The Secrets Men Keep

by Mark Sampson

  It hit me. It slammed into me like a bus. I won’t lie, brothers—I nearly crashed backward against my whiteboard. Teenage lust. Teenage. Lust. And right then, I knew. I wanted to race over to my attendance to remind myself of Lily’s last name, but I didn’t need to. I remembered it: Dobson.

  Dobson.

  And suddenly I was travelling through space and time, transported suddenly back. Suddenly, I was in my first year of teaching; it was, suddenly, 2005–06 all over again. I was suddenly that hot-headed rookie running afoul of Mrs. Gahan. I’d pissed her off somehow (What was it, anyway? My goofy comebacks? My Newfoundland accent? The fact that I had lived so many lives already and she, 20 years my senior, had barely lived one?) and to punish my insolence assigned me a “Locally Developed” Grade Twelve for my second semester. It proved a fitting penalty: those kids were shite! In it there was a conclave of girls at the back who were the worst human beings I’d ever met. And their ring leader was Maggie Dobson. Maggie fucking Dobson. Grotesquely pregnant, she would drop out halfway through the term—but o my brothers how she rendered my life a living hell in the meantime. She cursed. She never stopped texting. She came to class reeking of cigarettes despite being knocked up. She hit on schoolmates (both genders!) and teachers (both genders!) despite being knocked up! Worst of all, she and her friends would turn everything I said into sex. Sex sex sex! During the grammar module, I’d explain what prepositions were and they’d say, Mr. Appleby, are you going to preposition me for sex? I tried teaching them Shane—who the fuck teaches Shane anymore!—and they were all like, I’d let him ride me like a horse. I kept Maggie Dobson after class so many times, spoke to her using all the techniques and theories they shove down your throat at teachers college, the bullshit that just reinforces that it’s the kids who are really in charge. I pleaded and bargained with her, and when she wasn’t throwing that sulking teenage moué at me, she was laughing in my face, that caustic impenetrable guffaw that seemed to radiate from her hard blue eyes. And every day I’d come to class hoping things would be different, and every day she and her friends would just get worse.

  And what a naïve popinjay I was at the time. I thought: What I really need to do is stretch these kids out intellectually. I know! I’ll teach them ekphrases! This involved an unsanctioned field trip to the art gallery downtown (O can you imagine Mrs. Gahan’s eventual conniption!), which I thought would open those kids up to a whole world they had never known. But the trip was a disaster. They were like savages in there, disrespecting the art in every possible permutation. Security finally expelled us after Maggie fucking Dobson fake-humped a sculpture (Female Nude No. 87, by Marlyn Harris. Halifax, NS.), her baby bump grinding into its gleaming hip, her tongue attacking the stone nipples with lesbic abandon. I got into so much trouble. I should have been fired, or quit right there. But I endured. I endured, my brothers. And finally Maggie Dobson dropped out to have her baby. And I thought: May God have mercy on your bastard spawn.

  And now here I was—in THE YEAR OF PERFECT VISION—and that very progeny, having arrived across space and time, was sneering up at me with mocking truculence from the middle of my classroom. This caused a volcanic stir within the catacombs of my soul. A wilting, crippling realization. Jesus, I thought. Jesus. It’s been 15 years. I’ve been in this job long enough to have one of my own student’s children come through that door. Jesus. I’m a fat, 47-year-old English teacher who’s been here 15 years, and I am so far removed from whatever it was I was before. Or wanted to be. Jesus.

  I plugged on to the end—what choice did I have?—but my words had lost most of their elastic snap. When the bell rang, everyone but Lily scraped their chair legs and flung themselves toward the door. She just remained where she was, her tiny hands folded onto her desk. She didn’t say a word. I tried to ignore her as I shuffled some papers on my desk and cleaned off my whiteboard. But when I was sure the last of the other kids were gone, I went over to her. Stood right at her desk. God, she was the spitting image of her mother: hard blue eyes and jet black hair, those smooth, angular cheekbones. She was beautiful, but there was something monstrous in her beauty. As if she were one of those insects that eats its mates.

  “Who would have thought it,” I said to her, trying to have a chuckle, “that I would end up being your teacher? I mean what are the odds, eh?”

  She said nothing.

  “Look Lily, I need you to stay away from Harley St. Clair. I can’t have you coming over to my house. You know that, right?”

  She flashed that stare up at me. “You can’t keep us apart. I told you before—we fucking love each other. I don’t know what you said to Harley to make him stop calling me, but I am not done with that guy.”

  “Really? And what about the boy in the washroom from earlier today? Are you not done with him, either?”

  She looked away for a moment, scowling off into space. “You’re just jealous,” she said, turning back at me. “I saw the way you eyed me up when we were alone. You were all like, I know she’s only 14, but she’s fucking hot. I’d totally hit that.”

  O my brothers, I can move pretty fast for a fat man. I stormed over to my classroom door and slammed it shut, even though this contravened school policy about being alone in one’s room with a student. Then I came back over and got right in Lily’s face. “What the fuck are you doing?” I said. “I mean seriously, Lily, what kind of life are you setting yourself up for?”

  She tipped herself toward me, revealing a swell of teenage cleavage, and said, “Just admit it, Mr. Appleby. You’re all the same. You would’ve loved double teaming me with Harley that afternoon. You all want the same thing. That boy in the bathroom today—he put his cock in my mouth and he didn’t even know my name.”

  “Enough,” I said. “Lily, I’m going to recommend that you be expelled from this school. Congratulations—I think you’re the first person to have a teacher do that on the first day of Grade Nine.”

  “Go ahead. See if I care. I don’t want to be in your shitty school anyway.”

  This is not a shitty school, my brothers. It is a veritable fortress of learning. These hallowed halls—busting with young scholars ready to take on the world, and the teachers who groom them to do so—was my blessed refuge when the playwriting thing just didn’t work out. I love it here. I have to. And her dig at it made me summon the one thing I had on Lily. Maybe it was infantile to broach it now, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Your mother was a student here, wasn’t she?” I asked. “I think I taught her.”

  Fury coarsened her face. “Shut up about my mother.”

  “Maggie Dobson, right? I was her English teacher during her last semester here, before she quit and dropped out. She must’ve been pregnant with you.”

  Lily’s chair legs squealed on the floor as she flew to her feet. “I said shut up.”

  “Yeah, the resemblance is uncanny,” I went on. “And so is the behaviour. She hit on me, too, when she was here. She threw sex around like it was something she understood. Just like you.”

  Lily vibrated with rage. “Fuck you. I am nothing like my mother.”

  And then I did it, brothers. O it was childish, but I did it anyway. I laughed right in her face. Laughed like she had laughed in Harley’s; like her mother had laughed in mine. Laughed at the utter absurdity of what she’d just said.

  “I’ll get you,” she hissed. “Remember that I know where you live, asshole. I’ll fucking get you.”

  And just like that, I snapped out of it. Came down from the high of hurting her in such a vulnerable place. “Lily—” I said.

  She threw her book bag on her shoulder. “Expect retribution, asshole. Don’t forget that I know where you live. I’ll fucking get you. Expect retribution.”

  She pushed past me and I sort of chased after her. But as we approached the closed door, we froze. A face had appeared then through its narrow, vertical window. O my brothers, don’t ac
t like you don’t know who it was. That condemnatory stare burned like laser beams at us through the glass. I knew I was at Lily’s mercy then; she could do my career such a villainy right there if she wanted. But she didn’t move. And neither did I. We just waited until that face faded back from the glass. Only then did Lily press forward, throwing open the door and disappearing into the deep concrete throat of the hallway.

  I was shaking. O my brothers, it felt like the fabric of space and time had ripped open. Entire galaxies were tumbling and jumbling all around me as a thousand variations of this moment ran through my mind. I couldn’t bear to leave my room. I stayed almost two extra hours, pacing the floor until I calmed down. But then I realized—oh shit—that I had forgotten to call Erin at break. I’m a fucking idiot! So I packed up my things in a hurry and left. On the way to the parking lot, I noticed that some careless student or other had knocked down a YEAR OF PERFECT VISION banner on one side and it now dangled to the floor like a curtain. I paused long enough to straighten it back up.

  I drove home. Yes, brothers, I drive, even though my house is right there. This might help to explain why I’m so fucking fat. The sinking sun beamed into my car and the leafy trees of my neighbourhood rustled with autumnal longing. I had that sensation again—that time had shattered somehow, that the earth itself had been knocked out of its orbit. It felt like I was hallucinating. I’m not really here, I thought. It’s not really the year that it is. I grew convinced, then, that I was trapped in some other epoch of my life, entangled in a moment that refused to move forward, even as I aged, and failed at things, and then aged some more.

  I pulled into my driveway. Through the windscreen I could see what had happened to my house. Every window in the front—the big picture one in the living room, and the two smaller ones upstairs—had been broken. Jesus. Jesus Christ! Shattered glass crusted my lawn like frost. I freed myself from the car and raced to the front door. Jesus Christ! The windows were all broken. The windows here were all broken, and I am forever frozen in this year, trapped in a moment that just refuses to move forward.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Several of these stories have appeared previously (sometimes in slightly different forms) in literary journals across Canada and in the United States: “Going Soft through Luxury” in PRISM international (Winter 2013); “The Rock Garden” in Pottersfield Portfolio (December 2002); “The Man Room” in The New Quarterly (Fall 2013); “Advocate in Absentia” in Another Toronto Quarterly (Fall 2003); “Invasion Complex” in paperplates (January 2009); “Malware” in The Subtopian (March 2013); “The Fantasy” in The Antigonish Review (Winter 2014); and “Snoop” in Pithead Chapel (March 2013). Thanks to all the editors who accepted them. Especial thanks to Anna Ling Kaye at PRISM, who was the most engaged fiction editor I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.

  I owe a huge thanks to my wife, Rebecca Rosenblum, to whom this book is dedicated, for reading several of these pieces in draft and bringing her incredible knowledge of the short story form to bear on them. A handful of stories here are a decade old or more, and I also want to thank their first readers who helped me with them over the years: Art Moore, Trevor J. Adams, Nathan Dueck, David Foster. I’m sure there are others. Thank you all.

  Finally, thanks to Chris Needham and his team at Now Or Never Publishing for their rapid-fire enthusiasm for the ­manuscript.