Shorts - Sinister Shorts (22 page)

“I do. My wife says it's an unnecessary extravagance this close to the coast but after all day at school, I'm ready to be pampered.”

“Me, too,” she said, wondering what his wife looked like. Maybe like Nicole Kidman, with that narrow face and rat's nest of hair. “I live kind of up in the county land. It's not quite two miles. Sorry to take you out of your way.” Newell had always raved about how pretty it was up there, how woodsy and pleasant compared to the flats. He must hate Sacramento, with its heat and tract houses.

Mr. Capshaw turned the air on full blast and rolled open the sunroof. “Is that okay?” he asked, and she nodded, half-closing her eyes as they swerved out of town.

“Last time I came this way,” she said dreamily, “was with Newell.”

Carl could smell Roo, a kind of gym class sweat he remembered from his son, mixed with a lusty odor he tried not to think about. She seemed to have fallen asleep, her head tipped back against the seat. Awkward. Beautiful.

He remembered his body at seventeen. He recalled a day stepping out into the sunshine, fresh from the shower, the sun petting his skin, the licks of air, the rank smell of wet dirt. His own juicy youth had filled him up, flooded him. For one luscious moment, all was perfection. Then, knowledge returned like a slap and woke him up. The concrete burned his bare feet…

“Shoot. Roo, wake up. We're lost.” He could see the Pacific below the road. He'd overshot his turn. He'd gone too far.

She breathed deeply and raised a hand to her cheek. “Where are we?”

“I don't know,” he said. “You're the one who lives around here. Could you take a look at the map in the glove compartment?” They climbed steadily up a winding road to a dead end.

“I can't figure this out.”

“I'll look,” he said. Stopping in a shady spot high above the ocean, he turned off the engine, turning the map over to find the town. “Okay, the high school, right here.” He traced their route. “There's where I turned wrong.” She moved in to look. “We're five miles off base. At the bottom of the hill, I go left. Then back to Foothill. Left again onto Crocker.”

“I live right there.” She drooped a long thin arm over his arm to point. Her breast pushed against him, lightly, innocently.

When she removed her hand, he folded the map. She stayed close, looking out at the trees. “Can I get out for a second?” she asked. “I want to peek at the ocean.”

“Okay,” he said. “Quickly, though. Let's not give your mom anything to worry about.”

She walked over to where the land dropped away. On top of the hill like this, the wind off the ocean hit full force. Her hair slapped and blew like sails. She stayed so long, raising and lowering her arms in the wind, that he got out to get her.

She was crying again. “I'm so lonely,” she said. Carl put her head against his shoulder and let her cry.

After a while she quieted down. She sat on a rock, still clinging to him, holding his legs. She looked up at him once. She reached up.

“No,” he said. “Roo…” He stood with the wind to his back, as lovesick as any seventeen-year-old, as deeply moved, as heartfelt, as pained.

They made love, the teacher halting the compelling rush of his lust just long enough to witness himself there, hanging over the ocean, his body disappearing into the girl's body, his past resurrected, his future destroyed.

“Did you see this?” Cath said Monday morning, holding up the “Living” section. “You give a drug addict all the drugs he needs to be satisfied, and he is not satisfied. You give an alcoholic access to all the alcohol he wants, and he is not satisfied.”

“And… what conclusions do they draw?” He had slept poorly this weekend. He sipped his coffee slowly, savoring the flavor, savoring his wife who sat in a patch of sun at the table.

“Same thing with chocolate,” she continued, “even in unlimited quantities.”

“So…”

“So the point is, people who crave a substance can never get enough.”

He found it hard to come up with the right thing to say. Absorbed by guilt, he wasn't really following. “This is not news,” he said.

“No, wait. Nothing satiates the craving. A lot of crank doesn't do any better than a little. There's no satiety. Anticipation is what drives them on. Hope.”

“Always chasing the high.”

“But the chase keeps 'em going, get it?”

“Uh huh.”

“That's you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You feel stuck in your job. Sometimes you feel stuck with me.”

“Cath…”

“You've always been the seeker. Like Emerson's traveler, who is never happy. The spot you are in is never quite good enough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something's wrong, isn't it?”

He stood and tried to put his arms around her but while accepting his embrace, she sighed deeply.

“Nothing's wrong. It's the last day of school before finals. I'm distracted,” he said.

“That's not it.”

“Nothing's wrong, goddammit!”

The look she turned on him proclaimed exquisitely the depths of her understanding and grief. He had done nothing different than he did any other weekend, but his wife was already mourning over some unknown catastrophe. That's what a real marriage was, understanding too deep for deception. Well, he had a real one, didn't he, and now he had blown it, along with everything else.

He knew he should tell her before word leaked back, as it surely would, and soon, but he couldn't. He knew that he would try to explain, and he knew he couldn't. Cath's simple values were admirable, but there were things in his world that could not survive such astringency-delicate, complex things. Nothing could make her understand how wrapped up in that moment he had been, how obliterated he had been. How impersonal it had been. He had wandered outside her framework, and was lost to her comprehension.

He kissed her good-bye, lingering, wrapped in the smell of her shampoo, doing his own mourning in advance of the news.

In the car he tuned the radio to an all-news station all the way to school. Pasting a composed look on his face, he greeted the other teachers in the hallway with the usual salutations. They greeted him back.

So Roo hadn't said anything yet. There was still time.

Once in his classroom, he opened up the briefcase he was carrying, removed his gun, and tucked it into the bottom drawer.

“Final projects are due this morning,” he started off in first period, second period, third period. “You had the weekend to finish up,” he said while he flitted between heaven and hell.

At lunch, he sat under a tree, itching in a patch of cut grass, his paper sack untouched beside him. The gardener came unpleasantly close with his rake a few times. The teachers would not tolerate the noise of leaf blowers, so disruptive to the calm of academe. Mr. Cahill thought their position made his life harder and made his opinion known however possible. A horde of little children skating, followed by a troupe of mothers, screamed by on the sidewalk.

Another bell rang in fourth period and then there was the senior class parody, which was witty enough to shake a few nervous laughs out of him.

Fifth period. Roo.

She walked into the classroom with her friend Jayne, and sat in the back row until class started, chatting quietly.

“Stories to the front, please,” he said, amazed at his own cool. How did he do it? How could he function in the middle of the worst crisis of his life? Cath would leave him, if she knew. She would never trust him again.

He watched to see if Roo had something ready. She did.

“I need to see you after class, Miss Fielding.”

She nodded, and her eyes returned to her book.

“Now read this Katherine Anne Porter, the last story in your lit book, and answer the questions at the end. As you are reading, I want you to be thinking about how she generates a theme. What are the elements? What role do characters, plot, and detail play? Pay attention to the ending and the beginning. Look for parallels in the structure. Oh yes. We've talked a lot about point of view. We'll be talking about that again at the end of the period.”

The class groaned.

“Thought you could take it easy just because it's the last day, huh?” How normal he sounded! How pathetic and irrelevant everything he said sounded!

He had staved off the inevitable over the weekend, because he was afraid. He had justified his hesitation by telling himself he had to see Roo one last time to apologize, and that's what he would do, wasn't it, even though something sharp and nasty in him wanted to take her down with him.

He tried to write to Cath, but ended up throwing the pages away. He could not face her with this. He could not face the pain of her humiliation, and his own public downfall.

The world sucked. Everything was bound to appear so sordid, when it had been nothing but a spring day, the sunshine, the trees in an ocean breeze. Ah, how the world sucked.

Blurry in his thoughts, looking for something to get himself through to the end of the class when he would get Roo alone, or himself alone, or both of them, he hadn't decided, he picked up Roo's story and began to read.

“The Young Lady,” a new title, headlined the page. She hadn't used her synopsis at all. Roo wrote well; he usually enjoyed her assignments.

A clutching at his heart reminded him, and his moist fingers left marks as they traveled down the side of her paper. His time was up. He had done something others would see as deplorable, selfish, vile… the respect of his colleagues, the admiration of his pupils, all that would be lost along with Cath, as soon as they knew.

Was Roo's time up, too? Did he have to decide this minute, or was the decision made the moment he pulled off the road that day with her? His heart began to thump. He worried someone might hear it, might find him out before he could escape.

A squirrel ran down a tree outside. A few of his students turned to watch.

The gun in his drawer made that side of the desk feel warmer, like a hearth, so he leaned that way as if its comfort could pamper him through the last few minutes of class. But as he read, he forgot the desk; he forgot the gun. His fear continued to sit in his stomach, indigestible as coal, but he gave it no attention.

He found himself driving along in a car, a young girl, feeling the pressure of an older man's eyes on her skin as she feigned sleep. He took in the fine sensory details of her clothing, her perception of this man, his handsomeness, his strength, his intelligence. She had such a crush.

And slowly, he began to understand.

Roo's story was the story of his seduction.

Way back at the beginning of the year, Roo had decided to go after him. But Carl, well-schooled in how to handle students with crushes, had not taken her bait. He threw out his arsenal of defenses to frustrate her. Nothing she did caused even a flicker of interest in his eyes. Nothing she wore made him look any closer than he looked at all the other girls.

So, she had developed a plan. She would seduce Newell. She reasoned that would draw Carl's attention. She didn't care what kind of attention she got. Negative was okay for a start. She just needed a way to rise above what she called the “herd of anonymous cattle” in the classroom. If necessary, she would sacrifice her grade, but that direction had not come until later, when Carl continued to ignore her.

With fascination swinging toward dread, he read on, recognizing only snippets of the situation he had lived. The English teacher in him marveled at the point of view, so distinct, so different from his own. Moments he remembered had been distorted into something completely unfamiliar.

Roo's girl was ready to explore a bigger world. She had put her own physical feelings on hold long enough. Her character cited Margaret Mead on the subject of adolescent sexuality.

Carl read on. Appalled by the cold analysis of her seduction of his son, he flipped a page and stumbled into her version of his own. There it was, a “tryst” on the cliff, romanticized and glossy as a magazine cover.

The story was a message to him. A confession. She wanted him to understand. She wanted him to see it from her point of view. “The young lady had a different tale to tell,” she wrote.

He sat back in his chair and felt a glimmer of hope.

She would not tell Cath. This life that he loved so much would continue. For a long time he looked out the window, watching Mr. Cahill trimming pine branches outside with a long pole.

He would not lose his job. The gun… he would not have to use it.

He picked up a pencil and went to work on her story. Mechanically, he marked spelling errors in red while his mind kept up a chorus of protests at trivializing the contents.

Contrast POVs: his story was the story of her seduction.

She would never tell anyone, the last few lines read, and she told “the man” to keep silent. His victim did not accept her victimization.

What a gift. He wanted to stand up and cheer, he felt such a gush of relief. This was better than sex. Better than falling in love. She had given him back his life!

At the end of class, she walked up to his desk. “Mr. Capshaw, how'd you like my story? Did you get a chance to read it yet?”

“I did. It's on the racy side of good taste, Roo, but you worked hard on this and I'm sure your grade will reflect that.” He struggled to maintain his poise, but she undid him, opening her mouth a little to reveal her sharp, newly minted caps. As she ran her tongue self-consciously over them, eager to hear more, he found his attention riveted on the perfect white rectangles that were all for show, not for biting better.

“I like the way you developed your theme,” he said finally, then sat back in his chair.

“Great,” she said, nodding. Her eyes said nothing special to him. Only her mouth's half-smile appreciated the joke.

“You have summer plans?”

“My relatives have a house at Tahoe. I got most of my finals done early so that we can leave tomorrow, all except for this class, and I thought you might pass on requiring a final, Mr. Capshaw. I mean, you know what I can do well enough already, don't you?”

“The final's a big part of your grade.”