The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  I look down at my turkey tetrazzini. The panic says, She’s kidding, David, it’s a joke, get this through your fucking head, you ARE NOT WANTED!

  “You want to tango with me,” I say.

  She nods. “And we’re not going to tell anyone about it until we spring it on them at the contest, and we’ll practice in secret, and you’ll choreograph it. You’re going to be my Mr. Roarke, okay? I want that victory, David. Don’t even think about saying no. Say yes.”

  I see Annabel at a table in the distance, watching us.

  “Yes,” I say.

  • • •

  I SIT ALONE on the lakeshore at two in the morning, staring at the darkness. The ice on the water has started breaking up.

  I keep my mind clear. I don’t pray to Lack-of-God, and I don’t petition the night. The air is frigid good. Some animals scuttle in nearby branches. It’s been six days since my last quicksand attack, a new record.

  I think of my father. One summer when I was a boy, the rhubarb along the edge of our backyard didn’t grow in. I was upset because I wanted to chew the sweet stalks. I asked my former-farmer dad what I could do to treat the ground, to bring the rhubarb back.

  “Nothing much,” he said. “When soil is fallow, it’s fallow.”

  He told me you can fertilize a little, maybe, but that you can’t shock fallow ground back to life. It either gets rich in nutrients again on its own or it doesn’t. You have to leave it be.

  • • •

  I HAVE DORM duty again in Beckerman House on a Tuesday night. I make the rounds twice during the first hour of quiet time, checking to be sure the girls are in their rooms, studying. Kira and Tanya hide from me each time that I come around. The first time they are wedged behind their bureau, stifling giggles. The second time they bring their A game and after a couple full minutes of searching I get frustrated. They emerge laughing from inside Kira’s leather-bound footlocker.

  “How’d you ever fit in there?”

  They scrunch back down in and twist around each other, then close the lid.

  “I told you,” the footlocker says, laughing. “We’re Crucible girls. Don’t screw with us.”

  “Come out and study.”

  The footlocker sighs.

  Kira pops the lid and rises up. “Boring,” she scolds me.

  Later I knock on Annabel’s door and poke my head in. She asks me for help on the English paper she’s working on for Ms. Lowell. Each student has to select a poet to read and critique, and Annabel is doing e. e. cummings.

  “Let’s talk in the common room, please,” I say.

  She follows me down to the basement. We sit on a couch and she shows me the e. e. cummings poem “in Just-.” She says she likes it because it is about now, about spring, her favorite time of year.

  “And I know,” she says, “that this goat-footed balloon man who whistles far and wee, he is Pan. From mythology! And I will write that. But the rest of the poem is so simple, I don’t know what else to say.”

  I tell her there’s a potential double entendre in the word wee. I tell her it could be a noun, and that we, the readers, are maybe being invited into the poem and being asked what we will do in spring, when Pan whistles for us to follow him.

  “Clever platypus!” She jots notes. “Hey, you walk correctly now. I have observed you. Congratulations.”

  I tell her thanks.

  “But,” she says, “what is all this at the Home Run? You and Ms. Lowell?”

  I blush. “How do you know about that?”

  “Ay, this is Tapwood. Everyone knows.”

  “We just dance.”

  “You think about her too much, ornitorrinco. You have to get her out of your system so you can meet a girl.”

  “Go upstairs. Work on your paper.”

  “No! We are talking!” She puts her poetry project into her backpack and pulls out the first chapter of my thesis novel. I’d forgotten that I gave it to her.

  “This is good.” Annabel passes me the chapter. “But it has too much sadness. Can’t it be funny and sweet, too? You are these things. When you write your New York book, you must make it funny and sweet.”

  I tell her that if I ever write it, I’ll try. I ask her if she’s sure her name isn’t Esmé.

  “I do not understand this question,” says Annabel.

  “Never mind. Go work on your paper.”

  • • •

  I BUY SOME TANGO CDS at a record store in town. I listen to them alone at home and finally select an instrumental recording of “Por una Cabeza,” the tango music used in the films Scent of a Woman and True Lies. The original version of the song, a hit from the 1930s by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo La Pera, was about a man as addicted to the beauty of women as he was to the horses he gambled on. The music is addictive too—a strong, clear violin and piano arrangement—and I play it for Daphne and she agrees that it’s the one for us.

  Late at night now, instead of driving up to the lake, I move the furniture aside in my apartment and I choreograph a routine. I rent and watch Scent of a Woman and True Lies for tips. I’m not my sisters, and I don’t have much tango experience, but I know how it’s felt all my life to stand close to Caitlin and Lesley, to Sara Draper, to Audrey Vaillant, to Sabine, to Annabel, to Mara, to Daphne. I try to put all those feelings in the movements. I keep the music low so Ed Neville won’t barge through the Neighbor Mouse door and catch me dancing with myself.

  For our first rehearsal, Daphne and I meet in her classroom at school one evening and draw the blinds. There’s no one else around and Daphne told the maintenance guy not to disturb us, please.

  I play “Por una Cabeza” for Daphne. We watch the Scent of a Woman tango scene on a classroom TV and VCR set. Then I show Daphne what I’ve come up with and we try it. It’s awkward at first, at least for me, because there’s no loud, anonymous crowd around us like at the Home Run. Daphne holds me close, the way I show her to, but our movements are too mechanical, too stilted, too borrowed from things I’ve seen other dancers do.

  My chest softens with fear. The quicksand is percolating.

  “David, we’ll get it,” she says.

  • • •

  IN MID-APRIL, Barry, the regular live-in proctor at Larchmont dorm, is given a weekend off duty and I’m scheduled in his place. This means that I’ll stay in his ground-floor apartment for Friday night and Saturday night and I’ll watch over the Larchmont boys full-time.

  Friday night starts off fine, with the boys behaving themselves at dinner in the dining hall. Then we head back to the dorm and I play Ping-Pong with a few Thai kids. They annihilate me.

  Around eleven the real nightlife of Larchmont dorm reveals itself. The Korean boys walk around in tighty-whitey underwear without shirts or socks. I smell marijuana somewhere but can’t locate the source. I hear cacophony in the basement and head down.

  “Hello?” I call. The basement has cement walls and floors, with nooks and alcoves off a main hallway.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says a voice, “what did the Larchmont boy say to the Beckerman girl on the chaperoned trip to the bowling alley? ‘Check out my blue balls.’”

  There’s a bah-dump-bump of drums, then a cymbal clash.

  “No, seriously,” continues the voice, “you’re a great crowd.”

  I come around a bend into the basement’s large main room. There are laundry machines in one corner and in an opposite corner, inexplicably, is a full drum kit set up beside the mossy, crumbling cement walls. Behind the drums is a Larchmont student named Henry, and standing in front of the kit, holding a broken broom handle like it’s a microphone stand, is Henry’s roommate, Phillip. There’s no one else in the basement. They’re both in sweatpants and T-shirts, but Phillip wears a porkpie hat. When he sees me, he grins, holds a hand toward me, and speaks to an imaginary audience.

  “
Folks,” he announces, “it’s David Schickler, from the great city of Rochester! Mr. Schickler, welcome to the show! We’re the Catskills Boys!”

  “Guys,” I say, “what the hell?”

  Phillip struts around like he’s onstage and talks into the broom handle. He and Henry are in the Academy theater group.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says Phillip, “Schickler here got off to a rocky start last fall because of his bum hip. But now he and the Academy are really ‘clicking’!”

  Henry does a rimshot on the drums.

  “Clicking.” Phillip arches his eyebrows. “’Cause of how your hip used to sound.”

  “I get it. Please don’t drum so loudly. I’ll give you a half hour, then it’s lights-out.”

  I head back to the stairs.

  “Come back for our midnight show tomorrow!” Phillip calls.

  When I do room inspection before lights-out, one large Korean boy, Kwan, has left his room a mess. For punishment—which I’ve been told I have to give—I tell Kwan to take the trash barrels off each of the mansion’s three floors and empty them out in the Dumpster. He nods dutifully and heads off to the third floor.

  Minutes later I’m on the ground floor and I see a tiny Korean boy, Hyo, come downstairs struggling under a huge, full trash barrel. I ask him what he’s doing.

  “Sheeklah, I am help Kwan. My friend.” Hyo looks nervous. I let him go empty the barrel, but I walk up to Kwan’s room to ask what’s up.

  “A mistake, Sheeklah. I will take care of it. Sorry, Sheeklah.”

  The next morning in the dining hall, the dorm dean pulls me aside. “David, Hyo spoke to me. You can’t punish Kwan or his roommate Shin unless you watch them carry the punishment out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the Korean mafia.”

  I wait for him to say more.

  “That’s just what some of the Korean boys call it,” explains the dean. “They have a carefully worked out hierarchy among themselves. Shin is president, Kwan is the enforcer, the rest are drones. When punished, Shin or Kwan will delegate their work to a drone.”

  “Are you being serious?”

  “Yes.” His face is earnest.

  “Hyo is a drone.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I’ll talk to Kwan again.”

  “No, Hyo probably already got beaten up once for letting you catch him emptying the trash. Best just to let this one go and be more careful in the future.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  As he’s walking away, I hear an odd, unfamiliar sound. I realize that I’m laughing.

  • • •

  WE’RE IN DAPHNE’S classroom at night again with the blinds drawn. “Por una Cabeza” plays quietly from my tune box in the corner.

  We’re both in jeans and T-shirts. I move her back across the floor. When I raise my hand, she improvises, striking a saucy, preening pose with her head thrown back and her chin lifted.

  “That’s perfect!” I say. “You’ve got to keep that in.”

  She nods and we tango on, looking into each other’s eyes. I’m holding her close. I’m wanting to hold her ten times closer.

  “David,” she says, “when you get grooving, you get a sneer on your face. That’s so tango, you’ve got to keep that.”

  I hold her and dip her toward the floor, a little conservatively.

  She makes a chiding sound. “Come on. Go for it more.”

  She has no idea how far I’d like to go for it. Or more likely she does, but is too classy to say.

  I dip her further.

  • • •

  I’M SLEEPING BETTER. I don’t have mental whiteouts anymore. It’s been three full weeks since my last quicksand attack. Dr. Brogan tells me he thinks it’s the pills. I think it’s one part the pills, one part sugar-on-snow, and three parts the tango. But I keep this to myself.

  One morning in my classroom while I’m teaching my seniors, I hear a loud sound that I think is wailing. JoBeth is reading aloud a Shakespeare sonnet and I ask her to keep reading to the class while I go check what’s happening. I walk into the hall and follow the sound of human misery. But it isn’t misery, it’s laughter, coming from Daphne’s classroom.

  I go in and she’s sitting behind her desk, with her hand covering her mouth. It’s a free period for her and there are no students in the desks. Daphne is crying because she’s laughing so hard. Her face is bright red. When she sees me, she starts pointing wildly toward a paper on her desk. She can’t get enough air to talk at first, but she grabs the paper and holds it out to me.

  “Oh my God,” she gasps, “read it, read it. It’s not a joke, it’s poor Missy Turner’s actual paper. Oh my God, David, oh my God.”

  I take it and read. Whimpering laughter, Daphne reads over my shoulder. The paper begins:

  POETRY PROJECT TOPIC: SYLVIA PLATH

  BY: MISSY TURNER

  Sylvia Plath was an American poet and wife who killed herself by shoving her head into a front-loading washing machine, while it was running.

  Sylvia hated being a wife and mother. She was depressed. One of her poems, “Childless Woman,” is really powerful. She compares herself to a huge spider!

  Sound crazy? Remember: Sylvia killed herself by shoving her head into a front-loading washing machine, while it was running.

  I’m laughing as loud as Daphne. She’s leaning on me, still crying from laughing, and waving a hand in front of her face to swat away the absurdity.

  JoBeth appears in the doorway. She shakes her head at the sight of two indisposed adults.

  “Come back now,” she tells me. “We need you.”

  • • •

  A COUPLE WEEKS later the Academy community is dealt a horrible blow: Tanya, Kira’s roommate, dies unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. There are no warning signs, it simply happens.

  The day it is announced at school, all gatherings and conversations have a pall over them. JoBeth, who knew Tanya well, weeps steadily during English class. Kira is absent. I ask JoBeth if she wants to go home to be with her baby, but she says that she needs to be here with us.

  I try to wear a strong face, but Tanya’s death shakes me as much as the students. There are flutterings of pain in my hip. After school I go down to the bookstore in the Academy’s basement and hide between two high shelves. I close my eyes and breathe in and out slowly. I lie down, crack, adjust.

  Lack-of-God, this is no time for games. Come back and exist for the sake of this girl. Make heaven real and bear her up to it.

  Kira is devastated and won’t leave her and Tanya’s room. For days she stays in Tanya’s bottom bunk, wrapped in Tanya’s sheets. She can’t be consoled and will not be pulled free.

  The tragedy hangs over all the campus, and all our hearts, for weeks. Then May comes and the weather won’t stand for sorrow. The sun softens up Larchmont Lawn, the sky is clean blue parchment, and deep rills of runoff water come down the hillsides near school as snowdrifts melt. Birds and tree buds pop with songs and colors, and the clear mountain air is just shy of sixty degrees.

  Early one Tuesday morning I have Dorm Duty in Larchmont. I hound all the boys out of the mansion, send them to the dining hall for breakfast, lock the dorm so they can’t get back in till after school, and then do morning inspection of their bedrooms to see whether demerits need to be doled out. The mansion is eerie and quiet as I make my rounds, but all the boys’ rooms look clean, which is a nice surprise. I’m on the ground floor about to leave for school when I hear a thump upstairs. I go back up and investigate, looking more carefully in all bedrooms and closets.

  When I get to the room shared by Tong and another Thai boy named Kanda, I hear breathing. The room is spotlessly neat—the Thai boys’ rooms always are—but at the foot of Tong’s bed, there’s a person crouched inside his wastebasket. It’s a fairly lar
ge wastebasket, wide and over two feet tall, and the boy inside is small and tucked down with his hands over his head, trying to hide, but his back is still protruding out in plain sight. I tap his back and he doesn’t respond.

  “Hey. Lift your head up.” I tap him again and he finally looks up at me. He’s not Tong or Kanda. He appears to be Thai, about sixteen, but he isn’t an Academy student. He beams at me as if we’ve been friends forever.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Oh . . . is okay, I am Pu. Friend of Tong. I stay here while Tong is at school. Is okay, no problem.” He tucks his head back down inside the wastebasket as if our business has been completed.

  I tap him again and he looks up.

  “How’d you get here, Pu?”

  He chews his lip as if deliberating. “I am from Bangkok. I fly to New York and come here on bus last night. A visit. I am friend of Tong, is okay, no problem, don’t say things about me, I stay here while Tong is at school, okay?”

  He makes no move to get out of the wastebasket and I realize with something like eternal delight that if I tell him that he may stay here hiding in Tong’s wastebasket all day long, he might actually do it and might feel somehow victorious about it. This thought throws a party in my brain.

  I’m happy, I suddenly think. Right here, in this place, I’m happy.

  “Let’s go, Pu. I have to take you to the dorm dean now, so we can figure out what to do with you.”

  “Is okay, mister teacher. I just stay here.”

  Through my laughter I say, “Pu, get out of the goddamn trash can right now.”

  • • •

  SPRING DAY is almost over. The students have had their fun, their sports, their water wars, and now they’re gathered in droves on the hill near Larchmont grotto, sitting and watching the faculty interdepartmental competition on the lawn below. The teachers have done three-legged races, egg tosses, and tricycle races. Daphne and I have stayed out of all these. She and I are hiding in Larchmont mansion, watching it all from the window.

  Daphne is in a scorcher of a black dress that ends at her ankles. I’m in a black suit. We’re both barefoot, because I told her we can’t take a chance on one of her heels or my shoes coming off in the slightly muddy grass we’ll be dancing on. It would ruin the moment, I said, and she agreed.