by Paul Russell
“That’s good. You sounded very…” But she could not find the word or was she afraid that by naming whatever baleful possibilities had seemed, for a moment, to shimmer in Libby’s voice, she might draw her friend back into their clutches?
“I had a bad moment there,” Libby confirmed. “I hope I didn’t cause alarm. Really, I’m doing okay. There are times when I even think I can make out the future, and it doesn’t look that bleak at all.”
Through the window, half obscured by blizzard, Claire could see Louis down at the curb, where Tim’s truck still waited. She had forgotten him entirely—and really, she thought, she should invite her former student in for a cup of tea. She should at the very least thank him properly. He had, after all, saved her, if rousing her from such strange thoughts might be said to have saved her.
“I should go,” she told Libby. “You take a hot bath; relax. Have yourself a glass of port. You deserve it. Tomorrow we’ll talk. We’ll make plans.”
“Thank you,” Libby told her, “just for being there for me. Once again.”
If only you knew, Claire thought. But Libby never would know. She would make certain of that.
With a bit of annoyance she saw she’d tracked snow onto the hallway’s old oriental carpet. What she wanted herself was a hot bath and a nice glass of port; instead, after rummaging for a moment in her purse, she made herself venture back outside. The storm had not subsided in the least. Borne on gusts of wind, the snow tore down in sheets, body blows any one of which could knock a person down if she wasn’t on her guard.
“What a lucky coincidence,” Louis told her as she joined him at the bottom of the driveway. “This young man was just telling me he was your student at the college last semester. He’s saying highly complimentary things about you.”
Tim stood by the cab of his truck, smoking a cigarette. “Sorry, Ms. Tremper,” he said ashamedly, holding up the offending article. “I know it’s a bad habit.”
Would she ever have the heart to tell him she really couldn’t care less?
“I have to thank you,” she told him, holding out the twenty-dollar bill she had brought down with her. “Please accept this small token.”
He eyed the money hungrily. “I can’t,” he told her politely. “I’m just doing my job. But I do have a favor to ask.”
She waited, wondering whether that meant he’d received his grade from last semester.
Tim shifted awkwardly. He picked at a scab on his thumb. “Do you think, by any chance, maybe, you could be my adviser?” he asked.
“I have to say,” Louis mused, sipping from his scotch, “that was quite nice of him, offering to plow our drive like that.” They sat in the living room, snug against the storm that rattled, now and again, the windowpanes. Louis seemed quite pleased with himself, as if Tim Veeder had been a messenger sent to reward him for his efforts with the snow shovel. Claire wondered how much she should tell her husband.
“If only he could think half as well as he drives a snowplow,” she said, feeling stingy even as she said it.
“That bad?”
“Dreadful,” she confirmed. “The bane of my existence last semester. He was the one who kept sending me all those cards.”
“Cards?” Louis said.
“Surely you must have noticed.”
“I suppose I did,” he said vaguely. “Yes, as a matter of fact. I did wonder who your new pen pal was.”
“Pen pal.” She laughed. “If only.” But then she added, on reflection, “I think he had a certain crush on me at some point.”
It was Louis’s turn to laugh. “He seemed gallant enough, in his way. Rather rough-hewn.”
“That’s not the half of it,” she told him. “It was all a lot of bother.”
“And now you’re stuck with him. Heroic, I’d say, agreeing to be his adviser after all that.”
“What could I do?” she wondered.
“I’m sure that’s why you’re a very, very good teacher,” Louis told her. He’d finished his scotch and, stretching, rose to fetch himself another. He gestured toward her own empty port glass, but she shook her head. She felt pleasantly drowsy, fatigued by the day’s long unfolding. Now that it was over, it seemed very nearly fantastical in its way. From Tracy Parker she had heard an astonishing tale, hardly to be believed and yet ringing, sorrowfully, of the truth. To save Libby Fallone she had braved the storm (she was quite certain now that her venturing out had indeed tipped the invisible scales, shunted aside the threat that had marKed her friend out). Through it all, she had preserved her equanimity.
“One feels,” Louis said, returning from the kitchen with his scotch renewed, “one could put on a bit of music before bed. What do you say to that?”
“That would be nice,” she agreed, thinking of the ruined temple on the outskirts of town, how she had seen Jack Emmerich looking fit and treacherous as ever, how he and Louis and Tracy had moved together in ancient, immemorial dance.
“I have a hankering after Sibelius,” Louis confessed.
“It’s all this snow,” she told him, remembering snow-white Lux in a meadow of wildflowers.
Louis laughed appreciatively. “Winter music. Something strong and clean, I think. We haven’t heard the Seventh Symphony in ages.”
She would not tell her husband what she had seen. She would not tell him what she knew.
XV
Darkness was fast overtaking the lawn, the bare trees. The snow glowed blue in the fading light. There had been moments in the last few weeks, Tracy told himself, sitting before his computer and staring out the window of his study, when joy had seized him—when he had been able, for a snatched moment here or there, to give his circumstances the slip, to forget the fix he’d gotten them both into and simply float in the liquid suspension of the present. As a teenager he’d had a recurrent fantasy: how one night, unbeknownst to anyone, he’d just slip away. In his hand-me-down Chevy he’d head west, no map, no destination in mind, simply let the miles carry him, through the lonely hills of New York state and on out into the continent’s dawning heartland, the lost little one-stoplight towns, the empty flowing fields of grain, till finally, after days, weeks, perhaps months, he’d reach the Pacific’s glittering rim. He wasn’t, in those daydreams, so much running away from something as toward something, some bright and blessed future where he would be bolder, braver, where love sometimes in the guise of Eric the costume designer, but more often the beautiful stranger he had not yet met would greet him with open arms. He had had an inkling, even then, that only by losing himself, the well-behaved Connecticut boy he’d always been, might he ever hope to find his other, truer self.
Actually it had been Noah’s idea, not his, to forsake Middle Forge the morning after, but in the boy’s suggestion Tracy had recognized fate’s signature, the god’s ironic hand. With Betsy in the backseat, they’d journeyed all day across the Empire State’s snow-buried southern tier, and it was extraordinary how two hundred or so miles seemed to put them beyond the grasp of everything that threatened. As dusk touched its rusty light to the steep hills, they found themselves in a hamlet of such fierce poetry, or so it seemed to Tracy at the time, that he once again accepted it as fate. Two convenience stores competed with one another across Main Street; an aluminum diner gleamed like an abandoned toy; the scattering of old clapboard houses badly needed a carpenter’s sure hand. And the sign on the low-slung, distinctly ordinary Magic Pines Motel promised both VACANCY and PETS WELLCOME.
He felt numb with the enormity of his transgression; at the same time he thrilled at the prospect that it was all to be repeated, elaborated, improved upon in this little town far, far from home. “Come here,” he’d commanded Noah as soon as they were safely locked in their little room, and as if it were all a dream of his own making, the boy came. He was neither docile nor shy. He had a will and desire entirely of his own. All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.
For five days they had stayed there, lost to everyon
e but themselves. They made love, and then showered, and for a while watched the mesmerizing idiocy of television, and then made love again. Afterwards they walked Betsy along streets hemmed in by snow, the margins of the highway, in plowed parking lots. At the diner they ate bread and salad and spicy beets, the vegetable of the day for days on end.
“So what about the rest of our lives?” Tracy did not dare ask. Instead he said, with a smile, “Cut it out,” when Noah tried to play footsie with him in the booth. Back at the motel, the boy sat cross-legged on the bed, a pillow behind his back, and wrote stories in his notebook Tracy dared not ask to read. Instead he studied the beauty of his student’s bare feet, his perfect ankles, the classical grace of his calves.
“There’s nothing for us,” he wanted to cry out in panic, but in that charmed motel room there was, in a sense, everything for him, as he discovered yet again, reaching out to touch with wonder Noah’s calf, his thigh, pausing as Noah laid down his notebook and pen and looked at him from under eyelids half-shut with the heaviness of desire.
There would be nothing to show for any of this except punishment. So he did the holiest thing he could imagine, which was to touch his tongue reverently and hopelessly to the dusky rosebud of Noah’s anus, that secret site of wonder and repulsion, surprised at how the phrase came to him unbidden: greater love hath no man.
And then on the fifth day they had returned, as they must, to the ordinary world—the nightmare routine of school, all the unconsoling habits of home.
Even though he had been expecting it, the soft knock at the back door made him jump. He remained seated at his computer, listening to the clatter of Noah’s boots as the boy discarded them by the door in the kitchen, the moan of pure pleasure as Betsy greeted their guest, the prolonged rattle of dog biscuits tumbling from the box as Noah fed her not one, as he was supposed to, but many, many. Had there been a time when Tracy’s heart had lifted at the prospect of a visit from this person? Now he felt nothing but dread, a sick ache in the pit of his stomach.
“Hey Trace,” said that voice, nonchalant, unfathomable.
“I’m in here,” Tracy answered almost reluctantly, at the same time relieved to have Noah once again within the safety of these four walls where he could keep track of him, where at least he could entertain the delusion of being in control of the uncontrollable.
He didn’t look up from his computer screen when Noah appeared in the doorway.
“What’s that?” Noah asked, coming over to the desk and laying his hands on Tracy’s shoulders. Tracy willed himself not to flinch, and after a moment reached up with one hand and touched Noah’s, their fingers interlocking, caressing and why couldn’t this be possible between them? “A modem,” Noah went on. “Cool.”
Tracy would not allow himself to seem distraught. “I think I’ve finally got it working,” he said. “So what’re you up to?”
“Same old same old,” Noah told him. “Is school as much a drag for the teachers as it is for us kids?”
Tracy attempted mock dismay. “You’re calling school a drag?”
“Except for your class, of course,” Noah said. “Your class is definitely not a drag.”
“Well, that’s good,” Tracy told him, wondering if his student could tell how, these days, the teacher was just going through the motions. How the teacher’s mind, even in the doldrums of a class discussion about Romeo and Juliet, was constantly unfurling its own outlandish scenarios. How, whenever Noah spoke in class which wasn’t, thankfully, that often the teacher half expected him to say, “Speaking as somebody you fucked the other day…” Uncanny, the evil tricks his imagination could play. But Noah seemed, for the moment, blissfully unaware of the absolute power he had so suddenly acquired, the quiet terrorism he could wield were he so inclined.
What unnerved Tracy the most was the simple fact that, despite all his better judgment and best intentions in fact, as if in blatant mockery of them—he had allowed to happen between himself and his student exactly what he had known must never happen. Or was it that simple? He had not counted on Noah’s own tenacious will. He had never thought of his student as passive, exactly—for hadn’t that strange gift of a roll of toilet paper been the initial volley in what he had not suspected at the time would be a protracted siege, leading in the end to the fall of the city itself?—but neither had he been prepared for the boy’s quietly aggressive needs. And then there had been his own mood of defiance as well, his willful surrender that first night to a hunger he no longer, at least for that single moment of his undoing, cared to restrain. Was it a form of madness, no longer to be able to trust your sense of things? To be betrayed by decisions apparently arrived at carefully and through reason, but really no more than marauding appetites cunningly tricked out as reasonable choices? He had once—sentimentally, no doubt, even recklessly—imagined Noah as a temple inhabited by the beautiful god, all the while failing to see that another, craftier god had erected his temple within the hapless Tracy Parker as well.
And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone. Unlawful sexual activity with a minor. The law was the lawl, unambiguous, unimpeachable, unforgiving.
“Hey Trace,” asked the minor with whom he’d had more unlawful sexual activity than he dared calculate, “can we make a fire? You said we could. I’ll bring up the wood.” Tracy had noticed the stack in the basement when he’d moved in, but then had completely forgotten about it till a blown fuse had sent them down, a few days earlier, to investigate.
“A fire,” he said, all too certain what a roaring, romantic blaze in the hearth would eventually lead to. “I guess so. Why not?” Soon they would have to talk. Soon things would have to come to an end. But not tonight, he realized with disgust and arousal.
He let Noah take the lead, following him down into the musty basement, unused since he scarcely had anything he needed to store down there. It had taken him some time—until Arthur’s visit, in fact—to fathom that Dr. Emmerich had once lived in this very house, that those crude shelves that at one time had held home-canned tomatoes and beans and corn from the farm in Sullivan County had been built by Dr. Emmerich’s own hands. Had the headmaster laid in supplies as a hedge against the same war that had prompted the bomb shelters beneath the dorms? And the dry quarters of wood Noah stacked in his arms, how long had that cache sat untouched down here? Had it come from the back acres of the farm as well? He hardly believed the house was haunted, and yet what else was it but the guilty ghost of Jack Emmerich that lingered with increasing insistence in his thoughts these days?
“Now we’re both going to have black feet,” Noah said, clearly in a cheerful mood, as he so often seemed this bleak February, as if in inverse proportion to the misery his teacher was reluctant to let him see. He balanced on one leg to show Tracy a white sock’s soiled bottom. Was he feeling cocky because he really did realize the powerful position he was in. for perhaps the first time in his life? Or was he just happy, like any other adolescent, to be getting laid? Tracy could no longer count the number of times they’d had sex, but each time it happened he caught himself storing away each detail, each sensation like a man preparing for years of penance in the desert. Never again in his life would he be blessed with such merciful bounty, and the real sin, the unforgivable sin, it seemed to him, was to fail in his appreciation of the great, forbidden gift he had been given.
That first night he had lain awake, scarcely able to contain his euphoria and desolation, and studied, in the clear, lonely moonlight that filled the room, the prostrate, sleeping form beside him. Noah snored lightly, almost imperceptibly. Tracy watched the boy’s unblemished back, his tight adolescent buttocks, the backs of his thighs and felt consumed with sadness and pity. He had expected Noah’s body to astonish, and he had not been disappointed, though it was, all in all, a somewhat melancholy astonishment, the final much-deferred fruition of dozens and dozens of boys glimpsed, dreamed of, yearned after, a decade or m
ore of boys he assumed he had lost forever only to rediscover them here, transmuted into this single, slim, eager young body that had wanted to get fucked. You don’t know how much I love you, he thought to himself. Because if it was true, as he suspected at least once an hour these days, that he really was dying, then what did it matter that he flung caution to the winds and watched it exhilaratingly scatter? In his short, desperate time on earth he had known the love of a boy. At least, he mused as he followed Noah upstairs from the basement, arms loaded down with wood, his eyes on those shapely buttocks before him, at least he had seized that chance. At least, of the legions of wistful things that haunted his brain, he had made one thing real.
“All right,” Noah said, spilling his armful of wood onto the fireplace’s apron of bluestone, “let’s get this show on the road.”
“I think we need kindling, don’t we?”
“Forget it,” Noah told him. From the kitchen he fetched matches and a stack of old newspapers whose sheets he wadded into loose balls. “Kindling’s for sissies. I know all about making fires. My dad taught me.”
“Well, okay,” Tracy said amicably. “We wouldn’t want to be sissies here.”
“No sissies,” Noah proclaimed as he stuffed the wadded paper into the grate. “No faggots, no sissies, no queers,” he iterated with each wad.
There was a violence to Noah’s humor that worried Tracy. “Just us chickens,” he sparred back cautiously while Noah built up a pyre of logs with a meticulous delicacy that seemed, Tracy thought cruelly, like nothing so much as a sissy’s.
“You got it,” Noah said. “Chickens and chicken hawks.” He smiled ambiguously and dusted his hands on the front of his pants. “Now give me those matches.”
“Chicken hawks?” Tracy bantered with profound unease.
“Just something I heard,” Noah said, striking the match on the side of the box—zip, like a boy’s trousers opening. He reached in to the paper and lit, and lit again, and soon the paper had taken all around. Flames licked eagerly along the logs. Tracy stood over Noah’s crouched form, enjoying the sight of the boy’s ass crack as it disappeared into his jeans. He’d been inside Noah but not inside his mystery. That was what still unnerved him every time he looked at the boy: his unknown quantities, the scope of his volatility, the depth of what Dr. Maurer in the counseling office no doubt diagnosed as his emotional disturbance, below whose surface agitation, Tracy hoped fervently, the deeper waters were calm, the bottom smooth and sandy and no monsters lurked.
