Suddenly, outside our classroom, a clamor had begun, the hallway rumbling with footsteps and voices. My momentum broken, I glanced at the clock on the wall: the period was over.
“Okay, I guess that’s it for today.” I felt the disheartening change in the room—the communal distraction, the itching to bolt. A couple of students had put down their pens. “For Thursday, read the first chapter of American Government by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio.”
“How do you spell that?”
They were closing notebooks, stuffing book bags.
“Look it up on the syllabus, Mr. Weisberg.”
In a minute they were gone, all of them, Weisberg and Chen and Jackson, David Glassman too, packed up and eager to join the boisterous river of youth flowing to other parts of the building, other teachers, subjects, words, dreams.
Standing in the empty classroom, I felt the shock of the vanished hour, the relief of having navigated it, and the hollow sadness of depletion.
four
FOLLOWING TRADITION, at the end of term I took my class on a trip to Washington. The highlights were a tour of the Capitol, a lengthy observation of the House in the throes of procedural debate (an amendment to an existing logging bill), a fifteen-minute meeting with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, and a somewhat longer meeting with Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.
The boys were curious and enthusiastic. Our second night we ate a celebratory dinner at a chain steakhouse. As the chocolate sundaes arrived, Liam Weisberg stood up, tapped his glass with a spoon, and announced his candidacy for president in ‘92. He was aware that it was a little early in the process—there was a year to go yet before the ‘88 election—but, he said, he wanted to let us all know now, so we’d have a chance to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, while decent Cabinet positions were still available.
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Mr. Weisberg.”
“In return for a perfect grade, I’ll give you Health and Human Resources, Mr. Rose. Whaddya say?”
I laughed. “Weisberg, you’re a little Caesar in the making.”
“Caesar knew how to handle his PR, Mr. Rose, I’ll say that for the guy.”
“Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by his most trusted aide, Mr. Weisberg.”
“Bullies!” Brian Chen declared in a jovial voice.
Chen’s face, I suddenly noticed, was the color of rhubarb; so, for that matter, was Weisberg’s. I wondered if they hadn’t sneaked a couple of drinks somewhere before dinner.
“Sort of, Mr. Chen.”
“How about me?” David Glassman asked. “What position do I get?”
“Missionary,” Weisberg shot back.
General laughter. Ducking his head, Glassman took a bite of sundae and did not speak for the rest of the meal.
We returned to our hotel. By eleven o’clock sharp the boys were in their rooms for the night. I went to my own room and turned on the TV and found Larry King interviewing Susan Estrich, the manager of Dukakis’ bid for the Democratic nomination. Dukakis hadn’t failed yet. He was still climbing the mountain, still rising. The earth from where he stood must have looked flat, despite what he’d learned to the contrary in grade school; he could reach out and cover it with his hand. Such was his confidence at the time. And Estrich too—smart tough-talking commander of the minions—shared in the sense of imminent power. She was brazen in the face of King’s self-satisfied mien.
I turned off the TV and lay there—fully dressed, shoes on—in the hotel quiet. Sleep anytime soon was out of the question.
It was not a real quiet in that generic room, but a pervasive humming. As if there existed somewhere close by a generator, a strange white-noise machine designed to drown out all the televised lie-mongering and whining mea culpas and pandering.
I got up and left the room, intending to go to the bar for a drink. As the elevator doors opened on the lobby, I almost ran into David Glassman.
“David! What are you doing down here?”
His head ducked. “I …”
“It’s after curfew.”
“I know, Mr. Rose. Sorry.”
He ducked his head again, and this time I felt a flash of annoyance. I suppressed the urge to point it out to him, to explain how a tic like that—a kowtow in miniature—might express weakness or even servility to other kids, and how under certain circumstances kids could be as power-mad and ruthless as adults. Hadn’t he read Lord of the Flies?
“Everything okay, David?”
“Sure, Mr. Rose.” He was staring at his feet. The elevator doors started to close but I held them.
“David, look at me.”
The head turned up. The eyes were bloodshot and the nostrils mildly inflamed. He’d been crying.
“You’re a lousy liar, Glassman, you know that?” I said as lightly as I could, stepping out of the elevator. “Come on, I’ll buy you a soda.”
Wordlessly he followed me across the lobby.
A brief journey—but even so, time enough to reflect on whether the student was feeling relieved or merely dutiful at the prospect of a tête-à-tête with his teacher, however sympathetic; whether, for that matter, the teacher genuinely thought he could help the student with his problems (whatever they might be), or whether this was just another example of the rampant egoism of the lonely.
We went in. A hotel bar, half past eleven at night and the tables all full. Not just the seat of government, then, this town, but the mother lode of convention centers. Did people never sleep? Did they not have families to go home to? All these indefatigable male conventioneers in wrinkle-free gray suits and white shirts hunched over stiff drinks, groping for one more handful of nuts. All these tired women in heavy makeup and starched blouses and Colonel Sanders ribbon ties, whose permanent-press smiles evoked the last steps of a forced march that had begun eons ago in some other desert. A scene, as they say, to make you weep. Except that as we entered the bar a couple of heads turned in our direction, and mirrored in their curious stares I caught a glimpse of the little docudrama I was unwittingly directing: a man and a boy, at night, entering a bar. A mistake. Clearly the boy was too old to be my son. What, then, was happening here? Nothing good, declared the silent, judging faces.
I pushed on anyway. Though now I was angry with myself—it was sheer stupidity not to have considered appearances.
And it was too late. I hadn’t thought ahead, hadn’t noticed the stares in time. And the last thing I wanted to do was add to David’s problems and his pain, his clearly advanced if not yet fully articulated sense of being inadequate in the world. No, I wanted to say to him: The burden of being intelligent and shy and young is that you will always know, cannot not know; have grown up in a fiction of perpetual responsibility, believing that whatever cracks in life you find must be your cracks, that anything at all can be your fault. I wanted to tell him that what he didn’t see couldn’t hurt him, whereas what he did see would be with him for the rest of his days. And he would see a great deal, always, except perhaps his own worth.
We reached the faux-mahogany bar. There were two empty stools at the end. I slid onto one of them, and David climbed onto the other and perched there awkwardly. All of a sudden, he looked excruciatingly young.
The bartender sauntered over. Gray-haired, with a plush walrus mustache and a thick pitted nose that no doubt in its time had borne witness to entire epochs of pre-and post-convention despair, joy, and camaraderie. His eyes shifted from me to David, then back to me, before he asked what I’d have.
My order of two Cokes seemed to reassure him. He brought the sodas without comment, and went back to the other end of the bar.
“Now,” I said, turning to David. “Do you want to tell me why you were in the lobby half an hour after curfew?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Rose.”
“I know you are.”
He took several gulps of Coke. I waited.
“I was using one of the pay phones,” he said finally.
“Why?�
�
“My parents made me promise to call.” He paused. “I didn’t want to do it in the room, Mr. Rose. In front of anybody.”
“I understand. Is something happening at home?”
He wouldn’t look at me.
“David?”
“They’re getting divorced,” he said softly, looking at the bar.
“How long have you known?”
“Since last weekend.”
His gaze was fixed on his hands, which were wrapped around the glass on the bar; he was staring at his hands as if there were something in them that he was in the process of recording for posterity.
“It’s my mom who wants it,” he said. “She says she loves somebody else.”
He was quiet then, staring at his hands; I could hear him breathing. There was acne on his forehead, and he hadn’t yet grown into his nose. But he held himself like a man. It was all inside him, whatever it was.
I put my hand on his back. More than one head in the room turned our way, but the stares no longer made any difference to me.
For a few moments longer David held himself still. Then, bit by bit, he began to cry. He cried quietly, just as he was, sitting on the tall stool, his hands gripping the glass of soda.
From behind, in the cheap murky light of the bar, nursing your third drink or your eighth, you wouldn’t have heard him. You might have mistaken my young friend for an adult, a slight small-boned man, possibly a drinker. You would no longer have discerned in him the student, the growing boy, the hungry seeker of knowledge who until just a few days ago, a few minutes, had remained an optimist in spite of himself. This new pain was all confusion to him, a note struck in the darkness: knowing its source had changed nothing, shed not a single ray of light.
five
SHE KEPT COMING BACK. She was never far away. Washington or New York, hotel room or cheap studio, Riverside Park or Central, take-in Chinese or hot dogs on the corner, James Madison or John Locke, Mrs. Hogan or Mr. Maddox, Glass-man or Jackson or Weisberg or Chen, my words or theirs, reading or teaching, teaching or struck dumb. It made no difference. Every day she came, and every night. I was a blank screen and she was the only movie, and I watched her and watched her and watched her.
six
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, while running for the highest office in the land, the short dour governor of Massachusetts ill-advisedly placed an olive-green, one-size-supposedly-fits-all Army helmet on his large head and climbed into a tank. At that moment he lost the presidency, which he had desired for as long as he could remember.
Hours later, with the first clips on the evening news, the whole thing was over—vanished in a buffoonish mishap, an unwitting joke, a pantomime of such hubristic and small-minded desperation that somehow it would succeed in erasing all other impressions of the man. Gone forever was whoever he had been. This was what he was now.
November and the general election still lay ahead. Those final weeks must have seemed to him like a slow but certain public drowning.
At Cochrane, a new year began. I wasn’t a rookie anymore; walking down the hallway between classes, during lunch, you’d hear it: “Hi, Mr. Rose!” “Hey, Mr. Rose!” “Mr. Rose—my man!” The sheer numbers of students, their raw energy, backpacks stuffed with enough hope and anxiety to fuel a shuttle launch.
It’s the paradoxical reward of teaching that the job is never finished. No one, especially the brightest, will ever know enough. You yourself can never stock the larder of knowledge full enough to guarantee continual nourishment throughout the long winter of uncertainty that is living.
On top of this, perhaps, must be counted the old adage that teachers remain eternally young because their students never age. A time warp, in other words. Except that I did not believe it.
In my minuscule apartment there was a single mirror the size of a sheet of notebook paper. Big enough to shave by. Big enough to reflect back at me those few visible surfaces—a relatively unlined face, a long-fingered hand—capable of carrying on this charade of youthfulness to the outside world. At my age the skin was still resilient, if no longer exactly fresh. It made for the most natural of disguises.
The heart, of course, was a different story.
I tried dating a couple of times. But as had been the case in Cambridge, these attempts at romance lacked conviction, and were short-lived.
I took Carol, a redheaded English teacher, to an Italian restaurant on Columbus, then back to my apartment, where we sat on my sofa drinking wine and talking desultorily about school and the students we shared. Not a terribly demanding date—though not so simple, either, as it turned out. I couldn’t find the words or guts to tell her that most of what we said to each other sounded disturbingly secondhand to me, echoed by the memory of other, more resonant conversations; or that the toss of her head, the lifting of her hand to her face, too often struck me as shadowy reminders of moments already past. There were no original gestures left, I wanted to tell her, but didn’t.
And then, at some point, I simply began to shut down. It was involuntary; as though I were the last of my species, defeated by the grind of existence, fatal flaws made glaringly evident under evolution’s dispassionate magnifying glass. Excusing myself, I went to the bathroom and stood leaning over the sink. That was all. The tiny mirror, showing me myself, did the work of an entire wrecking crew.
When I returned, Carol was gone.
seven
IN FEBRUARY, for my thirtieth birthday, Toby Glickstein threw a party in my honor.
That night it snowed heavily. Toby lived up near Columbia, in a rent-controlled apartment passed on to him by an uncle. I walked up West End Avenue, the snow sifting down between the residential buildings in fat adhesive flakes; the city windless, muted, yellowed and shadowed by streetlights. The sidewalks nearly empty: a different place. The street, otherwise obscured, revealed itself as two furrows of oiled black made by the tires of a recently passed car. Nothing else went by as I walked, and gradually the furrows took on a velvet whiteness, and soon disappeared.
“Jesus, Julian,” Toby said, opening the door. “You look like a fucking snowman. Well, happy birthday. Put the coat in the bathtub, please.”
In the living room eight men about my own age were huddled around bowls of tortilla chips and salsa. I knew this crowd. We were all Cochrane almuni of a certain ilk. Many of us had grown a bit taller since the old days, but neither contact lenses nor Clearasil nor hair gel could hide the fact that somewhere in the past we’d been geeks.
I shot Toby a raised eyebrow. He followed me back into the apartment.
“Well, you try rustling up some women on such short notice,” he said defensively. “Anyway, don’t knock it. These guys are the last line of defense between you and another night flying solo with Captain Kirk.”
“Nice try, Tobe, but I don’t have a TV.”
“You think that’s something to brag about?” Toby said. “That’s pathetic, pal. Now how about taking off the coat? You’re dripping on my carpet.”
We rallied. We drank—red wine, beer, and bourbon. We stuffed ourselves with Chinese food from the Moon Palace and traded ten-year-old wallflower gossip as if it was hot currency. There was Muller, Goodman, Krebs, Piombo, Wolff, Scheinbart, Pleven, and Yang. Krebs was trying to make his first film, Wolff was a freelance journalist, Pleven was in computers, Yang was a lawyer, and Goodman was an oil and gas analyst for Salomon Brothers. Improbably, Piombo had written a children’s book that was being published in the fall (he confessed to having intended it for adults). Scheinbart and Muller were between things and discussing the possibility of some kind of joint venture, possibly a yoga studio. This idea was greeted with derisive hooting by all.
After a couple of hours of this, after cake and tone-deaf singing, I snuck off to the bathroom, simply to be alone. I’d been having a decent evening. But beyond the daily routine of the classroom, I guessed, I’d fallen out of the habit of being around a social group for any length of time.
I closed the door a
nd sat down on the edge of the tub. Beside me lay my heavy winter coat, where earlier I’d put it to dry. The wool was still damp. The snow that had covered it was strangely vivid to me, despite having disappeared. In my mind I saw it still falling, felt it settling once again on my head and shoulders. I put my face in my hands.
I was thirty years old. I needed to stop remembering, looking over my shoulder, being dragged from shore by a swirling tide of feeling for a woman who was gone and would not be coming back. Gone. A mother now, I had to presume. I didn’t know whether she’d had a girl or a boy, but I imagined a girl made in her image, and I saw this child walking, almost stumbling…. And Claire picks her up—
“Julian?”
Toby’s voice, through the door, followed by a tentative knock.
I jumped to my feet. “Just a minute.”
He knocked again. I flushed the toilet for the sake of appearances, turned the tap on and off.
“What is it?” I demanded, opening the door.
Toby’s eyes were bloodshot with drink. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You weren’t puking, were you?”
“No.”
After a moment his face broke into a lopsided grin. “Good. Because we’ve got company.”
I followed him out of the bedroom and down the hallway. In the living room three women stood surrounded by eager, nervous men as at a high school dance. Two of the women were laughing. The third, standing slightly apart, was Marty Goodman’s sister, Laura.
Claire Marvel Page 14
