Love May Fail (17 page)

“I want to be Zagreus again. Kill me, please.”

“Okay, I’ve been here for almost a week now, and I need to say this: Would you stop being such a pussy?”

I’m stunned by her use of that word.

I didn’t think women used that word—
ever
.

“As hard as this may be to believe, I vowed to save you before I even started writing your mother,” she says, “before I knew she even
was
your mother—and since I too don’t believe in God or mystical forces, this isn’t exactly easy for me either. I can’t explain how I ended up here to save your life, but I did, and here I am. We don’t have to understand what led to this very moment, but I suggest we use it to do something positive. Don’t you remember that paper airplane lesson you used to give on the first day of school? How you demonstrated the power of positive thinking and resisting Pavlovian impulses? Have your responses become conditioned for the worse? Are you going to piss on everything even before you know whether it’s good or bad for you? Eternally raise the middle finger high in the air just because a few things haven’t gone your way?”

I’m surprised she remembers that paper airplane lesson I used to give; I’d almost forgotten about it myself. I stopped giving it long before Edmond Atherton ended my career, mostly because it seemed sort of hokey after so many years of doing it, and also ad
ministration didn’t like me encouraging kids to throw anything out of the windows. I had been sternly warned on several occasions. Other teachers complained that I was interrupting their classes—that their students were distracted by my class moving through the hallways, and also by all of the airplanes flying in plain sight past the first-floor classrooms’ windows. I endured a lot of bitching about that little lesson over the years, and eventually it was just easier to hand out a syllabus on the first day of school and act like all of the other resigned and apathetic veterans—much easier, actually. Pragmatism won out in the end.

I’m a little touched that Portia remembers that paper airplane–throwing business, which I once considered one of my best lessons. And yet there is still enough piss and vinegar in me to say, “I was beaten with a baseball bat in front of my students. My dog has committed suicide. And now I’m being haunted by the misinformed and untested optimism of my youth in the form of a delusional former student who can’t even take care of her own problems, let alone mine.”

“
You
are my problem now!” Portia says, and I notice that her eyelids are quivering. “I’m not leaving until we solve
you
. Like in those old kung fu movies—I saved your life, and now I’m responsible for it.”

“Kung fu movies? Why do you want to solve me all of a sudden, when you were happy to leave me undisturbed for two entire decades? Why
now
?”

“Remember when you asked for volunteers to go down to the soup kitchen in Philly and read books to the kids in the day care there? More than half the class signed up because they were inspired by
you
.”

I sigh. “If your life was happy and fulfilling, you wouldn’t be here right now, would you? Don’t you see the irony of what you’re saying? You were my student, you believed what I told you, and it led you where?”

“Here! Remarkably, I’m right here with you
right fucking now
—even though you’re being impossible.”

“You are here because you want me to be something I’m not.”

“You’ve just forgotten who you are.”

“Enough semantics,” I say. “I’ve given you my proposition. We reenact Camus’s
A Happy Death
, with me playing Zagreus the old cripple, done with life, and you playing Patricia Mersault, the hedonistic young person who kills the old for money and a chance to exist free and clear of the average working person’s life. That’s my solution. Now what’s your counterproposition?”

A tear rolls down her flushed cheek, and that’s when I know I am breaking her—that I am winning.

“I want to bring you back to life—make you flesh and blood again.”

“That sounds a lot like Mom’s religious hocus-pocus crap.”

“You used to be so alive! And now you’re a ghost. Living like you’re already dead.”

“I want to be dead!”

“No, you don’t,” she says, shaking her head.

“How would you even know? You assume that you know the innermost workings of my mind when—”

“If you wanted to be dead, you would be already. You want to sulk at the end of the world all by yourself. That’s really what you want. It’s pathetic!”

“I just lacked the motive that I’ve recently found. I will be dead soon, don’t you worry! With your help or without it!”

“I want to motivate you back into the classroom.”

“Never going to happen. Not in a million years. I’m done.”

She’s shaking her head defiantly and crying a little more forcefully, almost like she doesn’t even care that she’s crying anymore. “It
will
happen.”

“How can you be so sure?” I say, smiling, because she has lost before she’s even begun.

“Because I know you. And you’ve become unacquainted with yourself.”

I stand and cane my way out onto the deck, allowing the crisp cold air to bite my skin. Portia follows and stands next to me. “I can assure you, Ms. Kane. You do
not
know me. Trust me on this. Students never really know their teachers. It’s all a bit of a show, and you are familiar with the show I used to put on twenty-some years ago, for a paycheck, health insurance, and a meager pension. I no longer play that role. I am no longer a public servant. Haven’t been one for some time now. Threw out the required mask many years ago.”

“Your mother believed in you. She saw what I saw.”

“My mother was batshit insane. More than me, she loved a fictional father figure who lived somewhere at the end of the universe, who sat on a golden throne in a cloud land. She heard voices. Had visions. Probably should have been living in a mental institution for the past forty years or so.”

“Do you really want to be left all alone here in the woods so that you can drink yourself to death? Is that what you
really
want?” Her face is now the color of a ripe Jersey tomato. “If you can look me in the eyes and say you wish to be left alone so you can kill yourself, I’ll leave right now. But you have to have the balls to admit it openly and without looking away. I want to hear you say it without breaking eye contact.”

I look directly into her eyes, which are quite red now in addition to being watery. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Kane, but yes, I would like to die. I can no longer answer the first question, let alone inspire people like you. I’ve given all I can possibly give, and it didn’t leave me in very good shape. I’m done living, so I
am without question done teaching. If you will not help kill me, I suggest you leave and go do something more productive with your time. Go throw paper airplanes out of windows if it makes you feel nostalgic for your youth, but it was all just so much bullshit. Truly. I’m sorry.”

Portia’s crying even harder now, scrunching up her nose like a rabbit, although she’s keeping her chin up—stiff upper lip.

“Okay.” She goes inside, packs up her luggage, and then marches out the front door.

I have to admit that I’m pretty shocked by her leaving without putting up more of a fight. I think she’s bluffing until I hear her rental car’s engine come to life.

I quickly cane my way to the edge of the deck to watch her pass my wrecked truck and exit my driveway.

She steps on the gas, descends, and her back tires fire snow and stones up in her wake as she disappears behind the tree line at the end of my property, leaving me free to kill myself at will.

And then I’m alone again with my thoughts and the oppressive, relentless quiet.

Albert Camus?
my mind calls, but of course there is no answer.

I resume my death-by-cigarettes-and-wine plan and consume an entire bottle of pinot noir and the better portion of a pack of Parliament Lights within an hour.

As much as I try to forget about Portia Kane, I can’t help but wonder what she would have done in her attempt to get me back into the classroom.

Would she take me to the top of the Empire State Building like we were some sort of platonic teacher-student version of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in
An Affair to Remember
, and have me throw a paper airplane through the chain-link fence to somehow symbolically erase all of the many unfair trials and tribulations of our lives?

Do they even have a chain-link fence at the top of that building?

Why would I even think of that building when I am here in Vermont?

I wonder what Portia Kane planned, and if there actually is anything I would like to do before I die. I decide I’d really like to learn how to blow smoke rings, because I have never done that before, never even tried, and yet it always looks so cool when actors in old-time movies do it.

That’s my dying wish—to blow smoke rings.

Why not?

It’s just as logical as meeting some fifteen-minute pop star or
going to Disney World, when you really analyze the arbitrary and—let’s just say it—silly nature of dying wishes.

As if getting to do one last thing can really make you feel less regretful about your existence coming to an end. It may make your loved ones feel better, but not you. And I no longer have loved ones.

Regardless, I take a large drag from the Parliament Light in my hand, make my lips into an O, open and close my jaw the way I’ve seen black-and-white movie stars do, push with the back of my tongue, and several perfect rings of smoke shoot out of my mouth.

At first, I’m amazed to have done it so easily.

Then I’m a little disappointed because it took so little effort that it hardly seems like an accomplishment at all.

What was the point?

And what is the point of sitting around drinking wine and smoking cigarettes now that I’ve decided that I am finished with this life?

Why prolong this?

I go up into my guest bedroom and pull out the old photo albums I’ve kept for some reason I cannot name, and I take in my mother’s face before she became a nun, when it was just her and me, before she made Jesus her “husband.”

Some instinctual core of me regrets not having the chance to say good-bye to the old woman, but I don’t feel like crying or anything like that.

The photos I have are pretty typical mother-and-son shots, mostly snapped during birthday celebrations, Christmas and Easter dinners, vacations and the like. I’m sure you have all the very same photos, just with you and your own maternal figure inserted where my mother and I are in mine, so I won’t bore you with the specifics.

I wonder if it’s wrong to miss my dog much more than I miss my mother, and then I contemplate retrieving the letters from the PO box before I remember I have no working vehicle—my truck is
still wrapped around the tree at the bottom of my driveway—and a limp that requires the use of a cane, which limits me to half-mile walks at one stretch on Vermont’s seldom-flat roads. The post office is a good twelve or thirteen miles away, which means I will die without reading Mom’s farewell to me.

Just as well, I think, as it was probably a guilt-inducing rant about my soul and ending up in hell if I fail to buy into what she bought into. I smile because I have already been to hell and survived, with the help of a little toy poodle who looked like Bob Ross. Or maybe hell is living on after your dog commits suicide.

“Pussy,” Portia had called me.

Portia Kane’s hardly a feminist, using that word.

But maybe I
have
been unmanly in my efforts to solve my problems. I feel my cheeks start to burn with some testosterone-fueled sense of self-worth or respectability, because killing myself is at least an action.

In the medicine cabinet I find an almost full bottle of aspirin, a bottle of NyQuil, an expired bottle of Percocet left over from my physical therapy days, some laxatives, a few antidiarrhea pills, and some Maalox.

In the kitchen, I dump all of the pills into a wineglass, pour the mysterious-looking green NyQuil over the multicolored fist-size ball of meds, and then retrieve a picture of my mother and one of Albert Camus from my bedroom.

He’s sitting erect with his one eye sparkling, looking out over the pond at sunset. The water is aflame with twilight.

Mom is making homemade crust for her delicious rhubarb pie, leaning down on a wooden rolling pin, flour smudged across her left cheek and her still golden hair up in a loose bun.

Back in the kitchen, I place each picture on either side of my hopefully lethal cocktail. “Albert Camus, a pact is a pact. Mother,
this is to prove once and for all that your god is a fairy tale; you were wrong.”

I lift the glass to my lips, intending to down the entire contents as quickly as possible, hoping that many of the pills have already dissolved, not quite sure what the hell I am doing, wondering if I will even be able to get this green semi-liquid concoction down into my stomach with one tilt of the wrist and then quell the gag reflex long enough to keep it there—but just before the rim touches my lips, the kitchen door flies open with a bang and I drop the glass.

It topples over.

Goopy liquid and wet meds spill out across the table like a tiny forest-green tsunami full of pill-shaped debris.

Portia takes in the scene, examines the contents of my lethal cocktail. “What are you doing?”

“What are
you
doing?” I retort.

“You were really going to kill yourself?
Really?
”

“Have I not been clear on this point?”

She strides toward me, lifts her hand back behind her head, and smacks me hard enough to twist my head ninety degrees.

“Fuck you!” she screams.

I touch my cheek with my palm. “Ouch!”

She slaps my other cheek even harder.

“Why are you doing that?” I yell. “It hurts! Please stop hitting me!”

“FUCK YOU!” she screeches even louder. “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK!!! . . . YOU!!!”

Then she starts smacking my face with both hands at the same time, screaming, “You liar! You told us to be positive! I believed you! I trusted you! FUCK YOU, you have a responsibility to your students! FUCK YOU, you have a responsibility to yourself!”

“Why?” I yell. “Why? If you can tell me, I’d be most grateful. I was just a high school English teacher. No one cared!
No one at all!
The world does not give a flying hoot about high school English teachers! Why do I have a responsibility to anyone? What responsibility do I have?”

“To be a good man! Because you changed the lives of many kids. Because we believed in you!”

“Bullshit,” I say. “I introduced you and others to the classics and helped you get into college. Handed out a few pointers about life—platitudes mostly, which you could have easily discovered by opening up Hallmark cards. And then all of you went your merry little ways and forgot all—”

“We didn’t forget!
I’m here!
”

“My mother guilted you into this, and—”

“You believed in what you taught us! That’s what made you different. I know you did.
You believed!
” She punches my chest hard enough to make me cough. “You can’t fake belief. Not in front of teenagers, you can’t!”

“Stop hitting me!” I yell.

She punches me again. “Fraud!”

“What?”

“Drinking NyQuil and pills just because life got a little hard. You’re nothing but a
coward
!”

“You’re being abusive and downright insensitive.”

“You’re being a
pussy
!” she yells back, and then she hits me a dozen or so times until it feels like my face is going to bleed and my ears start to ring.

I start flashing back to the day of Edmond Atherton’s attack—experiencing it all again, my body flooding with anxiety, the sound of the aluminum bat breaking my bones, shattering my elbows and kneecaps like dinner plates, the hate in Edmond’s eyes—until I
break down and start to weep and beg. “Please! Stop hitting me! Please! Just stop! I can’t take this happening again!”

I reach out to grab her like a hockey player trying to end a losing fight, and the next thing I know we’re both on the floor crying and our arms are around each other and she’s saying, “You can’t kill yourself because you’ll kill the best part of me,” which is a hell of a thing to say, and I’m saying, “Thank you,” over and over just because she’s stopped hitting me.

After we finish crying, we eventually stand and clean up the wine and pills together silently and then retire to my living room again, where we sit on the couch.

“I feel as though I should be calling someone,” Portia says, “because you are clearly a threat to yourself.”

“Maybe I should call the police and file assault charges, because you just broke into my home and beat the hell out of me.”

“Did you stop making Official Member of the Human Race Cards before the attack?”

“What? Why do you want to know that?”

“Just tell me.”

“I stopped in the late nineties, actually. It felt like a waste of time. I used to spend
days
making those cards, and half of them ended up on the floors just as soon as the bell rang. The last year I had enough energy for Official Member cards, I saw several students throw theirs directly into the wastebin on the way out of my classroom. They disposed of them right in front of my eyes! If they had spit in my face, I wouldn’t have felt as crestfallen.”

“Do you remember Chuck Bass?” she says, undaunted. “Class of ’eighty-eight?”

“How am I supposed to remember a name from two and a half decades ago when I taught
thousands
of—”

“He still carries his Official Member of the Human Race Card
in his wallet. He graduated before I did, and he
still
reads the card daily. Every single day of the year he reads your words. Your efforts, your message—it’s gotten him through a lot. He hopes to tell you about it himself someday.”

I find that hard to believe—anyone reading that stupid card on a daily basis—but I must admit that it gives me a little thrill, arouses something deep within.

“Okay,” I say. “Sure, I’m glad that those cards helped a few people, but it takes a lot of energy to maintain a belief in—Why am I even trying to explain this to you? I should be dead by now.”

“And yet you’re not.”

“I am not dead. Correct.”

“Will you give me a chance to revive your spirit? Get you believing again?”

Her eyes are wide and hopeful enough to make me feel sorry for her.

I do not want to tell this little girl that there is no Santa Claus. Who would?

“I promised your mother,” she says. “And I intend to make good on that promise.”

“Then why did you leave earlier?”

“Because you were being an absolute bastard.”

“Why did you come back?”

“You’ve been good to me more times than you’ve been a bastard. You’re still in the plus column.”

Goddamn, she looks so hopeful, it’s killing me. “What do you propose, Ms. Kane?”

“Leave this place with me for a few days—just a few days. Allow me to take you on an adventure.”

“Will we be hunting for pirate treasure?”

“No, we’ll be hunting for you. The
old
you.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“It’s a surprise. You were just about to kill yourself. You have nothing to lose whatsoever! So why don’t we hit the road like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty? We can be fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky!” she says, paraphrasing the naively enthusiastic Jack Kerouac poster I had hanging on my classroom wall back when she was a student, back when I myself was wildly naive. I resist the urge to tell her that Kerouac drank himself to death.

“Is your mother still alive?” I ask.

“Yes. Why?”

“I bet she’s still hoarding, right? Why don’t you go save her instead? Keep all of this happy namby-pamby business in the family?”

“Because she isn’t able to do what you can in the classroom. And not everyone can be saved.”

I laugh. “Ms. Kane, you sure know how to romanticize the past.”

“If you give me three days—just seventy-two hours—and at the end of it, you still don’t want to teach again, I’ll leave you alone forever.”

“If I give you but three little days, you’ll leave me the hell alone afterward? I’ll be able to kill myself in peace? No more interruptions? You promise?”

She nods.

“And you aren’t going to drive me to some psych ward and lock me away, right? Tell them I’m a threat to myself and throw away the key? I don’t want to end up in a straightjacket drugged out of my mind, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.”

“Paranoid much?”

“Your showing up like this is enough to make anyone paranoid!”

“I swear I will not take you to a psych ward. I don’t even know
where the psych ward is! Swear,” she says, drawing an X on her chest with her index finger.

It’s strange that I’m actually considering going—but maybe I’m just embracing the absurd. Why the hell not, at this point?

“If I agree, will you promise not to hit me again and refrain from calling me ‘a pussy’?” I say, making air quotes with my middle and index fingers.

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Where are you going to take me?”

“You’ll see,” she says, smiling now, as if all that has transpired so far is part of some elaborate plan, like she’s been in complete control from the very beginning.

I fear I might be caught in her web, that Portia Kane is a hungry spider toying with my emotions.

But then somehow it’s settled.