by Nancy Thayer
Reynolds stared at Lana, then smiled. He felt like a fool in front of everyone there, but he knew he was not as much a fool in their eyes as he was in his own. He shut his briefcase.
“Ms. Tyroff, Mr. Carpenter, my colleagues,” he said, “it seems there has been a mistake. I ask your forgiveness, and hope that you’ll let this matter drop. Please forget that I ever called this group together.”
“Well!” “Oh!” “Humm, yes!” people said, rising from their chairs with as much ado as if the chairs were physically hindering them. People left the room awkwardly, except for Lana Maccoby, who smiled graciously at everyone before she slid away. Reynolds approached Sandra Tyroff.
“I’m sorry about all of this,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to explain it to your satisfaction—”
“It’s perfectly clear,” Sandra Tyroff said. “Don’t apologize for what you can’t change. You’re simply an old-guard, conservative, male chauvinist. You can’t bear it that a woman will be made head of a department at this college that didn’t even admit women when you started teaching here. Oh, I understand desperate measures like yours.”
“My dear lady!” Reynolds began.
“I am not your dear lady,” Sandra Tyroff said. “I am your equal.”
With those words, she swept from the room, her sharp, pretty face held so high that Reynolds feared she might smash into the wall from lack of level vision.
He sat back down in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. His heart was thumping indecorously in his chest. Another professor sat down next to him; otherwise the room was empty. The door to the hall had not been closed by Ms. Tyroff when she left so that Reynolds sensed a vacant, looming quality in the air around him.
“I don’t know what happened,” Reynolds said to his friend.
“One of the facts that might have bearing on this case is that Ms. Tyroff was made vice president of the American College English Association at their August convention,” his friend said. “She’ll be president automatically next year. She’s powerful now—too powerful for anyone in her field to risk her enmity. I don’t imagine anyone in this college will challenge her now.”
“But why didn’t anyone tell me?” Reynolds said. “I feel such an ass.”
“Well,” the other professor said, “I don’t know. I don’t think it was a malicious act, though, Reynolds. I suppose that some of the department members assumed that someone else—Lana, anyone else—would be passing the word on to you. Then, too, this has been a blow, I’m sure, to many of them. To be blunt, they need to save their skins. They must feel defeated, and cowardly, and confused.”
“I don’t feel cowardly,” Reynolds said, rising. “But I certainly feel defeated.”
In the days that followed, he asked various English department members, when he came across them casually, why they had not appeared at the meeting or at least let him know they were not intending to appear. They all said that they felt that their individual cases were not important enough to be aired publicly, that they had not realized how seriously Reynolds was taking it all, that they had assumed other members of the department would be there, that they had not realized.… He never did talk with Lana Maccoby again, because she proved efficient at avoiding him, and he could not bear to exacerbate the situation by calling her at her home. He could understand why she had backed out at the last minute, although he did not admire her for it; he thought people should stand by their principles, or what were principles for?
Sandra Tyroff was made chairman of the English department. Now Reynolds, who before the summer had been on friendly terms with everyone in the college, found himself avoided, even disliked, by an entire department. They were the cowards, the pretenders, but he had no proof. He felt like a man who had lost his home through a freakish act of nature.
And now, the knowledge of Ron Bennett’s crime.
Now Reynolds stared out at the congregation that sat so raptly listening to Peter Taylor’s sermon. There sat the Bennett family, their heads and shoulders forming a little scalloped set against the white wooden pew—how perfect they seemed. Reynolds had almost believed they were perfect, a whole family of perfect people, perfectly interacting; and he hated them for duping him. Yet it gave him no pleasure to know that before this day was over, their complacent lives would be shattered. The Bennetts would never know it, but they already had their revenge on Reynolds: they had ruined his life as much as he would ruin theirs.
He was in such despair now that he could no longer believe in God, or in man, or in his work. He could believe in nothing.
Now it was only October, and he was only fifty-four years old, yet when he looked out at his students as he talked to them in class, he did not see their youth and beauty, but instead the skulls beneath their shining hair, the greedy fangs behind the smiling lips, the perfidious hearts beating beneath the alligators on their socially accepted shirts.
He was impatient with students now. Just this week a timid young junior came to him to complain in a voice tight with fear that the head of the English department, Dr. Tyroff, was constantly treating her in an insulting and intimidating way. Was it possible, the girl wanted to know, for her to drop Dr. Tyroff’s Shakespeare seminar and take something else?
“No,” Reynolds said. “I won’t let you drop the course. Go back and fight your way through it. This is not a nursery school. Whatever Dr. Tyroff is handing out to you is marshmallow fluff compared to what you’re going to face in the rest of your life. Grow up. And don’t come back to my office. You’ve got to handle this on your own.”
The girl left, nearly in tears, and Reynolds could tell that she was not one of life’s fighters. But he was past caring. Let Sandra Tyroff destroy the girl—he didn’t care. And once he had articulated those words to himself, he knew he had lost the meaning of his life. He would have to stop teaching for a while; he could not teach if he did not care.
Reynolds had applied for a sabbatical. At the middle of December, as soon as the first semester ended, he would be leaving Londonton. He was going to rent an apartment in Seattle, because he knew no one who lived there, and it was a big enough city so that he wouldn’t have to become friendly with anyone. Also, it was on the other side of the continent. If he liked Seattle, he thought he might just move there, and leave his tenured post at the college.
He would also stop attending church. He could no longer be satisfied with the teachings of the Church. There were still times in the days of his life when the sight of people walking under trees or when a fresh breeze swiftly skimmed through an opened window, rippling the papers on his desk, would make him aware of some sublimity in the world. It had to be explained somehow. Life had to be explained somehow. But he did not any longer think it could be explained through Christianity.
The idea of Christian perfection was wrong, impossible. Reynolds knew that now. Man could never be perfect, the world was not perfect, and so God could not be perfect. The workings of the human eye were signs of everyday miracles and such miracles could not be denied. But neither could the Holocaust, the Inquisition, or the Peloponnesian War; neither could cancer, famine, or greed. The world was flawed. It was a beautiful, ornate, revolving bowl that had been cracked from its conception in the hands of a flawed maker, and everything within it reflected inescapably that basic, deep, ineradicable imperfection.
So this was the last time Reynolds would attend a Christian church. It occurred to him that if he gave up teaching and churchgoing both he would isolate himself from his fellow man. But he was too tired, just now, to think of any other way to live. He had no reserves left. He knew that most people lived their lives by performing a delicate psychological operation: they lifted themselves daintily from the sordid world and set themselves apart, so that whether they smiled or cried depended entirely upon the singular events of their individual day. Reynolds had never learned that trick. And so he was defeated … by the young boy who cheated, by Lana Maccoby, by Ron Bennett.
The ushers were
passing out the collection plates; the service was almost over. Reynolds rose with the others to sing the Doxology: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above Ye heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
He no longer believed the words he was singing, but this did not bother him now. It did not matter. Nothing much mattered.
Amanda Findly
Why did Mother have to sit here?
It’s lovely being home for the weekend, lovely coming to church with Mother just as always. But why did she choose to sit up here on the fifth row from the front? Michael always sits in back!
Well, it’s not Mother’s fault; she doesn’t know about Michael. I didn’t see him when we came in, and I can’t very well turn around now, crane around looking past everyone else to search him out. There are so many people here today that he might not even see me in the crowd, especially since he doesn’t know I’m home. I should have called. But I promised myself I wouldn’t—wouldn’t call him, wouldn’t write him, would wait until he contacted me. Damn. Oh, damn.
And it’s hard sitting here so close to Reverend Taylor, practically right up under his nose. I’m trying to look respectable, but all I can think of is his son. His first son, who is my first lover. It makes me smile to see Mr. Taylor, looking so pure and pious behind the pulpit in his black robe, as if sex wouldn’t dare enter the atmosphere he inhabits. And all the while his own son is to sex what champagne is to wine.
At least, he is to me.
I’ve been away at college for just six weeks, but it might as well have been six years. I feel so much older. Ages older. You couldn’t tell it from looking at me, but I’ve got an old mind hiding in this eighteen-year-old body. What does it mean that Michael is a year younger than I am, that I’m eighteen and he’s only seventeen? I thought it meant that we were too young really to be in love. Too young really to be in love—that sounds like a bad song. I think it was a bad song.
There’s no way I can sit in this church, looking at Mr. Taylor, and not think of Michael. Of course it seems there’s no way I can be anywhere and not think of Michael, but it’s especially difficult when Mr. Taylor looks so much like Michael. Or, I suppose it’s that Michael looks like Mr. Taylor, since Mr. Taylor came first. They are amazingly good-looking: tall, slender, dark-haired, blue-eyed. Michael is so handsome that I don’t think I could have made love with him if he weren’t a year younger than I am; I needed to feel that slight edge of superiority that age gives, to balance out the advantage his good looks give him. I’m pretty enough, with blond hair and a slim enough figure, I’m not worried about myself, I’m fine. But Michael is extraordinary. Although now that I’ve been away from him for six weeks, it’s not his looks that I remember and miss, but Michael himself: the feeling of him. He is like a vein of marble hiding in a mountain: quiet, glistening, vivid, inviolate. I could never capture him with my sculptures. I could never capture Michael with one sculpture. But I can envision sculpting him again and again and again, each time never quite capturing his essence, but each time creating a work I love.
I did not ever think so much would come of it.
Because Michael is younger than I am, I never had paid much attention to him until this summer at a church picnic. I spent all summer waitressing at a local restaurant, making money for college, all my thoughts aimed into the future. That Sunday I had gone along to the church picnic partly out of boredom, partly to please Mother. I messed around with the little kids, tending them so their parents could socialize in peace. I like children, and I had babysat for most of these children at one time or another over the past few years. It was a hot day for June, clear and bright, and I was wearing short shorts and not thinking at all about myself and how I looked. No one that mattered to me was around. I bent over to pick up a little boy who’d just tripped, and when I stood back up, I saw Michael Taylor staring at me.
He was several yards away, alone, separate from everyone else, leaning against a tree, looking a little bored and disdainful. Our eyes met, and something about the way he looked at me made me quickly glance down at my blouse—for an instant I was afraid that the buttons had come undone and my bra was showing. His look was a look that made me feel that way. I fiddled around with the toddlers some more, and when I casually looked back at him, he was still staring at me.
I grew up here in Londonton, and the Taylors moved here a long time ago, so I’ve sort of known Michael for about ten years, I guess. He’s been as insignificantly indigenous as the Blue River or the college buildings. This summer I had caught glimpses of him around town from time to time; I had thought, “There’s Michael Taylor, working for the landscape company.” He was always working shirtless, sweating, trimming hedges, shoveling, mowing the grass on gracious lawns. I knew he was around, but on the eleventh day of this June, it was as if I were seeing him for the first time.
I stood there, patting a baby against my shoulder, and I met Michael Taylor’s stare without embarrassment—although it was a comfort having that baby there as a shield; I’ll bet she’s never been patted so hard in her life.
I think I fell in love with him right then. I certainly desired him, and that desire was as strong and clear and certain as a light coming on in a dark room. I really don’t understand why they don’t talk more about sex in the Bible; we are raised to want to be good, and to believe we can control our lives and our actions, but I’ll tell you, when I stood there looking into Michael’s eyes, I had as much control over my future as if I’d been tied down to a railroad track in front of an onrushing train. Why don’t we admit it? Sex has nothing to do with the wills of human beings. It’s a sort of universal law of physical energy exchange, and human beings are just the helpless transformers or converters. I have a theory—which will never be tested—that if everyone in the world refrained from sex simultaneously for five minutes, in those five minutes the earth would fly apart, or fall out of orbit, or stop spinning. The energy of the earth is sexual, there’s no doubt about it. Of course I wasn’t thinking these things when I looked at Michael Taylor; I was just thinking: well. And then, why not? After all, he’s a year younger than I am, and I’m going off to college in two months, so if it turns out to be awful, I won’t have to see him every day. I was wondering how in the world I was going to make a date with him tactfully—we hadn’t said over ten consecutive words to each other in years—when he strolled over and said to me, “Let’s go for a walk by the river later. Okay? I’ll meet you at seven by the bridge.”
“Okay,” I said, and before I could say anything else, he walked away.
I didn’t tell Mother or anyone else where I was going. Michael Taylor, the minister’s son, and a year younger than I—what could I want with him?
Yet when I saw him walking toward me through the high grass near the bridge I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of my blindness in the past. How had I lived in the same town with this boy and not seen him? For he was beautiful, beautiful, tall, and sexy.
We walked along the river, talking in a kind of daze about our summer plans, where I was going to college, little things. Before long we were out past the Mt. Grace Dairy, sitting by the river under an overarching stretch of willows. By then the sky was growing violet, and the willows formed a cave of shadowy light around us.
We sat on the soft grassy bank, tossing rocks into the water, almost not talking, but comfortable together. After a while Michael leaned over and kissed me. He took my shoulders in his hands and held me firmly while he kissed first my neck, then my chest, my breasts, my arms. Then we eased down onto the ground and he lay on top of me, kissing me while his hands moved and lingered. Russian hands and Roman fingers, I thought of the old joke at first, and then I thought: How can a minister’s son be so sexy? I wondered if I should tell him that I had never made love with anyone before, but I was afraid that if I did tell him that, he would stop. So I said nothing. I just kissed him back.
I kissed him and kissed him. I wrapped my arm
s around him, I ran my hands down his long back. Almost without being conscious of it, we took off our clothes, bit by bit, they had become impediments. What a surprising luxury it was—a multitude of delirious sensations shot through me. I could feel the swirl of grass under my back and legs, and the more delicate, intricate prickle and press of Michael’s thighs and arms and chest against my smooth skin. No sooner would his sweet mouth leave my breasts or neck or face wet with kissing than that spot would be dried by his warm breath as he exhaled, whispering, “Oh. Amanda.”
What stuff the skin is—seeming to be smooth, all of a piece, and yet it is shimmering, electric, and multiplex. My body felt like the control panel on a spaceship, with lights flashing in every imaginable rhythm and hue. When Michael came into me, I gasped and for a moment I was afraid: this was all new. “Oh,” I said, and Michael answered, “Oh,” smiling down at me. So I held on to him and let him lead, lift, carry me on our lilting voyage out of this earth, yet centered in my body and Michael’s and our bodies joined. Yes, Einstein, there is another dimension, and I know what it is.
We went on and on together until Michael suddenly hunched up, dug his face into my shoulder, and moaned. I understood what had happened, yet was disappointed. I almost cried—I didn’t want it to end!
And it didn’t. We lay side by side for a while, whispering, then we started all over again.
It was almost midnight when we walked back toward town, following the gleam of starlight reflected in the river. We walked with our arms around each other, leaning against each other, tired, not talking. When we got to the bridge, he kissed me softly and said, “Same time tomorrow night?” I said yes, and walked home, smiling. That we would be able to do the next night what we had just done—that we might have an entire summer of such nights!—made me want to spin cartwheels in the street. I wanted to shout, “Thank God I’m alive!”
