Fourteen

I GATHERED UP MY FAILURE WARNINGS. I WAS THE ONE WHO DESERVED ONE. And not a warning, either. A notice of failure.

If I’d never opened the book, never determined to find the underliner, never drummed Lydia Teller’s name into Mackenzie, a suburban murder would have been of peripheral or no interest to him. If I hadn’t popped up on the Teller doorstep immediately after her husband was shot, Lydia would have had time to think things through, even to escape—and not into my car and not into my arms or those of my conscientious policeman-caller. Without me, she would have had a chance.

With not much of a stretch, one could say I had set her up and directed suspicion her way, and intensified whatever troubles she had. And so I said it. Over and over, walking to my parking lot and driving the brief stretch to school, until a clear message was etched on the crevices of my brain.

You created this mess. What are you going to do about it?

Somehow, I had still managed to arrive at school early enough to retrieve my daily ration of stupid reminders. Today’s had to do with failure warnings, of course, and with misuse of the copy machine. Plus one notice that said a Miss Glenda Carter of TLC had called—yesterday afternoon, I noticed, possibly around the time I’d been chatting her up in person—to say I’d forgotten to leave my recommendations and résumé and would I please drop them off at my earliest convenience? She still wanted them. The business was, after all, a partnership. Teller-Schmidt Learning Centers. Mr. Schmidt was presumably still alive. Perhaps tutoring, like showbiz, goes on.

Helga watched me with her witchy scowl. I watched her back. I knew things about her now. I knew about the ogzmic file.

There was sufficient time left to repeat my miserable mantra.

You created this mess. What are you going to do about it?

I thought of something I could do. A start. I ducked into the entryway’s pay phone and called my brother-in-law.

Sam isn’t a criminal lawyer, but with his mild variety of annoyance, he reluctantly agreed to find out what could be done.

I headed for the teachers’ lounge, exchanging weather pleasantries en route with the ever-smiling Latin instructor, Caroline Finney. Season in, season out, Caroline and I establish that we like each other and are civilized by speaking of the weather. We also establish our differing personalities through this code. I complain about meteorological imperfections and Caroline finds something heartening about whatever is given to her—hail, blistering heat, floods, or blizzards. Today, I said it was nice to be finished with rain, but it was a little too windy for me.

Caroline replied, “Nihil est ab omni parte beatum.”

“What did you say?”

“That nothing is an unmixed blessing. And Horace actually said it two thousand years ago.”

Once inside the lounge, I decided that Neil Quigley could have taken a few sparkle plenty lessons from Caroline. Every day, he looked more like Norman Bates, thin and tightly strung as a high C piano wire.

“Morning,” I said.

His hand trembled as he gulped coffee, holding his cup as if it contained a magic elixir that might save him. “Neil,” I said quietly, “last night—”

He twitched. “What about it?”

Edie Friedman entered, looking tremulous and expectant, as if her One True Love might be lurking in the lounge. I wanted to shake her. The last few days had made what happened or didn’t between men and women incomprehensible. I didn’t know what to make of the evidence. Cruel marriages, like Wynn and Lydia’s; and plagued marriages, like Neil’s; and delusions of romance conquering all, suffered by Edie and whoever wrote the dating book; Sasha and her schizophrenic social life; and even me. And C.K. And Jinx.

Edie looked a little tired. Love Story had been on cable last night, she explained, looking acutely wistful. She poured herself coffee and left for hockey tryouts.

“My cup.” The words were not said, but delivered by Potter Standish, Doctor Potter Standish as he often reminds us, who leaned back on his heels, studying the pegboard where we put our cups. His hands were behind his back in a scholarly stance, and his lips scrunched as if sipping something bitter. Finally, he put out his right hand and retrieved his somber black mug from the bottom left side. “Who moved my cup?” It was a rhetorical question, as he didn’t look toward us or seem to care, and certainly nobody else gave a damn. “Shouldn’t have.” His words always seemed flat and printed in caps, like moving headlines that electronically revolve around buildings.

Potter taught chemistry poorly and by rote during the day and drank enthusiastically by night. There were rumors that he had something on Havermeyer and was blackmailing him. I couldn’t imagine what my principal could have done that would be that juicy and worrisome, but I also couldn’t figure out why else a school with no tenure would keep this man.

Potter downed his coffee while we watched. He then squared his shoulders, rinsed his cup, and hung it up again, but on his peg, near the top right. “Shouldn’t touch a personal possession.” And he left the room.

“What about last night?” Neil asked as soon as the door closed behind Potter. He sat in one of the degenerate armchairs, but so tensely, he seemed to levitate an inch above its cushions. “Is coming back for a roll book a federal offense?”

I backed off a pace and bumped into the refrigerator handle. “I was talking about Teller, not…us. Did you hear?”

He squinted, lifted his chin almost pugnaciously. “What now? What was I supposed to hear?” He stood up, thrumming with tension. “I didn’t have time to hear, even to think about him. Angela went into a false labor that lasted all night. Why?” His eyes squinched into fleshy slits. He was obviously, and with cause, exhausted.

“When—when did that happen? The false labor, I mean.”

“When?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. After dinner. Why?”

Because he hadn’t mentioned it when we bumped into each other last night, and it would have made sense to, wouldn’t it? “Just wondering if she’s okay,” I said.

He nodded impatiently. “What was I supposed to hear about Teller, Amanda?” He leaned against an archaic mimeograph. Helga thought we should use it instead of the copy machine. Its dust filmed Neil’s blue blazer, but he had more on his mind than good grooming.

“Teller’s dead.”

Neil paled. Pulled away from the machine, opened his mouth and made a breathy sound, then closed his lips again.

It was, I felt, overdone. A bad actor’s concept of how to simulate shock.

The bell rang—shrilled, really. Voices and calls flooded the hallway outside. I gathered my coat and briefcase. “I know it’s a shock. Even for me, I—”

“The bastard’s dead,” he said.

We left the lounge and joined the student crush. He hadn’t even asked what had ended Teller’s life. “He was murdered,” I said, out in the hall. “Somebody killed him last night.”

Neil navigated through the students. We climbed the stairs toward our rooms and reached a little island of clear floor. Only then did he stop and study me. The tic near his eye pulsed the seconds away. “You think I did it, don’t you?” he said.

“Of course not! Why on earth would I?”

His sad eyes looked at me levelly. “Because you’re intelligent. He did me harm and meant to do more. He was killing me. That’s why people kill other people. It’s all about self-defense.” And, looking weary, he lifted his hand in a sad farewell and crossed the wide hallway to his room, there to transmit the lessons of history.

Not Neil, I told the gods. Not Lydia. But who, then?

The students seemed unnaturally, disgustingly rowdy for the early hour, and I made my way through them as invisibly as possible. This is no big feat, as there is nothing they enjoy more than ignoring faculty. Still, there seemed an inordinate amount of hilarity, but then, they were teens.

I was involved with a graphic designer my first, shell-shocked year of teaching, during which my every educational illusion detonated, along with the relationship. I take full blame. I was obsessed with my professional loss of innocence, the fear that I didn’t have a calling, but a sentence.

The graphic designer had style. As a parting gift, he created what looked like an illuminated manuscript page, but what really was a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III. “Each hour’s joy wracked with a week of teen” it said. Act IV, Scene 1. It was comforting—cold comfort is better than none at all—to discover that teen meant annoying and vexful even before the idea of adolescence was invented. The poster hung in my classroom, as ignored as anything else Shakespeare ever said, until m’lord Havermeyer, checking his fiefdom before Parent’s Night, actually read it.

My first-period ninth graders were midway through a unit on Poe, always a happy time with his grisly, compulsive stories and resonating rhymes. We had fun with “The Cask of Amontillado” today.

Second period was still doing oral book reports, another comfort, for me, if not for them. Oral book reports are required by the curriculum. Ivory-tower educators believe the process teaches communication skills and reduces fear of public speaking. This is a pleasant concept, and completely fallacious. After decades of oral book reports, nationwide polls still show that the majority of the populace would rather face a firing squad than an audience.

Besides being ineffective, oral book reports are excruciatingly boring. One by one, students, eyes riveted to three-by-five prompts, rehash Cliffs Notes or movies, while their classmates listen only to how many uhs or ands they say. Nonetheless, it was a time during which I could both listen and, I hoped, do some serious thinking.

Nonnie Waters was the fifteenth tenth grader to read Steinbeck’s The Pearl, inspired less by its bitter wisdom than by its slenderness. “It’s, um, about these divers, see, for pearls, and they, um, have a baby, and, um, so like they find this pearl and it’s really valuable and I forgot to say they’re like poor, I mean really poor, and they can’t even get medicine for their baby, who has this weird name, which is something I didn’t like about the book, but anyway…”

Eventually Nonnie reached her critical summation. The Pearl was kind of boring, but okay, too. Too many ums, the class decided.

Next up, Dwight was so surprised that Shane was good that he had absolutely nothing else to say about it, including even the barest rudiments of the plot. Allison, bespectacled and shy, broke my heart by compounding her geeky reputation by confessing that she’d read Jane Eyre because I’d recommended it. And last for this morning, Didi Donato admitted that an Ursula LeGuin fantasy had been good. “Well,” she said, flinching as if she expected a violent reaction, “actually, I thought it was as good as a movie. No,” she insisted, as if she’d heard a chorus of disbelief. “It actually was.”

A normal morning. I found that awkward. Things were too skewed in the universe for us to be involved in ordinary pursuits. I kept contrasting Lydia Teller’s day with mine and obsessively walking the road to hell I’d paved with good intentions. If Sam got her out on bail, where would she go? To that place that couldn’t feel like home with its ugly memories and a gory kitchen off limits as the scene of a crime? She had no family, and her only child had been driven off by the husband she was now accused of murdering. I sighed so loudly that the class stopped counting how many ands Didi used. Instead, they pointed blank faces in my direction.

Who? I repeatedly asked myself. Who had been there last night while Lydia was locked in the bathroom? Who killed Wynn Teller?

My eleventh graders were having a vocabulary quiz, gunning up for next autumn’s SATs. Every word I randomly picked from the list seemed ominously weighted with new meaning. “Fiasco,” I said. Noun. That which my good intentions helped create.

Chicanery. Vindictive. Cadaver. I scanned the list for less grisly words and found a section based on mono, bi, and tri.

“Monotheism,” I said, breathing more easily. What a nice, respectable, noncriminal word. “Monologue.” A student groaned, as if she’d been dreading the word instead of learning what it meant.

“Bigamy.”

Bigamy! Of course. How could I have forgotten the woman dressed like an indigestion nightmare who’d insisted she was Wynn Teller’s wife, the mother of his children, the creator of the idea of TLC? Plus those hulking, unhappy children of hers. There were two abused wives, a slew of motives.

“That’s only seven!” a student said. I blinked and looked around.

“Is that all?” the child asked.

“All what?”

She rolled her eyes so far up they were nearly all white and definitely disgusting. “All of the spelling quiz,” a redheaded boy near me said, his voice embarrassed on my behalf. I was grateful for his concern.

I cleared my throat. “Trio,” I said.

Fay and Adam and Eve. One cheated of her idea, income, and husband, the others of their father and perhaps their share of the business. Could they have? Did the police know about them?

“Ahem!” It was a sound out of a comic book. Nobody except my students actually said it, but it did bring my attention back where it belonged, the vocabulary fist.

“Misogyny,” I read, and I sighed. All words led to Wynn Teller.

“Frustration.”

All words.