Pay It Forward (7 page)

I
wonder where people go when they die. They have to go somewhere. Right?

I mean, it would be just too weird to think about Mrs. Greenberg not being anywhere. That would just be too sad.

So, I’ve decided that she’s still out there somewhere. Because I’ve decided I can think whatever I want about it. Because I’ve noticed that everybody thinks something different about it. So I figure that means you can think what you want.

Course that means I’m gonna have to keep that garden real nice. And the cats! Geez! I just thought. Somebody’s gonna have to keep feeding all those wild cats. I wonder how much cat food costs.

Anyway. You know what? Even this way, it’s still sad.

H
e’d been in this house for three months, but nothing was unpacked. Almost nothing. The big bed was set up, made, and comfortable, so he spent a lot of time on it, grading papers, eating off his lap, and watching the news.

He made his way through the sea of boxes to the kitchen, took a small carton of ice cream out of the freezer, and proceeded to eat standing up, right out of the carton, with a plastic spoon, the cat weaving around and through his legs. It made him feel lonely, but then, so did unpacking.

The phone rang and proved difficult to find.

It was Trevor.

“Is it okay that I called you at home? I got the number from information.”

“Is something wrong, Trevor?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble? Is your mother there?”

“It’s nothing like that. I’m okay. It’s just my project. It’s not going so good. At all. It just got a lot worse. Something bad happened. Can I talk to you about it?”

“Of course you can, Trevor.”

“Good. Where do you live?”

Reuben hadn’t expected that. He let the receiver slip down and looked around. “Maybe I could meet you somewhere, Trevor, like the park. Or the library.”

“It’s okay. I’ll ride my bike over. Where do you live?”

So Reuben gave him the address, on Rosita, just off San Anselmo, thinking as he did that this was not the fifties, where public trust was such that a student could go into a teacher’s home without anyone getting a crazy and wrong idea. But he had not thought it through fast enough or well enough, because Trevor was off the phone and on his way.

They could talk on the front porch.

To be extra safe, he called Trevor’s mother, who was listed in the phone book, to explain where Trevor was and why. She wasn’t home, and Reuben had no idea if she worked on Saturdays, but he left a message on her answering machine. Just in case.

Then he looked down and realized he was in sweats, and unshaven. He managed to change into clean jeans and a white shirt and shave before Trevor arrived. It didn’t take very long. He grew beard only on the right side of his face.

T
REVOR DUMPED HIS BIKE ON ITS SIDE
on Reuben’s lawn. Reuben realized he had never seen Trevor upset, so far as he knew.

He stood on the bottom porch step in khaki shorts and a 49ers T-shirt. “Mrs. Greenberg died.”

“I’m so sorry, Trevor,” he said, offering the boy a straight-backed chair on the porch. “Come sit down and tell me about her. Who she was to you.”

“She was for my project. She was, like, my last chance.” Then
he stopped himself, as if ashamed, and took the chair offered him. “That didn’t sound right. I didn’t mean I was upset about my project. I mean, when she died and all. It’s not that. It’s both. I mean, she really was going to pay it forward. She told me. And then she died. I went over to her house this morning. I always take the paper right up to her door. But the last couple days, it’s like she’s not home. But she’s always home. So today it was Saturday, so I just waited. And then the mailman came, and he said she hadn’t taken the mail out of her box for three days. He said her monthly check was in there and it wasn’t like her not to get it right away. So then we knocked on her neighbor’s door, and they called her son, and he came over and opened the door. And she was in bed, just like she was sleeping. Only she wasn’t sleeping. She was dead.”

Trevor stopped for a breath.

This was a difficult moment for Reuben. Any moment that required him to be emotionally helpful, to offer solace or understanding, was a hard moment. Not that he didn’t have any. Just getting it from the inside of himself to the inside of someone else, that was the tricky part.

“I’m sorry, Trevor. That must have been hard for you.”

“The project is almost due. Jerry got sent to the state pen. He wouldn’t even come out when we went to visit. And my mom still thinks my daddy is gonna come back. The whole thing is a bust, Mr. St. Clair.”

“I’m not sure I follow the part about your mother.” He halfway did but hoped Trevor might elaborate.

“Oh. Well. It doesn’t matter. But what am I gonna do for my project?”

Reuben shook his head. It hurt to watch the idealism get kicked out of somebody. Almost as much as it had hurt when he’d lost his own. “I guess you just report your effort. I’m grading on effort, not results.”

“I wanted results.”

“I know you did, Trevor.”

He watched the boy pick at a seam on the cuff of his shorts.

“I didn’t just want a good grade. I really wanted the world to get better.”

“I know you did. It’s a tough assignment. That’s part of its lesson, I’m afraid. We all want to change the world, and sometimes we need to learn that it’s harder than we think.”

“I really do feel bad about Mrs. Greenberg, though. She was a nice lady. I don’t think she was really old. I mean, sort of old. But not that old. We used to talk.”

Reuben looked up to see an old green Dodge Dart pull up to the curb and Arlene McKinney step out. It twisted into an already sore place in his gut to see her unexpectedly. She was the closest he’d come to a date in years, a failed attempt at romance, but he’d never intended to put himself in that position and neither had she. It hadn’t been a real date, but now the awkwardness was real.

He watched her march up the walkway, up the steps to his porch. Purpose plastered on to cover human frailty. All outward confidence. And it struck him then, for the first time, how much alike they really were.

I know you don’t like me, she’d said. I know you’re looking down on me. So there it was. He acted defensive toward her because he assumed she found him ugly. She acted defensive toward him because she assumed he found her stupid.

It was such a stunning moment he wanted to share it with her. In that split second he felt he might have been able to communicate this realization, if they’d been alone.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen himself in someone else. It changed him, this simple observation, like being jostled off the edge of a tall building, causing him to wonder if it was too late to get his old isolation back.

“Now, Trevor,” she said. “I bet Mr. St. Clair’s got better things to do than hear about your troubles on a nice Saturday morning like this one. You can talk to
me,
you know.”

“You weren’t home.” Trevor studied his scuffed high-tops.

“I didn’t mind, Miss McKinney. Really. I just wanted you to know where he was.”

“Well, I thank you for that, but we’ll just be going now.”

She motioned with a hand to her son, who followed her off the porch obediently.

“Arlene.” He hadn’t known he was about to call her back, had never intended to use her first name. She must have been surprised too. She spun around, looked at him for the longest time. Really looked at him, as though seeing something she hadn’t seen before. Which she was. And it made him uncomfortable to feel so transparent.

“Trevor, wait for me in the car,” she said quietly, and rejoined Reuben on the porch.

She stood strangely close. Reuben’s chest felt heavy with the expectancy of the moment. The notion that he could express his revelation was gone now; still, he had no choice but to try.

“When you first met me. And you thought I was looking down my nose at you. I just want you to know something.”

She waited patiently, face slightly turned up to him. She reflected a pleasant expectance. She didn’t dislike him. She just wanted him to like her. It was right there on her face.

“I have a hard time meeting people. I’m very sensitive about—Well. I tend to think I repel people. I mean, I do. But. I was being defensive. That’s what I’m trying to say. I wasn’t looking down on you. I was being defensive because I thought you were looking down on me.”

“Really?” A skinless, unguarded question.

“Really.”

“Well, thank you. That’s nice.” She moved to the porch rail, glanced at the car and her waiting son. “No, really, that’s nice. I appreciate that you told me that. It’s kind of funny, really. I mean, here we are being all cold to each other. You don’t think I’m dumb? Really?”

“Not at all.”

“I don’t talk good like you. Talk well, I mean. I could, I guess. I know how to talk right. I just sorta got out of the habit. Maybe you could come over for dinner again some night.”

“Maybe.”

Maybe? Reuben felt surprised to hear himself say it. Maybe. Actually, he’d wanted to say no. Now that she had turned her eyes up to him, hopeful and childlike, flattered to win his approval, he could not get far enough away from her.

She stared at him for a moment, then marched purposefully back to her car and drove off without comment.

So. There it is, Reuben thought, his mind caught in a brand of resigned irony. There it was, there it goes.

What a relief, to know that nothing ever really changes.

From
The Other Faces Behind the Movement

My friend Lou, from Cincinnati, was gay. We’d go out for a beer and talk sometimes, in the evening, about our respective problems. Lou’s problem was he had a bad habit of falling for guys who were not. Gay, that is. And my problem was I tended to be…what’s the word I’m searching for? Picked up, befriended, latched on to, by attractive women who liked me and found me safe. Safe. That’s just how every lonely, sexually deprived man wants a woman to see him, right? Safe. They’d ask me out to the movies, to dinner. Exactly like dating. If it differed in any way from dating, I’d like someone to explain how. At the end of the evening I’d get a kiss on the cheek. Always the same cheek.

The hormones would rage. In me, that is. And right around the time I was hopelessly, relentlessly in love and having trouble hiding it, she would say something along the lines of, “I like you as a friend, Reuben. We have such a nice friendship. Let’s not spoil it.” Nice women, in most cases, so I had to assume they had no idea how cruel they had been. Because if any one of them had been
monster enough to do that much damage on purpose, I think I would have known.

Anyway, Lou and I tipped a few one night. I didn’t even know he was gay at the time. I told him the easiest stories to tell, older, less painful. The kind you can laugh at just a little because those “years to come” have already come. “You have no idea how that feels,” I said, not realizing who I was saying it to. “Nobody does. To have that depth of emotion for someone and to know that they would find your feelings utterly repulsive.”

And Lou laughed and ordered another beer, and told me a story of his own. And then I knew. And I knew as well that he knew how it felt.

“Why straight guys?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’re just so damn many
more
of them.”

I got quiet for a long time, and then I said, “Lou. You didn’t mean me, did you? You weren’t saying you had those feelings about me?”

Not that I would have been repelled if he had—I certainly wouldn’t have stopped being his friend—but I needed to know, to be sure I wasn’t being insensitive without realizing.

“Hell no, Reub,” he said. “You’re way too ugly for me. I think we should just be friends.”

“Well, good. That would have been utterly repulsive.”

We got to laughing then, and the sound of his laughter when he got going was so funny and silly it made me laugh just to hear it. I’d try to stop, but just when I’d get it under control, he’d break up again and we’d go for another round.

And then we fell serious, just like that, and I was so tired, more tired than I’d ever been in my life, and I wanted to go home. As if all of a sudden I realized: it’s not so goddamned funny.

T
HAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN
a safe, comfortable end to everything, but the following Thursday evening he ran into her at the market. Just dropped into a longish line with his ice cream and his TV dinners and found himself looking at the back of her head.

It seemed to Reuben as though one could look at the back of someone else’s head quietly, without being noticed, but apparently he did it wrong, because she immediately turned around.

“Oh, you,” she said, and that was it. She turned back, and they both waited in excruciating silence, watching Terri and Matt scan and bag groceries, as if finding their simple movements fascinating.

She looked briefly over her shoulder at Reuben on her way out of the store.

Then she was gone, and he breathed deeply, a man just having found his way to safety from grave and immediate danger.

He found her in the parking lot, leaning on his car.

“You know what your problem is?” she said.

It was the old Arlene, and it felt good to Reuben to have her back, that little lightning bolt of indignation all ready to read him the riot act about one thing or another.

“No. I don’t. What is my problem?”

“Your problem is, you’re so quick to think nobody wants you, you don’t even give ’em a chance. I couldn’t reject you if I tried. You’re too fast for me.”

“Thank you, Arlene. That was very informative.”

He moved for his driver’s door, and she peeled away, out of his trajectory, as he knew she would. He set his groceries on the passenger seat, got in, and slammed the door. But she wasn’t gone. She stood by his window as he fired up the little engine, and before he could drive away she tapped on the glass.

He rolled the window halfway down.

“So,” she said. “You want to go out, or what?”

“Yes and no.”

“What the hell kind of answer is that?”

“The honest kind. What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say, ‘I’m not doing nothing on Sunday night, Arlene. Maybe you and me could take in a movie or something.’”

Reuben sighed. He put the Volkswagen in gear, popped it out again. “Arlene, would you like to go to a movie this Sunday?”

He didn’t mean it to, but it came out sounding petulant, like a little boy who’s just been ordered to apologize when he wasn’t feeling one bit sorry.

“Yes, I would. But I bet I’m gonna be sorry I ever started with this.”

“I’ll put a couple of dollars on that, too,” Reuben said, but he was half a block away before he said it.