I Am No One You Know (31 page)

Noise in the Shamrock was deafening. Not just the bowlers but country rock music blaring overhead. Or was it a roaring in Rickie’s ears. Not knowing if he should duck out of there before his mom saw him or should he saunter over and say “Hi, Mom!” and let the bitch know he knew, and as Rickie hesitated Mrs. Swann glanced around to see him and her face froze and for a terrible moment—Rickie would remember this all his life, he knew—it seemed almost as if his mother would not acknowledge him. Then she relented. In a kind of guilty voice, but grinning—“Kiddo, hey. Long as you’re here, this is my big brother Stan and my sweet little niece Cleopatra.”

Big brother? Little niece?
What?

It was like that, who was it that Bible person turned to a pillar of salt for seeing something forbidden by God, how Rickie stood rooted
to the spot blinking at his mother who was smiling so widely at him her pale pink barracuda gums were exposed like some private part of her body. Rickie was too shocked to protest
But Mom: you always said you were an orphan! No family!
Like a TV switched off his brain had gone blank. “Stan”—the tattooed muscle-guy with the ponytail who must’ve been Rickie’s uncle—nodded at him and muttered a greeting. “Cleopatra”—the fattish girl who must’ve been Rickie’s cousin, the only cousin known to him—smiled shyly sticking a finger in her mouth. But Rickie couldn’t croak out any kind of greeting. Oh shit, was he tongue-tied. Mrs. Swann was advancing toward him with a warning icepick look, “This is our secret, Rickie, okay? No need to rat to your dear old dad.” In the next alley a bowling ball black as pitch rushed into pins with a deafening clatter. Rickie felt as if he’d been hit in the gut backing out of that hellish place stammering what sounded like, “Sure, Mom. I guess…” though his words were lost amid bowlers’ shouts and hyena laughter.

Run, run! Running into the night Rickie was panting and sobbing in a marshy field somewhere near the Turnpike where he ran until the soles of his sneakers were layered in mud the size of elephants’ hooves and what came into his dazzled head was lines of a poem his social studies teacher had recited to them that day
Run run though I await you run little rabbit run from your fate, you
but he couldn’t remember the rest of the words, he sank to his knees, filled with a murderous rage for that woman who was his mother he’d trusted who’d betrayed him but mostly Rickie was bawling like a baby, oh Christ he wanted to
die.

N
OW
R
ICKIE WAS
staying out of school, didn’t give a fuck if they sent a notice to his mom. His mom! And when he did show up, he was sullen-faced and disheveled like some kid with a gun in his backpack you wouldn’t want to cross. (There was no metal detector checkpoint at Grover Cleveland. The school was only a junior high!) Rickie’s teachers nervously took note of him, and were secretly relieved when he cut their classes. Except Mrs. Halifax, Rickie’s fourth-period teacher, began at last to notice him.
That woundedness in the boy’s face…

Seeing how the skinny gangly boy she’d never paid much attention to previously sat slumped in his desk at the back of the room staring
into space with hooded eyes and his boy-face haggard as a skull. She was tempted to tease him, to wake him up, but something held her back. He was one of those Mrs. Halifax who hadn’t an ounce of liberal sentimentality in her veins and was color blind on the issue filed away under
lost cause.
But now she became distracted by him. His presence. A tragic presence it began to seem. Among the ordinary boys and girls who were her pupils. And how ordinary, how banal, the day’s lesson, the textbook in her hand, how ordinary Mrs. Halifax’s own life she’d borne bravely like a burning candle aloft in wayward winds determined it should not be blown out, it should not be extinguished until she’d come to a fulfillment of her destiny thinking
That Swann boy, he’s beautiful
shocked at what she was seeing at the rear of her familiar fluorescent-lighted classroom on the second floor of Grover Cleveland Junior High in East Orange, New Jersey, as in the monumental works of Caravaggio a holy redeeming light radiates not from celestial sources but from the potent Mystery of the inner spirit. Dazed by this vision Mrs. Halifax stood for a moment speechless at the front of the classroom slowly stroking her downy forearms and the undersides of her heavy breast in a white angora sweater and and there came a sting of moisture in her eyes now tender, not-mocking and she said, “Rickie Swann.
Please see me immediately after class.
”

And after class Mrs. Halifax instructed Rickie Swann to
please see her after school.

T
HAT WAS EARLY
November. Their affair would continue for eleven months.
As soon as our eyes melted together we knew. We were each helpless in our fate.

For what Mrs. Halifax saw in Rickie Swann’s face was the old-young eyes of her soul-mate. Her lover. Oh, not the lover—not the lovers—she’d actually had, in her life; not her husband Dwayne Halifax, for sure!
What a soul-mate is, is your destiny. In an instant you know.
Not that Mrs. Halifax understood what the trauma was, in Rickie Swann’s heart. (One day, he would tell her. He would tell her all his secrets as she would tell him all her secrets, or almost all.) On that November afternoon darkening early with storm clouds and smelling more virulently than usual of sulfurous chemicals there sat Rickie Swann before her, fists jammed into his armpits in the most
hostile of boy-postures. His jaws, covered in a soft silvery down, trembled. His eyelids trembled. Mrs. Halifax was inspired to switch off the overhead lights. She was one to dislike fluorescent lights at any time knowing how they cast shadows down upon her girlish face. “You can speak to me, Rickie. Open your heart.” Mrs. Halifax was feeling tender as a fresh sliced-open melon. Spilling seeds, juice. She who’d long hardened her soul against the disillusions of her life as a woman; as, as a young idealistic teacher with an education degree from Rutgers at New Brunswick she’d had to harden her soul against the bureaucracy and stiffling intellectual mediocrity of the East Orange, New Jersey, school district. In the shadows, the walls of the classroom dissolved. The bulletin board, the floating clock face. There was just enough dimming light from the windows to see Rickie Swann staring at her. Mrs. Halifax was beginning to feel faint. Oh, what was happening to her! What was happening to this boy! “There is something locked in your heart, Rickie. You must open it to me. I am your friend…” Her hand reached out boldly to stroke his hair. His limp greasy tattered-looking hair. Her cool fingers stroked his warm forehead. Rickie squirmed, shivered like a frightened animal, swallowed hard.
That first touch. A flame between us.
Mrs. Halifax was deeply moved, the boy had not shrunk from her. Never had she touched any pupil so intimately in her nine years of teaching and this boy had not shrunk from her. She asked him again what was wrong, urged him to speak his heart to her, and he began to stammer that he was “so afraid”—“something was going to happen soon”—and Mrs. Halifax asked what would happen soon and Rickie said, as if the words were being pulled from him, “Something! Like lightning that can’t be stopped.” Mrs. Halifax moved carefully, as you might move to comfort a shivering German shepherd. She pulled up a chair close beside Rickie Swann, and she framed the boy’s face between her hands, and she looked him in the eyes so close, it was like bringing your own face up against a mirror, seeing your breath steam on the mirror and so close you can’t see yourself but can only feel. Gently she asked, “Who would this happen to, Rickie?” and Rickie shook his head vehemently as if he didn’t know, or if he knew he could not say, and a single tear distinct and pristine as a glittering gem spilled out of his eye and ran slowly down his cheek and Mrs. Halifax
not knowing what I did I swear in that
instant knowing only that this had happened between us before, in another lifetime long ago
stopped the tear with her lips. And all this while the boy was unmoving and now not breathing waiting
for what had to be, had to be.

Following this, things happened swiftly between Mrs. Halifax and Rickie Swann.

N
EVER WOULD HE
betray her. Never would he speak a word in corroboration of her felonious behavior. Never would he accuse her, never would he refer to her as other than “Mrs. Halifax”—or, sometimes, more formally, “Mrs. Halifax my teacher.”

His own guilt, whatever he’d done, he would accept. But not that Mrs. Halifax his teacher had conspired with him to commit it.

E
NTERING THE REAR,
kitchen door of her two-story wood-frame and brick home on Cedar Drive, East Orange Mrs. Halifax heard muffled laughter in the TV room. Scarcely daring to breathe she came to the doorway seeing only shifting TV shadows. A hulking silhouette on the Barcalounger. It was nearly 10
P.M.
A weekday evening! Mrs. Halifax would tell her husband Dwayne she’d been—where?—at a PTA meeting at the school. Her swollen, pale mouth would insist, yes she’d told him she wouldn’t be home until late, he should order a pizza for himself, wasn’t pizza Dwayne Halifax’s favorite favorite food? It was! Greasy Italian sausage, melted mozzarella cheese in yard-long sticky skeins, inch-thick chewy-dough crust that would set Mrs. Halifax’s sensitive bowels aflame, such was Dwayne Halifax’s favorite food which she was hoping he’d ordered so she’d feel less guilty. Not that she felt guilt for loving Rickie Swann! Never would Mrs. Halifax feel guilt for loving Rickie Swann, her love for the boy was the single pure clean selfless and innocent love of her life. There was only innocence between them. She was preparing to defend her love for Rickie Swann when she heard the moist rattle of snoring. Dear Dwayne had fallen asleep in the recliner. Thank God! As increasingly Dwayne was doing in the evenings since he’d lost his last job and his mysterious health symptoms had emerged. Poor Dwayne who’d once been a tight end on the Rutgers football team, with a head of shaggy curly hair, now nearly bald, pot-bellied and with
a strangely shriveling right leg at the age of only thirty-seven, only five years older than Mrs. Halifax but looking at least fifteen years older, almost overnight it seemed Dwayne had become the type of man you might love but wouldn’t be
in love
with, not if you were a normal very intensely female woman like Mrs. Halifax. Noooooo. Also Dwayne Halifax had been a vigorous alpha-type male in his earlier life but of late he’d become one of that category of left-behind Americans you might say. A high-tech computer whiz straight out of college hired at a six-figure salary then in the mid-1990’s abruptly “downsized” and with no choice but to re-enter the work force on a far lower level of income and distinction, he’d taken a course in real-estate at the local community college and was hired by the region’s largest realtor then again abruptly downsized with plummeting real-estate sales in the wake of a recession, next, still robust and hopeful, vowing not to be discouraged he’d taken first aid, lifesaving and lifeguard training and showing up for his first day as a lifeguard at Jersey City Beach he was met by State of New Jersey health officials armed with documents shutting the beach for reasons of
toxic chemical and cloacal bacterial
contamination. It was following this new disappointment that Dwayne Halifax began to turn inward upon himself, increasingly brooding and withdrawn, and his right leg began to
atrophy
as a local doctor tentatively diagnosed, it was possibly the onslaught of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”) or a milder sclerosis, though perversely, and Mrs. Halifax supposed this must be a positive sign, Dwayne’s appetite was wholly unaffected, you should see Dwayne Halifax
eat.
Well, let him have his pleasures at least. What remained to him. She was smelling pizza-smells, and beer. In her stocking feet, holding her shoes she tiptoed to the snoring, open-mouthed man on the Barcalounger and gave him a breathy kiss on the forehead. Blessed with the love of Rickie Swann, Mrs. Halifax felt a surge of affection for her husband. She would take care not to wake him. Often he slept in the TV room now. Long groggy bouts of sleep, sometimes as many as fourteen hours at a stretch. Not for an instant did it occur to Mrs. Halifax
God I hate him, wish he would die die DIE
and certainly she did not think
The boy will kill him for me,
instead she pulled a quilt up over his bulky body and switched off the TV and lights that he might sleep undisturbed through the night. In her loins that still throbbed in the
aftermath of passion, staining her black stretch panties was the boy’s silky semen seeping out of her, the hot deep secret core of her being, her eyeballs shuddered in their sockets as on tiptoe she ascended the stairs
Oh Ricki-ie. Rick-ie Swann. I love you so.

“K
IDDO.
Where the hell’ve you been?”

At 10
P.M.
Mrs. Swann had begun to worry about her son, yes and she was suspicious of the way he pushed past her avoiding her eyes and with his greasy hair swinging in his face like he was hiding behind it, and his mouth looked swollen and raw (had he been kissing some hot-chick little cunt?) and the scent of his underarms made even her practiced nostrils pinch. Over his shoulder he growled, “Go to hell, Mom.
I got homework.
”

Never would Mrs. Swann acknowledge their meeting in the bowling alley. Never would Rickie allude to it. Fuck if he would. Fuck if he gave a fuck about that shit. He didn’t need his scrawny old mom now. He’d learned not only his heart was in the possession of somebody who would never never break it,
it had already happened before a thousand years ago.
It was, what Mrs. Halifax called it,
sacrosanct.

T
HOSE MONTHS
! Madness.

They could not keep from each other. They could not bear being apart not knowing exactly where the other was. Mrs. Halifax bought Rickie Swann a cell phone for his (secret) use. In Mrs. Halifax’s fourth-period class Rickie sat now attentively at the rear of the classroom staring at Mrs. Halifax with a look of dreamy stunned boy-desire. Often his mouth grew slack and damp.
He loves me. Adores me.
Mrs. Halifax made every effort to keep her eyes from drifting onto Rickie Swann for if she allowed herself to acknowledge him she was in danger (she, Mrs. Halifax!) of stammering and blushing and losing her concentration. In Rickie’s proximity she felt a tugging sensation in her body, in her breasts and belly, a sweet helpless slipping-down sensation like the moon’s tide; she had all she could do to keep from moaning aloud in sexual need. Her classroom teasing was less cruel, more noticeably playful. She was looking flushed and youthful and gave off a new lilac fragrance. Never now did she twist her hair into a knot, always she wore it loose and sensuous on her shoulders. To her
pupils’ surprise, she even brought them home-baked peanut butter cookies to celebrate Columbus Day: “To honor the fact that the New World yet exists, boys and girls, to be discovered by each and every one of us in our own way.”