The English Teacher Page 9

  Her face hung in the window as Stuart dressed. They were always pretty, prettier than any girls at Peter’s school. They were goddesses (he’d studied Greek mythology last year): Athena, Artemis, or Aphrodite nearly every night through a pane of glass.

  The front yard, the driveway, and (with the plump one) the station wagon were Stuart’s midnight court. He never made a phone call or went on a date. They came to him. He never brought them inside, even when a covering of snow lay rumpled on the grass. Instead they each trod in it, not seeming to notice the frozen footprints of the night before.

  The first one Peter saw was small and giggly, with twenty bracelets on each arm. From his perch on Stuart’s bed, he watched them frolic like ponies on the lawn. The next one had pale eyes and painted lips and with her Stuart sat soberly on the bottom step of the porch (Peter pressed his cheek hard against the window to see so far to the left), kicking the ground with his boot. With the third, Stuart didn’t seem to talk at all. When she came, he lifted the window and the screen in one quick motion and they began kissing right there, the cold air blowing in over his bare torso across the room to Peter, who squinted his eyes open to watch. This one, the one with the thick curves and butterscotch skin, he brought straight to the station wagon, and all Peter could see were their heads before they pushed the backseat down flat. Unlike in the movies, the car didn’t bounce or shake. No one could tell that two people were lying down in it, taking off their clothes.

  Nights that there wasn’t a girl, he and Stuart talked. Around Vida and Tom, Stuart struggled for the fewest words possible, but in his room he had a lot to say. He was a philosopher, a mystic. Peter had never met anyone like him. He had answers to all the questions Peter had only begun to formulate.

  “Are you a popular guy at school, Pete?”

  No one had ever called him Pete before. He liked it. He saw that Stuart knew the truth about him so he didn’t dare lie. “No.”

  “Good. If others like you, you are weakening your true being.” He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, and for a long time he didn’t speak, just breathed noisily with his eyes shut. Then he said, “Chuang Tzu says that if you are mourned at your funeral, you’ve forgotten the gift God gave you. And if you grieve over someone’s death you’re a fool.”

  “Why?”

  “Because death is unimportant.”

  Peter wished he could see it that way.

  “Death,” Stuart continued, “is simply movement from one form to another. But what you want to achieve is formlessness, so that ultimately you don’t know—or care—whether you’re dead or alive.”

  “How do you achieve that, formlessness?”

  “Here.” Without untangling his legs, he reached down into the stack of library books by his bed. “Let me read you a little something.” He flipped through a paperback with cracked-off corners. “‘His body is dry like an old legbone. His mind is dead as dead ashes. His knowledge is solid. His wisdom is true! In the deep dark night he wanders free without aim and without design. Who can compare with this toothless man?’”

  That night Peter dreamed he was losing teeth; he dreamed Stuart was a dry twig on the pillow in the morning.

  Another book was about Eastern surgical practices. It had pictures, hundreds of pictures. Stuart showed Peter some of his favorites. “They’ve taken out this guy’s entire GI tract,” he said. “No anesthesia to knock him out, just a few needles there and there.”

  Peter looked at the man—he was smiling at the camera, with his stomach on the table beside him.

  “Surgery,” Stuart explained, “is their last resort, whereas here they hardly consider anything else. It’s all about using the knife. In Asia they have a one-in-three-hundred rate of cancer, and we have a one-in-seven. And for every eighty people they cure, we cure one.” To Peter’s relief he shut the book and lay back on his bed. “I told him to take her to Taiwan but he refused. He wouldn’t even bring her to this acupuncturist I found in Bristol. People would rather let people die than change their cramped little view.” He put his open hands up to the far sides of his eyes, then turned them in, as if he wanted to play peekaboo. He didn’t uncover his eyes for the longest time and when he finally did, his palms had pushed all the blood out of his cheeks. Peter watched how it flooded back in.

  “You don’t like your dad very much, do you?”

  Stuart looked at him with suspicion, as if he were working for the other side. “He’s okay. He just dreams the dreams of suburbia. If you asked him what he wants most for his son Stuart, his hair-trigger response would be, ‘College.’ ‘But’”—Stuart’s voice became stiff and graveled—“‘how do you think the boy is doing since his mother’s death?’ ‘College.’ ‘Do you love him?’ ‘College.’”

  Peter had heard Tom on this topic, but he didn’t want to reveal that. He pretended to be putting together the pieces himself. “Is it because he was the first to go in his family?”

  “Thomas Marnelli Belou. Rhode Island School of Design. Class of 1952.” Stuart managed to protrude the ledge of his eyebrows to become Tom. The voice and accent were surprisingly accurate. “My father’s family came down from Shitsville, Canada, and spent three generations in a paper mill. Sixty years they stunk up their houses with their rotten-egg smell before they figured out how to sew and make the money for you, Stuart May Belou, to perch up in an ivory tower and laugh at your pitiful, smelly ancestors.”

  Stuart lay in bed in the dark, though Peter didn’t think he ever slept. Peter tried to keep up with him but by midnight his body, like a child who wants to go home, pulled him unwillingly away from consciousness. When he woke up in the morning, Stuart was always gone.

  “What about your mom’s side?” Peter asked the next night. “Did they go to college?” He liked to slip in questions about her. It made him feel closer to the Belous, knowing things about her. It made her feel less dead. Just saying “your mom” brought her so much closer to the surface of life.

  “Same sort of thing as my dad’s,” he said without any attempt to recreate her voice. “She didn’t even go to college herself. She got married instead.”

  Peter knew if he was quiet long enough he’d go on.

  “She took me to look at colleges last spring—no, two springs ago. When I was in eleventh grade.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “California. I had this idea I wanted to go to Berkeley. So we saw that and Stanford and UCLA.” The light was still on. Stuart was propped up with a pillow that loomed high over his head and bobbed when he spoke. It made him look a little like Marie Antoinette, and Peter kept wanting to laugh.

  “It was a pretty weird place, California. The ocean’s a completely different color, like it’s been injected with some sort of dye. Mom loved it. She kept saying that if I went to school out there they’d all move. She came back really excited about that plan, but my father shot it down. Then she got sick and that was that.” With two hands he shoved the tall pillow under his head. He didn’t speak for several minutes, then he said, “Talk about mourning at a funeral. She was too well-liked. She wasted too many words and tears on others when she should have been looking inward.”

  Peter thought how if Stuart died there would be only girls at his funeral. He could see them in tight black dresses all in a row, crying into soaked Kleenexes. Eventually they’d notice each other and the service would turn into a brawl, culminating at the casket, where they’d tear the clothes off Stuart’s corpse. The plump one would confess to her nights in the back of the car and the others would have to bow down and give her the crown: Stuart’s underwear.

  The laugh he’d been battling exploded out of him.

  “What?” Stuart said.

  “Nothing.”

  Stuart didn’t press him.

  After a while Peter asked, “What does the Tao say about sex before marriage?”

  “The Tao doesn’t say anything. ‘That which is sayable is not the Tao.’”

  Peter waited for the real answer.


  “The Tao doesn’t concern itself with the idea of sin. Sin becomes irrelevant when you are using your mental energy in the right way.”

  Peter was patient. He listened to the metal number 7 slap onto the number 6 inside his clock radio, making it 11:57 P.M.

  “Sex can be a form of intense meditation, if you do it correctly. It can be very truthful.”

  Thinking about being with Kristina in the station wagon, Peter fell asleep with a very truthful hard-on.

  Peter tried to explain these theories to Jason. But Jason was un-receptive. “I think that guy has found a way to justify going nowhere fast. He’s a total loser, Peter.” Jason was still angry he’d moved away. No other faculty kids their age lived on campus.

  “The words of broken people come forth like vomit,” Peter quoted, he didn’t know from what.

  On a science test, Peter explained in a long, unrelated essay the story about the search for the Lost Pearl and how Nothingness, who was not asked, had it all along.

  Not only was he failing biology, but history and French were in question as well. And now his mother, the hardest grader in the school, was his English teacher at least until Christmas break, and Kristina was in that section.

  He hated Tess of the d’Urbervilles. There were so many words and so few of them were interesting. He wished for once they could read something pertinent to the life of a teenager in the twentieth century. He quickly fell behind in the assignments, and on the third day of class with his mother, he learned that Tess had had a baby. He searched the book for the scene of conception but found nothing. A kid next to him told him it happened with Alec d’Urberville in the woods at the end of chapter eleven. He read the pages, but all he could find was that they were lost in the dark, and Alec made a pile of leaves for her to sit on while he went to look for a landmark. Birds were roosting and rabbits hopping, and Tess was asleep when he returned. Peter waited for someone braver, someone whose mother was not teaching the class, whose crush of four years was not two seats diagonally to the left, to ask exactly what had happened. But no one did.

  “What name does she give the baby?” his mother asked. She looked around for other hands, then called on Helen, who had all the answers. She always did; even back in first grade he remembered her lone arm in the air.

  “Sorrow,” Helen said. And without waiting for his mother to ask why, she continued, “Because he was the result of her rape.”

  His mother narrowed her eyes and tipped her head. He knew the gesture well, and so did Helen.

  “She was raped. Alec raped her that night in the woods,” Helen insisted.

  “A statement like that is insulting to my intelligence.”

  From the four corners of the classroom the girls piped up in defense of Helen’s theory. “But she loathed Alec d’Urberville.”

  “And she was asleep.”

  “She wasn’t even conscious.”

  “She never even wanted him to kiss her.”

  “But she let him,” his mother said.

  “That was only because he was making the horse go so fast and only said he’d stop if he could kiss her. And she wiped it off after.”

  “She let him kiss her, regardless of the reason.”

  “But Mrs. Belou,” Helen began, and Peter could hear in her voice how determined she was to make her point. She’d underlined practically a whole page and was holding it close to her face, her left fingers marking three different spots. “Listen to what it says here: ‘But, some might say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the Providence of her simple faith?’ and then he says she was ‘doomed,’ that it was a ‘catastrophe,’ that her ancestors had probably ‘dealt the same measure’ toward some peasant girls.”

  “And if you look two pages later you will find Tess herself admitting to Alec that she loathes herself for her ‘weakness.’ She says, ‘My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.’ And then, a few pages further on, the narrator says that she had been ‘stirred to confused surrender awhile.’” His mother hadn’t even taken her book out of her bag yet. She knew it all by heart.

  Helen retaliated: “Then why does he say, ‘But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature, and it therefore does not mend the matter.’ He’s calling what Alec did a sin, the sin of rape.”

  “Don’t you have to say no out loud for it to be rape?” Kristina asked. Her boyfriend, Brian Rossi, gave her a nudge and a proud smirk.

  “She’s been saying no to Alec d’Uberville from the moment she met him!” Helen slammed the book on her desk.

  “But she was just doing that thing that girls do,” the new kid, Kevin, said.

  “What thing?” several of the girls asked in the same indignant tone.

  “You know,” Kevin continued, loving the sudden attention. “Saying no to get you to really want it from them.” Peter stole a glance at his mother, thinking she’d be ready to blow. But instead of getting ready to stop him, instead of even looking at Kevin, she was looking at Peter, as if he were the one who was talking. “I mean, how hard is it to avoid getting raped?” Kevin continued. “All you have to do is keep your clothes on. Any girl who gets raped secretly wanted it. She might think afterwards she didn’t, but at the time she did.”

  Peter had always heard that his mother was so strict, so challenging. How had she won that teaching prize last year? Why did so many students write her thank-you notes from college? Why was she just standing there?

  A few girls lashed out at Kevin, and finally his mother snapped out of her trance.

  “I don’t want to hear another word on this subject,” she said. “Not another word. I am sick to death of you people coming in here year after year and whining about what happens to Tess. A senseless nitwit of a girl in the woods at night with a proven lecher is not rape. It’s stupidity.”

  Lindsey put up her hand. “But—”

  “Goddammit. I don’t want to hear your buts. Get out of here. All of you. Right now.”

  There was a sick silent moment before Peter, knowing his mother was serious and would not back down, began packing up his books. Everyone else did the same.

  Before he left the classroom, Peter looked back at her. There was something about the way she’d wrapped her arms around herself, or maybe the color of her sweater, that reminded him of the caterpillars they had in the biology classroom, the way they hung suspended from the neck, forcing their own heads to fall off.

  On the stairs, Brian put his arm around Kristina.

  Karen said to Kevin, “You’re gross.”

  Kevin smiled up at her. “You won’t ever have to worry about it, Karen. No one will ever want to rape you.”

  Thanksgiving arrived. He and his mother had never hosted a Thanksgiving. They always ate at other people’s houses. Last year, like most years, they’d gone to Carol’s. Her son had been alive then, and they’d talked about basketball. He hadn’t seemed sad at all, and later Peter wondered if suicide could just come over you, like a cold, and the thought scared him for a long time.

  The Belous, he learned, always stayed home and had very firm ideas about Thanksgiving. There had to be one of those dried-corn-on-the-cob arrangements on the front door, and a fat pewter turkey that they brought up from the basement on a table in the living room. The sweet potatoes had to have brown sugar and pecans on top; dessert could only be pumpkin pie. The meal was always served at five.

  On Thanksgiving morning Peter woke up and felt it, the tightness in the air. He heard Fran scolding Caleb. He was surprised to see Stuart still in bed across the room. He was lying rigid on his back, arms at his sides, palms up. He was meditating, but his eyeballs were twitching against his lids and nothing about him looked relaxed. In the kitchen his mother and Tom were strategizing beside the raw rubbery carcass of a turkey: who would vacuum, who would do the beans, when the pies would go in, where people would sit. His mother looked like she did when she came
out of faculty meetings.

  He decided to skip breakfast and take a shower. It came to him that he didn’t like holidays. He never had. They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam you forgot to study for.

  He stood wrapped in a towel before the photograph. He was used to her presence in the bathroom now. Water slid in beads off of his hair onto his shoulders. The frame was slightly steamed. She grew up as Mary May in Skaneateles, New York, a small town built around a large lake. Peter even knew how to spell it. He’d looked it up. She was an only child. She took piano lessons from her aunt Becky. Her favorite color was green. She met Tom when she was seventeen at a cookout in Plattsburgh, where he was training and she was visiting a friend. The picture had been taken before Stuart was born, Peter guessed. She looked so young, nearly his age, squatting there on a trail in the woods, tying her sneaker. He wiped the steam off of her. She was looking straight at the camera, straight at Peter, pleased by what she saw. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he whispered.

  After he dressed, he decided to unpack the last of his boxes. Stuart had cleared off a shelf for his books, and the bureau Tom had brought up from the basement still had two empty drawers. He took his time. The energy outside his door made him uneasy. They were all setting up the living room for the guests and the meal. Stuart was moving furniture, Fran fussing about silverware, Caleb folding napkins. Their voices were louder than usual. He could hear his mother coming in from the kitchen to ask Fran something about glasses. She had forced a lilt into her voice. She was faking it, pretending that Thanksgiving was something special to her when all his life they’d tagged along at someone else’s holiday. She’d never stuffed a turkey or hung a decoration. It was nothing to her, nothing to him, and all day they’d have to act like it was, act like the Belous, to whom, despite death and rupture, Thanksgiving was still something sacred.

  He was sitting on his bed rubbing his knees when his mother came in. “You look squeaky clean.”

  He nodded. He wished she’d just acknowledge the act she was putting on.