by David Bergen
He said, “You can choose. I choose you. What do you choose?”
“Aww, Mason.” She let go of his toe and pulled him onto the bed with her and held his head to her chest. Mason closed his eyes and opened them again. Lena’s rib cage moved up and down with her ragged breath.
“This is nice,” he said, his voice muffled.
Lena let him go and he was aware of her cheek, her hair, and her ear. Neither spoke. For a long time they touched each other’s faces. Once, Mason slipped a hand inside her top but Lena said, “No,” and Mason said, “Okay.”
Later, he walked her up to the corner by the steak house and they sat on the curb by the parking lot and they shared a cigarette. They said goodbye then, standing on the sidewalk. Mason had his hands in his pockets. Lena put her arm around his neck and tipped her forehead in against his shoulder.
“Sorry,” she said.
Ms. Abendschade’s pregnancy began to show. She wore longer and looser tops, though once, when she reached upwards to retrieve the string on the overhead screen, her belly flashed briefly and Mason saw the slight roundness near her navel and then it disappeared. She was suddenly less grumpy. Crime and Punishment was drawing to a close and the last unit of the year would be poetry, though she warned the students that it was like eating a strong cheese, you had to acquire a taste.
One afternoon, walking home from school, Mason saw Ms. Abendschade. They were both cutting through the grounds of St. Mary’s and when she called out to him he stopped and waited for her. It was raining, a fine drizzle, and she carried her briefcase in her left hand, and with her right she clutched an umbrella. They walked on, side by side, and she tilted the umbrella upwards to protect half of Mason’s head. She said, “I see you trespassing every day, along this path. How are you this afternoon?”
He said he was fine. He could have held out his hand to capture her breath.
“Good. Good. It’s strange that I see you in the first class and then not at all for the rest of the day. The school’s too big. I don’t want to swell your swainish head but your class is definitely the highlight of my day. Not that your marks are great.” She smiled. He noticed her teeth and tongue, her earlobe, and heard the rain hitting the umbrella. “But marks are so arbitrary, so necessary, which is unfortunate.”
Mason said that most teachers loved marks, all those graphs and missed assignments and the median and the mean. Very black-and-white. They had reached the edge of the Academy grounds.
“Where are you going?” Ms. Abendschade asked.
Mason looked about. He said he was going up to the library, though this was not true and had just now entered his mind as an option because he knew that Ms. Abendschade lived in the Gates and the library was at the edge of the Gates and this would give him five more minutes beside her, listening to her voice rise into the afternoon air.
“Walk with me then,” she said, and they crossed over the bridge and Mason waited for her to say something but she didn’t and it was only when they arrived at the library that she said, “I heard about Lena Schellendal. I know you were her friend and I was wondering how she was.”
They had stopped walking. She turned to face Mason. Up close like this Mason saw that her cheeks were rounder.
“She wasn’t going to jump,” Mason said. “I know guys who sit up there for fun.”
“I don’t know what she was going to do,” Ms. Abendschade said. “I just heard the other day and I was shocked. Lena Schellendal was a lovely girl. So bright.”
“She didn’t die.”
“Oh, of course not.” She touched Mason’s hand briefly. “Have you seen her?”
“Yes. A few times,” Mason said. “She says she’s better.” The rain was running off the umbrella and hitting his back but he ignored it. Ms. Abendschade’s stomach was a few inches from his body. Her breath mingled with his. She waved a hand out at the rain as if attempting to catch a few drops. She said, “Come to my apartment for a bit. It’s just down the street in the Gates and it’s wet out here. Would you like that?”
Mason said he’d be glad to come. Visions of drinks and a fireside chat about Joyce and Eliot while Ms. Abendschade touched her collarbone with a red nail, the trace of the lace of her bra, and, “So, Mason,” she would say. “Sweet boy.” They walked down the sidewalk to a large brick house and Ms. Abendschade showed him up the stairs to the third floor where he removed his shoes and jacket and stepped into an open space that was kitchen and bedroom and living room and den and against the far wall sat a piano and at the piano sat a tall longhaired man, fingers poised over the keys. Ms. Abendschade called out merrily to him that she had brought home a student, Mason Crowe, and she turned to Mason and said, “Meet my husband, Richard.”
Richard came over and shook Mason’s hand and said, “Hello, Mason, Liliane’s talked about you.” Mason had failed to fit his whole hand into Richard’s and so the handshake was weak and sloppy and this bothered Mason.
Ms. Abendschade said, “I always talk about my favourite students.” Richard kissed his wife on the cheek and lightly touched her stomach, just below her breasts. He whispered a few words in her ear and then excused himself and put on his shoes and jacket and left the apartment. Mason watched him go and heard Ms. Abendschade say that Richard played piano in lounges late at night and so he slept in till noon and they usually saw each other at dinner.
She crossed the hardwood floor and set a pot of milk on the stove. The large window of the apartment looked out across the river and Mason stood at the window and through the clearing in the trees he could see Aldous’s apartment, over on Wellington, rising above all the others. He counted up twelve and thought he saw his mother standing by the window, holding a glass of something, and though he could not be sure it did seem possible; and this possibility, the fact that he was here and she was there at this moment, struck him as strange, and he said to Ms. Abendschade, “My mother lives over there. She lives with a man called Aldous Schmidt. A man who she fell in love with.”
Ms. Abendschade joined him at the window. Mason pointed and Ms. Abendschade said, “Not your father, then.”
“She left my father.”
“Ohh. And your father, do you still live with him?”
Mason said that he did, though he sometimes visited his mother and her boyfriend. “Aldous is rich,” Mason said. “My mother likes that.”
Ms. Abendschade stepped away from window and walked over to the sink. Mason moved around the apartment, looking at the books and CDs, and the photographs that hung, framed, on the wall. There were many shots of Ms. Abendschade and her husband. In most of them Ms. Abendschade looked cheerful but in several she seemed pensive, almost unhappy, and he wondered about this. Ms. Abendschade called out to him and they sat at the kitchen table and drank hot chocolate. Ms. Abendschade poured cream into hers, stirred it with a spoon. She talked about Lena Schellendal again. She said she knew that Lena and Mason had been good friends. “Are you still?” she asked. Then she said, as if protecting him, “You don’t have to answer.”
“No, it’s okay. I think we’re friends, though I’m not sure. She’s mixed-up these days.”
“What do you mean? You’re not sure about her, or you’re not sure about yourself?”
“Both, I guess. I don’t know. You don’t want to hear about it.”
“I don’t mind. I wouldn’t ask, otherwise. I’m not so old that I don’t remember those tortured days of high school.” She lifted her mug and drank and Mason was aware of her forehead and her dark eyes above the rim of her mug. She continued, “I teach Lena’s sister, Rosemary. She’s very bright, too. She doesn’t have the same confidence that I saw in Lena when I taught her, but Rosemary sees things all in one swoop.”
Mason looked at Ms. Abendschade.
Liliane.
Her hands were perfect.
She had a mole by her left eye.
She said that what she remembered about Lena Schellendal, and she didn’t want this to sound like a eulogy or anything,
she knew that Lena was very much alive and fine, but what she remembered was her wish to be seen. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. We all want to be seen. It’s just that some people not only want to be seen, they want to be recognized. They’re afraid of anonymity. Is this too harsh?”
Mason shook his head.
As if passing a blessing over the drinks, she lifted a hand and she said, “Oh, I have something,” and she stood and walked over to the bookshelf by the window. Mason watched her, saw her heels flashing. Her movements, everything about her, even the manner in which she approached a basic object like a bookshelf, exhibited boldness and certainty. She slipped a book from the shelf and walked back and handed it to Mason and said, “This is for you. I’ve often thought that you should have this, but I’ve never managed to get it to you. So here it is, finally. All writers should read it.”
It was Letters to a Young Poet. Mason turned it over and read the back and then said, “I have nothing for you.” As soon as he spoke he recognized how foolish this sounded but Ms. Abendschade seemed not to think so because she said that a gift was not given in expectation of getting something in return, a gift was simply that, a gift.
They talked some more of school and of books and Mason wanted to tell her how lucky he felt to be in her class and how he loved it when she talked about longing and regret and described the girl swinging her hair like a rope, and he wanted to ask her questions about Lena, about what Lena Schellendal might want from him and what he, Mason, should do about her, but he said none of this, and when he left her house he ended up at home by himself searching through the dictionary for the word swainish.
One Tuesday afternoon in June, as the light poured in through the south-facing windows, Mason asked Mr. Ferry about Rilke. Mr. Ferry lifted his head, as he always did when considering a question, and he said that Rilke was a melancholy boy whose mother dressed him as a girl. When he was nineteen he had an affair with a very cultured older woman who exposed him, among other things, to a Russian sentimentality that would lead to a religious vision for his poetry. Mr. Ferry paused and then he said that these days Rilke was particularly appreciated by university students, human beings who saw the world as full of opportunity and hope. “Like you, Mason.”
Mason wondered how old the woman was that Rilke loved.
Mr. Ferry said, “I don’t know if he loved her. That’s another thing entirely. She was a libertine in her early thirties and her name was Salome and I have read that she was friends with Nietzsche and Freud.” Then he said that he had a young woman, almost six feet tall, who was reading to him on Saturdays. “Her name is Cory. She studies philosophy and is very incisive and likes to argue. She took one of my books. Unamuno. But that’s okay, I like the idea of her holding my book. And perhaps she will return it and it will carry her scent. She is nineteen. Almost too old. Do you know why Socrates loved the young? Because they smelled of eternity. Hah.” He folded his hands in his lap.17
The calico cat, Minnie, appeared in the doorway, crossed the room and rubbed against Mr. Ferry’s legs, and then disappeared. The book Mason held was a collection of letters from one obscure writer to another. When Mr. Ferry had handed him the book the previous week, they had covered, as they did every time Mason arrived, the news of the past few days. This took the form of Mr. Ferry asking questions and Mason answering. Over the year, Mason had revealed the skeleton of his life to Mr. Ferry: his mother and father; his mother’s German lover; Danny leaving for Montreal; Lena’s despair. Those were the larger moments. The smaller details, the secrets, he kept to himself. Not that Mr. Ferry didn’t ask. When they talked about Lena, for example, he prodded Mason and asked him about Lena’s voice, was it happy at the moment when she had told him, “I don’t want to see you any more,” or when she had met him in the street. How did he feel, talking to a girl who still, but might not have, existed. “Was that strange?” Mason didn’t answer all of these questions. He felt that there was something perverted about Mr. Ferry, as if he got off on second-hand stories and the sadness of others. Once, when Mason had mentioned to him, without intending to, that the summer before he had sat in a café and watched Lena walk to and from voice lessons, Mr. Ferry had turned excitedly and he had said, “Is that true? That’s quite interesting.” And then he paused and moved his head from side to side and he made a noise inside his throat and said, again, “Interesting.”
When Mr. Ferry had first handed the book of letters to Mason, he said, “I’ve always thought that letter-writing was a skill, an art that will one day be looked upon as arcane and eccentric. Oh, I know you kids have chat rooms and e-mail and there’s the immediacy of the phone, but writing letters is a lot of hard work and it’s that hard work that makes them so special. They are intimate and full of useless detail. They go in circles. They beg for a response that is more than a few lines. You can draw pictures within the text of the letters. You can meander. They aren’t just about information. Do you ever write letters to Lena?”
“She writes me notes,” Mason said.
“That sounds like a beginning. Have you ever thought of sending her your poetry?”
“I showed her a few poems. But not any more. I don’t think she likes my writing.”
Mr. Ferry said that he had to feel something when he read a poem. There was no exact formula. He said that memory was involved, and experience, and language.
That had been the previous week. This week Mason confessed to Mr. Ferry that he had written a poem and that he had it with him. “It’s called ‘The Case of Lena S.’ ”
“Good, good, read it,” Mr. Ferry said, and Mason, surprising himself, took the poem from his pocket and read.
In the street you come and go
Watching and
Wishing to be that woman in the grey dress
Or that girl on the black bicycle
Who carries a tennis racquet and swings her hair like a rope
Your reflection in the window
And beyond
Your lover sitting with
That girl on the black bicycle
Swinging your hair like a rope.
There was a silence and then Mr. Ferry said, “Well.” He tapped his knee with one hand and said, “I like the hair and the rope. I like the ‘you.’ ”
Mason was pleased enough with this response and that night, at home, he read the poem to Danny.
“That’s a piece of shit,” Danny said. “Okay, maybe the first line is nice but it’s lifted out of T. S. Eliot, and so plagiarism gets you an F. Anyways, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“About Lena.”
“Yeah, yeah, but what if I don’t know Lena? What if she’s just a name?”
“I didn’t write this for other people. It’s for Lena.”
“She’ll be very happy to know that.”
Mason took the poem and threw it in the garbage. The next time he saw Mr. Ferry he said that he had changed the poem because his brother Danny had thought the first draft was plagiarized.
“That’s interesting that you should believe him. He’s not the poet, you are.”
“Yes, but he can be pretty convincing.”
“Read the new version. Let’s hear it.”
So, Mason read.
Swings her hair
Delighted to be seen
Vain neck
The hollows at her shoulders
When Mason was finished Mr. Ferry nodded his head and said that Mason had read the poem too quickly. He took a drink from the wine glass on his side table. Mason said that it was, he knew, a completely different poem and a lot vaguer and he wasn’t sure if even Lena would understand what it was about. “It’s pretty,” he said. “That’s about it.”
“Nothing wrong with pretty,” Mr. Ferry said. “And it’s not vaguer. You can draw the poem. I figure if you can draw the poem then it’s doing a job.” Then he asked, as if tired of indulging Mason, if Lena was going to come for a visit.
“I don’t know. She could, if I asked
her.”
“Do that, ask her. Ask her if she wants to go to a movie. We’ll all go. It’ll be my treat.”
Mason didn’t think this was a great idea. He’d recently gone to a movie with Mr. Ferry, The Deep End, and he had spent the two hours muttering in the old man’s ear, describing the images. Besides, the people around them had been fed up with the talking, even though Mason had tried to whisper. The movie had gone by in a blur and Mr. Ferry had been grumpy and demanding. “Talk to me, Mason,” he had said. “What does she look like?” “She’s blonde.” “Short or long?” “Mid-length. It looks almost dirty. Greasy.” “What’s she wearing?” “A skirt. No, a dress. Red.”
Then the scene had shifted, and on the descriptions went, and in the end Mr. Ferry had done amazingly well. He had kept up with the nuances and had understood when the woman seemed to be falling in love with the younger man. “She likes him,” Mr. Ferry whispered. “She’s getting dressed up a lot more.”
After that experience Mason had avoided taking Mr. Ferry to the movies, and to go with Lena would be even more difficult. He’d have two people to care for and Mr. Ferry would be sitting there, clutching his cane and swinging his head, calling out for the two of them to explain the film to him.
“Lena is unpredictable these days,” Mason said. He paused, aware that he was crossing into a dangerous space. “About two months ago she saw me sitting in a restaurant with Sadia Chahal. She walked by and looked in and there we were, the two of us. And, at that moment, everything changed. I was talking to Sadia, and then Lena showed up and immediately I wanted to be out on the street with her. I realized later that she probably wanted me to want that. She knew I was there, she followed me, and she was forcing me to think certain thoughts. You see how twisted it gets?”
Mr. Ferry spoke softly: “ ‘Here I sat and waited; here it was I nourished my love with the longing and refreshed it with the sight. My eye could take in the street and the sidewalk on the other side where she walked. Oh, what a beautiful time.’ ” He paused and offered one palm to the ceiling, and the oddity of the words and the upraised hand made Mason feel exposed and strange. Mr. Ferry said, “You watched Lena. Kierkegaard watched Regine. Phaedria watched the cither player. That is a fact.” His mouth worked silently, and then he said, “Lena.” And he smiled.
