The Best American Short Stories 2013 (44 page)

Her face gives her trouble as a teacher. Irony has inscribed certain lines—insincerity, others. The insincerity is estranging—estranging her from herself, that is, for she feels, inwardly, like the most honest person on the planet. Inwardly she is plain and kind—emotionally Amish. But outwardly, no. Outwardly she is a professor. With a mocking lift of her brows, she has more than once accidentally silenced a student and been stunned that it happened so fast. Now she strives, facially, for serenity. As a child in the depths of a great museum she was struck mute by the impersonally eloquent eyes painted onto the linen wrapped over the real face of the mummy—no detachment, no trace of aversion, rushed to defend her huge, vulnerable heart from the perfect painted face tenderly laid against the true hidden visage whose corruption seduced the imagination into graphic detail. That was going on right below an oval face whose uncanniness told her
I was alive
, whose individuality, almost completely submerged in stylization, was more poignant for having barely made it through. For the first time she understood death for what it was—once, a real person had spoken through those lips,
a person
had looked out from those eyes pointed at both ends. That was why they took children to museums—she had been meant to understand this great thing they all understood, whose inevitability they could somehow (she did not see how) bear, which they expected her to spend the rest of her life knowing: death, first recognized in the depths of the museum, would be alive for her now her whole life long, and could never be un-seen. Nothing had been offered in the way of preparation or protection, and this treachery of theirs, this cold willingness to let her see what she saw, could not be explained. Inconceivable, the demented precision of this blow aimed at her by forces pretending to be benign. Hours later, in the backseat of the station wagon trundling south on the highway leading away from the city, she had fallen asleep. When she woke, she was looking out of eyes pointed on each end.

Once another professor, a handsome old charmer and taunter, asked her by way of flirtation what she wanted on her gravestone. For years, long after losing touch with the other professor, who had left for a university on the opposite coast, she thought about this question. She wrote and rewrote her gravestone, always with him in mind, recalling that particular moment at the party when he had come up to her and with two fingers touched the inside of her wrist, exposed because of the way she was holding her glass, and then, as if his somewhat intrusive but tolerated touch required its counterweight in charm, he had smiled a beautiful male smile within a dark beard and asked what she wanted on her gravestone, and she has been answering him ever since, though he died years ago.

Her by now experienced soul (but her heart is no bigger than it was when she was a child) gazes out through pointed eyes at students whose great museum is all of literature. Her corner of the museum is in English, which she has always loved—which she will love to her dying breath. Here come students. Why do
they
love it? What do they want? Is the end of such love inevitable—will there be a last English major? Will he be eyebrow-pierced and tattooed, awkward as any culture’s newest young hunter, a prowling, scanning searcher-boy invoking the name DeLillo; could she be that Raggedy Ann–haired anorexic cross-legged in the last chair in the line of four chairs in the hallway outside the professor’s door, this girl with tattered paperback upheld? They come. They are enthralled. The professor likes how enthralled they are. It is an old thing, a deep thing, to be enthralled. While enthralled they are beautiful. She could swear that an enthralled reader nineteen years old is the most beautiful animal on earth—at least, she’s seen one or two who were in their spellbound moment the incarnation of extremest human beauty. They were not themselves. Literature looked back at her from their eyes and told her certain things she was sure they ought not to have understood at their age. They had gotten it from books—books with their intricacies and the things they wanted you to know about love and death that you could have gone a long time not knowing if you had not been a reader, and which, even when you were a reader, you saw as universal truths that did not apply to
you
.

When the professor sees that a student loves a certain sentence, her heart lifts as if she’s been told
great news! You will never die!
Why does it feel like this? That book in that student’s hand has nothing to do with her. It’s just luck she’s in the same room.

In the center of a roundabout, a paved orbit around a central island whose pale gravel is set with concentric circles of a kind of agave she happens to know are called
foxtail
after the slender oblong upheld sleekness of their array of pointed leaves, the professor watches while bicycles skim and veer past within arm’s reach, hundreds of bicycles. If she stands here long enough she could easily witness the whirling transit of a thousand bicycles with her as their still center. Either extinction or a drastic diminution of population worldwide is inevitable within their lifetimes, according to research well known by the students. Here we can make some really big, really simple connections—we can cease to care, for a moment, how it
looks
to make big simple connections instead of subtle small ones. So. The same world that warns them of extinction bestows toys for them to carry, to key, to rub with their thumbs in swift ovals, to insert into those aperatures called in
Hamlet
“the porch of the ear,” natural distance between brain and music annihilated, the cacophony nudged deep, close, too close to the species’ most exquisite bones, incalculably tiny, the miracle housed within each ridiculous naked human ear. That is the point of the ten thousand toys. They are not about strangeness and newness at all. They seek innateness, sensual invisibility, the body’s quality of being not-there to itself. In their insinuated proximity they elude the soul’s attempt to differentiate between soul and soulless. Which is basically all that literature has ever cared about, and why it will
never cease to be loved
. Sure, tell that to yourself, the professor tells herself. The strap of the professor’s heavy leather messenger bag rests on her left shoulder, crosses her chest, and fits below her right armpit, an arrangement completed with inevitable creasing of her jacket, which is black or any of the dozen soft shades of gray in her closet; not much variation there, not much risk; the bag itself is revolved until it rests snugly against her back, a trick learned from students in the nick of time, just before her neck acquired a permanent ache from one-shouldered weight-carrying. Calculate it sometime: the weight of the books you have carried in your life, would it equal that of a horse, a boat, a house? Bicycles rush at her from nineteen directions. No one hits anyone. Just how this is accomplished—by what unerring divination of one another’s intentions and how many hundreds of swift corrections—she wants to know, to see, or if she can’t see it, if she’s not quick enough to perceive the glance that averts disaster, and she’s not, then she wants at least to be close to it, she needs to know it happens, it goes on and on happening.

Her heart has always been the same size as it was that long-ago Sunday when she first saw those eyes pointed at both ends, and she has always felt the same to herself. Secretly, because people are supposed to go through enormous changes and to mature, she wonders if there is something wrong with her, to feel such consistency between who she is now and who she was when she looked down into those alive-dead eyes. Is something wrong with still being who she was as a child, or is she fine? What book can answer that? A great number of them seem to the professor to intuit the existence of this question
from her
, however far away she is in time from the writer of the book, however remote, and in this context the right adverb to modify
remote
is
impossibly
. A great many of the books she loves most
hold
this question. It’s in there somewhere, the question, if not the answers, and why is it enough, in reading, why is it beautiful simply to find your own questions?

Long ago, when she was a new professor with a new professor’s keen motivation, she took the trouble to think of really good answers to certain questions students asked, and the trouble she took then has paid off ever since, because the answers can be revised according to the times, some needing more revision than others, but her original responses continue to strike her as sufficient, and form a sort of core around which revision can take place, and the questions haven’t changed. Really there are only twelve or so, at least in her life. Twelve or so main ones. Around those, a haze or shimmer of worries and intimations that can’t quite materialize into questions. Anxieties like droplets lacking the particles of dust or grit they need to coalesce into clouds. Things they fear. Questions she could not answer anyway.

In her mind she answers the professor who asked the question, who is no longer alive to hear what she wants on her gravestone, not that she plans to have a gravestone because she wants to be cremated and despite her fear of death is consoled by the notion of ending up as ashes—why, she’s not sure: their lightness and vulnerability to dispersion suit her, as does their incorruptibility, the fact that nothing further can be done to ashes, that in their lack of ambition regarding immortality ashes are the opposite of those eyes she gazed into in the museum. In her mind he touches her wrist and asks his question, which for all she knows he’s in the habit of asking as a disconcerting, cut-to-the-chase,
what are you really like?
refinement of flirtation, whose bad-boy contempt for the usual niceties at least some women would respond to. She had responded to the professor, not in the way he wanted, not with equal and opposite impudence, but with the awkwardness of needing to think before talking, an awkwardness despised at her university, which she mostly hid, but not that evening and not with him, and he hadn’t liked that, and hadn’t liked her answer, so they parted and not long after that lost touch and she was left answering him in her mind, saying yes, there was something she’d like, just one word, on her gravestone.
Reader
. And in her mind he loves this answer.

For instance, a student will ask whether reading critically and interpreting—by beginning to study
literature
—will cause the student to stop loving reading, because the student thinks there’s a risk of this, and that is what the student never ever wants to happen, and what is the answer, is it right to reassure the student when after all the professor doesn’t know how it will go for that student, she only knows how it went for her? Well, she says, in my experience, she says, the more someone learns about an intricate thing, like, say, the human heart—the more a surgeon knows about that heart, right?, the deeper
in
, the more beautiful the thing seems, and by thing I mean a heart or a book, either one. Then the student says thank you and goes away. But the professor does not know any heart surgeons and has never asked a heart surgeon if what is felt is wonder. She made that up.

Only when she is well away from that roundabout, safely settled into her favorite corner of the couch in her office—when a new student plunks down in that corner, it’s a problem—only in this quiet, narrowing her pointed eyes in pleasure in an interval of aloneness she has no right to, because they should be here, the students, they’ve said they’re going to come by and one of them will knock on the door at any second, meaning the value of this interval, the preface to losing oneself in a book, is heightened by her awareness of its likely end—only in the particular space created by unexpected liberty (in which thinking her own thoughts has a stolen or illegitimate savor, really fun) does she intuit the real reason for her love of standing absolutely still in the bicycle onslaught, in the student whirlwind. As usual the real reason has been expertly swaddled in and obscured by false, lesser reasons, very attractive in and of themselves. Oh yes there is pleasure in being unmoved in the midst of an every-which-way assault. But also, this is like her life. They come at her from every direction! They never touch her! No. That’s not it, not the bottommost layer, not the meaning revealed only when other meanings are peeled away, whose existence you only ever discover if peeling is a habit, if you love this deft quiet work of lifting away length of gauze after length of gauze to find the true face. Down down down down down and down. They mean something, these almost-winged cyclists, in their seriousness and lightness, their concentration, in their searchingness that must discern every tiny signal
or else
, in their absorption. This is reading. No wonder she loves standing there: in the middle of a steady cascade of virtuoso reading on which everything depends.

It could be, the professor tells herself, that apart from your work and your teaching you do not have enough going for you, that you need to get out more, that due to your aloneness, which we’re not going to call loneliness because it’s not that—it’s a deliberate, cultured, desirable, nonnegotiable state, absolutely necessary if you want to get work done, intelligent aloneness,
good
aloneness; it has a point!—because you are alone, conceivably your students matter too much. At least you have to ask yourself once in a while, you have to check in regarding whether or not it is wrong, what you feel for them, the students. Without fail you need to recognize that the easiest transition love ever makes is into coercion, and that your most useful trait as far as students are concerned is
dis
interestedness. You’ve said often enough that you love teaching, but you have never said the truer thing, which is that you love your students, because it would only worry everyone to hear it, it would worry even you, and it might not even be true, because there is, remember, the risk that aloneness has exaggerated what you feel for them. Which may not be love, but some minor, teacherly emotion that nobody ever bothered to give a name. Who were they, the people who figured out what the emotions were, and how many of them would be recognized and named, and which sad little shadings or gradations could safely be ignored—who were they, these feeling-namers and numberers, and what did they have against shades of gray?