My Education (7 page)

We now stood in a kitchen the size of the entire first floor of my and Dutra's shared house. In it Brodeur seemed as transitional as a butler. His feet were not even quite touching the black and white tiles. But at the far end, in a deep breakfast nook, I could see where he'd set up his camp, as distinct as if he'd built a small fire and run up a flag. The papers sat squared in three equal-height piles, each centered exactly on one of the three sides of the nook-enclosed table and each with a roster beside it. Brodeur would sit at the narrow end, in a chair, and Laurence and I on the two longer sides, on the deep padded benches. “I've prepared the ground, I've laid in supplies.” He beamed as he settled us down at our places and then, like a proud host, added to the table for centerpiece a coffee can of some two dozen brand-new razor-tipped pens, color red, and an egg timer. No Martha Hallett leaned on the gleaming black slab of the counter, nursing her coffee or making small talk to distract us. No sound of any kind reached the kitchen from anywhere else in the house, no footsteps, no voices, no grumbling of plumbing. There was only a silence more profound and palpable than the winter morning quiet we'd left behind us outdoors. And so I assumed that the rest of the house was enjoying the tail end of sleep, and kept imagining I heard subtle movements of waking in far upstairs rooms, and thinking we were about to be joined by Brodeur's wife, or even his child, for I underestimated how large the house was, and how many choices of exit it offered, and how easily persons within it might achieve the objective of not crossing paths.

“Coffee's just finished brewing,” Brodeur said as he bustled with saucers and cups. “On the bench between you and the window, Laurence, is a large box of vile powdered donuts, and on your bench, Regina, for later, a large box of assorted fresh-made sandwiches, both delivered this morning. Shall I pour coffee now? And continue with coffee until—what say, Laurence? Noon?”

“Eleven-thirty or everyone's twenty-fourth paper, whichever comes first.”

“Good man. And so it shall be. Thereafter wine. Case is under the table.”

“And when we're done, God willing, scotch,” Laurence said, now revealing a wax-stoppered bottle he'd brought in his book bag.

“May I first propose a toast?” Brodeur interrupted himself just as he'd been making to wind the egg timer. He lifted his coffee mug. “To invaluable colleagues. And friends.”

“Here, here,” Laurence and I said together.

Brodeur and Laurence could read, write, and banter at once with the ease of jazz masters embellishing on the egg timer, while I had gone mute with the effort, squint-eyed and claw-handedly gripping my pen. The more I raced toward them, the faster the papers receded from me toward a point where I would have been grading them blind—and then just at the brink they abruptly changed shape, and popped open in space like box kites. I realized not what any of them was about, nor if any of them had succeeded in proving its point, but where my red comments, like dabs of paint, ought to go; and what sort of transit through space they should make; and what attitude they should convey. It wasn't reading or writing but music! It didn't matter at all what I said!

“Ah!” I cried.

“She's got it!” said Laurence.

“Of course she has.” Brodeur smiled.

Wine was uncorked not at eleven-thirty but at twelve-thirty, on account of my slowness, but from there, perhaps riding the sluice of the wine, I went faster. Calculating for transition time a flawless performance was ten papers an hour; by one-thirty I'd done eight in an hour and by two-thirty, nine. Long since torn open, the sandwich box splayed at the end of the table, and each of us gripped sandwich crust in our nonwriting hand; each time Brodeur wound the timer, Laurence topped off our glasses, and we all tossed back wine like parched soldiers draining canteens. Talk had thinned out, replaced as it was by a sense of meshed power and intricate skill such as I felt I had never been part of before, as if we were airborne trapeze artists, or the sort of gymnasts who form pyramids while water-skiing—the door from the solarium suddenly opened and shut and we jerked in alarm, the trance broken.

“Oh,” said Martha Hallett, regarding us. “Sorry to barge in. I meant to come back by the other door.”

Laurence was first to recover. “How are you, Martha?” he said while attempting to rise, though his spidery legs were trapped under the table. Something in the moment felt backward, as if it was we who had barged in on her, dressed as she was in a way that seemed private, despite that she'd just come inside from a subfreezing day. She must have just returned from exercising. She was wearing a baseball cap pulled almost to the bridge of her nose so her eyes were obscured; a bomber jacket zipped all the way to the delicate skin of her neck, but no scarf; saggy outsize gray sweatpants with elastic at the ankles; and, without socks, a pair of authoritative-looking running shoes of the sort whose maker I could not even recognize from the symbol on the side, so specialized must they have been. I found I was very embarrassed, as if the fact that I'd seen her that day at the market, and now was ensconced in her kitchen, should rightly excite her suspicions.

“Don't get up, Laurence,” she cut Laurence off, and in much the same tone to her husband, “Lucia took Joachim out.”

“Paying a visit to some tiny person or other?”

“Something like that. I'm going to shower.”

“Gym was lovely?” he called after her.

“I don't know if that's quite the word,” she tossed back, and was gone, her footfalls swallowed by some thick carpeting that must have started just outside the kitchen door. The egg timer completed its transit and rang.

“Might be a good time to run to the loo,” Laurence essayed.

“Me too,” I realized.

“There's a second downstairs, down this hall, near the front of the house,” Brodeur directed, Laurence having already gone into the small one we'd been using all day that attached to the kitchen. The kitchen door swung shut behind me and I had the sense of trespassing. Separate from the pressure in my bladder I wanted to hurry, on my own carpeting-silenced feet. I wanted a last glimpse of Martha, of that unguarded early-morning attitude I'd been hoping to find. I imagined her ascending her stairs, her attention drawn frowningly down to some item of mail. That was really all I sought: a quotidian picture I'd already formed in my mind. And I only sought it, I felt, because curious. She had an inverse effect to her husband, whose romantically sinister aura dissolved with each step nearer to him one took, so that, achieving the vantage of the man's breakfast nook, one was forced to admit he was practically normal. Martha, by contrast, grew stranger to me with each viewing—or so I theorized, pursuing her down the hallway, but it seemed that my theory wouldn't be tested. Without having seen her I came to the foyer off which was a small powder room, and my original errand could not be put off anymore.

When I reopened the door moments later she was standing directly outside, looking as startled as I must have, finding her there. She no longer wore the cap, jacket, or shoes and now I could see her green-gray eyes, like seawater on a bad weather day, and, through her thin, limp, too-large white T-shirt—had she borrowed these clothes from her husband?—the outline of her breasts—and also, though I was trying to look in her face, somehow the blue-veined nakedness of her feet.

“Oh! Sorry!” I cried, grinning and blushing that the strength of my mind had transported her there, to her own evident puzzlement.

“Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'd just been reaching for the doorknob when I realized there was someone inside. Sorry. I'm just—”

With exquisite awkwardness we changed our places through the narrow doorway, and then I stood outside and she inside the very small room, where she opened the undersink cabinet and lifted out a tidy stack of thick, if slightly dusty-looking, towels. “Sorry,” she repeated, turning to face me with the pile of towels between us, as if she realized her shirt was transparent. “No clean towels upstairs.”

“Oh! I'm sorry,” I repeated, hardly aware that I'd said it, for here she was, the object of my avid curiosity, and I could hardly hook a noun to a verb—but I didn't
want
to converse, I complained inwardly. I'd just wanted to see her.

“Why sorry? I assume laundry's not part of your job.”

I laughed disproportionately, and she added, as if politely hoping to inflate her joke to account for my outsize reaction, “Nicholas asks a great deal of his teaching assistants, but thus far I don't think that he asks them to launder his clothes. You're his new TA, aren't you? Why else would I find you handcuffed to a chair with a red pen in hand? I'm Martha,” and here she extended her hand, and I took it in mine for a moment and quickly let go.

“Regina,” I managed. “Gottlieb.”

“You're a first-year?” I agreed that I was, and this seemed to explain something to her. She went on, kindly, “You must be happy the semester is ending. All my students tell me the first is the hardest. You're still adjusting, and the winter's setting in.”

“I haven't minded.”

“The semester? Or the winter? Let me warn you, the winter is just getting started. ‘You ain't seen nothin' yet.'” To save us both from a repeat of my oversize laughter she added, “Are you going home for the holidays?”

“No. Nowhere to go.”

“Oh dear.”

“It isn't as bad as it sounds. My father's dead and so my mother likes to travel. She's spending Christmas in the Holy Land this year.”

“Ah. Really getting to the bottom of it.”

“Yes, going straight to the source. She keeps very busy.”

“She must have been happy with your father. She finds widowhood lonely.”

“I think she does,” I said, entering thoughtfully into this unexpected mood of analysis.

“That's nice. I mean, not that she's alone, but that she was so happy with him.”

“And they were an extremely odd couple.”

“Were they? Now you've made me curious about them. Wait, let me guess.” Very bemused suddenly, she examined me over her pile of towels, her eyes walking like fingers all over me, taking my measure. “Mr. Gottlieb. I'll guess the shy, quiet type. Germanic, obviously. Military? He must be, but I can't guess which branch. He meets Miss X while he's posted in Fill-in-the-Blank. For the hell of it I'll say Jakarta. Miss X is vivacious—she's going to spend her later years running around Palestine—and of course she must be beautiful. I'll guess Mr. Gottlieb is adequately handsome—perhaps he's not a heartthrob, but he has the kind of face that people like. An odd couple, they wed, and find enviable happiness, if it doesn't last quite long enough. Their—two?—children are very fond of them. So how did I do?”

Faintly, from far down the hall, I heard Laurence's donkeylike laughter. “Army,” I supplied after a moment. “Not Jakarta. Manila. Just one child. Also, somehow you failed to guess that she has an extremely loud voice, and that he was half deaf. Points off for that.” We regarded each other with delighted dismay.

“Goodness,” she said. “Points off or not, I'm impressed with myself.”

“I'm impressed with you, too,” I replied, which was an extreme understatement.

“What about the rest of my clairvoyance? Was Miss X a beauty?” Her first time voicing this speculation I had blushed at the implication for myself. Now I felt the blush return—but if I'd inherited anything of looks from my mother, I'd inherited her robust brown skin, which could conceal a furnace of blushes, even from close observation. That same observer, though, might feel extreme heat, and I took a step backward before I replied:

“It's funny to think of her that way, but I'd have to say yes. In her time.”

“In her time,” she repeated, as if she discerned extra meaning. “Speaking of time, I suppose you have papers to grade.”

“Only another thirty-nine.”

“Well, I'll let you get to it.”

“All right,” I said, very much wishing she wouldn't. “It was nice meeting you.”

“And you,” she agreed graciously, turning away.

But somehow I could not be content with having regained dignity by the time of our parting, and so I blurted, to her back, “And it's nice of you to have us to your house. It's a beautiful house,” realizing too late that this inanity might somehow imply that her husband was also a guest. She looked back at me over her shoulder, and for the first time I saw her disarming, uneven smile, just one corner hitched up.

“Now I know you're procrastinating,” she chided, resuming her ascent of the stairs. “Back to the salt mines with you.”

In the kitchen Laurence was still shaking with laughter over one of his papers, and Brodeur was rinsing bottles at the sink, and neither of them looked at me strangely despite how long I felt I must have been gone. The spell had broken for good in my absence, if not because of it, and they'd decided to transfer the rest of the party to the Collegetown Inn, so we could have a proper dinner, which it apparently went without saying we couldn't obtain where we were, in that enormous and well-equipped kitchen. And so I didn't see Martha Hallett again on that day, or for months afterward.

Looking back I can almost imagine that all of that time, in my life as a student, I preoccupied myself with nothing else but Nicholas Brodeur and his household, but that wasn't the case. The larger share of my time I spent successfully attending three classes, and writing three end-of-term papers I imagined would not be perused much more closely than I'd perused eighty-six papers on Chaucer. I chose courses to take in the spring, and set myself pious goals in reading unfamiliar classics and in otherwise improving myself. Over the Christmas holidays Dutra, as always equipped with the best in all things, produced from the basement a safety-orange plastic toboggan and took me for perilous drunken sled rides on the hills of the Ag School's Exhibition Plantation, where the sugar maples marched in their ranks down the slope, and the lines for spring tapping were already strung, so that we might, at high speeds, behead ourselves if we didn't first shatter our spines on tree trunks. Now I'd seen every season but one, and was inclined to believe, with Dutra, that our town was the earth's distillation: no place hotter nor colder, no place more purely aflame in the autumn nor palaced with ice at New Year's, nowhere so bathed by its waterfalls, cleaved by its gorges, sexed up in the spring by its shamelessly honey-mouthed blooms. “How can anyone
think
in the spring?” Dutra said one March day, as he swung in the hammock, which because we'd never taken it in was now frayed and gray as some scrap of net flung from the ocean. Of course what we welcomed as spring was a temperature just above freezing, and the filthy gray snow battlements turning slick on the top from the afternoon sun, and the little white snowdrops that bashfully hung down their heads, as if sorry that less demure flowers would soon hoist their skirts. Spring in that town was what most humans would have called winter, but where there is general agreement—to go without a hat, to sit at length outdoors, to even wear shorts with one's parka—there is seasonal change, even if just ahead of the weather. The Hallett-Brodeurs must have known this. I found out from a little note in my department mailbox, in Nicholas's strained, oddly juvenile hand, that they were hosting a party, to which Laurence and I, still honorary TAs, were invited.