Friday afternoon, Carl had Roo in his sixth-period study hall. She came in looking bedraggled, her face flushed pink with heat.
“Where's your proposal, Miss Fielding?” he asked. “That is due today, last period. I thought I made that clear.”
“I'll work on it right now,” she promised. “I'll get it to you by the end of the day.” The bell rang. The other students hustled to the oak tables, hanging backpacks on chairs, littering the floor with notebooks. He sat at his desk, trying hard not to notice Roo, whose pen hovered over her paper for minutes at a time, unwavering, while she stared at the neck of the boy in front of her. When the bell rang, the fog left her eyes. She looked up with a start and caught his eyes on her face.
“Your story concept?”
“Not done.”
“You'll have to stay after today, Roo. I'll help you if I can.”
Roo called her mother from the office so that she wouldn't panic when she came home late. “I'm working with Mr. Capshaw on finishing something up, Mom.”
“He's that cutie from open house?”
“My English teacher.”
“Newell's father, right?”
How was her mother always so clued-in? “Yes.”
“Where'd he go, anyway?”
“Who?”
“Newell. You went out a couple of times, didn't you?”
“He's at another school.”
“Private school, I bet. All the public school teachers send their kids to private, the paper says. They're canceling Honors English at Obispo next year. I'm just disgusted.”
“Can I stay 'til five? I'll unload the dishes when I get home.”
“Okay, honey. Need a ride? I don't want you to walk home alone, young lady.”
“Don't worry so much. I'll find a ride.”
Roo managed a poor rehash of a story she had written in eighth grade for something to give Mr. Capshaw. He didn't really do anything to help, just sat there at his desk pretending not to look at her the whole time. She finished by five. She asked him for a ride home, explaining that her mother worried. “A guy pulled over off the road once. He got out of his car and followed me for a few blocks. Asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. I was only thirteen. Since then, Mom's a maniac about safety.”
Roo had worn the lightest cotton she could find that morning, a sleeveless red blouse over sparkling white slacks. Her mom had helped her to twist her hair into a French braid, but by now she had a curly halo around her face, too messy, she felt. She excused herself for the bathroom and wetted some scratchy paper towels, getting her underarms with one, smoothing back her hair with another. She dabbed a dry towel over her washed face, licked her lips, then glossed them. She was ready.
Mr. Capshaw had parked his car under the row of eucalyptus by the far lot. By the time they got there, she was sweating again. “I hope you have air-conditioning,” she said.
“I do. My wife says it's an unnecessary extravagance this close to the coast but after all day at school, I'm ready to be pampered.”
“Me, too,” she said, wondering what his wife looked like. Maybe like Nicole Kidman, with that narrow face and rat's nest of hair. “I live kind of up in the county land. It's not quite two miles. Sorry to take you out of your way.” Newell had always raved about how pretty it was up there, how woodsy and pleasant compared to the flats. He must hate Sacramento, with its heat and tract houses.
Mr. Capshaw turned the air on full blast and rolled open the sunroof. “Is that okay?” he asked, and she nodded, half-closing her eyes as they swerved out of town.
“Last time I came this way,” she said dreamily, “was with Newell.”
Carl could smell Roo, a kind of gym class sweat he remembered from his son, mixed with a lusty odor he tried not to think about. She seemed to have fallen asleep, her head tipped back against the seat. Awkward. Beautiful.
He remembered his body at seventeen. He recalled a day stepping out into the sunshine, fresh from the shower, the sun petting his skin, the licks of air, the rank smell of wet dirt. His own juicy youth had filled him up, flooded him. For one luscious moment, all was perfection. Then, knowledge returned like a slap and woke him up. The concrete burned his bare feet…
“Shoot. Roo, wake up. We're lost.” He could see the Pacific below the road. He'd overshot his turn. He'd gone too far.
She breathed deeply and raised a hand to her cheek. “Where are we?”
“I don't know,” he said. “You're the one who lives around here. Could you take a look at the map in the glove compartment?” They climbed steadily up a winding road to a dead end.
“I can't figure this out.”
“I'll look,” he said. Stopping in a shady spot high above the ocean, he turned off the engine, turning the map over to find the town. “Okay, the high school, right here.” He traced their route. “There's where I turned wrong.” She moved in to look. “We're five miles off base. At the bottom of the hill, I go left. Then back to Foothill. Left again onto Crocker.”
“I live right there.” She drooped a long thin arm over his arm to point. Her breast pushed against him, lightly, innocently.
When she removed her hand, he folded the map. She stayed close, looking out at the trees. “Can I get out for a second?” she asked. “I want to peek at the ocean.”
“Okay,” he said. “Quickly, though. Let's not give your mom anything to worry about.”
She walked over to where the land dropped away. On top of the hill like this, the wind off the ocean hit full force. Her hair slapped and blew like sails. She stayed so long, raising and lowering her arms in the wind, that he got out to get her.
She was crying again. “I'm so lonely,” she said. Carl put her head against his shoulder and let her cry.
After a while she quieted down. She sat on a rock, still clinging to him, holding his legs. She looked up at him once. She reached up.
“No,” he said. “Roo…” He stood with the wind to his back, as lovesick as any seventeen-year-old, as deeply moved, as heartfelt, as pained.
They made love, the teacher halting the compelling rush of his lust just long enough to witness himself there, hanging over the ocean, his body disappearing into the girl's body, his past resurrected, his future destroyed.
“Did you see this?” Cath said Monday morning, holding up the “Living” section. “You give a drug addict all the drugs he needs to be satisfied, and he is not satisfied. You give an alcoholic access to all the alcohol he wants, and he is not satisfied.”
“And… what conclusions do they draw?” He had slept poorly this weekend. He sipped his coffee slowly, savoring the flavor, savoring his wife who sat in a patch of sun at the table.
“Same thing with chocolate,” she continued, “even in unlimited quantities.”
“So…”
“So the point is, people who crave a substance can never get enough.”
He found it hard to come up with the right thing to say. Absorbed by guilt, he wasn't really following. “This is not news,” he said.
“No, wait. Nothing satiates the craving. A lot of crank doesn't do any better than a little. There's no satiety. Anticipation is what drives them on. Hope.”
“Always chasing the high.”
“But the chase keeps 'em going, get it?”
“Uh huh.”
“That's you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You feel stuck in your job. Sometimes you feel stuck with me.”
“Cath…”
“You've always been the seeker. Like Emerson's traveler, who is never happy. The spot you are in is never quite good enough.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something's wrong, isn't it?”
He stood and tried to put his arms around her but while accepting his embrace, she sighed deeply.
“Nothing's wrong. It's the last day of school before finals. I'm distracted,” he said.
“That's not it.”
“Nothing's wrong, goddammit!”
The look she turned on him proclaimed exquisitely the depths of her understanding and grief. He had done nothing different than he did any other weekend, but his wife was already mourning over some unknown catastrophe. That's what a real marriage was, understanding too deep for deception. Well, he had a real one, didn't he, and now he had blown it, along with everything else.
He knew he should tell her before word leaked back, as it surely would, and soon, but he couldn't. He knew that he would try to explain, and he knew he couldn't. Cath's simple values were admirable, but there were things in his world that could not survive such astringency-delicate, complex things. Nothing could make her understand how wrapped up in that moment he had been, how obliterated he had been. How impersonal it had been. He had wandered outside her framework, and was lost to her comprehension.
He kissed her good-bye, lingering, wrapped in the smell of her shampoo, doing his own mourning in advance of the news.
In the car he tuned the radio to an all-news station all the way to school. Pasting a composed look on his face, he greeted the other teachers in the hallway with the usual salutations. They greeted him back.
So Roo hadn't said anything yet. There was still time.
Once in his classroom, he opened up the briefcase he was carrying, removed his gun, and tucked it into the bottom drawer.
“Final projects are due this morning,” he started off in first period, second period, third period. “You had the weekend to finish up,” he said while he flitted between heaven and hell.
At lunch, he sat under a tree, itching in a patch of cut grass, his paper sack untouched beside him. The gardener came unpleasantly close with his rake a few times. The teachers would not tolerate the noise of leaf blowers, so disruptive to the calm of academe. Mr. Cahill thought their position made his life harder and made his opinion known however possible. A horde of little children skating, followed by a troupe of mothers, screamed by on the sidewalk.
Another bell rang in fourth period and then there was the senior class parody, which was witty enough to shake a few nervous laughs out of him.
Fifth period. Roo.
She walked into the classroom with her friend Jayne, and sat in the back row until class started, chatting quietly.
“Stories to the front, please,” he said, amazed at his own cool. How did he do it? How could he function in the middle of the worst crisis of his life? Cath would leave him, if she knew. She would never trust him again.
He watched to see if Roo had something ready. She did.
