“What?”
“You wanna come in?”
“Yes.”
They kissed standing up in her living room. Her mouth was made for it. He admired the curve of her hip as she ran her hand down his biceps. She reached under his shirt and touched the hardness of his abdomen and ran her fingers down the ladder.
“I knew it,” she said.
“These are nice,” he said stupidly, as he cupped one of her breasts. His finger and thumb swelled her nipple through the fabric of her shirt.
“They hold my bra up,” she said.
The two of them laughed.
“I’m trippin,” he said.
“Me, too,” she said, her eyes alive.
“You know I can’t stay.”
“Really?”
“I can’t stay long.”
“That’s better.”
She stepped forward and came into his arms.
Lucas walked out onto the street after midnight, satiated, a cocky lilt in his step. He had no misgivings or remorse. For a couple of hours, he had forgotten about Tavon, Edwin, and death. He had not thought about Constance, his brother’s inevitable comments, morality, or anything else. His father had once told him, “Don’t let anything walk past you,” and Lucas knew well what that meant. There are opportunities and adventures that are there for only a short period of time, and only available to people of a certain age. He and Lisa Weitzman understood. They’d had fun. He didn’t want to be one of those sad middle-aged guys who think about the women they should have bedded in their youth, if only they’d been less sensible. He planned to age with good memories.
He started up his Jeep and drove over to 13th Street with the windows down. The ride home was sweet.
TEN
It was known as the high school up on 13th Street with the fine view of the city below. It was designed in the manner of a castle, complete with crenulated battlements and clean-line walls of brick and sandstone. In the distant past, the building had been described as the jewel of the public school system, but few made that claim anymore. Many students thought of Cardozo as a kind of prison, as students of a certain age are inclined to do, wherever they attend school. Because of this, and because of its imposing structure, dramatically set in relief against the high ground, generations of D.C. kids had simply called it the Rock.
The school sat on the steeply graded edge of the Piedmont Plateau, on the south edge of Columbia Heights, straddling the border of an area most still thought of as Shaw. For thirty-two years, when it was filled with whites of northern and southern European extraction, it was called Central High. Numerous generals, successful lawyers, committed educators, local department store moguls, and one famous FBI director were alumni. One hundred and forty-seven of its former students lost their lives in World War II.
In 1950, four years shy of Brown v. Board of Education, Central was declared a school for “Negro” pupils. The city needed the large facility for its black students, as their schools had become severely overcrowded, while the student population in white schools had begun to fall. Central’s name was changed to Cardozo High, the moniker of the smaller, all-black high school that had been located down the street. Its white students immediately transferred elsewhere, to west-of-the-park high schools like Woodrow Wilson and uptown schools like Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt. After Brown, despite the good intent and goal of desegregation, Cardozo stayed black. Central had boasted of graduating J. Edgar Hoover; Cardozo would claim Marvin Gaye and Maury Wills among its own.
Cardozo was not the greatest success story in the D.C. public school system. Its test scores were said to be at the top of the second ladder, behind Wilson, Banneker, and School Without Walls, and its dropout rate was too high. It was a deep-city school, with all the problems that accompanied the social conditions outside its walls. What made the news were the failures and shortcomings. But many students graduated, went on to college and beyond, and became productive and in some cases noted members of society. Their stories, for the most part, went untold.
Leonidas Lucas knew these stories intimately. He taught English up on the second floor.
The route to Leo’s classroom, once students and administrators passed through a main-entrance metal detector manned by private-firm security personnel, was via the stone steps in one of several stairwells. Millions of feet had traveled heavily over these steps since the building had opened almost a century ago, rendering the stone concave. Leo’s classroom windows were covered in heavy-mesh iron screens, allowing fractured, dim sunlight to enter. The room’s sole computer, donated years earlier, was ancient; its printer did not print. Pencils were hard to come by. Some of the desks and blackboards looked more than fifty years old.
Leo didn’t think too hard on the lack of supplies, the missing ceiling tiles, the bathrooms with no doors on their stalls, the stopped-up toilets, the grim, barely lit halls, the students who did not listen, or the few students who were dangerous among the many who were basically good. He thought about his kids and why he was there. Leo was only in his third year as a full-time teacher, and he had not yet lost his enthusiasm for the job.
He stood before the class, his ID badge hanging around his neck, pacing slowly like a yard dog on a chain, a paperback copy of Unknown Man #89 in one hand. Leo had a desk, but he rarely sat behind it during class.
“Okay,” said Leo. “I assume you’ve all finished reading the novel. You should have, by now.”
Leo looked out at the all-male group. He had classes with girls and boys together, but this one was newly instituted, modeled after parochial and private school setups, part of a growing public school trend. It was thought that a good deal of the misbehavior and non-participation in classrooms on the part of boys was due to the mixing of sexes. Boys had to show off for female students, or they were just distracted in their presence. Boys didn’t want to give up too much of themselves in front of girls for fear of appearing weak.
Leo had come to feel that all of this was true, as this class was the liveliest in his schedule. The boys spoke freely here, with enthusiasm, and he allowed them to do so, for the most part, uncensored. They were seniors, and most were seventeen or eighteen years old. Men or close to it. Unless the conversation crossed a line, and all sensed where that line was, Leo let it roll.
No one admitted to finishing the assigned pages, nor did they admit to not completing the assignment. Leo had not expected them to answer.
“I’ll start the discussion,” said Leo.
He talked about the author’s use of dialogue, how it illustrated character and moved the plot forward; how the central conflict of the novel was set up economically in the early chapters; how the protagonist, Ryan, struggled with alcoholism, and how his problem was handled with subtlety and grace. This led to a few of the boys talking about experiences in their family lives involving alcohol and drugs. Leo let them go with it. Inevitably this was followed by a discourse on the sexual relationship between Ryan and a character named Denise, also an alcoholic.
“The scene where they split a bottle of wine,” said Leo, “and then they leave an inch or so in the bottle? Neither one of them has the need to finish it. It means they’re making progress with their recovery through the vehicle of their relationship. Great scene, right?”
“Yeah, but after? You think he’s gonna do her. You want him to hit it. I mean, they been leading up to it.”
“They’re taking their time,” said Leo. “It’s going to happen, and both of them know it. But neither one of them wants to rush it.”
Many boys began to talk at once. They had landed on a subject that they all felt they knew well.
“That right there wasn’t realistic. He would’ve banged that trick right after dinner.”
“She wasn’t no trick. Denise was cool.”
