You Deserve Nothing

by Alexander Maksik

  “How does a school have a psychologist that the teachers don’t know about? Who has never practiced psychology? Cherry Carver? Fucking Cherry Carver?”

  “It’s always for the kids. We’re doing God’s work. Don’t forget that,” I said, smiling.

  “Speaking of which, I had a long talk with one of my new students. Marie de Cléry. Very sweet. Do you know that every day since the beginning of the year before she leaves she says, ‘Thanks Ms. Keller. Great class, Ms. Keller.’ She came by the office the other day to tell me how much she likes my class. This is why she stops by. To compliment me and to talk about the work? She stayed for an hour. She’s my new favorite,” Mia said beaming.

  “That’s good, it’s good to have fans.” I felt sick.

  “No, I mean she’s not like one of your panting groupies and she’s not looking for grades. She doesn’t really write all that well. She’s fierce and interested. Everything we talk about, she tries so hard to understand and then when it clicks, she looks like she could cry she’s so happy. It makes me want to cry. We’re reading ‘The Flea,’ and today she had this expression on her face. I don’t know, just total befuddlement, like she’s in pain and then all of a sudden she sits up, her face bright and relaxed. She raises her hand, I call on her, and she says, ‘Men are so pathetic.’

  “The others start giggling but I know exactly what’s happening and I smile at her and then all the other kids, none of whom have yet understood the poem, shut up, and Marie says, ‘It’s just another guy trying to get laid.’ Of course she’s right and she takes ten minutes to explain the whole thing to the class. It’s not as if she’s really literary but she saw the whole thing. While all the little SAT drones were looking for metaphors and similes, she just, click, gets it. ‘All that to hook up with this girl? So lame. Just say what you want. Be a man,’ she says. We spent the rest of the period talking about how men are pathetic. An excellent morning.”

  I loved the way Mia spoke about her students. I knew no one else who believed so certainly in what she did. I loved the way she taught, the way she worked for those kids, but I could barely look at her.

  As we were finishing our lunches I glanced up to see Gilad walking back along the walkway from the cafeteria. When he passed, I waved.

  He smiled and turned into the upper school building.

  “That’s him? The kid you kept from classes? The one you’re morally bankrupting?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve seen him around. He’s alone a lot.”

  “Always. I like him. He makes me want to be good. I have a few this year. But he’s at the top of the list. You should sit in on the seminar. It’s great.”

  “Just let me know when.”

  “Any time.”

  “So what else, William?”

  “Besides our new psychologist? And my recklessness? Well, let’s see. There was the discussion of my responsibility not to challenge the faith of my students. Oh, and apparently she doesn’t want me to encourage them to commit suicide.”

  “Well that’s unreasonable.”

  “I think so. Omar Al Mady is complaining that Abdul feels uncomfortable, attacked, and persecuted and Omar, she called him Omar like we were all drinking buddies, isn’t happy. I told her that it was my job to challenge the faith of my students, blah, blah, blah. But she was absolutely against it. No time for an academic argument, she said.”

  I heard a high pitched, “Mr. Silver!”

  Julia Tompkins and Lydia Winton were walking toward us waving.

  “Here’s your fan club. We’ll finish this later.” Mia put her hand on my knee. “Will. Will.” She shook her head. Then she smiled her sad smile, pushed herself to her feet and brushed the grass from her jeans. “I’ll leave you to bask in their adoration.”

  She waved at the girls and headed back to the office. I watched her walk away across the field.

  Julia dropped down next to me. “What’s up, Mr. Silver? What’s for lunch?”

  She rummaged through my plastic bag.

  Lydia, a year older and five years more sophisticated, sat down and looked at me purposefully.

  “So, Silver, we’ve got a proposal for you,” she said.

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “Lit mag,” Julia said. “Will you do it?”

  “When?”

  “Whenever you want to. Any day of the week after school.”

  “Except Friday. Obviously,” Lydia said.

  “Obviously,” Julia rolled her eyes.

  “Obviously,” I said. “Find anything you like, Julia?”

  She glanced one last time at the lunch bag, dropped it, shrugged and said, “Not really. And don’t change the subject, will you do it?”

  “Who else wants to do this?”

  “Who knows?” Lydia had closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun. “But believe me, Silver, people will sign up if you’re the advisor.”

  “Totally,” Julia laughed.

  “But then, you know that already,” Lydia said.

  “I don’t think there will be all that much interest but O.K. We’ll do it on Wednesday afternoons. I’ll get Ms. Keller to help. I mean if anyone shows up.”

  “Yay!” Julia punched me on the shoulder.

  “I knew you’d say yes,” Lydia said cocking her head to the side and smiling at me.

  I stood up.

  “Thanks, Silver,” Lydia said.

  MARIE

  He didn’t invite me back. I kept waiting but he never called. He’d smile at me in the halls and maybe he was a bit more flirtatious but barely. Just his condescending little smile. Sometimes I’d send him a text message. Tell him he looked good that day. I love when you wear that sweater, or something. And he’d respond. He’d tell me I looked good too. Fucking nothing. It drove me crazy. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I started to feel desperate. I began to invent things.

  I imagined he’d call or invite me over. Sometimes I’d write when I was drunk. I’d offer to come over but he’d say no. He’d tell me it wasn’t a good time. I don’t know. Maybe he had a girlfriend or something.

  Please, I wrote. Please.

  He said, Marie it’s too dangerous. So I started sending sexual messages: I want you to fuck me. Then just as vulgar as I could come up with. I’d write and he’d respond. He’d always respond. Tell me what you want exactly. And that’s when I started to lie. I’d tell Ariel that I was seeing him all the time. I started showing her the messages. I’d write them in front of her and we’d wait for his answers. Sometimes she’d write pretending to be me: Tell me what you want to do. He’d tell me and there was none of his tenderness in those messages. None at all. And he still wouldn’t let me come over.

  GILAD

  I’d never read Shakespeare before his seminar. Before him I got by the way you do—CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, ClassicNotes. You read the chapter summaries, the analysis, you pretend. You don’t ever have to read the thing. Shakespeare always felt like too much work to me. But the way he talked, the way he moved around the room, the guy was either a fantastic actor or he believed what he was saying. You just don’t see that very often. Teachers in movies are always leaping onto tables and sacrificing their lives for their students and their love of literature but the truth is that you rarely, rarely take a class from a teacher who cares. It’s just unrealistic. How many people could walk into a classroom year after year and weep for “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? That’s why the ones who stay are so often some of the most depressing people you’ve ever met in your life. It has nothing to do with their age. They’ve stayed because of their disposition—bitter, bored, lacking in ambition, lonely, and mildly insane. With few exceptions, these are the people who are capable of staying in a school. This is what it takes to teach for half a life-time. The ones who care, who love the subjects, who love their students, who love, above all, teaching—they rarely hang around. Which is more or less what my mom told me in Senegal when Ms. Mariama lost her job.

  “People
think teachers are easily replaced,” she said. “But that’s only true of the bad ones.”

  Mr. Silver was the first person I’d fallen in love with. Not that there was sexual desire. Or maybe there was. It’s hard to say. Any time you love someone that intensely, anytime you want to be loved that badly, sexual desire is always part of it. And when you’re seventeen, eighteen years old, what doesn’t have to do with sex? Not since Ms. Mariama had I felt anything for a teacher. I wanted everything for myself that he seemed to want for us—to live an involved life, to care deeply about something, anything, to feel the immediacy of time passing, to crave, to long. It didn’t feel like rhetoric then. I still don’t think it was. He believed it all, the whole thing.

  When we began to study Hamlet that October I was excited about it. He’d asked us to read the entire play over the weekend. I liked that. It made me feel adult. It made me feel as if I could read Hamlet over a weekend. Sunday I sat in the sun in the Luxembourg Gardens in one of those green metal chairs with a thick scarf wrapped around my neck and the collar of my coat turned up. I read the entire thing through in one sitting. I took a break to eat a sandwich and then kept on going.

  “Just go sit in a café and read the play,” he told us. “Have a coffee. Take a pen.”

  He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal person would do. But they weren’t obvious things to most of us. Even if I explored Paris on my own, even if I sat by myself from time to time on the banks of the river, when he suggested them they were different, as if we’d be crazy not to listen. And so those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions. And when we returned to school how many of us prayed he’d ask what we’d done over the weekend? Not only if we’d read but where.

  And that’s something.

  “Just go sit in the Luxembourg Gardens,” he said. “Get one of those nice free chairs, sit in the sun and read, watch the people, eat a sandwich, get out of your houses. Jesus.”

  And so I did. And I started wearing a scarf.

  I looked forward to school. I fantasized about conversations we’d have. I prepared lines. I wanted to talk about Hamlet. There was nowhere else I’d have rather been.

  * * *

  From my notebook:

  October 27

  “So, what’s the play about?”

  He looked around the classroom. He raised his eyebrows.

  Rick let out an impatient sigh. “So, it’s about this guy Hamlet and how his . . . ”

  Silver interrupted him, “Tell me what it’s about without telling me the story. I’m not interested in the plot. I want to know what the play is about.”

  “Yeah, O.K. So it’s about this guy—”

  “Rick, tell me what the play’s about.”

  “But it is about a guy,” Abdul said to the empty notebook in front of him.

  “I disagree,” Silver said, shifting his gaze to Abdul.

  “Whatever,” Ariel said under her breath.

  Without looking away from Abdul, Silver said, “Leave.”

  Abdul jerked his head up, his eyes wide.

  “Ariel, leave the classroom.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Finally he turned his gaze to her and said again, pausing between each word, “Leave the classroom.”

  We were silent. It was a kind of ecstasy. Aldo, with his mouth open, glanced from Ariel to Silver and back.

  “Are you serious?”

  He looked at her with an intensity and anger that I’d never seen from him. He was completely changed.

  Ariel was a deep red. For a moment her usual sneer was gone. Then she looked at him as if she’d been betrayed.

  “Fine, but I’m just going to say that this is . . . ”

  “Ariel,” Silver snapped. “I’m not interested. Get out.”

  She collected her things, shaking her head, her mouth moving wordlessly. She looked at Silver for a moment as if sizing him up. There was an almost imperceptible smile on her face. Then she left the room, slamming the door behind her.

  He waited a moment.

  Lily broke the silence. “Dude,” she said.

  Silver walked over to the open window and looked out into the day. I remember watching him there, wondering what was next. The tall trees at the far edge of the field had turned and were lit up in the soft sunlight.

  When he turned back he said, “You’re wasting your time. If I were you, I’d run for it.”

  No one spoke.

  He glanced up at the whiteboard and, as if just noticing the diagram, said, “That’s the whole point, right there. That’s the whole thing—the distance between desire and action, between what you want and what you do. That tension, that’s everything. Can someone please explain to me what the hell I’m talking about?”

  “The hardest thing is to do what you want to do,” Hala said.

  He nodded a dramatic nod.

  “Or live the way you want to live,” Rick said looking at the ceiling.

  “Meaning?”

  “That’s the tension, dude!” Hala smacked her desk. “You know you want to do something but you can’t get yourself to do it.”

  “Dude?” Silver grinned at Hala.

  “Lily’s fault. Sorry.” We laughed.

  “O.K., dude, why can’t you get yourself to do it?”

  “You’re lazy,” Colin said smiling.

  “Wait, why would you not do something you wanted to do?” Abdul asked.

  Silver squinted at Abdul. “Abdul, do you do everything you want to do?”

  “Pretty much. Yeah.”

  “Do you talk to every woman you find attractive, Abdul?”

  “I don’t have to answer that. It isn’t a decent question.”

  Hala let out a loud sigh.

  “O.K., Abdul. O.K.” Silver pushed himself off of the desk and looked around the room. “You’re damn right,” he said moving now, picking up the rhythm, “You certainly don’t have to answer the question. Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re at a party. Let’s take Colin as an example. Colin’s at a party. He’s standing in the corner. There he is. He’s bored. He’s thinking about leaving. And then, in walks the most beautiful . . . ” Silver looked at Colin with raised eyebrows.

  “Girl,” he said laughing. “For sure a girl.”

  “O.K., in walks the most beautiful woman Colin has ever seen. Suddenly he’s paralyzed. What is it about her? Her eyes? Her hair? He doesn’t know. Oh, but she’s magical, glowing from within, and so on.”

  Silver was pacing, loose and wild. Nodding his head, laughing. Drawing the scene, presenting this imaginary beauty with his hands, framing her, forcing us to see. “Here she is standing at the punch bowl. He wants to talk to her. He needs to talk to her. My God, she’s beautiful. Look at her. All alone. Look at those eyes. That sparkle. But. But, Colin? What’s wrong, Colin? He can’t cross the room. Oh he wants to, the pull is so, so strong. But no. Oh how he wants to. But he can’t do it. The tragedy, the—”

  “I’d cross the room,” Colin said, arms crossed, chin raised, chest out.

  “Oh, I’m sure you would, Colin. Because you’re a man. But for the sake of argument let’s just imagine, shall we, that you don’t. Are you man enough to pretend?”

  Colin smiled.

  “So, why wouldn’t Colin cross the room?” Silver stopped pacing, raised his eyebrows again and scanned the room, his hands upturned, shoulders shrugged. “Why?”

  “Because he’s a punk?”

  Everyone laughed.

  “And why is he a punk, Rick? What makes him a punk? You don’t mind do you Colin? It’s all hypothetical.”

  “No man, whatever.”

  “Did you just call me man?”

  Colin met Silver’s eyes, then after a pause, said, “Not you, just, it’s just a figure of speech.”

  For a moment Silver looked a
ngry and then it was gone. Was he kidding? Which was the thing about him. You never knew. Only he could push. You couldn’t push back. Not too hard anyway. Everything turned on that tension. You never knew what you’d get.

  “Rick?”

  “He’s a punk because he’s a coward. Because he just can’t get himself to walk over to her. To talk to her.”

  “Fear?”

  “Yeah. Fear.”

  “Yeah.” Pause. “Fear,” Silver repeated. “That’s the thing isn’t it?” Searching the room for our eyes, digging for the unmitigated attention of every single one of us.

  “Fear. That is what separates the hero from the common man. It’s crossing the room. It’s not complicated.”

  “So what? Heroes talk to girls?”

  “Some of them do, Cara, I’m sure. But that’s hardly the point. Come on. Push. Gilad, what’s the point?”

  I looked up from my notebook, my heart beating fast. “You do the thing anyway,” I said.

  Silver smiled his big smile. “Say that again.”

  “You do the thing anyway,” I said louder staring down at my notes.

  “You do. The thing. Anyway.” Silver wrote it on the board. He leaned against the edge of his desk, crossed his arms and said again nodding as if we’d just discovered the answer to everything, “You do the thing anyway. Yes. Yes. You do it in spite of fear. You do the thing anyway. No matter what. Because you have to. Because you know it’s right. Because you believe in it. Because by not doing it you’re betraying yourself.”

  His voice was rising and he had us all. Even dim, defiant Abdul looked up to stare curiously at Silver as he came off the desk and was moving again.

  “You do it because it matters and how do you know it matters?”

  “Because it scares you?”

  “Don’t ask, Lily. Tell me.”

  “Because it scares you.” She smiled.

  “Because it scares you. You do it because it scares you. That’s the core of it all. That’s the center. That’s how you know. That’s the heart of the whole thing. The heart.”