Savaging the Dark

by Christopher Conlon

  But I wasn’t attracted to them. Not in that way. I was a perfectly conventional woman with perfectly conventional thoughts and values. I’d had the usual boyfriends growing up, the usual overprotective father, the usual concerned mother. This was in the ’70s and ’80s, decades for which I’ve never felt the slightest nostalgia despite the drumbeat of movies and TV shows that have focused on that time ever since. Dad owned a little café, Mom was a housewife; we lived in a perfectly respectable row house in Northwest D.C., the Adams Morgan neighborhood. It was a good place to grow up, I guess, as safe and secure as life in any city could be in the years before the crack cocaine epidemic turned Washington into a shooting gallery. Until the catastrophe, at least, we lived average sorts of lives (except, of course, that by definition my brother and I could never be “average”). But even afterwards I was an excellent student, a responsible person, a good girl.

  I loved reading, especially gloomy romances—Jane Eyre and Rebecca and the like. I loved old movies, especially murder stories with Bogart or Cagney or Robinson and anything with a good femme fatale like Barbara Stanwyck or Lana Turner. And Hitchcock, of course—always and forever Hitchcock and his icy blondes, Grace Kelly or Kim Novak, the kind of simmering woman I dreamed of being. I liked new movies, too, of course—I saw Star Wars five times when I was a girl—but for me there was something special in the older productions, watching people who in many cases had been dead for decades magically alive again, their flickering shadowy selves plotting evil deeds, shooting guns, punching each other, tossing wisecracks. It was a strange, appealing sort of immortality.

  From grade school I knew that boys liked me well enough, that I passed whatever internal tests they had amongst themselves to judge females. I wasn’t brilliantly popular by any means, but neither was I an outcast. Other girls liked me. Boys talked to me. I had my first date at fourteen, when I was a freshman in high school: another freshman, a tall skinny boy named Stan Stevens, got up the nerve to ask me to a school dance. We went. It was neither magical nor disastrous; Stan was nice, we danced, he shook my hand at the end of the evening and thanked me. We went out once or twice more, casual things, then drifted apart.

  Both Mom and Dad drank too much, but whose parents didn’t in those freewheeling days? Whenever I saw adults getting together there always seemed to be beer, whiskey, those bottled wine coolers that were so popular then—our own refrigerator was perpetually stuffed with them. Occasionally I’d steal one to share with one of my friends and the sky didn’t fall. They seemed sweet and harmless. I was used to my parents’ voices slurring in the evening, used to the softening of their glances and the fuzziness of their expressions. Neither was mean or abusive. They just seemed to fade in the evenings, softly, like twilight turning to night. I never felt traumatized by their behavior. I never felt anything about them, really. They were stick-figures in my life, useful for an allowance or permission to go on a date but otherwise not terribly relevant. I didn’t think of them as alcoholics, though my mother drank wine coolers from early in the morning the way I used to drink Mountain Dews. I didn’t consider their drinking in any serious way. I didn’t think they might have been assuaging their pain. I had no idea they had any pain they needed to assuage. I thought that all the pain of the family was within me, myself (my half-self), that I carried it for them, silently, heroically. I carried it but I kept it sealed off, like nuclear waste buried deep within countless layers of lead or whatever they use for such a task. I didn’t let it hurt me.

  They died in an alcohol-fueled car accident shortly after the end of my high school career. I hardly noticed.

  4

  I met Bill Lindner in college. I was an English major, having been practical and deciding I needed a subject I could teach to young people—literature was much more marketable than movies, which were in some ways my bigger passion. My inheritance, not large, paid my way. Bill taught Political Science, a subject in which I had no interest, but I needed the course to help fulfill my general education requirements. This was at a little school in upstate New York run by aging hippies, who by then—the early ’80s, Lennon’s murder, Reagan’s rise—were sour, disillusioned people with a kind of siege mentality, as if they thought themselves the last bastion of peace and freedom and liberality left in the land. Teachers tended to sit cross-legged on the floor with their students in a circle around them. In good weather classes happened outside in the woods. Everyone was on a first-name basis; teachers socialized with students, students attended parties at teachers’ homes where they drank and smoked pot. Love affairs, though officially frowned upon between the learned and the learning, were frequent and generally the most open of secrets. I was two decades younger than Bill, a quiet kid who rarely made eye contact with anyone but a couple of trusted friends. I wore the kind of flipped-up hairstyle popularized by Mary Tyler Moore ten years earlier, badly outdated then. Plain sweaters, blue jeans. I was nothing that stood out in any way, but Bill took notice of me.

  I found him frightening at first—he was a fierce, articulate lecturer, slim and good-looking in an intense sort of way, though by then his encroaching male pattern baldness made his long hippie hair look a bit as if it were sliding backwards off his head. His beard, long and unkempt, was beginning to go gray. He wore beads around his neck, tie-dyed T-shirts, jeans, Birkenstocks. He was glamorous, a kind of campus-level celebrity: a political radical in the ’60s, he’d met Martin Luther King during the March on Washington, interviewed Malcolm X for his college newspaper (“What can white people do to help the black revolution?” my future husband asked him, to which the revolutionary replied, “Nothing”). He’d done sit-ins, passive protests, been clubbed by riot police at an anti-Vietnam rally outside the White House in ’71. I was just a shy, mousy sophomore—and still a technical virgin, modestly experienced with boys and their various erotic predilections but never having gone quite all the way. Bill, on the other hand, had had all the experiences one would expect of someone like him, including numerous affairs with students. He’d even been married briefly. Yet, as different as we were, something clicked between us.

  I didn’t know what to make of sex at first. I knew vaguely about female orgasms (learned quite young not through personal experience but by glancing hastily through a friend’s older sister’s copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask) yet for a long time the idea was only theoretical. I enjoyed the closeness with Bill, the caressing, the feeling of deep and profound togetherness, but the actual physical sensation was fairly limited. I wondered what it was that he felt, what made him sigh and moan and thrust faster and faster until he finished, sometimes quite violently, inside me. My discovery of my own physical resources wouldn’t come for years.

  I liked men. As a breed, as a type. I liked their physicality, their strength, their aggressiveness. Bill had those qualities in spades; I felt protected when I was with him. I could stay quiet and unnoticed, the only not-quite-adult in the room, when we were with his friends— other teachers mostly—and they were arguing about Reagan’s policies and whether he was deliberately setting out to destroy the poor or if they were just collateral damage in his insane, unprecedented military build-up. No doubt those people thought of me as just another of Bill’s groupies, but in my senior year he married me.

  We traveled a little—our honeymoon was in London, plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company and concerts at Albert Hall—but mostly stayed home. Bill had a cabin that had belonged to his parents in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a rustic area surrounded by pine trees that we would visit sometimes over long weekends—the kind of place where in warm weather we could walk around in the woods wearing nothing but sandals. There was electricity in the cabin, and a modern bathroom, laundry facilities, but otherwise it was fairly primitive—no TV, no telephone, no air conditioning, the only source of warmth a fireplace in the main room. In winter we would sleep there, in front of the flames; no space heater could keep the bedroom from chilliness. It was a nic
e place that we often visited when we were first together. Not so much later.

  Marriage made me less drab, gave me some level of confidence and a feeling of being connected with other people in a way I never had while sitting in the semi-darkened living room of the family home, Mom and Dad quietly getting sloshed with Starsky and Hutch or Barney Miller playing on the TV. Soon enough I graduated—“Mona Straw” it read on the diploma; I’d kept my name at Bill’s strong feminist insistence—and eventually got a teaching certificate, just in time for Bill to cut his hair and beard and take a job with a left-wing lobbying firm in Washington. He wore a suit and tie to work, something it took me years to adjust to; the beads and Birkenstocks vanished, never to be seen again. “It’s time to put away the hippie stuff,” he would tell his old teacher friends when they visited. “That failed. We have to work for change from within the system, not outside it.” His voice would hold an aching sadness in it when he said such things.

  Since my parents’ property in Adams Morgan had long been sold, we bought a house in Silver Spring, just north of the city, in a nice middle-class neighborhood of bungalows built in the 1920s. Big beech trees and black maples lined the streets and filled the nearby park with its playground and little ribbon of river. The streets were safe. I found a job teaching English at the Cutts School. Soon enough there was Gracie.

  It was my life. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing at all.

  5

  It happened slowly, but it seemed to happen quickly. One Tuesday after Labor Day Connor Blue appeared in my fourth period English class along with twenty or so other newly-minted sixth graders. I took no special notice. Why would I? There was nothing unusual about him. A bit shorter and slighter than most of the other boys, but a good-looking kid, fresh-faced, blonde hair a bit wild and prone to cowlicks, green eyes, a spattering of cinnamon freckles over his cheeks. Bright, quick to smile. Cute. At first he hung around a group of boys he’d been friends with the previous year, just average boys who ran around the playground at recess or played touch football on the grassy fields. But that didn’t last long. Connor seemed to pull away from them in the first weeks of school, to no longer engage with them much during class, to keep to himself during recess and lunch. It was during a lunch period I had my first real conversation with him. He was sitting under a tree reading a paperback book, an unusual thing for a boy to do. Since being on duty during lunch can be quite dull for a teacher—little ever happens, one simply stands there watching—I walked up to him.

  “Hi, Connor.”

  He looked up and grinned, one eye squinting shut. “Hi, Ms. Straw.”

  “Whatcha readin’?”

  He held it up for me to see. An old paperback: Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories to Be Read with the Lights On. I recognized it as being from the informal honor-system lending library in my classroom.

  “Do you like spooky stories?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” he shrugged, looking back at the book again. “I like Alfred Hitchcock.”

  “Really? I’m surprised you even know who he was.”

  “I’ve seen lots of his movies. Lifeboat. Rear Window. The Birds. Psycho.”

  “Wow. I’m impressed,” I said, sincerely. “Which is your favorite?”

  He considered. “I think Psycho.”

  I smiled. “That’s mine too. Do your parents have them on video? Is that how you see them?”

  “Nah. My dad doesn’t care about old movies. I watch ’em on TV. Sometimes I go to the video rental store and get one. When I have money. I like Humphrey Bogart, too. He was cool.”

  “He sure was. Have you seen High Sierra?”

  He shook his head. “I saw The Big Sleep.”

  “Ooh, that’s a great one.”

  We were silent for a moment. I looked across to the playing fields, watched Connor’s former friends running around with a football. “You don’t hang out with them anymore, huh?”

  “Nah.”

  “Why not?”

  Another shrug.

  I crouched down near him. He fidgeted, as kids often do when the teacher is giving them individual attention. “So how do you like sixth grade so far?”

  “It’s okay, I guess. Pretty easy.”

  I smiled. “Is my class easy?”

  He smiled, looked at me again. “Pretty.”

  “You’re a good English student, Connor,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, you’re a good English teacher,” he said.

  I stood again, a slight sensation of oddness coursing through me. Sixth-grade boys weren’t in the habit of complimenting my teaching skills, or those of any other staff member. It felt strange to hear him say it.

  “Well, thank you,” I said, starting to move off again. “Enjoy your book.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Straw!”

  That was the entire conversation. Other than calling on him when he raised his hand in class, other than the occasional Good morning or How are you, Connor? spoken in exactly the same way to him as to all my other students, it was the first time I’d ever talked to him, really talked to him personally. In those moments he became an individual, a person, as opposed to the others. Just as they no doubt found it difficult to imagine me outside the setting of the classroom—couldn’t picture me shopping for groceries or helping Gracie into her pajamas or making love to my husband—I couldn’t really imagine them, either. What did boys that age do when they weren’t at school, when they were home alone in their rooms with their thoughts and dreams? What was it like for a boy to grow up in the 1990s? What did a boy like Danny Morehouse, one of Connor’s former pals, do at home? All I could picture was a young kid sprawled in front of a TV or playing a video game on his computer—cliché images, but maybe true.

  I found myself wondering a little about Connor Blue, but he didn’t preoccupy my thoughts overmuch—no more so than a number of other students that year who seemed a bit different, quiet or sullen or angry. It was the usual mix. I tried to help them as I could, but the truth is that teaching a group of twenty or twenty-five kids English once a day isn’t a good environment for being especially helpful. It’s all one can do to keep order, to remember what points to cover that day, to hand back yesterday’s homework and give out today’s, to try to come across as reasonably cheerful and engaging. There isn’t a great deal of time for one-on-one counseling sessions or personalized discussions. And so a girl like Lauren Holloway, who almost never spoke or made eye contact? I could try to draw her out in stray moments, but for the most part, since she did her homework and didn’t actively misbehave, she was on her own. A boy like Richard Broad, always talking out of turn, squirming, getting out of his seat? I could send him to the office occasionally, perhaps at parent-teacher conferences gently suggest that he be screened for attention-deficit disorder. And someone like Kylie McCloud, who the other girls made fun of, always in her own world—tiny Kylie, with her asthma inhaler and eyeglasses that would slip down her nose, that same nose she kept buried in some big fantasy novel every period, every day? What could I do for her? Not much. Teachers are surprisingly helpless, really.

  But something about Connor held my attention, this quiet boy who read books and liked old movies and didn’t engage with others yet who always seemed happy to see me, quick to break into a grin and say, “Hi, Ms. Straw!”

  “Hi, Connor! Whatcha readin’?” It became my set greeting for him, whether or not he was actually holding a book just then. But he was always reading something, and he would always tell me about it: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Call of the Wild, Lost Horizon. Of course he asked me for recommendations, and I directed him toward writers like Madeleine L’Engel and Ray Bradbury. Boys who truly love to read are, of course, delightful for an English teacher to have in her classroom, and Connor was, in that way, a delight. Again and again I would be surprised that he had read one of my recommendations so quickly and could then return to me for such an intelligent discussion about it. We spent a lot of time on Meg Murry and Calvin O’Keefe and on
Bradbury’s Martians. And, of course, on old movies. I was amazed at his knowledge. He was familiar with not only Hitchcock, but Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, the Marx Brothers, James Cagney. Sometimes he would sit in my classroom through lunch, since fourth period was just before. Often two or three kids would be there, usually girls who liked to read or who didn’t feel like going outside. Sometimes it would be just Conner and me, alone. We didn’t say much. I would eat my lunch at my desk, reading (or pretending to read) a book or magazine while Connor sat with another book from the class lending library.

  “Aren’t you hungry, Connor?” I would ask him. He never seemed to have a lunch.

  He would shrug. “Not really.”

  “Want my apple?” I held it up for him to see.

  He brightened, as he always did when I offered him anything: a book, attention. “Okay!”

  And we would sit there, far apart—he habitually returned to his seat in the middle of the third row—quietly chewing, the teacher and her bright, unusual student, unaware (were we?) of the disaster that even then was rushing to meet us.