An Almost Perfect Moment (20 page)

There was no good reason to avoid John. It was not as if something ugly had gone on between them. Yes, he had crushed her like a bug when he stood her up, but that was months ago, and why not let bygones be bygones, they could at least be pleasant with each other; it was silly, childish really, to carry on as she had been, giving him the cold shoulder, and here was a perfect opportunity to patch things up, to walk on over there and say something like
Fancy
meeting you here,
and then they would at least be on speaking terms and who knows, maybe they could even go to a movie together sometime, and maybe that could lead to something, maybe they could pick up where they left off, maybe a life together wasn’t impossible, you never know.

You never know and no one will ever know because Joanne Clarke suffered from that venial, but most deadly, of sins: pride.

I don’t need him,
she told herself.
I don’t need anybody.

She’d read this letter a dozen times at least, and pacing from her kitchen to her dining room and back again, Gert Landau still didn’t know what to make of it.

Hours ago Mrs. Landau had called it quits for the day. She’d put in time above and beyond the call of duty. When she rose up from her seat and reached for her linen jacket on the coat rack, the folder with Valentine’s final exams, set on the edge of her desk, had—no surprise given the precariousness of its position—slipped to the floor. The papers slid out and fanned around the folder, and the way a magician can get one card to jump from the deck, one paper had gotten away from the others. Mrs. Landau crossed the room to get it, and bending down, she retrieved the letter that John Wosileski had written to Valentine Kessler.

Mrs. Landau read the letter over once. Then she sat back down at her desk and read it again more carefully. Then she read it a third time. And a fourth, after which she put it in her briefcase and went home where, with a cup of tea, she read the letter again. And again, and despite the rereading of the aforementioned letter a dozen times at least, the same question remained: What should she do about it? Also the other question: A handful of school days to go and this had to happen? A handful of school days left and a bomb had to land in her lap?

There was no one with whom she could discuss this dilemma. Her friends were all colleagues. To discuss it with any of them was tantamount to making a decision, to blowing the whistle, a choice she wasn’t sure was the best one.

The only thing to do now, Mrs. Landau concluded, was to sleep on it. The morning would cast a new light.

Miriam got into bed, but sleep did not come easily to her. She stared at the ceiling, and trying to fathom the mysteries of the universe, she spoke out loud. “Why?” she said, but to whom was she speaking? “Why?”

Also in bed, awake and staring up at the ceiling, was Valentine. What, if anything, she was trying to fathom will remain a mystery, but her expression conveyed weightlessness, as if a breeze, had there been one, would have carried her off like a fallen leaf.

A
long with end-of-term forms to fill out, grade sheets, and umpteen memos, John Wosileski found a handwritten note in his faculty mailbox.
Dear John,
it read,
Please come see me (Room 102) at your earliest convenience. Yours, Gert Landau.

Having no idea why Mrs. Landau, the guidance counselor, wanted to see him, prompted in John a general sense of foreboding that lasted until his lunch hour when he rapped lightly on the frosted glass pane of the door of Room 102.

From the other side, Mrs. Landau called out, “Come in.” She was seated at her desk, which was covered with folders in stacks piled in varying heights. Mrs. Landau’s glasses were perched at the edge of her nose. “John.” She smiled cordially. “Sit down, would you?”

While John pulled up a chair, Mrs. Landau cleared away some of the folders, placing them on the floor so that there was a clean space on her desk between herself and the math teacher. On that
space, she placed his letter to Valentine. “Do you want to tell me anything about this?” she asked.

It felt to John as if every drop of blood in his circulatory system rushed to his face. Several drops of urine did escape from his bladder, and John’s hands went to his lap to cover the spot.

“This is between us,” Mrs. Landau said. “No one else knows about this.”

“Thank you.” He managed to get out
thank you,
a whisper, but he said it without falling to pieces, which was an accomplishment.

“Well, don’t thank me just yet,” she said. “I’d like to keep it that way, between us, but there are no guarantees on that. You have some explaining to do. I have to ask you, John. Are you the father of that girl’s baby?”

“No,” he said, truthfully, the truth as he knew it, what he believed to be true.

“So what’s this about?” Mrs. Landau leaned back in her chair, prepared to listen, but nothing was forthcoming, and Mrs. Landau, who really was trying to give John every opportunity, said, “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

One of John’s hands covered the other, as if he were consoling himself. “She’s just so sweet,” he said. “I miss seeing her face. When she was in class, I, I felt…” John swallowed hard, which did nothing to alleviate the lump in his throat. “Like someone cared about me.” Snot began to bubble at his left nostril. “Like I wasn’t completely alone.”

Mrs. Landau knew what it was like to be alone in the world. She’d lost her husband four years ago to a heart attack in the prime of his life. Rachel, her daughter, was in New Guinea, in the Peace Corps, volunteering in a health clinic. Mrs. Landau filled
with pride as she always did whenever she thought of her daughter dispensing medicine to those in dire need, but couldn’t she have found people in dire need closer to home? Although Gert Landau did know what it was like to be alone, she didn’t know what it was like to feel alone the way John Wosileski did. Mrs. Landau got up from her desk and put her arms around the sorry young man, held him in the way she’d not held anyone for a long time, not since her daughter was a girl. Touch, the warmth of human contact, acted like a hammer on an egg, and John Wosileski broke.

Gert Landau held John Wosileski to her bosom until his blubbering subsided, until a hiccup signaled the end. Satisfied that this letter was a one-shot deal, that he had not snuck other letters in with Valentine’s homework, nor would he ever again do anything so foolish, and satisfied that there was no hanky-panky going on between John Wosileski and Valentine Kessler or any other student, in fact satisfied that there was nothing going on between John Wosileski and any person whatsoever, Mrs. Landau handed him a tissue and said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, John.”

In the girls’ bathroom on the third floor of Canarsie High School, a group of three pretty girls clustered around Beth Sandler, consoling her, their glee in the high drama camouflaged in staunch loyalty. “No offense, Beth. But you could do better than him anyway. You’re too good for him. That’s the truth.”

“She’s right, Beth. When she’s right, she’s right. You’re too good for him.”

Torn and vacillating equally between genuine heartbreak and
the genuine jubilation at being the center of attention, Beth had to make an effort to keep the tears flowing. As miserable as she was that Joey Rappaport had dumped her, out of the frigging blue he dumped her, she never saw it coming, this attention from the girls was more delicious than Joey had ever been.

It was lucky for John Wosileski that Mrs. Landau was a compassionate woman, and it was lucky for him that this situation arose these many years before issues of sexual harassment and child molestation took center stage in the theater of social ills. If this had happened in, say, 1995, no matter what sort of person Mrs. Landau had been, John Wosileski would’ve been crucified. Rather than getting him fired from his job and then fed to the tabloids, Mrs. Landau picked up the letter from her desk and she tore it in half. John winced, as if some tender part of him were being slashed, but that was to be ungrateful. When the letter was torn to scraps, Mrs. Landau let go, and the bits of paper fluttered like doves in the air on the way into the trash can.

Beth’s summer plans and her plans for the future in general were ruined. Graduation parties, afternoons at Brighton Beach with Joey, her Joey, evenings hanging out with everyone and then slipping away somewhere so that she and Joey could
do it
, Joey winning her a fuchsia-colored teddy bear at the Holy Family Summer Festival, and the heart-wrenching, highly emotive, near-to-tragic farewell as Joey left for college followed by the highs and lows of the long-distance relationship which was supposed to produce a preengagement ring before he went away, the real-deal engagement
ring his senior year, and the wedding ring the minute he finished law school. Ruined. All ruined.

What Beth had not factored into her life’s calculation was that the distance between Canarsie and New Haven was measured not in miles but in worlds.

“No offense, Beth, but ever since he got into Yale, he’s been walking around like he’s God’s gift.”

“We had such big plans for the summer,” Beth sobbed, and then sobbed harder, not from pain but from the humiliation when she realized it was
she
who had the big plans. Joey had never said boo about the summer, their summer. Plans for summer fun and summer love melted like ice cream under the summer sun.

“Really, Beth. Don’t cry. We’ll have a great time. Us girls. You’ll see. I promise you. It’ll be the best summer ever. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.”

Some of the teachers from Canarsie High School would teach summer school. They considered themselves fortunate to be asked to do so because the pay was good, but as far as Joanne Clarke was concerned, there was no amount of money that could tempt her to spend her summer trying to teach the losers, the discipline problems, the imbeciles who failed their exams, which were geared to the lowest common denominator to begin with.
No, thank you,
she would have said, had she been asked. She wasn’t asked because preference was given to those with seniority or some other favored few. Other teachers, the younger ones such as herself, took any old job they could get, minimum-wage jobs, just to make a few extra bucks. Joanne considered such work to be beneath her. A college graduate with a master’s degree in science education could hardly
spend two months bagging groceries for chump change and still retain her dignity. Suppose one of her students saw her at the A&P wearing a red smock with her name embroidered over the breast pocket ringing up canned goods at the register? You know those little shits would point and snicker and tell the whole world and no one would ever respect her again. That’s assuming they respected her in the first place, which wasn’t a given. They, her students, knew not to cross her, but that was not the same as respecting her.

Invitations to an afternoon swim, a day at the beach, a weekend at a country house, a backyard barbecue would not be forthcoming.

Joanne experienced a pang of longing for her father, if only because caring for him filled the days. Now, on this first day of summer vacation, without him to tend to, she had nothing to do; literally nothing. She stood there in her living room, which she had already cleaned, and was struck by the emptiness as forcefully as if emptiness had heft. The summer, the prospect of July and August, stretched out like the desert. Hot and endless and without mercy. And you can be sure the humidity did nothing to improve her situation with the acne.

For want of anything better to do, Joanne went to her bedroom to lie down.

The bedrooms in the Kessler house had air conditioners, but you couldn’t spend your life in the bedroom. The heat affected Miriam terribly, and although she was determined that Valentine eat three nutrient-rich meals a day, it was getting to be too much for her to stand over a hot stove.

Valentine’s offer to do the cooking was rejected. “You’ll faint,” Miriam said, “with this heat and the oven and in your condition. You know what I’m going to do? The butcher over on Flatlands has one of those chicken rotisseries. A roasted chicken. How bad could it be? I’ll pick up one of those chickens and I’ll make a salad and some Minute rice. For a minute, I can stand at the stove.”

At the end of his first day on the new job—a summer job which paid minimum wage, which was better than nothing and so he tried hard to be grateful for it—John Wosileski had to wonder if he was ever going to get used to the stench. “Hey, be grateful,” his father had said. “I had to pull strings to get you in there.”
There
being Stanislawski’s Butcher Shop, where John was hired to clean up in the back, a revolting job at any time of the year but particularly so in the summer months, what with the blood and guts and bone and gristle and flies and that smell of rotting meat. Not that Stan Stanislawski ever in his entire career sold bad meat.

John took a hot shower and lathered himself all over with Irish Spring soap, with the hope that it would eradicate the smell of death, but that, the smell of death, once inhaled, is not so easily washed away.

Because it was still hot outside and would remain so even after the sun went down, and his apartment wasn’t air-conditioned, John was wearing only his underpants, which were the color of a squirrel by now, when he opened the freezer to see what he had on hand for dinner. He reached for a frozen dinner, and looked to see which kind it was. At the sight of the picture of the Salisbury steak, along with mashed potatoes and green beans, on the box of the frozen
dinner, John’s stomach turned over. John made himself Kraft macaroni and cheese, which he ate while sitting in front of the television. During the summer months, all that was on television was reruns.

John didn’t really mind reruns, though.
Life is kind of like a rerun,
John thought.

Then John picked up a pad and pencil and calculated: forty hours per week times the minimum wage of $2.10 per hour comes to $84 a week times eight weeks equals $672 before taxes. Exactly the same number he’d come up with the day before and the day before that. Six hundred and seventy-two dollars and no cents.

Six hundred and seventy-two dollars and no cents before taxes wasn’t the sort of money that could change a person’s life any. But really, no amount of money was going to change John Wosileski’s life in any way that mattered. Then, for lack of anything better to do, he slipped a hand inside his underpants, but desire wasn’t located there. Mostly to see if he could work up an appetite, he fiddled with himself, but when he got no response, he gave it up in short order.

Having rapped twice on Valentine’s door, Miriam got no response, which is license for a mother to enter. Valentine was asleep in her bed on top of the covers and fully dressed.

Miriam walked to the foot of the bed, where she took off Valentine’s shoes. Who can sleep comfortably with shoes on and never mind what sleeping in shoes can do to the circulation and a girl with child needed all the circulation she could get. Then Miriam sat herself down on the edge of Valentine’s bed and watched over her daughter. It occurred to Miriam how often she’d
done this, watched Valentine sleep, how she did so without thinking, the way ritual evolves into a part of being. From the day Valentine was born, Miriam stood over her as she slept. And on this occasion, she did so for a long while, long enough so that the night came and moonlight came through the window. Watching her daughter who would soon be a mother too, Miriam, as she always did whenever she looked at Valentine, filled with love and then more love came, a flood of love, and Miriam began to fear it, so overwhelming the love was.

Crammed into a booth at Junior’s, home of the famous Junior’s cheesecake, six teenage boys were making lascivious comments about the four teenage girls in the booth across the aisle. Although they could not hear what the boys were saying, the girls were very well aware of being the center of the universe, at least as far as these boys were concerned.

Leah Skolnik leaned over to Beth Sandler and said, “That cute one with the Yankees cap on, he is definitely giving you the eye.”

Beth looked up. He was kind of cute, the one in the Yankees cap. Nonetheless, Beth said, “I’m not interested.”

“Beth,” her friends squealed in exasperation. “Quit being a martyr here.”

“Don’t start with me,” Beth warned. “I’m not over Joey. I still love him. I’m not ready to be seeing other guys.”

Brooklyn was not a place for false optimism, and Leah Skolnik, in particular, was a daughter of the soil. “You got to face it, Beth,” Leah said. “It’s over. You got to wake up and smell the caw-fee.”

Joanne Clarke woke with a start. Disoriented, she reached for the clock on her night table. It was almost ten-fifteen, but morning or night? It took a moment for her to connect the dots, to ascertain that it was dark outside, therefore it was ten-fifteen at night, barring the improbability of a full solar eclipse or the world having ended.