Brief Encounters with the Enemy (15 page)

It turned out that Fred wasn’t the only one unhappy to see me return.

“Where’s Mrs. Tannehill?” the sixth-graders wanted to know.

Mrs. Tannehill was the substitute the school had hired to take my place while I was gone. She was elderly, fifteen years past retirement, still bouncing from school to school, trying to piece together a living. She had arthritis and perfect diction.

“I do so love children,” she’d told me before I left, as if she weren’t doing it to make money.

“Who doesn’t love children?” I’d asked her. I was being snide, but the question had made her beam.

She obviously knew something about teaching, though, because the children weren’t behind in their lessons. That Monday morning I’d been surprised to walk into the classroom before school began and find the walls covered with drawings of the major figures of the Enlightenment. Spinoza. Locke. Newton. They were already on the Enlightenment.

On the floor beneath the drawings were cardboard dioramas in shoe boxes, a dozen or so dioramas featuring pivotal scenes from three centuries ago, like the apple hitting Newton on the head. I’d never done dioramas with my class. I’d never even considered them.

She’d also been conscientious enough to leave a detailed report on my desk, written in exquisite, outdated penmanship, informing me of each student’s strengths and weaknesses. “Ellery is shy, analytical, easily flustered. Mallory is contemplative, creative, and has allergies …” I didn’t bother to read the whole thing. My main concern was the prospect of having to rework my lesson plan, which had been handed to me six years earlier like a baton by the retiring history teacher, and which went only as far as 1959. “You won’t ever make it past 1910,” he’d sniggered. He’d been right till now. At the rate the students were going, they’d make it all the way to the present.

The day had started with such promise. I’d had butterflies coming around the bend, seeing the school in the early-morning light, two stories in red brick with a chimney. It was idyllic and beautiful, the school, in a run-down, affluent sort of way: drafty in the winter, hot in the summer, mice in the basement. It was surrounded by woods, a pond, and a baseball field, which had, when I’d driven up, six sprinklers going
full force, trying to keep the grass green and lush. The school had been built one hundred years ago, when everything was corn and wheat. Since then it had produced three congressmen and one poet. Their portraits hung in the lunchroom as a reminder. “Give your best, get your best” was the school motto, etched above the main entrance. And that morning the principal, Dr. Dave, had been standing beneath the portico, waiting to greet me personally.

“Here comes the soldier-teacher!” he cried. He shook my hand vigorously. He looked me in the eye.

“I’m glad to be back, Dr. Dave,” I said. I wanted to sound easygoing, but I was ecstatic that he was taking time out of his day. He wasn’t much older than I, but he was more successful, and that always plagued me. It put my life’s accomplishments into perspective. He’d gotten his doctorate by twenty-six, he’d become principal by twenty-nine, he spoke Japanese. He wore jeans every day to prove that he was down-to-earth. He went by his first name, but with “Doctor” added for the constant evocation of academic achievement. The day I got the news of my call-up, he’d appeared unannounced in the teachers’ lounge and said a few impromptu words about “Jake’s decision to become a soldier,” ending with “Give your best, get your best.” I’d always found the phrase fatuous, but it had made me blush like a boy.

It was only seven-thirty and the students hadn’t arrived yet and everything was quiet. Dr. Dave escorted me down the hallway with his hand lightly on my arm. My arm felt muscular beneath his hand. Our footsteps echoed on the stone tile. Here comes the hero.

George the custodian was mopping the floor. He’d been
mopping the floor for twenty-five years. When we passed, he stopped and said, “Welcome back, Mr. Mattingly.”

“I’m glad to be back, George,” I said.

“I prayed for you every day,” he said. He was being obsequious, and I liked it.

The typing teacher came out of her classroom and said, “Oh my God, Jake,” and hugged me. It was the first time a woman had touched me in eighteen months and I thought about resting my head on her shoulder. Her voice filled the hallway, which brought the spelling teacher out of her room, and the art teacher, and the English teacher. They all came running. Soon the hallway was filled with two dozen teachers and George, standing around waiting for me to regale them with war stories. I gave them platitudes. I told them it had been an honor and a privilege. I told them I’d do it again. They enjoyed the platitudes. They mistook the platitudes for details. Dr. Dave raised my arm like a boxer who’d won the championship.

But an hour minutes later I had fourteen boys and girls staring at me, wanting to know where Mrs. Tannehill was.

“Mrs. Tannehill was your substitute,” I informed them.

Their faces were blank. They didn’t understand. A substitute was someone who
replaced
the teacher. They had begun the year with Mrs. Tannehill, who was now being replaced. The seventh-graders before them had only ever known Mrs. Tannehill as well. As far as everyone in the near vicinity was concerned,
I
was the substitute.

The students sat in two rows of five and one row of four. They were the children of those who could afford prep school tuition—bankers, lawyers, doctors. They would grow up to be
bankers, lawyers, doctors. This was the cycle and I was a part of it. They dressed in clean, pressed uniforms in the school colors of gold and black. The girls wore dresses, the boys wore ties. Their ties were gold or black. They might have appeared like well-behaved students, with their hands crossed, their pencils at the top of their desks, but their expressions were vindictive and mistrustful. They wanted me gone.

I explained to them that Mrs. Tannehill had been covering for me while I’d been “off fighting a war.” This was supposed to impress them, but it made no significant impact, even on the boys. It left me at a total loss as to what to say or do next. I’d been prepared for a rousing reception from these twelve-year-olds and now there was silence. Perhaps they thought I was inventing my military service. No doubt they’d grown accustomed to being lied to by adults. It would have helped if I’d been wounded in the line of duty, just a minor wound, something that had left a mark. I could have rolled up my sleeve and said, “This is where the bullet went in.” There was a soldier in my battalion who lost the tip of his pinkie finger. Brandon. It was only the tip and only the pinkie, and he’d done it while cleaning his gun one morning. He was an idiot, but it wasn’t a gruesome disfigurement, nor would it hinder him in life, and it was something he would forever be able to tell an unprompted story about. In lieu of my own wound, I thought about passing around my military ID, but that struck me as defeatist and emasculating. No, they wanted something tangible. They wanted the tip of my finger.

I tried a different angle. “Who here can tell me how the war ended?” Even as I said it, I could hear the honeycoated quality of my voice, pedantic and condescending. It was too late to
take it back. I was talking down to them and they knew it, asking them a question that even a five-year-old could answer. Still, I waited, arms crossed in the pedagogical style, looking for someone to provide me the correct response, which, of course, was “We won.” This was the pivotal moment that I had studied in my teacher training courses; it was where I would gauge if the students respected my authority and viewed me as an educator. All I needed was one child, one out of fourteen, to give me the answer and I’d be able to move on organically to a discussion of what I’d been doing the last eighteen months. They would demand descriptions and I would give them descriptions. All the brutal descriptions their hearts desired. I’d hold nothing back and they’d be spellbound. Death by drowning, by burning, by whatever means available. That was how we had won the war.

While I waited, I could feel a prodigious amount of silent time slipping past. My mind wandered dangerously. It began to fade. I realized how jet-lagged I was. The manual had cautioned about fatigue. I became absorbed in the dioramas, little resting Newton being crowned by a clay apple, and I contemplated what historical events came after 1959 and how much work it would be for me to piece those events together. Through the window, I could see the gray sky hovering over the edge of the woods. The sprinklers oscillated across the baseball field,
shuck, shuck, shuck
was their sound, their reach long and powerful, and most of the time they missed the field altogether and shot straight into the pond.

Finally, mercifully, a little girl in the back row raised her hand. Her name was Bethany and she wore a gold ribbon in
her hair and sat with perfect posture. “Bethany is bright, introspective …”

“Yes, Bethany?” I said.

“Is Mrs. Tannehill sick?”

It was three weeks after I’d gotten home that I was finally able to see Molly. It was supposed to have been only two weeks, but that’s the nature of an affair. We’d had a few phone conversations along the way, breathy and furtive and yearning, and each time she’d had to hang up in the middle. “I’m trying my best, honey,” she’d promised. But she didn’t seem all that bothered. This was not how I’d envisioned my homecoming.

She arrived on a Saturday afternoon with Lola. They were en route to a pottery class and had one hour to spare. Lola leaped into my arms straightaway. At least she was happy to see me. “What’d you bring me?” she wanted to know. She was heavy in my arms. She’d become a little woman. I wanted to bury my face in her neck and weep at the passage of time. I wanted her mother to see how much I had missed them.

“I was at war,” I said. “I didn’t bring you anything.”

She shrugged. She jumped from my arms onto the futon. She jumped up and down on the futon. The futon was pushed against the wall and doubled as a couch, in the same way that my desk doubled as a table. My kitchen cabinets doubled as a place to file papers. This was life in an efficiency. With three people it was crowded.

“Don’t jump on the bed,” Molly said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I wanted to be permissive.

Molly let me kiss her on the cheek. It was a casual, platonic, meaningless kiss that I had perfected. Molly wanted to make sure Lola was protected from the effects of “our transgression.” If Lola were ever to innocently mention something to her father, it could be explained away as a harmless kiss from a harmless friend. “Mommy’s old friend Jake.” “Mommy’s dear friend Jake.” That was the parameter we worked within. We’d been working within it for three years. In three years, Lola had never said anything to her father. She seemed to notice nothing and be affected by nothing. As far as I could tell, she seemed to love me. I often wondered if she loved me most of all and was aiding and abetting us, perhaps unconsciously, because I was the one she really wanted as her father. “He’s absentee,” Molly had told me when we first met. She didn’t mean that her husband traveled, she meant that he was emotionless and humorless. He was an entrepreneur. He owned shopping malls or shopping centers. “I’m trying to help the world,” she said he’d tell her. He spent his weekends on the phone.

We sat around my desk/table, the three of us, eating muffins that I’d bought for our reunion. Lola wanted to eat only the tops of the muffins. “The muffinheads,” she called them. She pulled them apart, stuffed the heads in her mouth, and put the unwanted portion back on the plate. She was disgusting.

“Eat the whole thing,” Molly instructed.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I wanted to be the good guy.

Six muffins later, Lola had to use the bathroom. The moment the door was closed, I pulled Molly onto my lap. Her
body was warm and her hair fell in my face. “No, no, no,” she cooed, but she straddled me anyway. She was always sure to offer resistance. The resistance only increased the desire, of course, but it seemed to put her mind at ease and resolve the moral dilemma.

She’d married too young. That was the dilemma. She’d had Lola too young. That was another dilemma. She’d wanted to be an artist—now she was thirty-eight and a housewife.

“It’s too late,” she’d tell me.

“No,” I’d say, “it’s never too late.” But I didn’t really believe it myself.

We’d met by chance at a museum three years ago. She’d had her sketch pad and I’d had my students. I’d brought them on a field trip to show them a traveling exhibit of antiquities from the Ottoman Empire. They were disinterested and I was distracted. Molly kept walking past with her high heels and her hoop earrings and her red hair. I tried my best not to have my students catch me looking at her ass. I’d shown off in front of her by doing an imitation of Mehmed II. The class had roared and she had smiled. They loved me, those students. They would do anything I wanted, answer any question I asked. As we were leaving, I happened to run into her at the coat check. “If you ever want a guided tour …” I said. I had no idea she’d take me up on it. I had no idea she was married. A week later we were back at the museum. She’d brought her sketch pad again. In truth, she was the expert, telling me about the artwork and the artists and the brushstroke. She showed me some of her own drawings. They weren’t of paintings and sculptures but of people looking at paintings and sculptures.
She was obviously talented. “They’re amazing,” I said. “Do you really think so?” she said. We sat close to each other in front of Monet’s water lilies while she talked for twenty minutes about the painter’s failing eyesight. I was fixated on her hip pressing against my hip. Later we made out in my car, and when we were done, she pulled her wedding ring out of her pocket. It had one huge diamond. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. She thought that would be the end of us, but it wasn’t. I didn’t care about any nameless, faceless husband. It was every man for himself in this world.

We’d seen each other about once a month since then, sometimes twice a month. We avoided phone calls, we deleted emails, we met at out-of-the-way places. Once, when her husband was preoccupied, we managed to see each other two days in a row. We took Lola to the circus on Saturday and the amusement park on Sunday. It was like we were a family, or trying to be a family, laughing and sliding down the water slide. It had seemed like a grand achievement at the time not to exhibit any trace of desire. “Mommy’s friend Jake.”