“Not necessary,” said Mr. Farnham. Boy, had Thomas been wrong about this teacher. Usually when you get a young one, he’s pretty cool about getting off the subject and taking the class to the audiovisual center a lot, but not Farnham. He was like Mister Pedagogical Methods, always coming to class with these long lesson plans, which he followed strictly, and never talking about anything but English all day long. He’d taught in some school in Alabama for two years before coming here to Virginia. Thomas guessed it was one of those military training schools where everything had to be just perfect all the time. Farnham wore perfectly ironed clothes, perfectly polished loafers, a perfectly knotted tie, and a perfectly nauseating little mustache the size of a centipede. He was actually pretty nice, Thomas supposed, if he wouldn’t lose his temper so much. You do one little thing wrong, like show up without your book or something, and he would spaz for ten minutes.
“One of the great tensions in English literature from the very beginning,” Mr. Farnham was saying, “was the tension between cupiditas and caritas. Everyone knew that caritas was the kind of love that God felt for mankind, and that it was the kind of love that we were supposed to feel for each other. But God had also made us as sexual creatures, and so man had to come to terms with the fact that sexuality was, in itself, a good thing.”
Now you’re talking, thought Thomas.
“Sexuality was good,” said Mr. Farnham, “because it tricked us into reproducing our species. We’d be very unlikely to engage in that particular act if we derived no pleasure from doing so. Think about it.”
Thomas thought about it all the time. He was just a couple of weeks away from turning sixteen. Over the holidays he’d met a girl, Hesta McCorkindale, who was a tenth-grader at Mason School and who lived in McLean. She was really nice, he liked her a lot, and when he kissed her it seemed as though somebody had attached a jumper cable to his crotch. He thought about Hesta now, sitting across from him, the school had gone coed or something, and so she could be in the class, only she hadn’t worn any underwear and he could see—
“Mr. Boatwright,” said Farnham. “Near what planet are you orbiting?”
“Sorry,” said Thomas.
“Can you tell me what I was just saying?”
Thomas looked at his notes. “Sex is good,” he said. The rest of the class started to snicker.
“And why is sex good?” said Mr. Farnham.
“Because,” said Thomas. He was nailed. “I’m not sure.”
Landon Hopkins raised his hand. “It’s good because it encourages us to reproduce our species,” he said. “That’s what the pope says, isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Farnham. “The pope also says what these old medievalists would say; that is, that when sex becomes the ultimate goal or source of pleasure for mankind, then it has become a form of idolatry. Consider this.” He started to draw another diagram on the board. Across the room, Richard mimed laughing at Thomas. Thomas mimed vomiting in response.
“The human soul has three parts to it,” said Mr. Farnham, “and the three parts dwell in the liver, the heart, and the brain.” Dying, thought Thomas. I am absolutely dying, but he wrote down LIVER, HEART, and BRAIN just in case Farnham called on him again.
He wondered how much Farnham knew about sex. He wasn’t a geek or anything. He wore glasses, but a lot of neat people wore glasses. Thomas had worn them himself until he’d gotten contacts two years ago. Hesta wore glasses, in fact, but she wore these really cool wire-rimmed glasses that her aunt had worn during the 1960s.
Living in the 1960s would have been so cool if he could have been fifteen, his age now, back then. He would have dropped out of school to hassle the establishment. He and Hesta would have hung around on the Washington Ellipse in buckskin jackets and stuff, smoked dope all the time, and then every night they would have taken off all their clothes and done everything sexual you could do to each other. Make love, not war. Richard had told Thomas that some people do it in the morning instead of at night. In the morning, that would be wild. Sometimes he was horny in the morning, he had to admit. But he’d always thought that sex was something you did at night. He’d never actually gotten laid himself, but he had consulted many, many pictures and had heard the older guys on the dorm talk about it a lot.
“The heart,” said Mr. Farnham, “is the seat of our sensible souls. Now don’t get confused when I say ‘sensible.’”
Don’t worry, thought Thomas.
“I don’t mean ‘sensible’ as in ‘showing good sense,’ the way we might say that Ford made a sensible decision in pardoning Nixon. I mean ‘sensible’ in a more literal meaning; that is, in referring to the five senses. The sensible soul is the soul that gives us our feeling, our emotions. There’s no logical reason to draw hearts all over the place on Valentine’s Day. The heart is just an organ of the body that
