The Financial Lives Of the Poets

choices, and I know exactly what goes through the minds of the other fathers (and not a few of the mothers) as they listen to nasty lovely sweet Ms. Bishop of the pouty mouth and black-lined eyes, because it’s exactly what goes through my mind: Oh, you hot minx of an elementary school vixen, there are some bad choices I could make with you right now. On conference night, you have never seen so many fathers haunting the halls: smartly dressed, cologned, they pace and pretend to contemplate child-art and Popsicle stick dioramas, eager for a glimpse of Ms. Bishop’s famous paint-on skirts tracing her perfectly symmetrical and round a-(Stop, bad choice!) For me, a true Bishop connoisseur, it’s not the tight skirts (so obvious, unrefined) but the blouses, and it’s not the eye-catching fronts-these are for Bishop neophytes, with their V-cut, cleavy, gravity-defying peakage. No…my Bishopiphany came on Open House Night a few years ago, when she turned to the chalk board during a school open house and I caught a glimpse of the symmetrical small of her lovely back. It was as if, weary from riding all night, my horse and I had come upon this gentle, narrowing valley, smooth, gracefully tapering down from her shoulders, and there I saw it, this small, quiet place…an easy place…a place where a man could rest his head after two hours of extremely questionable choices.

Teddy was in Ms. Bishop’s class then, three years ago, and it was Lisa who noticed how, after we got home from school events, she and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other; it was as if Ms. Bishop were some sort of fertility goddess. After ice-cream socials and candy sales, pizza parties and school auctions, Lisa and I would fall off each other in bed, sweating and breathing deeply, and it was lovely Lisa who first said it: “Wow. Extremely good choice.” For a while, in the good old days, it became our code in front of the kids: “I’m thinking of making a good choice tonight.” “I hope you’re planning on making good choices later, young man.”

This, however, promises to be a less-than-erotic meeting with Ms. Bishop.

I’ve rescheduled my desperate wollie purchase (now I not only have to pay off the mortgage and private school tuition, I also have to cover eleven hundred in lumber I just bought from the guy Bishoping my wife) to come to school and talk about frail little

Franklin, who is accused of making an unprovoked attack upon a defenseless playmate using as his weapon the little wooden blocks he was supposed to be clacking together primitively in his music class.

Every father-whether he admits it or not-is gripped by two opposing thoughts immediately upon hearing that his child has been in a fight: first, the hope that no one was hurt, and second, the deep fear that your kid might not have won. (The art of losing isn’t hard to master.) Two days after punishing Teddy for slapping a classmate in the third grade, I found myself surreptitiously teaching the boy how to make a fist, how to keep his left up, jab, jab, cross with the right. (Speed, boy: stick and move, stick and move!)

“It’s just not like Franklin,” Ms. Bishop says.

“No,” I say helpfully, “he usually makes such good choices,” and the Pavlovian reaction to that phrase causes me to cross my legs. Franklin is cooling his heels in the office while I talk to his teacher, the rest of his class in Afternoon P.E. as Ms. Bishop and I sit alone in her classroom, surrounded by penguins and thick cursive letters and easy math problems, wedged into little chairs, and while this is serious stuff, our legs nearly brush and it’s all I can do not to look at Ms. Bishop, because then it will all be over, and I will not be able to affect the serious parent I need to be. My unemployment and Lisa’s recent flirtation with affairing has cut into my sex-frequency-it’s been nearly a month-so this is not a good time for me to be dropping in on women like Amber Philips and Bea and Ms. Bishop (whose jersey has long ago been retired from the delusional list of women who secretly long to sleep with me).

“No, it’s not like Franklin at all,” says Ms. Bishop. Franklin is the frail one. I fully expect Teddy to get in fights, but Franklin? His teacher shakes her head; she’s in a plaid skirt and buff-colored blouse that clings to her as if she’s just come in out of the rain. “That’s what’s so disappointing,” Ms. Bishop says. “That Franklin

would make such a bad choice.” She crosses her legs with a sweep of fabric and a glimpse of toned, muscled leg and I clear my throat to cover the sound of the whimper I feel in my chest. I stare at the ceiling, hoping it looks like I’m taking the details of Franklin’s assault especially seriously: apparently, in the middle of music, while they were learning the concept of keeping a beat, Franklin snapped and, without provocation, swung his clackers and hit his friend Elijah Fenton in the face. Elijah curled up. Franklin fell on him, crying, then hit him twice more before Ms. Bishop managed to pry the clackers from his cold dead fingers. (Clackers don’t kill people; people kill people.)

“Do we know,” I ask, “what precipitated it?”

“Some teasing, apparently, although Franklin wouldn’t tell me what it was about. I told him it doesn’t matter. The children know that nothing excuses physical behavior like this.”

(There’s some physical behavior I’d like to…)

“Franklin knows that violence never solves anything,” Ms. Bishop continues. “I told him that if he’s being teased in the future, he needs to come talk to me or to you or to Mrs. Prior about it.” (Who? Oh, right. Mrs. Prior. My wife. Bad choice.)

Ms. Bishop walks with me down to the office, where Cool Hand Frank is stewing in the hole, principal’s office. (My boy can eat fifty eggs!) I stare straight ahead, but the sound of Ms. Bishop walking nearly does me in. (What’s happening to me? Irrational, passive jealous reactions? Swooning over stoop kisses? Dizziness in the proximity of attractive women? I am officially fourteen again.)

Outside the office, Ms. Bishop explains that the school has “a set of violence and aggression protocols that Franklin has now accessed” and she sounds like my old editor, the nonsensically evil M-and I find myself wondering when the business jargon people took over education, or maybe it was the other way around. According to the violence and aggression protocols Franklin has ac

cessed, my little offender gets a one-day suspension for the first act, a week of suspension for the second and expulsion for the third. Because Franklin has never done anything like this before, Ms. Bishop says, she and the principal have agreed that if he writes a note of apology to Elijah, he will not be suspended, but this will count as his first act of violence. Any more acts, though, and he will be suspended for a week. I thank her. “Nothing is more important than providing a safe atmosphere for learning,” Ms. Bishop says.

In the principal’s office, poor Franklin is sitting with his head in his hands. “Come on,” I say. He moans. Thirty minutes later school is over and the boys sit in the backseat while I drive home. Franklin sniffs as he stares out the window. Teddy works like an old reporter, trying to get information about the fight.

“What kind of noise did it make when you hit him? Was it a slapping sound or a thumping sound?”

“Enough, Teddy.”

Another sniffle sniffle from Franklin.

“Elijah Fenton is kind of a jerk, Dad,” Teddy says. “It’s not the worst thing in the world that Frankie hit him.”

“I don’t think that’s true, but even if it were, you know it wouldn’t matter, Teddy,” I say. “It’s never right to hit people.”

Teddy asks, “What if they’re gonna kill your family with a grenade?”

“Elijah Fenton carry a lot of grenades, does he?”

“He probably said something really bad,” Teddy says. “He swears a lot.”

“It doesn’t matter. We don’t solve problems that way. No matter what someone says.”

“What if they say they’re gonna kill your family with a grenade?”

“Let’s stop talking about grenades and think about how Elijah

feels.”

Another moan from Franklin.

“He was playing kickball after school,” Teddy says. “He’s fine. Can’t I just ask what Frankie hit him with? Please. Let me ask that one question and then I’ll be quiet.”

“No.” I’m stuck behind someone turning left; I miss the light. Traffic is hateful.

“Please.”

“No!” I snap, then, realizing I’ve overreacted: “The wooden blocks from music.”

“Clackers! You hit him with clackers. Wow!”

Franklin moans.

“Teddy, that’s enough.”

I pull into the driveway. Inside, Teddy and Franklin retreat to their rooms. I try the Providential Equity prefixes again, leave voicemails all over their phone system. Since Lisa mysteriously claimed to have something to do this evening, I make dinner-chipped beef. Dad comes in from the TV room, sets his remote on the table, wrinkles his