by Daniel Quinn
Howard barely managed to stifle a groan. “Aaron, why the hell are you so bent on this thing?”
The old man’s face split in a wicked grin. “I’ll tell you, Howard. In my whole life, this is the only exciting thing I’ve ever done with my money. I kid you not. I’ve never spent a nickel on excitement. A lot of years my wife dragged me to Nassau to blow a few thousand at the gambling tables, and for her this was excitement. For me, I would have been happier to stay home and flush it down the toilet.”
“But how does what I’m doing add up to excitement for you?”
“It does, believe me. Look, I’m almost entirely retired from the leather business. What am I supposed to do with my money? Blow it on chorus girls, at my age? Play the horses? Like I said, I’d just as soon flush it down the toilet. Give it away? There’s no excitement in picking charities, I can tell you. Travel? I can’t stand the aggravation.
“You go to the Middle East, Howard. For me, that’s excitement. For me to be able to think, ‘I got a man looking into something for me in Syria’—that’s excitement. I know what I’m doing, so don’t worry about it. Don’t hold back. I’ve set this money aside, and it if takes more I’ll set aside more.”
Howard gave in with a defeated smile. “Okay, Aaron. I’ll dye my hair orange and get a passport in the name of Clancy O’Brien.”
As Howard stepped off the bus at Ainslee, a boy sitting on the waiting bench looked up hopefully, then dropped his gaze back to his hands, folded in his lap.
“Are you waiting for this bus?” Howard asked, still holding the door.
The boy looked up, puzzled. “No,” he said, then added a polite thank you.
Howard let the door close and began walking up Ainslee. After half a block he turned back. The boy was completely out of place. It wasn’t just that kids that age don’t belong at bus stops at one in the morning. He was too clean, too polite, too well-dressed to belong in this neighborhood at all.
When the boy looked up from the bench, Howard asked him if he was lost. He considered this gravely through half a minute, then gave Howard a doubtful smile and said: “Tonight, everybody seems to be lost.”
–––
Half a block away, on the other side of the street, a man in a parked Volvo sedan watched as Howard sat down beside the boy. For no very good reason, since he ordinarily gave little thought to time, the man checked his watch. After a few minutes Howard and the boy stood up and strolled down Ainslee together. The man watched them till they were out of sight, then started the car and headed for the Holiday Inn at O’Hare. When a small crowd off a flight from Los Angeles appeared in the lobby, he mingled with them to check in. After he’d paid for the night and received his key, he asked the desk clerk to reserve a room for him at the Inn in Omaha for the following day. The young woman went to work at the computer, and he waited placidly until she gave him an empty smile and told him it was all taken care of.
She had long ago stopped noticing the people she served, otherwise she would have seen a trim man in his mid-thirties, with black hair and a square face that was handsome in a dark, brooding way. Richard Holloway would have recoiled from him with a shudder of distaste, but to the desk clerk he was just another face in the crowd, and she’d forgotten him before his back was turned.
After a brief visit to the room he’d just paid for, the man left. On his way out of the lobby, he dropped the key into the lobby mailbox.
CHAPTER 14
Sometimes it’s as though the gods permit an imp to lodge in a man’s body and take root there like the embryo of an evil child. This is how it was for David Kennesey.
It had happened without any fuss, one Saturday during the previous fall. He didn’t even notice it at the time. For no reason at all, he’d felt like getting out of the house by himself and went for a drive in the country. He parked at the side of a rural road and let the tangy smell of burning leaves fill him with nostalgia. A red Fiero whipped down the highway toward him, and, as it shot past, he had a glimpse of the driver—a woman. At seventy miles an hour she was little more than a white blur, but David’s imagination made her a beauty.
It was as small a thing as that.
Within an hour he’d forgotten the country road, the tangy air, the Fiero, the woman at the wheel. He was back at his house going over a contract that had to be ready on Monday.
But in the months that followed he began to be a little worried about himself. He didn’t mention it to his wife, Ellen, seeing no reason to worry her as well. He wasn’t sick, wasn’t in any kind of pain, after all. It was just that he’d gradually become aware of a mounting, unrelenting tension in the center of his body, of a perpetual tingle of anxiety in his genitals. By midwinter he’d become almost unbearably nervous. Things at the edge of his field of vision seemed to be in constant, furtive movement. When he was working—or trying to work—the softest greeting would startle him like a gunshot.
Without mentioning it to Ellen, he took his symptoms to their doctor, who told him all the things he expected to hear, and prescribed a tranquilizer; although he hated to think of himself as one of those people whose well-being comes out of a bottle, David stuck with the pills for a month and then didn’t bother to renew the prescription, since they weren’t doing any good anyway. He had his eyes checked, got new glasses with a minutely changed prescription, and developed a maddening tic below his left eye. His bowels seemed to turn food of any kind to gas. On his forty-second birthday in the first week in May, he wondered what the symptoms of a nervous breakdown are like.
Then the very next morning a sultry wind from the Gulf brought a false spring to northern Indiana, and the imp stirred and delivered itself of a kick that left David Kennesey in no doubt about what had been growing inside him. At that moment he was standing in an upstairs bedroom in front of a mirror, slowly busy with a necktie. A breeze was flowing in through a window that hadn’t been opened since November, and it was as though enlightenment flowed in with it. The tic below his eye vanished as he understood—and instantly accepted—what he was going to do.
He was going to give the mold of his life a twist and shatter it completely.
He sighed so deeply it was as if all breath were leaving his body. This, he thought, is how a patient must feel on being told it isn’t cancer after all.
Their task forgotten, his hands fell heavily to his side. He stared into the mirror, and his eyes met the eyes of a stranger. Was this actually the way he looked to others? The solemn square face—handsome perhaps—thick dark hair, and wide, full mouth were vaguely familiar. But when had his eyes acquired that black, empty look? Not exactly empty. Haunted? They were the eyes of a man he’d expect to meet on death row. Was it really possible that this had become his face?
Suddenly the outline of his life shimmered like a mirage and twisted itself into an entirely new shape in his mind, and he nearly laughed out loud.
“Of course,” he whispered triumphantly. “Of course!” And he meant by this: Of course I’ve betrayed myself. I was sure I wouldn’t, but of course I have. For comforts, for pleasant companionship, for acceptance, for respectability, for security. For the sake of appearing to be a sensible, mature fellow. I thought I could get away with it, but of course I didn’t. No one can.
It didn’t matter now. The betrayal was over. By nightfall he would be behind the wheel of his Volvo with all he would ever need from this life in a single suitcase. It was going to be a nightmarish day, an agonizing day. There were other lives to be shattered along with his own, because other lives had been molded against his. Three others would share in the common disaster, but he would defer all guilt until later. This was the way it had to be.
Because it was time to resume the abandoned search. The search for a road. A certain road.
He pulled on his suit jacket and went downstairs. Ellen was washing the breakfast dishes, lost in her own tranquility. She had long ago accepted her figure’s tendency toward a matronly fullness; it suited her, really, and her upright p
osture confirmed it. Her dark hair had been prematurely graying when she was still in college; it didn’t detract from her palely handsome oval face (which reminded many of Virginia Woolf’s), so she had never tried to disguise it.
To save an explanation, David used the kitchen extension beside her to call the office to say he’d be a little late. She watched with an air of puzzlement. When he was finished, he led her into the living room, sat her down, and explained, as calmly and as gently as he could.
Ellen had never needed to develop a capacity for astonishment, so she listened in simple disbelief. She didn’t react with grief or outrage, not at first. This was just a terribly wrongheaded idea that had to be dealt with, as if he were telling her he planned to buy a Jeep or to send their son Tim away to a military academy. It was simply a matter of finding out where he’d gone wrong in his thinking.
Obviously he was tired, she told him—as he had every right to be. He’d been working himself to death for years and needed and deserved a break. She could certainly understand it if he wanted to go off by himself for a while and do something completely different. But to talk about destroying their marriage for the sake of getting away was overreacting a bit, wasn’t it? She actually smiled at this jokey attempt to put things into perspective for him.
“I’ll be gone by tonight, Ellen,” he said, his voice chillingly flat.
Then she realized that something was really wrong, and her stomach clenched with the first taste of fear she’d ever had.
No, she told him, he wouldn’t be gone by tonight, because they were going to talk this thing through and get to the bottom of it. Whatever was troubling him could be handled, perhaps with help from others. A mature, responsible person didn’t just walk away from a family, a home, a career. Not in a single day. Whatever was wrong, this couldn’t possibly be the way to handle it. He had to see that, surely.
What was it exactly that was bothering him? When he didn’t answer, she began to explore the alternatives for him. Certainly he was tired; that could be remedied. She wouldn’t blame him even if he was bored; they both could use a change from Runnell, Indiana. Was it his job? Disillusionment with Bob Gaines and Educational Enterprises? Disillusionment with the whole field of educational publishing?
With a sigh, she admitted that their sex life had become routine and unadventurous. It was probably her fault, but this too could be changed. In fact, she was eager to change it. Quite honestly, now that it was out in the open, she confessed to suppressing certain inclinations, thinking they might shock him. They could begin to explore them now. Perhaps there were inclinations he himself wanted to explore. She was open—more than open—to anything.
It went on and on, becoming more and more pathetic.
After nearly two hours of talking, she finally saw the appalling, unmanageable truth. David didn’t want to better his present life, he wanted to destroy it entirely. His resolve nearly caved in then, because, without reason and good sense to appeal to, she was reduced to begging, to groveling for his pity. Did he really mean to shatter both their son’s and her future? Did he really mean to abandon them to poverty, despair, and humiliation? Did he really have no sense of compassion for them, no sense of responsibility toward them?
He explained wearily that he had those senses but was going to smother them for the sake of his survival as a person. What he was doing was an act of unalloyed selfishness that he couldn’t excuse, rationalize, or expect forgiveness for.
But what was it he wanted? More freedom? Other women? She could tolerate that. If he wanted to have affairs with other women, so long as he didn’t flaunt them, so long as she didn’t know.…
It was all very squalid, and toward noon he left the house thoroughly ashamed of himself. He didn’t head for his office. Ellen would quickly realize she needn’t be alone in the effort to save David from himself. Her most powerful ally would be Bob Gaines, his boss, his friend, and his mentor in a career he’d poured his life’s energies into for more than a decade. If anyone could bring him to his senses, it would be Bob Gaines. And so he dawdled, giving her time to call Bob and giving himself time to prepare for this next (and in its own way more deeply testing) encounter. A few minutes after twelve he stopped at a phone booth and called the office. Tillie, the receptionist, answered, and David asked if Bob was available.
As expected, the question puzzled her.
“Actually, he’s on the phone with.… He’s on the phone, David.”
“I see,” he said. “Do you know if he’s free for lunch?”
“I think he is. There’s nothing on his calendar, anyway.”
“Good. Will you ask him to join me at Fredo’s then? When he’s free, of course.”
“Sure. Uh …”
Tillie was burning to know what was going on, but David thanked her and hung up.
Poor Tillie. Poor Bob. Poor Ellen. Poor Tim. It was going to be an upsetting day for everyone.
–––
David looked around Fredo’s with the grateful thought: I’ll never have to see this place again. It was the town’s one Elegant Restaurant, where you took clients to lunch, where you celebrated birthdays and anniversaries, where you spent what passed as a romantic evening, but even its pretensions were second-rate. Until now he hadn’t let himself realize how thoroughly tired of it he was.
He was toying with a Bloody Mary when Bob pulled out a chair across from him and sat down.
“Forgive me for staring,” he said.
David shrugged. “I expect to be stared at.”
Nearing sixty, Bob looked to be in his mid-forties, with a broad, humorous face, a haircut that hadn’t changed since prep school, and the body of an athlete just a bit gone to seed. Right now, giving David a speculative, almost wounded, inspection, he looked like a football coach who’d been asked for a brief explanation of quantum theory.
“I suppose you know I’ve just been talking to Ellen,” he said. David nodded. “Did you really say what she says you said?”
“I expect so.”
“She says you’re going to pack up and leave.”
“That’s right.”
Bob sagged in his chair. “Do I get an explanation?”
David took out a felt-tip pen, wrote ten words on the back of a cocktail napkin, and passed it across to him. Bob studied the words with a thoughtful frown. He knew them well, since they were his own; he’d spoken them a dozen years ago at a convention of the National Education Association, held that year in Dallas: WHAT you DO NOT KNOW YOURSELF, you CANNOT TEACH ANOTHER. They were the words that had brought them together in the first place.
David really had no business being at the convention at which they were spoken. In his first seven years in educational publishing, he’d moved around a lot—and up a lot—and had gained the reputation, in that small, muddy pond, of being someone who might turn out to be a fairly big frog in ten or fifteen years. By sending him to Dallas, his current employer was tossing him a bone usually reserved for middle-management executives. David had no authors to talk to, no contracts to wave, no producers to prod. He was just there to meet people, to finger the competition’s merchandise, and to attend a few lectures if he felt like it.
One of these was being given by a man he was curious about: Bob Gaines. Everywhere David had gone in the industry, Bob Gaines had been there ten years before and was spoken of in almost legendary terms: “That was the policy when Bob was here.… That was Bob’s idea.… That was something Bob started.…” David had never met the man and had the vague impression he’d drifted out of the industry.
He was scheduled to speak on “Changing Roles in Education,” typical convention fare, but evidently people thought that anything Bob Gaines might have to say would be worth listening to. By the time he stepped to the lectern, the room was filled to capacity both with school people and with David’s colleagues from the publishing world. Within ten minutes it was obvious that something strange was going on, and the audience was restless, not from boredom but from
disorientation. They’d come expecting the usual blather about how important they all were, how roles change in changing times (like these), and how vital it was (now more than ever) to pull together as a team—and they weren’t getting it.
Bob Gaines wasn’t talking about roles that were altering, he was talking about roles that had been exchanged. He seemed to be saying that the educational system of the twentieth century was the result of fundamental role-exchanges made in the nineteenth century, and people were giving one another bewildered looks. They were no less bewildered when he took them back in time to examine classical models of the teacher. From these he derived and offered to his listeners a postulate he felt no educational theory could ignore. There was a long, stunned silence as listeners played back in their heads the words he’d finally spoken—the Gaines postulate:
“What you do not know yourself, you cannot teach another.”
People shifted in their seats uneasily as they tried to decide how to take this apparently harmless, apparently obvious, even vacuous statement. Then, getting it, David began to chuckle. Then, getting it some more, he began to roar with laughter. The people around him—some still puzzled, some beginning to be alarmed—played it back again and grew very still. Someone at the back of the room gave forth a low, almost embarrassed, boo. Others joined in. People began to stand up, gathering the courage to walk out in indignation. It seemed to settle the matter for them when David began, all by himself, to applaud. They scrambled to be gone, piercing him with icy glances they didn’t have the nerve to direct to the speaker.
With those ten words, Bob Gaines had just thrown a big, ugly rock at a cluster of notions that form the foundation of modern education: the notion of professionalism in teaching, the notion that teaching is primarily a matter of technique, the notion that a well-trained teacher can teach anything—whether he knows it himself or not.
