Special Topics in Calamity Physics (13 page)

"I'm
Dungeon Master," clarified a kid quickly.

"Jade?" I asked hopefully, turning to one of the girls. It wasn't a terrible guess: this one, wearing a long black dress with tight sleeves that ended in medieval Vs on top of her hands, had green hair that resembled dried spinach.

"Lizzie," she said, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

"You know Hannah Schneider?" I asked.

"The
Film
Studies teacher?"

"What's she talking about?" the other girl asked the Dungeon Master.

"Excuse me," I said. Holding onto my tight smile like some crazed Catholic her rosary, I backed out of Room 208, hurried back down the hall and stairs.

In the aftermath of being brazenly hoodwinked or swindled, it's difficult to accept, particularly if one has always prided oneself on being an intuitive and scorchingly observant person. Standing on the Hanover steps, waiting for Dad, I reread Jade Whitestone's letter fifteen times, convinced I'd missed something—the correct day, time or location to meet, or perhaps
she'd
made a mistake; perhaps she'd written the letter while watching
On the Waterfront
and had been distracted by the pathos of Brando picking up Eva Marie Saint's tiny white glove and slipping it onto his own meaty hand, but soon, of course, I realized her letter was teeming with sarcasm (particularly in the final sentence), which I hadn't originally picked up on.

It had all been a hoax.

Never had there been a rebellion more anticlimactic and second rate, except perhaps the "Gran Horizontes Tropicoco Uprising" in Havana in 1980, which, according to Dad, was composed of out-of-work big band musicians and El Loro Bonito chorus girls and lasted all of three minutes. ("Fourteenyear-old lovers last longer," he'd noted.) And the longer I sat on the steps, the cruddier I felt. I pretended not to stare enviously at the happy kids slinging themselves and their giant backpacks into their parents' cars, or the tall boys with untucked shirts rushing across the Commons, shouting at each other, cleats slung over their bony shoulders like tennis shoes over traffic wires.

By 5:10 P.M. I was doing my AP Physics homework on my knees and there was no sign of Dad. The lawns, the roofs of Barrow and Elton, even the sidewalks, had tarnished in the fading light of Depression-era photographs, and apart from a few teachers making their way to the Faculty Parking Lot (coal miners plodding home) it was all quite sad and silent, except for the oak trees fanning themselves like bored Southerners, a coach whistle far off on the fields.

"Blue?"

To my horror, it was Hannah Schneider, descending the steps behind me.

"What are you doing here at this hour?"

"Oh," I said, smiling as joyously as I could. "My dad's running late at work." It was critical to appear happy and well loved; after school, teachers stared at kids unattended by parents like they were suspicious packages abandoned in an airport lounge.

"You don't drive?" she asked, stopping next to me.

"Not yet. I
can
drive. I just haven't gotten my license." (Dad didn't see the point: "What, so you can cruise around town for a year before you go off to college like a nurse shark lazing around a reef desperate for guppies? I don't think so. Next thing I know you'll be wearing biker leather. Wouldn't you prefer, anyway, to be chauffeured?")

Hannah nodded. She wore a long black skirt and a yellow button-down sweater. While most teachers' hair at the end of the day resembled crusty windowsill plants, Hannah's—dark, but rusting a little in the late-day light-posed provocatively around her shoulders like Lauren Bacall in a doorway. It was strange for a teacher to be so guiltily watchable, so addictive. She was
Dynasty, As the World Turns;
one felt something fantastically bitchy was about to happen.

"Jade will have to swing by and pick you up then," she announced matter-of-factly. "It's just as well. The house is difficult to find. This Sunday. Twoish, two-thirty. You like Thai food?" (She didn't wait for my answer.) "Every Sunday I cook for them and you're the guest of honor from now until the end of the year. You'll get to know them. Gradually. They're wonderful kids. Charles is adorable and sweet, but the others can be difficult. Like most people they hate change, but everything good in life is an acquired taste. If they give you a hard time, remember it's not you —it's them. They'll just have to get over themselves." She gave one of those housewife commercial sighs (kid, carpet stain) and waved away an invisible fly. "How do you like your classes? Are you adjusting?" She spoke quickly and for some reason my heart was hitch-kicking excitedly in the air as if I was Orphan Annie and she was that wonderful character played by Anne Reinking who Dad said had spectacular legs.

"Yes," I said, standing up.

"Wonderful." She clasped her hands together—sort of like a fashion designer admiring his own fall line. "I'll get your address from the office and give it to Jade."

At this point, I noticed Dad in the Volvo, parked by the curb. He was probably watching us, but I couldn't see his face, only his splotchy outline in the driver's seat. The windshield and windows mirrored the oak trees and the yellowed sky.

"That must be your ride," Hannah said following my stare. "See you Sunday?"

I nodded. Her arm lightly around my shoulder—she smelled like pencil lead and soap, and, oddly enough, a vintage clothing store—she walked me toward the car, waving at Dad before continuing down the sidewalk toward the Faculty Parking Lot.

"You're absurdly late," I said, pulling the door closed.

"I apologize," Dad said. "I was walking out of the office when the most appalling student marched in, held me hostage with the most mundane questions—"

"Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about."

"Don't sell yourself short. You're more
Masterpiece Theatre."
He started the car, squinting in the rearview mirror. "And that, I deduce, was the meddling woman from the shoe store?"

I nodded.

"What'd she want this time?"

"Nothing. Just wanted to say hello."

I intended to tell him the truth; I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare to be that rivalry which occurs between apes"—but then we were accelerating past Bartleby Athletic Center and the football field where a crowd of shirtless boys leapt into the air like trout as they hit soccer balls with their heads. And as we rounded the chapel, Hannah Schneider was directly in front of us unlocking the door to an old red Subaru, one of the back doors dented like a Coke can. She brushed her hair off her forehead as she watched our passing car, and smiled. It was the distinct, secret smile of adulterous housewives, bluffing poker players, consummate con artists in mug shots and I decided, in that split second, to hold onto what she said, cup it tightly in my hands, setting it free only at the last possible second.

Dad, on Having a Secret, Well-Laid Plan: "There is nothing more delirious to the human mind."

VIII

Madame Bovary

There was a poem Dad was quite fond of and knew by heart, entitled "My Darling" or "Mein Liebling" by the late German poet, Schubert Koenig Bonheoffer (1862-1937). Bonheoffer was crippled, deaf, had only one eye, but Dad said he was able to discern more about the nature of the world than most people in possession of all their senses. For some reason, and perhaps unfairly, the poem always reminded me of Hannah.

"Where is the soul of my Darling?" I ask,

Oh, somewhere her soul must be,

It lives not in words, nor in promises,

Mutable as gold hers can be.

"It's in the eyes," the great poets say, "

 
'Tis where the soul must dwell."

 
But watch her eyes; they glisten bright

At news of heaven and of hell.

I once believed her crimson lips,

Marked her soul soft as winter's snow,

But then they curled at tales dismal, sad;

What it meant, I could not know.

I thought her fingers, then, her slender hands,

'Cross her lap, they're delicate doves,

Though sometimes cold as ice to touch,

They surely hint of all she loves.

Aye, but there are moments she waves farewell,

 
I confess my Darling I do not follow,

 
She vanishes from view 'fore I reach the road,

Windows bare, house quiet and hollow.

And at times I wish I might read her walk,

Like a sailor his map o' the sea,

Or find instructions for her looks,

Explaining all she hopes will be.

How curious such an enlightened life!

God Himself wouldn't deign to doubt her

Instead, I'm left a-wondering,

Darling's shadows lurking about her.

Dinner at Hannah's was a honey-bunch tradition, held more or less every Sunday for the past three years. Charles and his friends looked forward to the hours at her house (the address itself, a little enchanting: 100 Willows Road) much in the way New York City's celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943 (see
Forget About El Morocco: The Xanadu of the New York Elite, the Stork Club,
1929-1965, Riser, 1981).

"I can't remember how it all started, but the five of us just got on with her famously," Jade told me. "I mean, she's an amazing woman—anyone can see that. We were freshman, taking her film class, and we'd spend hours after school sitting in her classroom talking about any old thing—life, sex,
Forrest Gump.
And then we started going to dinner and things. And then she invited us over for Cuban food and we stayed up all night howling. About what I don't remember, but it was
amazing.
Of course, we had to be hush-hush about it. Still do. Havermeyer doesn't like relationships between teachers and students that go beyond faculty advising or athletic coaching. He's afraid of shades of gray, if you know what I mean. And that's what Hannah is. A shade of gray."

Of course, I didn't know any of this that first afternoon. In fact, I wasn't even positive I knew my own name as I rode next to Jade, the very disturbing person who only two days prior had maliciously directed me toward the Demonology Guild.

I'd actually assumed I'd been stood up again; by 3:30 P.M. there'd been no sign of her, or anyone. That morning, I'd hinted to Dad that I might have a Study Group later that afternoon (he'd frowned, surprised I was willing to subject myself again to such torture), but in the end, there was no need to give him a lengthier explanation; he'd disappeared to the university, having left a critical book on Ho Chi Minh in his office. He'd phoned to say he'd simply finish his latest
Forum
essay there—"The Trappings of Iron-Clad Ideologies," or something to that effect—but would be home for dinner. I'd sat down in the kitchen with a chicken salad sandwich, resigned to an afternoon
of Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text
(Faulkner, 1990), when I heard the extended howl of a car horn in the driveway.

"I'm appallingly late. I am
so sorry,"
a girl shouted through the inch-opened, tinted window of the blubbery black Mercedes beached at the front door. I couldn't see her, only her squinting eyes of indeterminate color and some beach-blond hair. "Are you ready? Otherwise I might have to take off without you. Traffic's a bitch."

Hastily, I grabbed keys to the house and the first book I could find, one of Dad's favorites,
Civil War Endgames
(Agner, 1955), and ripped a page from the back. I scrawled a terse note (Study Group,
Ulysses)
and left it for him on the round table in the foyer without even bothering to sign it "Love, Christabel." And then I was in her killer whale of a Mercedes, all Disbelief, Awkwardness and Outright Panic as I compulsively glanced at the speedometer trembling toward 80 mph, her lazy manicured hand slung atop the steering wheel, her blond hair in the cruel bun, the sandal straps XXXing up her legs. Candelabra earrings broadsided her neck every time she took her eyes off the highway to survey me with a look of "corroding tolerance." (It was how Dad described his mood waiting for June Bug Shelby Hollow tending to her acrylic nails, creative half-a-head highlights and pedicured feet—"With bunionettes," Dad noted—at Hot-2-Trot Hair & Nails.)

"Yeah, so this"—Jade touched the front of the elaborate, parrot-green kimono dress she was wearing; she must have thought I was silently admiring her outfit—"this was a gift to my mom Jefferson when she entertained Hirofumi Kodaka, some loaded Japanese businessman for three grisly nights at the Ritz in 1982. He had jetlag and didn't speak English so she was his twenty-four-hour translator if you know what I mean—
Get off the fucking road!"
She leaned on the horn; we veered in front of a lowly gray Oldsmobile driven by an old lady no bigger than a Dixie cup. Jade craned her neck around to give her a dirty look, then flipped her off. "Why doncha go to a graveyard and kick the bucket, old bag."