The very exquisite melancholy of Acting Vice Principal Pierce was a sight to behold. He was tall and skinny, fair-haired, with a loose, bent-shouldered gait. His smile for all its brightness was easily erased; it slipped off his mouth like a glove. He had no wife. No wife and no children. If you ran into him at the supermarket after school, you’d catch him floating thoughtfully down the immaculate aisles, pushing a cart with almost nothing inside it. Chicken breasts, lettuce, yogurt, and wine. He drove an old, long-finned Dodge with New York plates and a snaking crack in the side window—the scar, it was rumored, of some errant gunshot back in the city. A jealous husband? A drug deal gone bad? Nobody knew. The car’s shocks, as if bending to the weight of the driver’s secrets, sagged and sighed.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. P.”
“Hey.”
Still, Oren Pierce was that rare thing: a vice principal who wasn’t an asshole. He was boyish, congenial, good-looking, and all in all, rather easy to avoid. He was rarely to be found in his office. He rarely yelled. He rarely indulged in pointless power plays or random disciplinary actions. When he encountered students in the hallways he rarely asked to see their bathroom passes, and when he did and found them wanting he rarely gave out detentions. He had only been promoted, if a promotion it was, a few months before; he was still finding his way. Every afternoon he stalked the labyrinthine corridors with his clip-on walkie-talkie, a minotaur in black denim, lingering attentively at the doorways of the classrooms, the teachers’ lounge, the computer lab, the gleaming gym with its dangling, clustered ropes. His face loomed against the windows, as if looking for something—a way out, a way in, it wasn’t clear. Meanwhile he circled the peripheries.
“Hey, Mr. P, I think they’re looking for you down at the office.”
Oren nodded. The school, or half the school anyway, had been left in his care, a challenge to which he had no choice but rise. Apparently Teddy Hastings had tapped him for the vice principal job last summer, and then gone off on his abrupt sabbatical—gone off, it was said, like a wayward rocket, in a wobbly, flaming spiral—leaving no instructions or navigational instruments behind. Even now, the fallout of Hastings’s departure had not yet settled into clarity. The budget, half a dozen curricular issues, and at least one knotty tenure case were still unresolved, and now of course there was the Blackburn fiasco, all of which required some rigorous vetting from Oren and his fellow vice principal, Zoe Bender, with whom he shared power.
It was hardly a fair arrangement. Zoe, with her eighteen years of distinguished service, her hard-won doctorate in moral development, her handsome Eileen Fisher ensembles and officious pageboy haircut, had both the will and the tools to be acting principal; moreover, she had the experience, having stepped into Teddy Hastings’s shoes many times in the past, even on some occasions when his feet were still in them. Zoe was a skilled administrator, it must be said. On In Service days she brought in big, flaky homemade pies and left them on the table in the teachers’ lounge with a note (“ENJOY!”) she never signed, though no one failed to recognize the handwriting. The secretaries adored her. Parents sought her out at concerts. Her office was full of tributes, framed photos, memory books. Why hadn’t she been named acting principal? Only a flagrant act of perversity, of reckless, heedless passive-aggression—all qualities for which Teddy Hastings was famous—would seek to deprive her of the title and salary that were rightfully hers. But then Zoe Bender was something of an expert in the field of deprivation. She had made her mark in that area, it was said, a long time before.
As for Oren, he’d made a mark, or a smudge anyway, in a number of areas. That was the problem. His childhood had been a shower of gold. Doting parents, Quaker day schools, piano, chess, a tasteful but lucrative bar mitzvah, summer camps of every kind…no comforts were denied him, no deep wounds were lodged. In high school he’d been popular and canny, high-achieving; the girls had favored him with their blessings, his garage band was the best in town. Flying off to college, shooting down the runway in that big, gleaming jet, sunlight sparking giddily off the wings, his eyes had grown moist from the sheer dazzle of his future. But somehow when he got to Stanford, he never quite managed to land. For years he’d skidded from department to department, adding and dropping courses, trying on majors in the same inquisitive and fastidious manner he tried on clothes. Nothing fit. For years he’d been told he was a cool, gifted, creative person. But gifted how? Creative in what way? In his poetry workshop, he specialized in white space. In the painting studio, the old masters he sought to emulate turned their backs on him. He could stretch out a canvas perfectly well; what he could not do was fill one. All through his youth he’d understood, with precocious solemnity, that somewhere just out of view, in the banquet room of his future, an extraordinary meal was being prepared for him alone. Now came the hard part: narrowing his appetites to a single dish. After so much promise, no one actuality proved enough; too much of the world’s plenitude was missing. And so he wound up like a lot of his classmates, loitering in cafés, reading poetry and art criticism of a theoretical nature and writing notes in his journal even he couldn’t bring himself to reread.
He was good at smoking hash, actually. He was pretty goddamn masterful at that.
The drugs he’d done along the way, that was small, ephemeral stuff mostly, gone up in smoke. His dreams by now had calcified; the fine point of his will had frayed. The hash, looking back, had been a holding action, a way of stopping time while the equity of his potential gathered interest. But there was no stopping time. It went ahead and did its thing, whether you were with it or not.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. Pierce.”
For years now he’d been wandering through the desert of his unformed intentions—though he preferred to see it as a quest—following lines in the sand from one hopeful and shimmering vision to the next. Always beginning, then ending, then beginning again, a motion in search of a motive, a train in search of a track. Even after his father had died, and his mother began to fail; even after his first love had broken his heart, and he’d retributed for it with his second; even after his various graduate studies in law and film and rabbinical school and social work had come to nought; even after his friends, one by one, had jumped ship, swum to the comforts of shore, and begun to take root in the quotidian terra firma—which always looked like quicksand to him—he’d drifted on, until finally, after a decade of disappointment, of keeping all options open not closed (“You like to look over people’s shoulders,” Sabine told him once, “especially your own”), he’d arrived here, at river’s end, where there were practically no options whatsoever.
Well, he supposed it was progress of a sort. The end of his beginnings, his false starts and hopeful embarkations. He had been a luftmensch, an aspirant, too long. Time to burrow in and build himself a life from the ground up.
“Wassup, Mr. Pierce.”
These days he defined himself more by what he wasn’t than by what he was. He was not a lawyer. Neither was he an artist, a rabbi, an independent filmmaker, a psychiatric social worker. These were his lost boys, the shadow selves he’d failed to become along the way. But perhaps that was being too harsh on himself, Oren thought. Perhaps he’d actually succeeded—succeeded in avoiding these false selves, thereby maintaining his freedom to become the formidable and significant person he was even now in the process of becoming.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce, can I get a late pass?”
“I think Ms. Bender’s looking for you, Mr. Pierce.”
Whom did they see when they saw him? Someone too different to learn from, or too similar? The mirror still offered, floating in the amber of his irises, the fossilized particles of his youth. Traces of it too were in his excitable cheeks, his high, avid brow, his golden dome of corkscrewed curls. But there were hints of maturity—or was it dissipation?—as well. His face had grown longer. The first white hairs, unnaturally elongated and smooth, had begun to insinuate themselves at his temples. He was no longer the youngest person in the room. He’d turned the corner somehow since his arrival in Carthage. Or perhaps the arrival itself had changed him. He remembered winding around the traffic rotary that cold October evening—broke, gaunt, pleasantly strung out on speed, peering through a windshield fogged with his own breath, looking for the unmarked road that might lead him to Sabine’s house, to which of course he had no directions. People in shapeless sweaters stared at him blankly from the crosswalks. What, were you supposed to stop for pedestrians up here, when there were so few of them, and they were dressed so badly? Huddled over the dashboard in his black leather coat, wild-haired and bug-eyed, Oren must have looked like some anarchist or refugee, an outlaw in midflight. And in a sense he was. In flight from a life far too flight-heavy already, and hence in flight on some level from flight itself.
Ah, the frequent flier, his father used to greet him, half admiringly, half not, on the occasional stopover in South Jersey. How’s the air up there anyway?
Well, now he knew. They both did. The air was thin; it would not sustain weight. Which was why no sooner did he alight in a new city—Seattle, Paris, Prague, Ann Arbor—than he began plotting his departure for the next. And now he’d left New York, which he’d supposed the final stop, in flight from all the venues in which he’d whittled away the last golden shavings of his youth: Columbia Law School (two years), NYU film school (eight months), Hebrew Union College (three months), and the CUNY program in social welfare studies (six months); from all of which he had, depending on whom you asked, either not chosen to graduate (his view) or chosen not to graduate (his therapist’s) or made no choice regarding graduation whatsoever (everyone else’s). In flight as well from Sabine, and his mother, and from a dozen other once amiable relationships that had ossified or attenuated or somehow gone wrong. In flight from his many haunts and habits, the bars and coffee shops, the movie houses, the hotdog-and-papaya joints, the washed-out light at Julian’s, the narrow underground aisles of the Strand, the spindly, yellow-skinned rotisserie chickens he’d buy at the Korean grocers and pick the wings off with his fingers. Yes, he’d given them all up. To succeed in life, his therapist liked to say, one had to make choices, to say yes to some things and say no to others. That was how the maturity business operated. And everyone agreed Oren needed maturing. Even the people he did not write checks to for $105 an hour agreed on this point.
“Dude, I fell asleep. I forgot it was even on.”
The first no was to his therapist. This to show them both he was serious. The second no was to the city itself. The third, renouncing all options to his rent-controlled studio in Alphabet City, was the most fateful no of all. He’d hesitated, down at the Carthage post office, before dropping his notarized letter through the OUT OF TOWN slot. It seemed an irretrievable message. And so it was. Even now he still dreamed of that apartment in all its shitty, claustrophobic glory, the blue-veined bathtub in the kitchen, the galaxy of cracks on the ceiling, the parched aspiring tendrils of the coleus plants, all those webby, intricate designs that had held him in place for five years. Who was living there now? It didn’t matter: Oren Pierce was not. That bridge was a cinder. He had a new place now. A new life. New goals.
He’d learned a few things about goal-making since moving to Carthage, had found a strategy of sorts laid out in the administrator’s handbook in his office. First you identified your particular need areas, then you reconfigured your systems and procedures to achieve them. The goals had to adhere to certain requirements. They had to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, and Time-bound. SMART goals.
“Hey, Mr. P.”
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Wassup, Mr. Pierce.”
If on close analysis the choice of Carthage was not strictly, or even loosely, his own—he’d chosen it because Sabine had scored a job there, and he was in reckless, abject pursuit of her at the time—then he would refrain from close analysis, from any analysis at all. The facts on the ground were simple. He was here. And here he would stay. Because you had to be some where, apparently. And if you were going to be somewhere, you couldn’t ask for a more congenial, low-impact environment than Carthage, with its cornfields and dairy farms and craft collectives, its postcardlike downtown in which one could buy, if one chose, something like eight different varieties of maple syrup. True, Oren didn’t care for maple syrup, or any of the breakfast foods that went with it, pancakes and waffles and so on. But he liked the idea of maple syrup, of having a cabinet at home—of having a home at home—with maple syrup and all that other heavy, bland American stuff on the shelves, a place where you could either make pancakes and waffles or not, according to your personal preference, as the light streamed through the windows and the birds twittered musically in the trees. And that was what Carthage offered. A healthy grounding in the essentials. Weather, shelter, good light, local foods. A town free of urban pressures and noise, urban intrusions.
So free in fact was his new home of urban pressures and noise and intrusions that it struck Oren on first glance as incredibly boring and unreal, an impression his second and third glances did little to change. The trouble with Carthage, he thought, was that it resembled not so much an actual town as a movie location, a movie about a small, boring, unreal town like Carthage. Oren had worked on such a movie, as it happened, two years back, a dismal independent called The Unknowables, directed by his friend Roger Barstow from NYU. Roger was one of those fiery, long-maned, take-no-prisoners young-Turk types, as Roger himself would cheerfully tell you. What he wasn’t was a director. Among the crew the film was dubbed The Unwatchables. It had some minor success on the film festival circuit, played the Thirteenth Street Quad for a week, then went straight to the back of the video stores. Oren logged no little time in the back of video stores these days himself. Such was the social life of a single man stranded in the provinces.
True, looking back, the decision to follow Sabine up here to Carthage—moody, unreliable Sabine—was itself rather dismal and independent, given Oren’s antipathy for small, boring, unreal towns, and also his academic status at the time, a mere three credits short of taking his master’s from CUNY, and also of course his romantic status: that Sabine had, to be ruthlessly linear about the chronology, already broken up with him two months before.
“There’s this dependency issue,” she’d announced the day the job came through, toweling dry her hair after a shower. “Like part of me wants to stay with you and part of me doesn’t, and I can’t figure out which part is the good, admirable part and which part is the bad, cowardly part.”
Oren had stood there nodding both yes and no without ever quite being aware he was nodding at all. Meanwhile he couldn’t help but notice that the kimono she’d put on—a glittery purple silk, frantic with doves—was his least favorite article of her clothing, hanging as it did in a weirdly unflattering way, and clashing as it did with her wide hazel eyes, and coming as it did from her previous lover, Jonno, a mixed-media artist who lived next to the matzo factory on Rivington Street. “I vote you stay,” he’d said. “That would get my vote.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if I stayed. I mean, for a living. I’ve got no gigs lined up for fall.”
“What about the New School? They love you there.”
“Night courses for lawyers, dilettantes, and lost souls? I’ve done that, thank you. They pay about, what, a month and a half’s rent?”
“Look, I understand,” he’d said, putting aside for the moment that they had met at one of those night courses for lawyers, dilettantes, and lost souls. And a truly inspiring class it had been too. He’d hated to drop it; though he had, of course, halfway through the semester, not because he was sleeping with the dark, gangly, underfed-looking instructor—that came later—but to better concentrate on finishing up his law courses and beginning what were conceivably in retrospect his somewhat dilettantish film studies at NYU. He was a big one for higher education, all right. “You’re overqualified for that, I agree. But there’ll be other jobs. Real jobs. In the city.”
“I’m not qualified for other jobs. I’m barely qualified for this replacement thing. You know how tight the job market is here. Even Jonno says—”
“Wait, even Jonno says what?”
“Nothing.”
“Even Jonno says what?”
“Nothing, okay? Nothing.”
“I don’t understand how Jonno even talks. How can he talk if you don’t see him anymore? There’s a philosophical level on which I’m pretty sure that can’t take place.”
“There are other levels too,” Sabine said mildly.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we can’t all be as philosophical as you are. You have to start somewhere, that’s the reality. You can’t go from being a part-time flunky to a tenured professor at Yale. There are stages in between.”
“Wait, since when do you want to be a tenured professor at Yale?”
“Look, I’m sick of flinching every time the Visa bill comes, okay? I’m not like you, Oren. All this freelancing and insecurity…it’s not a game for me. I was born insecure, okay? I can’t do it anymore. I need health benefits. And don’t tell me it won’t help to apply for jobs and grants on a nice piece of stationery with the Carthage College logo. Don’t tell me that won’t help.”
It was, of course, eminently and practically true: it would help. So persuasive was she on this subject that Oren, by nature something of a dreamer, turned practical himself. That is, he begged. He was thirty years old, and Sabine had been his fourth and most serious romance; how many was a man given that he should surrender now without a battle? No, a fossil fuel like love, quarried from whatever deep, turbulent, and mysterious inner source, was not endlessly renewable: you had to fight to keep it. You had to tough it out, put some troops on the ground, conduct a Gulf War of your own. So Oren drew himself up to his full height and flung wide his arms, as if to show off a fresh new pair of invisible stigmata, and began to repeat more or less every argument his therapist had advanced so expensively over the past two years—about getting on with things, about the slow, winding road to maturity and growth, and the need to take shelter there with another person, and the hard, persistent labor required to build and maintain that shelter, and so on and so forth. Sabine frowned as he spoke. Her expression, which he tried not to observe too closely, was affectionate but distant, even nostalgic, as if she were already on the Hudson train headed north, time’s black wheels pounding away, flattening all that was present into the past. So he talked faster.
“Wait,” she said, when he was through. “Are you, like, proposing? Is that what’s going on here?”
“Am I like proposing what?”
“Because you make it all sound so joyless. And if you’re talking about the whole marriage-and-children thing here, if that’s what this is about…” She paused. “Is that what this is about? Honestly, with you it’s hard to tell sometimes.”
It hadn’t occurred to Oren that he was proposing marriage and children, exactly, but now that the idea had been introduced, it seemed possible he was. What was that line from Kafka he’d copied down so assiduously in his college journal? There are questions we would never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operations of nature. He remembered puzzling over the words in his dorm room, sensing in them, at nineteen, some obscure, only vaguely proximate application to his life. Meanwhile his girlfriend at the time, Ravenna Fox, had just gone off to Capitola with Steve Auerbach, her TA in Marxist Theory, a class she’d only taken in the first place because Oren had bullied her into “joining the struggle.” Ten minutes in he was tired of the struggle and ready to shop around for another course. But not Ravenna. Not the Emma Goldman of Woodland Hills. “I thought you were so committed,” she whispered hotly. In her voice he’d heard a new, merciless sibilance, the hiss of a deflating tire. So long, see you later. Why were women always taking him up with so much fervor, Oren wondered, and then leaving him with so little? Where were the operations of nature that could deliver him from that?
Anyway he doubted Kafka could provide much help in these matters. That doomed, dreamy bachelor, what questions was he talking about anyway? Marriage, or death? Did he—did anyone—even know the difference?
“Listen,” he said now, “here’s the thing—”
“Just answer the question, please.”
“I’m trying to, Sabine.”
“Well, stop trying.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to stop trying.”
She stared at him, or rather through him, watching the tinny, creaking gerbil wheel turn and turn in his head, the poor animal, for all his exertions, never quite reaching a destination.
“Okay, well, look, what if I was? Do you even want the whole marriage-and-children thing?”
And now despite herself Sabine’s eyes went moist, the dewy green in them ascendant, the hard, nutlike brown crumbling away. She was not so tough as she thought. Who was? At that moment she looked rather frail and drawn, hollow-socketed, chewing on her plump lower lip as was her habit in moments of intensity, whether shuddering in sexual transport or lost in skeptical deliberations. Regretfully, this appeared to be the latter. He watched her recede into herself, her gaze wandering, her arms crossed over her chest like a shield, weighing the package of her doubts at that moment—her parcels of romantic melancholy, her freight of fear regarding aloneness—against a lifetime of disappointments and betrayals. Her parents had met in a deportation camp; her mother had died when she was six. What could he possibly add to the stores of her knowledge when it came to getting on with things?
“Let’s wait and see,” she’d finally announced, in a tone he recognized from a thousand previous deferrals. “You’ve got your orals to concentrate on anyway. Let’s just wait and see.”
So that’s what they did. They waited and saw. He waited while Sabine packed up her studio and shipped it north via UPS; he waited while she stalked lower Broadway in search of a down coat and some good thick leather boots; and while she handed the keys to her apartment and her still-valid Metrocard to a twenty-one-year-old Cooper Union student who could not believe her luck; and then, when no time was left for waiting any longer, no time for waiting at all, he saw her go. As she broke their embrace and elbowed open the door of his car, she sobbed, and her eyes filmed over. He saw that too, and God help him, took comfort from it, even as he acknowledged to himself that Sabine cried easily and often, at both life and the movies—sometimes at TV commercials—and so her sobbing now, in what was beginning to feel like a very bad movie indeed, or a hideously extended advertisement for Zoloft or Wellbutrin or Maker’s Mark premium whiskey (he imagined the bottle he’d buy, the pleasure it would give him to violate its waxy, blood-red seal), did not seem as meaningful as it might have, nor prevent her from waving for a redcap and vanishing a moment later, swallowed up by the dragon’s mouth of Penn Station, the breath of which was flavored as always with a rich, sulfurous scent of hell.
The truth is he was glad she’d gone. He was. Among all the other liberating new developments her absence made possible, he was now free to go ahead and fail his orals in peace. He didn’t even try to pass; he merely stared at the feet of the committee members, the droopy socks, the sensible thick-soled shoes, waiting for them to take as much pity on him as he was taking on himself, to release him from the company of high-achieving academics and send him on his way. Surely they recognized a fuckup when they saw one; the condition, especially in grad school, was hardly rare. But no, there was the theater of communal disappointment to be performed first, the leave of absence to be nominally requested and then nominally granted, before he was let out to trudge back across town, under the throbbing gaze of a motionless sun, in search of the by-now-highly-mandatory bottle of Maker’s Mark.
Along the way he brooded and sulked. As brooding and sulking was going to be his new vocation for a while, it seemed best to go ahead and get started. Shirtless drunks nodded gravely from the doorway, welcoming him to his new, losing team. The streets, having baked on high all morning, gave off a yeasty summer aroma of old trash, crystallized urine, and scorched turds. The sidewalks were strewn with remaindered books and old LPs and other discarded objects of obsession. He tried to collect a coherent impression of himself from the shards of reflection he glimpsed in other people’s sunglasses. The pieces did not come together. His life was a two-legged table with nothing on it. He should never have let her go. He should never have proposed marriage. He should never have waited so long to propose marriage. He should never have moved to New York, or Prague, or Seattle, or Paris. He decided to go on walking and cataloging all the things he should never have done in his life but did anyway, then all the things he should have done in his life and failed to do anyway, until he came to the river. Then, what the hell, maybe he’d throw himself in.
The dust of demolition, sickly and gray, rose from the piers. A few ships were going out but none, Oren could not help but notice, were in any sense coming in. He stood at the rail and looked across the river at the dull geometries of New Jersey. The squat refinery domes and low, hazy cliffs, the tall, spindly condo towers advertising expensive vacancies. Yep: still there.
It seemed more or less redundant to kill himself. So he turned around and trudged home.
A train screamed underground, rattling the grates, belching heat. A limo swished past, carrying off his reflection in the black windows. He watched it sail up the Avenue of the Americas and out of sight.
In Washington Square the dealers with their fine radar approached him hopefully, but he waved them away. He had plenty of drugs at home, and that was fortunate; he had every intention of taking them all.
At the corner of St. Mark’s he stopped to buy a soda and drank it down fast, watching people younger than himself go in and out of the tattoo parlor. It was the same cramped and grungy little establishment he’d been walking by twice a day for years, without ever being remotely tempted to go in. He wasn’t tempted to go in now either. What was the point? He hated tattoos, hated needles, hated pains and punctures of all kinds. So no, he wasn’t even tempted to go in.
That he went in anyway, and his motives for doing so, and the actual story of what transpired in that place over the next forty-five minutes…this would come to be shelved, in the branch library of Oren’s memory, among the mysteries. All he knew was that when he reemerged, he felt like another person, a person perspiring heavily, a person with dilated pupils and a lighter wallet. As for his left wrist, it appeared to have fallen victim to some nasty, barbarous accident. It quivered down there at the end of his arm, encircled by a lurid tangle of what might have been thorns. The ink was still wet, but then why shouldn’t it be? An enormous quantity of blood was mixed in.
Great, he thought: another biblical injunction bites the dust. How many were left to break?
For the next few weeks he lay low, virtually underground in fact, spending long days and nights on the sofa, waiting for the pulpy bruises in his wrist and his heart to recede. Sitting there in his Jockey shorts before the overtaxed air conditioner, watching the dust motes, briefly distinct in the failing light, take the last slow turns of their weary arabesques—his eyes, like his manhood, reddened and chafed, drooped sulkily at half-mast—he tried his best to lose himself in the usual self-pitying diversions, namely smoking pot, drinking whiskey, and watching tragic, meandering movies. It was a kind of depressive trifecta. The nice thing about smoking pot and drinking whiskey and watching tragic, meandering movies, Oren decided, was how well they got along together, how amiably they made room for each other on misery’s moldering sofa. It was like being on the receiving end of a really good blow job, say, while also listening to jazz, and also watching a ball game you sort of but didn’t particularly care about—and most ball games fell into this category for Oren—in the background. Each strand of the helix enriched your appreciation of the others; moreover, and here was the really crucial point, none of them demanded much from you, or for that matter anything at all, in the way of decisive action. You didn’t even have to stand up. Simple reception was enough.
Yes, looking back, he had been on the receiving end of some really good blow jobs in his life, Oren reflected warmly, and some really good whiskey, and some really good pot, and some really good movies and ball games, and that was important to keep in mind, all the modest but palpable pleasures he’d been granted in the past, distant though they might feel to him now…but perhaps in retrospect there had been something a bit passive and unhealthy about them, he thought, something he should consider changing radically about himself, provided of course that change did not preclude any future reception of jazz or whiskey or blow jobs or ball games or movies or pot.
The movie-ish thing to do, obviously, was to go up to Carthage and win the girl back. On the other hand, the reality-ish thing to do was to remain where he was, hanging out in his apartment feeling sorry for himself. The consensus among his friends was that any plans of action he concocted vis-à-vis winning back Sabine would come off as transparently foolish and pathetic, and perhaps legally actionable, in execution. To say nothing of how humiliated he would be if she refused him. Not that there was any shortage of humiliation now.
When she finally called, however, on a wan, cool night in September, her voice on the phone fairly pulsed with sadness. He could feel the effort it cost her, holding back. The quivering pizzicato of the heart’s taut strings. Why? He had known she would call. Of course she would call. The lines of possibility could not avoid each other forever—they yearned like all things to converge, to be located, to bend and fold.
“I’m thinking I might come see you sometime,” he said, laying down his cards, such as they were, right away. “That is if you’re up for it.”
He had ample time, in the lengthy and demoralizing silence that followed, to count all the qualifiers in this proposal. Sabine appeared to be counting them too.
“Here’s the deal,” he announced. “If you don’t tell me no, I’m going to go ahead and take that for a yes.”
“And if I tell you no?”
“It’ll depend on how you say it. I’ll have to decide then.”
“You’re always deciding then,” Sabine observed mildly. “Always then, and never now.”
“That’s not a bad thing. That’s actually a good thing. It comes from a very prudent and reasonable aversion to making mistakes.” By way of illustration he held up his wrist, brandishing the dark tattoo, a mistake if there ever was one. But of course Sabine could not see his wrist.
“Not making mistakes,” she said, “can be a mistake too.”
“That’s an interesting theory. Can I just say this though? I have no idea what it means.”
“I know you don’t.” She sighed. “It is amazingly beautiful up here,” she conceded airily, apropos of nothing.
“I know. I was there once, remember? That pretentious little gem I shot with Roger?”
“Roger?” His life and that of his friends, it was fading, fading, from her mind.
“I’m coming up there,” he’d said. “I really am.”
“How’d the orals go? You never told me.”
“They went.”
“Oh, well, I’ve never been able to see you as a therapist. Is that a bad thing to say? I mean, you’ve got good intentions, don’t get me wrong. But you’re not all that much of a listener, and you’re not much into supporting other people, either.”
“Well, neither are you.”
“Exactly. Don’t you think one of us should be better at it, if we’re ever going to be together?”
“If?”
Oren reminded himself that if was just a word, and a short word at that; it was important not to make too much of it. No sooner did he get off the phone, however, than he proceeded to make too much of it. He clutched it to his chest, petted and pampered it like a kitten. True, it was a tiny thing, but how much purring, hopeful vitality rested on its paws. How that lean, vulnerable i and that sturdy, overhanging f, just by getting into bed together, generated a home for themselves at the center of a life.
And that was enough, in the end. That one word. That was all it took to cut him loose, propel him off all the sofas he’d been occupying in recent weeks—his therapist’s, his friend Sandy’s, his own—sublet his apartment, say his good-byes, and soar up the Thruway to Carthage.
Carthage was of course a very pretty New England college town as pretty New England college towns go. Not that Oren had much experience with pretty New England college towns, or for that matter had ever wanted to have it. He’d never fantasized about moving to a pretty New England college town the way he had about such cities as Paris or Prague or Seattle or New York—fantasies that actually moving to those cities, living in them awhile, then ditching them for the next, had left oddly unaffected. But that was the point. This tendency of his to yo-yo from one place to another, his gaze forever trolling backward, through nostalgia’s beaded curtain, to yet another place he’d just left…this failure to live completely in the present, or even partly in the present, was the very thing he must change about himself from this moment forward. And he would. Time to stop running around the globe, he thought, chasing a whisper he no longer heard. You’d have thought the only intensity in life came from pursuit, from the space between what was desired and what was attained. And what had he attained at this point? He’d attained nothing.
No, he was through with all that. Through with frequent flying, with romantic fantasies; those fickle gig-lights had lit his runway too long. Time to shut them off. And he would. Just as soon as he’d pulled off this one last flight. One final, fantastical flight, then he’d hang up his wings for good.
It didn’t hurt that the rents upstate, after all these years in thronged, fantastical cities, were something of a revelation. Funky old Victorian houses, Sabine had told him, could be rented for a song, and that was an attraction, even if in the end she hadn’t rented a funky old Victorian, but a rather prosaic ground-floor flat in the town’s one successful subdivision. Anyway, so what? He’d done just what he said: gone up and won Sabine back. It hadn’t been so difficult. Shorn of her friends, burdened with academic duties, tumid with nostalgia for the city and what she’d taken to calling “the person formerly known as myself,” the poor thing looked, when she opened the door to claim him, as delicate and unguarded as a child. Her nose was swollen red; her front teeth, sallow and uneven, sought purchase on the slope of her lower lip. She stared at him dully, wordlessly. He could hear her breathing, or trying not to breathe, through her mouth. In her eyes the white jelly trembled. He saw hunger there, and perplexity, and something very like amnesia.
“Honey,” he’d cooed, “I’m home.”
She’d already taken a short step back, into the shadow of her rented hallway. “I’ve got a cold,” she said, putting up her hands like a traffic cop. “Better not get too close.”
“Okay.” He nodded, all smiles. Admittedly on the list of reunion fantasies he’d compiled in his head on the Thruway, not getting too close ranked low. Still, it was higher than some of the others, like being screamed at or laughed at or finding her in bed with some thick-limbed, ponytailed country person who worked with his hands. “How about inside the house, though, instead of outside. Is that too close?”
“We’ll see.”
He dropped his duffel bag inside the door and followed her into the foyer, glancing around to see what Sabine had made of the Oren-free life. Not much, from the look of things. The walls were bare, and there was little furniture to speak of, let alone sit on. Indeed, the inside of the house did not seem noticeably more comfortable than the outside.
“All right then,” he said, in the high-pitched, unattractive new voice he’d worked up specially, it seemed, for this occasion, “what now?”
“You don’t know?”
“Not really, no.”
“Look, you’re the one who drove up here,” she said, wiping her nose with a crumpled paper towel. “I’m figuring you must have some plan.”
“That was the plan. The driving up. Honestly, that was as far as it went.”
“Well, no one ever said you weren’t honest.”
“I mean, it’s not like I had it all worked out in my head, like you’d just open the door and we’d jump into each other’s arms and it would all be that simple.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “Because that would really scare me.”
With that she lapsed into thoughtful, conflicted silence, staring down at the fuzzy pink slippers she wore, more or less ironically, in cold weather. Oren was determined to bide his time, to respect her mood for as long as he could and meanwhile to think of something winning and persuasive to say that might liberate them from the drafty silence of the foyer. But he’d just driven two hundred miles without stopping, and a dark, cumulous headache had heaved into view, obscuring for the moment whatever that winning and persuasive thing might be. “A beer might hit the spot though.”
“Sorry,” she said, “I’m on the wagon.”
“That’s okay. I’ve been drinking alone for a while now. I’m getting used to it.”
“What I mean is, there’s no alcohol in the house. Not a drop.”
“I’ll settle for coffee then.”
“Actually I’ve gone off that too.”
“No problem. It’s just that I’ve been on the road all day and there’s this little invisible jackhammer pounding on my eyeballs all of a sudden from behind.”
“How about some tea? I’ve got this great rose-hips tea from the co-op here. Totally organic. You should try it, you’ll love it.”
“I probably would, if I didn’t hate tea so much. Remember?”
“It’s really good with honey,” she went on blithely. What had they done to her up here? It was as if her brain matter, which was totally organic too, had begun to biodegrade. “They sell this fabulous honey at the farmers’ market. It’s made out of lavender.”
“Wow, that does sound fabulous.”
“Good old Oren. The commissar of sardonic remarks. It’s not my fault that you’re always so unhappy, you know.”
Actually, he thought, it is. Anyway he was only teasing. “I was only teasing,” he said. “Lighten up.”
“I have lightened up. You wouldn’t believe how much lightening up I’ve done lately. Ever since I left—”
“Left me, you mean.”
“I was going to say New York.”
“But you didn’t mean New York. You meant me.”
“You don’t know what I meant, Oren. How could you? You barely know what you mean half the time.”
“Admit it. You meant me.”
“Fine. You win, okay? I meant you. Does that make you feel better?”
“You bet.” Indeed it did; it felt so good to be arguing with Sabine again, engaged in their old combat, that he almost felt he had won something. But what had he won? Bile in his throat. Congestion in his heart. Pain in his head. “Listen, I don’t suppose you’ve got any fabulous organic aspirin lying around?”
“No. Honestly, Oren, all this heaviness and fucking around we specialize in, don’t you see? It wears down the system. I’m thirty-one years old: I don’t have time to fuck around. From now on I just want to live close to the ground and do my work.”
“How do you live close to the ground, anyway? I’ve always wondered. What, you get down on all fours?”
She shook her head with what appeared to be genuine sorrow. “And here I was feeling almost happy to see you again.”
“Maybe if we sat down with a couple of really strong alcoholic drinks, we could recapture that feeling.”
“I told you, I’m off all that stuff. No booze, no drugs, no caffeine, no sugar, no meat, no cheese. You’d be amazed how much energy it gives you, letting it all go.”
“It’s funny, but it’s never given me energy to let things go. If anything it takes it away.”
“Maybe you’ve been letting go of the wrong things,” she said.
“What about the furniture? Did you let all that go too?”
“Most of it.” She yawned contentedly. “Remember that ratty old plaid sleeper-sofa I inherited from my uncle? I thought, get real, do I actually want to keep sitting on this for another ten years? So I left it out on the lawn the day I moved in. The next day it was gone. Like a bad dream.”
“Sometimes even ugly sofas come in handy though. Like when you’re really whipped, say, and you need to sit down.”
“I may get another one eventually. I’ll have to see.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could get one tonight?”
“Not likely,” she said. “C’mon, stop being so crabby. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”
He allowed himself to be led, like any polite acquaintance, through the bare wood foyer to the back of the house. There wasn’t a lot to see and he was in no mood to look. But Sabine seemed delighted. “Don’t you love it? It’s so clean and impersonal; it’s like living in a motel. You have no idea how good it feels, coming back here at the end of a long, hard day.”
“Yeah.” Her enthusiasm for this pared-down life of hers was no longer getting on his nerves; it was jumping on them with both feet.
“Don’t get me wrong, I still have my down moods, like anyone else. But it’s like there are more hours in the day now. It’s liberating. Nobody calls to have coffee or lunch or drops by unannounced to ask for favors. Nobody criticizes me to make himself feel better, or tries to undermine me by making snide remarks, or rolls his eyes when I express perfectly valid sentiments…”
Too late, Oren tried to rearrange his features into some approximation of a smile. Who could argue with liberation? It was only the thought of whom she had been liberated from that defeated him. He looked around the kitchen hopelessly. The linoleum was monstrous, and the cabinets were tilted at warped, perilous angles, like a German expressionist film. “I wouldn’t mind lying down,” he said. “I’m beat.”
“Whoops.” She winced. “I don’t have a spare bed either. We’ll have to think about how to do this.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll give it some thought.”
“Just to warn you, I’ve been wheezing and hacking a lot at night. It’s this damned cold. Or it may be allergies. I’ve got this tight-ass dean who’s always on my case. You wouldn’t believe the stress I’m under. I’m not such pleasant company lately, is what I’m trying to say.”
“I’m not such pleasant company lately either, believe me.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
She regarded him for a moment through the narrow gray-green area between her lids. “So, when were you going to tell me about that little eyesore on your wrist?”
“I had the feeling you weren’t going to like it much.”
“Poor Oren.” She frowned, touching the tattoo lightly with her index finger, as if wary of being impaled on its spikes. They would never get married to each other; he was certain of that now. “You didn’t go to those butchers on St. Mark’s, did you?”
“Now she tells me.”
“And you’re usually so cautious and uptight about your body. Repressed, even.”
“Apparently I’ve made some progress in that area. I believe I’m what they call in the trade a real weeper.”
She shook her head. “God, I can’t believe you’re here. It’s hard for me to digest.”
“Me too.”
“I’d hate to think this is just about not wanting to be alone. I really would.”
“What do you mean, just?”
“Come on, Oren. To drive all this way and spring this big surprise…it’s one thing if you really miss me. But what if this whole thing’s just because you feel all needy and horny and lost in your life?”
“What do you mean, just?” he said.
Nonetheless they did, later that night, enjoy a raucous and productive bout of sexual congress on the cold floor of Sabine’s bedroom. This was followed by a lively bipartisan caucus the next morning, before she pedaled off to class on her bike, and then a slower, more deliberate and contentious assembly upon her return. Sabine’s soft cry into the seam of the futon—half-surrender, half-misgiving—at 4:16 that afternoon marked the high point of their second term together, give or take. After that it was strictly a lame-duck session. They cooked, they cleaned, they went to crafts fairs and yard sales, attended lectures and movies, had dinner with Sabine’s new colleagues and then came home to gossip about them, like any young academic couple. But then in the mornings they’d avoid each other’s eyes in the bathroom mirror, the unpacked bags below the sockets, the forking red lines of antagonism that shot out from the pupils like lightning bolts. They were ex-ex-lovers: a double negative. Nothing had been settled; they were only waiting and seeing all over again, listening for some second shoe poised overhead to drop. If she could keep her job another year; if he could find a job; if they got along; if the graft of their transplanted affair would take, and grow…
But if nothing was settled, they told themselves, then everything was still in the air, still possible, within reach. And indeed, everything was. Including the very worst things.
The low point of their second term together was this: one frigid December weekend, Sabine took the train down to the city alone to consult with her allergist, then returned on Sunday evening to announce that though her allergist had gone home with the flu, which was the bad news, a tenure-track job had opened up at Wesleyan effective immediately—Jonno, remember Jonno? He’d been generous enough to recommend her for it—and her dean here, who’d actually turned out to not be such a tight-ass after all, had agreed to let her out of her present contract with a minimum of fuss, and to hire a friend she’d worked with at the New School to replace her. And wasn’t that amazing? Now everything was decided, everything was clear. Sabine would pack up her things at once—it wouldn’t take long—move back to the city, and commute to Wesleyan from there. And that was the good news. That was the big break. That was the new plan. The new plan was already in motion, executing itself and everything else in its path: that was what new plans did. Out with the old and in with the new. Yes, that was the good news, all right, and the low point, and the big break, and the new plan, and the second shoe, and the end, the end at last, of waiting and seeing.
The next move, in Oren’s view, was a no-brainer: return to the city and lick his wounds. How could he stay in Carthage? What would he do up here, and why would he bother to do it, and with whom? No, it was time to admit defeat, time to crawl back to Alphabet City and relearn the basics, the remedial stuff, the ABCs.
And yet, as the days passed in their weightless, uneventful fashion, an odd thing happened, or rather didn’t happen: he stayed right where he was. He’d already spent most of the previous summer licking his wounds down in the city—there was only so clean wounds, it occurred to him, could get. Besides, he sort of wanted to stay. This came as something of a surprise to him, and something of a disappointment as well. In town, the people continued to nod at him tolerantly as he slouched past, delivering unto him their stoic, good-fences-make-good-neighbors expressions, and he liked that. He liked these dispensations of casual goodwill, liked the way no one ever stopped to ask him what he did or had he seen that review in the Times or what did he think of that screening at the Angelika or that new Alsatian bistro in Red Hook, and all for the simple and miraculous reason that no one cared. Why should they? He was a flatlander, a visitor, a vacant circle on the census. Even he was tempted to overlook himself. He had no reason to be here, yet here he was. Striding down the sidewalk, he’d repeat the line to himself like a mantra, not in complaint but in progressive stages of wonder and defiance. No reason to be here, yet here he was! Here he was!
And then his savings began to run out, and with them went some of that wonder and defiance, until at last he was forced to dust off one of his old résumés (there were a number of versions to choose from) and find himself a job. Okay, it wasn’t a particularly interesting job—filling in for a pregnant social studies teacher at the local middle school—but that was okay, he’d been interesting for years, he almost preferred to do something steady and boring and prosaic at this point, something mindless.
Not that he’d put it in quite those words of course, interviewing in the principal’s office. What he’d said was “I’ve been on the student side of the desk for a long time. I’ve had some excellent teachers along the way. Now I’d like to try to give something back.”
“A noble sentiment,” the principal, Teddy Hastings, said mildly, taking a quick look at his vita. “Like what for instance?”
“Whatever I have, I guess.”
“Ah.” Hastings fixed him with a penetrating stare. He was a broad, thorny, agitated-looking person. His eyebrows were wild. Hairs flew out like notes from the whirled horns of his ears. His cheeks were pitted and flushed; his nose a bright pink bulb in the middle of his face. His forearms were huge slabs of meat, knotty with veins. They strained against the buttons on his shirtsleeves. Fortunately Oren was here for a job interview and not a wrestling match. The guy would break him in two. “Well, I hope you’ve got a lot then.”
“I hope so too.”
Hastings’s tie, a hideous, mustard-colored thing, dangled askew as he flipped through the pages of Oren’s vita, the length and vagueness of which document appeared to perplex him. A thick shock of hair, gingery white, plunged over the frames of his glasses. He brushed it away reflexively, like a horse swishing off flies.
Oren looked around the office. The ceiling was discolored; the windows were frosted shut. BUILDING A FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE, the school’s motto, was emblazoned on butcher paper on the wall. And yet nothing about Teddy Hastings’s office—the dented file cabinets, the congested in-box and out-box, the anarchic stacks of memos and letters shucking off the oppressions of their paperweights, the wayward constellations of stains, doodles, and coffee rings on the blotter, whimsically connected by fountain pen, the cheap bookshelves with their faded veneers, bowing under the weight of all those instructor’s manuals, state licensing handbooks, and yellowed, inked-up standards like The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and Call of the Wild—suggested the construction was complete. Off to one side of the desk sat the constituents of the principal’s lunch: a pint of milk, a tuna sandwich, a navel orange in a resealable Baggie, and a roll of Tums.
“Well.”
Hastings took out a handkerchief and blew his high, beaky nose like a trumpet. Oren fidgeted. A few minutes before, sauntering through the glass doors, webbed with shatterproof wire, and signing in with a flourish at the front desk, he’d have sworn he was the star of this particular movie. But now he wasn’t so sure. He smoothed the front of his shirt, which he’d neglected to iron properly that morning, and sat up straight, waiting for the lines on Hastings’s forehead, dipping and merging like indices on a chart, to come to a rest.
“Christ,” the principal said at last, “you can’t tell much, can you, reading these things.” His molars, grinding like pistons, gnawed away at a Tums, or perhaps the inside of his cheek. “You could be overqualified, you could be underqualified. For all I know you could be just right. I’ve given up predicting.”
But isn’t that your job? Oren wanted to say.
“Just talk to me about this, in your own words.” Hastings leaned back in his executive chair, his fingers steepled on his chest, his ankles scissored up on his desk, not so much casually as belligerently, as if daring Oren to peek below the cuffs of his slacks, at the rounded calves with their dense, springy fur. “I’m curious. Why would a young man like you wind up here?”
Oren thought for a moment. “I suppose he’d wind up here for pretty much the same reasons I did.”
The principal smiled, or at least his mouth did; his eyes remained steady. On the ledge behind the desk an antique globe tilted sidelong on its axis, its outer regions blurry with dust.
“Okay, look,” he said, “I realize my vita isn’t the most conventional document—”
“Oh, people always think their vitas are unconventional. And yet so few really are.” Hastings yawned good-naturedly. “Though yours is more eclectic, shall we say, than most. It reminds me of a tapas bar I ate at once.”
Despite himself Oren was encouraged by this. At least the man knew what a tapas bar was.
“On the other hand, you’re young, right? What are you, twenty-eight?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Okay, that’s young too. It makes sense to take your time, explore your options. Why get trapped in one place prematurely if you can help it?”
“I’ve been fortunate, it’s true. I’ve had a lot of opportunities, and not too many responsibilities weighing me down. So I’ve been able to experiment a bit. Take my time.”
“It’s good to experiment, up to a point. It’s how we learn.” The bullish intensity of Hastings’s stare, an effect of either the lenses he wore or some turbocharged antidepressant, was disconcerting. “You’ll find that our students here, they’re experimenting too. Trying things out. It’s what makes them so challenging to work with.”
“Yes, I’ve always heard that about junior high.”
“We call it middle school now.”
“Middle school. I’ll have to remember that.”
“Of course when people say challenging,” Hastings observed neutrally, “they don’t generally mean ‘challenging.’ They mean ‘horrible,’ don’t they?”
Oren allowed, with the merest shrug of his shoulders, that perhaps this was generally so.
“Well, it’s true,” the principal said, “they can be horrible. But then so can we, right? The kids mirror back to us our own failings. Take all these terrific new shortcuts we’ve developed. Standards testing, bloc scheduling, Web-based research. They’ll be around for a while and then along will come something newer still. The kids aren’t stupid. They see what’s going on. Their teachers are way overloaded—they can’t fit everything in and also teach critical thinking and writing and also deal with all the state-mandated testing. It’s easier to go through the motions. Pass out the old worksheets and get by. No wonder they’re so bored. I’d be bored too. Wouldn’t you?”
Oren nodded yes, then shook his head no. Having never once been sent to the principal’s office as a student, it seemed a regressive development to find himself sitting in one now. On the other hand he hadn’t eaten since breakfast and was enduring the latest in a series of migraine headaches, so it might have been that.
“It’s not the kids who flatten out,” Hastings went on, “it’s us. We’re lazy, set in our ways, we’ve stuck with burnout teachers it’s impossible to get rid of, and the kids all know it. But they’re not as jaded as they want to be; you can still do good work with them if you try.” Thoughtfully he examined the orange on his desk, turning it this way and that, as if plotting an incision. “Every brain goes through two major growth spurts, according to the research. One as a baby, the other in middle school. So naturally they’re confused at this age. They should be. Their frontal cortexes are going berserk. It’s a jungle in there, see? All those half-formed cells, fighting it out for survival. The ones that get stimulated and fed—they grow and prosper. The rest dry up and die. It’s a Darwinian process and it never ends. Ever been to a jungle, Oren?”
“No.”
“I only ask because of that tattoo on your wrist. What do they call those, tribals, right?”
“I’m not sure what they’re called.”
“I see them on the kids these days. The design if I’m not mistaken comes from Borneo.”
“Does it?” He’d meant to keep his damn wrist covered. But what difference did it make? The world will always unmask your mistakes.
“My daughter tells me these things. They’re popular down at the high school, she says, particularly among the basketball players. I assume that’s why you got one, because of basketball?”
“No.” Now that the salad days of brain growth were officially behind him, there was no reason not to go on and admit, “Actually I’m not sure why. It was just this weird thing I did.”
“I only ask because we’ve got this Wednesday-night pickup game at the municipal center. It’s not too bad, if you don’t mind playing with a bunch of old hackers. Come on out sometime. We could use a little height.”
“That’s a nice offer. But I’m afraid I haven’t played ball in years.”
“Come anyway. Get the blood flowing. Mix it up a little. If you could have, you’d have gone to Borneo, right? That’s what you wanted—something new. Something really rough and different. The tattoo was just a shortcut, am I right?”
Oren shrugged. He was beginning to feel he had gone to Borneo. Hastings’s office felt airless, impenetrable, crowded with knickknacks and orphaned texts and globby misshapen art projects. He no longer cared, if he ever had, whether he got the job or not. Why go back to square one, to the raw Crayola primitivism of childhood?
“Anyway give it some thought,” Hastings said briskly, looking at his watch. “The basketball I mean. But the job too. It may not be what you’re looking for. I know you’ve done some TAing, but believe me you’ll find this more rigorous. You’ve got the federal assessment tests to teach to. The state mandates. The parents’ expectations. And then of course there’s the kids. The thing with the kids is to stay honest. Otherwise they’ll shred you to pieces. Don’t sell them short. They’re still highly adaptable. Whatever they learn at this point, the connections they make—some of those are going to last forever.”
“Great,” Oren said. “I’m all for adaptability.”
“I know.” Hastings had begun to tear the skin off the orange in his hand, digging into the flesh with his thick fingers. Juice spritzed in the air. “I can see that from your vita.”
Oren flushed. “I don’t regret any of those fields I studied. It’s just, I’m tired of working on an abstract plane. I want to do something actual for a change. Get down in the trenches.”
“Of course the actual can get old.”
“I realize that. But so can the other.”
Hastings nodded. Suddenly he looked rather glum behind his corrective lenses, as men his age do, Oren thought, when considering how old things get. “Want some of this orange? It’s tasty.”
“No thanks.”
Hastings frowned; apparently this was the wrong answer. In fact the orange did look tasty. Why was Oren withholding himself? He watched the man wolf it down, then toss the rind in the trash. “It’s funny, you don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d go out and get a tattoo for no reason. It raises the issue of stability.”
“Look, if you’re worried that I won’t stick around, let me assure you: I’m fully prepared to sign a contract for as long as you say. A year. Two years, if you prefer.”
“The board will insist on one. For protection.”
“I don’t need protection.”
“Not yours,” Hastings said. “Ours. According to Janis Lee, the teacher you’ll be replacing, she’s coming back next year, baby or no baby. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t. Babies change things, don’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well believe me, they do. Babies, wives, houses. The whole catastrophe, as they say.”
Oren laughed. “A little catastrophe,” he said, “might be good for some people.”
“Maybe so. Anyway listen, bottom line?” Hastings pushed back his chair. “I’d like to say we’ll think about your application and get back to you, but frankly we’re in real need here, so if you want the job, it’s yours.”
“Great.” In a small way Oren felt disappointed: he’d been hoping for greater resistance, the friction of a formidable challenge. But perhaps that would come later.
“You’ll be a long-term sub to start. The certification requirements you’ll have to deal with over the summer. There are special arrangements we can make. You’ll have some pretty boring dues to pay next year, frankly. That is, if you’re still here.”
“I’ve got no other plans.”
“Plans change. Take a day or two to think it over. I’ll hunt up a copy of this year’s curriculum. It won’t be hard: it’s pretty much the same as last year’s. You’ll find your worksheets and benchmark goals laid out for you there. A man of your potential should have no problem following along.”
Oren nodded. Was he being teased? “I’ll do my best.”
“And if the actual turns out not to be your speed? What then?”
“I’ll adjust my speed,” he said.
Not twenty-four hours later, Oren was offered a much better job at the state Historical Society, with a higher salary, greater freedom, and more flexible hours. He turned it down at once. The last thing he wanted was more free and flexible hours. He’d had too many free hours already and spent them too meagerly, too wastefully, too unwisely, too unwell. His faith in freedom was broken; he wanted to be bound by other people’s schedules, live the unfree inflexible life, like everyone else. So he said no to the better job, and yes to the duller one, because that, he seemed to recall, was how you went about the maturity business, by saying no to some things and yes to others. The greater the refusal, the fuller the reward. To say no was the key. To say no, and go on saying it, until yes sprang open like a magic door, like a lover’s thighs, a parting sea…
Nowadays he had it pretty much perfected. Now he awoke each morning in a bed with no partner, in a house with no character, read a paper with no news, consumed a glass of juice with no pulp and a bowl of yogurt with no fat, kissed no one good-bye, spent his mornings addressing students with no interest in a subject with no parameters and for which in any case he had no training, and his afternoons wandering the hallways with no particular purpose, making no plans, no decisions, no mistakes, all in the service of fulfilling his duties as an acting assistant principal in a middle school with no principal.
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, Mr. Pierce, they’re looking for you in the office.”
Strange: for all his expeditions over the years, his peripatetic yo-yoing across the country, Oren had never actually landed in America before, never docked, unloaded, and established a colony in the heartland. And now here he was. Enfolded by forests and mountains, in a town with eight churches, one movie theater, four restaurants, one supermarket, and two state-run liquor stores. So much for creature comforts. And yet comfort-seeking creatures flocked up here regardless, to stay at the inns and watch the leaves fall and browse for antiques. And discomfort-seeking creatures too, hikers, hunters, skiers, fly-fishers, kayakers, people practiced in the arts of outdoor extremity, who put on cumbersome clothes and endured painful trials of endurance so as to remember—or was it forget?—what it felt like to be fully alive.
Oren had spent that first year in Carthage wandering up and down the same five blocks on Main Street, his brain burbling like a fountain with the novelty of it all. Here he was, he’d think, going to the quaint little store, where the pies and the fudge were made in back and the bell over the screen door jingled when he walked in. Here he was driving right up to the quaint little post office to mail a letter, parking in a space with no meter, standing in no line. Here he was depositing his monthly check at the quaint little bank, where the teller, with her teased blond hair and woolly sweater, greeted him by name, as if just by opening an account he’d become personally endeared to her. Here he was, venturing out into the bug-infested woods, cycling on the nonexistent shoulders of winding, treacherous country roads, diving into the bone-cold, shadow-drenched, seemingly bottomless old marble quarry, and then coming home at the end of the day to gaze dreamily at the sunset from an actual Adirondack chair on an actual wraparound porch with a view of, unless he was mistaken, the actual Adirondacks, drinking a glass of dark, sediment-heavy local beer and feeling, if not inner peace, some of the precarious calm of a truce. Around him the creatures were tuning up their instruments. The mournful coo of doves in the driveway, the demented warbling of blackbirds in the locust trees, the phlegmatic bellows of the cows, shackled and stoic in their decrepit stalls, from the dairy farm across the road…what a ruckus the world made! You’d think all that noise must have meant something. But what?
True, there were no museums, the restaurants were awful, the movies crap, the bookstore a joke, and the local gene pool, in its doughy, homogenous whiteness, a less than inviting place to swim. But though he regretted the losses he did not regret them entirely. Losses after all were what he’d stayed for. Losses were what he’d hoped to gain.
It was difficult to admit, even to himself, how relieved he was to have slipped free of the city’s net. All his life he’d been learning the best things; how good it felt, how weirdly necessary, to learn the other ones. To drink bad coffee, eat abysmal food, see terrible mainstream movies, hear vile, tinny, amateurish music…unshackled at last from the surface discriminations, that tyrannical train of knowingness and connoisseurship he’d been riding for years, mistaking scenery for experience along the way. Now other forms of transport would have to be found. Other scenery. Other experience.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
His dreams that first year were a frolic through space. They vaulted up from his austere little futon, profuse, fantastic. In his loneliness and displacement he’d felt like a jailhouse philosopher gazing up at the stars. They’d been there all along, of course, but he hadn’t seen them—the city’s brightness had lain over them like a veil. You had to turn off the power to get a clear view. It was the absence of light, not the presence, that stirred his imagination. The vacancy that must be filled up from the bottom, in a new way.
And then in time the dullness set in. The team meetings. The parent conferences. The “conversations” over lunch in the teachers’ lounge, in which he pretended to care who won the seventh-grade basketball game or who had seen what television show the night before. Soon he was no longer quite so enlivened by his new circumstances. For one thing they were no longer new. No longer could it be said that he was in flight from a previous life. From now on he was in flight not from, but to. But to what? And on what wings?
“Dude, my locker won’t open.”
“I’m like so dead.”
“Me too.”
Onward he went, down the hallway, past the faculty lounge, the special ed room, the band room. In the language lab kids were hunched in their cubicles, stiffly parroting back the blockish, unwieldy expressions. Il est quatre heures et demi. Everywhere he looked he saw the child he had been. The curse of the profession: you were forever being reminded of how for all your travels you had only made a circle.
Like most young men he had sought to build from his yearnings a great tower. But the babble of competing voices in his head had halted construction. Too many days and nights had sifted through his fingers. Unrecoverable.
“Hola, Mr. Pierce.”
“Bonjour, Mr. Pierce.”
“Guten Tag, Mr. P.”
The girls in home ec were baking lemon scones. The smell of rising sugars had taken over the hallway, infiltrated the rooms.
Of course without Sabine he was lonely up here, massively and spectacularly lonely: he’d be the first to concede that. His prospects were limited. Unmarried women his age were few. There weren’t many unmarried men his age either. When old friends visited from the city, he’d enjoy a brief boost, but by Sunday some of the novelty would fade, and they’d pack up their strollers and skis and whatever maple products and artisanal cheese they’d bought to boost the local economy and head for the Thruway. Beautiful place you’ve got here, they’d say. You’re lucky you found it. And yet he sensed their impatience to get out of here already, away from beauty’s thin consolations and into something more vital, more dense.
Poor Oren, he imagined them saying to each other on the drive home. He should get a dog. He’s got the space.
Somehow I can’t see Oren with a dog.
We couldn’t see him moving way up here either, but he did, didn’t he?
For no good reason.
No good reason.
No good reason.
“Ah, just the man I’m looking for.”
He’d been standing at the school’s back door, gazing out at a sky stretched thin, at a lawn bleached stiff. Already the kids wore ski coats in the morning to wait for the bus, breathing clouds of hoarfrost in the spectral light. Men were stalking the foothills for deer. The woods were full of bleeding creatures caught in unseen traps. You took your life in your hands, Oren thought, just going out.
He turned to face Zoe Bender, bearing down on him in her black knee-length toreador pants and her sensible flat shoes.
“You weren’t trying to sneak out the back door, were you, Mr. Pierce? The bell hasn’t rung.”
“Just checking to see if it’s locked.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“What a relief. Of course,” she said, “that door’s been locked since l987. But it never hurts to check.”
He smiled. Being as he was more than a little afraid of Zoe Bender had never prevented him from enjoying her company. “Sometimes things come unstuck,” he said. “You never know.”
“Listen, I need to run over to the hospital. I left a note on your desk.”
“Don?”
“Mmm. He may’ve taken a turn for the worse.”
Don Blackburn’s now infamous stroke had come midway through his eighth-period Language Arts class. By the time Oren arrived, the children had been hustled out. The overhead projector was on, but the stencil had slipped off; a vacant square of light beamed wanly over the blackboard. Don lay on the floor beside the AV cart. The chalk was still in his hand. His mouth was disarranged but his eyes were calm. He appeared to be waiting for something good to happen. Surely this wasn’t it.
“Poor guy,” Oren said. “To go down like that. Out of the blue.”
“Oh, he’s had high blood pressure for years,” Zoe said, with the sort of casual good sense that made people think her harsh. “You could see it in his face.”
Oren nodded. He’d been looking in Don Blackburn’s face off and on for a couple of years now and had failed to see anything. Its color he’d mistaken for health, its swollen capillaries for pleasure, high spirits.
“I better run,” she said, “Gail’s alone over there. Can you cover that curriculum meeting after school? It shouldn’t go on too long.”
Gail? The town was full of people he should have been able to recognize by now and yet rarely did. His attentions had been fixed on himself. He was aware that this was not a good thing, but he was aware of it only vaguely, as he was aware at night of the cold massing at the window. It did not disturb his sleep.
“Go,” he said. But by then of course she already had.