“I need to see you after class, Miss Fielding.”
She nodded, and her eyes returned to her book.
“Now read this Katherine Anne Porter, the last story in your lit book, and answer the questions at the end. As you are reading, I want you to be thinking about how she generates a theme. What are the elements? What role do characters, plot, and detail play? Pay attention to the ending and the beginning. Look for parallels in the structure. Oh yes. We've talked a lot about point of view. We'll be talking about that again at the end of the period.”
The class groaned.
“Thought you could take it easy just because it's the last day, huh?” How normal he sounded! How pathetic and irrelevant everything he said sounded!
He had staved off the inevitable over the weekend, because he was afraid. He had justified his hesitation by telling himself he had to see Roo one last time to apologize, and that's what he would do, wasn't it, even though something sharp and nasty in him wanted to take her down with him.
He tried to write to Cath, but ended up throwing the pages away. He could not face her with this. He could not face the pain of her humiliation, and his own public downfall.
The world sucked. Everything was bound to appear so sordid, when it had been nothing but a spring day, the sunshine, the trees in an ocean breeze. Ah, how the world sucked.
Blurry in his thoughts, looking for something to get himself through to the end of the class when he would get Roo alone, or himself alone, or both of them, he hadn't decided, he picked up Roo's story and began to read.
“The Young Lady,” a new title, headlined the page. She hadn't used her synopsis at all. Roo wrote well; he usually enjoyed her assignments.
A clutching at his heart reminded him, and his moist fingers left marks as they traveled down the side of her paper. His time was up. He had done something others would see as deplorable, selfish, vile… the respect of his colleagues, the admiration of his pupils, all that would be lost along with Cath, as soon as they knew.
Was Roo's time up, too? Did he have to decide this minute, or was the decision made the moment he pulled off the road that day with her? His heart began to thump. He worried someone might hear it, might find him out before he could escape.
A squirrel ran down a tree outside. A few of his students turned to watch.
The gun in his drawer made that side of the desk feel warmer, like a hearth, so he leaned that way as if its comfort could pamper him through the last few minutes of class. But as he read, he forgot the desk; he forgot the gun. His fear continued to sit in his stomach, indigestible as coal, but he gave it no attention.
He found himself driving along in a car, a young girl, feeling the pressure of an older man's eyes on her skin as she feigned sleep. He took in the fine sensory details of her clothing, her perception of this man, his handsomeness, his strength, his intelligence. She had such a crush.
And slowly, he began to understand.
Roo's story was the story of his seduction.
Way back at the beginning of the year, Roo had decided to go after him. But Carl, well-schooled in how to handle students with crushes, had not taken her bait. He threw out his arsenal of defenses to frustrate her. Nothing she did caused even a flicker of interest in his eyes. Nothing she wore made him look any closer than he looked at all the other girls.
So, she had developed a plan. She would seduce Newell. She reasoned that would draw Carl's attention. She didn't care what kind of attention she got. Negative was okay for a start. She just needed a way to rise above what she called the “herd of anonymous cattle” in the classroom. If necessary, she would sacrifice her grade, but that direction had not come until later, when Carl continued to ignore her.
With fascination swinging toward dread, he read on, recognizing only snippets of the situation he had lived. The English teacher in him marveled at the point of view, so distinct, so different from his own. Moments he remembered had been distorted into something completely unfamiliar.
Roo's girl was ready to explore a bigger world. She had put her own physical feelings on hold long enough. Her character cited Margaret Mead on the subject of adolescent sexuality.
Carl read on. Appalled by the cold analysis of her seduction of his son, he flipped a page and stumbled into her version of his own. There it was, a “tryst” on the cliff, romanticized and glossy as a magazine cover.
The story was a message to him. A confession. She wanted him to understand. She wanted him to see it from her point of view. “The young lady had a different tale to tell,” she wrote.
He sat back in his chair and felt a glimmer of hope.
She would not tell Cath. This life that he loved so much would continue. For a long time he looked out the window, watching Mr. Cahill trimming pine branches outside with a long pole.
He would not lose his job. The gun… he would not have to use it.
He picked up a pencil and went to work on her story. Mechanically, he marked spelling errors in red while his mind kept up a chorus of protests at trivializing the contents.
Contrast POVs: his story was the story of her seduction.
She would never tell anyone, the last few lines read, and she told “the man” to keep silent. His victim did not accept her victimization.
What a gift. He wanted to stand up and cheer, he felt such a gush of relief. This was better than sex. Better than falling in love. She had given him back his life!
At the end of class, she walked up to his desk. “Mr. Capshaw, how'd you like my story? Did you get a chance to read it yet?”
“I did. It's on the racy side of good taste, Roo, but you worked hard on this and I'm sure your grade will reflect that.” He struggled to maintain his poise, but she undid him, opening her mouth a little to reveal her sharp, newly minted caps. As she ran her tongue self-consciously over them, eager to hear more, he found his attention riveted on the perfect white rectangles that were all for show, not for biting better.
“I like the way you developed your theme,” he said finally, then sat back in his chair.
“Great,” she said, nodding. Her eyes said nothing special to him. Only her mouth's half-smile appreciated the joke.
“You have summer plans?”
“My relatives have a house at Tahoe. I got most of my finals done early so that we can leave tomorrow, all except for this class, and I thought you might pass on requiring a final, Mr. Capshaw. I mean, you know what I can do well enough already, don't you?”
“The final's a big part of your grade.”
She shrugged. “My mom's decided to enroll me in private school next fall. So this is my last day here. Could you possibly double the credit on the story? I worked
“I guess I could. Yes. Well, we're really sorry to lose you, Roo. Stop in to say hi next year. And you have a nice summer, now.”
“Have a hot one, Mr. Capshaw.”
He watched her leave, closing the door on his class for the year. Outside, Mr. Cahill, taking advantage of the school-wide exodus, started up the leaf blower. Ignoring the din, Carl rushed to clear his desk. He wanted to get home early and curl up with Cath in the hammock. He needed her to steady him, to bring him down from the lunatic elevation of his thoughts. Because there was no tragedy here. No harm done to anyone! No suicide! No murder! Looking around the classroom, he allowed the prosaic sight of crooked desks and beat-up linoleum to mute the twanging of his heart.
He dismissed his sixth-period study hall early and finished marking his students' stories. Before leaving, before putting the gun in his pocket to stow in the locked box at home, he reread the ending of Roo's tale.
“She would dispense with her mother's criticism, that she was a greedy girl, that nothing satisfied her. That breaking the rules led to heartache. How worth it it was to have a hope, play it out, and blunder. What did her mother understand about the moments that fed a girl's soul and in between, the pleasurable hunger of her waiting?”
She needed to cut it. She needed to tone down the florid language, be more subtle. He wrote on her paper to “watch the fragments” and gave her an A.
Laughing to himself, restored, he wondered how she would interpret her grade.
On the way home, he stopped to buy roses, yellow ones, Cath's favorite. He felt such love for her, such appreciation. He couldn't believe his luck, but he was so thankful for another chance. It had been an aberration, he said to himself in the car on the way up the hill to his house. He would never, ever do it again.
“Cath,” he cried, throwing open the front door. “Cath?”
A yellow note, very brief, had been stuck to the front of the refrigerator.
She would not be back.
Juggernaut
From the Hindi,
The first accident gave Neal the idea for the second accident.
He had spent the evening of the first crash pouring coins down the throat of the Silver Ghost, the name of his favorite slot machine at Harrah's Tahoe. As usual, when he was about to give up, eager, in fact, to watch the cherries, plums, and jackpot signs line up, signifying nothing, three bars kachunged into place and seventy-five dollars in tokens pinged into the bin. It was not a big win, considering his investment that evening, but it was enough to keep him going until his eyes were bloodshot and the free drinks from earlier in the evening had invaded his bloodstream and slithered over his brain stem. Now he felt tired. Exhausted. Oh, how he could not wait for bed.
His car was hard to find because he had not parked in the usual spot, so he floundered around the lot looking for it under stars bright as burning spear points, shivering. Up here in the Sierra, November always came as a rude shock. October blew through like fire, all reds and oranges and gusting wind. Winter chased right behind it like a hound from some bone-biting, cold hell.
Finally, he found the Toyota crouched in the far end of the lot, almost touching the dark forest beyond. He wished he were drunk, but no such luck. The abysmal state of his stomach had kept him prudent, along with the hot cups of coffee toward the end of the session.
Too bad, because a clear head brought him around to thoughts of Juliette, who would be waiting at home, mad because once again-once again, she would say, in that new and strident tone he hated-she had to spend the evening alone. Of course, she wouldn't say that at first, she would stand at the kitchen counter watching him with her mouth sullen, refusing to talk, refusing to respond.
As he started the engine, he drifted into a pleasant fantasy. She would decide for once to treat him right. He would come through the door and find her sleeping in a pretty pink negligee like the one she wore when they were first married. He would crawl into bed. Her fragrant arms would rise to pull him down beneath the cool white sheets. Not a word would be spoken; no guilt would be heaped on him.
Checking his rearview mirror for oblivious drunks, he backed out slowly, drove through the valet parking area and out toward the street, where he stopped to wait for a break in traffic before entering. It was while he was there, mentally with Juliette, imagining what they would do in bed, that a stretch limo roared up behind him, screeched its brakes, skated into a skid, and slammed into him with the force of a locomotive.
