I stand in the pristine hallway with smooth arches sloping to form a high concave ceiling. A stern-looking woman in her mid-fifties approaches. She wears a sleeveless blouse with a sweater tied around her waist.
“
I shake my head, confused. My best move is to go on the offensive.
“I’m heading to administration.” Purposeful, just shy of angry.
“It’s French Day. We ask parents to participate.” I’m being scolded.
She points to the right and shakes her head.
Carl Lemon’s brass nameplate identifies his heavy brown door. I knock, causing the slightly ajar door to open. Behind a desk sits a man wearing suspenders and who has been flattered by the caricature on his web site. His brown curls have begun to recede, foretelling an eventual sharp widow’s point in the center of his spacious forehead.
“Mr. Lemon.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m here about Faith?”
“You’ll need to make an appointment.”
He looks down again at whatever he’s working on, summarily dismissing me. He’s serious to a fault.
“I’m with the press. On a big story involving your school.”
“If you don’t leave, I’ll call security.” Still looking down.
“I relish the opportunity to talk with them.” Now he looks up. I continue. “Where is Faith? What have you done with her?”
He blinks.
“So get security.”
“Come in. Shut the door behind you.”
47
“Who are you?”
I realize my arms are crossed, an emotionally defensive posture, which is not the message I’m looking to send. He needs to feel like he’s backpedaling, mostly because I’ve got only bluster, not information. If he feels threatened, he might start offering a confession as part of a conditional surrender. I’ve seen it work in interviews before. I’ve also seen it miserably fail.
I lift an expensive brown wooden chair from its perch near the wall to my right and carry it to the edge of his desk. I can feel its leg dragging, bunching the image of the African women carrying the swaddled child that is woven into the area rug beneath me. He winces. Why on Earth would Faith want her nephew to attend school here?
I drop his gaze to situate myself in the chair, letting the silence stir up inside him. I look at him, then glance around the room, playing a role of confident interrogator that, even in my most officious moods and with the most inane corporate-relations flacks, feels manufactured. He’s got a couple of diplomas on his textured white walls and a picture of a beached whale being encouraged by the cheers of children.
I tell him my name as I pull from my wallet my driver’s license and business card. It’s intended to show I’m unafraid to reveal myself. I tell him that I tend to do investigative pieces and that he can look up online my recent award to get a sense of the kinds of stories I write. He doesn’t much study my license and business card, which I generally find to be a sign that he trusts what I’m telling him. Or maybe he knows who I am already, but I doubt it. In either case, he’s ready to bargain.
I pull my notebook from my back pocket.
“What do you want?”
“Where is she?”
He shrugs. “I have no idea. Did you say this is for an article? Which publication?”
Already, in an instant, I can feel the momentum shifting against me. I’ve got little to go on.
“She’s worried about her nephew, Timothy.”
He clenches his jaw.
“You’re using him.” I’m being deliberately vague.
He averts his eyes slightly to the left.
“Did you mess him up with the Juggler? Is he part of the testing?”
His gaze hardens, then he looks at me quizzically. I’ve overextended myself.
“Alan Parsons sent me.”
Several rapid eye blinks. It’s not that he knows about Alan Parsons. Far from it, I realize. Rather, he senses I’m either a fraud or someone on a fishing expedition who cannot rightly threaten him. Something bad happened between him and Faith, but I’ve got no clue what that is.
I stand. I lean forward on the desk. For the first time, I peer through the picture window behind his desk. I’m looking into a large grassy play area, the courtyard, with serpentine brick walkways, a wooden playground in the far corner anchored by what looks to be a large sunken ship, and dotted in spots by benches. I can’t take my eyes off a boy sitting alone on a bench, holding a toy airplane in his right hand, pretending to make it fly over his head.
I pull my gaze back to the bureaucrat. I’m seething with anger but with little way to channel it. A gut impulse strikes me. Where logic and rational argument fails, I need to use emotion. I need to appeal to something rhetorically irrefutable.
“I’m also Faith’s boyfriend.”
I deliberately lean another millimeter forward, like I just might jump over the desk. “Cut the merde.”
“What?”
“It’s French Day, asshole.”
The crazy-guy look in my eyes must perk him up. It can’t be my pronunciation. He holds up his hands, palms out. “
I feel prickles. Revelation coming. I let my body recede that extra millimeter to suggest I’m willing to listen.
“That’s not how she tells it.”
“This is not for an article. It’s off the record. And I know the distinction between off the record and ‘for background.’ ” He uses air quotes around the words. “She used me.”
“You’re going to hate losing this job.”
“Her nephew doesn’t belong at this school. I told her that. We owe it to our families to make sure every student contributes to making this the most competitive learning environment, and creative one. I gave him a chance and he’s squandered it.”
I remember hearing his voice and words on Faith’s voice mail, telling her she is running out of time. Demanding, threatening.
“That doesn’t give you an excuse to threaten her.”
“You’re her boyfriend, so you know exactly what she’s about. She picks at weak spots and exploits them. But that’s beside the point. By the time I was. .” He pauses, looking for the words. “By the time I was spending time with her, I’d already agreed to give her nephew a chance and to provide a scholarship. He needs a chance too. Our relationship, brief as it might have been, has nothing to do with the issue of her nephew’s education.”
I’m scrambling to stitch together his clues. I can almost picture my resource-starved working memory, my little closet filled with precious near-term intellectual capacity, churning like the engine room in the
I try it out on him. I act surprised, a little hurt. I ask him whether Faith started sleeping with him as a way of getting her nephew into school? And, now that he’s in the school, she’s withdrawn?
