by Paul Russell
Claire’s egg, tumbling in its turbulent bath, boiled briskly. The tea steeped. Spring-loaded, the toast popped up in the toaster. Louis dropped the thin wafers of kiwi into the fruit bowl, added a spoonful of brandy, then another for good measure. Pouring himself a finger’s width in a juice glass, he drank it down.
Last night’s confirmation of all his suspicions had unnerved him. And if that was not enough, he’d dreamed once again that strange dream of a large snow-white dog, and though the creature did not physically resemble Lux, or resembled him only insofar as a supple wolf might resemble an aged and arthritic German shepherd, Louis knew that it was he. Lost in a snowstorm, Louis stumbled about in a cathedral-like forest of conifers reminiscent of nothing so much as those Wagnerian stands of fir he and Claire used to hike through in the Black Forest. Then, unexpectedly, he came to a clearing where there was no snow. Wildflowers bloomed. The magnificent snow-white spirit dog, Lux and not Lux, sat calmly on its haunches and waited patiently for him.
He had awakened in a sweat, his heart thumping like a dog’s friendly tail. An omen, he had thought edgily, he who did not believe in omens. Perhaps it meant that soon he would die. That Lux was beckoning him to the other side.
But that was ridiculous. He’d been to the doctor only weeks ago. His heart was fine, his constitution hardy. His outlook on life—well, they had not discussed that particular malady.
In the dream, the creature’s eyes, Lux’s eyes, had shown like gold.
On Claire’s tray Louis set her bowl of macédoine, her boiled egg, her toast, her tea. What caused him, at that moment, to glance out the window? His heart leaped in fear and disbelief; he could not have been more alarmed had he glimpsed a resurrected Lux waiting patiently for him on the front lawn. He glanced at the clock. Ten after seven on a Saturday morning, and Tracy Parker was walking up the neatly plowed drive toward his door.
Caught in the headlights of what was almost certainly an approaching crash, he stood motionless and waited for the sound of Tracy’s knock. When it came, a series of crisp assured raps, he resisted the urge to fling the door open at once and meet the moment head-on. He cleared his throat, counted to fifteen—at last it was going to happen, the confrontation he had so shamefully avoided—and then, with great deliberation, he unlocked and opened the door.
“Tracy,” he said in a voice as studiously civil, he hoped, as that of the newsreader for the BBC. “At this early hour. Is everything all right?”
“I’m really sorry to bother you,” Tracy apologized. He looked awful: unshaven, red-eyed, his radiance gone.
“Not at all,” Louis told him. “Won’t you come in?”
“I will,” Tracy said. “I think we need to talk.”
Something terrible had happened, Louis knew at once—something beyond the ordinary distress of being caught out in a lie. For a mad instant he considered offering his guest a brandy. But Tracy was wasting no time; without hesitation he launched into sentences he must have rehearsed on his way over, speaking rapidly as if afraid that, given half a chance, he might reconsider.
“You know I’ve been lying to you,” he said. “I’m not going to insult you by pretending you don’t know what’s going on.”
Louis breathed an inward sigh of relief. If Tracy intended to crash in flames, at least he could be heroic about it. “I assume you mean that student,” he told Tracy, all at once surprised to discover he felt such unreasoning enmity toward Noah Lathrop that he could not even bring himself to say the name aloud. If he was angry with Tracy for having allowed himself to be ensnared, he was furious with Noah Lathrop for having taken advantage of his teacher’s good nature, his generosity, his all-too-human weakness.
For many years he had not been able to say Arthur Branson’s name aloud.
“That student,” Tracy said with a nervous laugh.
“Well then,” Louis told him ruthlessly. “Be frank with me.”
“We’ve been having a relationship,” Tracy admitted.
It was a disappointing word.
“Sexual?” Louis probed.
“Intimate,” Tracy said with an air of wonderment. “Loving. Yes. Sexual. Everything. You’ve suspected that, haven’t you?”
“I suspected,” Louis said. “I didn’t know.” Strange how he had longed for this moment as much as he had feared it. A dreadful excitement stirred in him. For years he had kept a sheaf of newspaper articles, a priest here, a high school teacher there, sad relics of human disaster, reminders of what might happen should one ever dream of turning poetic phantoms into reality. He felt a certain awe that Tracy had actually dared. That he had touched with the hands of love a living boy. That he was here to tell about it.
“And I’m afraid that’s not even the worst of it, Louis,” Tracy went on. “Now it’s all gone and blown sky high. I mean, I thought I could…I don’t know, contain things. But they got away from me. It’s out of my control.”
Louis longed desperately for that drink. He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.
“Last night,” Tracy said, “after all the fire trucks left, and you left, well, it was so clear to me how we couldn’t go on. The secrecy and everything. The sneaking around. I tried to tell Noah that. Explain to him how a bad idea from the start was just getting worse and worse.”
He stopped, agitated, and Louis seized the chance. “Here,” he said, moving with resolve to the cabinet and taking down the bottle. He poured a generous dose into two glasses and handed one to his suffering friend.
“No,” Tracy said. “None for me.” But he took the glass nonetheless, even as he spoke, and tilted it back in a single swallow. “I guess it can’t hurt,” he said miserably. “Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Please,” Louis told him, sitting as well and gratefully nursing his own share of the brandy’s warm comfort.
Tracy ran his hands through his hair, the very image of desolation—nothing less, perhaps, than the wandering figure from Die Winterreise. “Noah’s a hugely scrambled kid,” he continued. “Volatile. I’m afraid he didn’t take what I was saying very well. He got upset. I wasn’t trying to hurt him or make him angry, just explain to him how impossible everything was. Alkthe reasons. And then he just left. He stormed out. I presume he went to New York. But this is the bad part.” He leaped to his feet and paced the kitchen like a prisoner in a cage. His voice broke in distress. “He took Betsy with him.”
“Your dog?” Louis asked, suppressing a desperate laugh at this unexpected element of farce.
“I don’t know what it means,” Tracy said. “At first I thought it meant he’d just gone out for a little, you know, a walk around the lake to cool off, something like that, but then he never came back. I checked his dorm—he’s not there. And anyway, he’d signed out to go to New York for the weekend. See, that was our cover. He’d sign out to go home, but then he’d spend the weekend at my place. Not good. Sordid, in fact.”
“And how long has this been going on?” Louis asked.
“Since New Year’s,” Tracy admitted.
So Noah had been up here New Year’s after all, while the headmaster was off neglecting the helm in sunny Arizona. Louis recognized, however, a thrill of satisfaction. He had known since November; he had known their secret even before they themselves did. But hard on the heels of that bitter satisfaction, squeamishness overtook him. Could it be that he had wished exactly this upon the two of them? This passion, this suffering. Had he not wished it, in his way, upon himself as well?
“I really thought I could help him out,” Tracy continued remorsefully. “I really did what I thought was best at the time. But I guess I was confused. I guess what I’ve learned is that I can’t trust myself to make the right decision. Because I really thought I had. And then when I realized I was wrong, that the whole thing was wrong, was impossible—then I was in it and I couldn’t find a way out. I tried. It’s not easy.”
But Louis was
no longer listening. With stinging clarity he all at once saw something that had completely eluded him, a small matter, really, but devastating in its way. The enmity he felt toward Noah Lathrop—it was nothing other than jealousy. There had been no other reason at all for him to dislike the boy. Why had he not seen that, when it now seemed so excruciatingly obvious? He’d been jealous of Noah Lathrop the same way he’d been jealous of Arthur Branson. The same way he’d once been jealous—did he dare even admit it?—of Libby Davis. Of all those innocent souls, in fact, whom he had perceived as taking from him what he could never admit to himself that he might have wanted, in the first place, to have.
“He seemed very special to me,” Tracy went on. “Very damaged but very gifted. The quintessential Forge School student, right? I thought I could rescue him. Isn’t that what we all feel? I was in love with the idea of being able to help him. I think my own loneliness got the better of me.”
Bleakly Louis understood how little he had ever meant in Tracy’s scheme of things. He had loved Tracy. That was the strangest thing of all. He had loved him but could only imagine that love, could only enter its dream, inside the black notebook—a darkened room in an ancient summer house in the mountains where two figures, Tracy and Noah, Tracy and Arthur and Jack and Bobby Wainmark and Christian Tyler and who else besides struggled wordlessly together on a big four-poster bed while the rain rained and Schubert played, and it was strange: listening to Tracy’s litany of misery, he found himself secretly disappointed in this young man who, having dared make of his own errant dreaming a reality, now grew so quickly frightened of the beautiful disaster he had created for himself. Such love as this, tragic, criminal, impossible, a dream meant only to be dreamed and never, never to be lived, such love, once undertaken in the flesh, should burn more brightly, should march proudly toward its own magnificent extinction, not quiver in fear at the very taboos it had sought to break asunder.
Perhaps he only expected of Tracy exactly that defiant courage he himself had always lacked. In the shadow-world of the dead, was Jack Emmerich laughing even now, as he had perhaps laughed that rainy evening as he aimed his car straight ahead on a road that curved left?
Tracy’s voice brought him back. “I’m prepared to resign from the school,” he said defeatedly. “I guess that’s what I came here this morning to do. It’s all in his hands, you know. Unlawful sexual activity with a minor. Thirddegree sodomy. Statutory rape. Endangering the welfare of a minor. I could get hit with all of those things, couldn’t I? And all I was trying to do was show some love to another human being. I’ve been so stupid,” he said vehemently.
Beyond the kitchen door, a movement caught Louis’s eye. Wondering, no doubt, what had become of breakfast and hearing voices in the kitchen quite different from the usual soothing tones of the BBC, Claire had come quietly down the stairs. Tracy could not see her from where he sat, but Louis gave his wife a look of silent warning. She seemed at once to understand. In any event, he realized, she had heard enough; she might as well have heard everything. Not this time would he succeed in cloaking the truth in silence, as he had managed so superbly long ago. Claire nodded, a stricken look on her face, and withdrew as silently as she had come. So ancient fish rise calmly to the surface of still pools in the forest and then fade back into their depths, Louis thought distractedly, heart filled to the brim with love for the wife who had kept him from just such an abyss as this these many terrible years.
“I don’t know what to do,” Tracy went on, shifting from recrimination to a more pragmatic tone. “I don’t know whether I should try calling his dad in New York or what. I don’t even have the number.”
“I think I should handle this,” Louis said firmly. Whatever other vast scope his reaction might encompass, he was nevertheless the headmaster, and it was to him that the responsibility for the school fell. “I think it would be a grave mistake for you to contact the boy’s father.”
“I guess you’re right,” Tracy said. “But I should warn you. Be careful. Noah’s dad’s a loose cannon if there ever was one.”
“What are you thinking?” Louis asked.
“Litigation. The last thing I want is to get the school embroiled.”
“How thoughtful,” Louis said.
It must have sounded even more ironic than he had intended. “I know how much I must have disappointed you,” Tracy exclaimed with something like a sob.
The truth, of course, could never be said, though Louis came perilously close. But he restrained himself. For Tracy now he felt, officially at least, only pity—but also a certain wonder (he would test this out on Claire) that all that charm and assurance had come, in the end, to nothing more than a sordid little episode, an ugly scandal it was his business, now, to avert as best he could.
“Obviously I cannot condone for an instant what you’ve done,” he heard himself say sternly. “But I also do not want to see anyone’s life ruined over this.” The thought did occur to him, however: why shouldn’t Tracy’s life be ruined? He had, after all, committed a crime. And who was to say that Noah hadn’t been hurt, much as Arthur Branson had been hurt? Once again, he felt an uncanny shiver run through him at the thought that Tracy and Arthur knew each other. That he had even assumed, for a moment, that they must be lovers. Surely Arthur had told him about Jack Emmerich, and even knowing that, Tracy had charged on in. Looked at that way, there was no excuse for the young man. No excuse at all. Leniency must be out of the question.
His tone, despite his cascading thoughts, remained businesslike. “We have to think this through clearly. Right now, we don’t have enough information. We don’t know where your student is. We don’t know what his father knows. We should proceed with caution—which, I might add, is what I wish you had done in the first place. More than you know. But what is done is done.” He tipped his glass back and swallowed the rest of his brandy, then poured them both another. Without allowing himself second thoughts he said briskly, “I’ll ask you to put your resignation in writing and deliver it to me this afternoon. Then perhaps I’ll know more. I’ll decide at that time whether to accept it.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” Tracy said. “For everything you’ve done for me.”
Louis felt a tinge of annoyance at that improbable bit of gratitude, but brushed it aside. “Try to stay calm,” he told the young man. “I’ll be in touch with you when I know more.” With that, he ushered Tracy Parker to the door. “I hope, by the way, that your dog will be all right.”
“I do too,” Tracy said. “Right now, that’s what I’m most worried about.”
How badly I have bungled things, Louis thought as he shut the door behind his fallen colleague. He had not said what was in his heart to say. But what, exactly, would that have been? That he was not, despite appearances, completely unsympathetic? That he had nonetheless, in spite of all that, lived an exemplary life?
He found himself still thinking about Arthur and Jack. He had loved Jack, of course. And it was at least partly to punish Jack for that circumstance, hardly of Jack’s own making, that he had given Arthur refuge when the confused and hurting boy had come to him for help. Unquestionably, under the circumstances, it had been the right thing to do—Louis had never for a moment doubted that. Arthur was frightened as well as wounded, and Louis had known all too well himself what it felt like to bear the brunt of Jack Emmerich’s displeasure. Nevertheless, the question had haunted him for years: is a moral act any less moral because the motive is corrupt?
He had always known his path would be difficult. He went back into the kitchen and gathered up Claire’s breakfast—as well as what remained of his own disarray—and mounted the stairs. Always the trooper, his wife sat up in bed, propped on pillows, her writing board across her knees. She was grading student papers. To temper the luxury of “Introduction to Writing by Women” in the fall, the school always asked her to teach “The Joy of Business English” in the spring, a task she rose to with grim cheerfulness.
“I’m very sorry abou
t your breakfast,” he told her. “It’s all stone cold.”
“Never mind that,” she said. “Tell me what’s happening.”
His first impulse, as always, was to keep quiet. But Claire was right; whatever she’d heard, it was already too much for him to protect her from the truth of the situation.
“Our young man,” he said bitterly. “The news goes from bad to worse. He’s been having an affair with one of his students.”
Claire looked at him gravely. He met her gaze with an expression of defiant triumph that said, See? No matter his charm, his attentiveness. I was right to distance us from Tracy Parker.
It was a moment before his wife spoke. “Yes,” she said quietly, “I’ve known about all that for some time now.”
Louis stared at her dumbfounded. “What do you mean, you’ve known about it?”
“I suppose it’s a despicable thing,” Claire told him, “the secrets we keep from each other. But you must remember: Tracy Parker became my friend as well as yours. Furthermore, he has remained my friend.”
“I…” Louis said, but stopped. This was difficult to fathom.
“We’ve had lunch together several times,” Claire explained. “We’ve talked. He’s been quite candid with me.”
“You knew about this all along and you never said anything? That’s aiding and abetting.”
“Louis, I’ve been his friend,” she said, stressing that noun more than he might have wished. “He needed somebody. I was there.”
As you were not. Had she actually uttered those words aloud, she could not, he thought, have accused him more pointedly of failing at something.
“You never told me,” Louis repeated, at once stung and furious. “You knew something immoral, illegal, potentially ruinous for everyone involved was going on, under everybody’s nose, and you did nothing?” You may have been his friend, but you were also supposed to be my wife, he thought fiercely—though under the circumstances the thought had the potential to be more shaming than anything else.
