IT DIDN’T HAPPEN often, but when Jane Brzostovsky and Barry Paul had sex, her eyes closed, his didn’t. She could only bring herself to look at him in partial glimpses from under an arm, over a pillow. Or her eyes, precisely when she’d averted them in shame, caught a close-up of her woodland-creature’s pudendum. Unlike her own bushy blur, his was flat and pale. Like grass crushed under a lost sandal for a month, the hair clung to a slight puckering of his abdomen, obscuring nothing. Only a tiny Hitlerian patch had gone dark. Directly under that, the plumbing hung out abruptly. A chrome sink trap couldn’t have looked more bare. The lumpy cravat of scrotum did nothing to dress things up. Its ruddy crinkles were also bare. It too sprang from his smooth abdomen with a pipe fitting’s abruptness. Then Jane would shut her eyes again. The idiocy of this pastoral peek-a-boo threatened to wake her from her dream. She couldn’t let that happen. As if he were a minor deity whose beauty teetered between enchanting and grotesque, she pretended that, as a mere mortal, her risk was blindness, but it was death.
She knew they’d have to stop. She’d leave her job. She’d ask to teach third-graders or much older students at the upper school. Because she was so weak, yet so arrogant, instead of simply stopping, she thought she’d cleverly arrange for it to be impossible. It was all flailing. She wondered aloud to a colleague whether less mothering and more teaching might prolong her career. She brought up the time she’d slapped Darius Van Nest. “Could I be burning out already? I certainly don’t want that.” Her efforts proved hopeless when Satan personally got involved, whispering mischief into Jeanette Paul’s ear.
Jeanette called, begging Jane to start seeing more of her son outside of school. Apparently the chimo joke from years before had been, on balance, more joke and less gimlet-eyed intuition. Jeanette wanted Jane to tutor Barry. “You’re the only one I know who lives close enough.” In case that sounded like she cared about convenience most, Jeanette wheedled, “I really think you’re the one teacher he responds to. He’s told me that. I swear. He says, I love her. I just love her.” Barry had never said anything of the kind, but Jane’s heart fluttered despite her recognizing a lie. “It would mean so much to him. He’s such a dope,” Jeanette pleaded.
Jane said she’d call back. She had to play at reluctance at least. The handy extra pay enticed her, not the sinister convenience, she told herself. She shook her head in rough scorn after hanging up. She pretended to be repelled that Barry had used that word, love. If he’d used it. This was not love. She wasn’t naïve. She slapped her hands together hard to make her palms sting. She noticed the dim, cold self that turns up when passions are playing out. The mind lurks in the wings like the star’s accountant with a backstage pass.
Jane began to tutor Barry on Saturdays. Their sessions weren’t the orgies some might imagine. Having engineered the delicious teacher-student premise, the great Pornographer moved elsewhere—on to pizza delivery boys and run-of-the-mill adulteries. This teacher and this student really studied. Jane taught at the kitchen counter with Jekyll-like civility. On warm September days, she and Barry met in the front yard and were full of innocent waves for the elderly neighbor who clapped feebly to scare off a housecat stalking songbirds.
When they met indoors, Jane was inhumanly patient with Barry’s flirting, which was sexual in a formal sense only. Among children, imitation precedes feeling. The tickling of his sneaker toe under the table, the sudden bouts of exhaustion when his head and arms fell to the counter and his overgrown child’s fingers accidentally brushed her shoulder or trapped her hand—all of that made him seem more like a restless kid than a seducer. He was pushy and humorous, pumping his eyebrows when an obstreperous erection showed. It didn’t seem to involve desire in the least. Only rarely, when Jane misted over, did she respond to his fidgeting, usher them away from the kitchen counter, slow things down until they got to real sex. At times like that he acted shell-shocked, awed by her methodical step-by-step.
A little experience seemed to go a long way with Barry. What he was after, or what he played at being after, was still a bit much for him. He wasn’t panting constantly for a roll in the hay. Maybe Jane’s game of indirection, of warm and cool, wasn’t that different from what it always feels like to be a child, and Barry assumed this affair was the natural sequel to childhood.
The dislikeable mother, Jeanette, stopped in for chats at first. Her casual falsity was breathtaking. She let slip, “He didn’t want to do it! As usual he fought me and fought me. I told him, Barry, don’t be an idiot like you always are. This is your favorite teacher! Or was. And she’s nicely offered—” Barry shrugged hugely and gave Jane, blushing with shame, a raffish smile. “Furthermore,” Jeanette waved the envelope of cash aggressively in front of Barry’s nose. Then, all demure sweetness, she presented it to Jane, “I really wonder if this idiot’s even worth it.”
The first time they really had sex, Jane had no greater inspiration—no thoughts in her head at all, really—than to heave the mannequin Barry into position with her hands. Her hands were more aware of what was going on than she was. They did the bulk of the work. Propped on his elbows, he got to work, swaybacked, arrhythmic, eyes closed. After a while he stopped. He rolled off her. With a pleased grin, he wiped his brow and lithely sat cross-legged. He flipped at the erection still rising behind his ankles. It was as stiff as ever, gleaming and full of promise, not fatigue. Barry made an uncertain stab at humor, “Boing, Boing.” He seemed to feel the same friendly companionship for it as he did for Jane. “That was—amazing.” He lowered his voice, certainly quoting some joke or movie. Jane didn’t dare suggest they go on. The boy seemed not to realize there was more to it. Was he too embarrassed? The next few times sex ended with the same childish and abrupt change of subject. Since he never made the first move (beyond his general, constant flirtatiousness) Jane was confused by the decisive yet inconclusive way he kept breaking it off.
Then Jane grasped something awful. He was so painfully innocent that he thought of nocturnal emission as a rude mess. He knew of no connection between his own splurting at midnight, asleep in his bed, and what it was he and Jane had started to do in hers. He knew nothing!
Barry could have lived with sex or without it. But now that it was happening to him, now that Jane was making him happy on the whole and he was getting all the adoring attention he could want, he tried to reimagine it as something he’d pursued. Though he had no gift for fantasy, he came up with an enjoyable way to think of their relationship. He adopted a cool, James-Bond-like persona. In bed he made odd facial expressions, amused or supercilious, which mystified Jane but were supposed to drive her wild. When given an opening, he stroked Jane’s chin with avuncular tolerance. “Yo, bitch.”
When he started opening his eyes during sex, there was a lot for him to admire. The breasts with their forbidden, V-shaped pallor lurched in drunken, separable ways. Their sponginess needed so much restraint that it worked on his nerves. Even the slightest touch sometimes made her cringe. And the miraculous tubular muscle her hand usually had to lead him to!—when he did look at it for the first time, leaf upon leaf upon leaf parting, until she had him just graze the Jack-in-the-pulpit with his callused forefinger, he wore no expression at all, his heart in his throat. The thing was like some minute dungeonmaster secreted behind pink curtains that were half-animal, half-fluid. He tried raising his chin to give her a taste of Bond-like arrogance, but he couldn’t stop staring. He was under her power. He couldn’t conceive the extent of her power. After pulling his hand back, he reached out again, covering the apex of her legs with his palm as if to calm his mind. For a moment his eyes rested on the blue ink stamp on the back of his hand, leftover from admission to Frightmare Asylum, a Halloween attraction. His mind couldn’t take in so much detail all at once. Or he was so young he didn’t know the words for the details he did see. Which is probably the same thing.
To a surprising degree Jane was still his teacher. She refused to “play” at anything for Barry. He got no Miss Moneypenny or Mrs. Robinson. She calmly stared at him across the kitchen table’s piles of dog-eared worksheets, until she was sure he really didn’t know whether a comma was needed before a prepositional phrase. “It’s not. Generally, the fewer commas the better,” she smiled. In bed, with the very same calm, she’d pull his hand away. “Don’t be a brute with a girl’s clit, Barry.” The uniform matter-of-factness went over well with her student and lover.
As long as it was tutoring, as long as they only met in the parallel world of her house, Jane could bear it. Not that the situation didn’t take a toll. She had occasional attacks of nerves. She had an ominous bout of hilarity when she and Barry once opened her front door and startled Lynn Paul standing right there. He drifted inside as Jane and Barry retreated. He wangled a cocktail, pretending to solicit the teacher’s thoughts about school board elections. The truth seemed to be right there on the surface, obvious to anybody. Apparently, it wasn’t.
But school was a problem. Jane was in a constant agony of indigestion, waspishness and gloom. She mistrusted herself. She self-psychologized wildly. Another teacher commiserated with her about having a tough year. Was Jane trying to get caught despite herself? She skydived from unconsciousness to panic, from passion to unawareness.
Barry was insufferable. She tried to walk past him in the hall. “Yo, B! That Coke for me?” His insolent hamminess caused no particular surprise with the other kids. But Jane’s grip made her Diet Coke can emit an aluminum ribbet of annoyance. She said, “Mister Paul,” in a wry and severe singsong and swept past. She told herself Barry was an incautious ass. She tried to disparage him. He wasn’t even attractive compared to the obvious standouts. The standouts left her cold.
Then again, she and Barry might cross paths at school and it would be just them. Alone together at the end of the day, reduced to black flickers in the consuming glare of an over-waxed floor, like wisps of soot in a candle flame, they shared a gaze neither could actually see. Only a voice, Jane reminded him gravely, “Barry, I have total confidence in you.” The way he nodded in the dazzle could have been manly. His smile, too faint or unclear to be cruel, struck her as impossibly sexual. Appalled, rapturous, she worried he could hear her heart kettle-drumming through her blouse, or see it. The over-stretched collar of his navy T-shirt was washed out in the glare and hung like a lasso around his neck. His messy, stripped and dyed blond hair caught the silver light like a staticky glory. He looked more apparition than real, and it was easy for Jane to return to her dream world for an hour.
The following summer Jane took a cruise of the Chilean fjords by herself. Life-vested, she was shuttled by Zodiac to a briny crag colonized by seals. She ignored the Iowa retirees in the boat with her, even the handsome guide. She studied the seals. What animals animals were! This wasn’t a virtuous nature show. The seals stank. They bleated. They farted. They fought. They bled. Long yellow fingernails twisted over their flippers. But all around, the crushing sublimity of the fjord remained somehow unaffected by their uncleanness or their crimes against each other. Since this lonely trip was a trip away from Barry, Jane couldn’t help holding up her own crime in comparison. Strange to say, seeing how it, too, had no impact at all on the sublime inattention of Nature and Time made her guilt seem less pardonable to her than ever before. Judge and criminal both existed in a single vessel.
A few days after she got back, Jane heard Barry rustling in the lilacs outside. He was hiding his bike from neighbors, a pretty much pointless habit from the early days. She opened the door and backed up without greeting him on the stoop. Also an old habit. She sat him down on the couch next to her, and his knees fell apart in the cocky way he had, though he could tell it wasn’t going to be that kind of a visit. And if it had been, oddly, a breath of shyness would have come over him.
Jane addressed something they’d never mentioned before. “Our—friendship, Barry. You know, people don’t think it’s OK. They really don’t.”
He asked how dumb did she think he was. Of course he knew that.
“No, Barry, if this happened in—I don’t know—in China, and someone found out, they might whatever-they-do—execute us, cut off our heads. I don’t mean to be terrifying, but on the other hand, of course, if we were in a different time and place, like Rome, ancient Rome, I guess, maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal at all. But we are where we are, right?”
He gave her a shrug. He looked off. Jane had a horrible reminiscence of justifying a failing grade to another student.
“We know we have to stop. Absolutely stop. Don’t we?” Jane collapsed against the couch pillow with a sigh of regret and unpleasant clarity. Barry crossed his arms. He uncrossed them. For a second she thought he was going to hit her. Then she smiled at her ridiculous alarm. She’d relaxed again completely when his hand floated toward her as if involuntarily. He pinched her thigh as hard as he could, a strange, witchy or infantile punishment that made her jerk away. It really hurt. She shrank against the cushion, so shocked she couldn’t not laugh and frown. She rubbed the sore spot. She looked at him. “Barry! What’s that about?”
“Nothing.” He pouted but raised his chin, Mussolini for an instant. His eyes—Jane stared with incomprehension—watered up. “You’re done with your toy, so you throw it away.”
Jane couldn’t speak. The idea that he had feelings, or such strong feelings, had never occurred to her. He was a kid. A nauseating pang of guilt came when her heart and stomach spasmed at once. Might he betray her in anger? Was that something electrical with her heart, a palpitation? But his grief was sure to blow off in an afternoon. He was a kid. Besides, he was the one who cheerfully switched moods on her, who played Boing Boing, who got under her skin in the Lawrence halls. She was the only one of them with a full set of adult emotions in play.
His eyes narrowed. Tears bulged like glass matchsticks. He was a child. She felt an iota of anger and tried to crush the feeling, all feeling, because wasn’t it intolerably selfish of her, an adult, to think she was the one who was going to suffer?