I turned to my wife with, no doubt, a distinct gleam of triumph in my eye and said, "I got a letter yesterday from R. Wilson McClain." The cup of coffee didn't quite reach her lips, hovered for a second, began a downward course, held briefly just above the saucer, a millimeter or two, and then dropped with a clink and a slosh. She never had believed that I knew him, never mind all the stories and my protests of complete sincerity. Had I been such a liar that she had gone for years doubting me in this one simple matter?
"You actually do know the guy?" she asked. And then she shook her head and brought the coffee to her lips again. "Come on, Les. I have a busy day ahead."
"I not only know Willie McClain, he's a good friend."
I could see the little wheels spinning in that attractive but not particularly ingenious head. I could see her conclusion before she even spoke it. She smiled a little lopsided smile and again raised the coffee. "Oh, you're just--"
"Why is it so inconceivable that I might know a man who has won the Pulitzer Prize, whose books are awarded their own free-standing cardboard display racks in shopping mall book stores? Cut us both, do we not bleed?"
She had black eyes, my wife, and beautiful black hair that before she had begun cutting it very short had been one of my greatest pleasures, watching her brush and brush that long black hair and quietly hum popular tunes from her high school days. And for some reason, thinking about that, I realized that it had been getting harder and harder to impress her lately, and that idea startled me because I hadn't realized I had been trying.
"Oh," I said, "I don't communicate with him daily, you know. Let's see, how long has it been? Eleven years?"
"It seems much longer."
"Nasty, nasty," I said. It was a lame return, but I wasn't thinking well, yet I didn't want her to go scot-free. At one time she wouldn't have dared to even try to sneak one in, much less be so obvious, but the rules of marriage had been shifting in her favor for some time. She, who had once lived in blue Jeans and sweatshirts, had been buying better and better clothes from small shops which displayed their dresses on mannequins that resembled African art, and she had been wearing perfume and nail polish and even, my god, ear rings, sexy little earrings that caught the light as she talked. That's why she had cut her hair, and why not? She had an excellent job.
"I've got to go put on my makeup."
"Coward. Sit and listen about old Willie Mac."
"I don't have any time. You're a schoolteacher, Les. You don't understand the demands of the business world."
"No, no, I don't understand those demands at all. Above my head. I'm down here with Michael Jackson and the mangled syntax of 'my summer vacation.' Small stuff. The leadership of tomorrow. Genius and snot."
"I don't have time to argue."
"Don't leave this table," I said, startled by the note of warning in my own voice. I had never had to threaten her before. I wasn't sure what I would do if she simply laughed and left the room, whether I would chase her and hit her or just stand in the hallway calling her selfish bitch and other spur-of-the-moment masterpieces. I might hit her. That idea had been coming around lately, and I wasn't nearly so troubled by it any more. It seemed to go with the short hair and the earrings.
"You've lost too much weight," I said. "Go off that diet. Make yourself a meat loaf sandwich."
"Les, I've got to go. May I go? Tell me what R. Wilson McClain wants, why he wrote, and then later this evening I will make you a drink, bring you a pillow, do all those things you say I don't do for you any more. But for now, Les, please! Why did he write? Why does this Pulitzer Prize winner write you?"
Everything in me said to carry on with the struggle, not to let her get away with such straightforward reasoning, not to let her clear the decks so competently, but instead I folded my arms and said, "He's delivering a lecture in the city. He wants to stay with us for several days. He wants to get drunk with me, he says, and search out suburban housewives. His last several books have been duds, he says, and he needs--what's the matter?"
"He wants to stay here?"
I glanced around. I resented the emphasis on that last word. "So what's wrong with this place?"
"He is going to stay here? Let me see that letter."
"Even great men sometimes deign to dwell temporarily in vermin-infested shacks. I like this house. Even you used to like this house."
"I want to see where it says he is coming to visit us."
"Okay, I'll pick up a little bit. Pull down some of the cobwebs in the hall, board over a couple of the rat holes, dust off the bed in the guest room--what's the matter with you?"
She was standing, never mind my threats. "I will not have a Nobel Prize winner in this house."
"Pulit, dear, Pulit. The Pulit Surprise. There's a big difference." I had to raise my voice. "Now come back here! What I said before still goes!" I followed her down the hall. "Come out of there. Oh dammit, you pushed the lock. Don't you remember what I said about the bathroom lock? I don't even know where the screwdriver is. You going to go out the window? Better start hiking your skirt, Hon, cause this door ain't going to open until hell--"
She open the door and stared at me. "I gave it some oil yesterday. All it needed was some oil."
"Well sure," I said, "if you're going to give it oil. Anybody could have fixed the damn thing with oil."
"I don't have time for this. Get out of my way."
Strange creatures, these women. A 'my blue heaven' at first, and then they begin to reconsider the wall paper and start hanging around the jewelry counter. Their clothing grows sleeker, their bodies too, and clever repartee begins to bore them.
"My famous friend will love you," I said. "The house won't make a difference. Nothing will make a difference."
"You had better call your school," she said calmly, "and don't say I have a yeast infection. That's a sick excuse, and they don't believe it anyway."
"But I never used that. I just told you I did." I called the school, watching my wife as I did so, watching her flatten her tummy in the hallway mirror, catch a smudge of lipstick at the corner of her mouth, and honest to god smile--after all this!--smile at herself. She was practicing for the world.
I explained to the school secretary that overnight I had had a heart attack, yes, or at the very least a broken leg. Temporary cancer attack. Her name was June, and she was in her sixties and used to like me. "Hungover, Les?" she asked, not entirely in humor.
"First period only, June. First period. I swear I'11 be in by second. First only. You have my word of honor."
"How does your wife put up with you, Les? How does she do it?"
"Gosh, June. She's one heck of a little lady. First period. Just first. I'll be in by second. You can handle first, can't you, June? Don't tell Machine Gun Jim."
"You're heading for a fall."
"Well, put it off until second period, okay? I'll be in. Thanks a lot. Give 'em a free period. Let 'em write on the walls. Let them beat up Harvey Leadbetter. That'll keep them busy all period. Thanks, June. And don't tell Mr. Allison, okay? He's got this thing lately."
"They're going to fire you," my wife said quietly as I hung up the phone. "Honey," I said, "they have to catch me first. Hey, where you going? I Just got a stay of execution for at least a period, maybe more."
"Then you," she said in a voice like stepped-on glass, "can clean this shack up. You can get the baseboards, the cobwebs--you--" she lowered her voice dangerously, "can just jolly-well vacuum."
I glanced at my watch. "Call in sick this morning. Let's talk about this. Frankness is important." That suggestion speeded her up along the hallway. "Let's just have it out," I said. "You ashamed of the house?"
"Yes!" she cried, and she left, or rather she tried to leave, but the front door stuck, as usual, and I had to jerk it free, the chain bolt swinging in an arc and bouncing with a "thunk" off her forehead. I tried to inspect where it hit, but she pulled away and stepped quickly up the sldewalk to the car, holding her forehead or maybe just putting her hand over her eyes. She gunned the engine, and a pebble or two from the gravel ricocheted off the old boards of the porch siding.
"That could have hit me," I said quietly, watching the car disappear down the road. "Could have put my eye out."
Sure, it was an old house, but that was what we had wanted those years ago, seven was it? Eight. An old frame house. A house that could breathe, we had said. It breathed, all right.
I closed the door and walked despondently back into the kitchen. I could now drive over to school and relieve June of what I did not kid myself was an easy task, or I could sit around and feel sorry for myself. Feeling sorry for oneself was a dull affair so early in the day. Better to wait for the cocktail hour. What I really needed was a chat with someone who understood, or at least said he did. I drove my Ford over to a little bar on Western Avenue called "Harpy's" where a friend of mine named Chum Ursley--a gentleman of solid, if not entirely respectable success--was undoubtedly counting last night's receipts. I parked next to the trash dumpster and abandoned my car to the mercies of the meter maid.
I came through the back door too quietly. Chum had the pistol in his hand, but when he saw who it was, he said, "Goddamn," and laid it back beside the thick piles of tens and twenties. "You almost lost your kneecaps," he growled, no longer looking at me, "or at least one of them."
"Why kneecaps?" I asked, sitting beside his desk in the wicker chair that Chum provided for his cuter waitress applicants, the others being grilled out in a booth in the main room.
"Dirty Harry aims for the kneecaps. Don't you go to the movies?"
"Why not the elbows?"
Chum let out his breath, stopped counting, and stared at me. "The elbows are in the back. The knees are in the front. Why aren't you in school teaching school? That's where you should be. All them little minds need you so bad." Chum grinned. He didn't mean any harm.
"Chum," I said, casually inspecting my fingernails, "you once said you would pay me twice my schoolteacher salary if I worked as your night manager. That deal still hold?"
Chum stopped counting his money, shoved the stack he was handling back into several other stacks, and rubbed his chins with the tactile sensitivity of a man who truly appreciated his own stubble. "You ain't going to teach school any more?" The idea had caught him unawares.
"Just thinking."
Chum sat up straighter in his chair, an old fashioned three-quarter back swivel chair he had once refused me a hundred and fifty dollars for, and said, "Chief, are you really getting out of the schoolteaching business? Is this for real?" He seemed almost hurt.
"It's been done before. I told you I'm just thinking."
He studied me seriously. I stared back. "Now there's your basic problem," he said. "How much you making?"
I told him. Actually, I told him a figure fifteen hundred too much. He said, "Okay, I'll Jump that a third."
"You told me twice as much."
He grinned. "I lied, like you just lied, but let me spell it out for you, teacher. You close six nights a week. You mop, you wash dishes, you do anything you can't get the rest of the lazy bastards to do." He sighed. "Stay away from the girls, of course, but that's no problem for you cause you got such a sweetbun. How is the little woman?"
"Fat and ugly."
"I should have such 'fat and ugly' working for me, not you." He returned to his counting.
Chum's modest establishment had a special place in its heart for the college crowd. I had worked there as a dish washer during my undergraduate days, and sometimes as a floorsweeper and now and then tended bar. One night a drunk stumbled in and threatened Chum with a blade, and I tackled him and had gotten to be a hero. My future wife had been waiting tables that night, and that, for whatever reason, became the first night we made love.
I remember other nights seeing her moving about the main room with a tray held shoulder high, her long hair drifting with her casual, graceful movements, her figure clearly etched against the background smoke and dim lights forever outlined in her waitress uniform, a snug business that Chum insisted upon and which brought only mild protests from the sorority girls he liked to hire. And I remember her eyes, suddenly noticing how I was watching her.
I said, "She's working for Langley Morris. Stocks."
Chum leaned back. "I've heard of them. They're quality. She was quality too. I wouldn't have her back here."
"But you would me."
Chum smiled. "If you need the work, you need the work."
"That doesn't offend me."
"Of course it doesn't." Chum picked his nose gently and asked, "Is it still good between the two of you?"
"Sure," I said. "Our love is eternal."
Chum smiled again, patted the scrambled pile of ones. "Has she figured out yet what a dud you are?"
"Right."
Chum laughed and for some reason picked up his gun and put it down again. "I just want to know if you are ready to handle a nighttime entertainment operation such as we have here. You showed some stuff, once."
"I still show stuff occasionally. Got any hit men you want me to neutralize? The Mob is a picnic compared to high school sophomores."
He looked at me, almost sadly. The thought struck me that this fat old man, whom I had always thought of as a stock character in a screwball comedy, had in his way stuck to his rules better than I had mine
"I like you," Chum said suddenly. "You ought to be at work in your schoolteachlng job. You going to skip out on me too?"
I was walking over to the Mr. Coffee machine. "I would never do that to a friend."
He laughed. "Where's the guy--remember? It was Christmas Eve, ten, maybe eleven years ago. Where's the guy that got all lathered up when that little what's-her-name, big-titted little blonde with the eyes kinda crossed, Emily, said, 'School is a bunch of no-nothin's teaching a bunch of do-nothin's,' and you grabbed her by I swear-to-god her shirt front, and that one had a shirt front, and you said like Dirty Harry would say it, and I really can't forget this because I was honest-to-god moved by what you said, and it was, 'Schools keep America free. If we had better schools, there never would have been no Viet Nam.' God, I love it! Here you was giving a history lesson to some twat that could hardly hit a toilet on a good day."
"I never said anything like that."
"Better put a little water in that. My Mr. Coffee, he's not mixing so well these days. You drink that like it is now and you are going to be walking on tiptoes for an hour or so."
I poured in a little water. "I never said any of that," I repeated. The coffee still tasted like somebody had soaked nails in it overnlght.
"Sure you did." Chum grinned. "You said it, and you meant it, you brainy fart. 'If we had better schools, there never would have been no Viet Nam.' I mean, Les, who would ever think of that? Fifty-six thousand guys killed because of our lousy school system. Sentiments like that are the kind of thing--I mean, it's awesome."
"What was that girl's name anyway?"
"You ask me? You went with her. Emily, I think. I always thought of her as the big-titted cross-eyed college dip that couldn't change a nickel." Chum laughed and again picked up the gun, a cheap revolver with a barrel no longer or thicker than my pinky and a chipped plastic handgrip.
"I didn't go with her."
"The hell you didn't! You shacked with her for about three and a half months over in that trailer park on Hershey Street."
"Oh. Yeah. Name was Leanne. More like three weeks. She joined the Peace Corp, I think."
"The Army. The goddamned Army." Chum twirled his knee cap gun. The muzzle looked incapable of handling any caliber larger than a darning needle. He aimed the pistol at the sleazy calendar on the wall. "Hell, I wanted to write her and tell her that if our schools were better, there wouldn't be no such thing as the goddamned Army."
"When do you want me to start, Chum?" I stood, remembering to pick up the cup. Chum took it personally, leaving a dirty cup in his office.
He looked up at me. I began to realize I had gotten him talking too much. "Oh, well." He stared down at his pistol. "How about a week from tomorrow? Better still, let me call you. Yeah. I got this guy in there, I mean he couldn't hit the pot on a good day, but I got to ease him out gently. He works like a bat, but he disturbs me because he don't have any philosophy of life. A customer engineer got to have a philosophy."
"A customer engineer?"
"Yeah." He laughed and put the gun down. "I got that from IBM. That's what I call my bartenders now. 'Customer Engineers.' If garbage collectors can be called 'sanitation engineers,' then I figure a good bartender can be called a 'customer engineer.' I'm not talking about just mixing the drinks, you know?" He got serious.
"I know that." And I did know that. Chum had always seemed to me to be a man of mission. But something in his face had given me a new question. "You changing your mind, Chum? I mean, about me?" How did I know that?
"Naw, Les." His face looked sad again, but sadness for what I didn't know. I used to consider him a sort of human three-ring circus, with his street grammar, gutter enthusiasms, and the mildly disgusting thing he had for the teenage girls he hired, the kind of guy everybody ought to know at least one of. Now, coasting along with his cheap pistol and his crude calendar and his killer Mr. Coffee machine, Chum seemed to me a creature at peace with the essentially rabid nature of the universe.
And I had no doubts that, within the space of thirty minutes, he had hired me and fired me.
I would have made a lousy bartender. I had made a lousy bartender ten years ago, but Chum had looked upon me not as a bartender, not merely, but as a kind of walking set of beliefs that he admired and didn't much understand.
I had been so clever then.
June wasn't taking care of my class. She was in the office when I walked in, reading the morning paper. I asked her, "Who's handling the barbarian horde?" and she looked at me as if that was a question I asked too often.
"Mr. Allison," she said, not without a little spike of satisfaction.
"His Eminence Himself? In my class?" I kept myself from running down the hall. This was not a good thing, not a good thing at all.
Allison was standing chin to chin with my most difficult student, Hector Marquisa, usually called "Glom" by the other students. Hector seemed forever suited in his heavy duty military field jacket, which I was told he always wore, even during April and May, but I myself couldn't prove that because April and May were Hector's months to skip school. The jacket gave him the imposing look of a six foot two, olive drab beer can.
Mr. Allison was not without a little romance himself. One night at my house he had briefly dropped his legendary facade of iron self-discipline--perhaps because my opinion or that of my wife meant nothing in school politics, or perhaps because my own imbibing had lured him slightly over the line--and, sipping kindly from the most expensive wine I had ever purchased, mentioned that "in the early days of Viet Nam" he had acquired the nickname "Machine Gun Jim" because of his talent with the M-60 light machine gun.
"It was in the hip," he said, smiling with the odd balance of a man not used to smiling. "I could position the butt of the weapon against my hip and direct my field of fire more concisely and with better effect than the others." Then the little smile flickered and disappeared.
What a shame that Machine Gun Jim had never used his talent in actual combat, having been judged by his superiors as even more capable in the care and management of manila folders and iron file cabinets than in directing concise and effective machine gun fire against paper targets.
Hector, never a fellow to respect abstract qualities, growled, "Who does this turkey think he is?" He undoubtedly knew that Allison was the principal, but his question was, I think, more along the lines of, "So what's a principal, and what's it got to do with me?"
"That does it, young man," Mr. Allison said in the voice of a man whose extraordinarily reasonable limits had just been reached. And then he tried to take Hector's arm.
In some circles, reaching out to take the arm of another person to lead him off somewhere might not be supposed to be an act of ultimate aggression, especially if, as the professional "literature" on the subject would have it, "the role and authority of each participant is clearly defined."
Nothing had ever been defined clearly in Hector Marquisa's existence. In a quick rustle of canvas he knocked away Mr. Allison's arm so firmly that Allison himself was turned slightly to the right.
Violence had occurred. Rlsing out of the usual class room mist of routine and dim effort, something hard and bright and undeniable had quickened the student pulse, mine as well, and excited us with the possibility of real trouble.
"Glom" I said sharply, fixing my classroom voice to a penetration just above "Cool it, jerk" and just under "I'm going to gnaw your knees to the bone." I learned years ago, back when I thought it mattered, that you could play your voice the way a dancer plays his own body, and to much the same effect, if you were good.
Hector looked at me. His real name, and my voice, had turned his head. The rest would be nothing. That which had been briefly visible subsided back into the mist, and the room palpably shifted into its usual mode. The Establishment had once again conquered an interesting development. "Sit down," I said quickly to Hector, and just as quickly beckoned Mr. Allison out into the hallway. I allowed a little irritation in the motion, so that the fulcrum of confrontation could now be shifted in everyone's mind to Allison and me. Hector, I knew without looking, would now sit down, relieved of the responsibility for carrying the action.
In the hallway, Machine Gun Jim's hands were shaking. "That boy struck me," he said. "In fourteen years of teaching, no one has ever struck me."
And then I said, and it was a stupid thing to say, "How many of those years were you actually in the classroom, Mr. Allison?" It was a stupid thing to say, but I was beginning to realize how stupid I had become over the years. Larger questions would be brought up in a moment or two, and my handling of the recent tension would disappear like a document discreetly filed.
"This morning," Mr. Allison suddenly said. "Where were you?" It was a good question for him. It calmed him, straightened out a little matter of authority. "Ms. Lembeck said it was a domestic squabble."
"It was.
"Oh? I called your wife's office over an hour ago, and she said she arrived at work on time and didn't know why you weren't at school."
"A joke, Mr. Allison. My wife makes strange jokes."
"Nevertheless, she was at Langley Morris almost two hours before you came to work." Mr. Allison, now out of the classroom, was once more in charge. Authority seemed to flow back into him minute by minute, as if the absence of real students acted upon him like a fast battery charge. I should have left him to Glom.
"I think--" I said, "I think I'm going through sort of a personal crisis." There, that couldn't fail to bend the heart of a bureaucrat, not one who, at every symposium, conference, workshop, and committee meeting, declared his unamended allegiance to the value of the "inner man."
"Let's go into my office," Mr. Allison said, and, having snatched some off duty teacher from the faculty lounge to watch my class, who were no doubt thoroughly pleased to see the system once more in confusion, he led me quickly off to the carpeted and paneled vault of power. The halls, I thought, were too energy inefficient for this man. Nothing would do but the lightning of an inner office.
Behind his desk his shoulders seemed to fill out, his chest gain several inches, the rather flaky material of his chin coalesce into a quite respectable jut. "You are a good teacher," he said in a voice that suggested otherwise. "But your ways are unorthodox, and you don't seem to keep up with recent developments."
I wanted with all my heart to tell him that there weren't any recent developments in teaching, that teaching was a thing of spirit that ran back along the strands of hope and generosity back to the ultimate beginning of accomplishment, back to the first conversation and the first attempt. I wanted to tell him that recent developments were composed of the same straw that he himself, with his "fourteen years of teaching," was composed of. I wanted to tell him in the same voice that I could handle a Glom with that teaching was as simple as knowing something important and wanting, very badly wanting, to give that to someone else, as a gift-- perhaps the only real gift we can give.
But now I was in his zone of lightning. His plaques and degrees flashed down upon me. I realized how easily it was for him to take our truths and have them misfiled and have our achievements rerouted.
"She's a wonderful woman, your wife," he was saying.
"Okay," I said, "cut the shit." I was surprised at my own words, but not too surprised to offer a silent self congratulation and put a tight grip on a fear that threatened to swamp me. Talking like this to my wife was one thing. Allison was something else.
He looked at me. I could see in his face a small light of joy, very small, almost imperceptible. From the misty depths of our professional relationship I had just brought forth something visible and clear.
"So," he said, but what he really said was that it was all over, that we needed to run through a final couple of hundred words, and then that would be that. But we had to have that final couple of hundred words, or else the parting would be unclean by system standards, perhaps even tainted by the suggestion of unfairness, and unfairness was the one pollutant that Allison would die to protect his little operation from.
"You really don't want to teach anymore, do you Les?"
Ah, now he could use my first name. Standing at the edge of eradication, I was to be provided a decent measure of humanity.
"No," I said. "No I don't."
"It's obvious." He smiled, a genuine friend at last. "I was in two of your classes this morning. The students are crude, poorly educated, badly disciplined. The last boy, the big one with the army jacket. He really wasn't much different from the others."
"Not much different."
"They don't respect you very much, do they?"
"'Us,' Mr. Allison. They don't respect 'us.'"
Mr. Allison moved some papers about on his desk, and I recognized that in many ways he used his desk the way that I used my voice. "Your wife said you are suffering a loss of confidence."
I jerked my head up. That light of joy was much bigger now. I stood. "My wife always has my best interests at heart. As a matter of fact, I was at a bar this morning, trying to get a job, trying to step up in life. The owner, I'm afraid," and I was finding it hard to speak, "felt that, sometime during my extensive teaching experience, I seemed to have lost the knack." I turned to go.
"The knack? Knack for what?"
I did not look back.
June, who had of course heard everything, was standing behind her desk, ready perhaps to run if I did anything rash. "He's not that bad," she whispered.
"Oh yes he is," I said. "Oh yes he is."
I went home and hit the beer. The injustice came upon me wave after wave, and for every wave I drank a beer, and for every goddamn insult I had suffered at the hands of zombie teenagers and blinded bureaucrats, I clenched my fists until my wrists ached, and for the tendons tearing at my neck, I drank a beer.
My wife came home shortly after five. The way she entered the room--how can I explain?--the way she glanced at me, began pulling off her gloves, made me realize that some time during the day she had betrayed me with another man, that my now legendary ineffectiveness had somehow extended itself to the conjugal bed. The glove, the look on her face as she removed the fingers one by one, the calm, absolutely unloving look on her face as she stared down at me. That kind of pain communicates by its own semaphore, coded in the minute actions of a woman I thought I had loved for years.
I watched her at the door of the closet as she reached for the hanger, her body firm, her sexuality like a bright jewel in the dim hallway, and I realized what a fool I had been to think myself beyond all this for so long. I wanted to put my hands on her waist, to lay my face against her belly.
Instead I said, "Come here." She left without looking at me, knowing I had been drinking all afternoon, left quickly down the hall. I wanted her to ask me what was wrong. I felt tears coming in anticipation of what I could tell her, of how I could describe the harsh things, the harsh things that had happened to me. But she knew my questions and my speeches, and she wasn't interested in bringing them up. Her high heels clicked down the hall, no leniency there.
I watched the back of her neck, strangely naked, the must unfamiliar part of a suddenly unfamiliar woman, and I wanted, as I had never wanted it before, to take my cheating wife to bed.
I walked to the kitchen door, a beer in my hand. I leaned against the door frame. She was moving pots and dishes, pulling cans from the cupboard. She seemed young, entire universes younger than me, as if time had changed the rules and, for my long and consistent ignorance, had placed me a penalty distance down the line. She moved with motions clean as blades, and she was damned aware of her sexual parts in their crisp, efficient clothes, now like smiles from someone in a separate group, in a different room.
(copyright 1994 by Fred Kemp)