The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Actually, it seems we began imitating each other,” he said.

  There was a shriek outside the classroom, followed by giggles. Joan looked up to see Olivia and a friend standing at the studio door. Her niece looked surprised—and not particularly pleased—to find another member of the family at her school.

  Joan decided there wasn’t any way to avoid embarrassing her. “Hi Olivia,” she said. “I just came to see Mr. Yuan for a moment. I was hoping I’d run into you.”

  Olivia stared at her fingernails, but gave way to her training. “Um, Aunt Joan, this is my friend Emily. Emily, my Aunt Joan.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Emily said, bored.

  Olivia turned to her teacher. “Mom wants me to ask when you’re going to be done so she can drive you home.”

  “I’m ready now,” he said, to Joan’s disappointment.

  “Maybe we could set up another time?” she began, but Yuan Zhao was watching Emily, who had wandered to the opposite end of the room. The other girl was still working quietly, wearing her headphones.

  “Hi June!” Emily said suddenly. “What’re you doing?”

  “She can’t hear you.” Olivia seemed eager to leave the classroom. “I’m going to get my mom now, OK?”

  “Don’t hurry her,” Joan said.

  “June!” Emily shouted.

  June finally took off her headphones and turned around. She was of Chinese descent: perhaps that explained the dissident’s interest. Or it might be that he was simply supporting the underdog. Olivia’s friend was clearly one of St. Anselm’s social elite, while the other student—with her after-school project, her headphones, and her red-and-white-striped knee socks—was probably not.

  “I just wondered what you were working on.” Emily pointed one toe in front of her, tracing an invisible line on the linoleum.

  “I’m making a net,” June said, and indeed there was a heap of netting trailing underneath her stool.

  “Come on,” said Olivia. “We’re going to be late to rehearsal.”

  But Emily ignored her. “A net for what?”

  “It isn’t for anything,” June said, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice. Joan felt sorry for her. She remembered girls like Emily and the power they wielded: an instinctual, particularly adolescent kind of dominance.

  “You are so avant-garde,” Emily said. “Isn’t June avant-garde?”

  Olivia was twisting her hair nervous ly around her index finger. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Mr. Yuan seemed to want to rescue June. He turned suddenly to her tormenter: “Emily, Ms. Travers might like to see an example of our classwork. Would you please show her your Color and Design series?”

  Emily gave her teacher a sullen smirk. “I don’t have them.”

  “That’s too bad.” Mr. Yuan turned to Joan: “Emily has made a good beginning with acrylics.”

  “I love those paintings,” Olivia gushed. “Did you leave them at home?”

  Emily shook her head.

  “I hope you haven’t misplaced them,” Mr. Yuan said.

  “I threw them out,” Emily said.

  Olivia gasped.

  Emily smiled: “I decided they sucked.”

  “They were very good,” Mr. Yuan said. “Your best work so far.”

  Joan had her first twinge of sympathy for Emily. She’d been in that position herself: having a friend or editor tell her something was good when she knew in her heart it was junk.

  June put down her net. “You mean you’re not using them, or you threw them away?”

  “I burned them.”

  “You did not,” Olivia exclaimed.

  Emily nodded. “Last weekend, in Lake Tahoe. Our condo has a fireplace.” She turned to June. “What do you think? You think I should’ve kept them?”

  June was gathering up her things, and didn’t respond.

  Emily smiled. “See? June thought they were bad.”

  June slid off her stool, and started toward the door. Then she looked at Emily, and seemed to consider. “They weren’t bad. They weren’t great, but at least they were better than your other stuff.”

  For a moment Emily looked startled. She opened her mouth, as if she were going to return the insult, but just as suddenly she seemed to change her mind. She turned to her teacher: “See,” she said calmly. “I’m not a good artist. Thank goodness June isn’t afraid to tell me.” Then she linked her arm through Olivia’s and exited the classroom, calling over her shoulder with exaggerated coyness: “Bye, Mr. Yuan.”

  “You may stay,” Mr. Yuan told June—he almost seemed to be imploring her—but the girl hurried from the room without acknowledging them. The dissident watched her go with concern.

  “Don’t worry,” Joan said. “Teenage girls are like that. It’s when they aren’t difficult that you have to worry.”

  It didn’t seem to reassure him. If he was going to get worked up about a quarrel between two students, he wouldn’t last long at a girls’ high school. Joan thought it might be better for him to focus on his own work anyway; frankly, she thought St. Anselm’s was a waste of his time.

  “I’d love to see what you’re working on now,” she told him. “Do you think I could stop by some time?”

  “I am not very far along yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Joan said, getting up to go. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  They shook hands, but the dissident was clearly distracted. He seemed to take the girl’s disregard personally. When Joan looked back, he was still sitting there, looking small and young himself behind the massive teacher’s desk.

  37.

  I CAME INTO THE CLASSROOM ONE AFTERNOON TO FIND MY STUDENTS deeply engaged in their work. Jenna (“Mountains”) was arranging photographs from a family ski vacation on black posterboard; Holly (“Outer Space”) was working on an oil painting of Laika, the Russian space dog, copied from National Geographic, while Katie (“French Things”) had begun a series of fashion designs.

  “What are those?” Kate asked.

  “Culottes,” Katie replied. I did not recognize the word, but from the horrified murmurs around me, I imagined them to be a sort of medieval torture device.

  “Not regular culottes,” Katie insisted. “Cool ones. Hey! Cool-lottes.”

  Emily lifted and lowered her eyes; Katie blushed a burnt sienna. Emily was sitting in the brightest corner of the room, sketching a winter landscape in colored pencil. On a stool facing her, perched at a respectful distance, Catherine was making a charcoal portrait, adjusting her pad to compensate for Emily’s frequent sighs, yawns, and shifts of position. With her freckles and kinky red hair, her invisible yellow lashes and unwieldy breasts (breasts were discussed in my class with startling frequency), Catherine was never going to look like any of the women in Katie’s fashion designs. Nor did she seem to have any artistic enthusiasm. It was clear even to me that Catherine had joined our class simply to be close to the other girls, a strategy that—to use an expression popular at St. Anselm’s, though not found in Idiomatic English—had turned around and bit her on the ass.

  And yet there was something compelling about this terrible drawing, designed to flatter, with every asset heightened, and each particular smoothed away. Catherine had captured (no doubt unintentionally) a certain imperious expression in her subject’s snaky green eyes: I felt as if I had seen it somewhere before. Catherine felt me staring, and looked up.

  “What are you working on?” I asked her.

  “A drawing of Emily and Jake.”

  “What does that have to do with your theme?” (I checked the board surreptitiously; I often had trouble remembering which girl went with which topic.)

  “Love.”

  “That’s your theme, but…”

  “She’s doing a picture of me and my boyfriend,” Emily said. “His name is Jake. He goes to Choate, and he’s only here in the summer, so I have no idea how she’s going to draw his half of the picture.”

  Catherine’s voice,
normally quiet, became almost inaudible. “Maybe at Christmas break?”

  “At Christmas break we’re going skiing at Lake Tahoe.”

  The other girls murmured their admiration.

  “Just you guys?” Katie asked.

  “C’est super,” sighed Courtenay.

  Emily turned back to her work, giving Catherine a supercilious, sideways glance, and suddenly I saw the resemblance. Catherine’s portrait had almost nothing in common with its living subject, except for the position of the eyes and the head, which the artist had captured exactly. This attitude communicated the sitter’s disdain for the artist—and for me, recalled another young woman (my first imaginary lover) staring down from my former teacher’s peeling bedroom wall. For the first time in many years I remembered the majestic, imperious Violante, and from that day on, I could not help but associate her with my student, Emily Alderman.

  I hadn’t planned to give my AP artists any tasks apart from the portfolio requirements in Drawing, Sculpture, and Color and Design. On the day I found Catherine drawing Emily, however, I decided to give an assignment of my own. I went to the board and wrote in careful upper-case letters: HOMEWORK. When I turned around, three hands were waving in the air.

  “Mr. Jow?”

  “Mr. Jow?”

  “Mr. Jow!”

  “Katie?”

  “We don’t get art homework in America.”

  “This shouldn’t take you very long.” Underneath HOMEWORK, I wrote: “Make something that is not art.”

  I looked back at the room to gauge their reaction, and saw that I had finally gotten June’s attention. For several days she had been sitting quietly in the corner, tying knots. She spent a great deal of time in my classroom; but no matter how many hours we were together each day, she never said more than “Hello” and “See you.” She was wearing her headphones even more often now, and I believed she was living in some private world—a world of art, separate from ours.

  Now, however, she looked up.

  “But I don’t understand the assignment.” Catherine looked nervous ly around the room.

  “I only want you to think about what isn’t art. That will help you understand what is.”

  “He means, like, Hallmark cards,” Emily said.

  “That’s greeting cards,” Katie helpfully informed me.

  “That’s a good example,” I said. “But everyone must come up with her own idea. We’ll discuss the homework in class on Monday.”

  Soon my classroom was empty except for June. Today she was wearing the yellow dress, and because it was an especially warm day, she had left the paint-spattered trousers at home. The only thing that distinguished her uniform from the others was a pair of red-and-white-striped socks, bunched around her ankles. As she worked, she kicked one tanned and shapely leg against the bottom rung of the chair. I noticed the way she brushed her hair out of her eyes every few minutes, a charming, impatient gesture, and the extra piercing at the top of her left ear, where she wore a thin gold ring.

  June must’ve felt me watching, because she looked up. I immediately frowned at my desk, where there was a stack of announcement cards for my upcoming show at UCLA. These DNA-ture paintings had been exhibited at TFAM in Taipei, and would have appeared in Beijing—at no less a venue than the Ancestral Temple of the Forbidden City—had the show not been shut down by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Still I had never seen an announcement card as lavish as the one they produced in Los Angeles, on silver metallic card stock, with a sort of double helix design looping around the text:

  Yuan Zhao: DNA-ture

  The Fowler Museum

  Co-sponsored by the Departments of Fine Arts and Asian Studies

  Opening Reception: November 22, 2000

  6–8 PM

  “Is that weird?”

  “Excuse me?” I was disoriented by the casual way June had come around to my side of the desk, and was now peering at the card over my shoulder. She smelled like handsoap, with a trace of turpentine.

  “Seeing your name like that?”

  I explained that seeing one’s own name in print is always a strange feeling, intensifying a sensation peculiar to artistic creation: that the work you have created is not your own.

  “Uh-huh,” June said. “Will we be invited?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Although you’re certainly not required to come.”

  June looked thoughtful for a moment. “If I come to your show, will you promise to come visit my grandmother?”

  “Why would I do that?” I didn’t mean to sound rude, but the request startled me.

  June was nonchalant. “She wants to make you dinner. You guys can speak Chinese and stuff.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. If parents in China invited their child’s teacher for a meal, it would almost certainly be in order to bribe them. I couldn’t imagine that this was the case with June’s grandmother, however, since I was not giving the students scores, but only preparing them to be evaluated by the AP Board. Even if I had been grading June, no art teacher could’ve given her anything less than an A.

  “I don’t think I can accept,” I said.

  June brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Why not?”

  But I couldn’t tell June the reason why not. If there was something wrong with the way I felt about her, I didn’t think going to her house would make it any better. At the same time I was very curious, and also very tempted; in a purely pedagogical spirit, I wanted to see the house hold in which such an advanced young artist had been raised.

  “Please thank your grandmother for me,” I said. “But I—”

  “One time,” June said. Her insistence surprised and, I will admit, flattered me. “I need your help with something.”

  “With what?”

  “I can’t really explain. It’s at home.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  June turned away from me, hiding her frustration. I watched as she pretended to read the assignment on the blackboard.

  “You don’t have to do that, if you don’t want,” I said. “You could just continue working on your project.”

  “I want to do it,” June said. “It’s a great assignment.”

  “Thank you,” I said shamelessly, as if I’d come up with it on my own.

  “I may need a little extra time,” June said.

  “That’s fine.” I could hear Mrs. Travers chatting with someone in the gallery outside my classroom. Over the past two months, we had developed a routine: my hostess would come upstairs when she was finished with her work in the Internship Office and pick me up. Then we would drive home together. That afternoon, for the first time, I found I was not eager to leave.

  “I mean to night,” June said. “I may need to stay a little later.”

  “I have to lock up now, unfortunately.”

  “Why don’t you just leave me the key?” June suggested.

  The vice principal had drummed into me the importance of keeping my keys on my person at all times. Theft was not unheard of, and there were liability issues if a student were to injure herself on school property after hours.

  “I get here early because my neighbor drives me before work,” June encouraged me. “I could open the classroom in the morning and leave the key on your desk.”

  From childhood I have always been the kind of person who obeys the rules, both stated and implied; even in university, I was usually the one chosen to petition the administration in the repeated and futile bids for improvements in our dormitories. When I started spending my evenings and weekends in the East Village, my cousin would sometimes ask me to talk with his neighbors—mostly workers from a nearby automated instrument factory—when they complained about the strange events that were suddenly taking place in their neighborhood. Perhaps due to my up-bringing as the only child of aging parents, I was good at this kind of negotiation: I had an extraordinary aversion to conflict and a strong desire to please. It was this quality, my cousin told me hal
f jokingly, which made me unsuited for activism of any kind.

  “Here,” I said, handing June the classroom key and pocketing my desk key as I hurried out of the classroom. “Just don’t forget it in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Yuan Laoshi,” she called after me. “Have a good night.”

  38.

  I SLEPT WELL THE NIGHT I’D GIVEN JUNE THE KEY. AS OFTEN HAPPENS with mistakes, I forgot what I had done until the next morning when I was on my way out the door. Due to Ptolemy’s diabetes, which necessitated a trip to the veterinarian before school, Cece and I arrived late. I heard the second bell ringing just as I was hurrying from the parking lot around the side of the school, to enter through the back gate.

  St. Anselm’s is a squat, two-story white building, with classrooms linked by open walkways on both levels. Three sets of stairs (north, south, and east) lead up to the second floor; hiding in the shade of the southern staircase is a slender dogwood tree, which drops delicate white flowers into the Elizabeth Ehlers Memorial Rock Garden. The garden boasts a few stone benches (one of which is shaped like a tortoise, mascot of the class of ’56) and a sundial with a brass plaque donated by the class of ’29. It was in this pleasant nook, where the students often came to have study sessions, social cabals, or their lunch, that I found my entire AP Studio Art class assembled and waiting for me. The entire class, that is, except for one.

  “Mr. Jow?”

  “Mr. Jow, Mr. Jow!”

  “What are you doing down there?” I asked them. “The second bell has rung for first period.”

  I saw Emily whispering to Olivia. Then Olivia nudged Catherine, who stood up:

  “Mr. Jow, there’s a bad smell.”

  “Excuse me?” I felt ridiculous peering down at my students over the railing; at the same time, I wanted to show them I knew that they should have been waiting upstairs outside my classroom, even if I was late.

  “Smell!” Catherine instructed me excitedly.

  There was nothing to do but take a deep breath. I inhaled the ordinary aroma of St. Anselm’s: cut grass, ammoniac glass cleaner, and carbon monoxide from the traffic around the perimeter.