The Bigness of the World (15 page)

I’d had my fill of critical theory by that time, so I certainly did not need to be eating lunch with some amateur reader-response critic, but when I suggested, coyly, that perhaps she had been reading too much Stanley Fish, she stared back at me blankly. “I don’t believe that I am familiar with Mr. Fish’s work,” she replied, overly politely I felt. “I’m simply making a point about the way that people communicate. This conversation is a perfect example,” she added, pointing her fork at me severely and, I might add, not unbecomingly. “I’m
saying
one thing, but you
think
I’m talking about something else entirely, about some Fish fellow, whom I’ve never even heard of.”

I will admit that her use of “whom” left me undone, even with that preposition dangling unattractively at the end, but then I’m afraid that I’ve always been attracted to such things, the ability to differentiate between subject and object forms, a refusal to use
if
when the situation requires
whether
.

“This,” she was saying, “is what makes mathematics so appealing. The number one is simply that—one. Everyone who sees it thinks the same thing.” She looked smugly at me across the table.

“Yes,” I replied. “But numbers are just as much symbols as words are.” I had nowhere to go from there, but I insisted on babbling on. “This,” I said, pounding the table, “is a table, the actual, tangible thing, not to be confused with the word. The same can be said for your number
one
, I am afraid.” I sketched out the number in the air between us.

Of course I was ashamed of myself, using basic Plato to impress this woman, though, to her credit, she did not look impressed. There was a moment of stiff silence, which compelled me to continue. “To quote one of my students, ‘Why is a sheep a sheep and not a rock,’” I said lamely, a bit of irrelevant nonsense to end the discussion, but to my great pleasure, she laughed. Sally, in case you were wondering, was still present, sitting there eating her Cobb salad and, I was to find out later, listening to us argue and regretting the fact that she had ever thought us
ilkstresses
(my word, of course, not the windshield-fixing Sally’s).

Over the next few days, Felicity and I did not discuss her baldness or the incident with the chalkboard or even the ongoing escapades of Mr. Matthers, who had gone on to post several signs in the teachers’ lounge announcing that he was interested in acquiring used Tupperware, the word
used
underlined thrice. She made a point of emphasizing her busyness and her jetlag, and before we knew it, it was Friday and I was off again, this time to a cat show in Scottsdale, and when I returned on Sunday evening, via a taxi as we had planned, Felicity was gone. I’m sure that to the average, discerning reader, this comes as no surprise, and so I am embarrassed to admit that I never saw it coming.

She left a short letter, of course, in which she explained that she had moved into a studio apartment downtown and purchased a used car, drawing entirely on her “own funds,” she was careful to note. The car, she wrote, had belonged to one of the teachers at the school, but she did not refer to this teacher by name, an omission that struck me as a total denial of the degree to which our lives were intertwined. She acknowledged this interconnectedness only at the very end when she wrote that it was her desire that we not “advertise” the change in our relationship at work, that she did realize there
would be speculation and gossip, particularly after she filed her new address with the school secretary, but that she hoped we could “absent ourselves from such conversations and treat one another with the politeness and friendly rivalry accorded colleagues.”

I was most bothered by the reference to her “own funds,” for I was not aware of any funds other than the meager sum of money that resided in our joint checking account, though the mystery of these funds resolved itself soon enough. I made a quick sweep of the house, noting that she had taken all of her books, an easily accomplished task for we had never merged our collections, but left those that we had acquired together. Appliances and kitchen items also remained, though when I counted the cutlery and dinnerware, both of which we had purchased in sets of twelve, I found that each set now consisted of eleven pieces, a consolation, for had there been two of each missing, it would have suggested a situation that I lacked the emotional wherewithal to face.

One of my suitcases was gone, but I forgave her this, for I had taken her suitcase with me to Scottsdale, the suitcase that we always fought over because it was light and maneuverable and orange—easy to spot on the luggage carousel. I fetched it from where I had parked it just inside the door and, not one to let sorrow sideline the moment’s practical requirements, began to unpack—placing clothes in the hamper, hanging my toothbrush in its usual slot, though both were now available, and transferring the set of essays that I had graded on the plane into my briefcase.

Inside the suitcase’s small, inner compartment, which overzealousness required that I check even though I had not used the compartment, I discovered a piece of paper folded carelessly in half. It bore a pinhole near the top, and several Chinese characters marched down one side, so I knew immediately that it had been left behind after Felicity’s less-methodical style of unpacking, carried out exactly
one week earlier upon her return from Hong Kong. The rest of the text, which was in English, read thusly:

NOTICE

Kindly to all hotel guests.

A Hong Kong film company has need of the following:

1. Several women (Caucasian) to serve as extras. Roles require British Victorian maidens, but as there is no speaking requirement, Americans and Australians are acceptable. Costumes provided. No stipend, but scene involves eating. Real food provided.

2. Caucasian woman, any age, for horror film. No speaking, but must be willing to shave head on camera. Upon completion of baldness, a fee of $2500 (U.S.) will be paid in cash.

Interested parties should please inquire from Mr. Simon Woo, front desk, for contact particulars. Thank you.

I read the notice twice, the English teacher in me making mental corrections, before tucking it away inside my desk, in the notebook containing this account, and though I tried to sleep then, I could not. Finally, I rose, retrieved this notebook, and proceeded to read back over my text thus far, but gone were my student days when everything seemed clearer in the middle of the night. I did realize, in looking back over what I had written, that I had said nothing of Felicity’s hair, beyond noting its absence. For the record, it was blond, though not purely so, but I dislike expressions such as
dirty blond
and
dishwater blond
. Perhaps what I most admired about her hair, purely from an aesthetic point of view, were the two patches of white hair that grew in little tufts on either side of her head, directly at her temples. A beautician told her once that these white patches were caused by the use of forceps during childbirth, which I liked
to think was the case, suggesting as it did that her stubbornness-bordering-on-truculence had been there all along, making its debut in her unwillingness to cooperate with her own birth, and while the beautician had seemed confident of her theory, she had also maintained with equal assurance that she herself had been born with the ability to understand both German and Chinese, so you can understand my reluctance to put full faith in her explanation.

When I parked in the school lot the next morning, I looked around at the other cars, wondering which was the used car that Felicity had purchased with her own funds, the source of which I had identified but did not wish to dwell upon. She and I did not cross paths that morning, which was not surprising, for, as I have already indicated, math and English occupied different sides of the school. I made it through my first class and chose to spend my free period in my classroom rather than in the teachers’ lounge, so I was there, sitting at my desk, when my tenth graders arrived, Salingers in hand. It was impossible, of course, that they knew anything of our breakup, but I could not shake the feeling that they sensed something, for they struck me as oddly muted that morning, restrained, like caricatures of what they believed perfect students to be.

I handed back their essays, the ones that I had graded on the airplane in a state of oblivion as my bald girlfriend was transporting her few possessions, via her new used car, to her studio downtown, but when I turned toward the blackboard to copy out the five worst sentences, something struck me, perhaps the memory of the last sentence that we had revised, pushing and prodding it into some sort of straightforward, grammatically sound ideal:
Ms. Lundstrom and Ms. Shapiro are lovers
. In any case, as I stood there at the board, chalk in hand, set to record their most recent transgressions, I began to sob. I did so quietly, of course, but eventually they understood that something was amiss, and I felt them become perfectly still behind me. For several minutes, I stared at a particular spot on the
blackboard, at what appeared to be the remains of a letter
b
, composing myself, and then I turned to face my tenth graders, wholly unprepared for the looks of sheer terror and helplessness that sat upon their faces. We stayed as we were, facing one another, I in front of the blackboard and they, sitting erectly in their seats, eyes focused uniformly downward, with the exception of Tina, my timid, plaid-wearing redundancy expert, who sat in the back row regarding me closely and nodding.

“Class,” I said at last, “please forgive me. I am not in the habit of indulging in such outbursts.” At hearing me sound reasonably like myself, they tilted their faces upward again, relief settling collectively upon them; I recalled, in that instant, the vulnerability of youth. I would like to say that this put me fully in charge of my emotions and that the remainder of the class passed without incident, but that was not the case. Rather, as the tears began to flow once more down my face, I blurted out—in an attempt to explain myself and perhaps offer reassurance—these words: “Ms. Shapiro is bald.”

And Down We Went

I. THE LAST TIME

I have been defecated on three times in my life, literally crapped on that is, for I am not the sort to go around characterizing any victimization I might feel in such vulgar metaphorical terms. In each case, the offending party was a bird, the incidents occurring on three different continents over the course of thirty-five years, the third and most recent incident occurring on a quiet street in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as Georgia and I stood beneath the eaves of an antique textile shop waiting for it to open. We had first visited the shop two days earlier and were not particularly looking forward to seeing the owner again, for, like a certain type of gay man everywhere, even Malaysia it turned out, he could not take lesbians seriously and responded to our questions regarding
songket
and
ikat
with a barely concealed smirk. At one point, he wrapped a shawl around my shoulders and stepped back, declaring, “Ideal for the streets of Manhattan,” though I was not from New York and had said nothing to suggest otherwise. “And more reasonably priced than other pieces in the collection,” he added, tucking his hands behind his back as if to suggest that he were at my service.

The shop was late in opening that morning, though lateness was something we had come to expect in the year that we had been teaching in Malaysia. There was even an expression that Malaysians used —
rubber time
— to sum up their general feelings about time, which they saw as something that could be stretched and pulled, even snapped, as the occasion required. I was familiar with lateness from my years in New Mexico, but I could not adjust to the rubber analogy, perhaps because I had been living so long in the desert, a place where rubber turned quickly brittle, bags of unused rubber
bands crumbling in my desk drawer. Thus, when my Malaysian students, tethered to their invisible rubber bands of time, arrived late for class day after day, my patience grew brittle. “Tardiness sends a nonverbal message,” I reasoned with them, employing the language of Business Communications, which is what I had been hired to teach them after all, but they stared back at me with looks that implied that Business Communications was a subject best left to theory.

Eventually, I began locking them out, but they simply gathered in the hallway, waiting patiently for me to relent. I always did, for I knew that they were sorry, not sorry that they had been late but sorry that their lateness upset me, which were two different things. But as I unlocked the door one morning, prepared to listen to the usual excuses about the rain and late buses and uncooperative scooters, I saw myself as they must: a middle-aged woman who lectured them day after day regarding a notion whose value she seemed to measure in inverse proportion to the blatant disregard attached to it by others, who pounded the doorjamb, her neck growing blotchy, as they looked on quietly, their shuffling feet the only suggestion of protest. When, I wondered, had this woman begun to view tardiness as a symbol of moral decay, a personal attack being perpetrated against her daily? And when had I become her?

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in rural Minnesota, attending school with farm children who often arrived late for some reason or other — because milking had taken longer than usual or a calf had become sick. There were times, too, at the beginning and end of the year, when they missed entire days, a state of affairs toward which most teachers in our school were tolerant. The exception was third grade: that year, as the farm children slouched in exhausted and disoriented, excuse notes in hand, Mrs. Carlstrom, our teacher, stopped whatever we were doing to assess each note, and then, picking up her chalk once again, addressed the recently
arrived child, saying, “Mr. Otto, how nice that you could fit us into your busy schedule,” after which she chuckled dryly. We were afraid of Mrs. Carlstrom for a variety of reasons: because she talked like this, using our surnames and speaking as though we were adults who made our own decisions about time and attendance and our educations in general and because, unlike our other teachers, she did not alter her tone or diction level when she addressed us, not even her notion of humor, which was tied closely to the first two and which none of us understood.