The Dark Path (16 page)

So is that what I am to You now, Lack-of-God, now that I want Mara back? Am I a footnote, a small thing who can't wield power, a commoner waiting for some bishop's blessing rather than giving to a woman or receiving from her a blessing of my own?

Mara's not a small thing. My love for her isn't small, and it's not Something Lower. So why did You write a book and build a church that are making me feel, tonight, so small and low and second-class compared to priests, to the kind of man I can never be? Are You listening? I've listened for years, now You fucking listen!

“It doesn't matter,” I say to the black over the lake. My voice sounds sudden and wrong, like it's against the rules of the dark night air for me to talk.

So I switch back to my inside voice. I pray to the God who isn't there in the shadows anymore.

Please let her love me
, I pray.
Let her choose me
.
Please come back to me just that much
.

MY STUDENTS
in Accelerated Sophomore English are easier to teach than my seniors, with the exception of Drake, a tall, quiet, blond boy from Saint Louis who enrolled at the Academy when I arrived. He's in the boarding program but he doesn't pal around with other dorm kids, even though he's handsome and I've seen him in the basketball field house, draining jump shots. He is well read and fiercely intelligent—I can tell from his essay on Vonnegut and Orwell—but he never speaks in class. He sits with his arms folded tight and he won't look at girls who try to flirt with him.

I decide to reach out to Drake. He is a loner here, like I am. Even if I can't reach the wider community, the greater assembly of my students, maybe I can reach Drake. One day after class he stands in the back of the room, looking at my Plurals of Animals poster. It lists phrases giving the funky but correct names for groups of animals:
a crash of rhinoceroses, a smack of jellyfish, an unkindness of ravens
.

“Do you know them all?” he asks. There's challenge in his voice.

“Pretty much.”

He tells me to turn around so that I can't see the poster. I do and he quizzes me.

“Ducks,” he says.

“Um . . . a paddle. A paddle of ducks.”

“Peacocks,” he says.

“An ostentation.”

“Bears.”

That should be an easy one, but I can't remember. I shrug and turn around.

“A sloth of bears.” Drake folds his arms and nods at the poster. “Cool list.”

“Yeah.” I yawn and then apologize for yawning. It's been nine days since I spoke with Mara, and—still unable to sleep more than two hours at a time—I've driven to the lake each night to yell at Lack-of-God. Now I think,
Get out of your head, David, and do something good for someone else . . . then she'll call. Be kind to Drake . . . then she'll call.

“Your first essay was impressive,” I say.

“Thanks.”

“Your quotes from
Cat's Cradle
were great. And relevant.”

“Thanks.”

I ask him if he misses Saint Louis. He says he doesn't spend much time there. It's where his parents live, but he's bounced around the country from boarding school to boarding school for years. I don't ask why, sensing that he's tense about it.

We don't speak for a minute. He keeps his arms folded tight.

I say, “I've been thinking of holding a student trivia bowl, with prize money for the winner. I bet you'd do well. Would you be into it?”

He smiles, just a little. A grudging smile, but a real one.

“Might be cool,” he says, and he walks out.

For five minutes I feel not so shitty about myself.

•   •   •

MY APARTMENT
is off campus in town, but the other new young Academy teachers have apartments in the campus dorms. These teachers have Dorm Duty: they proctor their dorm students and eat with them in the dining hall. Twice a week the dining hall hosts Formal Family Dinner, where the proctors and kids dress up and eat at white-linen tables set for eight people—one proctor and seven students per table. It's supposed to be a time for civil behavior and sharing wholesome stories, like the Family Home Evenings I used to witness. It's more challenging than the Mormon version, though, because the dorm kids are from Korea, Thailand, Venezuela, the Middle East. English is their second language, but at Formal Family Dinner they have to speak it.

Since I was hired mid-semester, I'm the only new teacher who doesn't live in a dorm and have a set proctoring schedule. The other new teachers resent this and they really resent that I have an off-campus apartment. They might feel differently if they could see me at three a.m. on my apartment floor, sleepless and nervous and compulsively eating Vlasic pickle spears.

To make things fair, the dorm dean has assigned me to be a floater who fills in as needed for other proctors. When a new female teacher takes a leave of absence, I get assigned to her Family Dinner table.

I show up on a Monday in a suit coat and tie, and meet my seven students. They are three wordlessly polite Thai boys, a Venezuelan girl, and three Spanish kids, two of them girls, one of them a boy. One of the Spanish girls, Annabel, is gorgeous and nineteen—she finished high school in Barcelona and is doing a post-grad year here to get ready for college in the United States. She sizes me up from the far end of the table, while Gonzalo, a confident Spanish junior with badass sideburns, presides over the meal. He passes around family-style plates of pork chops, he flirts with the Venezuelan girl, and then he turns to me.

“Señor,” he says, “you walk funny.” He imitates with his mouth the clicking sounds that my hip makes.

“I try not to.”

He waves my words away. “Señor, I am Gonzalo, from Majorca. You know Majorca? You will come there someday. You must. This food—chops, you say?—this is nothing like what we eat in my island. In Majorca, eating is delightful.” He nudges the silent Thai boy beside him. “Hey. Speak to Señor.”

The Thai boy looks terrified.

“That's all right,” I say. “You don't have to.”

“Yes, he does,” says Gonzalo. “We all must communicate with each other. It's Family Dinner! Go on, Tong, communicate.”

Tong tells me hello. The second Thai boy follows suit. The third Thai boy tells me, “You have nice car.”

Gonzalo looks like a proud father. He puts his arm around the Venezuelan girl.

After dinner I have evening Dorm Duty in Larchmont, a three-story mansion that the wealthy, late Larchmont family gave to the Academy. Nathaniel Hawthorne must have designed it. Its top is crowded with turrets and dormers, it has long, creaking staircases, a spooky, off-limits attic, a secret passageway behind the walls, and a stone basement out of
Silence of the Lambs
. Larchmont houses the Spanish and Korean boys, the two most populous nationalities among the boarders.

During Quiet Study Time from seven to nine the boys stay in their rooms, allegedly doing schoolwork. I sit in the drafty main hall at a wooden table under a chandelier, unable to correct the papers in front of me. I stare at a wall portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Larchmont, who built this home.

Did they love You, Lack-of-God? And did You love them? Did they overcome time and distance and other obstacles to be together? Were they ever apart and Mr. Larchmont just flipped the fuck out waiting to hear from the future Mrs. Larchmont?

At nine, stereos come on and the boys pour out of their rooms. The Spanish guys head outside to the Smoking Grotto, which is an area on the back lawn where Larchmont boys are allowed to smoke and flirt with the girls from Beckerman House, the girls' mansion dorm that is across Larchmont Lawn. The guys and girls can't ever go inside each other's dorms.

I stand in the cold on the back porch and stare at the teenagers in the grotto as they laugh and smoke. Drake is smoking alone under a pine tree, while in the center of the grotto crowd are Gonzalo and the Venezuelan girl from dinner. They are communicating by sucking each other's faces. We proctors are supposed to shut down any PDA, but I don't have the heart. I hobble back to the table and correct papers.

An hour later, before lights-out, Gonzalo comes down from his room and sits beside me. The dorm doors are locked now. Gonzalo wears sweatpants and some sort of silky European sleeping shirt. He looks concerned.

“Señor,” he says, “you are so sad.”

I try to deflect. “What's your girlfriend's name?”

He looks confused.

“You were kissing her in the grotto.”

“Oh. Milagros. She's . . . nice.”

He asks if I like Quentin Tarantino. He asks me about New York City. The dorm kids know I lived there.

I say, “Hey, I saw Drake in the grotto, too. Do you guys hang out?”

Gonzalo scowls. “I do not like Drake. He is a weird person. You say
weirdo
.”

“Maybe he's just new and needs a friend.”

Gonzalo waves my words away. “Señor, you will come to Majorca someday? You must. If you visit, you will stay with my family. In my house! In Majorca you won't be sad. There are nightclubs.”

I've heard from Daphne that the Majorca kids are from very wealthy families and that they party like gods back home.

Gonzalo fixes me with a probing look. A bolt of pain chooses now to shoot through my hip and ache down my leg. It is a bad one and I shudder.

“Señor, you will love our Majorca nightclubs. There is very little . . . how do you say it, when a girl has never sexed?”

I sigh. He is sixteen. “Virginity,” I say.

“Yes. There is very little virginity.”

“Okay,” I say. “Good talk. Lights out.”

He goes back upstairs.

I get home to my apartment late and stand in the kitchen, staring into the fridge-freezer, which I've stocked with frozen Banquet fried chicken, Vlasic pickle spears, and Bass beer. They're my comfort foods. While I'm staring, trying to remember whether I ate dinner at the dining hall, a door in the wall beside me opens. This door is set smack in the middle of the wall, meaning that the bottom of the door is several feet off the ground. I call it the Neighbor Mouse door. At one time there may have been steps leading from my kitchen floor up to it, but not anymore. The door swings open now and my landlord, Ed Neville, sticks his grinning face in. He gapes around until he sees me.

“Schickler! You want a pop?”

Ed is a friendly night owl. He usually has a tumbler of whiskey in his hand—a pop, as he says—and whenever I enter my apartment, the Neighbor Mouse door jolts open a few minutes later and Ed shouts for me and offers a pop. The door is located at the back of his house's pantry, and I can't lock it. Plus I'm living here cheaply, so I try to be a welcoming tenant.

The first time the door snapped open, it scared the fuck out of me, but now I'm used to Ed's Mr.-Furley-like appearances. A couple times I've scrambled up the wall and joined Ed in his house for a pop. But as much as I like Bass, whiskey on a regular basis will make me a full-blown drunk. Also Ed's twenty-year-old daughter, Sarah, lives at home and wears skimpy shirts and no bra underneath them and she is therefore hard to talk to. My first conversation with her went like this:

SARAH:
I hear you're a writer. I love Camus.

SARAH'S INSANELY PERKY NIPPLES:
Don't look at her, David. Look at
us
.

DAVID:
I've only read
The Stranger
.

SARAH:
That's my favorite.

SARAH'S INSANELY PERKY NIPPLES:
Look at us, David! We also like Camus!

Sarah is dating a guy with a gun rack on his truck, meaning that she's dating a male Vermonter.

I smile up at Ed in the Neighbor Mouse door. “No pop tonight, thanks, Ed.”

He asks how my first Dorm Duty was. I say it was all right.

“And how's your hip?”

“It . . . really hurts.”

“Hence your need for a pop.”

The phone in my living room rings. I say good-bye to Ed and all but sprint to the phone, praying,
Lack-of-God, let it be her, let her love me!

I pick up and say hello.

“David, it's Dad.”

I sink down into a cross-legged position on the floor. My hip crackles and smarts, sharp enough that I see bright white pepper across my vision.

My father hears me catch my breath. “What, your hip?”

I tell him yes.

There's a weighted pause. “Son, I've been talking with Mom. We're wondering if it's time you talked to somebody up there. A psychiatrist. It's just . . . with your anxiety and your hip. They have medicines now . . . mental-health medicines . . .”

The quicksand surges hard, fills my rib cage.
Pills, David?
it says.
Good fucking luck. Do not come at me with pills, kid. I'm stronger than pills.

“I . . . Thanks, but . . . we'll see, Dad.”

After we hang up, I drive to the lake, windows open, gulping in the cold. Once I'm there, I park and pace on the pebble shore, my hip stabbing and cracking, my mind tumbling. I'm exhausted but wired. Five hours from now I have to teach creative writing.

Pills, Lack-of-God?
I pray at the darkness.
I don't think so. I think Love, not pills. I think human connection. I think Mara. I need her hands on my skin, not some stranger's hands tinkering with my brain. Please, not that. Please, just Love.

•   •   •

I GIVE MY SOPHOMORES
their creative writing assignment, a two-page fictional story. I tell them that fiction can be real, it can be the truth, even though it doesn't literally happen. I tell them that it can be a lens, a prism, for witnessing and clarifying what's vital in the world.

While I say all this, three girls in my class have little pots of raspberry lip balm on their desks. They dip their fingers into the balm and apply it to their mouths every few minutes. Also their pens have sparkly purple glitter floating in tubes of clear liquid, like handheld lava lamps. Meanwhile two boys stare out the window with fascination at what is apparently the first passing garbage truck they've ever seen.

But not Drake. He sits in the back row beneath the Plurals of Animals poster, with his arms crossed tight, but he's hearing me. Isn't he? He must be, because he's nodding in what looks like agreement each time I say something new about what fiction can do.

He's hearing me, Drake is. He's my hope.

•   •   •

AND THEN
the letter comes.

It arrives on a Tuesday morning. I find it in my teacher's in-box in the faculty room, my only personal piece of mail on top of some office memos. The return address says Mara Kincannon and lists a Boston apartment number.

I take the letter to my classroom. My familiar point of pressure throbs behind my right eye. My seniors will arrive for class in a minute and we'll be talking about
The Crucible
, so I tell myself,
Wait, don't open this now, it might say something drastic, wait till later
. I think,
It must be bad news, she would've called with good news
.