Blue Angel (16 page)
“Of course I do.” Swenson can only pray that his pleasure and pride aren't visible on his face. “It's always flattering to have a fan. Especially such a talented one. I mean, I think Angela may be a real writer.” Then he stops. It so rarelyâneverâhappens that he gets to say this with any sincerity, he can't imagine how it sounds. Probably like he's lying.
“She's always been a writer,” her stepfather says. “Back when she first learned, I got her a computer, and she started printing this little family newspaper. She'd put in stuff like how long she'd had to wait that morning for me to get out of the bathroom. I knew computers were going to be big. They've sure changed my businessâI'm a pharmacist. I can't imagine how we lived without them.”
Swenson can't manage to hate this guy. He's no more the father in the poems than he is the dad in the novel. But something's not computing. Didn't Angela say her father killed himself when she was a teen? Wasn't that why she liked
Phoenix Time
, why it saved her life? But this guy talks as if he's been around forever. Could Angela have lied about this? What point would there have been? Is there some way of asking the guy if he's her father or stepfather, if the real father committed suicideâ¦without soundingâ¦nosy? Surely, the truthâthe explanationâwill emerge on its own.
He says, “She's working on a novel. It's really very good.”
“What's the story about?” asks her mother.
“A high school girl,” he says at last.
“What about a high school girl?” Angela's mother says.
“Well⦔ How much does he want to risk? The closer to the edge he goes, the greater the chance that he'll look over it and see something he wants to know. “It's about a girl and a high school music teacher who is not exactlyâ¦er, alwaysâ¦professional in his conduct with his students. At least that's what I think it's going to be. I've only read a few chapters.”
Angela's parents exchange glances.
“What is it?” Swenson fears he knows what's coming. The novel
is
autobiographical: the tragic drama of Angela and her teacher. He doesn't want it to be true, doesn't want to know he's dealing with a student who compulsively seduces teachers. “What is it?” Swenson repeats. “Something I should know?”
“Actuallyâ¦,” says Mrs. Argo, “something like thatâ
sort of
like thatâhappened at Angela's school. There was this biology teacher⦔
“Angela wasn't involved,” her husband adds quickly. “But the guy was messing around with a whole bunch of girls. He had himself a regular harem. Friends of Angela's, too.”
“Her best friend,” says Angela's mother, “gotâ¦you know, involved with the teacher.”
“But not Angela,” says her husband. “Angela's too smart a kid.”
“Also she's a big chicken,” says her mother proudly. “Don't let all the body piercing fool you. Angela's a pussycat, really.” A peculiar echo resonates from that last sentenceâthe faintest hint of meow or growl. I'm a pussycat, too. Or has Swenson imagined it? Is compulsive seductiveness a learned trait that Angela studied at her mother's knee? But what is Swenson thinking? Angela's the least seductive person he knows. In fact a big part of her appeal is the touching effort she puts into eliminating anything that might elicit desire.
“Actually,” says her mother, “I've always thought that Angela was a little shy, a littleâ¦funny around boys.”
“Funny how?” says Swenson.
“Wellâ¦she'd chase after some kid she likedâ¦and the second he started to like
her
, she wouldn't answer the phone.”
But what about her boyfriend? Is there some way to ask about that? Swenson's trying to formulate some sort of tactful, halfway-normal sounding question when Angela's father says, “Jesus Christ! This guy's her teacher, not her friggin' psychiatrist.”
After a silence, Swenson says stuffily, “Well. Be that as it may, she's an excellent writer.”
“Thank you so much,” says her mother.
“Yeah, great, a writer,” says her father.
“Thank you,” says Angela's mother, standing. “We appreciate your time.”
Her husband follows her cue, and stands. Swenson's up on his feet.
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Argo, Mr. Argo.” If the guy isn't Mr. Argo, if neither of them are Argos now, maybe they'll tell him so. And he'll know that this guy is the stepfatherânot Argo, the biological father. But what if he's adopted Angela and given her his name?
“Thank you,” repeats her mother.
Her husband nods and, in his haste to escape, nearly plows into the door.
“Oops,” he says. “I nearly ran into the door.”
Angela's father, thinks Swenson.
T
he discussion of Makeesha's story goes reasonably well
compared with the scene Swenson envisioned as he lay awake last night and imagined Makeesha denouncing the workshop's racist bias. In fact, the class has responded instinctively to the undefended sweetness of Makeesha's improbable transcription of a phone conversation between a black college student and her former high school boyfriend, the white guy who broke up with her the night before the prom, under pressure from his parents. From its first line, “I knew the dude's voice right away, even though we didn't be speaking for a year and a half,” the story, like Makeesha, veers in and out of street talk, and is in every other way (its protagonist is a sophomore at an isolated New England college) so very much like its author that when Jonelle Brevard says, “I really believed these characters,” there's a chorus of “I did, too,” and everyoneâincluding Makeeshaâis relieved and happy.
Their positive comments go on for a while. Swenson's not going to chill these warm feelings by introducing the tricky question of how one transforms experience into art, or by pointing out the stiffness that results when narrative exposition masquerades as dialogue. (Early in the story, Makeesha's heroine says, “Dude, what you be calling for? We ain't talked since you broke up with me a year and a half ago on the night before senior prom.”) Is Swenson's forbearance racist? Is he being unfair to Makeesha?
The only thing Angela says in class is, “I liked the moment when the girl and her boyfriend stop making small talk and fall silent, and out of nowhere the guy tells her he's been thinking about her nonstop for a year and a half.”
After class, Makeesha hangs around for a final word with Swenson. Claris waits for her at the door. Angela remains at the seminar table.
“Good job, Makeesha,” Swenson says. “It's obvious everyone thought so.” He smiles at her but doesn't speak, though she's clearly expecting more. If Claris and Angela weren't watching, Swenson could be more falsely effusive. Their presence also makes this harder on Makeesha, makes her more eager to get out while she can, with her dignity still intact, before she's had a chance to beg for another compliment from Swenson.
“Well, thanks,” she says, and hurries to join Claris. As they leave, they cast identically disdainful, competitive glances back at Angela. She watches them go, then turns to Swenson and says, “Jeez. Excuse me. What did
I
do?”
“It's what I
didn't
do.” Apparently it's become quite normal for Swenson to engage Angela in these unprofessionally conspiratorial chats about the other students.
“I want to thank you,” Angela says. “You did me a giant favor.”
“What was that?” asks Swenson.
“Lying to my parents.”
“Lying?”
“Telling them I could write.”
“You
can
write. I was telling the truth.”
“You don't have to say that,” Angela says. “I spent the whole weekend crying because my novel's so bad.”
“Every writer goes through that,” Swenson says. Everybody, that is, but Swenson, who hasn't written a word in so long that at this point a crying jag would be a sign of progress. “Anyway, I enjoyed meeting themâ¦your mother andâ¦stepfather.”
“Enjoyed? That's hard to imagine.”
Swenson says, “That
was
your stepfather, right?”
“Right,” says Angela. “Why?”
“Well, it was the strangest thing. He kept talking as if he knew you when you were a child, almost as if he were your real fatherâ¦.”
“He
did
know me. He lived next door to us my whole life. He and his wife, that is. A year after my dad killed himself, the next-door neighborâmy stepdadâmarried my mom. Major neighborhood scandal. His wife and kids kept on living next door. Everything was the same, except they weren't speaking to us, and he was married to my mom. I know it's hard to imagine a hot romance, to look at the two of them now.”
Swenson tries to summon their images so he can match them against this new information, but only unhelpful fragments appearâfalse eyelashes, jewelry, shoesâdetails that fail to cohere into a portrait of lovers who braved all New Jersey just to be together. Also, he's still not entirely convinced that Angela's telling the truth.
“I lied about something,” Angela says.
“Oh?” says Swenson. “What's that?”
“My real father wasn't crazy. He was sick. With emphysema. I remember once he took me grocery shopping for my mom, and he got so winded helping me bag the groceries that he had to sit down. He was wheezing. He couldn't catch his breath, and for a while it looked like they'd have to call an ambulance. And I was like at the mercy of these checkout guys, my dad's
life
depended on themâ¦.I saw one of those assholes roll his eyes at the chick who was bagging. Until then I'd been thinking that particular guy was cute. The worst part was: I was so embarrassed. I mean, about my dad. After he killed himself I couldn't stop thinking about that day, and I felt totally guilty.” Tears well up in Angela's eyes. She scrubs them away with the back of her hand. “Why was I mad at him?”
She can't be lying. Or can she? That Swenson can't tell makes him painfully conscious of the distance between them.
“You weren't mad at your dad.” He should be patting her shoulder, but a seminar table divides them. “You were angry at the situation. Life can be cruel and unfair.”
Angela shuts her eyes, squeezing back tears, her fingers hooked onto the edge of the table. “Anyway, I can't believe how I'm repaying the favor. You were so nice, saying all that stuff to get my parents off my case. And now I've brought you another chapter. You don't have to read it. I can wait.”
“Hand it over,” says Swenson.
Â
Alone in his office, after class, Swenson finds himself pretendingâas if someone were watchingâthat he has many more pressing things to do before he can get to Angela's chapter. He has to open his desk drawer and then immediately close it. He has to wheel his chair back and forward. He has to pick up the phone and put it down. He has to think about checking his E-mail and then decide not to. Only after considering and putting off these many important tasks does he take Angela's manuscript out of its orange envelope and begin the first page.
After school every afternoon I rushed out to the shed to see if the eggs were hatching. I searched the shells for fissures, the needle holes chicks poke with their beaks. But the shells were unbroken as I spun them in my palm. I knew they were dead and cold, that their warmth was from the incubator, not from life inside them.
Incubation took twenty-one days. Three weeks passed. A fourth. I knew from Mrs. Davis, and from the pamphlets, how much could have gone wrong. Problems with the parent stock, old roosters, malnourished hens. Incubator malfunction. A few degrees here or there. And yet I couldn't make myself admit they were dead. What was I supposed to do with five dozen rotten eggs? Was my mother supposed to cook the little things I'd imagined as tiny pulsating blood-red creatures growing daily in secret, sixty fragile ovals from which I'd thought I heard sixty heartbeats?
One night I asked my father to come out to the shed. I remember how pleased my mother looked that at last I was including him. I hated that it made her happy.
So I said, “I think they're dead.”
My father said, “What do you mean, dead?”
I said, “They were supposed to hatch ten days ago.”
“Ten days ago?” my father said. “Christ. Where have I been?”
He pushed his chair away from the table, left his steak and potatoes. I had to run to keep up with him as he ran out to the shed. Emergency! He flung open the door as if something were hiding inside it. But of course there was only the red light, the silent eggs, the humming.
My dad said, “Have you been keeping charts?”
I said, “Look, Dad. Look how neat.”
“None of them hatched?” he said. “Not one?”
I waved my hand around the shed.
“These things happen,” my father said. “The point is to find out why, and redesign the experiment.” He didn't want me to be discouraged. He wanted me to like my science project.
“First of all,” he said, “let's verify our results.” He grabbed an egg from the incubator and hit it against the rack.
The smell took a second before it hit.
“I'm throwing up,” I said.
What to do with the broken egg? My dad transferred it, oozing gunk, to his other hand, and picked up an egg from another incubator. It broke. It smelled bad, too. He ordered me to get a trash bag from the house, and I held the bag for him while he dropped in the eggs. At first he was just efficient. But the smell got really bad. He began to slam them in hard. He said, “It's all about trial and error, goddamn it. Finding out what went wrong.” He asked if I was sure the temperatures were correct. If I'd turned the eggs every day. I told him I'd done all that.
I knew what I had done wrong. But I couldn't tell him.
I was supposed to have candled the eggs. When they were a week old you held them up to a bright light and and looked for a veiny red spot that proved they were fertile. If they weren't, you threw them out. The blanks could spoil the others.
I couldn't do it. I didn't want to see what was inside the eggs. I didn't want to be the one to throw the dead ones away. Besides, Mr. Reynaud had said something about helping me with that part.
Instead of candling the eggs, I'd gone out to the shed and imagined a knock, imagined I opened the doorâand there was Mr.
Reynaud. I pictured the look on his face: confident, as if he had every right to be there, and at the same time worried I might not let him in. I imagined he took off his jacket, replaced one of the red lights with a bright light bulb, and gently, one by one, held the eggs to the light. I imagined him saying, Come here. And I did. I stood behind him, so close I felt his rough jacket against my skin, and I leaned forward, against his back, looking over his shoulder until I could see what he saw: the egg as red as the blood in your hand when you hold it up to a flashlight, and the yellow yolk deep inside, and the tiny red clot.
By now I had to lean in so close that my breasts pushed against his back. I felt it, and he felt it, neither of us spoke. He replaced the egg in the rack and started to reach for another, but then he turned slowly. I was so close he could have thrown me off balance. He put his hand on my upper arm and steadied me as we turned against each other and meshed, his mouth locked into mine. We kissed. His hands ran over my back. Then his hands slipped under the waist of my jeans, and I made a sound so low in my throat that even the unborn chicks must have heard me. What did they think that noise was as they swam around in their shells?
Angela's thinking about him. He knows this with telepathic certainty. She's back in her room at the dorm waiting for him to call. He should call her. Tell her the chapter's fine, it's great, just keep on doing what she's doing. He picks up the phone. He puts it down. Good. He'll wait for a while.