A few years ago I found myself in the south of France. It was early winter and I was writing a travel piece for one of those glossy magazines you read on airplanes when you’re stuck on the tarmac or trying to terminate a conversation with a chatty neighbour. On the way back to Paris and the plane home, my train stopped in Toulouse. On the spur of the moment I yanked my bag off the rack and jumped down. Storing my things in a luggage locker, I started up the rue Bayard, past the American Express where, almost forty years earlier, I had gone daily hoping for a letter from Raissa Shes-tatsky. Sometimes yes, but mostly no.
I drifted through the narrow red-brick streets until I arrived at the Père Léon, the café where I went to read her letters or, when there weren’t any, to think about her and to wonder if I’d ever make love to her again. I was about to go in—for some absurd reason I expected the same waiters to be there—but instead I kept walking. During those unhappy months so many years earlier, it had seemed as though I were fixed to a miniature railway track that ran from my apartment on rue Victor Dequé to a table in the window of the Café Père Léon. But I had never seen what was on the other side of the café. I had no curiosity; like a car locked in a single gear, I felt only the absence of Raissa and her slender limbs from my bed.
So this time I walked further on; and there, not fifty yards away, like the opening chords of a Beethoven symphony, a wide, beautiful river, a half mile across, opened up in front of me. I swear I’d never seen it before, never even suspected it was there. A cargo boat drifted dreamily downstream; on the far bank, a tiny red light flickered off and on.
How could I have missed it, this green jewel that seemed wider than the Mississippi? For six months I’d lived in Toulouse and I’d seen nothing except the furious wallpaper inside my head: its drastic scenarios, its pornographic reruns. What else had my misery blinded me to?
So over the next few months (it was quite gradual, I remember) I decided, almost in the spirit of settling a personal debt, a debt to oneself, to go back to other places where I’d suffered, this time with my eyes open and, more important, pointed outwards. Go back and see what’s what.
But where to start. Something old or something new? Which old mansion of horror should I visit first? A boarding school, a Ferris wheel spinning backwards into the night, a park in Los Angeles, a busy office at a film festival, a country house with a broken spine. . . ?
Happily, the decision was made for me. One day, leafing through the newspaper at my ex-wife’s house—M. was making dinner for me and our daughter, who was home from university that weekend—I happened across the picture of a barracuda-faced woman emerging from a limousine. Below, a caption read, OPERA HOUSE FUNDRAISER CHARGED WITH MISAPPROPRIATION. There was something familiar about the face, the exaggerated cheekbones, the sleek, brushed-back hair, but I couldn’t recall what it was. I moved on to the next item. But the face called me back. “Misappropriation of funds.” I took another look: it was Clarissa Bentley. And apparently up to her old tricks again. Beneath those ample breasts beat the heart of a woman so unpleasant even the Borgias would have hesitated to have lunch with her.
A few days later, Clarissa on my mind, I wandered up to my old high school. I passed through a set of regal blue doors, the school crest embedded in the floor like a giant Roman coin, and stepped into the interior courtyard. Just across from me was a squat, three-storey brick building. I was an unhappy boarder there for a brief period in 1966, the year the Beatles came to Toronto. I say brief because I ran away that October after only a few weeks. I ran away, let me say it simply, because a young girl went up the Ferris wheel with me as my girlfriend and when she came back down, she was someone else’s. It was the first romantic betrayal of my life.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me go back to that summer cottage in Grassmere when I was fifteen. Dew-damp mornings, pretty girls in canoes, dances in town. And those sounds! I have never forgotten those sounds. Stones crackling under the tires of the family car as we made our way down the driveway, tree branches brushing the sides. At night you could hear everything across the water: people talking on their docks, a screen door banging shut. A fish slapping the water. These nights remain haunting for me with their whispers of “You are missing something, you are missing something.”
Nodding my head to the satisfying clank-clank of Ringo’s cowbell in “I Call Your Name,” I was lying on my mother’s bed at the far end of the house when I heard her calling me from the kitchen. A phone call. Long-distance, hurry, hurry.
It was a girl I barely knew, Clarissa Bentley. Her father was a “big shot” in the movie business.
“I just broke up with my boyfriend,” she said.
Even at that age I recognized the moment when a fresh moon might be rising in the sky. Looking out the picture window, at the yellow Van Gogh fields descending to the forest, I said, “That’s too bad.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, and inhaled sharply.
“Are you smoking?” I asked.
“Everybody smokes.”
“Where are your parents?”
“My father lets me smoke in the house. He knows what’d happen if he didn’t.”
I pondered that for a moment. The lake glimmering like broken glass behind the trees.
“So are you coming down to the city or what?” she said.
My mother, her bright red shirt tied at the waist like a Caribbean chanteuse, was making a tomato sandwich in the kitchen.
“Who was that?” she said.
I liked my mother; I liked talking to her. “A girl I hardly know,” I said. “She just broke up with her boyfriend.” “Ah,” she replied, keeping her gaze deliberately on the chopping board.
My father was sick that summer and sometimes my mother would fold her long brown legs into our Chevrolet and drive for two hours south to the hospital in Toronto to see him. Which meant that my older brother, Dean, and I had the house to ourselves for the weekend. We played the stereo at full blast, drove old golf balls into the ravine, fired hunting rifles into the garbage dump, talked about girls, and once took a drive along a lonely country back road in my father’s little blue Morris. That night, the night my mother left for Toronto, we went to the Saturday night dance at Hidden Valley in the boat.
“Remember,” Dean said, “if I give you the signal, find another way to get home.”
But the girl didn’t show up or showed up with another boy and he didn’t give me the signal that night. The two of us puttered home under the stars, the lake motionless and warm as soup. We tied up at the dock, cut through the spooky forest, broke out into a field beneath the moonlight, and climbed through the wet grass to our house, which gleamed like a jewel at the top of the hill.
I was only there a few minutes when the phone rang. I was downstairs, lying on the couch, staring at the knotholes in the ceiling. Dean was upstairs listening to an American baseball game on his bedside maroon radio. A lonely sound.
I picked up the phone expecting my mother, but when I heard the voice, again that feeling, the sensation of a bright moon rising in the sky, filled my head.
“What are you doing?” Clarissa Bentley asked. Her voice was as clear as if she were in the next room.
“I was at a dance.”
“Did you meet anybody?”
“No, actually, I didn’t.” Then I thought, no, that was the wrong thing to say; that created entirely the wrong impression, and I flashed on those boys at the dance, a cluster of them by the railing, local kids, one of them finally tearing himself away, crossing the floor and asking a city girl to dance, only to make the same excruciating walk, droop-tailed, back across the floor to his friends. Refused.
“That’s probably pretty unusual for you,” Clarissa said. “You strike me as a real playboy.”
The moon rose still higher.
She said, “I know a girl who knows you.”
“Yeah?”
“She thinks you’re going to be really good-looking when you grow up.”
It was a curious compliment, like a razor blade tucked in a candy bar. First you felt good but then you wondered. Realizing it, or hearing what, in fact, she’d just said, Clarissa went on, “I like how you say actually. It’s sort of English.”
I could hear the baseball game upstairs. Someone had just hit the ball.
“Why don’t you come down here?” Clarissa said. The air fizzed around the radio announcer’s voice. The sound of life happening elsewhere.
“Down there?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Tonight,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Tonight?”
“You could hitchhike.” She was smoking a cigarette. “We could sleep in my parents’ bed.”
A few minutes later, I went up the stairs and walked down the dark hall to Dean’s room. I was older now, more mature than I had been only fifteen minutes before. He lay on his blue bed, his arm behind his head. In the announcer’s American voice, in the ghostly sound of thousands of people behind it, you could see the brightly lit field, the players trotting in their white uniforms.
“Was that that chick?” Dean said. He turned his face toward me. He must have been eating chocolate again because his skin had broken out afresh.
I said, “I think I’m going to hitchhike to Toronto.”
Then he said something cruel about my ears. I looked at him speechlessly.
“I’m going to get in shit for this,” he said, as if we’d been talking about it for weeks. But that’s not what he was angry about. It was inconceivable to me then that, being two years older, he could be unhappy. I started down the stairs. I could hear him get off the bed. I took the last few steps two at a time. I tore through the kitchen, through the living room and out the front door, the screen door banging behind me, and started up the driveway. I got to the first bend and glanced over my shoulder. Dean was standing in the doorway in his underwear, the living room lit up behind him. Then I plunged into the darkness, the trees overhead, the stones under my feet, until I reached the main road that led to town and beyond.
I arrived at Clarissa’s address just as it was getting light. It was a big white apartment building on the edge of Forest Hill. A brightly lit lobby; black leather couches, abstract paintings. I pressed her number. A car drove by outside in the street. I pressed the number again. The lock on the door clicked once, then twice.
“Clarissa?” I said, bending over the speaker. No answer. I tried the door; it opened. And then I went inside.
She had done it before. You could tell. The way she took her clothes off and got into bed. But you could also tell that she was acting a bit. Then she talked about her boarding school in Switzerland, about having dinner once with Alfred Hitchcock; then she lit a cigarette and sat in a chair with no clothes on and told me a movie star had a crush on her, that he’d invited her to his cabin in New Mexico but her mother had found out and phoned the movie star and ruined everything. During these stories I had the feeling I was being lied to, that something like these stories had happened, only in a smaller, less spectacular way. But of course that’s true for almost everything you think about other people’s lives. Always smaller, always lonelier than you imagine.
I waited for her to bring up her ex-boyfriend, and I suspected that would be a lie too, whatever she told me. A particular lie with a particular slant. All her lies had the same slant, away from her, always toward someone else.
And I wished she would put some clothes on.
I knew her ex-boyfriend. Bill Cardelle was a party boy with a dash of red colouring in each cheek as if life or nature had given him an extra dose of vitality. He was a boy I’d never be like, a boy you saw in the halls at school and thought, “I’d be happy if I looked like that.” But my hair was too curly for a proper Beatles haircut, my jackets always rose up at the back (“Don’t slouch, dear!”) and I couldn’t dance like Bill Cardelle. At parties, even the boys watched him dance, not directly but with quick furtive glances between sips on a straw. In his white chinos and Oxford shirts and oxblood shoes, he had it all. Except for one thing: he wasn’t very bright. I adored him because he was gorgeous; he admired me because I was smarter than he was; and for a time, while I tutored him in Latin, we were friends.
I telephoned Dean long-distance at Grassmere the next morning and I noticed in his voice a slightly different tone and it took me many months to understand what that tone was—an almost unwilling approbation that would be the beginning of a whole new kind of problem between us. He was eating an apple, sounding matter-of-fact, but what caught my ear, what mattered to me, was that I could hear him trying to sound matter-of-fact.
“So you guys stayed up really late?” which was his way of asking me if I’d fucked her. And when I said yes, pretty late, and felt a flush of pleasure (vanity), I could also tell that he had hoped that wasn’t going to be the answer.
“So when are you coming home?” he asked. And in this too, things were different. Because normally he would have just ordered me around, told me to get back now.
I said that I’d get there for sure before Mother got home.
“Let’s hope you don’t run into her down there,” and for the first time ever it was like we were talking shop as equals.
I said, “Yeah, that’d be something.” We both had a good laugh over that one, longer than it deserved.
Then he said, “Don’t fuck me on this, okay?” and I said, “You’re a great guy, Kiv.” That was his pet name; only my mother and I called him that, and only when he was being soft enough to let us.
And then I put the phone down and went back into the living room. Clarissa was standing by the window; below you could see the ravine and on the other side of the ravine, the Jewish quarter with their big houses and wonderful deep backyards. She said, “Let’s go steal something.”
It must have been a week or so later that I came down to the city with my brown suitcase to stay with my uncle, Laddie. He was the family disgrace, plastered by noon every day. He had squandered his intelligence, his dark good looks, even a career as a hockey player. (I heard more than once, always in shaming tones, that he’d been invited to try out as a goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs.) But his late wife, Ellen, was a kindly soul and had died before she could come to despise him, leaving behind a monthly, untouchable stipend, enough for Laddie to tipple himself to death more or less un-interfered with. And like many charming drunks, he’d quickly found a simple, decent woman to look after him, who saw, behind his puffy features and coarse humour, the classy educated gentleman he had once been and, in the grips of a ferocious hangover, could still be. A man who could quote Horace with his head in the toilet bowl.
My mother, who was Laddie’s sister, knew I was going to Toronto to “see a girl” and that romantic streak in her, the streak that allowed her to stay with my father despite his infidelities (he fucked her best friend on the couch at Grassmere early one morning when he thought, incorrectly, she was asleep in the far wing of the house), let her drive me to the bus station in Huntsville. She was a woman who simply could never say no to love, even to her fifteen-year-old son.
I haven’t described Clarissa. I’ll leave that to you, except to say that with her black eye makeup, her short “French” haircut, she struck me, from the first time I saw her in the kitchen at a Christmas party, as a girl out of my league. And yet how odd it is that in only a matter of days she went from being a girl I could never “get” to a girl I assumed belonged with me.
Her good looks—and her “big shot” father—got her a job as a model at the Exhibition, a giant old-fashioned fair at the edge of Lake Ontario. On warm summer evenings, tingling with the excitement of the city, of being caught up in and fluent in its swirl, I rattled downtown in the streetcar to see her. Wandering under the huge gates of the Exhibition, through the crowds, the bangs and pops and shrieks and swoops of rides and games, I felt that I was being pulled toward the centre of life; and at that centre there was Clarissa Bentley, a human mannequin who stood motionless on a slowly revolving podium in the Automotive Building. Wearing a pink dress or a blue jumper or jeans with a candy-cane top, she was the object of scrutiny—would she blink, would she twitch, could you make her smile?—for the parade of humanity, men mostly, occasionally dragging their plump wives and bored children among the new-model Chevrolets and Buicks and Cadillacs. Having a beautiful girlfriend is a certain kind of delicious when you’re young, and that moment when the podium ground gradually to a halt, when Clarissa’s arms came to life, a smile crossed her heavily made-up features (“Johnnie, look at that!”), that moment when, carefully, she stepped down from the dais, one step, then another, then another, and came over to me, to me, that single moment quite lifted me from who I used to be and made me, I was sure, into someone new. The life I had always been owed. The summer advanced. I have a photograph from that time, a coloured picture taken in a booth, me in a candy-coloured jacket and a straw boater, Clarissa in profile. I put it in a plastic gadget that lit up when you put it to your eye and pushed a button. I carried it around in my pocket like a passport.
And then one afternoon a boy from school, Justin Strawbridge, took me to the Place Pigalle, a gloomy downstairs tavern where, he said, we could get “served,” the drinking age in those days being twenty-one. I hated the taste of draft beer, it made me shiver with disgust. But I loved getting “served” and I loved doing things with Justin Strawbridge and so I drank and drank and gradually it seemed to me I was a very interesting, daring fellow.
And after Justin left (he had an errand to do for his unpleasant mother), I wandered through the twilight bar, talking to people, even sitting down once at a crowded table until I found myself talking to the back of an engineering student. But I didn’t take it personally. I let the sweep of things take me here and there.
It was such a gorgeous night when I emerged hours later, the sky a luminous, inexpressible blue, a sliver of moon hanging over the lake. So beautiful I couldn’t stand to leave it, and I walked all the way down to the Exhibition. The moon rose in the sky, the stars came out, the city was wrapped in a bubble of density and meaning. Passing under the Exhibition gates (they loomed like a canyon overhead), I slalomed through the caramel-sweet air and children and exuberant young men. A double-decker Ferris wheel spun backwards into the night.
Clarissa waited for me outside the auto pavilion. She was chatting to another model, a girl in a red sweater with eyes too big for her bony skull; and it seemed to me that this girl spoke to me in a rather supercilious manner, as if she’d gone from not knowing me to not liking me in about forty-five seconds.
I wasn’t as indulgent this time as I’d been with the engineering student, and I must have said something (I had quite the tongue back then), because she walked off without saying goodbye to either of us.
“Somebody’s been drinking,” Clarissa said. We started across the midway, the Saturday night crowd swollen and somehow more aggressive than other nights. Drifting in and out of the mob, fifty yards ahead of us, was Clarissa’s old boyfriend, Bill Cardelle, coming this way.
I didn’t know if they’d seen each other since he dumped her, but she wouldn’t look at him, kept looking around the crowd as if she was expecting someone. But Bill, being Bill, eased his way through it, wasn’t put off by her one-word answers, his hair falling just so over his forehead, his white chinos fashionably high up on the ankle and a pink shirt which, on anyone else, would have looked, well, you know. And after a while they fell into a conversation, friends in common, other couples, and the three of us, at my suggestion, made our way over to the Ferris wheel.
There was a messy lineup, couples changing their mind amidst a great deal of hilarity, teenagers butting in. I struck up a conversation with a grey-haired man and his wife. I did it, I think, to show Clarissa how easy, how confident I was with people, my gift of the gab. But it was my undoing, this gift of the gab, because while I was talking, Clarissa and Bill somehow got onto the Ferris wheel before me; down went the bar, clank, and the wheel moved up a notch. I got on. Clank. Then behind me the grey-haired man and his wife, who seemed not so interesting after all.
The ride started. Up, up, up we went; all the way to the top, where you could see the yellow clock tower of my school, like an owl’s eye, staring at me. And then with a rush of screams and exploding lights, down we went, around and around and around. I could see in the chair just above me that their heads, Bill’s and Clarissa’s, were bent close together, as if to hear better; she was asking him questions; he’d answer and then pull his head back to see her reaction and then she’d look at him, not saying anything. I sensed that I was in terrible danger; panic whipped through my body like a pinball. Around and around and around we went. It went on forever, this infernal ride, and with every revolution I could feel her moving away from me.
They got off first, and when I joined them, staggering a little theatrically, I could see that they were waiting on something, she looking at him, Bill looking down at his loafers. And my mouth went completely dry.
Bill was dim but he wasn’t vicious, and so he stood off at a decent distance while she told me. “I want to be with Bill now,” she said, and there was, Clarissa being Clarissa, a hint of impatience, the same I’d heard in her voice when she asked me, Was I coming down to see her in the city, as if, in this case, she wanted to get this part of the evening over with (me) and “get on with things.”
Bill drove me home to my uncle’s. Just the two of us sitting in the car, driving up the same big street I’d walked down only a few hours earlier. How could everything have changed, my whole life, in so brief a time?
“Is this your car?” I said.
“My dad’s.”
“It smells new. Is it new?”
“Is what new?” he said.
“The car. Is it a new car?”
“I think it is.”
“I like the smell of a new car,” I said.
We drove over the train yards, up through Chinatown, the moon in the rear-view mirror. A streetcar rattled by, empty now.
“Hard to believe it’s already August,” I said. I don’t think Bill found much of anything hard to believe. But he nodded cooperatively. He took his right hand off the wheel and rested it on the seat between us. His “petting” hand, it occurred to me.
“I always like the idea of summer,” I said. “But somehow it always ends up sort of a disappointment.”
Pulling to a graceful stop in front of my uncle’s house, Bill turned his handsome, almost feminine features to me. Even in the light from the street lamps, I could see the splash of blood in his cheeks. (My blood, it seemed to me.)
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said. And in his way, he was. I got out of the car, ran up the flagstone steps, made a small theatrical production of looking for my key, but when I turned to wave I could see from his face in the car window that he understood exactly how I felt but that in five minutes he wouldn’t be thinking about it anymore. On his way, no doubt, to Clarissa’s house. Her parents, she’d mentioned earlier, were at a film festival in San Sebastian.
When I awoke in the morning, birds chirping outside my window, the room bathed in yellow sunlight (the wrong kind, the too-early kind), I hovered for a second the way you do, on the verge of remembering: a corpse you can almost make out in the mud. Oh yes, that. A foul taste in my mouth, my head aching from the beer as if I had an arrow clean through both temples. My girlfriend gone.
I tried to get back to sleep, but like a diver with an air pocket in his suit (she’s gone!) I couldn’t get back under the surface. (How awful it is, more than forty years later, to recall those moments.)
I lay for I don’t know how long staring at a crack in the ceiling over my head, a long, lightning-shaped crack, the kind you see over a lake in the summer. And the events of the previous evening, the girl in the red sweater, the Ferris wheel, Bill Cardelle looking down at his loafers, seemed, at the same time, nightmarish and inevitable. As if a handful of cards had been thrown in the air and come down in their precise numerical order. While I was lying there, too stunned to do much except stare at the crack in the ceiling and plan to go downstairs to brush my teeth but unwilling to leave my bed, as if by my moving, and with that movement officially beginning the day, the situation would only become realer, I heard, for the first time since I arrived at my uncle’s, a knock on my bedroom door.
“Yes?”
The door opened, my father came in, and the horror of everything, the unfairness of it, tumbled over me like a stack of wooden chairs. I’d forgotten: fresh from the hospital, determined to make up for “lost time” and “bad behaviour,” he had made a plan to take me clothes shopping for the new school year.
In his little blue Morris, we drove uptown, passing on the way the deep ravine on the other side of which I could see Clarissa’s white apartment building where, I imagined, in her parents’ giant white bed, the silk curtains stirring just so (like the hair on Bill’s forehead), the two of them, Clarissa and a boy with blood on his cheeks, stirred, side by side, in their sleep.
I watched the ravine retreat in the mirror and we turned onto Eglinton, still too bright in that awful summer sunshine, and went into Beatty’s Store for Young Gentlemen.
It was a day that went on forever. Perhaps, to this day even, the longest of my life. My father, shaky like all alcoholics about their “former” behaviour, asked me questions as if reading from a manual. My answers barely interested him, except for one. “I hear that you have a beautiful girlfriend.” We bought a blazer, which had to be fitted, grey flannels, which had to be measured, button-down shirts, a belt, a house tie, a school tie, gym socks, dress socks; it went on and on and on; at one point, excusing myself to try on a sleeveless grey sweater, I went into the dressing room, closed the door, sat down with my back to the mirror, and wept into my hand.
Two weeks later, I went into boarding in the same squat brick building I now stood in front of. A boarder! One of those guys, along with the chronic masturbators and pimple squeezers and unloved children whose parents plied the civil service in Nairobi or Senegal or East Timor. Those dandruffy, never-have-a-date, sad sack pooches you saw doing their homework on a Friday night! All my life, all my friends, we were “day boys,” we went home after school, we took off our ties, we watched television, we slept in on Saturday mornings and we never went to church. But that, too, was gone now. My parents (could they have made a worse decision?) sold our house in the city, other people lived there now, and moved up to our summer cottage. “Less stimulation,” my father’s doctor recommended. Well, everyone got that.
I shared a room with a boy no one else wanted to room with, whose skin was white as cream and who enjoyed prancing around the room stark naked, flexing his muscles and emitting whoops of laughter. He also had an enormous, uncircumcised unit; it looked like a giant worm and I had an uncomfortable sensation that he found his own nakedness arousing. The window over my bed looked out onto the courtyard and a gloomy statue—the courtyard where I now stood decades later.
A little chamber of horrors, it was. I nearly went mad from the bewilderment of it all. I couldn’t get over the notion: when I went up the Ferris wheel, I had a girlfriend; when I came down, I didn’t. How could this be? What kind of a world was it where things like this could occur? What are human beings really like? Is language simply a disguise, a way to keep people off the scent of who you really are and what you really want?
After lights out, I took out my little plastic viewer and put it to my eye and pushed down on the button—and there we were.
There we were.
I ran away in the middle of the next night. I slipped out the window into the courtyard and scampered past the statue into the shadows.
It took me all night to hitchhike to the American border crossing. By then the sun had come up; cars streamed by in the brilliant sunlight.
“Where are you going today?” the customs agent said at the mouth of the bridge.
“Niagara Falls,” I said.
“For how long?”
“Just the day.”
“Why aren’t you in school today?”
“It’s a scholars’ holiday. Do you want to see my student card?”
“Not particularly,” he said, amused by his own dryness. “Away you go.”
I walked twenty-five, fifty, a hundred yards along the bridge; I looked down at the river crashing below me; the wind picked up; it blew my hair on end. I was seized with the desire to start running, to run and run and run. All my life I had had the suspicion that I was a bad boy and that I was going to be punished for it, that one day a kind of giant fly swatter was going to come down on me with a terrible whap. And now here I was, being truly bad, midway across the bridge, a rule breaker of the first order, a middle finger extended to law and order and . . . and nothing. There was no fly swatter. No God, no hell, no punishment. Nobody even paying attention, much less punishing. A blind man came tapping his way along the bridge toward me, heading to the Canadian side, his black suit flapping in the high wind from the river. I waited till he got past me and then I broke into a run. I ran all the way across the bridge and when I landed at the very end, when I stepped onto an American sidewalk, I swear I was a different boy than the one who had started on the other side.
The sun had set now behind the school’s clock tower, its round face slowly yellowing. The door to my old dormitory burst open, and a crowd of teenage boys spilled raggedly out into the courtyard. They looked at me quickly—I could have been a pole or a bicycle rack—and hurried across the flagstones. It must have been dinnertime. I waited till the last one had gone up the steps and into the building; from where I stood, you could hear them moving down the hallway toward the dining room, those high, excited voices.
I looked again at the window of my old room. The student who lived there must have turned off the light and I could see only my reflection in the window.
I lingered in the growing darkness a little longer. There was something more I wanted; there always is. I was trying to imagine what I might have thought that night as I slipped into the October darkness, running from shadow to shadow, running across playing fields and bridges, what would I have said if someone had told me that one night many, many years later, when my hair was grey, when I was older than the teachers who teach here (strange notion), that I’d end up back in this courtyard.
And why, I’m not sure, but leaving the school property (I could see two paunchy old boys heffing around the track), I felt a great tenderness for that young boy darting into the night. I found myself thinking that he was, above all else, more than reckless, more than daring, more than naive, something more. Some extraordinary quality that I no longer possess. The lack of which, when you think about it, is probably a good thing at my age.
And who would have believed it—that Clarissa Bentley would be my great liberator? The dispeller of superstition. A cruel little girl who grew up to be a dishonest adult but who, more than my mother who adored me, more than an English teacher who inspired me, gave me the rule breaker’s freedom for life. A blessing from a monster.