it was a word. She thought it was—she thought it was what she’d later call a “neglected positive.”

  Prefixes like “in,” “non,” “un,” “dis,” and “im” make words negative, yes? There may be grammatical particulars I am not addressing here, but generally speaking. So you have a positive word like “restrained,” and you add the prefix “un” to get a negative: unrestrained.

  Possible. Impossible.

  Sane. Insane.

  When there’s a negative word or expression— immaculate, for example—but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word. The neglected positive of immaculate is maculate, meaning morally blemished or stained. The neglected positive of insufferable is sufferable—meaning bearable—though no one ever uses it.

  Other times, the neglected positive is not a word. It is then an imaginary neglected positive, or INP (inpea).

  (Frankie made up everything that follows after the stuff about maculate and sufferable, just in case you thought of impressing your English teacher with your knowledge of the inpea.)

  Some inpeas: Impetuous means hotheaded, unthinking, impulsive. The positive of it doesn’t exist, so you can make a new, illegitimate word.

  Petuous, meaning careful.

  Ept, meaning competent, from inept.

  Turbed, meaning relaxed and comfortable, from disturbed.

  You can make more inpeas by pretending that something is a negative when it’s not a negative—because, you justify, it has one of those prefixy-sounding things at the beginning.

  Impugn—it means to call into question, to attack with words. It comes from Latin in- (against) plus pugnare (to fight). Pugn by itself—although there is no such word—should technically mean to fight, like to fistfight. But to the ardent neglected positivist, to pugn would be to speak well of something.

  Yet another technique of the neglected positivist is to impose a new meaning on a word that exists but, through the convolutions of grammar, doesn’t technically mean what you are deciding it means. The neglected positive of incriminate is criminate, which actually, technically means the same thing as incriminate—because the in- isn’t really making a negative in this case—but it is much more amusing if you use it to mean the opposite. Criminate: to give someone an alibi.

  When you redefine a word like this, you are making a false neglected positive, as opposed to an imaginary neglected positive, and it can be useful to term these falsies FNPs or finnips. But falsie is more entertaining, so Frankie went with that. Later, when she thought all this through.

  Gruntled is a falsie, though Frankie didn’t know it until Matthew explained it to her (though not in those terms, of course).

  “Gruntled means grumpy,” he said, walking over to the dictionary, which stood on a large stand. He flipped some pages. “It doesn’t mean happy, it means . . . look, to gruntle is to grunt repeatedly, like to complain, or even better, to grumble.” Flipping to the D section—“Disgruntled comes from the same middle-English source.”

  “Why?” Frankie was cross that he was being so literal. “That makes no sense, because if gruntled means grumbly, then disgruntled should mean un-grumbly.”

  “Umm . . .” Matthew scanned the dictionary. “Dis-can be an intensifier, as well as a negative.”

  Frankie bounced on the couch. “I like my version better.”

  Matthew took the dictionary off the stand and hiked himself up to sit on the small table. “My dad works in the newspaper business,” he said. “I don’t know if I told you that yet.”

  As if everyone at school didn’t already know who his dad was.

  “He started as a copy editor, and he used to make us play dictionary games at our summerhouse. So I learned, on fear of public humiliation, to look up any word I wasn’t absolutely sure about.”

  Frankie didn’t want Matthew to be right. In fact, a later Internet search proved that gruntled can indeed mean happy, but it’s a back-formation from disgruntled that probably started with The Code of the Woosters, so today it legitimately means both one thing, and its opposite.

  But by the time Frankie found that out, she was way beyond sharing it with Matthew.

  What annoyed her now was not that Matthew was right—but that he wouldn’t just enjoy the made-up word. That he needed to be right. And that he’d chucked her—actually chucked her under the chin, like you do to a dog, when informing her that, essentially, her cleverness with gruntled had been completely trumped by his stellar memory for obscure bits of the dictionary.

  “It was a joke,” she told him.

  “I know,” he said. “But it’s only funny if you’re really making up a word, and in this case you’re not.”

  “You don’t have to make me feel like such a nimrod.”

  “I was only pointing out what I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Way to take the fun
out of it.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive, Frankie.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re pouting over a word in the dictionary.”

  “Fine.” Frankie went back to her book, but she didn’t read. If she was too sensitive, she thought, she was never going to last with this boy, this marvelous boy who made her feel dizzy when he kissed her.

  She’d lose this world she’d gotten into, the brash rhythms of traded insults, the unembarrassed self-immolation, the giddy ridiculousness of Matthew and his friends. She could see immediately that being shrill or needy was the fastest way to lose her place among them.

  She was not only worried about losing her boyfriend’s affection. She was worried about losing her status with his friends.

  Matthew had made Frankie feel delible. Yes, that was a good word for it.

  She pulled out a sheet of notebook paper and began to make a list.

  CHEESE FRIES

  A few e-mails sent in early October, which were later to fall into hands other than those of the intended recipients:

  From: Porter Welsch [[email protected]]

  To: Frances Landau-Banks [[email protected]]

  Subject: Hey

  Frankie, what’s up? Hope your term is going well so far. I want to apologize for what happened with Bess last year.

  —Porter

  From: Frances Landau-Banks

  [[email protected]]

  To: Porter Welsch [[email protected]]

  Subject: Re: Hey

  You mean, you want to apologize, or you are apologizing? Your grammar is indistinct.

  From: Porter Welsch [[email protected]]

  To: Frances Landau-Banks [[email protected]]

  Subject: This is me, apologizing

  I apologize.

  From: Frances Landau-Banks

  [[email protected]]

  To: Porter Welsch [[email protected]]