by Paul Russell
Large wet flakes were indeed coming down. Already the lawn was daubed with white. You’re making far more of this than need be, Louis chided himself. Still, he could not get out of his head the irritating diminutie Noah had bestowed on his teacher. Not the word itself so much as the fact that Tracy had failed to call him on it. His initial impression had been correct. There was something about this picture he didn’t like. One did not give one’s life to an institution like the Forge School without, over the years, acquiring some intuitive sense of things.
The kitchen floor was spattered with drops of dark blood. For a moment his heart stopped; then he saw the note on the fridge. One of the polyps in Lux’s ear canal—for the last year an intractable source of misery to the poor beast—had burst, and Claire, braving the storm, had spirited him off to the vet to have the ear cauterized. Her mission of mercy made Louis uneasy. Though Claire was a perfectly skillful driver, the vet was some miles away, and he had registered, walking home, how the streets were starting to get a bit tricky. Some days the temptation to yield to superstitions was stronger than others. He would try hard to resist. What he would not resist was the temptation, equally strong this evening, to pour himself a comforting scotch.
Whenever he found himself left alone in the house, he felt dangerously unanchored. Even as a child, when his parents would go out, he’d feel freed from some scrutiny. But that freedom brought not release but emptiness. Anarchy raised its seductive head. He could do anything; there was nothing that was not allowed. He’d march around the house singing at the top of his lungs. He’d get into the pantry and icebox and taste bits of everything. He’d go through his parents’ closets and drawers, and afterward feel soiled and disgusted. Joseph Conrad had no doubt been right to observe that the presence of the policeman around the corner is the only thing that keeps us civilized.
A companionable marriage certainly did wonders in working one through the treacherous spots as well. For this, he was eternally in his wife’s debt. Sometimes it took an absurdly great effort of the will just to continue to function normally. Even having a drink alone was sometimes a bad idea.
On the kitchen counter lay the day’s mail: a circular from the local hardware store, a letter addressed to his wife. He’d seen the envelope’s tiny, torturous handwriting before; whoever it belonged to had been writing Claire with great regularity over the past several weeks. The strangeness of that occurred to him. Though she had developed professional contacts over the years and hardly lacked for friends and acquaintances, Claire seldom received mail of the old-fashioned kind.
The envelope was slit open across the top, but Louis resisted the urge to gratify his curiosity. It wasn’t as if he’d ever, in forty years, suspected Claire of dabbling in anything untoward and he certainly wasn’t about to start now. No doubt she’d tell him, one of these days, about her eager new correspondent.
Settling perturbedly onto the creaking old leather sofa, he turned on the television to try to locate a weather report—that, after all, was a normal thing to do—but the various channels had moved on from their local to national news broadcasts, and he had long ago ceased to watch those corporate-sponsored entertainments. On the public television station, however, a conversation caught his attention. A prominent conservative critic was interviewing a journalist who had written a prize-winning book about the former East Germany. Smartly dressed in a dark blue suit, the young woman spoke precisely, articulately, though her voice was curiously dispassionate. “Consider the case,” she said in her clear staccato, “of Olga Schmidt, an East German activist who, with her husband, had worked actively in the peace and environmental movements. After the fall of communism Olga campaigned to have the files of the secret police opened, and ultimately she was successful. As she read the Stasi file on herself, a several-hundred-page-long chronicle of her life as a dissident, she came gradually to a realization. Amid the minute and mostly irrelevant details were certain pieces of information about herself that were so intimate that they could have been known to no one but herself and her husband. For weeks she carried this secret knowledge, but finally could bear it no longer. When she confronted her husband with her suspicions, he acknowledged that, yes, he had indeed informed on her—not just once but regularly, for years in fact. But he insisted that, in doing so, he had betrayed neither her nor their shared ideals. He had seen himself, in fact, as furthering their dissident work by opening up important channels of communication with the Stasi, by allowing them to see the extent of the people’s discontent.”
Louis sipped his scotch, mildly intrigued by the predicament—betrayals always intrigued him—but at the same time wary. Clearly the journalist had recited this anecdote countless times before. He thought, idly, that he should have stayed to chat with Tracy instead of seeming to flee. Though on the other hand, he cautioned himself not to invest too much in someone who might well prove a disappointment to him in one way or another.
“That’s an amazing story,” the critic effused. He was pompous though probably harmless. Louis usually avoided his program. “And you see this as somehow”—he cast about for the word he wanted—“exemplary of life under communism?”
“Oh yes, absolutely,” the young woman told him. Her black bangs made her look rather severe, though perhaps that was the look she intended. “Complicity under communism wasn’t between people but within people, like the veins and arteries inside the body. It makes no sense to talk about victims and collaborators, because all too often they were one and the same. It happened every day, under every conceivable circumstance. Take something so simple as a third-grade teacher instilling in her students the ideals of the socialist state. Without educating its children in how to think, the state cannot perpetuate itself. That third-grade teacher was as much a collaborator as any informer who turned in his neighbor or coworker.”
“We’re talking about a tragic situation,” the critic said. He drew out the adjective with exaggerated effect. “But fortunately, we’re also talking about a system that brought about its own inevitable collapse. The corrupt state that the Stasi tried, through its nefarious means, to prop up is simply no more.”
“I would certainly say that a long nightmare is over,” the young woman agreed.
“Well,” said the critic, who seemed very pleased with his guest’s performance, “I must say it will be fascinating to see how the people of the former East Germany manage to come to terms with their new freedoms, freedoms that we take so much for granted under capitalism and democracy.”
“That will be the challenge,” said the young woman. “Will they successfully play ball in the rough-and-tumble world of the free market, or will they be left behind?”
What was truly fascinating, Louis thought, was the level of self-deception people were capable of. Or was it really something far worse? A carefully calculated mendacity. She had done very well by her book, this young woman. She had won prizes for it. She had been amply rewarded by those in power. Surely she was not so naive or clueless as to think that she stood free of the metaphor she herself had so neatly described.
Suddenly he wasn’t so much fascinated as furious. “Idiots,” he said aloud to the ghosts on the television screen. Then more forcefully: “Moronic bastards.” Those two collaborators understood perfectly well how their jobs—like everyone else’s except, perhaps, that impervious old woman he had seen earlier with her shopping cart—entailed nothing less than propping up the State.
In disgust he flicked off the set. Who were they trying to fool? He was an educator, after all. He knew all about inculcating values. Hadn’t Aristotle noticed two thousand years ago the importance of schooling people to feel joy and grief at the right things? Hadn’t he held that true education was precisely that? Veins and arteries. “I have news for you,” he said to the blank screen, the empty room. To the prize-winning journalist and the conservative commentator and Reid Fallone and, yes, Tracy Parker also. The former East Germany hardly had a monopoly on complicity. Life’s every mome
nt caught one out in one form of it or another.
From the driveway came a familiar sound strangely deadened by the falling snow: an Audi’s engine shutting off, a car door slamming shut. Lux’s jubilant bark of homecoming. Just in time, he thought with relief. Just in time. He would try to compose himself for the evening. He would try to play the game—it was perfectly, even deadly, serious after all. He would try to stay calm while doing so.
X
My body is a temple,” said the svelte young woman in the black leotard and tights.
“My body is a temple,” repeated the fifteen middle-aged women sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“My body is the dwelling place of God,” said their leader, her voice mellifluous and soothing.
“My body is the dwelling place of God,” they all repeated.
Claire’s legs had gone to sleep. They always seemed to do that. She dreaded the moment when Rachel would command them to rise, to stretch, to bend. She knew she was sure to fall right over.
“When God is in her temple,” Rachel told them, “then any woman can accomplish anything she wants.”
Claire tried not to giggle, because she suspected that Libby took this all somewhat seriously. Still, it was vaguely distressing. They were two grown women, after all, with good heads on their shoulders. They should know better than to go in for some kind of prepackaged Eastern mysticism. She herself no longer believed God dwelt anywhere at all. The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination. But the physical exercise, never mind what mumbo jumbo it came wrapped in, was undoubtedly good for her. She gained ten pounds every winter when her garden lay out of reach under its blanket of snow; if yoga could see her through till spring, then she supposed she was willing to put up with it.
When she and Libby emerged from the storefront gym into the pellucid December sunlight, she felt that both of them radiated a pleasant well-being. The organic machines that carried their precious consciousness might be approaching, if not dusk, then at least the late afternoon, but the gears and plumbing and engines still seemed to be in working condition.
Their after-yoga custom was to lunch at Sara’s, the health-food restaurant located in the same unprepossessing strip of stores. They sat at a window seat that looked out, through the plate glass, onto the parking lot, the busy street beyond. The restaurant’s walls were a soothing gray, its floor a smart checkerboard of black and white linoleum. They both laughed about how, left to their own devices, they’d be skinny as rails. It was their husbands who kept them yoked to such fattening diets. But while Louis somehow stayed trim on his meat and potatoes—a long-simmering resentment against the world can burn off more calories than you might imagine, Claire joked to her friend—Reid piled the pounds on. He had no resentments. He was capacious in every way imaginable. “I do worry about him,” Libby confided. “Let it all hang out, they used to say, but this is getting a little alarming. At least I’m trying to exercise, watch my diet.”
She had ordered the salade niçoise, her usual, while Claire opted for the grilled seasonal vegetables, under which lurked a comforting lump of polenta. Since Tracy Parker had appeared on the scene, she’d been experimenting with meatless meals.
“Reid is definitely a man of many appetites,” Claire agreed.
“I just hope it doesn’t kill him,” Libby said darkly. “He’s in such a whirlwind these days. His blood pressure’s way up. And he’s off to Crete for Christmas.”
“No,” Claire said.
“He claims he’s hiking the Samaria Gorge. Huffing and puffing it is more likely. Of course, whatever he’s really up to, he’s not going to tell me about it in advance. He’s too afraid of looking foolish.”
Claire considered that scenario. “Do you think he looks foolish anyway?” she wondered.
“Oh, I’m sure we all look foolish, in our way. You know me. I’m quite content for him to have whatever he wants. He showed me pictures of her after he got back from his conference at Thanksgiving. I suppose you could say she’s rather fetching, in a harried sort of way. Definitely not my type. She’s an archaeologist, of course. American, from Texas.”
For weeks they would talk only in the blandest of terms. But then on certain days—the weather, the confluence of planets and stars, who knew the explanation?—a lovely honesty opened between them. They had never kept secrets from each other.
“I sometimes fantasize,” Libby went on, “there’s this whole circuit of academics who save themselves up for affairs during their foreign vacations.”
“As if what goes on over there doesn’t count back here,” Claire observed.
“Well, it doesn’t, does it?” Libby said, perhaps a little tartly. “Anyway, you know how I simply loathe Greece. I hate that whole part of the world. I feel so out of place there. So…gratuitous. I remember we were in this village once, and an old man asked us, quite explicitly, Why are you here? What are you looking for? Reid took it all as one big joke. He just laughed. But I asked myself, What are we looking for? And I realized I didn’t know. Or that’s not it: I realized that whatever it was I might be looking for, I shouldn’t have to go all the way to some broken-down village in Greece to find it. And that was it, for me. Whatever Reid wanted to do with his life, whatever it was he was looking for, well, that was just fine. I didn’t begrudge him that. But I had other things to do.”
She had, in fact, taken up painting. Nothing pleased her more than to set up an easel and spend the day in solitude, contemplating whatever scene lay before her. Her watercolors from the Cape, from around the Hudson Valley, softened the cold walls of their cavernous house. In her own modest living room Claire had hung a handsome watercolor Libby had done: Claire’s garden with lavender and the old rugosa rose “Blanc de Coubert” in pale bloom. She cherished this glimpse of her beloved flowers through Libby’s eyes, their blooms bobbing bravely above shadows slightly more ominous than any she had seen the sun cast in her real-life garden.
“I sometimes wonder what I’d have done if Louis had ever had an affair,” Claire mused. “But it’s a moot point. He never did. He never will.”
“You almost sound disappointed,” Libby observed.
Claire was silent for a moment. “Looking back on it all, I just wonder…” But she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. “I just wonder if I might have felt less, I don’t know, guilty, if he’d gone off and done something or other. I wouldn’t have been so afraid of having my own shortcomings discovered. But no. My husband the monk.”
“And my husband the satyr,” said Libby. “Which one do we think will get to heaven?”
“You mean, which one made his pact with the devil? That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” But since it was a question she didn’t, at the moment, have the stomach to pursue, she tried changing her tack. “Have I told you, speaking of the devil, about our new young man? Or maybe Reid’s mentioned him. Tracy Parker—the new teacher at the school. Louis is quite taken with him.”
She had grown rather fond of him herself over the course of the semester: generous, good-humored, perhaps a bit too nice for his own good. And lamentably naive; she had the awful suspicion he was incapable of comprehending the particular place he occupied, at least for the moment, in Louis’s imagination. Or that Louis’s innocent enthusiasms invariably ended in disappointment of one kind or another.
“Does it ever make you wonder?” Libby asked.
“You mean about Louis? I used to wonder all the time,” Claire admitted. “He’s undoubtedly the classic sublimated homosexual.” She was able to say it simply and easily. “Does that bother me? Not one bit. I just wish he understood himself a little better. But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.”
“Not my husband,” Libby reminded her. “Reid really doesn’t like men very much at all. Never has. It’s why Dr. Emmerich could never work hi
s magic on him. No, he just puts up with men. It’s women he thoroughly loves. That’s why Emmerich would never have chosen Reid as headmaster. Not that Reid ever cared one way or the other. I always wonder, though, considering all their differences, how Reid and Louis ever managed to become so close. It’s a mystery. But strange to think, if it wasn’t for that, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
That was true enough, Claire thought. It was a possibility she had glimpsed one rainy evening years ago. “Where do you think we’d be?” she asked in all seriousness. She didn’t regret marrying Louis, even if it had been Reid rather than she who’d mattered to him at the time. She’d had her own reasons, after all, hardly less complicated than Louis’s. Now, having made those choices, having lived that life, she found it difficult, even impossible, to imagine what other life might have been hers.
Libby seemed unable to imagine herself anywhere else as well. “See?” she deflected Claire’s question. “There we go, talking about our men. I’m quite sure they don’t get together and talk about us like this.”
“I wonder what they do talk about.”
“I’m sure I don’t want to know,” Libby said with great certitude.
“Hey, Ms. Tremper,” intoned Tim Veeder, emphasizing the “Ms.” “Got a minute?”
“Only,” she told him, without looking up from the paper she was marking. “I’ve got to end office hours early today.” Perhaps she was mistaken, but it did seem that her least favorite student had lately taken to haunting her life. Not a week’s office hours went by without his confident appearance at her door. He seemed oblivious to the chilly reception his teacher bestowed on him, but had he ever gotten anything more than a chilly reception from anyone? She felt guilty, despite herself, though there was the matter of the notes: Post-its left on her door, greeting cards in the mail, Happy Halloween, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Thinking of You, No Particular Reason. The matter of the notes had begun to weigh heavily on her mind.
