FORMER LEFTIST DREAMER Jane Brzostovsky taught ten-year-old boys. She was popular, and during the school year, about every month, she was invited to dinner by one or another of them. The invitations, enchanting displays of nymphal upper crust manners, didn’t enchant her. Not at first. Coming from a job at an urban school where the custom didn’t exist, she found the invitations made her uneasy, mistrustful even. The dinners were awkward. Once she’d eaten with her student and two Filipina housekeepers in the kitchen, while the parents (Dairy Queen franchisee and pharmaceutical sector analyst) dined alone in state. That comic book gazillionaire behavior was laughable but turned out to be unique.
Eventually Jane found a way to enjoy herself. She looked at the evenings as an education. Seeing the domestic worlds of her little men added psychological color to the forces of history she still often thought about. Careful not to be too well-mannered and careful not to gawp, she discovered the exotic gentility wasn’t utterly irresistible. Observing “the help” was a nice corrective. They were either morose and perfunctory or ashimmer with the cynicism of slaves in Plautus. It was all new to her. A real education for a Queens girl whose father had wept at the clarity when he first read Thorstein Veblen. Or so he now claimed, a tearful, repetitive old man. Now his only pleasure was the occasional knock-down drag-out with Jane about how even what was left of the Left in 1983 supinely equated Ronald Reagan (Reaganism, God forgive us) with society in its natural state. Social Darwinism. Father and daughter agreed. It only sounded like they were arguing.
However ambivalent she was about fraternizing with the rich, New York (she refused to say “Harlem”) was finished for Jane. For five years she taught at a private school in a crumbling brownstone. One student and his whole makeshift family were blown to pieces in a gas explosion in their homestead across the river in the Bronx. Jane went to the homegoing service. That finished it for her. An insane minister sing-songed over a cluster of tiny white caskets piled with candy, cards, and droopy flower shop leftovers. The minister said he could hear choruses of angel children hollering welcome to the family in heaven: “Rakeef! Devon! Devon, get over here!” Jane realized that everyone believed this, truly believed it with doomed soft-headedness. They could smell the grass of heaven. She had to leave.
But the pretty world she’d entered concealed a much worse sin. She was no Thorstein Veblen, and anyway this sin was inconspicuous, exceedingly difficult to make out. After many months, however, with an excitement that felt wonderfully uncouth, Jane hit on it. The training in irony. That was it. That, she decided, was the spring of sin.
She saw it often and everywhere. On the patio of the Westerbrook Club’s poolside snack bar. Tables of tanned children laughed with precocious knowingness about a TV show, an acquaintance or anything or nothing at all. A plastic “brass” plaque was glued to the wall of the snack bar above a raucous table. Todd McCormick 1966-1983 We Miss You, Skeetch. The shine hadn’t come off the plaque yet, and a keychain with a plastic E.T. figurine hung precariously from one corner. This was a grave offering from an eleven-year-old girl. The children’s attention turned to the figurine. Laughter exploded. Overhearing them, the mothers at the next table chuckled fondly. One of them dropped a lemon wedge on her napkin with an iced teaspoon and an air of infallibility. To Jane she explained, “We don’t like E.T. anymore.”
As if Jane couldn’t gather that from the woman’s son, who was leaning toward their table now to crack, “Mom, please! We’ve got to see E.T. for like the fiftieth time!” Laughter re-exploded. The boy plucked the keychain from the plaque and made it hop into a friend’s boat of French fries. “E.T. phone French fry! Please,” he droned in a nasal voice.
Like any late twentieth century intellectual would, Jane tried to sort through the semantic feedback. A little boy parroted grown-up cynicism in order to ironize other little children innocently enamored of a faux naïf fable. She recoiled from the conceptual rococo. She fixed on the disdain. Cruelty—oppression, really—subtilized. She was too cautious not to question her own Reformation ferocity. Wasn’t it a little much for her to bandy about the word “sin”?
No. Her paranoia was the blood drawn by their invisible weapons. It seemed sweet of them to invite her to Westerbrook. But once here she felt a bit like a paid companion, a ladies’ maid, a babysitter. She couldn’t think her way out of continual, faint resentment. When she tried to finesse it, adopt their sweetness, their “Belgian” shoes, their trumpeting laughter, her submission only felt more complete. Revolt against their little nothing airs was impossible.
Among these women, who’d endured lifelong training, all the heavy-handedness of irony had vanished. In fact, one and all, they’d forgotten their early lives as worms. Their creamy friendliness, their little frownlets of concern, as eloquent as cling wrap, were, to them, anything but the global falsehood Jane thought screamingly obvious. With an insistence that didn’t strike them as suspicious in the least, they liked to murmur the name of their sort—“nice people.” Sometimes they whispered the two words bare of any context at all! This time, into the aimless silence following the children’s laughter, one of the women even piped, “I thought E.T. was a nice movie. A tiny bit gross in parts, but I like it when good triumphs.” Her defiance sounded proud but little-girly. Yet with perfect distinctness, Jane understood her to mean the opposite of what she said: “Really, the movie was worthless, and I like it when evil triumphs!” It was one of those truths only hysterics can perceive, but no less true for that.
Gazing tranquilly at the splashed-in pool, another woman, Sohaila Van Nest, whispered, “I never see movies.” Her conversation often wilted back on itself like this, hardly conversation at all. Highly articulate breathing, perhaps. But she snagged everyone’s attention. Sohaila was an anomaly. Foreign. Her black bathing suit was rhinestone-encrusted. Huge sunglasses, like split black melons, didn’t quite hide the tips of painted eyebrows. Had she been American, they would have thought her trashy, a tart, but, because she was foreign, even the ballsy garden club women accepted Sohaila’s whispery manner, garish makeup and languid deportment. In fact, her unplaceable accent and exotic hauteur had a strong fairy tale allure for them. This was years before trashiness became a universal affectation, even among WASPs.
Her presence at the club today partly accounted for the long silences. Almost like suitors, the chummy women hunted for common ground. Sighs and mild exclamations about the weather kept the conversation going. One boxy wife chuffed, “You should be in movies, Sohaila! Doesn’t she look like Sophia Loren? I’ve always thought so.”
Sohaila smiled at the noises of assent. “But I always hated being so dark.” Long fingernails kicked at her black hair. “You’ll think I’m—do you know I was blond once? Like you.” She nodded at the women, all of them. “So silly! Like a dancer! For me, I mean.”
“This gang’s not as blond as you think,” one woman brayed.
“You remember Jeanette Paul when Barry was young!”
“Can you imagine?”
Clipped laughter yielded to an enjoyable tension. Looks were exchanged. “She’s right over there,” someone sang in a teensy whisper.
The boxy wife glanced at Jane. Leaning forward, she planted her chin on her fists. Her bathing suit straps fell from her shoulders like spent petals. “For years and years and years she’s dyed poor Barry’s hair the same color as her own. Right from the start, I imagine. Just so people would think it was natural. Hers, that is. But the thing was—years ago no one lightened or had streaks like we do now and the dye was so cheap. Barry lived in the pool, and, of course, the chlorine turned his hair green. Bright green. Nothing could have been more obvious.”
“I mean, really! Who cares? I tint my hair! So what!”
“The woman’s deeply, deeply unsure of herself.”
“That’s nothing.” The iced tea spoon lady pursed her lips.
“Ah, well—” the boxy wife cautioned. She fussed with her straps.
Several of the group leaned back in their chairs. The tension abated.
“Darius doesn’t look like me,” Sohaila observed. Her accent was at its strongest when she pronounced her son’s name. She said, almost, “Dah-li-ush,” though the rest of the world pronounced it the ordinary American way. Unless she was present, when they avoided using his name at all.
“For obvious reasons! Adoption’s a different case.”
“She’s talking up Bea Sayles,” said a woman who was keeping tabs on Jeanette. “By the wee-wee pool.” Even from a distance Bea Sayles’s friendly squint looked besieged. She was mechanically dipping her youngest son, Ross, in the baby pool. “I should go rescue her.”
“Bea can handle herself.”
“To be blond they would think—” Sohaila said ethereally. “Almost—you were a concubine.” Jane Brzostovsky looked at Sohaila skeptically. Could the woman be such an airhead? All jewels and rouge? Without seeming overly stiff, the other women managed not to laugh at the unusual word, though one of them turned it over softly. “Concubine.”
Sohaila’s son, Darius, was one of Jane’s students. Something of a child dandy. Jane wondered if it wasn’t the mother’s influence. The boy had a penchant for wildly floral shirts. And too tight white pants that made him look like a sexualized clothespin, skinny with an overlarge head. Jane found him a little displeasing. He didn’t strike her as boyish enough.
Darius was neat and prompt. He arrived early in homeroom and sat quietly while the other boys played chess or flicked triangular paper footballs across their desks. Sometimes he made a flowery gesture to himself before recomposing his hands on the glazed plywood.
In Jane’s opinion, he was mostly dull and inhibited, but every so often he spoke at length in class. On these occasions he was riveting and made no sense at all. He’d twitch and flinch at the loud ticking of the clock as the words poured out. He only became still when he leered at a patch of the acoustical tile ceiling. “Sharks are animals! Sharks are animals! You look at them, and they have these major senses we don’t have. And they’re animals, so—also, the fishermen don’t know about the cancer cure thing!”
Waving for his attention, Jane put in, “Are you saying they’d be more careful not to overfish sharks? Our speaker made the point that even though sharks are dangerous, they may benefit us.” Jane knew the sense she tried to make for Darius wouldn’t penetrate.
The student who’d just given his homeroom speech on sharks and who was still jumpy and flushed in patches squealed, “Yeah, because of what I just said—the cartilage!”
“No, no,” Darius groaned. “Because sharks are animals!” His gaze made an appealing but haughty sweep of his audience before drifting to the ceiling again like oracular smoke. He made a passionate gesture with one arm in a way that caused giggles. He seemed not to hear them. “This, this is not what they see!”
Jane began to wonder whether this time he was making sense a bit too sophisticated for his age. Then she heard, “They’re as scared of us as we are of them!” An age-appropriate banality.
But then, “I have a tooth from an extinct shark two-thousand-feet-long.” Snorts of disbelief and no ways went unnoticed. “I threw it in our pool. I won’t say why.” Was it a contentless compulsion to perform? Gibberish rhetoric, in a manner of speaking? “I know he loved his tooth.” Much laughter. And Darius laughed too, as if for a moment allowing this was all a joke. The moment passed. “But he’s an animal—was. You guys might be useful for cancer, too. You could be! This!” Thrillingly he seized the homeroom speaker’s hand and tried to hold it up. But the boy shook his arm free with a stormy look and blocked-sinus wheezing. Darius talked on. What could one say?
When the boy finally wound down and the bell rang, Jane reminded him to stay after class to discuss his own speech, next on the schedule. Darius sat, crossed his legs tightly and put a jaunty hand on his hip. He looked exhilarated, proud, which somehow annoyed Jane. The truth was, she disliked him. He was spoiled. Unseriousness bubbled up, like that moment of laughter today, even when passion had seized him. Most ironic and maddening of all, he adored her. She was his favorite teacher. He took her winces, her reserve, her dutiful encouragement as a sort of hilarious flirtation. She sighed. “Maybe you should think about doing a follow-up, more on sharks, since you feel so strongly.”
“I’m doing it on the Borgia family,” he said, an eyebrow raised. He’d moved to the desk closest to hers. “They’ve probably never heard of them.” He chucked his head at the empty room.
“Darius, don’t be so arrogant. You come off looking foolish. I’d wager some of them have heard of the Borgias.”
He smiled at her, an oddly prying expression, and repeated “Foolish?”
“I only mean it takes a lot of hard work to do well and—to explain your thoughts clearly. I do get a sense that you have something to say sometimes. But let’s get on with it. What about the Borgias?”
“Well, the Pope had a homosexual incest relationship with his nephew, who was really his son.”
“I think there was a lot of nasty gossip about the Borgias. I mean—a very evil family.”
“And the son was in love with his sister.”
“I don’t think you need to be—sensationalistic in your speech.”
Again he raised an eyebrow at her.
“Darius, do you know what all that’s about?”
“Of course.”
“What?”
“Sex. The Borgias, you mean?”
“I don’t know if that would be such an appropriate thing to dwell on. Maybe if you talked about the dark side of the Renaissance.”
“You want me to hide the truth?” he asked in a most insinuating tone.
Jane made a face at the window. Outside, healthy-minded boys were playing flag football, plastic streamers, red and blue, dancing from their narrow hips.
“Don’t look out the window on me,” Darius said, outrageously, baselessly intimate.
“Darius!” Jane snapped. “A little respect!”
His face went slack. She closed and rolled her eyes briefly, causing herself an invigorating pain. The boy’s ignorance didn’t make him any more endearing. He had no clue about her real feelings. She glimpsed a vast rather than a poignant vulnerability in his shock. As vast and empty as the mother’s glorious vacuity behind the intergalactic darkness of her sunglasses. The family resemblance startled Jane and frightened her a little. These people were deeply odd as well as dull. It wasn’t a matter of colorful eccentricity.
Her heart sank when a chastened Darius frowned and asked, “I was wondering, if you feel like it, if you want to come over to my house for dinner.”
“Does your mother know about this?”
“Of course,” he mewed awkwardly, frowning harder. Then his lips made a nonsensical pout. His shyness was as unreal, as random as his arrogance, though perhaps it took more out of him. Jane knew she couldn’t hold him responsible for not expressing his emotions clearly—he was only a boy—but her sense of being manipulated was overwhelming.
She said, “Well, let’s have your phone number, so I can call and check. But yes, in principle, I’d love to come over. And we’ll have your outline by Monday, and just remember—heavy on the politics, light on the sex. There’re some things you have to—know more about before you can talk.”
In the teacher’s lounge she reported his infuriating reply. “He said, ‘I know all.’ What is it about that kid?”
Her much older colleague was a history teacher with a reduced schedule of classes. Jane had a soft spot for him, a mildly daft old boy from another era. He was looking dolefully at the discolored bottom of a glass coffee pot. His face was crumpled as if education, far from being an easy life for the unambitious, were uniquely exposed to time’s bad weather. “You don’t like him,” he rumbled gently. “It happens.” The faucet spattered the front of his pants. He moderated the flow.
“No. It’s a little different. He gets to me. I’m talking about him now, and that actually annoys me. I’m usually curious about the kids, but he makes me not want to ask questions. I resent being interested. And it’s not as if I know all about him or understand him. He’s talented and smart but hardly outstanding. It’s more his manner. A sort of negative star power.”
“He was quiet with me. Had him in New Jersey History. Average and shy I always gathered.”
“Well, it may be he has a crush in my case. But that’s not what gets to me. It’s—you want to shake him and say, Connect, for God’s sake!”
“Only connect,” the old man quoted stagily. “Hmm.” He brushed at himself, looking hapless and incontinent. Tall and stooped, he wore a formless blazer. It hung like saddlebags, the gaping pockets full of quizzes folded lengthwise. “And so you must go to dinner, to dinner with the king! The board should be excellent,” he said hopefully.
“About the last thing I care about. Fancy food.” Jane crossed her arms stubbornly. “Could it be rivalry? Jealousy? Because he’s rich? But all these kids are rich.”
“The family’s intriguing, Ms. Brzostovsky.” He enjoyed pronouncing her name. “But you’re not going to like them, I’m afraid.”
“No, I know. I know already. He takes after that geisha of a mother of his—spacey.”
“That can’t be. He’s adopted.”
“Oh! Oh, damn. Was I supposed to know? I knew about the Baker boy. Does he know himself?”
“I’d imagine so.”
“Funny, maybe that’s what got him on the Borgias. Nephews who turn out to be sons. But, you see—even with something like that—I should feel more compassionate than I do. It’s what I was saying about his mother. Not that they look alike but that they were disconnected in the same way, and that’s upbringing.”
At that, with a magical ping, the coffee began to piss itself into the dirty pot. The old teacher contentedly murmured, “Lifesblood! Yes, the mother, well—but I was thinking more particularly of the father with whom I’ve had a bit more interaction. You won’t care for him. Not a pushover like me.” He winked amiably. “Very grand in his origins. We were doing a unit on the Puritans, and Darius brought in a manuscript letter from Cotton Mather. The real thing, written to one of the father’s ancestors, I believe, and surprisingly toadying. He counsels reflection or something, if I recall.”
“Aha! All right,” Jane smirked. “The WASP with the exotic wife.” The corners of her mouth curled tighter.
“But he can be—and this is between you and me, my dear—he can be quite sinister.”
“The WASP with the exotic wife,” Jane repeated in a heavier rhythm.
“Oh. I see what you mean.” An old WASP himself, he looked hurt for a moment. He could see her lack of expression was meant as apology. “All I meant is the man can be ill-mannered.”
“Wonderful! He said something in particular?”
“No-o-o,” the history teacher said thoughtfully. He made sure the coffee maker’s parts were in place. The drizzle was slowly lowering in pitch. “No. We’ve had dealings. We’re both alumni. Darius is a legacy, of course. No, it’s simply that he can be brusque. Snide, even. You don’t know where you stand with him. Not my idea of the good old, none-too-bright WASP at any rate.” He chuckled to gloss over a deception. He touched the side of the coffee pot with a finger. The heat made his hand jump, and the quizzes were jostled from one pocket and fell.
Only the month before, the aging history teacher had talked Oliver Van Nest into contributing five thousand dollars to help rebuild Lawrence Academy’s upper school gymnasium, destroyed by arson. In the course of head-shaking over the unidentified firebug, Oliver muttered, “A sick kid. Or a communist like that Reichstag business.” Then he remarked that Stern’s Hitler Diaries might clear up some of the “tremendous confusion about those so-called death camps.” Holocaust denial wasn’t yet the notorious cottage industry it soon became. The old man had never heard of such a thing. He didn’t know what to make of Oliver’s remark. But he decided he wasn’t going to tattle about it now. A mote of an incident, it was still radioactive. And he wasn’t going to ruin Jane Brzostovsky’s dinner.
The old man was suddenly unhappy. Mere secondary school historian that he was, he was aware his silence, even now, here in New Jersey, could be construed as complicity, albeit remote, in millions of deaths. “In silence, like fetal sharks, complicity devours civility,” he intoned or, maybe, quoted mysteriously.
The coffee maker puttered and hissed now that the water had run through. Steam belched from the top, and the machine sighed like a luxuriating dragon. The fragrance of the coffee provided the history teacher no oomph, given his dreary consciousness of mass murder.