Into the Great Wide Open (21 page)

Mrs. Connolly was droning on and Kenny was watching, listening from his seat in the far back of the class, deep into a sex dream (the memory of his life as a whore still clinging to his waking self, like wisps of cobweb, half-remembered). She was the body he was putting his dream on: smaller than Junie, nimble, monkeylike; he could imagine her tight thighs, her nipples big and dark and hard, shrinking
into tight points when she was excited. Sex with a teacher. Sometimes he looked at her and it seemed like they both knew. And something had changed over the year, too—something that he learned from Junie, that women were full of secrets, that sometimes you could get at them. Before, with Mrs. Connolly, the fantasy was strictly out of
Penthouse:
the teacher’s lounge, deserted, or the old unused equipment room at the edge of the athletic field, Why Kenny what are you doing here … Now he could almost imagine it, not just the place to put his fantasy but Mrs. Connolly herself.

A spring day, anyway, or just before spring: flat gray skies and the promise of rain for once, instead of snow. The classroom idle, overheated; the boredom hung like a faint foul odor. The ground was damp outside and the air smelled faintly like the damp dirt, that first mineral clue, or what? An
intimation
, Kenny remembered, and looked to Mrs. Connolly for approval; but she was public, preoccupied. Look at me, he thought, love me, admire me.

Like spiders or bear cubs, the students were restless with the coming change of season. Mrs. Connolly talked and talked and her words ran off, down the gutters between the chairs, out the door, unimpeded. She seemed distracted herself. Her face was a performance of teaching, a mask that was growing thinner and thinner. A person in there, Kenny thought. Tell me your secrets. I want you: I want you to come here, to tell me how you got here, how you ended up in this classroom, what you were hoping for and what you want now. He sent the message like a radio beam, one planet to the other: this isn’t just about sex, although sex may be involved—
will be
involved—but I desire you …

Mrs. Connolly stopped, like she had heard him. “You’re not paying attention to me, are you?” she asked, in her flat colorless voice.

Nobody seemed to notice, nobody but Kenny. They saw each other over the heads of the others.

“Maybe I should just give it up,” she said. A murmur of confusion
arose in the front of the class, where the asskissers sat. Mrs. Connolly closed the book she was reading from and laid it on the desk, looking meanwhile out the window, like there was a message for her there. Even then, it seemed like she knew what she was doing. She stayed inside herself, unlike Junie; maybe it was just something about being older but Kenny didn’t think so. I’ll get you off, he thought, get you out of your head. She turned and looked at Kenny, like she heard him.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “I’ll put this off till tomorrow, OK? Either it’s boring or I’m boring or I don’t know what. But you have to do one favor for me in return.” She paused for dramatic effect; Kenny thought that maybe she had seen a movie about a teacher somewhere. She said, “I want you to listen to a poem I’m going to read, and really listen to it, OK? I just want you to get one poem out of this class. That’s enough.”

More mumbling, butt-shuffling. This would go down in a small way as a memorable day; nothing to compare to the time Mrs. Englehart threw the glass ashtray at a student or the time that Brian Faircloth played the bugle in class, but still. Kenny sat back, enjoying the show, while Mrs. Connolly leafed through a little paperback. “What do you want to hear?” she asked, without looking up.

“Robert Frost,” said one of the asskissers.

“Sylvia Plath,” said a girl in black.

“Eddie Van Halen,” said one of the resident idiots.

She looked up brightly at this latest insult, ready to rumble. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t see Van Halen in the anthology. Maybe you could bring a poem next time to read yourself?” She turned to the class at large. “Maybe all of you could, next time—bring your favorite poem in and read it to the class. I’m sure we’d have quite an array. What am I even doing here?”

She had their attention. They weren’t used to hearing a teacher be sarcastic but Mrs. Connolly didn’t care. She leafed furiously
through the anthology, stopped twice but neither suited her. Finally composed herself and read:

She snapped the book shut at this point and put it into her large leather handbag, along with her glasses and her fountain pen, which had been lying on the desk. What else? She searched around for a minute, opening and closing the drawers of her desk. More fidgeting, laughter from the children, who were apparently forgotten. When she had everything she took a final look around and said, “I have nothing further to say to you.”

Then she left. She just opened the door and walked out of it and then there was no teacher at the front of the classroom. A long confusing minute, thinking it over, then the room exploded in nervous talk and laughter. This was better than the day that Mrs. Englehart threw the glass ashtray at a student after all. They had driven another teacher from the classroom, maybe from the profession. Their ignorance, which they were proud of, which they fought for every day,
had won again, driving its enemies before it … Kenny left in the confusion.

He thought he had lost her, thought she might have gone back into a teacher’s bathroom or lounge—those mysterious forbidden rooms—to have a nervous collapse, or whatever. Then he spotted her in the parking lot, walking between the cars; spotted her raincoat actually, and then figured out it was Mrs. Connolly. It was a black vinyl raincoat with large yellow polka dots, actively wrong. Mrs. Connolly had a past, presumably. He had to walk the long axis of the school before he could get to a door that led outside, down the rows of closed lockers, past the classrooms and the drone of teachers’ voices, on and on, the endless perky question: Class?

She was still there when he escaped; she was walking across the battered grass, a gray carpeting of pull-tabs, cigarette butts, and pigeon feathers. Kenny ran to catch her but it wasn’t hard. She was proceeding languidly in her black unpractical shoes. She was thinking.

“Where are you going?” Kenny asked.

She didn’t seem surprised to see him at all. “I was just wondering that myself,” she said. “Either San Francisco or back to graduate school, I think.”

“You’re not going back, are you?”

“Why, are you?”

She looked up at his face, skeptical, slightly playful, the hint of a smile.

“I don’t know,” Kenny said.

“Whatever you say,” she said. “I’m going to buy myself a cup of coffee, I think.”

Kenny couldn’t decide if this was an invitation or not but walked along beside her anyway. She was shorter than he thought, and more opaque. Her plastic raincoat rustled with the movement of her hips, and Kenny remembered that only a few minutes ago he had
been speculating about her nipples. Something had happened to make that seem wrong. What?—the pornographic world, he thought; where sex and power ran together. When she was still a teacher he could do whatever he wanted with her, the whole sex rodeo in his daydreams. Now she had taken off the uniform, become a small quick woman with brown hair, something birdlike … and Kenny liked the company of women, he had learned this from Junie. He was curious about their lives, their girlhoods. A fascination; learning to slow down, learning to listen.

“What’s your name, anyway?” Kenny asked.

“Candy,” she said; without further explanation. She had disappeared inside herself, walking toward the avenue but talking to somebody else, in another room somewhere. Kenny felt useless; and then he realized that he had also walked out of the school, that he was in trouble, too. He tried to summon a sense of gravity about this but he could only find fake, official emotions. There was no real surprise or freshness; he had already made this decision in small increments, months of not deciding, not doing his homework.

She led him into Bennigan’s, where it was dark and quiet; the permanent airless quiet of the shopping mall. It was ten-forty-five in the morning and they were the only ones, except for the bright blond college girl who greeted them in a green smock. “Sit anywhere!” she said.

They took a booth together and sat opposite; Mrs. Connolly (Candy?) looking out the stained-glass window next to them, out at the distorted cars in the parking lot, red and yellow, red skies. A second college girl took their order for coffee.

“I’ve never been in here before,” Kenny said. “It’s like McDonald’s with drinks.”

“It’s worse than that,” Mrs. Connolly said. “I will now perform my last official act.”

“What’s that?”

“I wanted to tell you,” she said, “that you could do this standing on your head, any of this.”

“What do you mean?” Kenny asked.

“I mean that you can read, and you can write, and you can think, which is not as usual as you might think. You can see that, looking around the classroom. You know what I mean. I used to look at you and go,
there’s one
.”

“Well, thanks, I guess.”

“But you never even did the reading, you never spent more than forty-five minutes writing a paper. I don’t mean to lecture you, I mean, I’m glad you’re here. There’s no good way to say it. I was curious about you, is all.”

Kenny noticed that she had moved into the past tense. “That poem,” he said, trying to change the subject.

“I just wanted to talk about cat balls, to see if anyone would wake up. Did you like it?” Kenny nodded. “I thought you would. It’s Frank O’Hara. Are you gay?”

Kenny looked up sharply, surprised and angry, like she had slapped him out of nowhere. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it, one way or the other.”

“No, you’re right,” he said; and the awkwardness between them started to thicken and harden. Why were people, why were
women
, always apologizing to Kenny? What did he do to make them wrong all the time? She was staring out the window now, and the coffee was never coming. Most people only have one left hand, Kenny thought. Plus there was this little core of difference inside him, and he was afraid of being found out: the drag queen in the coffee shop had recognized it, maybe, and so had Mrs. Connolly. He didn’t even have a name for it, didn’t know why he had to keep it hidden, but this was where the panic started. His dark secret love. His dark secret: love.

“I’m not trying to accuse you of anything,” she said. “It’s just sometimes, you seemed to understand things, I don’t know.”

“I mean, I have friends that are gay,” he said. “It’s just not me, not exactly.”

“I wonder if it’s as black-and-white as that,” she said, rummaging in her bag for something, not finding it. “I’m not talking about you in particular. There are a couple of different schools of thought, you know—one says that it’s a whole continuum of feelings and expressions and so on, that there’s no clear line. Then there’s the sort of genetic school that says that either you are or you aren’t. Which do you think?”

A
third
college blond—aggressively heterosexual, teeth and hair and bulgy breasts, though in other circumstances Kenny wouldn’t have noticed—brought their coffee, which Mrs. Connolly drank black. Kenny spooned sugar into his.

“I don’t know,” he said; then decided to gamble, to show her a little bit and see what she would do with it. “I guess I think it’s the first way,” he said. “I guess it’s just a question of where you are on the line, where you are on the spectrum, and then what circumstances, you know, come up.” (Faltering here, but it was too late to back down.) “I mean, I guess most people, if they met the right person … Maybe not most people, but a lot.”

“You think so?”

Kenny came up lame. “I don’t know,” he said.

“That seems romantic to me,” Mrs. Connolly said. “You know? That kind of like straight, white, middle-class thing that wants to include all the other experiences, too, you know, I could be gay if I wanted to. I don’t know. Other people’s territory.” She went back to rummaging, finally coming up with the poetry anthology, which she laid on the table like a priest with a Bible:
The Modern American Poets
.

Mrs. Connolly tapped the cover and said, “You read the biographies of the people in here, men and women, and they were all so sexually
various
, you know? Not very successful, is the main impression, but various. I mean, Bishop and Lowell and Ginsberg, for
Christ sake. Sometimes I feel like poetry is a thing for
them
, and not for us—I’m straight myself, I guess you don’t know that. So I guess I admire it, as much as anything else.”

Her face was stained red and yellow in the funhouse light of the window. Hands cupped around her coffee, the nails unpainted, small dark hairs on the skin of her arms; she stared at her hands.

She said, “Sometimes I feel like one of those awful French teachers, the ones from Indiana or somewhere who were always going on about the glories of
la belle Français!
I had about seven of them. They turn them out in a factory in Terre Haute. You know, just never quite getting it and then always telling everybody how great it is. That kind of half-assed translation.”

Kenny must have been looking blank because she stopped when she looked at his face; then returned to her hands, sipped her coffee. “I don’t know,” she said to the table; then nothing, for a minute, and then: “I sort of hoped you
were
gay,” she said. “I was hoping you could explain it to me. I mean, partly because you seem to get it, and partly because of the way you looked when you started the school year, I mean that lifeguard thing with the bleached-out hair and the tank tops. You looked like a member of the Village People or something. I had the biggest crush on you.”