I
’m the oldest
person in the room by a long shot. And, aside from a blond-headed jock named Troy wearing a Red Sox T-shirt who’s about to become a P.E. teacher, I’m the only man. It’s about a hundred degrees outside, but it’s chilly in this heavily air-conditioned basement classroom in Building #3 at the Fairfax Community College. Barack Obama is the president of the United States, the economy is still dicey at best, and in a few weeks everyone in this room will be turned loose to do our parts at helping to shape the minds of America’s youth.
I’ve revisited the nightmares of my childhood in earnest over these past few months. Last night I was standing naked at a blackboard holding a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
over my penis. The night before that, two faceless bullies with braces and acne were trying to wrestle my head into a urine-splattered toilet bowl, and I can’t believe I let my mother talk me into this.
Diane Griffin, the instructor for this course in educational psychology and my mom’s friend, is going over a list of proven techniques for effectively communicating with teenagers.
“So, just to, like, clarify,” says Troy. “We’re not allowed to choke them, right?”
Everyone in the room laughs, even Diane, at least begrudgingly. Troy is the class cut-up, and it’s been a running joke throughout the summer that the first opportunity he gets, Troy will beat his students without mercy. He looks like the guy in every after-school special who smacks his girlfriend around, but everyone in the room has decided to assume that he’s only joking.
The point of the lesson is that teenagers are a complicated, volatile bunch who process information differently than adults. I, of course, wouldn’t know. Aside from Danny, the teenager I made up and who doesn’t exist, I haven’t had so much as a conversation with anyone younger than twenty in about fifteen years. This is among the myriad reasons I am in no way qualified to be anywhere near this room. Everyone knows it, even, I fear, Diane. My mother, though, has more pull in the Northern Virginia teaching community than I imagined. And so here I am, a now-thirty-six-year-old former corporate propagandist turned snarky blogger who’s been fast-tracked to teach English Composition and Literature thanks to the desperate need for what my mother calls “warm bodies in the classroom.”
I may not be a businessman or a teacher, but I am, at least, a warm body.
Mr. Gilmore, whom I’ll be replacing, has agreed to stay on for the first month of the semester this fall to coteach my classes in lieu of my student-teaching requirement. But then, after that, I’ll be on my own. The first book on my syllabus is
Lord of the Flies
, which makes perfect sense. At some point, maybe halfway through the semester, when they’ve identified my many personal and professional weaknesses, the students will rise up against me. They’ll paint their faces and do unspeakable things to the nerds among them and act like animals, and there will be nothing I can do to stop it.
What frightens me most is the actual attention and work that seems to be required to be a teacher. During my stint on the Death Star, I could phone it in. I could blend into the unholy beige walls and turn my brain off and look at CNN.com and kill hour after hour without anyone even noticing. Not so in the teaching world. For a fraction of what I made back then, I’ll have twice the work and responsibility and I’ll never be able to escape at random, smoke on the roof, or wander the streets goofing off.
“But you’ll be doing something worthwhile for once,” my mother said. We were having dinner at her house the other night. “
And
you’ll be fulfilled.”
“I think you’ll be a great teacher,” said Gary. That’s his role in my life: blind encourager and ambassador of false senses of security.
As the class ends, everyone stands and gathers their things and a little circle forms around Diane. My young classmates have so much freaking energy to do something good and righteous and meaningful. They probably could have made more money selling sandwiches out of the back of a van on Connecticut Avenue, but they’ve chosen this, and they’re fully committed. Sometimes I feel like I should warn them that things often don’t turn out the way you think they will, but they probably wouldn’t listen to me anyway. I know I wouldn’t have, either, when I was their age.
Troy punches my biceps. “See you next time, Gramps.”
This is what he calls me, Gramps, but I like him anyway. Despite his propensity for violent humor, he’s the only student in the class who really talks to me, and it’s nice to have a friend. The rest of the class is made up mostly of young, pretty girls. One in particular, Jessica, whom I have a small crush on, is standing at Diane’s desk now asking about the reading assignment. The first day of class she asked me if I was related to Curtis Violet. We haven’t spoken since, and if I can help it, we won’t. She reminds me too much of Katie and of how things can spiral out of control.
I have never loved my wife more than I do right now. Somehow, all of this has jolted Anna and me back into the breezy mix of comfort and desire that was our youth, despite our occasional bouts with silences and trepidation. A few times now since her return from Boston, I’ve thought of telling her about Katie. But I haven’t. I listened to my father give a lecture once to a group of young writers. He told them that by the end of a novel, their main characters should have had to answer to each of their sins. In terms of fiction, he’s absolutely right. Unfortunately, reality is more complex, and each of us has to live beyond that final page. And so I’ve allowed her to believe that she took our marriage to the brink all by herself. It’s not honorable, of course. It’s a lie of omission at best, but I know that it’s the way it has to be. I’ve thought about her and David Anderson a lot, together in her hotel room and the things they did and almost did. Somehow, I’m able to compartmentalize it, to bury it somewhere in the murk. I don’t think Anna would be able to do the same thing. I’ve been married long enough to know that the image of me nearly naked with a beautiful young girl in a tiny apartment in a different state is something we’d never be able to recover from, and all of this would be undone. I think of Dr. Charlie, exiled from his home a while ago, fighting to reassemble the pieces of something nearly destroyed.
“You’ll be as bad a teacher as you are a golf instructor,” he’s told me, several times, in fact. That is his role in my life: manager of expectations. I asked him to review my dad’s file a few months ago, and he did so at a bar. And then the three of us got drunk—my dad, my best friend, and me. Because that’s all that we could do.
I’d be lying if I said there isn’t still a small, Katie-shaped hole in my heart, this little nook that hurts during those fleeting, less-and-less frequent moments when she crosses my mind. Two afternoons ago, I got a call from a smart-sounding lady from one of the ad agencies downtown. “Is this Tom Violet?” she asked. The remaining corporate synapses at the back of my brain fired and I immediately recognized her as an HR person. I felt a sudden welling of shame. After all, it was the middle of a weekday afternoon and instead of working in some office somewhere I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich over the sink and watching
Judge Judy
with my dog. She asked me if I wouldn’t mind chatting about Katie Montgomery, who was a candidate for a junior copywriting position. She’d listed me as a job reference.
“What was your relationship with Katie?”
I suspect she was interested in the shorter version. “I was her direct supervisor.”
“How would you describe her as an employee?”
“She’s wonderful,” I said, complete with a pang of melancholy. “A great person and a really gifted young copywriter. If I were you guys, I’d hire her in a second.”
In real life, nothing concludes without a few loose ends, and some are more glaring than others. My feelings for Katie and what they say about me as a husband and a man are clearly unresolved. I’m less worried about that, though, than I am about the troubling matter of logistics. Katie read my novel, and toward the end of this year that same novel will be published by Curtis Violet. She’ll figure this out, of course, and what she chooses to do with that information has kept me up more than a few nights this summer. I know it sounds romantic and ridiculously naïve, but maybe when she hears about Curtis—if she already hasn’t—she’ll understand. At least I hope so. Either way, it’ll be up to her to draw her own conclusions and to make her own decisions. Contacting Katie, even something as simple as an e-mail, will open a door that’s best left closed.
I’m absolutely certain that she’s going to marry Todd the Idiot. It’s one of those cosmic facts that I simply know to be true. David Anderson will stay with his wife and their boy Conner, and Anna and I will be married until one of us dies. And Todd, who’s probably not as much of an idiot as I’ve claimed him to be, will buy a ring and she’ll accept his proposal, and that will be the life she has. In our hearts, we all wish we were unforgettable to the people in our lives and the companies that show us the door. But, in truth, for a while Katie will think of me from time to time, and then, gradually, she’ll begin not thinking of me at all. And MSW, in all its horridness and empty, meaningless bullshit, will weather this economic storm and trudge on, and someone else will write their crap for them and no one there will even remember that I exist. Not even Greg.
The circle of students with questions dissipates and Diane smiles at me. I’ve known her casually through my mom for years, and so, without ever actually discussing it, I’ve volunteered to walk her out to the parking lot after each class. Like my mom, she’s one of those people who can be identified instantly as a teacher. A tiny woman, she’s dressed in a long, flowing skirt and a loose-fitting blouse of random, mismatched color, as if she dressed this morning with the lights off. She smells like the inside of an old book.
We step into a swamp of heat, and I start sweating instantly. It’s dusk, but still unbearable. A group of male students is playing hacky-sack with their shirts off.
“You think these kids are ready to be teachers?” she asks. She’s well into her sixties, but she likes commiserating with me like we’re peers.
“I don’t know. Hell, do you think I am?”
“Probably not. But I’d give you an edge over them. These young ones, right out of school, are too idealistic. The job can’t possibly live up to their expectations. The first time a father shows up at a parent-teacher conference drunk or one of their students says, ‘I hate you,’ they’ll be devastated.”
“Well, fortunately for me I’ve learned to embrace people’s hatred of me. You learn that where I used to work. Everyone hates everyone, for the most part.”
She grins at the pavement as we walk. “I’ve been reading your blog, you know. I look forward to it each week. I used to sometimes wonder if I made the right choice all those years ago, and if I would have been better off giving the business world a try. Your blog makes me feel good about where I’ve ended up.”
“Well, if I can save just one person’s soul each week, then I’ve succeeded.”
As Andrew Brown predicted, my blog has done pretty well. In fact, it’s one of the most popular features of the
Post
’s Web site. Last week, my blog, “Life After the Death Star,” received 112,000 unique hits. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but Andrew tells me it’s very good. I’m currently working on a blog called “40-Hour Sentence” in which I make an argument for why inmates in maximum security prisons have it better than the average cube dweller. It’s not Shakespeare, but it keeps me off the streets.
“And how is your father?” she asks.
I look away, off at nothing in particular, the way I always do when people ask me about Curtis. Most of the world doesn’t know that he’s sick, but people like Diane do, teachers and readers. There are stories here and there about him and his illness, but I suspect most news outlets are waiting until he’s actually gone to pay their tributes.
“Not great,” I say.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Tom. It’s good, though, that he finished his last book. I think a lot of writers don’t get that opportunity. Have you read it? Does he let you read his books before they’re released?”
“Not usually,” I say. “But I’ve read this one.”
“And?”
I still get an odd little charge of anxiety when faced with questions like this. I guess I haven’t fully embraced the lie yet. “It’s not bad,” I say. “I think you’ll like it.”
There’s a lot of symmetry to what we’ve done, which makes it feel not quite so wrong. In the weeks after giving the book to my dad, part of me was never actually convinced that it would work. But, somehow, it did. Brandon, taking over from his mother as Curtis’s agent, delivered the manuscript to Curtis’s publisher in person, showing up at their offices downtown in his best suit. He even wore a tie. They were surprised, of course, considering they’d heard the same rumors that Alistair had, that my dad was done. As Brandon predicted, though, any suspicions or trepidations that they may have had were trumped by the thought of blinking dollar signs.
“They fucking love it,” Brandon told me over lunch in Georgetown shortly after our literary heist. He’d come to D.C. to check out his mother’s new place in my dad’s house. “They called me the next damn day. ‘A new and invigorated Curtis.’ That’s what they called it.”
“I wonder if they’d have liked it if they knew it was by me?”
“I guess we’ll never know,” he said. “It’s a good fucking book, though. I don’t care whose name’s on it.”
“Oh shit . . . what about your hot intern?” I said, startling the child in the high chair one table over. The intern . . . another loose end, of course. There could be dozens of them scattered around the country. People I haven’t even thought of yet. People I don’t even know.
“What about him?”
“Brandon, he read it when it was by me . . . or, well, Thomas Ferris anyway.”
“Oh, right. Dude, this isn’t amateur hour. I’m way ahead of you. I gave him and his handsomeness a full-time job, complete with the all-important nondisclosure clause. It’s funny, I don’t think it had even dawned on him what kind of power he momentarily had over me. He’s very pretty, but, well, you know.”