See You in Paradise (33 page)

My building was quiet when I arrived, and I couldn’t get in because my keys were in my duffel bag. I wondered if I would ever see the bag again. I walked around outside, trying the windows, which were locked, and I noticed a blinking red light inside: there was a message on the answering machine. Finally I went to my door. A box lay on the hallway floor, with my mother’s return address scrawled in her florid hand. I sat down and leaned against the wall, to wait for dawn and for the landlord to wake up.

I had a brilliant idea for my classroom bulletin board, but when the principal scuttled it I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to teach second grade this year, or perhaps ever again. The bulletin board was going to be an evolutionary chart, starting on the left with some chemical symbols meant to represent amino acids and progressing through single-celled animals and amphibians and apes all the way up to man, who would not be a man at all but a seven-year-old child wearing a mortarboard and holding a scrolled-up diploma. I was going to get Gwen, the art teacher and my significant other, to draw the child in a way that evoked the development of reason through natural selection. Each student would have his/her name markered onto the left-hand column, and with each book he/she read over the course of the year a promotion in evolutionary rank would be awarded by me. I was very excited about this and couldn’t wait to get my hands on some construction paper. And then, in an exuberant aside in the break room, I described my plan to Doug, and Doug told me that this was a Christian community and that while evolution was part of the curriculum there was no reason to ruffle any feathers by emphasizing it unnecessarily. Also, while he had me, my practice of encouraging extraneous reading tended to make self-conscious those students who didn’t like to read, and since we were on the subject, from now on we would be referring to students as
learners
and to teachers as
facilitators
, at the request of the parents’ association. I tried not to cry right there, and in fact I made it into the parking lot before I broke down, flinging my empty briefcase at my car and cursing the day Doug was born while tears streamed down my face. I cry easily, for a man. I’m not ashamed of this.

Once I’d caught my breath I picked up my briefcase and got in behind the wheel. It’s a little car, a Volkswagen Golf, red, with a bumper sticker depicting a businessman smugly chattering into a cell phone beside a message reading DRIVE NOW, TALK LATER! A few people have honked at me after reading it, or given me the finger. Let them! I say. I am not afraid to voice my opinions; in fact I believe that to do so is absolutely vital for the advancement of the democratic ideal. It was noon, and I was hungry. My briefcase was empty because I had been eating my lunch during Doug’s little speech, and I had left the lunch, largely uneaten, on the break room table when I ran out. It was hot: there was still a week before school was to start. A few of the custodians were hanging around in the parking lot nearby, smoking, though Doug had insisted that all smoking take place off the school grounds. Perhaps the rule wouldn’t take full effect until classes began. Anyway, it wasn’t my problem. Get fired, gentlemen, if you wish! Die of lung cancer!

I fished in my slacks pocket for my keys and started the Golf. Hot air blew in my face, and the radio blared show tunes.
South Pacific.
I would be playing clarinet in the pit band up at the high school this fall, and there was no reason to put off getting ready. But suddenly the musical, all musicals, seemed shallow and pointless. I switched it off. You’re supposed to take the tape out first—the capstan can permanently indent the pinch roller, creating flutter and wow—but for the moment I didn’t care. I rolled up the windows and turned the fan on high.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I shouted.

I drove down to the strip and got in line at Wendy’s. Behind me was a giant Oldsmobile containing what appeared to be two identical men, pale, heavy, large-headed, with wispy blond hair and gigantic jaws and necks. I studied them in the rearview. The driver was alert and erect and blazingly illuminated by afternoon sun. The passenger wore a ball cap and his head hung low, so that his entire face was deeply shadowed; he seemed to be asleep. I’m no Chinese cosmologist, but there certainly seemed to be a yin-yang thing going on here, the driver bright, dry, robust; his passenger dark and weak and damp. Which was I?

The passenger, of course. The passive passenger, laboring in darkness, unrecognized and misunderstood, wet (with sweat, as the AC seemed to be completely broken), and subject to the whims of a higher and utterly arbitrary authority. To think that I just sat there nodding at Doug, taking it! Just taking it! I began to feel shaky all over again and kneaded the steering wheel. Sticky black stuff came off it and rolled itself into little cigars under my hands. Evolution, indeed. How very foolish of me, of all of us, to imagine there was constant and inevitable movement toward greater intelligence, efficiency, physical perfection!

Pretty soon my turn came. I accepted the food with a nod. Then I realized I was out of money.

“Do you take checks?” I asked the kid.

“Credit cards?”

“Checks.”

“Checks?” he said. I nodded. “Let me talk to my manager.”

Like all fast food managers, this one was slight of stature and frowned with a practiced authority. He had the requisite small black mustache. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m out of money. I just realized. I don’t do credit cards. Can’t. The check is local, it’s all current, I’ll give you my driver’s license …” I handed him the license and he looked from it to me four or five times, his frown deepening. At last he said, “We don’t normally do this, but I’ll make an exception.”

Whew! I borrowed a pen from the kid and wrote out the check. “Wendy’s,” I wrote in the PAY TO: line. Somehow, that act made me sadder than anything that had happened yet that day. Behind me, yang honked. I waved and pulled around to the lot.

When I was finished with my Cajun chicken sandwich and Frosty I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. How hard could it be? I thought. I took off my shoes and pushed the seat back and crossed my legs, then placed my hands palms-up on my knees. I said “Ummm …,” which did not sound quite right. I pictured a big naked bald man doing the same thing. In a little while a feeling of peace and well-being washed over me. Soon I was dreaming: I was a medicine ball, like the one they had in the school gym, simultaneously heavy and buoyant, girded by flexible metal rods. The children cheered as they propelled me through the air!

I woke to a tap. It was a girl wearing a Wendy’s hat. The atmosphere inside the car was stifling. I rolled down the window and the air billowed out. “Yes?”

“They sent me out to see if you were all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“They said I should tell you no sleeping in the parking lot?”

“Okay.” I looked at the time. Two thirty! How’d that happen?

I pulled out onto the street.

I didn’t want to go back to Betty Shaver Elementary. I couldn’t endure the humiliation, and besides, I had nothing to do: my plan had been to work on the bulletin board all day. I’d been planning to drive Gwen home, but she actually lives very close to the school and could comfortably walk, especially on a nice sunny day like this. So, exiled from Wendy’s, I drove around, looking for hidden neighborhoods I’d never seen before. In a hilly town like ours, such places really exist, carved out of mountainsides or tucked away behind copses of trees. But my search was in vain, as the last few had been. I had found them all long ago. Disappointed, I tooled around on pot-holed country roads for fifteen minutes or so, until one led me to Route 13, which gave way to the Southern Tier Expressway. I revved it up to seventy, and the whole car hummed, or maybe shuddered. I switched the radio back on and began to sing. What in God’s name was I doing? The road unscrolled before me like a medieval decree: the king of my subconscious had spoken.

I drove several hours until the sun dipped into my path, then I switched my glasses for the prescription shades that were stashed in the glovebox. That was better: the mountains and highways and clouds all sharpened and browned, as if they’d just come out of the oven. After a couple of hours I pulled over and got on the horn to Gwen, still at school.

“I was just about to leave. Where are you?” In the background I could hear a ditto machine, which in this age of electronic reproduction the Betty Shaver Elementary still maintained. Only a few ancient teachers used it, hooked as they were on the smell, that of fresh-baked cookies laced with acetone.

“That isn’t important,” I said importantly. “I just want to tell you I won’t be back for our dinner date.”

“Really? Why not?”

“It isn’t important.”

“Can I tell you something? About an idea I had? Or is this a bad time?”

“No, now is just fine,” I said. I have to admit, I was a little bit put off by her acceptance of my dismissal. Couldn’t she have pressed the issue? But that was just not her way. You can imagine how delighted I was to find her, five years after my divorce, trying to lift a graffiti’d desk-chair-combo thing into the trunk of her car out in the BSE parking lot. Can I say that she is beautiful? Can I mention her golden tresses, her too-large face, her twitchy little schnoz? I had thought I might never make love to a woman again.

Her twenty or so thin bangles chimed as she settled herself in the school office; I could imagine her hips shifting on the simulated-woodgrain surface of the buffet table where copies were collated and where people talked on the phone. She said, “This being the year 2000 and all, I was thinking about how everybody’s thinking about the future? You know, with the internet and everything, it’s all future, future, future.”

“Yes.”

“So I’m going to ask the kids to paint the future! First they’ll mix up their own colors and put them in Tupperware and make up names for them, Millennium Red or Future Blue or some such happy horseshit”—and here I noticed that the dittoing had stopped, and that Gwen was alone in the copy room, else she would not have said
horseshit
—“and those’ll be the colors they use all year. And then I’ll ask them to paint the future. Like what the buildings will look like, and the people, and the trees and plants and insects—”

“Probably they’ll all be dead.”

She tsked. “That’s exactly why I am not giving you this assignment, Luther, because you have no hope. But the good thing is that whenever I run out of ideas I can just whip out the whole future theme and make them paint that. And maybe we can do a storybook—like get Mrs. Greitz to have them write a futuristic story together—”

“Hah! Greitz! Good luck with that!” I said.

“—and then in my classes we can illustrate it, with our fancy new colors and all that. I wonder if it’s possible to get metallic paint? Since, you know, there are metallic crayons …”

She went on for a while in this vein, and I grew more and more jealous of the idea and more and more bitter about my own crushing defeat that morning. How was it that this woman, this gawky young thing, could bob so blithely down the rapids of life’s river? And how was it that my canoe was forever snagged upon its tangled flotsam? I thought, the hell with it. The hell with it all!

“So do you like it?” Gwen said.

“I do. Like all your ideas, it is brilliant. But listen—”

“Oh! Maybe you can help me in reading and science! You can have them read a science fiction book and teach them about rocketry or computers!”

“Listen, I have to tell you something.”

A silence. “What, already?”

“I’m quitting. I’m not coming back to work.”

She laughed. “Whyever not?”

“You can ask Doug. Tell him I quit. Tell him no hard feelings. He’ll know why.”

More silence. “You’re serious!”

“Yes.”

“Luther, where are you?”

“That’s not important. I’ll be back soon, I promise. But tell Doug it’s over. I’ll see you.”

Hanging up, I did not feel the kind of masculine personal triumph I’d hoped to, and when I turned and regarded the Golf it seemed a trifle of a car, a mere toy, incapable of taking me anywhere, literally and metaphorically. Yet I climbed in. I had no choice!

The Expressway emptied onto Route 90 and Pennsylvania, and pretty soon I was in, you know, Ohio. More hours passed. It got to be around dinnertime. I ate at another Wendy’s, exactly what I’d eaten for lunch. It seems to me that if you eat something once in a day, it is simple nourishment, but if you eat the same thing twice it is a motif. As I polished off the last of the Frosty and endured the sudden headache, I found myself cheered. A motif! I stopped in the men’s room (surprisingly clean) and, when finished, used a match from the box I habitually carry to burn away all evidence of my efforts. This small act of propriety and self-negation felt right on the money, as did having quit. It was all for the best: removing myself from the future. I was a throwback, a species meant to atrophy. Back on the road, fully warmed up by
South Pacific
(now dormant), I began to sing in the operatic style, narrating my day in rhymed couplets: