A Much Loved Teacher
By the time Aaron approaches the accident, a couple of cars have already stopped, their bundled-up drivers crouched by the toppled motorcycle and the man sprawled on the icy asphalt beside it. The traffic means that Aaron has a clear look for maybe fifteen seconds. The motorcyclist, or one of those assisting him, has removed his helmet. His face is turned away from the road. He holds his chest as though something there is oozing out, or oozing within. It’s only as Aaron is about to pass the scene that he catches sight of the victim’s face and thinks he recognizes his old French teacher.
Mr. Shenkman. A good teacher, an extraordinary storyteller. For his seventh-grade students, Shenkman’s stories took on mythic dimensions. He’d lived in Africa. He’d known Pierre Trudeau. At one point he’d known Trudeau in Africa. No less compelling were his stories set in their quiet suburban community — about his Jewish motorcyclists’ club, or his eldest son’s confrontations with teenaged anti-Semites. Between stories Mr. Shenkman reviewed vocabulary, verb conjugations. He was solidly built, not too tall, bald, with thick-rimmed glasses from behind which his eyes met yours with reserved intelligence and, if you earned it, great warmth. He was known to cultivate lasting relationships with certain students. Aaron was never one of them. Their relationship was respectful, unexceptional. He hasn’t spoken to, or really thought about, Mr. Shenkman since he graduated from elementary school a decade ago. Until tonight.
He arrives home still preoccupied by what he saw. He paces his childhood bedroom, tries to decide what to do. Some of his seventh-grade friends were close with Shenkman, babysat their teacher’s nieces and nephews; some of them might’ve been entrusted with his phone number. Maybe Lana Franklin, he thinks. In the seventh grade he hadn’t known Lana very well, but they bumped into each other on campus a month ago and she suggested they grab coffee sometime, scribbled her number on a scrap of paper torn from her prettily engraved notebook.
She picks up right away. I didn’t think I’d hear from you, she says. I’ve been meaning to call, he says. Happy you did. Listen, I think Mr. Shenkman’s been in an accident, you remember him? There’s a pause. Of course, she says. What kind of accident? I think he fell from his motorcycle. Fell. Yeah, there was ice all around. God. Yeah, I know. And you’ve spoken to him? No, that’s the thing, I don’t even know for sure that it was him, I couldn’t see the guy’s face clearly, but so I wanted to call him and make sure everything’s okay and it occurred to me that you might have his number. I do, she says, and falls silent. He waits. Listens to her slow breathing on the line. I used to have the biggest crush on him, she says. Really, he says. Crazy, I know, he must’ve been over fifty even then. But there was something about him. Unknowable. No matter how much he told us about himself. Actually, the more he revealed, the less I felt I knew him. As if each story made the decoy Shenkman more lifelike while the real him made a run for it. She’s silent again. He waits, rapt. Sorry, she says. Please, he says. Didn’t mean to weird you out, she says, I promise I won’t be like this if we go for coffee. I promise I won’t spring bad news on you if we go for coffee. And if there’s bad news? I’ll lie, he says.
He dials Shenkman’s number as soon as they hang up. He’s concerned about the late hour, close to midnight—if his intuition proves false, he’ll have alarmed the household for no reason. After five or six rings, a groggy female voice: Hello? Hi, says Aaron, very sorry to call so late, could I please speak to Leonard? It feels awkward, transgressive to use his teacher’s first name. Who’s calling, Mrs. Shenkman wants to know. He could just ask if her husband had been in an accident this evening. He doesn’t. I used to be his student, he says. There’s a hesitation. The sound of slow exertion: someone standing who’d rather not. Hang on, she says.
Hi, who’s this? says Leonard Shenkman, and immediately Aaron’s certain he’s made a mistake, it was somebody else by the side of the ice-slicked road, he’s called this man for no reason and now he has nothing to say. Hi, this is Aaron Gold, you probably don’t remember me, I — Sure I remember you, spacey kid, big hair, how’re you doing? Fine, how are you? Retired now. So what’s new, what’s your life like these days? Good, listen, sorry to call so late, it’s just — So you called, it’s late, okay, now are you gonna catch me up or what?
Aaron hesitates. He’s tempted to say goodbye, hang up as fast as possible; he’s tempted to recite as a list all the accomplishments for which he’s been recognized since grade school. He feels sure that anything he says will be listened to. I’m in university, he says. Good, do you like it? Comme-ci comme-ca. So leave. I’m almost finished. So stay. I plan to. What else? I’ve been painting. Oh yeah? Quite a lot actually, yeah. Ever consider going to school for it? Well, not really, not full-time anyway, but I’m enrolled in a program in Paris this spring and then I plan to travel around Europe a bit. Good too, be careful … I plan to be in Europe myself this spring, Shenkman goes on. I need to take a little time. Been feeling a bit wrecked lately. Wrecked how? Silence. You probably would’ve understood better when you were twelve. A strange laugh, hard and abrupt. In the background, Shenkman’s wife calls for him. I’ll be a few minutes, says Shenkman. Turn out the lights, I can find my way in the dark.
Just a little wrecked, Aaron’s old French teacher says. Probably this brutal weather. There were times like this when we were in Rhodesia. Zimbabwe. There it was the heat. You could just sit for days. Not do anything. Unhealthy. I remember a time when I went off into the bush near our house with a rifle because we heard a rustling. Soon as I approached, the rustling stopped. So there I was, gun in my hands, nothing to do with it. I could hear the voices of the others back at the house. Didn’t feel like joining them again. So I just sat down where I was. And then, maybe two yards away, this little family of snakes crept out from beneath a cluster of plantains. Five of them. Long. Black long things. The width of two fingers. No clue what type of snake they were, didn’t look like any snake I’d ever seen before. They moved together. Towards the compound. Real slow, but that was their direction. Towards my wife, and my sons, and all the locals we employed to help around the place. Those snakes weren’t interested in me at all. They moved right past me. I could’ve walked away. But instead I got real close, pointed the gun, and put a bullet in each of them, fast. Black goo. Explosions of shiny purple. Five bullets. Didn’t bother me much to do it. Easy to rationalize in the moment. My family was there. Or whatever. But what got me was that even when I crouched over them and aimed, not one of them looked my way. They didn’t acknowledge me. It was as if I wasn’t there at all.
Soft breathing on the line. So I’ll be in Europe for a while this spring, Shenkman says, I’m going to Venice, when are you in Paris? The end of May, Aaron says, his voice faint. Let’s meet up if you’re in Italy while I’m there, Shenkman says, I’ll be by myself, my wife’s not coming, and Aaron says, okay.
They hang up. He sits on the edge of his bed. There’s nothing else he wants to do tonight, but even if there were, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it. He brushes his teeth, undresses, lies under the covers in his dark bedroom. He closes his eyes and tries to picture his old French teacher’s face. Can’t. Sees instead five sunbursts of blood on a jungle floor.
But thank God he wasn’t in a motorcycle accident, he thinks. Thank God, thank God he wasn’t in a motorcycle accident.
The Snake Crosses the Tracks at Midnight
We drive south, park at the community centre, walk along the curb, as per the directions Lucy got from Shira Coffler in our Grade 12 Civics class. Traffic wings by us. I follow Lucy down a little path into the ditch, around the overpass. Gang tags mark the overpass’s side: a dragon’s head, teeth clamped around a bloodied serpent. We’re headed into trees, the path in front of us dark.
“Did they bring lights?”
“They’re making a fire.”
We’re in some sort of valley. Moonlight peeks through and I see a black stream to our right, hiccupping over rocks and twigs with belches of fo
am.
I grab Lucy’s shoulders, squeeze a little. “Are you just trying to get me alone in the woods?”
She stops. She turns and looks at me. I’d meant something along the lines of: are you trying to murder me or steal my wallet? A little, unfunny joke. But she didn’t hear it like that. We’ve had these moments before.
Lucy and I have known each other since we were four, when my house was two doors down from hers and our parents took advantage of our pre-pre-pubescent love affair — she was my girlfriend, and I liked to pinch her, apparently — for babysitting purposes. When my parents wanted to go to the movies on a Saturday night, they’d leave me with Lucy and the Friedmans; when Mr. and Mrs. Friedman wanted to spend time with their mistress or mistress, respectively, they’d deposit Lucy on our front stoop. We haven’t discussed our early romance since puberty bodychecked us, but sometimes a ghost of it appears behind her eyes, and I think: it was real. What we felt then was real.
There’s the sound of a train horn. Lucy looks up towards the sound, which is still distant, a rumour. Suddenly she’s pushing me off the path, up a hill, where I trip, fall. Dry leaves crunch and I’m on my back. She’s beside me. In a crouch. Close to me. I don’t really want her, she’s too known, but I have an erection. She doesn’t touch me, doesn’t even look at me. She stares at the tracks.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Waiting for the snake.”
Maybe I should be more interested in her. I like girls. I like sex, the tastes I’ve had of it. I’m too particular. Or I’m too nervous. We’re alone in the woods; this is how it could happen, if we both want it to. But she’s not even looking at me.
“It’s not coming. It must be going the other way.”
She shakes her head. And she stands up and walks off as if nothing’s happened.
I trail a few feet behind her. No questions; she’d give me no straight answers.
We spot a fire in ten minutes and arrive at a crowded, subdued party. Our classmates sit on logs, on the ground. There are dry leaves and twigs nearby and I worry the fire might spread, create a secret inferno that we must secretly squelch. Souvenirs of alcohol are littered around: cans and bottles, small puddles from spills. Shira Coffler and Michael Stein spot us; Stein tells us to make ourselves at home. We find an empty spot in the circle and plunk ourselves down. I don’t know most of the people here. Lucy doesn’t seem to, either. There’s the beanpole selfprofessed “player” from my math class, his arm around a petite blonde; the three Gothy Russian girls never seen apart, dubbed the Dark Sisters of the Revolution by certain wits; and Brian Waters, who plays water polo but is sometimes snubbed by other jocks because of his freely confessed affection for Broadway musicals. Waters offers us a joint. “Toke?”
“Noke,” I say, which makes him think I’m already high, which is incorrect, or that I’m a complete fucking knob, which is correct. Lucy takes a few long drags.
“How long have people been here?” I ask Waters.
He leans back, rests on his elbows. “Not long. Since eleven maybe.”
That’s all I can think of to say to him. Not that he minds: he’s lost to us, embroiled in a love affair with the night sky and his navel. For a very long time, I do nothing but sit still and wear a tense half-smile and eavesdrop on gossip. Crickets play cricket in the bushes. Lucy talks about Evita with Waters. I chew on my lip. I’ve got a few basic points in common with the others here: imminent end of high school, inability to imagine a future, constant low-level terror/longing re: sex. So it’s weird that I have no desire to say anything to any of them besides Lucy. Finally, worried I’ll fall asleep if I stay silent, I turn to a short, ripped guy in a Nirvana T-shirt and say, apropos of the insects on my jeans: “I’m so glad there are more spiders than mosquitoes here, you know?”
He looks at me with his mouth open a sliver. “Wha?”
I shake my jeans. “Spiders. They eat mosquitos. So it’s okay if I’ve got the former on my pants, because it means I won’t get bitten by the latter. You know?”
He looks at me with terrible intensity. “You’re so high, man.”
The bellow of the train rises. Lucy shoots to her feet, wheels towards the sound. “Come on, we’re going to miss it!” she shout-whispers at me. She grabs me by the arm and marches me across the clearing, up a hill. A few heads by the fire turn to watch us.
“What are you doing!”
“Come on! You’ve gotta run!”
When we’re halfway up the hill, she stops. We turn and I can see the train tracks, the graffiti’d overpass, and, approaching quickly, the lights of the Canadian National. Lucy tugs at my arm. “Look. Look. Watch this.”
The train starts across the overpass. Lucy giggles like a little girl.
And I see what she wants me to see. The fence at the side of the overpass allows light from the train to pass through in fragments. A pattern is created. The light from the train cuts up, down, over, up, down, over, like a light show, a performance held just for us, free of charge. The train is a snake, slithering across the tracks. Lucy’s arm coils around mine. The light from the train barrels on, and on, and on: up, down, over, and again. A snake in the night.
“See? I told you it was worth it. We could’ve seen it even better from the path.”
The train barrels east; its light leaves with it.
Moon remains. I can see Lucy’s eyes. Green.
“Cool,” I say, just barely.
When Lucy and I were seven, our families went on a picnic together, and it was a scary experience for our parents because they thought Lucy and I had gotten lost. For two hours they scrambled around the park in search of us, my mother crying, Lucy’s father shouting at strangers, demanding to know if anyone had seen a skinny little boy with a pigtailed little girl. When finally they found us, they yelled at us for twenty minutes. Her father shook me; my mother wagged a finger in Lucy’s tiny, uncomprehending face. We were packed into minivans, driven home, and sent to our rooms with the sternest reprimands.
But we hadn’t meant to cause trouble. Lucy and I had felt abandoned. We’d been walking in circles around a huge elm tree, discussing why we can buy animals from stores but they can’t buy us, when suddenly we noticed that all the adults, plus my sister, plus Lucy’s brothers, had disappeared. We stood still, silent, stony-faced. Looked out over the empty field. They had left us all alone. So we decided, in that clearheaded way I lost with the first breath of adolescence, that we should just stay put and wait for our prodigal guardians to return. I escorted a ladybug off Lucy’s arm. We lay in the grass, under the sun and the sky which had clouds but not too many clouds, and we chatted. I said what do you think we’ll be when we grow up and she said astronauts. I agreed with her. She said what do you think that cloud is and I said an elephant. She agreed with me. I said that cloud is a train and she said no it’s a box of cereal on its side. We proceeded across the sky: a noodle, a cheetah, a bird (which actually was a bird). She asked me where I wanted to live when I was older, and I said I don’t think you can choose, I think when you turn eighteen the wind starts to blow really hard and by that point you have a special flying suit, so when the wind blows with all that fury it lifts you up, off the ground, throwing you around the world over majestic peaks and valleys, until finally, when your flying suit is wearing out, the wind sets you down in the place you’re supposed to be, with the people you’re supposed to be with, and you’re okay. You’re okay. You’re just okay, I said. And she held me through the afternoon until our parents found us.
At around one in the morning Brian Waters keels over. Efforts to revive him fail. Alcohol poisoning, somebody says, and I realize I don’t know whether that means he’s going to die or he’s just out for the night. Panic ripples. One of the Goth girls pulls out her phone and calls an ambulance. She doesn’t know how to describe where we are, though, plus she probably doesn’t want to, so she tells the paramedics to meet us by the overpass. I join an overmanned effort to carry Waters through the unmarke
d woods — to go back along the path would take too long — and we set out, bearing our wounded, Lucy so close behind me I can feel her breath on the back of my neck. We emerge into the light of the street and climb out of the ditch, lower Waters to the damp grass by the side of the road, in the glare of passing traffic. The ambulance arrives. The paramedics lift Waters onto a gurney, load him into the vehicle. Michael Stein goes with them, his face sombre. Responsibility: it sits in the gut, sticks. The wind’s picked up.
Lucy’s arms are crossed, hands folded beneath them to keep warm.
“How’d you know about the lights from the train?” I ask.
I regret the words the moment they’re out of my mouth.
“Sometimes I’ve gone down there to read.” She doesn’t meet my eye. “Sometimes I’ve stayed into the evening.”
She looks so old to me. She looks thirty, a hundred years old, like she’s seen everything, outlived every mystery, and I want to go back, to ask her again and hear her answer: What lights? What train? There is no train. There has never been a train. What you saw, old man, was a snake.
An Old Friend
So I’m at this bar, busy place on the Esplanade the guys from my firm visit after work. I don’t often join them, my home life appeals to me and I see my family little enough as it is, but this time I’ve gone down for a quick drink, I think this is a Monday evening, long week ahead. I’m sitting at a table with Aaron Gold and Joe Harris, both of them guys around my age, we have work in common and similar taste in movies and music, we get along. There’s a certain testosterone quotient at the table, definitely, but none of us are the loud type, neither Aaron nor Joe nor I ever went in for the cutthroat stuff, we came to the law as idealistic, let’s say quasi-socialistic young guys, we were smart and we were interested in things like human rights law, social justice, advocacy for the voiceless and so on, and we never abandoned the spirit of that, but, it happens, we all got married, two out of three of us had kids, and our politics changed as we spent more time in the world. Now we make more money than we ever dreamed of making, way more than our fathers ever made, and sometimes the work’s interesting, it’s always demanding, which is fine, keeps you sharp, but it’s good to grab a drink and ease the pressure.
Faithful and Other Stories Page 4
