Getting Warmer (22 page)

“You were brilliant,” I whispered when he took his seat next to me. He took my hand and squeezed.

But it was for nothing. That’s how Lars looked at it, anyway. After impassioned speeches by Claudia’s mother, a member of the school board and some random guy who didn’t even have kids at Agave but apparently just liked to hear himself talk, Dr. White, wearing a black suit and a fuchsia blouse, took control of the stage.

She had considered both sides of the argument. Theater was important. The students had worked long hours on the production; it would be wrong to tell them that the show could not go on. At the same time, parents had the right—no, the duty—to protect their children from material they deemed inappropriate. Having read the play and discussed it with the superintendent, she had determined that the students could perform it—under the condition that the offending scenes were eliminated. Further, she would institute a policy whereby any future play intended for a school production would require approval by her and the school board.

The parents seemed placated. Lars was fuming. He didn’t say anything until we reached the parking lot, stopping in front of his Prius, which he had parked under a light. “Fucking mind police,” he growled.

“At least they didn’t cancel the production.”

“They might as well have. It’s not even going to make sense now.”

“It’ll make sense. We’ll make it make sense.”

“And what plays are we going to do after this one? What kind of stilted, soulless stuff will pass the censor board?”

We stood in the parking lot, talking for about twenty minutes. The night air was chilly. Lars lent me his blue blazer.

“I have a frozen pizza at home,” I said, clutching the blazer around me. “The self-rising kind. And a bottle of red wine.”

“That sounds really good right now.”

I got to the house before Lars, who said he’d pick up a salad on the way over. After sticking the pizza in the oven, I turned on the gas fireplace in the great room and shuffled through my CDs, finally popping in some jazz (which I’ve never particularly enjoyed but seemed sophisticated). I poured some red wine into my parents’ Riedel glasses. I considered lighting candles but decided that would be overdoing things.

He brought a bag of lettuce mixed with herbs. “I forgot to get dressing. You have any?”

He took the glass of wine I offered. I held up my glass. “To perseverance.”

“To enlightenment,” he countered. We drank.

We went into the great room and settled on my mother’s camelback sofa. Flames licked the ceramic logs in the beehive fireplace. “What do you think of the décor?” I asked. “I call it ‘Boston Meets
Bonanza
.’” (Yes, okay, so I recycle jokes.)

“I’m really disappointed in Dr. White,” Lars said, staring into the fire.

“I think she was worried about a lawsuit.”

“I feel like I’ve completely compromised my artistic integrity. Which makes me a poor role model for the kids. Like, I should show them what it means to stand up for your beliefs, but instead I just sit down and take it.”

“No,” I said. “You’re being pragmatic. If you keep fighting, the play could get canceled altogether. That’s not fair to these kids.”

Lars turned to me and smiled gently. “You’ve been great through all this.”

“Thanks,” I said, drawing in a sharp breath.

The timer rang.

“Oh! The pizza.” I popped off the couch and hurried into the kitchen. I set my glass on the counter and poured some more wine. A drop splashed on the counter.

We ate at the kitchen table: not as romantic as outside, but a lot warmer. “You want me to light the candles?” Lars asked.

“Sure.” I dimmed the lights slightly.

He had a second glass of wine. He told me about his first year of teaching, how tired he had been. He told me about being a kid in Seattle. He told me about the summer he spent backpacking through Europe.

I finished the wine.

We went back to the great room, sat down on the couch. He winced.

“What?” I asked.

“My back. Probably because I’ve been so tense.”

“Here, let me rub it.”

He sat sideways. I rubbed his well-muscled shoulders through his blue dress shirt. Lars had looked so perfectly pressed earlier; now his shirt was covered with creases, and his khakis were rumpled. I worked down to his shoulder blades. “Mm,” he murmured. “This feels good.”

“I’m glad.” I ran my hands down his spine and then back up again. I made fists and kneaded his lower back. Finally, I slid my hands forward, encircling his waist. I leaned against him, my front pressed against his back.

He tensed. I sat back. He turned around, alarmed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I thought—”

“No,
I’m
sorry,” he said, retreating to the corner of the couch. “I guess I was sending you the wrong signals. I just—my back hurt. But I didn’t mean to—well, I guess I thought . . .
you knew
.” He blinked at me. He looked so pretty in the firelight. It made his hair glow like a halo.

My eyes widened. “Oh! No! It’s okay! Really.” I smiled. “I drank too much wine. Don’t worry about a thing. Everything’s fine.”

As soon as he left, I called Jill. “You were right from the beginning,” I said. “Lars is a flamer.”

Robert arrived at school on Monday wearing black and white checked chef’s pants and a tired expression.

“You ready to start your internship?” I asked.

“Started it already.” He ran a hand over his bleary eyes. “Luis called me Saturday—said they were swamped.”

“You worked on Saturday?”

“And Sunday.” He smiled sleepily. “It was fun. Course, I had to work at the hospital, too, so I’m wiped.”

When I had a break, I called the restaurant to talk to Luis. He wasn’t in yet, so I explained to the hostess that I was Robert’s academic advisor for his internship and that I had a few concerns.

“Robert? That the guy who was in over the weekend? Real good-looking?”

Yes, I said. That was him.

“Real good worker,” she said. “Totally saved the bartender’s ass.”

“Excuse me?”

“Cocktail waitress didn’t show up. That Robert kid jumped right in, started delivering drinks. Even mixed a couple.”

 

 

I caught up with Robert near his locker. “Robert.”

“Hey, Mrs. Q.” He smiled.

I kept my face stern. “Alcohol. Internship. Not a good mix.”

“Luis told you?”

“No, some woman. I have a feeling Luis wouldn’t want me to know that he was breaking the law by having a minor serve alcohol.”

“It’s not like I drank any.”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t serve if you’re under nineteen.”

“It’s just that they were really short-handed.”

“Robert. This cannot—
cannot
—happen again.”

Later, on the phone, Luis feigned ignorance. “The kid’s under nineteen? Oh, man, no way.”

“He’s a high school student. High school students are generally under nineteen.”

“Oh, well, I guess you never told me.”

“It was on his application.”

“Oh, well, I guess I didn’t look it over too careful.”

Luis swore Robert would no longer work the bar. I hoped he was telling the truth.

Neil Weinrich was in the lunchroom when I walked in with my insulated lunch bag. I gave him a quick wave and hurried past before he had a chance to ask me about Robert’s internship.

Jill and Lars were sitting at our usual table, eating out of matching Tupperware containers.

“What, no mystery meat?” I asked Lars, peering at his farfalle pasta salad. There were chunks of chicken, some herbs, cherry tomatoes and black olives.

“Jill made me lunch,” he said.

“What? You never made me lunch.”

“You never asked,” she said, spearing a bowtie pasta. “Don’t get used to it,” she warned Lars. “I just had extra, and I wanted to get rid of it before it went bad.”

I settled myself into a molded plastic chair and opened my lunch bag, pulling out an orange, a plastic bag of crackers, a hunk of cheddar cheese and a child-size water bottle. “I’m avoiding Neil Weinrich,” I announced.

“Why?” Lars asked, twisting open a bottle of iced tea. “He’s kind of hot.”

“
Eew
,” Jill and I said in unison.

“Just
kidding
.” Lars rolled his eyes and tossed his blond hair. I couldn’t believe I had ever thought he might like girls. “But have you seen Raoul? The new student teacher—I think he’s in science.
Yummy
.” He took a giant swig of the iced tea and screwed the cap back on.

The next morning, I called Robert’s cell phone when I got to my classroom, five minutes before the first bell. “I just wanted to check on your internship. Are you at school yet?”

“Yes.” I heard a car horn in the background.

“Then why are there car sounds?”

“I’m in the parking lot.”

“How was the internship?”

He was silent for a moment. “Very educating. I got educated about how to rinse glasses and scrape plates.”

“Oh, no.”

“Dishwasher called in sick. And they were, like, totally short-handed.”

At lunch this time, I lingered by Neil Weinrich long enough for him to ask about Robert’s internship.

“So far, so good!” I chirped. “Of course, it’s still early.” Then I ever-so-casually asked if there had ever been a time when an internship didn’t work out.

“We check out our business partners as closely as possible,” Neil Weinrich said. “But there will always be times when a business mentor does not fulfill his”—here he paused to look me in the eye—“or
her
—part of the bargain. We normally allow a month-long orientation phase, during which students can switch internships, if necessary. The orientation phase is over in a week, however, so if your student requires a switch, it would have to be done pronto.”

When I sat down, Lars was just biting into a square piece of cafeteria pizza. “I think you’re too hard on Neil,” he said after swallowing. “About his looks, I mean. Check out his shoulders. I bet you anything he works out.”

I waited until I got home to make the call. It’s not like I hadn’t thought about calling Jonathan from the beginning. And I suppose I was glad to have any excuse to talk to him, even if my heart felt like it would burst. I used my parent’s phone rather than my cell so my name wouldn’t come up on caller ID.

He knew it was me, anyway.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” I took a deep breath. I had rehearsed my speech. “I’m not calling about you and me because I accept that you cannot forgive me.” I didn’t really accept it, but it sounded mature. “I am calling to see if you might be able to help someone out. A young man, a student. He has a learning disability and reads at a fifth-grade level.” Actually, this was progress. When we started, Robert was reading just slightly better than an average third grader. “I told you about him, actually. He’s the one who froze up in the play audition.”

“I thought you made up the play.”

“No!” I felt oddly hurt, like,
Don’t you believe anything I say
? “The play was real. It just wasn’t at the . . . um, it was at school.”

I explained my predicament: Robert would benefit greatly from an internship, but I hadn’t found him anything suitable, and time was running out. With all of Jonathan’s industry contacts, he could surely find a place for Robert. “I’m not asking you to do this for me,” I ended grandly, “I’m asking you to do it for a very deserving young man.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, softly: “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

“Oh. Okay.” I was disappointed but not really surprised. It was time to say good-bye. I didn’t want to. “How’s Krista feeling?”

He paused a little too long. “Fine.”

“My sister’s really big and really nauseous. That’s what my mother said, anyway. My parents went out to her place in Rhode Island. To help out. So I’ve got the house to myself again.”

I waited for Jonathan to say something—anything. He remained silent. But at least he wasn’t saying good-bye, at least not yet.

“Jonathan,” I said. “I know I’ve said it a million times and I know it doesn’t make everything better, but I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Maybe if we could just get together, for coffee or something, we could talk this over and—”

“I have to go,” he interrupted. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” I said to the dead air.

Friday was the final dress rehearsal; Saturday was opening night. Lars spent the first hour in a powwow with the kids, trying to explain why they couldn’t just perform the play as they’d rehearsed, in its entirety. They sat, Indian-style, in a circle on the amphitheater stage. Arriving late, I squeezed in next to Katerina. The concrete surface felt cold through my gray dress pants.

“What are they going to do? It’s not like they’re going to stop the play in the middle. I say we just go for it,” Claudia said, despite—or perhaps because of—her mother’s leading role in the crusade for censorship.

“The cuts ruin it,” Katerina said. “It just doesn’t resonate the same way.” Dr. White had deemed several of Katerina’s scenes “inappropriate.”

“I know how upset you guys are about this.” Lars ran a hand through his golden hair and sighed. “I’m upset, too.”

I did my best to look concerned, but, honestly, the play was the last thing on my mind. After school, I arrived at Aji Amarillo unannounced. I was hoping to catch Robert, but he had already left for the hospital.

“Hi, Luis,” I said, putting on my happy face, desperate to make the most of an imperfect situation. He took a drag on his cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. With his other hand, he stirred a pot of pungent-smelling sauce.

I started in with, “I just wanted to be clear about the requirements of Robert’s internship,” when my nose took off on its own journey, trying to identify the competing smells of Luis’s kitchen. Roasted onions. Garlic. Chili powder. Chicken. Chocolate. And something else vaguely sweet that I recognized but couldn’t name.