Blue Angel (24 page)

“How's school?”

“Fine, sir. Very well, thank you. And how have you been?”

“Excellent,” Swenson says.

Just then, Matt's attention is caught by something over Swenson's shoulder. Swenson turns in time to see Angela walking toward them.

“Hey, Angela, how's it going?” says Matt. “How's your semester been?”

“Sucky,” Angela says. “My semester bites. Except for this guy's class.”

“Oh, that's right,” says Matt. “I remember. You're a writer.”

Swenson can't stop himself from saying, “Angela's my prize student.”

“Yeah, well,” says Angela. “I'm going to get my ass kicked this week.”

“Uh oh,” says Matt. “Good luck.”

“Oh, it won't be so bad,” Swenson says. “I'll bet it goes just fine.”

“Right,” Angela says. “Well, I guess I'd better go. I'm on my way to the drugstore. To buy earplugs to wear to class.”

Matt glances at Swenson, uneasily. “I told her to,” Swenson says.

“Only kidding,” Angela says. “I'm going to buy Tampax. Plus I've got to return this.”

She holds up a videotape case, which Swenson takes from her.
The Blue Angel
. His hands shake as he returns it. He and Angela exchange a searching glance, which must be even more puzzling to Matt than it is to them.

“Good choice,” Swenson says.

“It's a cool movie,” Angela says. “But a little boring.”

“I'm surprised the video store had it,” Swenson says.

“Are you kidding?” says Angela. “That store's the best thing about this crappy town. So…okay. Gotta run. See you guys later.”

Together, they watch her go. Swenson turns to Matt. “Can I ask you something?”

Matt tenses visibly. “Sure,” he says. “No problem.”

“Why would you want to sit here?” Swenson says. “It's the ugliest spot in the world.”

Matt grins with a relief so genuine and boyish that Swenson catches a flash of the person Ruby must have liked.

“I can think here,” Matt says. “Don't ask me why.”

“Well,” says Swenson, “thinking's always a good idea.”

“And I run into the nicest people. Like you and Angela.” Swenson wishes Matt hadn't said that.

“Well, I'd better be going,” Swenson says, taking off down North Street. Only now does it cross his mind that he forgot to mention Ruby.

 

Swenson drives around aimlessly to work off the adrenaline rush for which he can thank his meeting with Matt and Angela. Finally, he's calm enough to go home, where he finds Sherrie napping by the wood stove. There's an open book in her lap, her head's tipped back. He longs to kiss the smooth white arc of her neck. Standing in the doorway, he can almost convince himself that he's the person he wishes he were, the one whose life is still in order, the one who hasn't yet pulled the pin on the grenade that's going to blow his happy home sky-high.

He doesn't move or make a sound, but Sherrie senses his presence and opens her eyes. She's happy to see him and at the same time, he's pained to note, annoyed at having had her nap disrupted. “Guess who I talked to today?” Swenson says brightly.

“I give up,” murmurs Sherrie.

“Guess.”

“The Nobel Prize Committee. Hey, congratulations.”

Swenson winces. “Ouch.” His marriage is in worse shape than he imagined.

“Sorry,” says Sherrie. “You know I get crabby when someone wakes me up.”

“Actually, it was better than the Nobel Prize Committee.” Swenson waits a beat. “Ruby.” Now let Sherrie be sorry that she made that nasty crack. “She's coming home for Thanksgiving.”

Sherrie says, “You're kidding.”

“I wouldn't. You know that. Not about this. Anyway, that's the good news. The bad news is she asked for Matt McIlwaine's phone number.”

“Fine,” says Sherrie. “Give it to her. It's got to be a good sign.”

“I guess,” says Swenson. “Unless she's coming home to tell us that she's just recovered a memory of our having abused her in some satanic ritual.”

Sherrie says, “That's not funny.”

Swenson knows that. He's only trying to dispel the heavy weather of grief and guilt that settles in whenever Ruby's name is mentioned.

“She was bound to come around,” Sherrie says. “She couldn't stay mad forever.”

Swenson sits and watches the fire. Sherrie glances down at her lap.

“Page one hundred and sixty.” She shuts her book. “Remind me where I was.”

“What are you reading?”

“
Jane Eyre
.”

“Why that?” Swenson manages to say.

“Arlene was reading it. Arlene who never reads anything but supermarket romance. I guess there's some new movie or miniseries or whatever…. I found your old copy in the den. And you know, it's amazing. What you remember is her marrying Mr. Rochester, you forget the stuff about her being so plain and poor and furious….”

“I should reread it,” Swenson murmurs, then pauses, staving off paranoia. He was never one of those men who believed in a conspiracy of females. But now suspicion nags at him: Arlene and Angela somehow in league, and they've enlisted Sherrie. A coven of vengeful harpies, their anger and resentment fueled by periodic readings of
Jane Eyre
.

A
s soon as Swenson walks into the classroom he senses
something in the air. Something vile is about to occur. What maniac invented this torture, this punishment for young writers? Imagine a group of established authors subjecting themselves to this! It's not an academic discipline, it's fraternity hazing. And the most appalling part is that it's supposed to helpful. The bound and gagged sacrificial lamb is supposed be grateful.

But why is Swenson experiencing this acutely heightened compassion? Because his feelings for this particular lamb are unusually strong and complex. Meanwhile he can't help thinking that what's in the air isn't merely the normal, garden-variety, classroom blood lust and angst. This is something special. Just as Angela predicted, she's going to get her ass kicked.

“Whose head is on the chopping block today?” Swenson asks, rhetorically.

Angela grins at Swenson and shrugs. The others melt from the edge of his peripheral vision. Can he risk saying her name out loud? Better not even attempt it.

“Well then,” he says, “would you like to read us a paragraph?”

Angela's manuscript rattles in her hands. A spasm flutters one eyelid. The others are never this scared. Swenson longs to reach over and take her hand. She doesn't have to put her heart and soul on the line to satisfy a spoiled college kid's whiny demand for fairness. And it's all his fault. His feelings for her have warped the entire class.

Angela begins to read: “Every…after…I…out…sat with the eggs.”

It's a good thing they've read it before and that they're reading along as Angela mumbles, swallowing every other word. She swigs from her water bottle.

“Jesus, Angela,” Carlos says. “Pull it together, okay?”

Scowling, Angela says, “Okay. I'm starting again.”

“‘Every night, after dinner, I went out and sat with the eggs. This was after my mother and I washed the dishes and loaded the washer, after my father dozed off over his medical journals, it was then that I slipped out the kitchen door and crossed the chilly backyard, dank and loamy with the yeasty smell of leaves just beginning to change, noisy with the rustle of them turning colors in the dark.'”

The long sentence has done Angela good. It's taken her briefly out of herself and made her forget the class. Still, she's not a great reader. She goes too fast, in a nasal monotone and a faint Jersey accent. Even so, Swenson's enchanted by the language and by the image of the girl dreaming of her music teacher among the incubators and eggs.

For one terrifying moment he thinks: Oh dear god, I've fallen in love. There is no remedy, nothing to do but try everything, risk anything to be with her. What a time to realize this—in the middle of class! Meanwhile his students are squirming. Angela's still reading.

“Thanks,” he says. “That was great.” Angela turns on Swenson with the grumpy face of a kid waking from a nap.

“What's the matter?” she says.

“Nothing. That was terrific.” He never says anything like that. “Who wants to start?”

“I will,” says Meg. “Well, first of all, I just didn't believe it.”

Fine. They can write that off. Everyone recalls how Angela tore into Meg last week. It's payback time. That's how the system works, except in the rare cases of unusually generous, honest, or masochistic students who can get their hearts ripped out and the next week praise their attacker. But no one's that selfless in this class. No wonder they're all writing about having sex with lower life forms. It spares them the complications of love for their fellow humans. Well, some classes are just that way. It's chance, the luck of the draw, group dynamics. All of which means that Angela could be in for a very rough time.

“What didn't you believe, Meg?” Swenson labors to purge his voice of contempt.

“The whole thing,” says Meg. “Every word. Even the
a
's and the
the
's were a lie. Like Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman.”

Comparing Lillian Hellman and Angela Argo strikes Swenson as so hilarious that he's afraid he'll dissolve in hysterics that may lead to wrenching sobs. “Yes, well, I suppose that before we get into Hellman and McCarthy…someone should say what's good about the piece.”

“I thought some of the egg stuff was…okay,” Carlos offers.

“Oh, come on, Carlos,” says Claris. “It was all so heavy. So obvious and symbolic. And fake.”

“You go, Claris!” says Makeesha. “Don't be giving us that egg shit, Angela.”

Claris looks Swenson full in the face, and everything becomes clear. Cool appraisal flickers in her yellow-green eyes. He glances through Angela's manuscript. How well he knows those first pages. He can hardly remember how his own novel begins.

“I didn't believe the voice,” Meg says. “A teenage girl wouldn't think like that.”

“She doesn't use any teenage expressions,” says Nancy. “It was, like, totally unrealistic.”

“I have to say I felt the same way,” Danny says. “I kept wanting this girl to say something that made me believe in her as a character, instead of which we get this weird…
old person
going on with this disgusting stuff about hatching eggs.” Awfully high-toned sentiments from a guy whose hero has unnatural relations with the family dinner.

Jonelle says, “We don't hear anything about the narrator. I kept waiting to learn something about her…as a character.”

“Well, it's only the first part of the first chapter of a novel,” says Swenson.

“Still,” says Meg. “All the more.”

“Yeah,” says Carlos. “I mean, a novel's got to have something to keep you reading, and I wasn't sure I was going to stay with this story about some chick, ha ha, some chick hatching eggs and having fantasies about her teacher.”

Swenson's paging through the manuscript, this time with the vague intention of asking them to point out the parts they don't believe. But before he can speak, Courtney Alcott announces, “I totally agree with everything everyone's said. This is, like, the worst thing we've read in class all year.”

Tears are shining in Angela's eyes. Red patches bloom on her cheeks. She's on the edge of breaking apart, and Swenson's let it happen. She can't just shrug the whole thing off, as the others have learned to do. This is Angela's heart's blood, and Courtney's drained the last drop.

Swenson feels the thrum that precedes the bells. As they toll, he closes his eyes, and the room disappears. The sound fills his mind, working its way into the folds of his brain. There's no space left for distraction, for trivial, useless thoughts. He enters a deeply meditative state. He could be a Tibetan monk blowing one of those six-foot trumpets, in search of instant enlightenment through oxygen deprivation.

When the bells stop and he opens his eyes, the world appears washed clean. Now, in his exaltation, he feels less like a monk than like a prophet or a madman or the…oracle at Delphi. All he has to do is open his mouth for pure truth to come burbling out. He's never felt so guided, so certain of his mission.

“Sometimes…” Swenson pauses to listen to the silence so deep it's roaring, or maybe it's the lingering echo of the bells. “Sometimes it happens that something new comes along, something fresh and original, unlike what's been written before. Once in a lifetime or once in a generation, there's a Proust or a Joyce or a Virginia Woolf. Almost always, hardly anyone understands what the writer's doing, most people think it's trash, so the writer's life is a hell.”

How banal his little oration is! Every moron knows this. And what is he doing, mentioning Joyce and Woolf? Suggesting that Angela's novel is
Remembrance of Things Past
?

“As good as Angela's chapter is—and it's very good—you realize I'm not saying that Angela's writing
Ulysses
.” A few students giggle. Do they know what
Ulysses is
? “But her writing's original, the rest of you need to see that, because if there's anything I want you to take away from this class, it's the ability—the generosity—to recognize the real thing.”

Two hot dark coals of resentment glow in each student's face. Let them find out for themselves that life is unfair. Talent isn't doled out equally to everyone at birth. Plus, Angela, gifted as she is, works ten times harder than anyone else. How dare these little thugs presume to tell her how to write? He knows his anger isn't pure, or purely on Angela's behalf. He has his own reasons for being enraged: the hours he's spent in this hellhole, the pages of grisly prose that have furnished the text for hours of classroom discussion. The years he's sacrificed! How little time is left, and how much of it he'll have to waste in rooms like this one—in
this
one—pandering to these children's silly ideas about something that means so much, something he might be doing right now if he weren't watching time trickle away in the company of his adolescent jailers.

“What should be obvious to you all is that Angela's manuscript is a thousand—a million—times better than anything we've seen in this class this semester.”

“That's bullshit, too,” says Carlos.

The others are temporarily incapable of commenting on whether it's bullshit or not. Swenson stands and gathers his papers and—without a thought for how long the class is supposed to last—leaves the room before anyone can ask him whose story they're doing next week.

 

Hurrying across the quad, Swenson feels confident, energetic—capable, for the first time in weeks, of telephoning Len Currie. He won't be calling about himself, his book or lack of book, won't be asking for a favor or for personal attention, for patience or impatience with him for not having written his novel. He needn't wheedle or apologize, manipulate or boast, resort to the various strategies writers adopt with their editors. No, sir. He's doing something generous and large, something in keeping with his standing in the literary world and his vocation as a teacher.

Clearly, his classroom aria on the subject of Angela's work was a dress rehearsal for his conversation with Len. Every adjective he used was a dry run for what he'll say when he calls down to Manhattan. He unlocks his office door, throws down his coat, picks up the phone, and dials.

Some higher power must know that Swenson's on a crusade. Len's assistant asks Swenson's name and immediately puts him through. Len not only picks up, but sounds happy to hear from Swenson.

“Hey, man,” he says. “How are you? It's been a million years. When are you coming down to New York? It would be great to see you.”

Isn't that what you always hear: call your editor after lunch. After the two martinis, they're in more receptive moods. At least that's what you used to hear. No one drinks at lunch anymore. It's all Perrier and decaf. Even Swenson knows that. Or does he? What does
he
know? He's been away twenty years. For all he knows they're drinking again. Because the fact is that Len sounds…drunk. Or in some other sort of artificially assisted good mood. Maybe he's been carrying on a noontime romance with some assistant publicist. Which means that he and Swenson have a little something in common…. In any case, Swenson understands that this moment is unusual, and fleeting. If he wants to see Len, he should take him up on it now.

“Well, actually, that's why I'm calling. I'm going to be in town…the week after next.”

“Let me check my calendar,” Len says. “The week of the twenty-third? That's Thanksgiving week. Really?”

That's not what Swenson meant at all. Ruby's coming home for the holiday. It's the one time in the entire year Swenson can't come down. He could postpone classes, faculty meetings, student conferences. But blow off Ruby's visit? He just said the week after next without knowing what week it was.

Len says, “Actually, you know what, that Friday is perfect. It's the only lunch slot I've got free on my schedule for the next year. Only kidding. But it's almost that bad. That Friday would be fabulous. I'm not going into the office. By lunchtime I'll be climbing the walls to get away from the wife and kids.” He pauses. “Don't tell anyone I said that.”

Maybe, just maybe, it's possible. Swenson could fly into town Friday morning. Ruby would understand. She probably has plans of her own, plans involving Matt. Ruby and Sherrie could have some time together, and they'd all be heartened by this evidence that the man of the house has a life, a professonal life beyond Euston.

Of course, it's just as likely that Ruby will hate him for skipping out on her first weekend home in a year, and Sherrie will never forgive him. Well, so be it. He'll have to live with that. He welcomes it, in a way. If he's going to do something wrong—cheat on his wife, skip out on his daughter—he might as well do everything wrong. Let's show the world how bad he really is: bad husband, monstrous father. What is this sick Dostoyevskian craving for punishment and expiation? Possibly something he inherited from his dad, like some late-onset degenerative disease, latent until middle age.

“Ted,” says Len. “Are you still there?”

“Sorry,” says Swenson. “I spaced out for a second.”

“Jesus,” says Len. “You writers. All right, then. See you Friday, at one. You know the Norma? On East Twenty-second? Twenty-second and Park Avenue South.”

“I'll find it,” Swenson says.