What Comes Next

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “Well, what do you want to be, Christopher? A mathematician?”

  “A good history student,” he said fiercely. And Parks, taking it as a joke, laughed alone.

  There were times, teaching a class, when he had the feeling that he would never be able to get through to the end. He had that feeling now—the sense that things were out of his control—though he knew he could end the session at any time if he had to, if there were no other way.

  “I suppose you’re worried about going into the Army,” Parks said, the subject bringing itself up. He envisioned him, under fire, forced to kill to defend himself, corrupted.

  “That’s right.”

  “Is there any way you can avoid it?”

  “Do I want to avoid it?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “It’s one of the fundamental racial experiences of my generation,” he said in a dry voice, smiling to himself, his mouth bitter.

  “You’re kidding me, aren’t you?” Curt knew from having looked at his record that the boy had quit ROTC after two years.

  He stared at his teacher in outrage, his eyes like the points of knives. “Why do you ask me things if you don’t believe what I tell you?”

  Off guard, Curt apologized. He assumed, he said, getting up, walking around, that no one who was sensitive and intelligent wanted to go into the military, especially when an unjust war was being prosecuted.

  Steiner smiled unexpectedly, like something cracking open, his eyes overbright, his hands tense, clasped. “There’s no way of avoiding the unavoidable.”

  “Maybe not,” Curt said, “but there’s something to be said for trying.”

  “There’s something to be said for everything, but it’s only words. I don’t trust words, Mr. Parks.”

  “I don’t trust wars, Mr. Steiner,” he said gently.

  Unable to stop, Curt spent the rest of the hour talking about his Army experiences, embellishing where memory failed. Events long forgotten came back to him once he started in to talk. Humiliations he suffered. The gnawing dullness of so much of it. His refusal, which enraged his father, to go into OCS. He had been an EM, a fuck-up, a Pfc after two years of service. He was telling him about a command inspection he had stood in the field, a comic affair though nightmarish—a drawn-out hassle about which way tent pegs ought to be pointing in a field display—when the bell sounded, ending the hour. The story, incompleted, saddened him. It was as if he had lost something of himself, left it behind.

  After he had gone, Parks felt sick, his mouth sour with the aftertaste of himself. In a few minutes it passed and he felt better, elated with his possibilities. Something had happened between them, some flash of trust—a beginning. He rode all week on his sense of things, a cavalry officer leading a charge on a hobbyhorse, looking forward to their next meeting, fleeing the devils of his past failures.

  Their second conference (if conference it was) was a thoroughgoing failure, his student more laconic than ever. Trusting to instinct, Parks had started badly. He suggested as delicately as he could that Christopher (calling him “Chris”) call him by his first name. The boy made a face, said he didn’t see the point. In his father’s voice—it came out that way sometimes—Parks said he didn’t care whether he saw the point or not, he was to call him Curt. “Curt,” he said, looking at his feet, and after that hardly said a word. It was like talking to a wax image, or worse—a mechanical man, trained just off center to the forms of polite response. No matter what Curt said or did, no matter how outrageous, he couldn’t get him to react. At one point he suggested that assassination ought to be the inalienable right of every citizen in a democracy, and the student, as if the idea were reasonable, said he would have to think about it.

  “Have you ever read anything your father’s written?” Curt asked him.

  Christopher shrugged, looked blindly ahead.

  “Have you?”

  “He’s very good. I can’t understand a word of it.”

  “Maybe he’s not as good as you think.”

  The face blank. “Maybe not.”

  “He’s going to die, you know,” Curt said. “He’s human like the rest of us.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’m not his father.”

  The hour was spent again in Parks’s telling him about his own life, a gesture of trust, a subject close to his heart. He started with the Army, and once started, branched off into other matters—his childhood, his marriage, his problems with his father. He had enough restraint, he thought, not to let it get too personal. It was a relief when the hour ended, and the boy, muttering something, bolted.

  In a fierce mood, Parks wandered the length of his office—cursed his student, the war, the college, the sterile life he had committed himself to. Anger made him lecherous and he had to sit down, embarrassed to go out into the hall, until his heat cooled. He thought of the war, its pointless brutality (children being burned alive by our bombs), its violence supported by men like his father. He thought of the women he had loved, of how few there were, regretting lost opportunity. Though he didn’t want to think of it, his failure with Christopher came to mind, how badly he had handled the situation—his own clumsiness to blame for the student’s misunderstanding him. Parks saw his choice as doing more of the same, trying to win Steiner’s trust and increasing his contempt, or teaching him American history, which was better than nothing. He decided to make their next meeting a history lesson. That settled, he went home looking beaten, which gave Carolyn the sense of having done something she hadn’t done. It depressed her to see him hurt by someone else.

  He was writing a letter to the President in protest of the war, when Miss Byrd, from his History as Literature course (his one elective), came in without knocking. The student, almost beautiful in certain moods of light, had been in to see him in the beginning of the term to complain about the nature of the course. Her point: the more history was literature, the less it was history. He agreed with her in part, he had said. The course was conceived by someone else—the man on a grant to Greece—but the readings, whether history or literature or both, were generally exciting. After arguing pointlessly with him for an hour, she had said, though no one had asked her, that she would stay in the course and withhold judgment.

  She was wearing an off-white dress with two thick red stripes like hoops above the knee. If she weren’t so attractive—it gave him pleasure in class just to look at her—he would in his present mood have asked her to leave. He settled for offering her fifteen minutes of his attention. She said she would try to make it do. What she had to say, finding it hard to begin (Curt breathing her perfume), was that she disagreed with almost everything he said, though she enjoyed the class anyway, which must mean—she had arrived at that conclusion—that he was an especially good teacher. “I’m glad I decided to stay,” she whispered, getting up as if—had he imagined it?—she were offering her face to be kissed. “Are you still withholding judgment?” he started to say, but she was gone, taking five unused minutes with her. He watched the door to his office close, her shape (Miss Byrd about five foot eight) sitting on his horizon like the skyline. The next day she was back. He told her that he had a tutorial student coming in about an hour and that as much as he’d like to talk, they would have to make it another time. She asked shyly if she might sit in a corner of his office and read; she’d be so quiet he wouldn’t know she was there. Though it was an unusual request, he didn’t see why not. She understood, of course, he said, that she would have to go as soon as his student arrived.

  She understood, she told him, more than he dreamed she understood. In ten minutes she was up, moving toward the door. “You don’t have to go yet,” he said, not looking up. (He had been preparing a statement against American involvement in the war, unable to concentrate, drawing figures of rockets instead.) “I can’t read with you here,” she said and, so quiet he hardly knew she was going, left.

  My God, he thought when her remark had sunk in, what am I getting into? His sense
of her, a large, sensuous girl with marvelous sad eyes, faded into air as he waited tensely, planning his strategy, for Steiner’s arrival.

  He didn’t arrive. It was twenty after the hour before Curt was willing to concede defeat. And then he sat another twenty minutes, like someone unable to wake from a bad dream. If he couldn’t be of use to the best student he had ever had, he was no teacher. If not teacher, what was he? Husband? Father? Second-rate at both. Historian? Not so you’d notice. To ease his conscience, he wrote a check for twenty-five dollars—he had intended at most ten—to a fund for War Orphans of American Bombing. After the check was sent, his conscience still ached like a bad tooth. He suspected that the group was a fraud and his money was being used for more bombs.

  He spent a day negotiating two and a half pages of his dissertation and decided he still wasn’t ready. When Carolyn asked over dinner if his student had done anything notable yet, like a definitive history of history teaching, he told her to go fuck herself. “The way you’ve been performing in the past month,” she said blandly, “I may have to.” He told her to get out of his sight and to his surprise she left the table in tears. At a loss, Curt consoled his daughter, Jacqueline, who at fourteen months looked extraordinarily like her father, rocking her in his arms, while his wife, in another room, cried.

  It wasn’t as if he expected him to be there for their next meeting—the student had made no effort to get in touch or explain himself—though he was disappointed again. Years back, when he refused to go into OCS, his father, like a doctor making a diagnosis, said he would never amount to anything. Whatever else he accomplished, he wanted to be a better man than his father—wiser, more loving, of greater use in the world—and wanted the old man to see it and take back his words. At the same time, he suspected, no matter what he did, it would make no difference to his father. The failure his father recognized in him was in the blood. Some of us know what it’s about, Curt would have said to the student if he were there. Not all of us are against you. Against the dictates of pride, he decided to seek him out and ask him to come back. Then a curious thing happened.

  It was on a Saturday. He was leaving the Forty-second Street library to get some lunch when he heard a commotion behind him on the steps. Some harridan, obviously mad, was shrieking at a young man who was standing, hands in pockets, looking away. A crowd had gathered. Despite himself, Curt looked on, a dozen people or so blocking his view. The woman was pounding the fellow with her purse (only in America, he thought—a piece of the madness of the times), screaming at him something that sounded like “You filth, you filth.” The crowd looked on—no one moving—as if transfixed. What was surprising was not that the woman was hitting the kid—New York was full of mad people—but that the kid was standing there letting her beat him. Why didn’t he just walk away? Why didn’t someone in the crowd restrain her? He looked around for a cop but there was none in sight, though minutes before he had seen two talking together at the foot of the steps. The hag was pounding the boy with a large plastic purse, swinging her arm viciously as if she would kill him if she could. Violence upset him; he wanted to run, but saw it his duty to do something. “Hey,” he yelled to the boy, “move away.” Someone grabbed the woman. The boy turned toward him, impassive, scowling. It was the student. Curt waved. “Wait.” “Filth,” the woman was muttering as he went past, a man and a woman restraining her. “He’s what you want.” When he got to where he was, he wasn’t. Had it been Christopher? If so, why had he stood still before and run when Curt approached? And what was he doing, not interested in words, on the steps of the library?

  The following Monday—the last week of school before Christmas vacation—Curt returned from class to find him, in jacket and tie, his hair windblown, waiting for him outside his office. He was breathing heavily, his face flushed, as if he had been running hard. Away or toward? he wondered. It was enough that he had returned. Curt invited him in.

  They sat silently for a moment, each waiting for the other. The student put his hand inside his jacket, and for a bad moment Parks imagined him pulling out a gun. So that’s how he would be repaid. It was a notebook (withdrawn like a weapon). Rushing the words out in his hoarse voice, he wanted to know, he said, bright-eyed as if feverish, how the historian evaluates conflicting evidence.

  Curt sensed that he had come for something else—the madwoman’s purse flapped in his mind like a vulture’s wing—but decided to answer what was asked. History came first. Trust. He wrote frenetically in his notebook as Parks lectured, intent, it seemed, head down, on getting every word. When he asked questions, some were surprisingly naïve, some unanswerable. Was he putting him on? He was more limited than he suspected, concerned more with what he felt than with fact. “You rely too much on instinct,” Curt told him. “If you didn’t begin with the facts, how can your conclusions have any validity?” He expected an argument but he merely wrote it down in his notebook. “You don’t ignore the givens in a math problem, do you? Do you? I thought you were a mathematician.”

  “A math student.”

  With his colleagues, literal men, Parks tended to argue that history was metaphor. But when an outsider treated his discipline as if it were without hard rules, its truths equally accessible to all, he would rise patriotically to the defense of his profession. He lectured the math student for an hour and a half, carried away by rhetoric, intoxicated. When he was done—the student either stunned into silence or convinced—he knew himself for a liar. How hard it was, he was continually discovering, to tell even approximately the truth.

  The student said that he would like to come back on Friday if he could, though offered no explanation for the weeks he had missed.

  “I’ll see you on Friday,” Curt said, resisting disenchantment, handing his student the reading list he had worked out for him. “If you can’t make the conference, would you call me?”

  He said he would, hung on. “I want to thank you, Mr. Parks, for …”

  Curt nodded. The boy left, his sentence unfinished. “It was nothing,” he said silently to the empty office, and was sorry he didn’t ask him, if he had been the one, why he had let the madwoman beat him on the library steps without defending himself.

  He noticed that there was something red on the corner of his desk—not an eraser, which was his first idea. It was the head of a rose, its petals mostly gone, badly crushed as if someone had squeezed it in his hand. Was it meant as some kind of gift? He picked it up gingerly, as if it hid a bee, and threw it in his wastebasket. It was still warm. A mutilated rose for the teacher—the idea upset him.

  Carolyn, in a rare gesture for her, suggested that he bring his student home for dinner sometime. If well meant, it was badly timed. Suspicious, Curt said he would think about it. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a son,” she said. “You’re a man who needs a son.” He cried in her arms that night, too tired to make love, dreaming of a son.

  On Friday, his office door left open, Rosemary Byrd revisited him. She was wearing a black jumper with a silver pin of a snake (its eye gold) above her right breast. Without perfume, her hair in a severe bun, she looked older, as if crisis or sickness had aged her.

  “I know,” she said miserably. “You’re expecting your tutorial student at any minute.”

  He said, moved by her sadness, that they could talk until he came, his student due unfortunately in five minutes.

  “I wrote you a letter,” she said, sitting down tentatively on the chair next to his desk.

  “What kind of letter?” He glanced at the open door to see if he was waiting; the hall empty.

  Rosemary shook her head, reached into her shoulder bag, came out empty-handed. “I’m terribly embarrassed,” she said. “I know I’m behaving like a child.”

  “I’m embarrassed, too,” he admitted.

  Rosemary sat with her hands covering her face.

  He suspected what was wrong but didn’t know what to say or what he wanted.

  Studying the girl, he had the sensation of being wa
tched—someone at the door—though when he looked up there was no one.

  His nervousness about the time made it hard for him to attend to Miss Byrd, who was, her face uncovered, smiling at him.

  “How many children do you have?” she was asking.

  “Two” came to mind but, in fact, he remembered, it was, “One. A girl.”

  Rosemary nodded. “I had a dream,” she said, “in which you were my father. You took me to the movies.” She laughed and the snake danced on her breast.

  “I’m flattered,” he said, distracted, wondering if, seeing Miss Byrd in his seat, Christopher had come and gone.

  “I just want you to know,” she said, getting up, “that I won’t make things difficult for you.”

  Curt offered to take her for coffee at the end of the day.

  She said no, she had to run, not moving. “Have a marvelous Christmas.” He wished her the same. She touched his shoulder wistfully and was gone.

  He waited another hour with burgeoning anger. “If I were his father,” he said to himself, “I’d spank the piss out of the son of a bitch.” Then went home.

  Two days later, his phone rang after midnight and when he answered, disturbed at so late a call, no one answered. He put it down to a wrong number, but the same thing happened the next night. “Who was it?” Carolyn asked in her suspicious voice. He said no one. “How sad,” she said, pulling the covers over her head, “that no one calls.”

  The next night, about the same time, no one, who was someone, called again. Curt raged into the phone, threatened the police if the calls continued. It could have been anyone, conceivably even a stranger who had picked his name at random, but he strongly suspected, not knowing which, one of the two of them.

  The phone calls stopped, though not his wife’s suspicions. “I’m glad she has the decency not to call anymore.”

  “How do you know it’s a woman?” he asked.

  “It’s the kind of thing a woman would do,” she said, as if she knew. If not wholly convinced—he trusted Carolyn in such matters—Curt leaned toward Rosemary Byrd as the caller, and though she was not there to know or defend herself, offered his forgiveness. The calls harder on her than on them. The mystery of the other troubled him more.