The English Teacher (21 page)

Stuart was not in their room, and he was relieved. In his bed in the dark his body reexperienced, in random order, moments of the long night. The bra on the windshield, the smell of stain, the salty metallic slippery kiss, the blue black of Kristina’s hair in his fingers, Jenny Mead’s head tipping back. His mind could find nothing to rest on, nothing that made him feel safe.

SEVEN

VIDA CIRCLED THE CLASSROOM SLOWLY, STOPPING AT EACH WINDOW
, feigning interest in the bleakness below. Wendell was out by the pond, raking up the last of the slimy half-frozen willow leaves at its edges. Her freshmen were writing an in-class essay comparing “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with “A&P.” If she looked toward them and not out the windows, their hands would shoot up with a hundred useless questions—Can I use purple ink? Where should I write my name?—questions designed simply to bring her over to their side where just the presence of her body was comforting to them. But they were in ninth grade now, and they needed to be broken of those middle school habits.

Stepmothering, she realized, was not all that different from teaching. It was essential to keep their intellectual development in mind at all times. You couldn’t get all wrapped up in their needs and whims. Stuart and his mysticism. Fran reading
The Thorn Birds.
They were too old now for that kind of material. A young man needed a hearty Byronic outlook, not this boneless Taoism. And if Fran began to believe in the characters in novels like that, real people were going to be a sore and sorry disappointment. She would have to, once again, urge Fran to read
Tess of the d’Urbervilles;
that would teach her exactly how far she could trust a man, even a seemingly well-intentioned man like Angel Clare.

Or Tom Belou, who had withdrawn since her blowout with
Fran last week. He was angry in a way she didn’t understand—placid, wordless anger. He had behaved yesterday as if he couldn’t see her in the room. She figured that all marriages, if they lasted, ended up here in the land of quiet regret. She and Tom had simply arrived a little early. She had predicted it, but even her own conviction that she would fail did not protect her from the discomfort of having done so. In bed last night she had tried, her heart thumping stupidly, to make a small advance: one brave hand reaching up over the curve of his hip bone and down into still unfamiliar and terrifying ground—but it was soundly rejected and she lay awake for several hours cradling her humiliated fingers.

She moved to the windows at the back of the room. A dog she didn’t recognize trotted briskly up the driveway. A few years ago Walt would have charged out to meet it, smell it, inform it of whose territory it had trespassed. This morning she’d had to lift him up and hold him before his bowls as all four legs quivered and shifted desperately for a painless balance. He took a tongueful of water, then looked at her, confused by his lack of appetite.

Behind her Patrick Watkins cleared his throat. He’d let his raised arm fall unbent into the crook of his other hand just to let her know how long he’d been trying to get her attention.

When she was beside him he asked, “Is it okay if I call Seymour Glass Morie? I mean, just sometimes? My father’s best friend from college is named Seymour but we call him Morie so I’ve kind of gotten used to calling Seymour Glass Morie in my head.”

“That’s not okay, Patrick.”

“Really?”

As she weaved through the desks back to the perimeter of the room, she saw that Mandy Hughs was dotting all of her i’s with daisies. She’d only written half a page for all the time it took to make the petals. “No flowers,” Vida said as she passed. “Just letters.” How did those middle school English teachers sleep at night?

Finally the bell shook the floor. Her students dashed off their last thoughts and tossed their pages onto the pile on her desk. Everyone was suddenly free.

Peace returned to her classroom. She realigned her chairs, picked up flecks of torn notebook paper from the floor. She gathered up the essays, each page puckered on both sides from the ballpoint ink pressed on hard and nervously. If she were focused, she could get through half of these, then glance at the pages her sophomores read over the weekend before the next bell. But focus had eluded her lately. She was behind on her grading, and had been less than inspired in the classroom. Her students rattled her in a way they didn’t used to. And the material, once so easily intellectualized, seemed to writhe under her inspection of it. Even Hardy, whose theories on Darwinism, religion, and social codes were as cold and straightforward as mathematics, was becoming a sensualist, with all those disgusting passages she’d never noticed before about the oozing fatness and rushing juices of summer, the dripping cheeses in the dairy where Tess takes refuge after her baby dies and meets Angel Clare.

“Vida.”

A wild yelp came out of her as she spun toward the voice. It was Tom. Fuck him for sneaking up on her like that.

“I was just hoping …” he said, looking around, making sure they were alone. “I called to find out when you had a free period, and I thought we could talk.”

She couldn’t speak for the sudden thrumming of her heart. She’d heard nothing, no scuffle on the stairs, no crack of an old board in the hall. Fear, unable to hear reason, flooded her body.

“Is there someplace we could go? Someplace”—he looked around the dim, cavernous room—“smaller?”

The scare had heightened her perception yet dulled her reaction. She could smell the vinyl of his station wagon on him,
but it took her a delayed moment to turn and lead him to her office.

He sat on the ratty green sofa and she moved to take her seat behind her desk. He patted the cushion beside him. It was the first attempt he’d made to be physically close to her in eight days, and she gave in. She regretted it instantly; the springs were shot, the cushions nearly featherless. She felt trapped in a rabbit hole.

How often, in September and October, she had conjured him up in this room as she worked at her desk. How often she had stared at the empty couch and wondered who he really was, and what he wanted with her, her blood churning at the memory of the slightest gesture from the night before. And now he had come and it seemed perverse to think back to that other time when his lips shook against hers, when he said things no woman should ever let herself believe.

“I came here to try and talk.” The sound of his voice in this tiny room that had been for fourteen years reserved for the dispassionate talk of books, made-up people’s blunders and heartaches, not her own, disturbed the very molecules in the air.

“Okay. Shoot,” she said, feeling the gulf between this smooth, teacherlike response and the mayhem inside her.

Disappointment flickered in his face. He began again. “I think we need to air out a few things. I came here because I thought it might be easier for you to talk in your own element.” His eyes traveled briefly around the room, which after all these years bore little evidence of her presence. The books on the shoulder-level shelf across from them could be found on the shelf of any high school English teacher in any state across the country: Norton anthologies, the Riverside Shakespeare, Melville, Dreiser, Brontë, Hawthorne, Cather, Faulkner. Nothing contemporary, nothing edgy, nothing out of print, nothing in translation. Not even a slight leaning toward a theme, a preference of gender or time period. The passionless shelf embarrassed her.

“All right,” she said, straining for the appropriate tone to cover up the hollowness she felt, as if all her emotions and the words for her emotions were scurrying to the farthest side of her brain where she couldn’t reach them. Years ago, her first year at Fayer, Gena had flown in for Christmas wanting to talk, wanting to know what had happened, why Vida had left home so abruptly, and though she’d planned, that whole fall, to tell her sister everything, when the time came her mind went blank. She had let Gena hold Peter, feed him a bottle, walk him around the pond in her arms, but she was never able, not even with an easy lie, to explain his presence.

Tom began talking. He had a lot of things to say, rehearsed phrases that he’d clearly refined over the course of days and maybe even weeks, phrases like “off on the wrong foot” and “between the sheets.” Her years at Fayer, with all their assemblies, banquets, and dedication ceremonies, had made her an expert in the art of not really listening. She let his clichés roll easily over her. She did not let their eyes meet, and instead looked at the cuff of his dress shirt, a wedge of which poked out from beneath his jacket sleeve. His clothes did not have tags. They were softer to the touch than regular men’s clothes; their colors were unique. The tweed of the jacket he wore today had bits of scarlet, bits of turquoise, though looking at it from a distance you’d never guess it had anything but shades of brown. And the jacket fit him in a way that men’s clothes off the rack wouldn’t. Even though he was sitting down, there was no bulge at the back of the neck. He was pleasing to look at, pleasing to touch, without trying to please at all. His clothes fit because he had been making them for himself since he was nine years old. There was something she resented about the comfortableness of his clothes, the comfortableness of his body in this world. Even now on the green sofa beside her he seemed to be pretending to be nervous, pretending to be awkward and wary of her reaction to his words, pretending to
care about who she was and what would become of them. But no matter who she turned out to be, no matter what happened to them as a pair, if they could really call themselves that, he would be fine. In his soft tagless clothes in his little mouse house (he was talking now about the house, how it was a challenge, merging families, merging lives) with his precious, badly educated children, he was going to be just fine.

“Hey.” His eyes, squinted, fierce, accused her of not listening. He clutched her two hands, his fingernails stinging the flesh of her palms. “Please talk to me. Please.”

“I really don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to share yourself with me. I want you tell me how I can make things better for you.”

“I’m fine. You don’t need to do anything for me.”

He dropped his face into his hands, rubbed, and then sat up again with a red forehead. “I keep going back to certain moments. At Emma’s, remember that night? It was the first time I’d spoken of my children, really. You had so many questions, so many insights.” He went on and on, each date, each conversation.

He was right. She’d been good at talking; she’d been good at listening. She had that English teacher’s ability to communicate, to draw out meaning, to produce the larger picture. She had taken great interest in his children as characters. But he had expected more from her when they became flesh and blood.

“Everyone said to take it slowly but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. When I saw you go up to that podium last June I knew. Honestly, it was all I needed to see. I felt I knew you, and I wanted to be with you.”

“I can’t be that person you saw. You’ve got to forget about her. She existed for a few minutes and then she sat back down.”

“But Vida—”

“That morning my friend Carol’s son hung himself in an apartment in Boston. My favorite class was graduating. It was an emotional day.”

“And you’re saying you’ll never be emotional again?”

“It’s not something I can turn on and off.”

“Just turn it on. Forget about off.”

He took her hand with the rings on it and cupped it in both of his. It quickly warmed to his temperature. She wished they could just stay like that. Why did relationships have to be so verbal? All day long she dealt with words, adjusting them, negating them, praising them.

“I know you’ve begun drinking to stop it from turning on.”

“Begun drinking?”

“From what Peter says this is pretty new.”

From what Peter says.

“When I was a little boy I watched my father disappear every night. He came in from the shop joking and laughing and by the time dinner was over that man had died. And a bitter disappointed man was in his place.”

Oh Lord. She couldn’t bear the cliché of it. Had he plucked it directly from one of Fran’s books?

“I can’t watch that happen all over again in my house. I know where it leads. I’d like to ask you to stop.”

“Stop drinking?” She was still incredulous.

He nodded.

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Oh God. You’re way off track.”

“Am I?”

“I’m a hell of a lot better with a few drinks in me.” Didn’t he at least understand they’d never have sex again if he cut her off?

“I don’t think so.”

“Trust me.”

“I don’t, Vida. I don’t trust you at all.”

And then, like the junior boy who’d sat on this couch last week begging for a better grade, he began to cry. He made no attempt to stop his tears or cover his face or turn away. Her eyes, which had been locked on the sleeve of his jacket, drifted up toward his, and when they met she felt a shifting of the weight inside her and she could feel how it might be to speak about the falling falling falling feeling she got sometimes even when she was drunk and Tom was touching her, a feeling as close to feeling like you don’t exist, have never existed, as you can have in this life, like the whole universe is a joke, an enormous joke and you’re finally being let in on it, and how somehow this feeling was worse than the terror she had felt in that bathroom that afternoon all that time ago. How a memory could be worse than the thing itself made no sense but it was the remembering she was scared of, and if she unplugged that memory for him it would always be there between them. It would spread everywhere; it would spread to Peter, and then her life would truly be over.