by Jill Malone
Some nights I would walk through the narrow, silent streets of Manoa alight with my solitude. Cycling through town those wicked hot afternoons didn’t bring sleep any sooner, so most days that summer Emily and I would surf the pre-dawn swells with Ryan Grey, catch an early breakfast at this little hippie café, and sleep away the morning. Surfing was a rush, a kinetic high that overwhelmed my deep exhaustion and lent those days a sense of genuine accomplishment. We had surfed. We had seized all the vigor within ourselves and wrestled our potential like Jacob.
Grey threatened to keep me company on my night rambling, adamantly refusing to see insomnia as anything other than a party he hadn’t been invited to. After our first meeting, I’d entertained the notion of a crush with the heir to a surfboard legacy, but it quickly passed into a filial impulse that surprised me. This goofy mellow guy being married to a ferocious political insider seemed tragic, and I found myself, in spite of everything, wanting to protect him.
“His wife is incredibly ambitious,” Emily explained the morning after that first party. “They married during college and she just has no place for him now. She’s one of those brilliant chicks who can convince you of anything. It’s only later when you think about the conversation that you realize you didn’t agree with anything she said, but somehow at the time, you’d just stood there nodding. She spends most of the year on the Mainland, working for the Senator in D.C. Poor Ryan, he’s always had no luck with women. He’d never ask for a divorce, though. Talk about clinging to scraps.”
I’m not sure why I regarded him as off limits. Perhaps my determination to focus on teaching, perhaps I knew we’d make better chums than lovers, perhaps I sensed a more serious crush would ambush me. But Grey and I fell into friendship effortlessly; both of us letting go of the notion that something else might thrive under our skin.
Grey, as it turned out, had dated Emily during high school, though, he qualified, they had never been really serious.
“She was always a little fast for me. Too confident, you know, too wild. I was always a little afraid of her.”
Late in the summer, after an evening at the Blue Spark, Emily drove me out to Black Point Beach. We hopped the iron fencing and skirted along the rough white stones of the beach until we came to a small cove braced against a rock wall.
Emily’s face had edges as if it had been torn from a larger sheet of paper. As I shielded the match from the wind, she lit the pocket of twigs and newspaper at the center of the stones we’d gathered well back from the shoreline. I was naked, chilled after swimming over the fat round rocks just below the surface of the water. For a moment the newspaper held the thin yellow flame. Emily’s face went dark again. Black Point Beach barreled in loud swells just beyond our bare feet. The thick rope swing, suspended from the palm tree at the water’s edge, seemed to move across the surface of the moon.
“Here,” she said, tossing me the matches. “You light it.”
While I held a match against the newspaper Emily leaned into it and blew. I watched the flames glare against her pale skin and blacken her eyes. Behind us three houses sat in dark hulks like hillsides. She squatted next to me, our shoulders touching, and massaged my hands.
A child told her story to stand up and walk. She watched her story hobble away through the cornflower field. In a moment it was too late to recall.
The fire flickered without much warmth or enthusiasm. Emily rubbed her hands against the outside of my legs like a trainer. Her hands burned the surface of my skin. I shivered into a towel, her body bright and warm against mine as if I still shielded the match in my palms. I name that moment, I name that place, as the one that moved beyond what I could handle. As the one that moved.
VII.
It rained all that weekend before my classes began. A torrent that Hiromi, the caretaker, fought bitterly in her rubber boots and peasant straw hat; piling bricks around the garden and digging moats to hold the water back. I stayed indoors, fingering through my books in a distracted, juvenile way as the rain drummed.
In an effort to reduce the musty smell in the studio, I kept the French doors opened and stood outside with my cup of coffee, letting the rain splatter against my bare feet. A vision of my mother crept into the garden, and I saw her among the mango grove with her disheveled hair and sad baggy clothes. Trying to remember one of her stories, I thought instead of the autumn my father had taken us to Europe. I remembered little of the trip—shards of memory, really—but I knew my mother did not want to go, had balked for weeks, even to the moment of our departure from the airport terminal.
Of the five countries we visited, Germany held my most vivid recollections. Cater-corner to our hotel we discovered a bakery where they made chocolate with toys inside each piece. I had a train engine in one of the pieces I ate. I remembered large stretchy gummi bears that you could buy from vending machines, and pubs with growling men whose dogs lay at their feet as they ate tremendous white sausages and fatty pork.
During the last week of our trip, my father insisted we visit Dachau Concentration Camp; arguing that one must see even the brutal historical sites firsthand for context. I can still see that twisted metal at the entry gates and the brown hard-packed earth in and around the grounds. Bitterly cold, the air had the fermented scent of a barn, and we moved among several other tourist groups with a muted trudge. At the ovens, my mother wept. I remember the look on her face, how it was more a hole than an expression.
“Do you have more coffee?”
I felt Emily’s hand on my shoulder even as I heard her voice and, overwhelmed with the rain and nervousness and my heavy dead mother, I turned into her and was lost. My face pressed into her collarbone as if I could push inside her and hide my body beneath her ribs. Lodge against her spine and become another self, more solid, calmer. Was it possible to gather into each other?
“What is it?”
Her hand came around my head and I thought of Ireland and the dentist, the danger I’d inhabited by remaining in this garden with this girl, the absence of tenderness and the failure of stories.
“What is it? What is it?”
Her hair smelled of green apples; she held onto me with something like despair. We were mirrors, clinging images. I wished that I knew more languages so I might have a word for everything.
Had I sought Emily to fill a void in myself or a void in her? It seemed to me that we would never understand one another, and the alien in her felt like a failure in me. Her hair slipped through my fingertips, thick and soft, her body braced against my body as solidly as core. I thought of the scar at her right eye, its luminescent whiteness. I wanted to ask her: Who suffers more, the living or the dead? Ut lingua deficio?
VIII.
To my relief, classes began that August without cries for revolution or disgruntled students marching the halls demanding my resignation. My second-year students were quiet and studious, prepared each day and willing to participate. Most of the students were Japanese—only a handful seniors—and all of them looked grateful when I said pronunciation was not vital to their grade since Latin survived essentially as a written language.
Dr. Adams had written a single, thick textbook to be used for the first two course years. Monday through Thursday each week, we studied a lesson: vocabulary words, grammatical usage, verb conjugation, and a translation exercise using any lesson from the previous weeks. One Friday we’d review the week’s work and the next Friday we’d test cumulatively. The classes required very little improvisation on my part (barring startling questions from my brilliant and gifted darlings) although the prescriptive nature of the instruction required me to work harder to keep the students interested and challenged so that no one would be underwhelmed by the routine.
During class time we would do a group grading session of the previous evening’s translation exercise, review the previous day’s usage, and then go over the new vocabulary words and usage lessons so that the students could complete their next translation exercise. Instead of the monotonous a
nd dismal translations we’d hammered against when I was in high school, Adams had used Greek and Roman myths for each translation exercise, interspersing poems, and challenging the students by randomly repeating previous lessons’ vocabulary words and grammar usage.
In fact, the only time of the day my students’ zeal subdued—dashing my deluded notion that they’d taken Latin simply because they loved the sound of it in their mouths—occurred when we ran declensions. By their very nature, declensions can be monotonous—sometimes one has to spice things up by declining verbs to the rhythm of La Cucaracha while doing a little Latin dance—but running declensions was my favorite activity. In our greenhouse, with the light filtering onto my students’ heads like vague halos, I felt holy, as if the lot of us formed a chanting chorus of heaven. The rounded, dead words in their mouths rattled the windows, moved the tables and chairs, until even the overhead projector vibrated with the crescendo. It was glorious, thrilling, and triumphant! I expected trumpets to usher princes on elephants through campus to the very throne of my golden black-haired angels. I would have dressed them in purple capes and shiny knee-length boots; a mantra to transcend all time:
Having a room full of twenty-somethings seated on wooden chairs around rather short-legged tables seemed absurdly suggestive of grade school, but I’d found all of my students to be dedicated and focused on the work assigned them. At the end of the second week, they took their first exam and all scored better than eighty-four percent. I had an assortment of majors in my classes: a great many pre-med students; Liberal Arts and Humanities students; and a surprising number of business majors. Apparently, compulsory language labs for every other foreign language class had made Latin very popular indeed.
Joy was what I most wanted to impart to them; my passion for oral declensions—the calming, repetitive song like an incantation spoken between us privately, devoutly—seemed the ideal tool to convince them that Latin is beautiful: the very shape of the words in one’s mouth, the translations, the transformation of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Most of the time, however, my primary function seemed to involve keeping the students from stroking out with self-inflicted pressure.
When I called on Angie, a tall, stork-legged Korean girl, to read the entire translation after we’d gone line by line, she flushed and blurted: “Oh, mine’s a disaster. I didn’t realize they were sisters and I translated the genitive incorrectly.”
She looked mortified and I could see red marks all over her translation where she’d attempted to correct her initial mistake. Beside her on the table, her textbook—its spine meticulously duct taped—her laminated flashcards, her homework all but annotated and I felt my task keenly: these kids needed some fucking perspective.
IX.
During midterms, we had four bomb threats at U.H. The Manoa campus has a long history of bomb threats coinciding inevitably with midterms, finals, and term papers, so during our first staff meeting with Dr. Adams, the professors were instructed to tell our Latin students that in the event of a bomb threat, we would take our test outdoors in the grass—rain or shine. More than once on my way to class, I saw the yellow police tape and a couple of officers with their dogs stalking through the eerily deserted quarantine. A certain amount of space around the particular building had to be secured as well, so occasionally two halls would be closed for inspection and sometimes the classes would be huddled around in the grass nearby carrying on with their lectures. It was surreal each time I came upon such a scene—the calm pedestrian response to a frighteningly maniacal threat which was exerted with no further objective than to have an extra day to study—and after living in Ireland where bomb threats and bombings shade everyday experience, I felt S.W.A.T. teams and felony charges a more suitable response. Still, we struggle in our own ways, and our way did insure that Moore Hall did not receive any bomb threats.
I developed the habit, that first semester, of splitting my required office hours before and after my class time so that I wouldn’t go mad at the end of the day, and also to foster relations with my bizarre office mate, Dr. Samara Delvo. Delvo taught in the morning, and kept office hours through lunch until about one-thirty each day. In the back half of our cement office her desk shouldered piles of workbooks, Latin texts, and various volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, which loomed unsteadily above any student daft enough to sit in the impossibly short-legged wooden chair at the end of the desk. Delvo kept four rubber band balls in the otherwise empty desk drawers to fling absently against the cement walls (or me) as she talked on the phone. She did not keep a computer at her desk—Security is too easily compromised, Elliot; never give students the opportunity to plant porn on your hard drive—but carried her laptop around in her black shoulder bag to classes, the office, and home again.
A tall robust woman in her early forties, Delvo was a little thicker than usually considered attractive, but the extra weight sat proportionally on her body and her bold confidence (nearly a conceit) gave her a strangely sexy demeanor. In tight stretch tops and blue jeans, she wore her thick black hair pulled away from her face into various styles of braids. Her nose was wide and slightly flattened; she had cat’s eyes with elegant, perfectly curled eyelashes and a laugh like a gunshot.
When I came into the office one morning in October, she looked up at me and nodded.
“So a student this morning—a third year mired in some cosmic crisis—demands to know the point—the point, he says—what is the point of learning a dead language?”
It upset her simply to repeat the incident. Her face had assumed the stern teacher’s mask of rebuke. I contained my grin and widened my eyes to simulate astonishment.
“What did you say?”
“I told the class it was a good question and they could each write a thousand-word essay exploring the answer. You should have seen the daggered rage his classmates cast at the little bastard.”
I laughed until she joined me, and the sternness slipped from her expression. For Delvo, Latin was not the enlightening discovery I had experienced, rather a rigorous science to be etched on the body methodically and with full awareness. To her, Latin was a law; and to question the law, heresy.
“It’s really not funny, Elliot.”
“Come on. They’re under a lot of pressure; half of our students are pre-med.”
“Pressure? What the devil do these insulated spoon-fed hatchlings know about pressure? We’re talking about Latin, Elliot. We’re talking about the very foundation of modern language: the scaffold for communication.”
“You’re writing a thousand-word essay too?”
She flung her rubber band ball at me.
“Oh laugh, laugh. You would have been infuriated by such a question as well, and you know it. Elliot, you were educated by the Irish—a people who have struggled—passionately struggled—to maintain their own language for hundreds of years despite savage oppression. No doubt you observed this passion firsthand and felt a kinship with it.”
“Every one of my professors carried around an etymology dictionary.”
“I well believe it: another world entirely.”
I leaned back in my chair, considering the mass of texts on her desk.
“Yes,” I said, “but there is a level of devotion that tumbles into fanaticism.”
“How so?”
Now she had adopted her empirical expression and scooted her chair around the corner of her desk so that we might have a clear line of sight. She wore a French braid today with a silver clasp.
“I took a poetry class my second year from an amazing poet, Paula Monahan.”
“Yes. I’m familiar with her work.”
“Of course you are; you really do read everything. Anyway, we wrote original poems for her class and she bickered with my use of ‘inhaling’ in one of my poems.”
“Why?”
“My line described the consuming nature of love, how my narrator was ‘inhaling with both hands.’ Monahan thought the usage improper.”
“Certainly it wa
s.”
“It was a poem.”
“Yes, Elliot, but words have limitations—even in poems. Gertrude Stein said overuse of a word renders it meaningless. ‘Love’ for instance.”
“She also said a rose is a rose is a rose.”
I kicked my feet on top of my desk and chucked the rubber band ball back at her, adding, “Language must stretch to grow.”
“You can’t mean it,” she said. “You can’t seriously think that diction has no boundary, that words are flexible. What would be the point of proper definitions if anyone could come along and fling words about as though they were darts?”
“Take your argument to its logical conclusion and we’d still be speaking like Chaucer.”
“Chaucer would never have spoken like Chaucer since we’re on a slippery slope. Social growth is different, often an intolerable and destructive influence—now children learn to talk from television—but there are still rules governing usage and grammar and they are necessary rules, just as it is necessary to have a universal standard of spelling.”
“I’m not advocating improper usage, but I think pressure can be put on words without breaking them. ‘Inhaling with both hands’ became a visual metaphor for my narrator evoking the way lovers test each other through intense sensory pressure until the senses meld together. My use of the word ‘inhaling’ was a natural evolution of this process of oral and sensory exploration. Not to mention the denotation of gathering greedily.”
