The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (11 page)

Then, just as Cath had calmed enough to sniff and wipe her eyes, Warren's phone rang.

“WHERE
ARE
YOU?” cried a tinny voice.

It was Warren's wife, Breanna. Inside Cath's car. Cath gave a little shiver.

“I'm in a beautiful Mercedes sports car, next to the lovely Cath, and we're going to the movies,” Warren explained promptly. “How about you?”

“I'm
here
! At
home
! I've come down for a surprise visit! I've got candles and
everything
!” Breanna's voice rushed along in a high-pitched gabble. It was unnecessarily loud, and was filling Cath's car. She opened her window.

“You're joking,” said Warren, his voice deepening and softening at once. “You're here? My beautiful Bree, within
minutes
of me? On a weeknight?”

“I was starting to worry about you! What kind of a job does he have, I thought. I thought he was a teacher! A laugh of a job! I was wrong! Come home! Come on! I've got Indian!”

“I'll be there in five.”

He returned his phone to his pocket. “Sorry, Cath. Another time?”

As he walked toward his own car, he blew a passionate kiss her way, which she almost took for herself. Then she realized it was for her car.

Driving home, Cath passed the ice-cream van that was always parked across the street from her apartment block, and thought,
That van is NEVER open.
What if she wanted an ice cream right now? Even if it
was
after eight, and a cold, foggy, blustery night. She would, in fact, like an ice cream.

She walked into her apartment and the silence seemed to catch her like a hangnail.

I like the way he walks,
thought Cath, one late afternoon, watching Warren from her classroom as he crossed the playground.
I like the way he kind of lopes along, scuffing at the fallen leaves. See how his head sits way up on top of his body there?
I like that. He looks good in that linen suit, too, with the open collar. I wonder when I'll get to kiss his collarbone?

She watched as he approached their building. He had stopped to lean over and pick up a toy car.

It's not wrong to think about kissing his collarbone. That's probably healthy. You have to fantasize about someone's collarbone; it could be Brad Pitt, let's say, and you know you're never going to kiss his collarbone. So why not dream about Warren's?

Warren was now running up the steps to the second grade balcony, and Cath thought fiercely,
Turn right, turn right toward my classroom.

He did. He leaned into her open classroom door and said, “
There
you are! I've been looking for you everywhere!”

“How come?” She busied herself away from the window. “I'm just taking down these pictures of polar bears.”

“Because I want to take you out to dinner tonight,” explained Warren. “I've got a reservation at Tetsuya's, and Breanna was coming down especially, but she just canceled, if you can believe it, so you're not allowed to say no, okay?”

Cath regarded him.

“And also,” said Warren. “It's my birthday today.”

“Okay,” said Cath. “I'll come.”

After Tetsuya's, they took a taxi to the Shangri-La Hotel for cocktails. The taxi nudged through traffic and gathering rain, and Warren Wishful Woodford unfurled his long thin body, and unfurled his words (“How much?” to the driver), and his body and his words were like a banner, or a long royal carpet, thought Cath, gazing through the steamy taxi window. He was standing on the pavement waiting for her, and she was inside the taxi thinking that his words were like a pathway through the woods.

As she gathered up her handbag, he opened her door, taking the steamy taxi window with him, and letting in the traffic and the cold. She
walked beside him silently, her legs moving smoothly like the wheels of a cart through the furling, ferny fronds of a forest. (At Tetsuya's there had been a nine-course
degustation
menu, with a wine to match each course.)

At the cocktail bar, it was so crowded they had to lean in close to hear one another. They talked for a while about how wicked it was of Breanna to cancel on Warren's
birthday,
even
if
a pair of clients had phoned her to say they had made a joint suicide pact and were having trouble with the catch on the gun. “Birthdays come but once a year,” said Cath sternly, “but suicide pacts?” She gave a dismissive shrug. “A dime a dozen,” agreed Warren.

“Hey,” said Cath, changing the subject, and looking up at Warren from her frothy strawberry cocktail (she reflected that her eyes would be shining in this light). “I need your teaching advice. You know Cassie Zing?”

“How could anybody not know Cassie Zing?”

“Well, today she said ‘tax audit' five hundred times.”

“Of course she did.”

“Well,” agreed Cath doubtfully. “She does this all the time, you know, she chooses a word or a phrase to say five hundred times, and sometimes I think the best thing is to ignore it, and she'll get over it, but she doesn't.”

“What other words?”

“You know, negative things. Like ‘eczema' or ‘garbage disposal' or ‘penalty notice.' Kind of negative in a small, itching way. Things from around the home that you don't usually talk about—anyway, now that I think about it, maybe she's casting a kind of spell over the classroom, I mean a
good
spell, where she's taking all the evil out of the world by chanting away the ugly, little things, so there's nothing left for us but
good,
so maybe I should just, you know, let her cast her spell.”

“Does she take requests? Because I've got an ingrown toenail.”

“Seriously, do you think it's a spell thing? Or do you think maybe I'm drunk?”

“Well, she's either casting a spell or she's obsessive-compulsive, and you are gorgeous when you're drunk. And you're the experienced teacher—I'm just making it up as I go along. Do you want me to ask Bree about Cassie? She used to work with kids before she got into relationship counseling.”

Bree
was in the conversation a bit too much tonight, Cath thought, disgruntled.

“Oh no,” she said, “I'll ask Lenny. Good idea! Professional help! I always forget that Lenny's the school counselor as well as the sixth-grade teacher. I'll ask her advice.”

“She'll be distracted,” said Warren, signaling for the bill. “Sleeping with Frank Billson must be very—distracting.”

“You can't pay for this too, Warren. This will be me paying. This will be your birthday present from me. Watch me pay, okay? And HEY, HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT LENNY AND BILLSON? IT'S A SECRET!”

Warren slid the bill from underneath her hand and said, “You coming out with me tonight?
That
is my birthday present from you. And I know about Lenny and Billson because Lenny and Billson are blindingly obvious. Everybody knows about them, Cath Murphy.”

“Do they?” Cath said wonderingly, enjoying the way he just said her full name, and scraping at the sides of her cocktail glass with the straw.

“Maybe not Heather Waratah,” conceded Warren. “Heather Waratah probably doesn't know about Lenny and Billson. She's too busy baking muffins. Don't forget your jacket there, eh? Here, let me take your arm.”

Later that night, Cath lay awake replaying Warren's sentence: “You coming out with me tonight?
That
is my birthday present from you.”

The next day Warren passed on Bree's “eternal gratitude” to Cath, for taking care of Warren on his birthday.

Zooming from school to her law lecture, and then from the lecture to a Feminist Discussion, Cath felt she had a full life. Her windshield wipers dashed back and forth, trying to keep up with her full life.

She ran through the rain to the café and sat in the comfortable plum-purple chair. “Hi,” she whispered, and, “Sorry to be late,” and Leonie mouthed back a quick, “No worries!”

Leonie Marple-Hedgington was an old friend of Cath's from teachers college. She had purple hair, polar-white skin, and the settled, mistaken belief that Cath was the kind of person who would want to go to Feminist Discussion. Cath did not like to correct her, and so attended every session.

Leonie leaned forward bonily, cardigan pushed up to her elbows, to say, “I thought today”—a little shy to start—“I thought today we might find a way to deconstruct the rational/irrational duality?”

Everybody nodded, including Cath, but as she nodded she thought of Warren Woodford and his own special nods. His own sideways, thinking nod; his own hearty, rapid nod; his own slow,
perhaps
nod; his nodding nod-nod.

“As you know, there's a crit group who call themselves the
Irrationalists
so as to reclaim the word
irrational,
and invest it with something powerful and good,” continued Leonie.

Irrational,
thought Cath, and she thought, immediately, of the word
affair.

How irrational an affair would be! Even, let's say, if Warren planned such a thing. I would NEVER let it happen! It would be wrong, but more to the point: IRRATIONAL. I've read the books, I've seen the movies, I've read the magazine problem pages! Don't even worry about it. He'll keep promising to leave his wife, but he NEVER EVER will.

“Doing no more than exploring the boundaries of the admittedly nebulous notion of sense, of course.”

And of course, I wouldn't WANT him to leave his wife! That makes no SENSE. Because, see, if he's the kind of guy who leaves his wife, he's not a nice guy, and why would I want a not-nice guy? Plus, I would never want to hurt another woman like that. I'm at Feminist Discussion! If I had an affair with Warren, I would betray my own KIND!

“What we still have to do, you know, is to pin down the power/knowledge paradigm, and colonize Foucault, make him our own. Keeping in mind the Balkanization of the issue, of course,” finished Leonie.

“Hmm,” agreed Cath, nodding along with the others.

In the last week of the school term, Cath sat on her living-room floor, wrapped in her quilt, and played with the hole in her tooth with her tongue. It was so cold that the windows had fogged over, and her small electric heater did not know what to do. It made hysterical hissing noises.

Cath had to make a dentist appointment. She leaned out of her quilt to write in her Filofax, choosing the second Tuesday of the holidays to insert:
Make dentist appointment.
Then, efficiently, she closed the Filofax. So, that was done.

“Now, I'm sure you will
all
have noticed that Sydney is experiencing
record-breaking
lows even for winter—and this is only autumn!” the weatherman interrupted her. She looked at the TV and nodded her agreement.

“And you might
also
have heard some buzz around that
snow
might come to Sydney. You know what? I'm going to put my eggs in that basket too.”

“Snow!” said Cath scornfully. “It doesn't snow in Sydney!”

But still, imagine if it did! The weatherman was waving an arm over
his map, and talking about ground temperatures, a cold front, and moisture on its way. “Or,” he was saying, “let me go out on a limb here—I would not be at all surprised if this turned out to be
freezing rain
!”

“Freezing rain,” wondered Cath, imagining a sky filled with long streaks of ice. Dangerous. But what was “freezing rain”?

“If you don't know what that is,” the TV was saying obligingly, “take a look at these shots from the film
The Ice Storm
—see the ice and the icicles everywhere? Turns out they used
hair gel
for those shots. But if it happens here in Sydney, it won't be a result of film tricks—no, it will be the result of these zero-degree temperatures we've been having. See, rain falls from the warmer sky, hits the colder surface of the earth, and instantly freezes. That's any surface—cars, mailboxes, rooftops, trees, you name it.”

“Zero degrees!” said Cath, “No wonder I'm so cold!”

“Brrrr,” agreed the weatherman.

She changed the channel to MTV, and waited for a song that would make her cry. Crying would warm her up. She had an apple, but eating made her feel unbalanced, her left cheek aching from all its chewing, and the right side begging for some apple. But if she relented, let the right side of her mouth have some apple, she was sure to hit the tooth with the hole and make it shriek.

She set the apple on the carpet.

There were Things-To-Do clumped all around her, and her cat, Violin, trod from Thing to Thing—disrespectful, indiscriminate, like the weather. She took Violin beneath her arm, the bell on his collar jangling, and surveyed her Things-To-Do.

1. A pile of egg cartons for arts and crafts at school. (Cut out the eggcups so that the kids can glue them to Popsicle-stick rafts. Think up a reason why.)

2.
Cases and Materials on Torts.
(Read Chapter 7: Trespass and Assault.)

3. Letters from her staff-room pigeonhole. (Open.)

She decided to begin with the letters from the staff room. The first envelope was addressed in elegant gold:

Dear Ms. Murphy,

You may be pleased to know that my daughter (Cassie's) loose tooth has come out. And the tooth fairy has come and gone.

I hope you will forgive me for writing again so soon, but I have a small favor to ask. I have just learned that Cassie's “cousin” will be “attending” Redwood next term—she is one of the Grade Seven students from Clareville Academy, where, as you may have heard, there has been a flood! Apparently, there was a faulty connection that caused a water pipe to burst. So, after the holidays, she and her classmates are being “shipped out” to your school for a month or two.

I say “cousin,” by the way, rather than cousin, for this reason—I have a sister, Marbie, who lives with a man named Nathaniel, along with Nathaniel's daughter. Do you see? And it is this daughter—Alissa Taylor, better known as “Listen” Taylor—who is the “cousin” of whom I speak.

In any case, I am wondering if you might keep an eye on Listen for us? She is beautiful, but perhaps not in the way that young people understand. And she seems to us a very quiet little thing. If you could just look in on her, once or twice—make sure she is not lost in the system—I would be so grateful.

Again, thank you for being such a delightful teacher to our Cassie, and again, I am longing to meet you at parent-teacher night!

Best wishes,

Fancy Zing