The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  “Go on to class,” he urges me.

  I wait a moment longer. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  He is focused on paperwork. “Because you’re exorcising a demon.” He points me toward the door without looking up.

  • • •

  ONE THURSDAY NIGHT I’m assigned to Dorm Duty in Beckerman House, the girls’ mansion dorm. It is rare for a male teacher to proctor in a girls’ dorm, but lately there aren’t enough fill-in opportunities in the guys’ dorms, and the other new teachers have grumbled to the dorm dean that I’m getting off easy. So Beckerman’s regular female proctor has been given the night off and I’m standing in.

  The girls have been told to be on good behavior and I’ve been told to knock several times on any closed door and announce myself loudly before entering. It’s an extra-frigid January night and evening club or sporting events have been cancelled, so all the girls are here. I do a few rounds of the rooms during the first hour of Quiet Study Time and things seem peaceful. Swedish Kira and her roommate from the Ivory Coast, Tanya, tease me and tell me to stay the hell out of their room.

  “We’re being magical in here,” says Kira. “We are Crucible girls. Watch your back.”

  I head down to the basement, which is carpeted over and has three couches and a TV. I correct papers for a while but the couch is too soft and my hip hurts. I lie on the floor, pretzel up, and start cracking.

  “Mr. Schickler? What are you doing?”

  “Adjusting.” I re-angle my body so I can see the doorway. Annabel, the Spanish girl, stands looking down at me, wearing her backpack.

  “May I please study down here?”

  “It’s Quiet Study Time and you’re supposed to be in your room.”

  “Ay, my roommate, tonight she is bip-bip-bip-bip-bip about boys.” She uses her hand to mimic a chattering mouth. “Please?”

  “All right. But I have to stretch more.”

  She sits on a couch and takes out some work. She wears bell-bottom jeans and an Academy sweatshirt two sizes too big for her. She is nineteen and so head-turningly gorgeous that when she first arrived on campus, a male British science teacher hit on her in the dining hall, mistaking her for the new Spanish intern. The man can’t be near her now without going crimson.

  Annabel looks down at me. When I crack my hip again, she asks, “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “It helps me.”

  She watches me stretch, then smiles. “You make a funny face when you do this stretching. You look like ornitorrinco.”

  I ask what that means.

  “You know, this small animal with the funny face who swims. He has a hard mouth, like a duck, but flippity feet and fur and he lays eggs.”

  “A duck-billed platypus?”

  Annabel claps her hands. “Yes. Him. Ornitorrinco.”

  “I’m just adjusting. I don’t look like a duck-billed platypus.”

  “Yes, you do. What happened to your arm?”

  I took my sweatshirt off to stretch and I’m just in a red T-shirt. I sit up to catch my breath. The panic comes quick and hard. The pills aren’t working, David, a new gym won’t kill me, you’re mine, you’re down, I fucking own you!

  “Hey,” says Annabel, “are you all right?”

  I try not to gulp air. To keep the world steady, I focus on Annabel’s hair, which is a charcoal-black pixie cut above the permanently sunned skin of her neck.

  There’s no meaning, David! Hobble off and die!

  No. I won’t. There is beauty.

  “Mr. Schickler? What’s wrong?”

  It passes. “Nothing.” I get up and sit on a couch with my paperwork.

  “What happened to your arm, I was asking.”

  “It happened over vacation.” It comes out more snappishly than I’d planned.

  “Oh.” She looks down at her work and reads.

  “I’m sorry if I sounded rude.”

  She looks at me. It is the appropriating gaze she has aimed my way at Family Dinners.

  “I’ll bet it’s from a girl. That bruise on your arm.”

  “Annabel.”

  “Hey, you can tell me. Kira shared with me about your letter. A Dear John, Kira said. I didn’t understand that, and Kira said it means a girl destroyed you. In a letter.”

  “Well—”

  “Now you are looking for a new girl, yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mr. Schickler . . . you shouldn’t walk around by yourself so much.”

  I ask what she means.

  “I have observed you. When you’re with people, you smile, but alone, you are heavy. Sad.”

  Apparently all Latin people are seers. I tell her that Gonzalo says I look sad, too.

  “Ay, don’t compare me to Gonzalo.” She rolls her eyes. “Majorca this, Majorca that. He wrote Kira a love letter with words from this song, ‘Let’s Get It On,’ and he used no quotes. Plagiarism!”

  I look down at the papers I’m supposed to correct. It’s quiet. If we were out in the real world and I were a normal man and she weren’t a student, I’d buy her a drink in this quiet.

  “So,” she says, “a girl destroyed you?”

  I ask her if she grew up Catholic in Barcelona.

  “I was raised that way, but I’m not that way anymore.”

  I tell her my deal. Not all of it, just the priesthood stuff, a couple hints about depression, nothing about sex or pills.

  “I see,” she says. “So, is this why you have a crush on Ms. Lowell? Because her father is strong in the church and she is too?”

  “I don’t have a crush on Ms. Lowell.”

  Annabel gives me a pitying look. “Ms. Lowell is my English teacher, ornitorrinco. I see you talking to her.”

  “We just . . . went to college together.”

  “And then you lived in New York City, right? Was it so much fun there?”

  “You should be doing your homework.”

  “Ay, homework, I can do it in sleep, I get all A’s! You’re a stubborn platypus!” She pokes my arm with her pen. “You never talk to me at Family Dinner. Talk now. About fun New York City.”

  I tell her about the Cloisters on the Hudson. I tell her that I miss Chumley’s, Hogs & Heifers, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, the Strand bookstore, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Riverside Park. I tell her that I once went in the Dakota, where John Lennon lived and where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed. I tell her that I want to write a book that takes place in a building like that, a building that is half the real gritty New York and half fairy tale.

  Annabel asks if I’m writing now. I say that I’m not, but I tell her about my Columbia thesis novel.

  “Give me this novel to read,” she says.

  “No way. Well . . .” I have one early thesis chapter with me in my backpack and I pull it out. It is an inoffensive chapter. I tell her that she can read this one part if she wants and I hand it over.

  There’s a commotion upstairs.

  Annabel glares up at the ceiling. “Ay, stupid girls! I’m talking to platypus!”

  I go up to investigate the commotion. It turns out that one girl called her roommate a fucking bitch and the roommate called her a fucking whore back and now they hate each other forever. I try to mediate a conversation between them, but they don’t really need me. They just scream a little more and then they stop and laugh and hug and say that they love each other forever. And then the dorm full of girls goes to bed.

  • • •

  I GO TO THE WATER WHEEL, day after day after day. I gaze out at the river, lift my weights, crack my hip, again and again.

  I go to see Dr. Brogan. He asks if the pills are helping. I say that I don’t know. But I tell him about the Water Wheel and how hard I’ve been working out. I say that I’m moving my hip toward health, and that if the Paxil is helping me d
o that, then I’m grateful.

  I drive north to the lake late one cold midwinter night. I haven’t been coming as often. I still have insomnia, but not as bad as before. I sit on the pebble shore. The lake is a pure, clean sheet of ice now, with the darkness hovering over it. I look into the black.

  I’m starting to heal, Lack-of-God. I’m getting stronger. Isn’t it sad, though, that the further I get from You and the less often I come here, the stronger I feel? It’s sad to me. Of course, if You wanted to do something about that, like, say, if You wanted to decide to exist again, You could. You could choose to exist and to speak just one time, maybe. I’d be all right with that.

  • • •

  ONE DAY I’m lying in the Academy hallway outside my classroom, cracking myself, adjusting. I just finished class with my seniors, and Paul and Max are standing here, teasing me about my stretching.

  “You look like a dork,” says Paul.

  “Yep.”

  Max says, “You’ll never get a chick doing that.”

  “Thank you, Max.”

  Daphne’s husband, Andrew Preevy, steps out of his classroom, sees me on the floor, and walks over.

  “What you’re doing,” he says, “is not appropriate.”

  I ask Paul and Max to please head on to their next class. They go.

  Once they do, I tell Andrew that I’m not trying to bond with students, I’m just adjusting. I tell him that whenever my hip pain strikes now, I hit the ground and do this, and it’s helping.

  “You should do it at home.”

  “Home isn’t always where it hurts.”

  “You have no pride,” he says.

  I keep stretching. Andrew walks away.

  A couple of hours later, at the end of the day, Daphne walks into my classroom. I figure that she’s about to tell me to play nicer with her husband, but she doesn’t bring him up.

  “You’re walking better,” she says. “Totally normally, it looks like to me.”

  “Thanks.”

  She leans back against the wall and gives me one of her cool, easy grins. “So . . . you were a piece of work at the Christmas party.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You can really dance.”

  “I told you about the tutus and all that with my sisters. I hope it counted for something.”

  She nods. “So, would you like to go dancing sometime? With me?”

  “Dancing where?”

  “At the Home Run.”

  The Home Run is a seedy bar in town that has rednecks and a DJ and a great dance floor, from what I hear.

  “I don’t think Andrew would like that.”

  “He doesn’t really dance much. I told him I’d be asking you.”

  She’s my good friend. But she also has to know how attractive she is to me.

  “Come on,” she says, “therapy for that hip of yours.”

  “All right.”

  “Saturday night?”

  “Saturday night.”

  On Saturday evening I stand in my apartment’s spare bedroom, where I keep my clothes. I look around at my outfits. My sisters and mother are forever buying me preppy shirts and ties, but I’m a jeans and T-shirt man. I put on my best non-ripped jeans and a black Ramones T-shirt.

  I walk to Daphne’s house to pick her up. Andrew’s daughter, Laura, lets me in and says Daphne will be right down. Andrew is in the living room, reading what looks like an encyclopedia. He gazes at me over his glasses.

  “Hey, Andrew,” I say.

  He watches me. Other than our weird moment earlier in the week, he’s always been cordial, but I’m never sure that he actually sees me. He is a dreamy-headed man and I know what that’s like.

  “Did you know,” he asks now, “that the east–west migration habits of the American black bear are almost identical to those of the Canadian grizzly?”

  “No,” I say.

  He looks disappointed and ducks his head back into his book.

  Daphne comes down the stairs and we head out. She’s in low heels, jeans, and a silky black top. We’re both in sleek coats that aren’t warm enough for February, but the Home Run is a short walk down the hill into town.

  As we walk Daphne bumps my shoulder with hers. “It’s good you’re not going to Mass these days. Father Gheritty never plans his sermons. He just walks up to the pulpit believing that the Holy Spirit will tell him what to say. But unless the Holy Spirit is a babbling nimrod who likes to use New England Patriots analogies, I don’t think it’s happening.”

  The Home Run is packed. I stash our coats under a table and we each have a drink.

  The panic sucks at my heart. Fuck this night, David! Daphne’s not yours, go home to your pickles, the Earth is a doomed cinder in space, and you’re unloved.

  Daphne sees my face. “Come on.” She pulls me out on the floor.

  We’re tentative at first, and the quicksand is with me all through whatever disco-era travesty is playing. Then the DJ puts on “Hippychick” by Soho and “Connection” by Elastica, and the crowd pushes me into Daphne, my hands hold her waist, and there’s a melting.

  Her eyes ask mine, Are you going to lead here or what?

  So I do. I lift my hand and she twirls, then our bodies team up close at the hips, and her wrists cross at the back of my neck. I smell her perfume, a light citrus wind, and my hands learn the bones in her back through her shirt.

  “You’re good at this,” she says.

  “So are you.”

  We stomp through “Cotton Eyed Joe” and then groove slow and close to “Crazy for You.” I’ve got sweat at the base of my spine coming through my Ramones T-shirt but she’s got sweat at the base of hers, too, and I feel it through her shirt and Daphne Lowell, Daphne Lowell, why aren’t you my wife?

  Eventually my hip acts up, so I have to let go of her body and lead her off the floor. We get one more drink and then leave.

  We walk home in the freezing cold. At Georgetown, on the first night I met her, she and I watched The Shining together. Now we’re walking through a world like the one in that film, a white world walled in by huge drifts.

  I get her to her porch. She leans forward and bumps my shoulder with hers. I guess that’s our thing.

  “Daphne, I . . .” Forget the expert on bear migrations. Come home with me, I am not all that broken.

  She says, “I had fun, too,” then she hugs me and goes inside.

  I walk back to my apartment. The Paxil is zinging back and forth under my skin. Once inside, I kick off my shoes and sit upright in the dark on my couch. I don’t want to lie down. If I fall asleep now, I might forget how it felt to have her in my arms, and I can’t take that chance.

  It’s one in the morning. Off in the kitchen, the Neighbor Mouse door bangs open.

  “Schickler! You want a pop?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  IT’S THE FIRST WEEK of March now, sugaring season. It’s still cold out and there’s snow everywhere, but the maple trees are bleeding pleasure by the bucketful. My local-born senior students tell me that they have a surprise for me. They ask me to meet them behind the dining hall after school. I do and they present me with a cereal bowl full of snow. Each of them has a bowl of it, too. Then JoBeth walks grinning out of the culinary school’s back door with a steaming teakettle.

  “What’s all this?” I ask.

  “You’ll see, Flatlander,” says Max.

  Paul nods. “A Northeast Kingdom specialty.”

  JoBeth pours into our bowls of snow what I at first think is steaming coffee but turns out to be fresh, piping-hot maple syrup. The syrup congeals on the snow and makes lumps of confection.

  “What do I do?”

  JoBeth says, “You eat it, duh. It’s called sugar-on-snow.”

  “You’re supposed to have pickles and doughnuts with it,” sa
ys Paul, “but someone flaked out.”

  Max punches Paul.

  “I love pickles,” I say.

  JoBeth tells me to shut up and eat, then we do. We snack on what they all grew up on. It’s delicious.

  • • •

  DAPHNE SITS DOWN next to me at lunch one day in the dining hall. She is dressed sharp in a suit. She’ll be going with her father on a trip later in the day where they’ll attend a meeting in New Hampshire to talk to people about the Academy or recruit students or something.

  “So,” she says. “Guess what’s coming up in May?”

  She informs me that there’s an annual school event called Spring Day where the students get the day off to play games outside and compete by classes, juniors versus freshmen and so on. There’s Ultimate Frisbee and dunk tanks and revelry. The best part, Daphne says, is that at the end of the day all the students gather on the hill near Larchmont grotto and watch the faculty square off, department versus department, and battle one another in various competitions, sack races and other embarrassing stuff on Larchmont Lawn. She says that the faculty departments take it seriously because they want the year’s worth of bragging rights and lording it over their rival disciplines. She says that the English department hasn’t won in many years, and she also says that the final, most heavily scored and popular category in the competition is a dance contest.

  “And?” I say.

  “And I’m entering you and me, representing English.”

  My hip has been getting better and better. Daphne and I have had a couple other Saturday dancing nights at the Home Run in the past six weeks and I’ll be able to recount, if the FBI or alien interrogators ever ask me, exactly what Daphne wore on each of those nights and what she drank and what I said that made her laugh and vice versa.

  “I want you to choreograph it,” she says now. “And I want to tango.”

  During my first semester at Columbia I took a few ballroom dancing lessons as a lark and I’ve told Daphne about them. I’ve told her that I didn’t go for most of it, but that I loved the tango. When she asked why, I said that the tango is basically a man and a woman having sex with their best clothes on, while they dare the whole world to watch and have a problem with it.