You Deserve Nothing (21 page)

I saw in the eyes of those people passing that there were things happening around me, things beyond my control, and I was tumbling forward.

I bought a sandwich and smiled at Jean-Paul, who waved at me from the back of the kitchen. I felt a sudden tenderness for him. I wanted to put an arm around his shoulder. But I knew it was only nostalgia for my first days in Paris when Jean-Paul and his terrible food were novel pleasures.

The morning fog had burned off and the high clouds were gone, there was bright sunlight on the field. I stood at the far side, where the bare poplars lined the fence. From there I could look back at the school. Sitting on the grass, still damp from the morning’s dew and fog, I felt the cold moisture soaking through my jeans.

I ate and watched faculty and students come outside. The younger kids ran screaming out of the buildings, girls clutching each other.

Now there were kids everywhere, chasing, reading in the sun, studying for exams, all of us dreading the bell sure to ring.

I looked out at the picnic benches, and the stream of students flowing between the school and the cafeteria. And then I closed my eyes.

Soon, I felt someone touch a warm hand against the back of my neck.

Mia said, “I’ll see you at lit mag and if you want to have a beer tonight. Or whenever, I’m around.”

“Thanks,” I said, keeping my eyes closed. “I’d love to. We’ll do it.”

After a moment I opened my eyes and squinting into the sun, I watched her walk away.

The bell rang and the field emptied, the students funneled dutifully back inside as if drawn by some great magnet and I stayed there as long as I could, until my next class began fifty minutes later.

MARIE

I
don’t know what happened to make him change his mind for the second time. But one day he said yes. I mean just like that. And that’s when it really started. The two of us. I mean we were a couple in our way. Lovers anyway. Real lovers.

I came after school. On the weekends. Whenever he let me, I’d come. I’d sit clutching my phone like an idiot, waiting for him to send his permission. I hated him for that but by then I was his. Long before then really. Like I said, I’d have done anything he asked.

We had a routine. I’d walk up those fucking stairs. We’d lock the door. Sometimes it was gentle. Other times it was rough. I guess like any other couple. And that’s the thing really. For a while, it felt as if we were just like any other couple. Sometimes I’d bring bread, or a bottle of wine. I liked the idea of shopping for him. I used to pretend that it was our apartment, that we lived together, like it was our normal life. It was easy to do that. For a while it was easy, anyway. We’d make love or fuck or whatever we were doing, and eventually I started to have orgasms with him. He was very patient. He was always whispering in my ear. He hypnotized me that way. He was always encouraging me to tell him what I liked. This? This? Like this?

You have to talk to me, Marie, he’d say. Just let yourself go. Tell me what you want, he’d say, like I had any fucking idea what I wanted. But, still, I felt like a queen the way he treated me in bed. He was so delicate, so precise, so, and this sounds strange but it’s right—he was elegant. He gave me so much attention and eventually I just gave in, just came unlocked, you know? I was loud and wild and happy.

Afterward, with my face all flushed, he’d tell me how beautiful I was. And I loved it. I did. Really. But I started to have the impression that I was making love to a ghost or a phantom or something. And more than once I felt that I could have been anyone. Anyone at all. As if what he was doing with me there in that apartment wasn’t much different from what he did at school, what he did in the classroom.

I don’t know. I’m not sure I really actually thought those things at the time. It was more a feeling, a sort of dark hum I didn’t want to listen to. But I do remember that feeling, that sense that he wasn’t really there, that he was just doing a job. I don’t know, it’s a strange thing to say, and yet it seems exactly right.

The best days were when there was nowhere to go, when I didn’t need to get home. When it was like that I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. He’d cook for me or play me music or we’d watch a film. Whatever it was, there was always a lesson. How to make a sauce, or why some musician mattered, that kind of thing. You can say what you want but then, at the time, it was a dream. I’d come from ISF and walk through the city all gray and cold and mean and enter that code, a number I kept thinking of as secret and magical. He took me in and fed me and made love to me. I mean through that door and up those stairs it was a warm, beautiful world. I didn’t want anything else. How anyone couldn’t understand that was beyond me.

I started to sleep there. I’d go over on Saturday night after being out with Ariel. At first I’d leave him at three or four in the morning. He asked me to stay but I couldn’t figure out how to organize all the lies. But finally I just said O.K. And when he asked me, I told him my parents thought I was sleeping at Ariel’s. And where does Ariel think you’re sleeping? At home, I said. And that was that. The problem, the real problem, was Ariel. Once I stopped sleeping at her apartment she just lost her mind. At a certain point I stopped going there at all. I left some things at his place and would spend Saturday night and all of Sunday and then I’d take the RER home in the early evening.

I’d sit on the train with that late-Sunday dread, that heavy winter sadness made worse because I was racing away from him, going exactly in the wrong direction. After that, after I cut her out, Ariel barely spoke to me. Or we barely spoke to each other. That kind of thing happened all the time. We were inseparable and then it was over. Girls changed friends all year long. You were part of someone’s life. Knew their parents. And then you’d never see each other again. In that way we were prepared.

I didn’t care about anything else. My entire life for a while. I mean there was nothing else. Nothing. And one day I told him. We were in bed and I looked at him and I said it. Will, I love you, I said and he looked like I’d told him the sky was blue. We made love afterward and maybe he was sweet to me but all I could think about was that expression and how he lay there not moving looking like he was dead.

At school I started sitting outside his classroom. There was this space between where the lockers ended and his door, maybe three feet of empty wall. I used to sit there and pretend to study. I was like a dog or something, sitting outside his door. These are the things you do. I’d sit and listen. I’d stare into my book, sitting on the cold polished floor, in that awful gray hallway with my head resting against the wall, trying to hear everything, to be with him, not to miss a moment.

Those kids adored him. Unless you listened to him teach, saw him, you can’t understand. I loved listening to his voice, thinking about the things he was saying.

One day I heard him make a comment in class and it sounded so familiar to me and I realized that I’d already heard it, that he’d said it a few days before. I don’t remember exactly what it was, just that he’d said it to me. We were lying in bed and it was the same sentence, the same cadence, the same inflection.

It was awful and suddenly I had that same terrible feeling, as if he was a ghost, or I was a ghost, and that he’d never love me. I was just filling space.

GILAD

H
e’d never been so late. Twenty minutes had passed and nothing. I thought of him waiting at Odéon the day we saw Christophe Jolivet die. I looked around at my classmates and imagined their lives to come. It seemed to me that without Silver we were all doomed somehow. Rick sat with his arms folded across his chest looking at the closed door. There was something wistful in his expression and I watched his eyes until he glanced at me. He nodded, almost indiscernibly. Hala looked away from the room out to the poplars. Lily smiled sadly at me. Abdul rocked back and forth, from time to time quickly running his thin fingers through his curly hair. What would he become, this nervous kid so paralyzed? In black ink, Cara drew an intricate design across a white page. Aldo slept on his desk, his hair across his face. Jane straightened the books on her desk and then she opened her notebook. On a blank page she wrote, “December 13, 2002.” I watched her hand, the black nail polish replaced by a clear varnish, move slowly over the page: December 13, 2002, retracing the date again and again, December 13, 2002, December 13, 2002, December 13, 2002. The tip of her pen followed the deepening line, the pressure forming a groove in the soft paper.

“He’s probably not coming,” Hala said.

I glanced up at her surprised.

Rick looked at Hala and nodded knowingly.

Cara shook her head. “Unbelievable,” she said.

“What?” I said.

No one answered.

Colin was staring at me with a strange expression on his face. When our eyes met it seemed as if he were apologizing for something.

We were so quiet waiting there. So still. And I thought: This is exactly where we are. Friday morning. December 13. 2002. This is exactly where we are, waiting for the next thing. December 13, 2002. I concentrated on the fake wood grain of my desk.

In the stillness of the morning, I felt such affection for all of us in that single moment of our lives. Everything was tenuous. Everything was fragile. The flat gray light outside, the black leafless poplars, the frost on the field, the muffled voices filtering through the thin walls. This is where we are. December 13, 2002.

* * *

When the door opened and we saw that it was him, what we felt, I promise you, what we
all
felt, was relief. He carried with him a stack of novels.

“Bad morning,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.
As I Lay Dying.
William Faulkner,” he said, handing out the books.

“We haven’t even talked about
l’Etranger,
” Hala grumbled.

“No, Hala, you’re right we haven’t. And we will, but I’d like you to have this and begin reading it. You’ll be able to move through it slowly. It’ll be an opportunity, a chance to savor a novel rather than read it under duress.”

He smiled. But Aldo, who’d been sitting glumly with his chin on his desk, laughed smugly. “Savor it?”

“Indeed Aldo, savor. Like a piece of pie.”

“Whatever.”

Silver turned, looking at him for the first time.

“Aldo,” he said sternly as if beginning a speech. And again in mock sadness, shaking his head, “Aldo.”

He turned to us and began.

“Every text is understood by each of us differently. We cannot separate our experience from the way that we read. Our experience informs our reading in the same way that it informs our lives, what we see on the street, how we interact with people, and so on. Which is why you might argue that there’s no single truth, no absolutely common experience. Both
l’Etranger
and
As I Lay Dying
deal, in their own ways, with this same idea. As you read, you’ll see that Faulkner and Camus have more in common than you might first imagine.” He looked around the room. And then he said what he always did, “What am I talking about?”

He folded his arms across his chest and waited. I watched him up there, that familiar expression, the cocky demeanor, the posture of expectation, of control. He’d been charming, had spoken with those irregular pauses, a slight grin when he’d suggested the possibility of savoring the novel. And again the restrained smile, amused with himself.

I raised my hand.

He faced me and gave a slight bow. “Gilad,” he said, “Tell us.”

“I think the point is, well, I think that’s right. Everything we’ve experienced determines how we experience other experiences. Something like that. Each person sees the world slightly differently. So, the same should be true with something we read. I guess because reading is another experience.”

He nodded and he had the look on his face that always made me proud.

“Obviously,” Hala said, “there are many people who believe in a single truth, Mr. Silver. But it’s obvious to me that, I mean, it is an impossible, stupid, childish idea. I read a book, or see a film, or even go to a party, what I see there, what I take away from those experiences can never be the same as what someone else takes away.”

“Yes, Hala,” he encouraged. “And let me make clear that these are not my ideas; I certainly wasn’t the one to come up with them. These are the principles of deconstruction, the notion, essentially, that the reader, as much as, if not more than, the author provides meaning to a text. We, as readers, apply our experience, our knowledge, not to mention our ignorance, to the meaning of a given work. This is interesting as literary theory, but for our purposes, I think more interesting if we apply it to our lives, to the way we view not only texts, but also the world around us. Does everyone see what I mean?”

Cara didn’t understand. How could a paragraph not mean precisely the same thing to every reader?

Silver wrote a sentence across the board: “The dog ran across the field.”

“Consider this sentence. Read it to yourselves a few times.” He waited and then read aloud, “The dog ran across the field. The dog ran across the field. Rick, what does the sentence mean?”

“A dog ran across a field?” He looked flatly back at Silver.

“Yes, O.K., fine. But give me your interpretation of the sentence.”

“There’s nothing to interpret, a dog ran across a field.”

“I agree,” Abdul said, eyes on his desk. “It’s obvious.”

“No mate, what
you
see is obvious, but the sentence might mean different things to other people,” Colin said.

Silver nodded and folded his arms. He turned to Lily, twirling a braid in her fingers, studying the board. He kept his eyes on her.

“What do you see Lily? I mean exactly.”

She shrugged. “Ummm, there’s a little white dog, he’s missing a leg, and he runs with this weird limp. He’s small and the field is all covered with snow and he leaves his little tracks as he goes.”

She never took her eyes off the board, and when she finished we all laughed. She shrugged her shoulders again and said, “That’s the dog I see.”

Which was precisely what Silver wanted. And he knew Lily would give an answer like that. Then the bell rang and we were left with an image of a three-legged dog limping across a field of snow.

Winter break began the next day.