The Dark Path (20 page)

I head down to the basement, which is carpeted over and has three couches and a TV. I correct papers for a while but the couch is too soft and my hip hurts. I lie on the floor, pretzel up, and start cracking.

“Mr. Schickler? What are you doing?”

“Adjusting.” I re-angle my body so I can see the doorway. Annabel, the Spanish girl, stands looking down at me, wearing her backpack.

“May I please study down here?”

“It's Quiet Study Time and you're supposed to be in your room.”

“
Ay
, my roommate, tonight she is
bip-bip-bip-bip-bip
about boys.” She uses her hand to mimic a chattering mouth. “Please?”

“All right. But I have to stretch more.”

She sits on a couch and takes out some work. She wears bell-bottom jeans and an Academy sweatshirt two sizes too big for her. She is nineteen and so head-turningly gorgeous that when she first arrived on campus, a male British science teacher hit on her in the dining hall, mistaking her for the new Spanish intern. The man can't be near her now without going crimson.

Annabel looks down at me. When I crack my hip again, she asks, “Doesn't that hurt?”

“It helps me.”

She watches me stretch, then smiles. “You make a funny face when you do this stretching. You look like
ornitorrinco.
”

I ask what that means.

“You know, this small animal with the funny face who swims. He has a hard mouth, like a duck, but flippity feet and fur and he lays eggs.”

“A duck-billed platypus?”

Annabel claps her hands. “Yes. Him.
Ornitorrinco
.”

“I'm just adjusting. I don't look like a duck-billed platypus.”

“Yes, you do. What happened to your arm?”

I took my sweatshirt off to stretch and I'm just in a red T-shirt. I sit up to catch my breath. The panic comes quick and hard.
The pills aren't working, David, a new gym won't kill me, you're mine, you're down, I fucking own you!

“Hey,” says Annabel, “are you all right?”

I try not to gulp air. To keep the world steady, I focus on Annabel's hair, which is a charcoal-black pixie cut above the permanently sunned skin of her neck.

There's no meaning, David!
Hobble off and die!

No. I won't. There is beauty.

“Mr. Schickler? What's wrong?”

It passes. “Nothing.” I get up and sit on a couch with my paperwork.

“What happened to your arm, I was asking.”

“It happened over vacation.” It comes out more snappishly than I'd planned.

“Oh.” She looks down at her work and reads.

“I'm sorry if I sounded rude.”

She looks at me. It is the appropriating gaze she has aimed my way at Family Dinners.

“I'll bet it's from a girl. That bruise on your arm.”

“Annabel.”

“Hey, you can tell me. Kira shared with me about your letter. A Dear John, Kira said. I didn't understand that, and Kira said it means a girl destroyed you. In a letter.”

“Well—”

“Now you are looking for a new girl, yes?”

“I don't know.”

“Mr. Schickler . . . you shouldn't walk around by yourself so much.”

I ask what she means.

“I have observed you. When you're with people, you smile, but alone, you are heavy. Sad.”

Apparently all Latin people are seers. I tell her that Gonzalo says I look sad, too.

“
Ay
, don't compare me to Gonzalo.” She rolls her eyes. “Majorca this, Majorca that. He wrote Kira a love letter with words from this song, ‘Let's Get It On,' and he used no quotes. Plagiarism!”

I look down at the papers I'm supposed to correct. It's quiet. If we were out in the real world and I were a normal man and she weren't a student, I'd buy her a drink in this quiet.

“So,” she says, “a girl destroyed you?”

I ask her if she grew up Catholic in Barcelona.

“I was raised that way, but I'm not that way anymore.”

I tell her my deal. Not all of it, just the priesthood stuff, a couple hints about depression, nothing about sex or pills.

“I see,” she says. “So, is this why you have a crush on Ms. Lowell? Because her father is strong in the church and she is too?”

“I don't have a crush on Ms. Lowell.”

Annabel gives me a pitying look. “Ms. Lowell is my English teacher,
ornitorrinco
. I see you talking to her.”

“We just . . . went to college together.”

“And then you lived in New York City, right? Was it so much fun there?”

“You should be doing your homework.”

“
Ay
, homework, I can do it in sleep, I get all A's! You're a stubborn platypus!” She pokes my arm with her pen. “You never talk to me at Family Dinner. Talk now. About fun New York City.”

I tell her about the Cloisters on the Hudson. I tell her that I miss Chumley's, Hogs & Heifers, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, the Strand bookstore, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Riverside Park. I tell her that I once went in the Dakota, where John Lennon lived and where
Rosemary's Baby
was filmed. I tell her that I want to write a book that takes place in a building like that, a building that is half the real gritty New York and half fairy tale.

Annabel asks if I'm writing now. I say that I'm not, but I tell her about my Columbia thesis novel.

“Give me this novel to read,” she says.

“No way. Well . . .” I have one early thesis chapter with me in my backpack and I pull it out. It is an inoffensive chapter. I tell her that she can read this one part if she wants and I hand it over.

There's a commotion upstairs.

Annabel glares up at the ceiling. “
Ay
, stupid girls! I'm talking to platypus!”

I go up to investigate the commotion. It turns out that one girl called her roommate a fucking bitch and the roommate called her a fucking whore back and now they hate each other forever. I try to mediate a conversation between them, but they don't really need me. They just scream a little more and then they stop and laugh and hug and say that they love each other forever. And then the dorm full of girls goes to bed.

•   •   •

I GO TO THE WATER WHEEL,
day after day after day. I gaze out at the river, lift my weights, crack my hip, again and again.

I go to see Dr. Brogan. He asks if the pills are helping. I say that I don't know. But I tell him about the Water Wheel and how hard I've been working out. I say that I'm moving my hip toward health, and that if the Paxil is helping me do that, then I'm grateful.

I drive north to the lake late one cold midwinter night. I haven't been coming as often. I still have insomnia, but not as bad as before. I sit on the pebble shore. The lake is a pure, clean sheet of ice now, with the darkness hovering over it. I look into the black.

I'm starting to heal, Lack-of-God. I'm getting stronger. Isn't it sad, though, that the further I get from You and the less often I come here, the stronger I feel? It's sad to me. Of course, if You wanted to do something about that, like, say, if You wanted to decide to exist again, You could. You could choose to exist and to speak just one time, maybe. I'd be all right with that.

•   •   •

ONE DAY
I'm
lying in the Academy hallway outside my classroom, cracking myself, adjusting. I just finished class with my seniors, and Paul and Max are standing here, teasing me about my stretching.

“You look like a dork,” says Paul.

“Yep.”

Max says, “You'll never get a chick doing that.”

“Thank you, Max.”

Daphne's husband, Andrew Preevy, steps out of his classroom, sees me on the floor, and walks over.

“What you're doing,” he says, “is not appropriate.”

I ask Paul and Max to please head on to their next class. They go.

Once they do, I tell Andrew that I'm not trying to bond with students, I'm just adjusting. I tell him that whenever my hip pain strikes now, I hit the ground and do this, and it's helping.

“You should do it at home.”

“Home isn't always where it hurts.”

“You have no pride,” he says.

I keep stretching. Andrew walks away.

A couple of hours later, at the end of the day, Daphne walks into my classroom. I figure that she's about to tell me to play nicer with her husband, but she doesn't bring him up.

“You're walking better,” she says. “Totally normally, it looks like to me.”

“Thanks.”

She leans back against the wall and gives me one of her cool, easy grins. “So . . . you were a piece of work at the Christmas party.”

“How's that?”

“You can really dance.”

“I told you about the tutus and all that with my sisters. I hope it counted for something.”

She nods. “So, would you like to go dancing sometime? With me?”

“Dancing where?”

“At the Home Run.”

The Home Run is a seedy bar in town that has rednecks and a DJ and a great dance floor, from what I hear.

“I don't think Andrew would like that.”

“He doesn't really dance much. I told him I'd be asking you.”

She's my good friend. But she also has to know how attractive she is to me.

“Come on,” she says, “therapy for that hip of yours.”

“All right.”

“Saturday night?”

“Saturday night.”

On Saturday evening I stand in my apartment's spare bedroom, where I keep my clothes. I look around at my outfits. My sisters and mother are forever buying me preppy shirts and ties, but I'm a jeans and T-shirt man. I put on my best non-ripped jeans and a black Ramones T-shirt.

I walk to Daphne's house to pick her up. Andrew's daughter, Laura, lets me in and says Daphne will be right down. Andrew is in the living room, reading what looks like an encyclopedia. He gazes at me over his glasses.

“Hey, Andrew,” I say.

He watches me. Other than our weird moment earlier in the week, he's always been cordial, but I'm never sure that he actually sees me. He is a dreamy-headed man and I know what that's like.

“Did you know,” he asks now, “that the east–west migration habits of the American black bear are almost identical to those of the Canadian grizzly?”

“No,” I say.

He looks disappointed and ducks his head back into his book.

Daphne comes down the stairs and we head out. She's in low heels, jeans, and a silky black top. We're both in sleek coats that aren't warm enough for February, but the Home Run is a short walk down the hill into town.

As we walk Daphne bumps my shoulder with hers. “It's good you're not going to Mass these days. Father Gheritty never plans his sermons. He just walks up to the pulpit believing that the Holy Spirit will tell him what to say. But unless the Holy Spirit is a babbling nimrod who likes to use New England Patriots analogies, I don't think it's happening.”

The Home Run is packed. I stash our coats under a table and we each have a drink.

The panic sucks at my heart.
Fuck this night, David! Daphne's not yours, go home to your pickles, the Earth is a doomed cinder in space, and you're unloved
.

Daphne sees my face. “Come on.” She pulls me out on the floor.

We're tentative at first, and the quicksand is with me all through whatever disco-era travesty is playing. Then the DJ puts on “Hippychick” by Soho and “Connection” by Elastica, and the crowd pushes me into Daphne, my hands hold her waist, and there's a melting.

Her eyes ask mine,
Are you going to lead here or what?

So I do. I lift my hand and she twirls, then our bodies team up close at the hips, and her wrists cross at the back of my neck. I smell her perfume, a light citrus wind, and my hands learn the bones in her back through her shirt.

“You're good at this,” she says.

“So are you.”

We stomp through “Cotton Eyed Joe” and then groove slow and close to “Crazy for You.” I've got sweat at the base of my spine coming through my Ramones T-shirt but she's got sweat at the base of hers, too, and I feel it through her shirt and
Daphne Lowell, Daphne Lowell, why aren't you my wife?

Eventually my hip acts up, so I have to let go of her body and lead her off the floor. We get one more drink and then leave.

We walk home in the freezing cold. At Georgetown, on the first night I met her, she and I watched
The Shining
together. Now we're walking through a world like the one in that film, a white world walled in by huge drifts.

I get her to her porch. She leans forward and bumps my shoulder with hers. I guess that's our thing.

“Daphne, I . . .”
Forget the expert on bear migrations. Come home with me, I am not all that broken.

She says, “I had fun, too,” then she hugs me and goes inside.

I walk back to my apartment. The Paxil is zinging back and forth under my skin. Once inside, I kick off my shoes and sit upright in the dark on my couch. I don't want to lie down. If I fall asleep now, I might forget how it felt to have her in my arms, and I can't take that chance.

It's one in the morning. Off in the kitchen, the Neighbor Mouse door bangs open.

“Schickler! You want a pop?”

IT'S THE FIRST WEEK
of March now, sugaring season. It's still cold out and there's snow everywhere, but the maple trees are bleeding pleasure by the bucketful. My local-born senior students tell me that they have a surprise for me. They ask me to meet them behind the dining hall after school. I do and they present me with a cereal bowl full of snow. Each of them has a bowl of it, too. Then JoBeth walks grinning out of the culinary school's back door with a steaming teakettle.

“What's all this?” I ask.

“You'll see, Flatlander,” says Max.

Paul nods. “A Northeast Kingdom specialty.”

JoBeth pours into our bowls of snow what I at first think is steaming coffee but turns out to be fresh, piping-hot maple syrup. The syrup congeals on the snow and makes lumps of confection.

“What do I do?”

JoBeth says, “You eat it, duh. It's called sugar-on-snow.”

“You're supposed to have pickles and doughnuts with it,” says Paul, “but someone flaked out.”

Max punches Paul.

“I love pickles,” I say.

JoBeth tells me to shut up and eat, then we do. We snack on what they all grew up on. It's delicious.

•   •   •

DAPHNE SITS DOWN
next to me at lunch one day in the dining hall. She is dressed sharp in a suit. She'll be going with her father on a trip later in the day where they'll attend a meeting in New Hampshire to talk to people about the Academy or recruit students or something.

“So,” she says. “Guess what's coming up in May?”

She informs me that there's an annual school event called Spring Day where the students get the day off to play games outside and compete by classes, juniors versus freshmen and so on. There's Ultimate Frisbee and dunk tanks and revelry. The best part, Daphne says, is that at the end of the day all the students gather on the hill near Larchmont grotto and watch the faculty square off, department versus department, and battle one another in various competitions, sack races and other embarrassing stuff on Larchmont Lawn. She says that the faculty departments take it seriously because they want the year's worth of bragging rights and lording it over their rival disciplines. She says that the English department hasn't won in many years, and she also says that the final, most heavily scored and popular category in the competition is a dance contest.

“And?” I say.

“And I'm entering you and me, representing English.”

My hip has been getting better and better. Daphne and I have had a couple other Saturday dancing nights at the Home Run in the past six weeks and I'll be able to recount, if the FBI or alien interrogators ever ask me, exactly what Daphne wore on each of those nights and what she drank and what I said that made her laugh and vice versa.

“I want you to choreograph it,” she says now. “And I want to tango.”

During my first semester at Columbia I took a few ballroom dancing lessons as a lark and I've told Daphne about them. I've told her that I didn't go for most of it, but that I loved the tango. When she asked why, I said that the tango is basically a man and a woman having sex with their best clothes on, while they dare the whole world to watch and have a problem with it.

I look down at my turkey tetrazzini. The panic says,
She's kidding, David, it's a joke, get this through your fucking head, you ARE NOT WANTED!

“You want to tango with me,” I say.

She nods. “And we're not going to tell anyone about it until we spring it on them at the contest, and we'll practice in secret, and you'll choreograph it. You're going to be my Mr. Roarke, okay? I want that victory, David. Don't even think about saying no. Say yes.”

I see Annabel at a table in the distance, watching us.

“Yes,” I say.

•   •   •

I SIT ALONE
on the lakeshore at two in the morning, staring at the darkness. The ice on the water has started breaking up.

I keep my mind clear. I don't pray to Lack-of-God, and I don't petition the night. The air is frigid good. Some animals scuttle in nearby branches. It's been six days since my last quicksand attack, a new record.

I think of my father. One summer when I was a boy, the rhubarb along the edge of our backyard didn't grow in. I was upset because I wanted to chew the sweet stalks. I asked my former-farmer dad what I could do to treat the ground, to bring the rhubarb back.

“Nothing much,” he said. “When soil is fallow, it's fallow.”

He told me you can fertilize a little, maybe, but that you can't shock fallow ground back to life. It either gets rich in nutrients again on its own or it doesn't. You have to leave it be.

•   •   •

I HAVE DORM
duty again in Beckerman House on a Tuesday night. I make the rounds twice during the first hour of quiet time, checking to be sure the girls are in their rooms, studying. Kira and Tanya hide from me each time that I come around. The first time they are wedged behind their bureau, stifling giggles. The second time they bring their A game and after a couple full minutes of searching I get frustrated. They emerge laughing from inside Kira's leather-bound footlocker.

“How'd you ever fit in there?”

They scrunch back down in and twist around each other, then close the lid.

“I told you,” the footlocker says, laughing. “We're
Crucible
girls. Don't screw with us.”

“Come out and study.”

The footlocker sighs.

Kira pops the lid and rises up. “Boring,” she scolds me.

Later I knock on Annabel's door and poke my head in. She asks me for help on the English paper she's working on for Ms. Lowell. Each student has to select a poet to read and critique, and Annabel is doing e. e. cummings.

“Let's talk in the common room, please,” I say.

She follows me down to the basement. We sit on a couch and she shows me the e. e. cummings poem “in Just-.”
She says she likes it because it is about now, about spring, her favorite time of year.

“And I know,” she says, “that this goat-footed balloon man who whistles far and wee, he is Pan. From mythology! And I will write that. But the rest of the poem is so simple, I don't know what else to say.”

I tell her there's a potential double entendre in the word
wee
. I tell her it could be a noun, and that
we
, the readers, are maybe being invited into the poem and being asked what we will do in spring, when Pan whistles for us to follow him.

“Clever platypus!” She jots notes. “Hey, you walk correctly now. I have observed you. Congratulations.”

I tell her thanks.

“But,” she says, “what is all this at the Home Run? You and Ms. Lowell?”

I blush. “How do you know about that?”

“
Ay
, this is Tapwood. Everyone knows.”

“We just dance.”

“You think about her too much,
ornitorrinco
. You have to get her out of your system so you can meet a girl.”

“Go upstairs. Work on your paper.”

“No! We are talking!” She puts her poetry project into her backpack and pulls out the first chapter of my thesis novel. I'd forgotten that I gave it to her.

“This is good.” Annabel passes me the chapter. “But it has too much sadness. Can't it be funny and sweet, too? You are these things. When you write your New York book, you must make it funny and sweet.”

I tell her that if I ever write it, I'll try. I ask her if she's sure her name isn't Esmé.

“I do not understand this question,” says Annabel.

“Never mind. Go work on your paper.”

•   •   •

I BUY SOME TANGO CDS
at a record store in town. I listen to them alone at home and finally select an instrumental recording of “Por una Cabeza,” the tango music used in the films
Scent of a Woman
and
True Lies
. The original version of the song, a hit from the 1930s by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo La Pera, was about a man as addicted to the beauty of women as he was to the horses he gambled on. The music is addictive too—a strong, clear violin and piano arrangement—and I play it for Daphne and she agrees that it's the one for us.

Late at night now, instead of driving up to the lake, I move the furniture aside in my apartment and I choreograph a routine. I rent and watch
Scent of a Woman
and
True Lies
for tips. I'm not my sisters, and I don't have much tango experience, but I know how it's felt all my life to stand close to Caitlin and Lesley, to Sara Draper, to Audrey Vaillant, to Sabine, to Annabel, to Mara, to Daphne. I try to put all those feelings in the movements. I keep the music low so Ed Neville won't barge through the Neighbor Mouse door and catch me dancing with myself.

For our first rehearsal, Daphne and I meet in her classroom at school one evening and draw the blinds. There's no one else around and Daphne told the maintenance guy not to disturb us, please.

I play “Por una Cabeza” for Daphne. We watch the
Scent of a Woman
tango scene on a classroom TV and VCR set. Then I show Daphne what I've come up with and we try it. It's awkward at first, at least for me, because there's no loud, anonymous crowd around us like at the Home Run. Daphne holds me close, the way I show her to, but our movements are too mechanical, too stilted, too borrowed from things I've seen other dancers do.

My chest softens with fear. The quicksand is percolating.

“David, we'll get it,” she says.

•   •   •

IN MID-APRIL,
Barry, the regular live-in proctor at Larchmont dorm, is given a weekend off duty and I'm scheduled in his place. This means that I'll stay in his ground-floor apartment for Friday night and Saturday night and I'll watch over the Larchmont boys full-time.

Friday night starts off fine, with the boys behaving themselves at dinner in the dining hall. Then we head back to the dorm and I play Ping-Pong with a few Thai kids. They annihilate me.

Around eleven the real nightlife of Larchmont dorm reveals itself. The Korean boys walk around in tighty-whitey underwear without shirts or socks. I smell marijuana somewhere but can't locate the source. I hear cacophony in the basement and head down.

“Hello?” I call. The basement has cement walls and floors, with nooks and alcoves off a main hallway.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” says a voice, “what did the Larchmont boy say to the Beckerman girl on the chaperoned trip to the bowling alley? ‘Check out my blue balls.'”

There's a bah-dump-bump of drums, then a cymbal clash.

“No, seriously,” continues the voice, “you're a great crowd.”

I come around a bend into the basement's large main room. There are laundry machines in one corner and in an opposite corner, inexplicably, is a full drum kit set up beside the mossy, crumbling cement walls. Behind the drums is a Larchmont student named Henry, and standing in front of the kit, holding a broken broom handle like it's a microphone stand, is Henry's roommate, Phillip. There's no one else in the basement. They're both in sweatpants and T-shirts, but Phillip wears a porkpie hat. When he sees me, he grins, holds a hand toward me, and speaks to an imaginary audience.

“Folks,” he announces, “it's David Schickler, from the great city of Rochester! Mr. Schickler, welcome to the show! We're the Catskills Boys!”

“Guys,” I say, “what the hell?”

Phillip struts around like he's onstage and talks into the broom handle. He and Henry are in the Academy theater group.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Phillip, “Schickler here got off to a rocky start last fall because of his bum hip. But now he and the Academy are really ‘clicking'!”

Henry does a rimshot on the drums.

“Clicking.” Phillip arches his eyebrows. “'Cause of how your hip used to sound.”

“I get it. Please don't drum so loudly. I'll give you a half hour, then it's lights-out.”

I head back to the stairs.

“Come back for our midnight show tomorrow!” Phillip calls.

When I do room inspection before lights-out, one large Korean boy, Kwan, has left his room a mess. For punishment—which I've been told I have to give—I tell Kwan to take the trash barrels off each of the mansion's three floors and empty them out in the Dumpster. He nods dutifully and heads off to the third floor.

Minutes later I'm on the ground floor and I see a tiny Korean boy, Hyo, come downstairs struggling under a huge, full trash barrel. I ask him what he's doing.

“Sheeklah, I am help Kwan. My friend.” Hyo looks nervous. I let him go empty the barrel, but I walk up to Kwan's room to ask what's up.

“A mistake, Sheeklah. I will take care of it. Sorry, Sheeklah.”

The next morning in the dining hall, the dorm dean pulls me aside. “David, Hyo spoke to me. You can't punish Kwan or his roommate Shin unless you watch them carry the punishment out.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the Korean mafia.”

I wait for him to say more.

“That's just what some of the Korean boys call it,” explains the dean. “They have a carefully worked out hierarchy among themselves. Shin is president, Kwan is the enforcer, the rest are drones. When punished, Shin or Kwan will delegate their work to a drone.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Yes.” His face is earnest.

“Hyo is a drone.”

“Yes.”

“All right, I'll talk to Kwan again.”

“No, Hyo probably already got beaten up once for letting you catch him emptying the trash. Best just to let this one go and be more careful in the future.”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

As he's walking away, I hear an odd, unfamiliar sound. I realize that I'm laughing.

•   •   •

WE'RE IN DAPHNE'S
classroom at night again with the blinds drawn. “Por una Cabeza” plays quietly from my tune box in the corner.