The Tutor

by Peter Abrahams

  “T equals seven point five.”

  “And the unit?”

  “Hours. Seven point five hours.”

  Julian reached over, made a check mark on the page, beside his beautiful DRT shield. Even his check mark was nicely formed. Brandon wondered what Julian would think of Trish’s mural.

  “Is that an agency thing?” Brandon said. “The DRT shield?”

  “Agency?”

  “Like it’s part of the materials they give you.”

  “I made it up,” Julian said.

  “Just now?”

  Julian nodded the way he did, with that distant look.

  Wow.

  Brandon tried ten more algebra problems, forming number sentences with equals in the middle, sometimes a whole paragraph of them. Paragraphs in math: his own idea. Julian slid over the answer sheet, let him grade them himself.

  “Get them all?” Julian said.

  Brandon checked. “Yeah.” He heard the surprise in his own voice. “How did that happen?”

  Julian didn’t reply. He was gazing at the photo of Adam over the sideboard, the one where he was playing his saxophone—Ruby’s now—and one of Wynton Marsalis’s brothers, Brandon couldn’t remember the name, was standing beside him with a smile on his face.

  “That’s Adam,” Brandon said.

  “Ruby was telling me.”

  What was the story of the photo? Something about a school jazz program and Adam making a big impression. “Ruby,” Brandon said; with her big fucking mouth. “She wasn’t even born.”

  “So I gather,” said Julian, bending closer to the photo, his face no more than a foot away. “And how old were you?”

  “Five,” Brandon said. Adam would have been in college, maybe even graduated by now. What college would that have been?

  “Do you have any memories of him?” Julian’s voice was soft; not a whisper, but soft.

  “Sure.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Good at everything,” Brandon said. Other than that, he actually didn’t remember much—just a big presence, on the move with Mom and Dad fluttering around him. Harvard, Stanford, Princeton: that was the future Adam had missed, where the top guys went. “Where did you go?” Brandon said.

  “Go?” said Julian, turning from the photo.

  “To college.”

  “I didn’t,” Julian said. He started to laugh. Brandon hadn’t heard him laugh before, and it was a bit weird because while Julian had a beautiful speaking voice, almost like music, his laugh was raucous, more like a crow. Raucous and contagious: Brandon started laughing too. They were still laughing when Mom looked in, pleasant surprise on her face.

  11

  After midnight, with three glowing things, his cigarette, last of the day, and two candles. Julian liked candles, liked those tiny flames loosely fixed to their single roots, chained prisoners, danger with the legs cut off. He’d found an old classroom desk under the carriage house, heavy oak with metal feet that had once been bolted to a floor, had cleaned it off, carried it up, placed it by the window overlooking the yard. He liked to sit there after midnight and gaze out into the darkness, darkness that came in three tones: lighter darkness of the field and lane between the carriage house and the big house, medium darkness of the big house, especially when no lights showed, as now, and the dark darkness of the woods.

  It was snowing. Julian couldn’t see the falling flakes, but he could hear them on the carriage house roof, very light. His hearing was excellent, eyesight better than 20/20, blood pressure 115/70, pulse 55, cholesterol 140. Easy measurements to take, but even the intangibles about him were of the same standard, as though he’d been designed for a special purpose. Of the six billion people on the planet, how many could be written off as more or less the same? Five billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred thousand. That left one hundred thousand who counted, who might be of interest to someone objective, some visiting connoisseur of humanity.

  Julian looked down at the paper on his desk, where the poem lay waiting.

  negligent is to forsake as

  mendacious is to deceive

  He held his Mont Blanc pen, double-shadowed by the candles, left and right, over the blank spot where line three would begin. A poem was locked in there, he could feel it, and if he could feel it, then he was a poet. All that remained was to break in and seize it. Grab the words, shake them up, spill them out on paper.

  But no words came, not even the first one. Who was to blame? At first, he couldn’t think of anyone, but then it came to him: the Gardners of Robin Road. They were a distraction of the very worst kind. How could a mind like his do its best work, the work it was designed for, when he had to deal with the Gardners of Robin Road? They were and would always be mired somewhere in the mass of those 5,999,900,000. The maddening thing about them, one of the maddening things, was that they didn’t know it. Did any of them even suspect their insignificance, their mediocrity? Or the obverse: were any of them less smug, less sure, less confident? An interesting question.

  A light went on in a top-floor window of the big house, startling him. A tiny light at this distance, but it destroyed the three-light source triangle, attenuating the geometry to a shape that made no sense. Julian took a deep drag of his cigarette to calm himself, to restore order, inhaled a long slow stream of hot scented smoke. Smoking tobacco was a way to connect with Mother Earth, although that fact never entered the endless discussions. Tobacco was as much a part of nature as redwood trees and baby seals; that made him an environmental activist.

  Nature and those nature shows on television: that noisome child, Ruby. He let his mind wander. Was this wandering somehow connected to the hidden poem?

  negligent is to forsake as

  mendacious is to deceive

  Julian lowered the tip of his pen to the empty space where the next word would fit. It was coming, something about nature, nature shows, some specific creature perhaps, and the child. He could feel the word coming, gathering momentum, and when it came the dam would burst, and nothing would ever be the same. He felt his penis growing hard.

  The phone rang.

  Phone? At this hour? He almost didn’t pick it up. But: better to know.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Julian?”

  Someone he knew, but who? Someone, someone—the landlady. Whatever remained of his poetic reverie broke up and vanished.

  “This is Gail.”

  He watched the light at the top floor of the big house, saw a shadow moving in it, grew calmer.

  “Gail Bender,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I’d never have called so late if I hadn’t seen you had lights on.”

  The shadow in the big house expanded. Julian considered blowing out the candles.

  “I’m really embarrassed to say this but there’s a bat in my house—trapped in my bathroom, actually—and I’m terrified of bats.”

  Julian recalled Gail out in the yard in her red-and-black checked jacket and heavy boots: did she look like the kind of woman who was afraid of bats? She looked more like a riding instructor he’d known long ago.

  “I wonder if you’d mind doing me a big favor and coming over.”

  He took another big drag.

  Perhaps she mistook it for a sigh. “I’m so sorry to trouble you.”

  Bats. Part of nature, of course, and nature seemed to have something to do with the poem. “No trouble,” Julian said. “I’ll be right over.”

  He blew out the candles, put on his coat. Downstairs lights flashed on in the big house.

  “You’re a gentleman,” Gail said, opening the door for him. She wore a mauve robe; also makeup, which meant she hadn’t been to bed. But the house had been dark. Therefore she had been to bed, and had reapplied the makeup. “You must think me very childish,” she said. “They’re the only thing I’m afraid of.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Gail. “I grew up ro
ugh-and-tumble, quite the tomboy as a girl. This was a working farm back then. We had two hundred acres, all the way down Trunk Road to where Blockbuster is now.”

  “But you never got used to bats.”

  She shook her head. “Even though I like birds.”

  “Bats are mammals.”

  “I know. Maybe that’s the creepy part. They’re like some Frankenstein experiment.”

  Julian smiled. He liked that line of talk. She smiled back; then her gaze went to the microbeard under his lower lip, the leftover tuft whose name he still hadn’t learned, and the expression in her eyes changed slightly. Her eyes: without distinction of any kind.

  “Take me to your bat,” Julian said.

  Gail laughed. He smelled liquor on her breath, possibly one of those coffee liqueurs, and pictured her in her mauve robe, sipping right out of the bottle, Tia Maria or Kahlúa; or perhaps in no robe at all, sprawled on her bed, eyeing the candlelight in the carriage house. He knew the layout of her bedroom already, sight unseen.

  She led him upstairs. Her body moved under the robe. A big woman, yes, but a lot of her weight was muscle. He could feel her feeling his eyes on her.

  They went down a wood-paneled corridor—the whole house seemed wood-paneled, with lots of ornate molding, combustibles partout—and into her bedroom. An old farmhouse bedroom, or possibly two or three bedrooms with the partitions removed, remodeled to look like something from a faux-rustic catalog. Nice furniture, nice rug, nice art, a nice bed, king-size; all as he’d imagined, if a little bigger. The only thing he hadn’t foreseen were the company reports and prospectuses scattered on the bed.

  “Investment club meeting coming up,” Gail said. “The J. P. Morganettes. We were up nineteen percent last year.”

  “Congratulations.”

  She handed him a tennis racquet. “It’s in the bathroom. My second husband always used this when it came to bats.”

  A crudely balanced racquet. “Was he a tennis player?”

  “I don’t know what he was,” Gail said.

  Julian moved toward the bathroom.

  “Not that I don’t appreciate a little mystery in a man,” Gail continued, speaking to his back, “but I do like getting a clue from time to time.”

  Julian opened the bathroom door.

  “About what’s going on in their mind, if anything,” Gail said.

  He stepped inside, closed the door quickly behind him.

  “Do you see it?” Gail called, right outside door. She talked too much, like the child. Women who talked too much bothered him, almost more than anything else. He could picture them in their billions, tongues, lips, teeth working, mouthing mundanities in myriad languages.

  Julian spotted the bat at once, of course. The creature hung on the towel rack over the toilet, as far as it could get from the lights over the sink counter, dark eyes on him.

  “Don’t like things too bright, do you?” he said.

  “What’s that?” called Gail.

  “Still looking.”

  Julian looked. He looked at the mascara tube, top off, lying in front of the makeup mirror, a tiny brush beside it, a few fallen flakes on the marble makeup table. He opened the medicine cabinet, saw bottles of Prozac, painkillers, estrogen. He bent down to check the reading material in the straw basket by the toilet: women’s magazines, a paperback romance—Dark Is the Color of Dreams—and at the bottom a worn hardcover, The Mature Woman’s Guide to Better Sex, with illustrations.

  “What’s happening? Are you all right?”

  Julian rose, looked at the bat hanging on the towel rack, an arm’s length away. The bat looked at him. A rodentlike body trapped in membranous wings, its stick-limbs forever constrained. Perhaps it really was a Frankenstein’s monster, some careless experiment of nature, gone wrong. Was that what the poor thing was trying to tell him with those dark eyes? Without taking his own eyes off the bat, Julian put down the tennis racquet, leaning it handle up against the toilet bowl. Then he reached out with his right hand and grabbed the bat.

  Reaching out really didn’t do justice to the action. It was much quicker than that; Julian was quick when he wanted to be, almost supernaturally so. The thing tried to struggle, tried to flap this or that little scrap of wing, tried to bite.

  “No, no, little vampire,” said Julian; soft, to calm it. Then he took the rodent head in his left hand and twisted it off, like a recalcitrant lid.

  A jam jar lid: strawberry jam.

  “Are you having trouble?”

  “None,” said Julian. He slid a window up with his elbow and tossed out the red-and-black remains, a sort of opposite to a bouquet, and he a sort of opposite to a bride. Oh, his mind was on fire. He felt terrific, in the true sense of the word.

  “Then what’s taking so long?”

  Julian washed his hands in the sink, dried them on a fluffy red towel, closed the window, screwed the top back on the mascara tube, opened the door.

  Gail was right there, arms crossed over her breasts. “What happened?” she said. “I thought you were locked in a death struggle there for a minute or two.”

  “Oh, no,” said Julian. “Nothing like that. In fact, I let it go.”

  “Let it go?”

  “I encouraged it to fly out the window,” Julian said. “Assuming your goal was to get it out of the house, rather than end its life, however humble.”

  Gail’s eyes opened a little wider, her lips parted; an opening response, in general. “That’s very nice of you, Julian.”

  He shrugged. Shrugged, but the blood was surging through his body.

  “I’m so grateful for your help, coming over in the middle of the night like this.”

  “Think nothing of it.” Or he could have said not at all, or don’t mention it. Think nothing of it was better somehow, elegant yet commanding.

  “I wouldn’t have slept a wink with that thing flying around the house,” Gail said. “In fact, with the excitement, I’m not even sleepy all of a sudden.” Her gaze slipped for a second to the little tuft of hair under his lower lip. “How about a nightcap?”

  Julian thought about that, his eyes on hers, but seeing right inside to the strawberry jam.

  “It’s the least I can do,” Gail said.

  “That’s very nice of you,” Julian said. Or you’re too kind—would that have been better? Probably not, laying it on too thick.

  “I’ve actually got a little drinks tray right here in my room,” Gail said. “In case of emergency.” She moved toward it, a silver tray on the lowest shelf of an old bookcase, possibly valuable. “Kahlúa, B and B, cognac,” she said. “What’ll it be?”

  Julian had cognac, Gail Kahlúa. He sat on a little chair, gilded and velvet, that she pulled up beside the bed for him. She sat on the only other place for sitting, the bed itself, clearing a space amid the J. P. Morganette material, leaning against the pillows, legs stretched out under her robe, only her feet showing, the toenails red-painted. Julian could tell she was proud of her feet, and well she should have been, beautifully shaped feet, nothing physically middle-aged about them but somehow deeply experienced all the same, full of promise: her best feature by far.

  Gail raised her glass. “To bats.”

  Julian sipped his cognac. Perhaps she had used the word loosely.

  “Tell me about yourself, Julian.”

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “No problem,” Julian said. “I’m sure your life is more interesting, that’s all.”

  “Don’t I wish,” said Gail. “In a lot of ways I don’t think I ever got started. I was forever getting waylaid by husbands, boyfriends, children, all of them not quite right. Not the children, of course. I’ve got two lovely children, a son and a daughter, long gone from the nest.”

  “Do they live nearby?”

  “One’s in Houston, the other in California.” She drained her glass. “But the point I’m making is that I’m still all about potential, which is crazy a
t my age, thanks for not asking. To be pent up, if you see what I mean.”

  Julian nodded.

  “You’re a good listener, aren’t you?” Gail said. “I don’t have much experience with that ilk.”

  He hadn’t been listening at all; she’d misinterpreted his steady gaze on her red-tipped toes.

  “Mind doing me a favor, Julian? Freshening my drink an itty-bitty bit?”

  She gave him her empty glass. Their hands touched. They must have been good hands once, almost as good as her feet, but now they showed their age. Julian went to the tray, poured more Kahlúa.

  “You’re very kind, I can tell,” she said, taking the glass. For a moment, sitting by the bed in his dainty chair, he thought another toast was in the offing, but she drank in silence, blessed silence. Her face grew pinker. She looked at him, drank some more, shifted her legs a little so one foot came to the edge of the bed. “Can I say something, at the risk of being personal?” she said.

  “Go on.”

  “I love that little beard thing under your lip.”

  Julian smiled.

  Her foot slipped off the edge of the bed in a way that could have been accidental, settled in his lap in a way that could not. He kept the smile on his face, altering it slightly as though it were meant for her. She moved her foot around a little, the red-tipped toes turning out to be prehensile.

  “Why don’t you come up here,” she said, “and let me demonstrate my gratitude.”