Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  “That’s just not my style, Mrs. Waters. Or the policy of the school.”

  “You can call me ‘Mama.’”

  “All right, Mama.” She felt odd using that honorific, especially with a black woman; it sounded to her that she’d entered into a blues song refrain—well, all right, mama. “Maybe we should wait for Mr. Waters?”

  “It’s not her father. Her father is in Africa. I’m no longer with her father. It’s my boyfriend here.”

  “Does he live with you?”

  “Why do you ask me that?”

  “Oh my god, I don’t know. Forgive me. It’s none of my business.” Emer felt like an idiot for asking that question, and she began to feel the chasm between her and Mama widening by the moment. She needed a third party there to adjudicate, or translate.

  “Shall we wait for him?” Emer asked almost pleadingly. And just then she heard the footsteps coming down the hallway, and a knock on the door—Sidney come to save the day.

  “It’s open,” Emer called out.

  And in through the door walked Con.

  At first, Emer simply thought he was mistaken, or brazen, coming to see her at school like this, when the timing couldn’t be worse—setting aside for the moment that it would’ve been borderline stalking to figure out where she worked. And yet she was also excited that he’d gone the extra mile to seek her out. And she was, she realized, happy to see him. All of those thoughts passed in the millisecond that their eyes met, and then Con said, “Sorry I’m late,” and went to join Mama at one of the desks.

  If Con was in shock, he was very adept at hiding it. Emer was unable to process what she needed in order to navigate this moment—everything, her career, her reputation as a teacher, a woman, her very character—all of that was in play. All the questions she had for Con—Did he know? What was he thinking? Was he fucking insane or just a fool or an asshole?—would have to wait for another day, if ever. Was this what had somehow blocked her from calling him again? Had she met him before? Emer just needed to get through the next minute or so without throwing up, which she was in real danger of doing. The best she could come up with was to introduce herself—“Hello, Mr. Waters—have we met? Maybe we’ve met at a previous thing?”

  Thing? What did she mean by “thing”? You mean a thing like a maybe-we-fucked thing? That type of thing? She glanced quickly at Mama to see if she had picked up on the “thing.” She thought about calling out for Sidney or excusing herself to go to the bathroom. Con said, “No. I haven’t been to one of these meetings before. I missed the, what was it, first two?”

  “Three,” Mama corrected.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Emer said. “I thought maybe. There are so many and…” Emer simply did not know how to finish her thought.

  “All of us look alike?” Mama asked. And then, adding off Emer’s stunned look, “All of us parents.” Con laughed. Mama laughed. Emer laughed. Emer inhaled for the first time in a while.

  “What do I call you?” Con asked. In her funk, Emer had absolutely no idea what that meant, and she saw Mama was puzzled at her confusion. Then it came to her; he was asking her name.

  “Emer,” she said, “but the kids call me Ms. Emer.”

  For the rest of the meeting, Emer tried to keep from hyperventilating, and continued to address Mama, though when she realized freezing Con out might look conspicuous, she looked at Con, only to go back to looking at Mama when she thought looking at Con was becoming fraught. She felt she had the attention span of a fly being swatted at in a bedroom. There was no exit and no safe place to land. She sought out an open window.

  She couldn’t think. Time was moving too fast and yet not moving at all. The meeting was eternal. She looked at the clock and couldn’t read it. She was afraid to get caught looking at the clock, or her watch, or her phone on the desk. Surely, they’d been sitting like this for hours, days even. Where the fuck was Sidney? When she could think of nothing else to say, she would merely repeat a variation of “I’m sorry and it will never happen again.”

  Finally, mercifully, Mama rose, and said, “Thank you for your time, Ms. Emer. You have no need to apologize further, if at all.”

  “Thank you,” Emer replied, extending her hand to Mama, who pulled her into a cheek kiss again, which made Emer feel even worse.

  Mama turned to Con. “Do you have anything else on your mind?”

  Everything was freighted with too much meaning. Emer felt herself losing a grasp on what words meant at all. What did else really mean anyway? What did mind mean? How was it different from soul or heart or conscience? Emer felt her knees buckle. She just wanted to go home and sleep for a day.

  “No. I’m good,” Con said. What did good mean? He continued, “Seemed like a tempest in a teapot to me anyway.”

  Emer extended her hand to Con, feeling, so close to the end, that she momentarily knew what this was all supposed to look like. He seemed surprised by the gesture, but then smoothly took it, as he had on the subway the first day they talked. She felt the buzz in his touch.

  “Nice to meet you,” she lied.

  “Nice to meet you, too, Ms. Emer,” he lied back.

  SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE

  EMER WAS EXHAUSTED by that ordeal, bone tired, but she felt the need to see her dad before heading home. Something about his unspoken love for her, a father’s love that abides and transcends the actions of a child at any age. She didn’t need the assurance of it, or a demonstration of it, she just needed to sit with it, be in the presence of it. When she got there, her father was asleep. Ging-ging was watching Dancing with the Stars.

  Emer sat down beside her and watched a couple of C-listers do a rhumba. Ging said, “I like the dance.” And Emer could agree, there was something reassuring in the blanket mediocrity and gung-ho spirit of that world. Emer felt it pull her in and down, with something darker and more nefarious waiting just on the other side of the dance.

  “We have long walk today. He loves to play the Pokémon Go,” Ging said.

  Emer looked over at the old man, his body rising and falling, doing its own, simpler dance before death. “That’s nice, Ging. Good for him. Tell him I came by, and I’ll be back soon. Tell him I love him.”

  “He know,” said Ging.

  “But tell him anyway.”

  “Okay, miss.”

  “Tell him I screwed up and he’s not gonna love me anymore.”

  “I won’t tell him that, miss.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not possible,” Ging-ging said, and turned back to the shadows dancing on the screen. Emer decided to stay and watch a little more Dancing with the Stars. Ging-ging came to sit beside her and held her hand.

  WOMBAT

  THE NEXT MORNING, Sid was waiting outside the school for Emer, a big, unreadable smile on his face. “How was the faddish inquisition?”

  Emer sipped her Pain Quotidien coffee and said, “Good, I think. Coulda been worse, coulda been a lot worse.”

  “That’s what I’m hearing.”

  “Good. Thank you, Sid.”

  “I think we can put this matter to bed. Swing by my office after three and we can compare notes, cross i’s and dot t’s.”

  Sometimes she really liked Sid and got a kick out of him. He had a steady hand. One of the first things he’d said to her as a young teacher was “When in doubt, do nothing. It’s never as good or as bad as it first appears.” He was a big one for aphorisms. On the average, three out of ten of his maxims were worth remembering.

  During the day, she was very keen to pick up signals, any signals at all, from the weird sisters. She had to guard against being oversolicitous, though she did treat the kids to a ukulele version of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” as she sniffed around for any lingering hostility, blame, or hurt, especially around the mercurial Ashia Waters. How could she treat this child evenly now that she had slept with her father? Well, not her father, but the actor who played the role of her father.

  Jesus fucking Christ, what have I don
e? Did the child know? They know everything, don’t they? No, they don’t. That’s a myth of a perfect child whose “receptors haven’t been corrupted” or some such New Age bullshit that raises the child to a god. A child is not a god. How long till the end of the year and the god moved up a grade? A month? That was doable, a month was doable. And then that horrible mistake would be dead and buried in the past forever.

  No, Ashia knew nothing and, today, she was having a lot of fun with the word wombat. Ashia had decided that the answer to everything today was going to be “wombat.” Two times three equals? Wombat. Benjamin Franklin discovered? Wombats. Rock, paper, scissors, wombat. Far from being annoyed at this last-stand rebellion, Emer was pleased that Ashia still had her spunk. And soon, of course, the other two girls were answering “wombat” to everything. Well, shit, Emer had to admit, it’s a funny word.

  The wildfire spread, and by the end of the day, the whole class had caught wombat fever. The answer to everything, the name of everyone, the key to all mythologies, was “wombat.” As the ultimate olive branch, right before the end of the day, Emer surreptitiously googled “wombats,” and announced, “Last quiz of the day—what is the short-legged, muscular quadrupedal marsupial that is native to Australia?” To her delight, the class was stumped. It was too obvious. “Here’s another clue. You gotta get it before the bell rings. They poop square!” An explosion of laughter and playful disgust for the miracle of square poop. Emer drew her eyes right to Ashia Waters. “Ash, any idea what animal I am describing?” Ashia shook her head no, the first time she had been silent all day. Little fucker. “Come on, the bell’s about to ring.”

  Ashia gave over, unsmiling, defeated, subsumed, not unhappy—“Wombat.” She sighed and then proclaimed by way of letting Emer know she was no one’s bitch, shouting, “Ewww—they have square buttholes!” That brought the house down. Emer had engineered a moment of unity. She joined with her nemesis to make a small, transcendent moment.

  Emer gathered up her things and went down to Sid’s office. It was a beautiful spring day, and she hoped the meeting would be short and she could head back uptown, take a walk in the park and think. Maybe give Izzy a call.

  Sid was seated behind his desk when she walked in. He rose and remained the same height. “Well, all quiet on the western front,” he said, gesturing for Emer to have a seat. “Had a nice chat with Mama Waters and the dreaded Schwartz-Silbermans. Do you know this is the third Schwartz-Silberman we have passed through these hallowed halls, like so many undigested meals? We should have a limit on kids here in this country. Like China. He must fuck her to shut her up, don’t you think?”

  “Jesus, Sidney.”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “Anyway. I think we dodged another bullshit bullet here.”

  “Thank God.”

  “If you must. But it was more me than Him.”

  “Thank you, Sidney.”

  Sidney shut the door to his office. “How was today?”

  “Fine. Good. Like nothing ever happened.”

  “Well, nothing did.”

  “Not exactly. I screwed up, Sid. I shouldn’t have.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “I know better.”

  “We all know better, Emer, but we’re human, most of us anyway, and we fuck up, we lose our temper, we do things. How are we to know what our character is unless we step outside it and look its way now and then?”

  “That’s quite nice.”

  “Might even be true. Would you like some examples of me being ‘out of character’? Mostly from the ’70s, mind you.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Good answer. Let’s color inside the lines, shall we? I’ll save it for the memoirs. Tentatively titled More Cocks Than Frocks.”

  “How are you not in jail?”

  Sidney was often profane, but never quite like this. It was like he was trying to clear out psychic space in the room. Emer sensed in it a condition of safety. He continued, “Well, no harm, no foul. I think it’s over. I can’t be sure. These issues can be like zombies, lying dormant and dead, and then one day, George Romero is back in town.”

  “Night of the Living Dead?”

  “Good catch.” Sidney went to the door to adjourn, but Emer, emboldened by Sidney’s “confession,” felt like this was the place to confess something of her own.

  “There is one more thing,” she said.

  “Oh?” Sidney said, and went back behind his desk.

  “And it’s awful.”

  “Something with your father?”

  “No, no, no … something unexpected, inconceivable … I can’t believe I’m in this position.”

  “Is it my business, Emer? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “It is your business, yes, unfortunately, it is.”

  “Best to come out with it, then.”

  “You don’t know me away from school, but I’m boring. I haven’t had a steady boyfriend in years. My life is here at the school, really, and my father, that’s it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve been noticing a man on the train to work the last couple months and I have this very strong attraction/connection to him.”

  “Do you mind if I pour myself a drink?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Would you like one?”

  “Maybe in a minute. Just let me get through this.”

  “Go ahead.” He went to pour himself a tumbler of Bushmills.

  “So the other night, late, I’d been in Chinatown.”

  “What were you doing in Chinatown?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Well, there he was. And we talked, and we kissed, and more.”

  “Sounds like a nice story.”

  “It’s not.”

  “No?”

  “Can I have that drink now?” she asked. Sidney handed her his glass. “So last night, in the middle of the meeting, the second meeting…”

  “With the Waterses.”

  “Yes, the dad was late and in walks the dad.”

  She let it sit there. At first, Sidney was waiting for the rest of the sentence with a rather bland aspect of anticipation. Then, all of a sudden, he got it and his mouth opened slowly.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “It was him.”

  “Fuck me running.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Emer!”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No!”

  “You never met?”

  “I’m almost sure of it.”

  “Almost sure?”

  “If I did, I didn’t remember. I’m sure of that.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he know?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Does she know?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Fuck fuck fuck. No one knows?”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  Sidney rubbed his mouth with his hand, as if trying to mold the next words, like a sculptor with a formless piece of clay. He shook his head. He raised his eyebrows a few times as if to begin speaking, but couldn’t. He said finally, “This. Is a situation.”

  “Yes. What should I do?”

  “What should you do?”

  “Please, help me.”

  “You can’t see him again.”

  “No? I mean, no!”

  “No! This is like living under a volcano now, we don’t know when or if it will erupt. Or a bomb, a volcano or a bomb.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A volcano is the hand of God. A bomb was built and set by man.”

  “You think this was a setup?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “For what reason?”

  “No idea. Maybe reasons that we don’t yet know.”

  �
�I’m so sorry.”

  “I understand you are, Emer, and the way you tell me this story, if you are, as you portray yourself, an innocent in this, which I believe, then it is just a divine coincidence. And I believe you. I believe you and I thank you for coming to me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like my advice?”

  “Please.”

  He took a few moments to choose his course and his words. “I think we let this sleeping dog lie. I’m sure this guy is in no hurry to admit an adulterous affair to his wife.”

  “Not his wife, apparently.”

  “Whatever. Semantics. An adulterous affair with his kid’s teacher.”

  “She’s not his biological daughter.”

  “Emer.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Maybe you get away with it.”

  “Me?”

  “If the shit does ever hit the fan, Emer, I will have to cut you loose. I will deny this conversation ever took place. I will lie and I will call you a liar to your face. You will not recognize me, and people will believe me, and not you.”

  “I understand.”

  “Does anyone else know? Izzy?”

  “Izzy knows. Of course. She knows I had a thing with a guy, but she doesn’t know who the guy is.”

  “Well, I would counsel that you don’t tell Izzy anything else, not what you’ve learned about this schmuck. And Izzy cannot know that I know. Anything. Are we clear on that? I’ll let go of both of you before I step down.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do not call this man. Do not arrange to meet him, even if it’s to tell him it’s over.”

  “What if he tries to contact me?”

  “You’re a big girl. No contact. Take cabs. Uber. Cold turkey. Absolutely no fucking contact. This is not gonna be my legacy. I didn’t put almost half a century of blood, sweat, and tears into this school for some stupid one-night stand to be my legacy.”

  That hurt. Was that what it was—a one-night stand? She didn’t like to think of it that way, didn’t like to think of herself that way, but thought it best not to quibble at the moment. They sat in silence.