WHEN SHE’D LOOKED over the sublime fjord and it dawned on her that the world is indifferent to crime, Jane had experienced a subtle form of growing up, a summer change of heart. For her students, two years, a season, or even a month involved shocking transformation. They re-costumed themselves, became hairy or gangly or sullen, slouching, flamboyant, impenetrable. The young grew and weathered at the same time. By the time Jane ended things with Barry Paul, he too had changed. The difference had made her uneasy with the lines she’d prepared. Partly she had to remind herself he was still a child, because on seeing him, his being bigger, greasier-haired, lower-voiced and more tender made their whole secret history seem not quite so bad (and his pinch much stranger). But exactly their sort of relationship had become public in several recent cases. And had not been shrugged off by the world. Even in Tierra del Fuego she’d spotted the scandalous headline “Mujer Monstruo de Maine—Maestra-Súcubo acecha en el aula!” tucked into that handsome guide’s orange backpack the day they toured a former prison camp near Ushuaia.
Darius Van Nest left Choate under a cloud, drug use or Bartlebyism. Jane heard he was coming back to Lawrence Academy. When she actually saw him in the first day rabble, his transformation was astonishing. She realized she’d been hoping time and trouble might have tempered him. After all, it wasn’t his fault that godawful people had once upon a time pointed at him in an orphanage or in a cryoservices catalogue or wherever. Since change was inevitable, why couldn’t he have become modest and amiable by now? But the only thing that hadn’t changed at all was the flood of dislike Jane felt when she saw him.
His face had thinned, his features becoming dark, sensual and accusing. His head was still overlarge. His body was easily a foot taller and looked emaciated, almost anorexic, in the baggy clothes he wore. Half-laced yellow work boots had been repaired with duct tape. Jane felt a touch of middle-class contempt for that lordly affectation of squalor. The unbuttoned cuffs and collar of his white dress shirt, impeccably laundered, had a paradoxical dandyism about them.
Darius stood unnaturally erect as Jane critiqued him from afar. He looked like he thought he was enduring fascinated examination from all sides, Jane thought sourly. Maybe tony Choate lingered in his deportment and his fashions. His meek superciliousness repelled her.
Jane turned away. She couldn’t approach him and hoped he wouldn’t see her in the thronged hall. A second later, he was in front of her, taller than she was and a bit too close. Long, glossy lashes curved back on themselves and almost touched his skin. He tucked a stringy lock of hair behind his ear. The effeminate gesture caused the cuff of his shirt to gape like a lily. But in a manly, if over-precise, voice he said, “Nice to see a familiar face.”
Jane welcomed him back. Briskness covered her distaste.
He made a mildly ironic comment about being forgotten over the past years. His vocabulary was a touch overblown. His flower-petal cheeks and the blackheads nestled along the crease of his nostril made the middle-aged refinement of his manners feel like a bad school play.
His irony annoyed her, but somehow he got her to respond in kind. “Fear not, Mr. Van Nest. We’ve read your transcripts. We know all about you. I hope you appreciate we’re giving you a second chance.”
Darius nodded uncomprehendingly. The idea that readmission to Lawrence was a chance or a privilege or important to his future or even particularly notable, had never occurred to him and meant nothing. “Naturally,” he murmured. “And I have to say—” The old knowing, presumptuous, too-intimate smile appeared. What gave him the right to stand so close? “I’m looking forward to many a long talk with you.” Pathetically sincere, he added, “I really am. I’ve missed our—”
“Why rehash the past?” Jane blurted out. She feared a long first conversation with Darius would necessarily be all about Barry. Was her coldness lingering jealousy?
Darius stared at her blankly. Jane asked herself if Barry had let something slip over the summer. Maybe an investigative poise was hiding a millimeter under the surface of this arrogant kid’s blank expression. He was imitating the false innocence of the detective, the eyebrow raised just before the truth is unsheathed with steely certainty. Maybe Darius was going to seduce that dope Barry and find out. Jane would more than pay for slapping him after all. “Any time, Darius, any time,” she said with what sounded like villainous bravado.
By now Jane Brzostovsky should have been aware of her blind spot. She had no idea what went on in the hearts of young men. Darius wasn’t out to destroy her. He still loved her. Or he still liked her very much in a way that made a self-conscious frost of poise settle on him whenever he came into her office. His remarks gleamed with ludicrous pomp and frigid curlicues of Vincent-Pricean diction. He crossed his legs and canted his hips in the chair. The toe of a yellow work boot tipped up and down with cavalier elegance. A few weeks into the semester, he drawled apropos of nothing, “Might I ask whether you’re surprised?”
Jane leaned back. Head tilted, withdrawing behind crossed arms, she asked, “Surprised by what, Darius?”
“Surprised by—” He made a flowery, dilatory gesture.
Jane swiveled, her eye panning across the Lego bonsai Barry had given her, many of its tiny plastic blossoms dropped or missing by now. A second squint at her color-blocked schedule taped to the wall wasn’t a big enough hint for Darius to cut things short.
“Well, by me. By what I look like. You certainly haven’t changed in the minutest degree. As lovely as ever.”
“What a crock! Obviously not what you came to talk to me about, Darius.” She made her bark of laughter raucous. She had a weary inkling that Darius was leading up to some kind of I-think-I-may-be-gay admission. That could easily take him weeks or months or forever.
“I just have to learn to trust you again. We both do. Aren’t we heading in that direction?” Darius looked unhappy about sounding earnest.
Jane gave her forehead a headachey massage and grimaced, guilt and annoyance in perfect balance.
Darius continued with his pushy visits. And she continued with her taut smiles. Polished eccentricity was the least appealing form of nervousness to Jane. Darius managed to be peremptory as well. “I need you to look at something.”
“What?”
“And I want to talk about it with you.”
“What?” Reluctantly Jane backed into her office.
After his usual dithering small talk, he opened a beribboned cardboard folder that he’d posed on his knees. With a forefinger he centered a large, brightly colored square of origami paper on one face of the open folder. Having gone through these preliminaries with trembling hands, he immediately began reciting, “Love I do him? Fell I waste it was too or?—”
“Darius, what is this? If we’re going to discuss poetry—”
“But this is important.”
“Why don’t you ask me to read it when I actually have time?”
“Please. It’s incredibly short and important. Yes, a poem. ‘—breast apple fresh her kissed I and love made we after, tears her to said I go must I. House my dark into backwards walked I. Eyes mine from streamed blood of years. Fell I? Love I do him? Death in avails nothing—’” He stopped. The origami paper made a faint skitching under his fingers. He had raised his eyes to her knees. His mouth was open, but his breath was gone. His whole face flushed, ears to clavicle, an all-encompassing blush, unlike the small red flags that showed on Barry’s camellia-white cheeks sometimes—after sex.
With an impatient sigh, bouncing a pencil by its eraser on the desk, yet as kindly as possible Jane wondered, “Darius, do you want to tell me something that might be clearer in a more prosaic form? Not that that doesn’t sound nice. Rhythmic. And I get the backwards syntax, I think.”
“Inverted,” he corrected her in a pitiful voice.
“Ah,” she breathed. Tensing her buttocks she allowed the spring of her office chair to straighten her up. “And I hear some waffling as to gender.”
His face shot up. He told her, “I’m not saying I’m a pederast. The author isn’t. Is that what you were thinking? That’s not what this is about at all. And anyway the reality of sex is far, far more complicated in my experience,” he said with abrupt condescension.
“But. Well for one thing, I’m not sure I buy the author’s experience in that department. I wasn’t trying to over-analyze. But you did tell me this was important to you personally.” Bemused and at a loss now, because he had seemed so obviously on the brink, Jane could only shrug.
“You know, all need not be read personally,” Darius informed her. “Anyway, love isn’t important? Art isn’t important?” A fragment of a knowing smile perked on his lips, despite his redness. Jane readied herself for hostile irony, but he said, “I mean this could be about you as easily as me, not so? That’s assuming it’s even a personal lyric. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. I think part of the reason I’ve always—felt fondly toward you is that I think we’re a lot alike on an emotional level. A lot.”
Jane felt like snapping, not in the least, but settled for a hollow, “I’m not a poet.”
“Nor am I. But, for people like us, aren’t there some experiences in life that—you’ll have to admit there are—that seem to come from a—parallel universe of—more intense experience? And they need to be expressed. They have to come out.”
Come out? A slip in phrasing? What a jumble. He couldn’t be suggesting this was really about her. She’d long ago gotten Barry to swear he would never gossip with Darius. “Darius, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I’m a working-class girl from Queens. I’m not a poet. I’m sorry. And I’m not sure we’re that alike. I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do,” he insisted. He composed his hands atop the now-closed folder. Jane’s heart raced. She leaned her chair back so slowly the spring creaked. Though still blushing, frowning at his lap, Darius still seemed like the glibbest of detectives on TV. His gaze flashed up at her for a second. Were his eyes wet from the rawness of reciting his poem? “I think you do know what it’s about and I think we do share an important experience.” Did Darius know about Jane and Barry?
Darius had no idea what effect he was having on his teacher. For him all this was badinage, even the weepy embarrassment. This wasn’t a conversation about anything definitely real. “I think you do know what I’m saying,” he repeated, looking up at her in the most challenging way.
Sometime after this meeting Jane crooked her finger at Barry Paul as he shuffled past in the hall and gave him a stern nod. She led him into her office. She was more nervous than he’d ever seen her. She held her hands in isometric prayer. She made them bob mechanically in his direction.
“I don’t want you having anything to do with Darius Van Nest,” she announced in a strident whisper.
“What are you talking about?” Barry asked, astonished. “We’re not—what gives you the right anyway, you know?”
“Look. What can I say? This is not about me or anything—us-related. I don’t want to alarm you about him—or make wild accusations, but that’s beside the point. Let me just say I think he could influence you in ways you wouldn’t like. We have his transcript and we know there was some drug use at boarding school.” Barry snorted in laughter. She held a hand up. “It may sound old-fashioned but the power rich kids have—have you ever heard the expression the primrose path?”
“No. I’m totally laughing,” he said. “If anything, I’m much more—”
“Please! Would you just keep an eye out for him,” she whispered sharply.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing!”
“I’ve never told anyone anything, if that’s what you think.”
She begged him, “You mustn’t, mustn’t tell anyone, Barry. I hate it, of course, but that’s how it is. But that’s not what this is about.”
“You think he wants to give me a blow job?”
Jane looked at him in shock. His instincts stunned her.
Barry shook his head. “No, you just think I’ll end up being a loudmouth asshole about you. You think I’m such a—”
Now her own eyes were wet with confusion. Their liaison was one of those things, thoughtlessly begun, that hobbles you for life. The law expects you to recognize snares before they come along, but you never do. Once the snare is tripped, the sentence has already begun. “For now, anyway, be careful with Darius. You’re the one I care about,” she added in a soothing tone they both found unpleasant.
Barry frowned at her. He mustered a chilly expression. She was obviously freaking out because she couldn’t make him go away or put him back in his box. “I’m not a thing,” he said.
So why was her incredible, deceitful feebleness still arousing to him? His heart pounded. His muscles released his expression, and his brown eyes took on a wounded clarity. He had to turn his head to the side—pure melodrama—so looking at her wouldn’t put him under her power. He jumped when he felt her hand on his thigh. “What are you doing?” he asked with a child’s helpless shock, not quite pushing her away.
She leaned forward to smell his hair. Barry was making a panicky noise, a droning in his chest. “We’re in school,” he warned. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m not doing anything. I’m not doing anything.” She lifted her crippled-seeming fingers from his leg.
Infuriated, he watched her notice how the crotch of his pants had inflated. He crossed his arms over his belly. “I really can’t believe you!”
Jane glanced up at the little square windowpane in her door. Every so often someone peered through it to check if she was in. “People are blind to what’s going on in the world around them,” she philosophized. “You have to know something to notice it.”
“I have to go.” Barry stood and turned his back on her. He remained motionless in front of the door for a time, explaining bitterly at last, “I’m waiting for it to go down.”
…
Jane needn’t have felt jealous or fretted about Darius. Barry and he weren’t able to restart their friendship. It hadn’t ended, but they couldn’t help noticing how unalike they were as types go. Barry now had too many friends who wouldn’t naturally get along with Darius, and Darius didn’t naturally get along with anybody. Still, neither of them forgot their old intimacy. They felt a puppy nostalgia whenever they spotted one another across a sea of other students. The nostalgia was surprisingly sharp for people so young.
Even when they exchanged mere passing up-nods, their gazes twined. Darius thought Barry’s eyes betrayed a strange, limpid but manly surrender, something he’d never seen in another person. Barry realized his haughty, biddable old friend wasn’t the most easygoing person. But when he thought about Darius more closely, Barry’s interest in the life and friends he himself was choosing trickled away temporarily, as if he registered a faint vestige of a heroic alternate life with Darius. Neither could make sense of it, but they relished their separation, the feeling of elevation tinged with sorrow.
Smoking wasn’t allowed at Lawrence, but the stunted woods outside the main classroom building were, by tacit agreement, not policed. Paths weren’t needed. The woods were sparse as well as stunted. For early December the trees seemed over-garnished with shriveled, ashy leaves. Students walked until they couldn’t be seen from the school, which meant everyone ended up at the same slight dip in the ground. They called it a ravine. At the bottom, the earth was polished, saplings were broken or stripped, and beer cans had weathered almost to bare aluminum.
Barry and Darius happened to meet at the smoking spot out in the woods. By way of greeting Darius indulged his habit of world narration (you-me-here). Barry reminisced about something or other, then a slavish bit of flattery from Darius interrupted everything. “I can really see you becoming the head of some big corporation or a famous politician.”
Barry smirked and shook his head at the ground. “Oh, buddy—man—” He couldn’t respond to the absurdity. “You’re killing me.” Barry was almost as tall as the trees. He hid his cigarette in the meaty hollow of his palm. To exhale, his cheeks puffed like a Botticelli west wind, and his jet of smoke ruffled into the low azure sky.
A third boy, a handsome, taciturn friend of Barry’s named Dean crouched, head bowed, wrists dangling over his knees. He came alive to suck at his cigarette, snorted the smoke out in laughter at Darius, then wilted again. It wasn’t hurtful laughter, more like an older brother’s distracted mockery.
A girl none of them knew blundered into their midst. She rubbed her bright magenta hands and shrugged hello. She seemed to be going for a neo-seventies look in huge clogs and a furry-lapelled yellow jacket. She fussed through her leather shoulder bag for Newports.
She begged a light and eyed Darius critically when he proffered his mini-Bic lighter.
The tip of her cigarette bobbing up and down in the flame she commented cynically about the school literary magazine. “You see that Ovum piece of shit came out? I swear every kid in this hellhole thinks they’re some fucking Allen Ginsberg.” Eyes pinched almost shut over her Newport, she went from incurably bitter to ecstatically sensual with one inhale.
“I actually have a poem in it,” Darius smiled. “Not that I disagree with you, really.”
“Ouch,” Dean said in the seemingly relaxed silence that followed.
“Ouch,” Barry laughed.
“Sorry. That sounded so...” the girl sounded like it was hard for her to apologize. She tapped her Newport in an unwoodsy way.
“Please.” Darius shrugged.
“It hurts him because it’s a love poem. Darius is in love with Barry,” Dean said without raising his head.
The girl looked uncertain and sniffed. She blew on her fingers.
As if ironically, Darius said, “Yes. As you can see, I’m madly in love with him.” He was smiling.
Still crumpled next to her mouth, one of the girl’s pink-blue fingers pointed. “Oh, you’re Barry. Yeah that’s what I thought.”
Nothing felt especially awkward, but Barry changed the subject anyway. “You see much of Ms. B this year?”
He was asking Darius, but the girl exclaimed, “Ukh, yes, I have her in English. You guys aren’t fans of hers, are you? I’m only asking cause our class decided like she’s some kind of bitch underneath it all. Even though everybody loves her. Maybe it’s us. I don’t trust the ones everybody else loves. L-U-V.”
“It’s not you,” Dean confirmed.
Darius decided not to say he was indeed a fan of hers, because he didn’t want to come off as contrary. “I guess I see her,” he admitted to Barry. “I don’t have any classes with her, though.”
“She’s out to get you, man,” Barry said to Darius. He started chuckling.
“I’m not out to get him,” the girl complained.
“Ms. B,” Dean corrected.
“Out to get me?” Darius frowned.
With smoky words, the girl said, “See now, this is good information. Kind of what we thought. She’s got this tight-lipped thing going on like she wants to be tough. But think about it. What does it do to you if you spend your whole life with kids, you know? It’s some kind of power trip.”
“Tough?” Darius wondered scornfully. “What are you talking about? She’s a sweetheart.”
Dean squinted in pain at the word “sweetheart.” “Don’t say sweetheart. It sounds so gay.”
Barry kept laughing about Ms. B. “She’s got your number, Dare. She’s out to get you.”
“I never thought of her as tough,” Darius repeated.
“Who cares?” Dean said.
“Really, she’s out to get you,” Barry said. “You want to know what she said? She warned me to watch out for you. Barry, watch out for that Darius Van Nest!” He couldn’t imitate Jane, so he made himself sound generically shrill and stern.
“Wait, that’s not out to get me, Barry,” Darius argued.
“See, but that’s sort of—I don’t know—” the girl mused in a whisper.
“You’re saying she told you to watch out for me? Right?” Darius was flummoxed. “Isn’t that nice?” He shrugged indifferently for show, then started kicking a maple sapling. Its few crisped ochre leaves shuddered. “She means, because—what?—she doesn’t think I can handle myself here? New kid on the block? That’s weird.”
“No,” Barry insisted. “No, man. Not watch-out-for-you-take-care-of-you. Watch-out-for-you, because she thinks you’re evil. Like you’re a bad influence on me or something. I don’t know.” He couldn’t help laughing at the expression of shock on Darius’ face. Everyone laughed, in fact.
“On you! Me?” Darius said.
“I know,” Barry confirmed the crazy misreading of their relationship.
“Obviously, she’s not your friend, either,” the girl said. “Really, these teachers spend all their time with kids, so in this sick way they end up more childish than we are. Not that we’re not pathetic, loser kids with no idea what it’s really like out there in the world.”