Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (16 page)

“Hey, Meredith.”

She jerked from side to side. Her hair was a mess. Fish bones and seashells lay in piles on the coffee table; more shells were scattered across the floor. There were so many shells. The rug was transformed—it was like a scaled-down seabed environment, a clutter of cowries and oysters and cockles and scallops that glowed liquid pink on the inside; and zebra-striped star shells, spiny-edged and no bigger than coat buttons; and top-shaped shells like iridescent children’s toys, their nautiloid exteriors gaudy with spots, speckles, and blotches.

Meredith opened her mouth. Her tongue stuck out. It wasn’t sexy, it was grotesque, and it upset me to watch it. I cleared a space and put the books on the coffee table, knelt beside her and said, “Honey?”

She was shivering and her face was white. I cradled her head in my lap. Her breasts beneath her lavender nightgown rose and fell with her breathing; her head was heavy. Fine strands of black hair clung to her forehead. I brushed the hair from her face. And I tried to avoid smearing blood on her, blood from my hands, but a little got on her cheek. I wet my shirttail with spit and wiped it away. Here in the warmly lit living room I could examine the full damage of scratching on my arms. They looked, my arms, as if they’d been assailed by frenzied kittens.

Meredith coughed a liquid cough. Her hands waved and her body trembled; her eyes opened, closed, opened. In a soft, faraway voice, she asked, “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. Pete.”

“Pete?”

“Your husband.”

“Husband?”

What was there to say to this? I stroked Meredith’s head, massaged the skin around the temples. My honey’s arms arced upward, then down, dog-paddling air in fluid, openhanded sweeps, dancing in rhythm with the drums and her own decelerated heartbeat. She stretched her legs, did a few lateral frog kicks, wiggled a bit, and sighed seductively, “Come on in, the water’s great.”

Was she kidding? What was she thinking? Had she forgotten what happened the last time I’d “come on in”? Did she want me to die?

Meredith was not, I realized at this point, as I watched her twist and roll on the carpet—she was not, strictly speaking, human.

As if to bear this out she made one of those fish faces of hers. This would be cute if it weren’t so frightening in its implications. She puckered her lips, scrunched her nose, shook her head in tiny, back-and-forth darting motions. What was she doing? Feeding? She seemed so far away. Her hand caressed my neck. Languid fingers tickling, the flick of a nail; it was pleasing and sad at the same time. I took her hand in mine, guided it searching up over my unshaved, dirty face. I kissed her palm, then opened my mouth and inserted a finger (her middle, the longest), sucking it down all the way to the knuckle. “Oh, Meredith,” I moaned—gurgled, actually; Meredith’s finger went quite far into my mouth, reached gag depth, almost; I could feel the nail poking and tickling the back of my throat, making my eyes water—“Oh, Mewedith, don’ you know I lub you?”

But she was too submerged to hear; she was out of earshot, swimming away to wherever.

“
Come back,
” I wanted to call to her.

After a while the drum tape ran its course. The hollow beating faded and ended, and the tape deck clicked off. The room became silent except for outside night sounds: a distant, shrieking seabird; gusting wind that blew a tree branch irregularly and repeatedly scraping against the back wall of the house; and, inside, the low vibrating rumble of the refrigerator motor shuddering on in the kitchen; and the sounds of our breathing, my wife’s and mine. Meredith’s breaths were the bottomless unlabored exhalations of a peaceful sleeper. My own were raspy, wheezy—I was getting some phlegm. Maybe I was coming down with a bug. What a rotten way to kick off the new school year. It’s important, during the first days of getting to know the students, and letting them get to know you, to be in top physical and mental form. Children tend to be acutely sensitive to any hint, in an authority figure, of weakness or despair; they’ll take advantage of it, they’ll be all over you. I don’t like to come off as a disciplinarian, but experience has shown that an atmosphere of order and control, established right off the bat, will prevail throughout the year, while laxity, permissiveness, any implied promise of unrealistic classroom “freedoms”—these things can be hell to correct, and can, unchecked, lead to anarchy. For this reason I typically adopt a “stern taskmaster” persona, informing the little scofflaws that they’ll have to stow away their favorite toys, the ones they’ve brought for the first day, they can forget about “playtime” for now; then giving a series of demanding in-class reading assignments, followed by a multiple-choice pop quiz on some arcane topic in history and, to top things off, hours of homework that gets graded harshly.

Meredith opened her eyes. She stretched and yawned. Her brown body smelled oceany. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to begin making our baby. Would this ever happen?

We huddled like slumber-partying children alone in the house, free to stay up late for the
Creature Feature
late show on TV, slightly uncomfortable on overstuffed cushions hauled from the sofa and dispersed like mattresses across the rug. Meredith pushed aside her scattered shell collection and turned to lie on her side. She was looking directly at me, giving me a
look,
as if she were waiting for me to explain my whole life. But it was my wife doing the explaining: “Everybody’s down on the reef, Pete. All our friends. Jerry and Rita and Abe and Bill and Barbara and Tom and everybody. And hey, guess what? It’s true about Abe and Rita. They are in love. You see, they’re both manatee, and Jerry’s a tuna.”

“A tuna?”

“Yeah. Can you believe that? And guess what Bill is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Seriously, I don’t know.”

“
Guess,
Pete.”

“Um. A clam.”

“Right!” She picked up a clamshell from the floor beside her and, gesturing with it, said, “Bill’s a bivalve. He doesn’t know this of course. He’s too busy drinking to have any real insights into himself. But I’ve seen him on the reef, buried in the sand in one of these.”

“How about that,” I said. Then inquired, coolly, whether everyone in town was some kind of sea creature, or if there were, maybe, other ruminants, grazers, or for that matter any manner of vertebrate land mammals to be found locally. Meredith told me that, as far as she knew, pretty much everyone we socialized with—those were her words: “pretty much everyone we socialize with”—was a continental shelf–dweller, but that I shouldn’t worry about it, certainly
some
of my kind were roaming around
somewhere.

How upsetting. I don’t profess to know much about the massacre of the Plains buffalo; it’s not my period of study. Nevertheless it was all I could do, thinking about it, to keep from becoming paralyzed with despondency. What could I possibly say? What could I do? It was the middle of the night and I felt alone. I said to my wife, “School tomorrow, hon. Why don’t you go on up to bed. I want to do a few last-minute things around the house,” then roused myself and made a groggy, stumbling tour of the downstairs, locking doors and turning off lights, shutting off the main power on the stereo, checking, out of habit, that the gas burners on the stove were, indeed, off. The stuffed bison, property of the Juvenile department of the public library, was still lying on its furry brown back, in the kitchen corner, behind a chair, where I’d tossed it the week before. I drank some tap water and went downstairs to the basement to look it over as a homeroom location. Yes, the basement was the place. With its fluorescent-lit, windowless walls, its low, cracked ceiling and unpainted concrete floor featuring sunk-in rusted iron drain gratings, the basement had a certain institutional feel, unlike the rest of the house, which was distractingly domestic in appearance and mood, as well as being full of breakables. Set up seats, tack up a bulletin board, and the basement would easily resemble any number of classrooms in real schools. There was a musty wet odor everywhere, and a fair number of spiders seemed to’ve made homes among the water pipes running beneath the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom, but these drawbacks were minor. The smell of mildew would soon be masked by the milky-scented breath of toddlers. The spiders could figure in a science project. I made a mental note to this effect—webs: compare and contrast—before trudging upstairs and padding from room to room, selecting furnishings from various places in the house, to lend the basement a friendly, welcoming air. From the living room I filched nature magazines, the ceramic bowl holding dried rose petals, several gaily embroidered throw pillows (for an informal “nap nook” beneath the insulated black pipes rising and twisting like swollen arteries from the top of the antiquated furnace), a straight-backed chair, and—not to forget—those textbooks rescued from the park. Maybe, with Meredith on religion and me on history, and using
Martyrs Mirror
as a source, we might team-teach a seminar on Pain and Sacrifice. (“This class ponders the ways that suffering has, historically, abetted the development of ‘personal’ consciousness and the autonomous Self, from Saint Augustine to the Moderns.”) I also threw in a few “leisure reading” volumes of my own, picture books offering photographic tours of foreign lands, great houses, and award-winning gardens. From the hallway I got a coatrack. Hanging on a wall were a set of sentimental watercolors of boats; these I tacked up in the basement stairwell. A pretty bathroom throw rug made the unpainted floor seem less cold. Lamps warmed the unclean white walls. I arranged, in columnar order, as benches, several storage trunks, battered steamers trimmed in bug-eaten leather and latched with brass clasps hammered to resemble fantastic animal claws. One of the trunks was extremely heavy because it contained a collection of tattered, yellowing school papers from the past: lesson plans, copies of student papers too praiseworthy to discard, end-of-year personnel performance reports. It was impossible to resist a moment’s reading. One report began, “While Mr. Robinson is decidedly one of our more charismatic and engaging lecturers, and while students appear to be positively influenced by Mr. Robinson’s enthusiasm for the material, it might be wished that Mr. Robinson’s podium style were, in future, less rhapsodic.” Another proclaimed: “Mr. Robinson’s novel ideas concerning history and the formation of social systems make fascinating food for thought. However, the committee wonders whether show-and-tell lessons which teach the interogation [
sic
] techniques of the Middle Ages constitute suitable educational fare for third-graders.” Blah, blah, blah. What a relief, to get free, once and for all, of administrative interference. Wasn’t this the whole idea behind the home school? Freedom? Freedom to reach out and touch the hearts and minds of the coming new generation—and no bureaucrats around to get in the way. With a concussive bang that sent dust clouds rolling through the somber basement air, I dropped the lid on the big crate of school files, upended it, and plunked it front and center at the head of the class: here was a fine podium. Every school must have its mascot. I retrieved the stuffed bison from the kitchen floor and awarded it pride of place, smack in the middle of everything, on top of the rusted iron drain grating sunk like an escape hatch in the poured foundation of the house. On my way back upstairs I paused a moment. The 1:32-scale dungeon model rested on its worktable. It had gathered, over the preceding weeks, a white patina of dust. I picked up a sheet of sandpaper and a chunk of balsa roughly whittled in the form of a “tree trunk” beheading dais. The dungeon walls begged for detailing: there were cracks to be carved; spiderwebs in my own basement suggested possibilities for rubber cement webs draped over the prison’s scaled-down hay bed, which I’d decided to pattern on the one in
Martyrs Mirror,
the one in the engraved plate depicting “Georg Wanger in the Dungeon.” There remained the question of the model’s narrative content. For instance, those reptiles. Actually whittling a snake—hissing, contorted and looming to strike out and murder an infidel—seemed beyond my journeyman-artisan capabilities. Frogs were feasible. But frogs weren’t especially threatening. How about an alligator? Implanting a nontraditional signifier (soft-sculpture subtropical crocodilian), within a traditional environment (musty European penal cell), could serve to recontextualize the scene, thereby transcending generic medieval-prison-image associations, upsetting viewer expectations, and creating a startling new “here and now” dungeon reality. Yes. I continued up the staircase, passed through the quiet, breezy kitchen—stopping along the way for another drink of tap water—then went out back to inspect the yard as a playground. The dark of night had passed, and the ocean air felt wet and warm. Dawn’s first rays of sun threw ashen light over tall palms and the roofs of neighboring houses. Meredith’s spear tips cast shadows into the depths of the pit. It was that sweaty time of morning when the first songbirds begin chirping. I had a bad case of fuzzy dry-mouth and one of those sickening behind-the-eyes headaches. And the scratches on my body had begun to ache in the throbbing way that presages infection. Before long, excitable kids would arrive in armor-plated station wagons driven by sexy moms. For now, though, the sandy, wet backyard grass felt cool to lie on. I loosened my belt, tugged up my socks, leaned back, closed my eyes, and did a creative-visualization relaxation exercise in which I breathed deeply and imagined myself roaming wild and free across the western Great Plains. Tall prairie grasses bent beneath wind and the stamping hooves of a vast, snorting herd. My herd! Slowly we made our way across open land. It was a bright new day. The sun was a silver wafer. Piles of our dung sent up steam. Tick-eating birds swooped down to perch on our matted backs. Here everything had its own rich smell. Clover, mint, fresh wild hay. Overhead, hawks lofted on convective drafts rising from the warm valleys where, in our multitudes, we gathered: a majestic, grass-chewing nation.