Sam tapped Asa on the shoulder. “Get your coat on. We have to go.”
George watched as the boy did as he was told. Sam took a card out of his breast pocket and slid it across George’s desk. “I’m sorry. I have to take care of an emergency—lately it’s one thing or another. My luck?” He shrugged like he couldn’t quite figure out if everything was his fault. “This is a card for my show. We open next week. Probably the worst time ever to have an opening—the week between Christmas and New Year’s but”—he shrugged again—“but I’ll take it.”
George picked up the card and looked down at the painting. It was a swirl of angry strokes of red, black, and white. When he looked at it more closely, he saw that it was a portrait of a man’s head and shoulders. The expression in his black eyes and slash of a mouth was disconcerting to say the least. He flipped it over. The gallery was in Chelsea—a name he was surprised he recognized, though he didn’t know why he did, since he didn’t make a habit of gallery-hopping.
“You should come to the opening, bring friends,” Sam said as he ushered Asa out the door.
“I’ll try,” George answered as he stood. “Although I don’t know much about art.” He was glad their meeting was over. He was looking forward to getting into the pool and clearing his head. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t know if he liked Sam Malik very much. Yet he found himself wanting to know more. What had he been doing in Michigan? Where was Asa’s mother?
He realized Sam was staring at him. He looked like he was waiting for a response. George blinked and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
Slowly, Sam repeated, “We’ll be in touch about the tutoring?”
George nodded. Then, realizing that he should appear more with it, he said, “After the break good for you?”
Sam nodded, but not before fixing George with the same intense, soul-peering look that earlier caused that quickening in his gut. George closed his office door and waited for them to retreat. He looked out the window and down into the courtyard until he saw the figures of father and son, walking hunched against the cold, shuffling through the snow down the icy flagstone path that led out to 67th Street. Then he turned and grabbed the gym bag that he kept on the floor by his desk and hurried to the pool. He couldn’t get in the water fast enough.
On Christmas Eve it snowed again. George thought about going up Amsterdam Avenue to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, not for the service but to hear the music. It wasn’t that he was religious, just sentimental. It seemed old-fashioned to him. What normal people did on Christmas Eve. He had one such memory of the holiday, and that occurred when he was very young (under five for sure). The entire family went ice-skating on the pond behind the house. There had been cocoa from a red plaid thermos and his father had worn a dingy white beard that he’d stolen from some prop closet along with a red velvet jacket with tails that George and Amy had clung to while he whipped them around the icy pond. After the skating, his father made a big production of choosing and cutting a tree from the woods that they carried back up to the house and decorated with chains made out of tinfoil and sticky pinecones. Years later, as they grew older and details of the holiday had been left to them, he recalled trudging through the snow with numb feet, carrying the saw as he followed behind a very determined Amy intent on the perfect Christmas tree that barely anyone but she would take notice of. Also lurking in his memories was their father’s disembodied voice calling out to them from his study. His words sloppy and slurred, he instructed Amy on the proper use of the saw because he was sure George’s limp wrists wouldn’t be able to handle the physical exertion. Then, he had snickered over his cleverness, whispering the phrase “limp wrists” over and over, chuckling to himself. George had suffered in silence, red-faced and queasy, at thirteen, too afraid to go up against his father. He would have cowered in the shadows forever had Amy not grabbed hold of his gloved hand and pulled him out the front door.
George told Amy his plans when she called to check on him from Owen’s sister’s house so that she wouldn’t feel like she had abandoned him. In the background he could hear the sound of kids opening presents early and squealing with delight. Amy had told him there would be five little girls under the age of ten, and he pictured them in tiny cable-knit sweaters, red-cheeked from excitement, flyaway wispy blond hair in pigtails. George knew that a big family Christmas was the kind that Amy always dreamed of, and he was happy that his little sister’s dream had come true, as much as he felt sorry for himself.
Out on the streets there were people rushing despite the snow, despite the holiday. It was freezing and George shoved his hand in his left pocket for his gloves and came up empty-handed. He must have forgotten them. He stood for a moment considering whether he needed them or not. Whether it was worth walking back to his apartment just for gloves. He sighed. When had he become so indecisive?
When he pulled his hand out of his right pocket, he held the folded gallery card for Sam’s show. Just to prove to himself that he was still capable of making up his mind quickly, he decided to go there first instead of immediately getting on the subway uptown. Even though the show didn’t open until the twenty-sixth, he was curious enough to see the paintings without having to commit to going in. He could probably glimpse something from the window that would allow him to see a little more of what was in Sam Malik’s mind.
The gallery was on West 24th Street in an area crammed with galleries. When George crossed over Sixth Avenue at 23rd Street and headed up a block, he realized why the address sounded so familiar to him. Jules’s new lover, Bobby the window dresser, lived on 26th Street in a little apartment above a gallery. While George had known from the beginning that Jules and he weren’t going to be together forever, he enjoyed the companionship. He liked going over to Union Square Market with Jules on a Saturday morning and buying provisions for the weekend. He liked having someone bring him a cup of coffee in bed and share the Times on a lazy Sunday. He liked not coming home to an empty apartment. Although if he was truly honest, he would have to admit those times were rare. Mostly there had been drama and tears and lots and lots of phone calls where, when George answered, the line almost always went dead. He didn’t miss that at all. But it did make him wonder if he was always going to choose wrong.
When George got to the gallery, he slowed his pace. There was a spot in the front window that illuminated the sidewalk. He looked up and was surprised to see the painting from the card staring back at him. It was large—it dwarfed him. In the glass he could see his reflection superimposed over the face. He took a step back because it freaked him out so much.
It turned out that all of the lights were on in the gallery, and it wasn’t as hard as he’d imagined for him to look past the painting in the window. He stepped off to the side. Directly behind the painting, on the back wall, another face stared him down. Equal in size, it too was of a man from the shoulders up, with a frightening furrowed brow, only in shades of deep blue and gray. There were several variations of this guy, front and back, and the intensity made George wonder if these might be portraits of the ex-partner, John. He glanced back at the painting in the window. What you couldn’t tell from the card was that the paint had been applied so thickly that it stood up in stiff ridges—even peaks in some places—almost like frosting that had hardened on a cake. George knew enough about art to understand that in cases like this, the brushstrokes were intentional—that people in the know who looked at this painting and these dried rims of paint would know something of the artist that George did not.
While he was lost in his thoughts, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. When he peered around the painting, he saw Sam and another man having a discussion in the center of the gallery. Sam was rubbing at his temples and shaking his head back and forth. His ponytail was caught in the collar of his shirt. The other man was attempting to make soothing gestures by stroking Sam’s arm through the sleeve of his gray sweater. Sam shook him off, and when he did, he tu
rned in the direction of the window and of George.
George reacted quickly and ducked off to the side. He didn’t understand why he actually felt a little foolish. He didn’t want to be caught hiding, so he turned and ran without looking back until he was practically to the West Side Highway across from the entrance to Chelsea Piers. He glanced over his shoulder, but he was fairly certain that not only had Sam Malik not followed him but, if he had recognized George at all, he thought George was most likely certifiable. George’s shoes were filled with snow, as were the cuffs of his pants, making his ankles numb. He leaned against a building to brush some of the snow off, but of course he didn’t have his gloves, and it wasn’t long before his hands and fingers were pink and numb as well.
At this point George decided to forget about the music at Saint John the Divine and just go home. He shoved his hands back in the pockets of his coat to keep them warm and headed back to the West Village. After he’d lied to Amy about going to the Strand and buying a stack of books, he’d actually gone and bought a few. On his walk home, he decided he’d reread The Metamorphosis and then follow that up with The Trial. It seemed there was no one fitting enough but Kafka for his mood. If all else failed, there were always the 104 channels of cable television, which Jules had insisted upon and George had yet to cancel.
Winter break seemed to bring more tension than relaxation. As far as George was concerned, there were too many expectations and too much chance for disappointment in the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Three days after Christmas, he’d received in the mail from his mother a DVD of her latest movie and a video-game version of Dead, Again 2. The game was a big deal, since it was yet to be released in stores, and Amy told George that she planned to put hers on eBay. George shoved both things back into the box and hid it in the far reaches of his closet.
He was exhausted from all the time he spent alone during the break and found himself deeply relieved to be back at work. The boys seemed to have grown taller and louder in the two weeks of vacation. Some of them had tans from visits to exotic locales—others had windburns where their ski goggles had been. Asa Malik was the only one of them that registered no evidence of where he spent his holiday break.
When George greeted Asa and told him that he’d set up math tutoring to begin the following afternoon, he was relieved that the boy didn’t act any differently toward him. George hoped this meant that his father really hadn’t glimpsed George spying on him through the glass on Christmas Eve. Although, technically, he hadn’t really been spying, had he? How was he to know that Sam would be in the gallery that night, of all nights? Shouldn’t he have been at home, celebrating with Asa? Or maybe that was moronic of George to assume that they even celebrated a traditional Christian holiday. Maybe, like for George this year, Christmas had been just another day to get through. The twenty-sixth of December had never been such a relief.
Siddhartha was the next book in George’s class. He hadn’t assigned any reading over the break—he’d tried that his first year of teaching and found he’d been a laughingstock in the teachers’ lounge. Instead, his plan was to discuss the overriding themes of the search for enlightenment and one’s own search for self. He could hear the masturbation jokes already as he passed the books out, and he wasn’t at all surprised that when he reached Asa’s desk, the boy had his own worn copy sitting atop his notebook.
Over the next two weeks, Siddhartha was slow going, painful at times. George found himself lecturing more than he wanted to, even going so far as to find a filmed version from the early 1970s that in the end he couldn’t bring himself to show. Eventually, Asa’s comments couldn’t help the hour go any faster and even Asa seemed to realize this. The boy was preoccupied and on more than one occasion, when George had given the class study hall in order to complete their reading assignments, he had discovered Asa reading a gaming magazine. Granted, he couldn’t make the boy reread a book he obviously knew well (his essays so far had been right-on), but he would have appreciated the effort in class. Maybe he was just trying to up his cool factor among his peers. Fourteen-year-old boys were far more complicated than most people gave them credit for.
When Asa’s math tutor called George to tell him that in six scheduled visits Asa had shown up only once, George called Asa into his office. This was the part of counseling George dreaded, and he had to admit he was surprised that Asa, of all his advisees, was putting him in this position. The kid was smart and didn’t seem like he was trying to jerk George around. He had appeared sincere in his efforts when they had arranged the tutoring and yet here they were.
The boy slumped in his chair and yawned while he waited for George to speak. George rubbed at his temples and sighed. The afternoon was already gray and dark, and it was only half past three. When George had confronted Asa with the no-shows, Asa hadn’t denied it. The only thing he wanted to know was if George was going to call his father.
“Don’t you think I should?” George asked him now.
Asa shifted in his chair and sat up straighter. “I’m not an idiot,” he said.
The boy’s hair was a little longer, shaggier, and he looked even more like his father. George leaned back in his chair and swiveled slightly as he considered what to say next. He really didn’t believe that Asa was so prideful that he wouldn’t attend tutoring to get a better grade.
“You heard what my dad said the last time: I get my poor math skills from him. What does it matter? He’s selling paintings; we have money. He has someone who adds it all up for him.” He shrugged but George could tell that his bravado was false.
Asa wanted his father’s attention, that much was clear. George had been there enough times in his life to recognize it a mile away. Pointing this out to Asa would do no good, so George just went along with the boy’s attitude. “Sounds like your father’s lucky.”
Asa spat, “There’s no such thing as luck. He works hard.”
George nodded. “I’m sure he does.”
“You don’t believe me?” Asa’s eyes were like slits as he peered at George. “Have you seen his paintings?”
George shook his head slightly. Not quite the truth, not quite a lie.
“Well you should go,” Asa said quietly, softening, like a child who was tired after a tantrum.
George tapped his fingers on his desk near his phone. He wouldn’t call Sam. Maybe he’d run into him at the gallery. George would suggest the noodle house a few blocks down on Sixth Avenue and then they could have lunch and then the subject of Asa would come up. Casually, naturally, of course. In George’s fantasy, the question of whether a teacher’s attraction to the parent of a student was wrong or right wouldn’t exist.
Suddenly, Asa unfolded himself from the chair and stood up, making George return to reality. “Go to the tutor,” George heard himself say. He stopped short of adding please.
Asa nodded, but George knew the boy wouldn’t go and he would be forced to do something about it. Which was obviously what Asa wanted in the first place.
One week later, when George was grading the final exams from Siddhartha (a book he was close to vowing he’d never teach to ninth graders again), Sam called.
He opened with, “I understand that Asa hasn’t been attending tutoring.”
George winced and braced himself.
“He told me,” Sam added.
“Ah,” George sighed.
“I know you were aware of this, so I’m wondering if something has changed? That perhaps you felt that Asa didn’t need the assistance?”
George knew from the quarterly reports that, unfortunately, Asa hadn’t experienced a miracle in math. He coughed.
Suddenly Sam laughed. “I didn’t think so.”
Relieved that Sam Malik wasn’t about to launch into a diatribe against him, George said, “I should have called you.”
Sam laughed again. “I probably wouldn’t have picked up. I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
“Asa said your show was successful.”
“Successful enough that I can pay back my debts and maybe have enough left over to buy some food, maybe paint—not enough, however, for new video games,” he said dryly. “Which seems to be the only thing Asa cares for.”
George thought about the video game shoved into the back of his closet. “I can help you with the video-game part.” After he made the offer, he removed the receiver from his ear and stared at it like he was crazy.
“A teacher offering to corrupt a child?” Sam teased. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“I didn’t mean…” George stammered. He felt a sweat break in his armpits. “I mean…”
“You’re reconsidering your offer?” Sam joked.
George felt like he couldn’t keep up with this conversation. This was almost like—well, what it felt like was flirting. Or was he just projecting his fantasy? He wiped his brow and pushed the hair off his forehead.
“Are you still there?” Sam asked.
“Yeah—sorry…I was grading papers and, you know, twenty essays on Siddhartha from uninterested ninth-graders who think it would have been easier on everyone if he’d just stayed home, and my head is buzzing.”
“Ah. Have you read Asa’s yet?”
“He’s number twenty-one and my last hope, I’m afraid.” George was starting to feel a little bit more normal talking about the papers when Sam asked to meet him for coffee. He didn’t even have time to freak out. He agreed to meet him at French Roast on the east corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street in half an hour, and Sam hung up before George had a chance to change his mind.
This time George was late. He half expected Sam not to be there, but he was, sitting at the bar, idly reading the Daily News. Before he let himself be known, George watched Sam lazily turn a page, take a sip out of the coffee mug to his left, and then put the mug back down. He had incredible posture for someone sitting on a stool—yet he didn’t look stiff. His entire body was relaxed, not at all like a man who had somewhere else he’d rather be.
The Summer We Fell Apart Page 12
