Claire Marvel (22 page)

“Everything okay, David?”

“Sure, Mr. Rose.” He was staring at his feet. The elevator doors started to close but I held them.

“David, look at me.”

The head turned up. The eyes were bloodshot and the nostrils mildly inflamed. He’d been crying.

“You’re a lousy liar, Glassman, you know that?” I said as lightly as I could, stepping out of the elevator. “Come on, I’ll buy you a soda.”

Wordlessly he followed me across the lobby.

A brief journey—but even so, time enough to reflect on whether the student was feeling relieved or merely dutiful at the prospect of a tête-à-tête with his teacher, however sympathetic; whether, for that matter, the teacher genuinely thought he could help the student with his problems (whatever they might be), or whether this was just another example of the rampant egoism of the lonely.

We went in. A hotel bar, half past eleven at night and the tables all full. Not just the seat of government, then, this town, but the mother lode of convention centers. Did people never sleep? Did they not have families to go home to? All these indefatigable male conventioneers in wrinkle-free gray suits and white shirts hunched over stiff drinks, groping for one more handful of nuts. All these tired women in heavy makeup and starched blouses and Colonel Sanders ribbon ties, whose permanent-press smiles evoked the last steps of a forced march that had begun eons ago in some other desert. A scene, as they say, to make you weep. Except that as we entered the bar a couple of heads turned in our direction, and mirrored in their curious stares I caught a glimpse of the little docudrama I was unwittingly directing: a man and a boy, at night, entering a bar. A mistake. Clearly the boy was too old to
be my son. What, then, was happening here? Nothing good, declared the silent, judging faces.

I pushed on anyway. Though now I was angry with myself—it was sheer stupidity not to have considered appearances.

And it was too late. I hadn’t thought ahead, hadn’t noticed the stares in time. And the last thing I wanted to do was add to David’s problems and his pain, his clearly advanced if not yet fully articulated sense of being inadequate in the world. No, I wanted to say to him: The burden of being intelligent and shy and young is that you will always know, cannot
not
know; have grown up in a fiction of perpetual responsibility, believing that whatever cracks in life you find must be
your
cracks, that anything at all can be your fault. I wanted to tell him that what he didn’t see couldn’t hurt him, whereas what he did see would be with him for the rest of his days. And he would see a great deal, always, except perhaps his own worth.

We reached the faux-mahogany bar. There were two empty stools at the end. I slid onto one of them, and David climbed onto the other and perched there awkwardly. All of a sudden, he looked excruciatingly young.

The bartender sauntered over. Gray-haired, with a plush walrus mustache and a thick pitted nose that no doubt in its time had borne witness to entire epochs of pre-and post-convention despair, joy, and camaraderie. His eyes shifted from me to David, then back to me, before he asked what I’d have.

My order of two Cokes seemed to reassure him. He brought the sodas without comment, and went back to the other end of the bar.

“Now,” I said, turning to David. “Do you want to tell me why you were in the lobby half an hour after curfew?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rose.”

“I know you are.”

He took several gulps of Coke. I waited.

“I was using one of the pay phones,” he said finally.

“Why?”

“My parents made me promise to call.” He paused. “I didn’t want to do it in the room, Mr. Rose. In front of anybody.”

“I understand. Is something happening at home?”

He wouldn’t look at me.

“David?”

“They’re getting divorced,” he said softly, looking at the bar.

“How long have you known?”

“Since last weekend.”

His gaze was fixed on his hands, which were wrapped around the glass on the bar; he was staring at his hands as if there were something in them that he was in the process of recording for posterity.

“It’s my mom who wants it,” he said. “She says she loves somebody else.”

He was quiet then, staring at his hands; I could hear him breathing. There was acne on his forehead, and he hadn’t yet grown into his nose. But he held himself like a man. It was all inside him, whatever it was.

I put my hand on his back. More than one head in the room turned our way, but the stares no longer made any difference to me.

For a few moments longer David held himself still. Then,
bit by bit, he began to cry. He cried quietly, just as he was, sitting on the tall stool, his hands gripping the glass of soda.

From behind, in the cheap murky light of the bar, nursing your third drink or your eighth, you wouldn’t have heard him. You might have mistaken my young friend for an adult, a slight small-boned man, possibly a drinker. You would no longer have discerned in him the student, the growing boy, the hungry seeker of knowledge who until just a few days ago, a few minutes, had remained an optimist in spite of himself. This new pain was all confusion to him, a note struck in the darkness: knowing its source had changed nothing, shed not a single ray of light.

five

S
HE KEPT COMING BACK
. She was never far away. Washington or New York, hotel room or cheap studio, Riverside Park or Central, take-in Chinese or hot dogs on the corner, James Madison or John Locke, Mrs. Hogan or Mr. Maddox, Glass-man or Jackson or Weisberg or Chen, my words or theirs, reading or teaching, teaching or struck dumb. It made no difference. Every day she came, and every night. I was a blank screen and she was the only movie, and I watched her and watched her and watched her.

six

T
HE FOLLOWING SUMMER
, while running for the highest office in the land, the short dour governor of Massachusetts ill-advisedly placed an olive-green, one-size-supposedly-fits-all Army helmet on his large head and climbed into a tank. At that moment he lost the presidency, which he had desired for as long as he could remember.

Hours later, with the first clips on the evening news, the whole thing was over—vanished in a buffoonish mishap, an unwitting joke, a pantomime of such hubristic and small-minded desperation that somehow it would succeed in erasing all other impressions of the man. Gone forever was whoever he had been. This was what he was now.

November and the general election still lay ahead. Those final weeks must have seemed to him like a slow but certain public drowning.

At Cochrane, a new year began. I wasn’t a rookie anymore; walking down the hallway between classes, during lunch, you’d hear it: “Hi, Mr. Rose!” “Hey, Mr. Rose!” “Mr. Rose—my
man!”
The sheer numbers of students, their raw energy, backpacks stuffed with enough hope and anxiety to fuel a shuttle launch.

It’s the paradoxical reward of teaching that the job is never finished. No one, especially the brightest, will ever know enough. You yourself can never stock the larder of knowledge full enough to guarantee continual nourishment throughout the long winter of uncertainty that is living.

On top of this, perhaps, must be counted the old adage that teachers remain eternally young because their students never age. A time warp, in other words. Except that I did not believe it.

In my minuscule apartment there was a single mirror the size of a sheet of notebook paper. Big enough to shave by. Big enough to reflect back at me those few visible surfaces—a relatively unlined face, a long-fingered hand—capable of carrying on this charade of youthfulness to the outside world. At my age the skin was still resilient, if no longer exactly fresh. It made for the most natural of disguises.

The heart, of course, was a different story.

I tried dating a couple of times. But as had been the case in Cambridge, these attempts at romance lacked conviction, and were short-lived.

I took Carol, a redheaded English teacher, to an Italian restaurant on Columbus, then back to my apartment, where we sat on my sofa drinking wine and talking desultorily about school and the students we shared. Not a terribly demanding date—though not so simple, either, as it turned out. I couldn’t find the words or guts to tell her that most of what we said to each other sounded disturbingly secondhand to me, echoed by the memory of other, more resonant conversations; or that the toss of her head, the lifting of her hand to her face, too often struck me as shadowy reminders of moments already past. There were no original gestures left, I wanted to tell her, but didn’t.

And then, at some point, I simply began to shut down. It was involuntary; as though I were the last of my species, defeated by the grind of existence, fatal flaws made glaringly evident under evolution’s dispassionate magnifying glass. Excusing myself, I went to the bathroom and stood leaning over the sink. That was all. The tiny mirror, showing me myself, did the work of an entire wrecking crew.

When I returned, Carol was gone.

seven

I
N
F
EBRUARY,
for my thirtieth birthday, Toby Glickstein threw a party in my honor.

That night it snowed heavily. Toby lived up near Columbia, in a rent-controlled apartment passed on to him by an uncle. I walked up West End Avenue, the snow sifting down between the residential buildings in fat adhesive flakes; the city windless, muted, yellowed and shadowed by streetlights. The sidewalks nearly empty: a different place. The street, otherwise obscured, revealed itself as two furrows of oiled black made by the tires of a recently passed car. Nothing else went by as I walked, and gradually the furrows took on a velvet whiteness, and soon disappeared.

“Jesus, Julian,” Toby said, opening the door. “You look like a fucking snowman. Well, happy birthday. Put the coat in the bathtub, please.”

In the living room eight men about my own age were huddled around bowls of tortilla chips and salsa. I knew this crowd. We were all Cochrane almuni of a certain ilk. Many of us had grown a bit taller since the old days, but neither contact lenses nor Clearasil nor hair gel could hide the fact that somewhere in the past we’d been geeks.

I shot Toby a raised eyebrow. He followed me back into the apartment.

“Well,
you
try rustling up some women on such short notice,” he said defensively. “Anyway, don’t knock it. These guys are the last line of defense between you and another night flying solo with Captain Kirk.”

“Nice try, Tobe, but I don’t have a TV.”

“You think that’s something to brag about?” Toby said. “That’s pathetic, pal. Now how about taking off the coat? You’re dripping on my carpet.”

We rallied. We drank—red wine, beer, and bourbon. We stuffed ourselves with Chinese food from the Moon Palace and traded ten-year-old wallflower gossip as if it was hot currency. There was Muller, Goodman, Krebs, Piombo, Wolff, Scheinbart, Pleven, and Yang. Krebs was trying to make his first film, Wolff was a freelance journalist, Pleven was in computers, Yang was a lawyer, and Goodman was an oil and gas analyst for Salomon Brothers. Improbably, Piombo had written a children’s book that was being published in the fall (he confessed to having intended it for adults). Scheinbart and
Muller were between things and discussing the possibility of some kind of joint venture, possibly a yoga studio. This idea was greeted with derisive hooting by all.