The Other (4 page)

They sent him to Lakeside, for example. (His contemporaries there included Bill Gates, who is sometimes depicted in a ’72 photo seated in front of an archaic computer, Lakeside’s DEC PDP-10.) In the annual—the
Numidian
—for ’74, John William’s portrait doesn’t appear, and though he’s listed with three other seniors as “Not Shown,” he’s nevertheless visible in a scene on the frontispiece, a figure striding away in the deep background on a path in front of the science-and-math building, his face turned left as if looking at something outside the photo’s panoramic frame—a snapshot in search of the idyll of Lakeside’s grounds, which does not quite come off because of lowering skies and the not-too-distant hint of a freeway on the modest residential horizon.

Despite the middling nature of its North Seattle precinct, Lakeside itself remains impressive. A year ago, at the beginning of summer, I attended a conference held there for English teachers. Maintenance vans were parked on the circular drive in front of Bliss Hall, most of them with sliding doors open; a small squadron of Seattle firefighters tested the hydrants; contractors in coveralls and earmuffs pressure-washed the brick-lined entry plaza; a landscape team mowed Parsons Field and the Quadrangle and weeded the beds in front of Moore Hall and the Refectory; and the school’s clock tower, with its sun-swathed cupola and modest spire, suggested small towns in New England.

So this was John William’s alma mater. He had a gifted teacher there named Althea Mastroianni, who’s now retired but is known to me—I would go so far as to call her a friend, because we were both active, over the years, in writing curriculum for school districts, and we also once served, simultaneously, consecutive terms on the Washington State Council of Teachers of English. Among the names on Lakeside’s faculty list in the seventies, Mastroianni’s was the longest and the only one Latin, and among the faculty portraits in the ’74
Numidian,
Mastroianni’s is notably subdued. She regards the aperture with no special interest. She’s perhaps forty but retains the aura of a lit. doctoral candidate—a lot of listless, frizzy hair tied back and, dominating the picture, outlandishly oversized glasses. This is somebody who looks to know much about something esoteric (as it turns out, her special province was the semiotician Yuri Lotman), though she doesn’t seem preoccupied, withdrawn, or owlish. She’s been shot with the bony crest of her left shoulder turned forward, but the studio lights are too extreme and cast a sheen across not just this knobby rise—covered by the nap of a ribbed turtleneck shirt—but also across her large, dramatic forehead. One suspects behind this blazing expanse a freighted cranium looming, though this feeling might derive from the Lakeside imprimatur, or from foreknowledge of Mastroianni’s densely packed résumé, which includes post-doctoral work at Yale (she once told me she tried to read while there all eight hundred of Lotman’s titles and most of the Lotman scholarship), two dozen articles in semiotics journals, and another two dozen in education reviews. Throw in an era of training in Jungian analysis, from 1955 to 1957, at the Carl Jung Institute in Zürich, where all the pedagogy is in German.

You will say that a scholar of this pedigree would seem out of place at even the best prep school, but Lakeside is known, among educators in Seattle, for its faculty of achievers from good Ivy League stock who are brilliant but flawed in some career-breaking fashion and so not trusted to command the podium in a lecture hall full of undergraduates. That’s how it was with Althea Mastroianni, who for better or worse had the lovely, trilling voice of a West Texas songbird, and though her mellifluous speech was just the sort of novelty that might briefly entertain an academic interview committee—that soft sagebrush twang on the subject of Lotman and the semiotics of Russian cinema—it was also a death knell when it came time to sign off on a Linguistics Department associate-professor appointment. Mrs. Mastroianni reinflected and modulated as best she could with a view toward losing all trace of El Paso, and while she was able to achieve a rich, mournful timbre that brought to mind Vivien Leigh in
A Streetcar Named Desire,
beyond that she couldn’t make her voice go.

Still, that voice was singular. I know it not only from our collegiality, but because I went with John William to Althea’s apartment in the early seventies. She lived in the El Monterey Building, on 11th Avenue Northeast—lime-washed stucco, narrow balconies with adjustable canvas awnings, and a high-walled courtyard featuring an algae-tinged pool and a rusting park bench. Very continental, or, more specifically, Iberian—like an ad in the
Times
of London for a villa in San Sebastián that turns out to come complete with motor traffic rumble. She shared a third-floor walk-up with her boyfriend, Robert, whom I took to be a French intellectual—he had in hand a copy of Roland Barthes’s
Sur Racine
when we met—and there she moved seamlessly between the Swiss French she’d honed in her years as a Jungian-in-training (asking Robert—silent “t”—to uncork a bottle of Burgundy) and her Tennessee Williams–tinged teacher’s brogue. (“What a pleasant surprise, my goodness, John William. Ro-bear,
c’est le merveilleux et brillant Jacques Guillaume.
Please do, now, come in and sit down.”)

We did, on a mohair sofa that smelled of cat fur, and then, with little prelude, Mrs. Mastroianni and John William began to argue about Chomsky’s “Notes on Anarchism,” which was suggested reading in her class, and this argument went on interminably. Althea wore the tackiest of polyester pants and a Mister Rogers–style button-up sweater for lounging. She tucked her feet under her and stroked her cat, an Abyssinian, as she listened to John William. For a woman in her middle years she had a fine complexion, and in the right light, a dusting of freckles appeared on her milk-white cheekbones. I suppose these things in sum bring to mind this natural question: was there something of the erotic in John William’s feeling for Madame M.? I’m going to say no. I don’t think my friend felt a physical desire for his English teacher. On the other hand, there might be something like Platonic Eros, and if there is, I would say this was present. Indeed, there had to have been some kind of yearning here, or why would John William have knocked on her door? Merely to talk about Chomsky?

In February of ’73, Althea once told me, she assigned the eighteen students in her Identity Crisis class to write papers of fifteen to twenty pages on Erik Erikson, Malcolm X, or
As You Like It.
There was enough range in that triumvirate to provide substance for everybody, she supposed—psychosocial, political, or literary. There was the expectation of outside reading and of documentation complying with the
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.
There should be footnotes and a bibliography but no title page, because a title page was too grandiose—it was sufficient, she stressed, to put the title at the top of page 1, centered but not underlined, with one’s name and the date just above, flush left with the text margin. None of this was new to Lakeside students, who were well steeped in the fussy mechanics of the academic essay, though the minimum of fifteen pages was more than they were accustomed to. Aware that such a minimum might seem daunting, Mrs. Mastroianni used the term “term paper” to describe what she envisioned, and gave her charges a due date ten weeks hence.

John William’s paper, “Cosmology of the Gnostics: Penetrating God’s Illusion,” consisted of forty-seven double-spaced pages. Mrs. Mastroianni was impressed by its scholarship but disturbed by John William’s obvious affinity for these early Christian heretics, with their dark take on God as a sinister deity who can only be transcended by defiance of his commandments: God as the devil, reality as a ruse, and life as a form of entrapment. In the courtyard of the El Monterey, throwing up her hands, she exclaimed, “All this gnosis, this very disturbing gnosis, this darkness and pessmism, this spiritual dread,” and I assured her I knew what she was talking about, that gnosticism was something he’d disturbed me with, too, and that I remembered him saying, many times, with urgency and self-regard, that the world’s a prison for our souls.

Althea recalled the comment she’d written after John William’s last bibliographic entry, because it was such a handy, stock essay-criticism: “While this is well done, you haven’t followed the assignment,” followed by a grade of F. As a teacher, I’m familiar with her quandary. Here’s a worthy exhibition of skills, a demonstration of learning and active intelligence, an essay she feels inclined to celebrate, but one that at the same time gives her deep pause because it brazenly ignores her instructions. I also know that, when a teacher comes across this sort of thing in a stack of papers, much depends on her mood of the moment, which might be colored by, for example, how much the obligation to read and comment on student work stands in the way of other things she wants to do, or whether this is the seventeenth paper she’s read in one sitting or the second.

Possibly this is the crux of the matter: that Althea Mastroianni had a life to live outside of Lakeside, and that, however committed she was to her students—to their education and to their developing psyches—she naturally put herself first at times. She put herself first when John William needed her to put herself second. Maybe Althea resented the English teacher’s burden by the time she came across John William on gnosticism in the stack of papers otherwise on Erik Erikson, Malcolm X, and
As You Like It.
Forty-seven pages on gnosticism—she would have flipped forward to that number, 47—and her first response, we might easily guess, was that John William had given this essay to the wrong teacher; it was meant for some other Lakeside course.

She’d been fond of John William—Althea stressed this to me. She’d sat across from him on a number of occasions, both after school in her Lakeside office and in her apartment at the El Monterey, and each time she’d made herself attuned to his presence, listening closely and responding in ways that let him know she understood who he was and what he meant as he rambled across subjects that interested him, from the Port Huron Statement of the SDS to the optical fundamentals of the phase microscope. In all her years as a teacher, she’d known no student whose mind was as overwrought. He reminded her of a boiling pot—hot water always about to spill over, and the perpetual manufacture of distillate. It did occur to Mastroianni, when she found him as much as an hour after school still waiting for her by her office door, that his need for her, though not necessarily unhealthy, was suggestive of a wounded psyche. As a trained Jungian, she had theories about this young man so earnestly moral and consistently distraught about the shape of the world, and, having met his father at an open-house, and having noted that John William was an only child whose mother was living in New Mexico, she had the sort of fodder for conjecture—including the dream journal he’d kept for Dreams and Literature—that Jungians, by definition, require. “What a terrifying loneliness he lived with,” she told me. “I suppose I must have offered the attentiveness he’d been waiting for all his life.”

After the paper on gnosticism, though, John William stopped visiting at the El Monterey and became stiffly cordial in her presence. In other words, after her F, their special relationship was over. I commiserated with Althea about this result and said I understood her regrets. I told her I’d had my own bad moments. I said I’d had young people attach themselves to me and in one way or another hadn’t been what they desired. “While this is well done, you haven’t followed the assignment,” followed by an F—I assured her I’d written approximately the same, similarly alienated students. But isn’t such terseness, finally, just the shortcut of the tired English teacher with her stack of student essays on a Saturday, naturally exasperated by forty-seven pages? Just that and not a personal betrayal? Althea Mastroianni in the courtyard of the El Monterey, retired now and wearing summer sandals: “In the end, I wasn’t a good mother surrogate, and I suppose I made things worse for John William by taking our relationship as far as I did, by letting him in the door of my apartment and then spurning him at the very moment when he was trying to tell me about gnosticism.”

W
HY WERE WE FRIENDLY
, John William and I? I had more than an inkling of his disturbance, after all, and from the beginning he derided and provoked me. Nevertheless, about a month after our adventure at the Seattle Center, I followed him up Mount Anderson, my first glaciated peak. We made it up on the wings of youth, but thereafter got confused in the clouds, and, coming off the summit, missed Flypaper Pass, and so ended up on the Linsley Glacier, which not only terminates in vertical wet rock but is impassable when its crevasses are open, unless you’re a technical climber and properly equipped, but we were just two sixteen-year-olds carrying candy bars and a hash pipe. Down we went, I would have to say merrily, leaping cracks and circumventing chasms as if our lives were charmed, progressively brazen until, near twilight, we came to an ice canyon broader than a city street. “What now?” I asked.

John William got down on one knee. The gap in front of us was like something from a fable, with no light in it after the first twenty feet—a maw, then nothing but a chill. “Screw it,” John William said. “Let’s die young.”

“Great solution.”

John William put his head and arms in the canyon and dug the toes of his boots into the snow. “Come on,” he said. “If we make it, good. If we don’t, we’re out of here—absconded.”

“Here’s where we go separate ways, rich boy.”

“We’re not going separate ways,” he answered.

His head was still hung over the abyss, which made me nervous. It muffled his voice. “What if I’d rather be dead than not jump?” he said. “What would be the point of living?”