Patrick looked down at his plate, crumpled his napkin on it. He was cornered again. “It was an accident,” he insisted, the second time in fifteen hours. When had the world become a confessional? Bless me Jerry, bless me Stan.
“Hey,” said Louie, eyes bright, spreading his hands wide, “you did what you hadda do.”
“Kid was givin’ you lip—threatening you—in fronna the, what? The chancellor, right?” Ralph croaked.
Stan gripped his newspaper. “And he…he pulled something on you, right? And he threw it—”
Patrick tried to halt this narrative several times, but it was useless. The trio was enjoying their recreation of the events of April 7th too much to be disappointed with the truth. And his attempts to interject reality, “It wasn’t like that,” “No, really,” were waved away. They would brook no diminishment of the drama. To dismiss the whole thing as a gruesome, strange accident was like hearing Dillinger explain that it was just a misunderstanding with the bank teller. And the ATM was broken…
It was that damned Post article, again, that had put these images in their heads, replaying the scene as less Mr. Lynch, room 234, and more Wyatt Earp, OK Corral. But hadn’t Patrick himself taught lessons on the power of mismatching text and image—the cruel Hun, the evil Jap, “Remember the Maine!”—creating a synthesis, a counter-narrative more powerful, more indelible than fact? It wasn’t much of a leap from the terrified, shovel-wielding teacher of Javier’s snapshot (with its overtones of homesteader defending his turf from the savages) to a picture of the defenseless teacher surrounded in his classroom, the hurled bathroom pass transformed to a switchblade sprung open. Impossible to penetrate this scenario, with so many layers of media behind it, to explain that he’d faced as much danger that day as the Lunch Lady had at her Waterloo, nothing between her and the adolescent hordes save meatballs.
“I woulda defenestrated the kid,” said Louie.
“You woulda reamed him with your mighty push broom,” said Ralph.
“I…I,” was all Patrick could manage, swirling a straw faster and faster through the remains of his large Coke. The sweaty Coke cup slipped in his hand, brown water and ice cascading onto Susan’s father’s twill Brooks Brothers trousers. He felt every pair of eyes in Nick’s on him. He felt the Coke soaking his boxers. Patrick grabbed at the napkin dispenser, emptied it. “Excuse me,” he muttered to the trio and elbowed his way past the lunch counter to the unisex bathroom, which, of course, was occupied. Patrick stood and waited, swiping at his damp crotch with a fistful of napkins. Eventually the Scribbler emerged, pen behind his ear, legal pad under his arm.
Patrick squinted at the madman in the bathroom mirror. His collar and tie were filthy, but he knew that. Since the nasty facilities at the Rubber Room were mirrorless, the forehead stippled with dried gutter-water was a surprise. As was the hair, so neatly combed when he left his apartment, now popping out at angles from his scalp, the cowlick in back set free. More disturbing were the permanent changes—the darkening grooves under his eyes, the hairline retreating at the corners—intimations of early middle age. If this was the man Susan saw, her recent lack of sexual interest and indifference to matrimony were no puzzle.
He checked his watch; five minutes left in his lunch break. Couldn’t risk being late twice on his first day. Susan’s dad’s pants were drier but the boxers were saturated with icy Coke. He plucked off his newly shined dress shoes and slid off the pants, laying them across the toilet lid. He yanked his blue and white striped boxers down his long thin legs and began wringing his underwear over the sink. He managed to induce a thin trickle of Coke but couldn’t imagine putting them back on, like putting on a wet bathing suit. He’d go commando––who would know?
The door cracked open. A wispy redhead poked in. The Weeper. Her eyes skimmed up and down him, pausing a beat at his hairy crotch, at his iced-down, retracted manhood, to which he thrust the ball of damp boxer. She didn’t cry out, or cry, as he might have expected. Just a giggle and a “sorry” as she punched the door closed. Weird. Locking the door, Patrick remembered: she was the Moaner before she was the Weeper.
He ripped some paper towels from the dispenser, wrapped them around his boxers and stuffed the soggy bundle down to the bottom of the wire trash basket. After tucking and zipping himself carefully into Susan’s father’s slacks, he took a last look at the madman in the mirror. He washed his hands, wiped the muck from his forehead, tried to smooth down his hair. Put on your teacher face, Patrick, he told himself. It’s all acting. It always has been. Then he squared his shoulders and flung himself out into the lunch crowd, assuming as much dignity as a man with cola-colored seepage outlining his privates can.
What Do You Need?
Patrick was lost. He’d taken a right out of the Rubber Room, as he had at 3:03 for the past two weeks and headed downtown for the subway uptown. But then he found himself wandering Chelsea, puzzling over the incongruous businesses––Middle Eastern specialty foods, Comidas Chinas y Criollas––that had so charmed his Midwestern eyes on first landing in New York. But now, his back against the hot rough brick of Chelsea Dental, perspiring in the bright May sun, he was as dislocated as any tourist. But he wasn’t a tourist. Five or six years ago a Japanese family pondering their map of Things To Do In Manhattan had pleaded his help and he’d effortlessly given sets of directions to places they might want to go, estimated how long it would take, detailed what buses and trains went where. To them, he was a New Yorker. And Patrick, for the first time, had felt like one.
But now the polyglot businesses of the city left him feeling at once everywhere and nowhere. Panic filled him as desperately as when his mother had left his three-year-old self in the frozen food aisle at Knutson’s Shop-Rite and he’d peered down the endless frigid row, gripping a pebbly bag of frozen peas, howling till she trotted around the corner clutching a jar of peanut butter. Could you really be lost on a small island with streets as gridded as the aisles at Knutson’s?
A slim, fuzzy-bearded young man bearing a green backpack seemed to want to answer that question. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked. Patrick glared at him, but all he got back was a concerned squint. “I mean,” said the young man, gently, “do you need to talk?” It was then Patrick realized he’d been talking to himself again, something he’d never done before but that had lately become a habit. Patrick, he’d hear Susan calling from the kitchen as he ranted to himself in the bathroom, were you asking me something? The young man––an NYU psych major?––lowered his brows and waited. “No, I’m fine,” Patrick insisted, and the man said “Okay, have a good day then,” and ambled off in search of other addled, mumbling pedagogues.
Is this it? Patrick wondered, clutching hot brick. Had he already succumbed to that Rubber Room fever where you lost your identity and took on a new one, no longer a person but a persona? He’d only been there two weeks, but Patrick feared he’d joined the Artiste, the Weeper, the Juggler in Ralph’s Rubber Room lineup. (The Mumbler?) Even on his second day he’d arrived to knowing glances, the men looking with admiration and puzzlement at the teacher-desperado dressed like a stockbroker, the women looking with—amusement? Had the Weeper spread the word to the female Rubber Roomers, what she couldn’t help noticing in his diminished, chilled state? Mr. Toughguy, she must’ve giggled to her sisters-in-crime, Student Gives Teacher the Finger, he’s not all that. Dillinger packs a derringer.
After his first day had begun so badly, Patrick kept to himself. Day two he’d walked the center aisle after signing in, nodding awkwardly to the trio of custodians, who returned cool nods. (Had he paid for his lunch at Nick’s?) A few bearded, middle-aged white guys, the ones who became teachers in the ’60s to avoid the draft, raised fists shoulder-high. “Hang in there, man,” said one.
Choosing a spot near the Juggler would ensure some privacy, he figured. Ralph had been right, of course, about the territorial nature of teachers. Back at Garvey, George and Sitkowitz h
ad nearly come to blows when George reserved the program’s lone VCR during one of Sitkowitz’s film festivals. The Rubber Room was the schoolhouse distilled: a chair or a table misappropriated risked blood spilt. Rubber Roomers chose their areas carefully and stayed put. Patrick noticed that the Juggler, whose affect was mild, his focus serene, had the right rear corner to himself. Apparently, though his skills had become impressive, no one had forgotten the incident between the bald-headed fruit tosser and the Artiste. Patrick spotted an empty chair six feet up the right wall from the Juggler and staked his claim.
In the ensuing days, Patrick had sought to bring some order, some meaning, to his tumbling existence. Incarceration, he reasoned, could be an opportunity, couldn’t it? Stone walls do not a prison make. If the Artiste and the Juggler could polish their skills, so he could he. The Rubber Room, he decided, was his chance to finally tackle the classic literature people assumed he’d already read. That weighty, faded copy of Remembrance of Things Past, for instance, had long called out from his shelves. He’d taught lessons on Proust and memory. He’d used Proust to impress women over cocktails, once dismissing a colleague as “a mama’s boy, like Proust.” Ha, ha, ha. And his date, who’d never read Remembrance, smiled at his erudition. But a tincture of shame crossed his cheek as he turned away: Proust was a challenge he’d avoided in college as being too long, intimidating, and, well, French. Now it would be his penitential ritual to sip a large dark roast from Nick’s as he burrowed into Swann’s Way, his toasted butter bagel aromatic as any madeleine.
And, in the Rubber Room, Proust proved a defense more formidable than the Juggler. The few inmates who were tempted to engage him on their way to the bathroom, intrigued by his legend, took a glance at the title of his book and kept moving. What did that say about his fellow educators? But what repelled most eventually drew the Scribbler, moth-like, to the flame of the world’s most irrepressible scribbler.
“Pardon me?” he said, bending down. The Scribbler held a legal pad between a rolled-up cuff of his blue denim shirt and his unbuttoned black vest. Whiskers, not quite a goatee but more than a shaving error, curled off his chin. An ink smudge underlined one of his little round lenses. “You’re reading Proust?”
“Uh, yes,” Patrick admitted, looking at the faded photo of the author, ready to apologize for his pretension. Susan had chuckled when she saw what he was taking for Rubber Room reading. He excused it; she didn’t laugh much these days. And he’d used up her remaining goodwill negotiating his wardrobe back to khakis and a button-down, open at the throat.
The Scribbler pushed his round spectacles up his sharp nose, adding a smudge between his eyes. Trotsky with a tiny blue bindi. “Is that the Moncrieff translation or the Enright revision?”
Patrick scrutinized the cover and shrugged, as if he’d found the book on the subway. “I’m not sure. To tell the truth, it’s something on my shelves from college that I never really finished.” He gave a weak grin. “Though somehow I passed the test.”
The Scribbler was uninterested in Patrick’s college career. He slid a plastic chair over the moldy carpet and sat, leaky fountain pen in hand, half-filled legal pad in his lap.
“You read French?”
“A little.” Patrick shook his head. “Not really.”
“Moncrieff really screwed with Proust, beginning with the title.” Patrick nodded absently. He didn’t want to encourage this guy, the kind of guy who would get pedantic with a pedant. “Remembrance of Things Past, that’s Shakespeare, of course. Sonnet 30.” He paused. “But you know that, being an English teacher.”
Patrick grimaced.
“I’m sorry,” the Scribbler inched forward, “but you’re the closest thing to a celebrity we have here.” His features rearranged into what would have been, in someone less intense, a smile. “Student Gives––”
“––Teacher the Finger,” Patrick snorted. His epitaph, clearly.
“Not a classic New York headline.” The Scribbler put a hand to his chin. “Not Ford to City or Headless Body in Topless Bar, but memorable. B+.”
Patrick thumbed back to his place in Proust. He had vowed long ago not to endure the bloviations of clueless males––always men––with no social skills but full agendas. Men in authority—professors, principals––had to be endured. But guys like the Scribbler, no way. He looked down at Proust, who gazed up with an expression that mixed hauteur and ennui and several other Gallic attitudes Patrick had forgotten since high school French. Marcel dared the reader to open his book. And Patrick––against all his Midwestern upbringing––did. He waited for the Scribbler to move on.
He didn’t.
The Scribbler offered his hand. “I’m sorry, Arnold Westerfield.” Patrick had to shake it. “I hate to keep you from Proust––even that translation––but I was wondering if I could interview you.” Patrick frowned. “For my book.” He gestured over to his table in the opposite corner, where legal pads and library tomes sat in yard-high stacks.
“Me?” Patrick peered around. “What’s your book about?”
“Here. This place.” He waved his pen in a circle above his head. “The Rubber Room.” Patrick looked puzzled. “Nobody knows about this place. Secret as any gulag.”
Patrick laughed.
“Well, did you know about it?”
Patrick shrugged. “I’d heard rumors.”
“Exactly. And you’re a teacher.” He jabbed the air with his leaky pen. “That’s how they control it––us.” He slid his chair closer. Patrick nudged his chair back, glancing at the Juggler, who’d just added two mangos to his Ferris wheel of fruit. “There are over a million students in the New York City school system, eighty thousand teachers. If it were a state, it’d be the ninth largest.” He looked down at his pad. “A budget bigger than NASA’s, twice the GDP of Bolivia.”
Patrick eyed Proust. His chapeau fell over his forehead, his mustache drooped. He could use an absinthe.
“But here’s my point.” He waited for Patrick to look up. “There are three other rooms like this that I’ve uncovered. I know there are more. Maybe forty-five teachers, on average, per room. A hundred-fifty, two hundred teachers on full salaries, with benefits. Add in the cost of warehousing these teachers, paying their subs, that’s––” he tapped his pad “––fifteen, twenty million a year. And growing by the month.”
“Twenty million? How do they hide that?” He was the kind of guy you wanted to argue with, even if you agreed. Especially if you agreed.
“How do you hide water in the ocean? Twenty million, that’s a lot of textbooks, test tubes, art supplies. But it’s only .25 percent of the overall budget. The Pentagon spends more on toilet seats.”
“But the press reports that.”
“You know what the press reports. The Post wants titillating random violence. Then moves on. The Times––” he pulled on his chin whiskers. “The Times pays liberal lip service. Oh, these poor kids; oh, these overworked teachers. But”––he jabbed the pen at Patrick––“when it’s Leonard Mishkin’s kid…”
Patrick winced. The Scribbler had done his homework.
“I’ve gone to the press,” he continued. “Their business is selling papers. They take care of their own.” He dropped his voice, leaned in. “You and I, we’re here for the same reason. You tangled with the wrong kid.” He didn’t wait for Patrick to agree. “I…I tried to blow the whistle on my principal. A racist, vindictive martinet.” The Scribbler’s eyes went a little unfocused at the recollection, but he didn’t elaborate. Patrick would have to take his word for it. Or read the book. “That’s why we’re here. It benefits the powers-that-be to quarantine us.”
Patrick smiled. “So, we’re a bunch of Jean Valjeans here in the Rubber Room?” Not an apt analogy, but it drew an actual grin from the Scribbler. If pressed, however, Patrick was on thin ice; Hugo was even farther afield than Proust. But Susan had dragged him to Les M
iz. Broadway CliffsNotes.
“God, no!” The Scribbler slapped his legal pad. “That chubby janitor you had lunch with?” He nodded toward Louie, dozing next to Stan, who was working a crossword puzzle. “He threatened to kill his vice principal. The tall one next to him embezzled thousands from his school. They belong in prison.” He turned, waved to the front of the room. “The old lady stabbing that scarf with those needles? Madame Defarge? Should be in Bellevue.” Fellow inmates were turning to look at them. The Scribbler hunkered down. “There are plenty of people here who shouldn’t be within miles of children. But that’s what makes this place so…insidious. You stick the whistleblowers, the enemies of the state in with the crazies and the crooks. Willy-nilly. Really clever, realpolitik-wise. How can you tell who’s who?”
How can you tell? Patrick wondered, scrutinizing the Scribbler, who was smart, well-informed, and about to launch into his theory of what transpired on the grassy knoll. There was much in what he said that made sense to Patrick, that confirmed all he knew. Comforting in some weird way. Until you took in the paranoid tone and noticed how his left eye narrowed whenever he said them.
And yet, it wasn’t the Scribbler’s paranoia or Marxist analysis that had Patrick shambling downtown at 3:12, aimless, appearing more inebriated than after a pint-fest at Marty’s. No, it was his parting shot as Patrick dismissed him––with Minnesota niceness––insisting that he’d think about being interviewed. He just wasn’t ready to discuss the whole ordeal right now. But, he added as a sop, maybe not a bad idea; it would help him prepare for his hearing.
“Oh,” sniffed the Scribbler, who, though no great discerner of social cues, had clearly received enough brush-offs to recognize even a polite one, “you needn’t worry. You have plenty of time for that.”
Class Dismissed Page 14
