Vintage Attraction (14 page)

Heather, Sally, Nikki, Dave, David, Seth, and Stereo came in. The noise level in the room was high with the collective volume of all of the separate conversations taking place. I directed a finger around the conference table, attempting to count the heads, but I kept losing my place. Finally I gave up and reached for my attendance book. Checking off their names seemed easier.

“Where's Adam?” I asked the grid.

T. J.'s was always one of the first arms in the air. He chimed, “Adam dropped.”

“He did not,” I said.

“Wait,” T. J. said. He was never easily contradicted. “Which Adam?”

My eyes bulged in front of the list. Could I really have gone all this time without knowing I had multiple Adams?

“You should say last names. You never call last names,” T. J. said. Generally I was cheerful in the face of T. J.'s smugness. He seemed to like and respect me, even if his officiousness sometimes felt mocking. Today I was diminished to the point that the gangly boy with insincerely mussed hair, thick Weezer glasses, and a cliché of a goatee might just have finally found his chance to usurp my authority.

“Let's move on. I'd like us to do some writing today,” I said. I spoke loudly, in as strong a voice as I could offer.

At the sound of the word
writing,
a cacophonic symphony of academic sounds commenced. The prepared kids opened the notebooks already before them. They flipped past the pages they'd previously filled until they landed at a blank opportunity. Accompanying this was the music of the unready. Piles of undesired books slammed down onto the table. Zippers on messenger bags pierced the air with high-frequency vibrations. Velcro closures that secured backpack compartments ripped apart. They scavenged for pens in pockets and jackets, borrowed from neighbors if necessary, and then uncapped or clicked into action. T. J. unsheathed a battered white iBook with a very large screen and deployed its initializing Mac chime.

“Okay,” I began, when the fourth movement had concluded. “I know we've been talking a lot about research papers over the last few weeks, developing theses, finding and cataloging sources, but I'd like to move on to a different form of essay, the narrative.”

T. J. had the syllabus in hand. He said, “But you have on here that today we're going to be learning how to . . . use MLA format.”

“Yes,” I said. “And MLA format is very important. But I kind of feel it would be of more use to us now to return to a simpler mode of thought.” I was catching my stride. I cleared my throat and spoke more assuredly. “I'd like us to take a moment to diverge.”

“But what about the syllabus?”

“What the adjunct coordinator doesn't know won't hurt her?”

“Nice,” went Heather. T. J. nodded his unqualified approval.

“Are we going to turn this in at the end of class?” David asked.

I sighed. “If you want to. If you want to keep working, you can have it for me—”

“Can we e-mail it to you?”

“I'm not going to be here next Tuesday, so can I give it to you after—”

“Look,” I said testily. Then I quickly corrected my tone with a stock good-natured grin. “I haven't even told you what I want you to write about.”

“About what you want us to write,” T. J. said. Was he trying to be funny?

“Yes. Right. And if anyone ends any sentences with prepositions, he or she must answer to T. J.”

The three or four who didn't have their eyes to their notebooks stared at me confusedly.

“Never mind,” I answered their searching gazes. “Okay, here is the prompt. I want you to write about a time when you were deceived.”

Lindsey raised her hand. Her pen still seesawed between two fingers. I nodded for her to go ahead. “Like, you mean when a boyfriend cheats on you?”

“That makes an instant
ex
-boyfriend,” Lindsay coolly added.

I immediately envisioned Pacer Rosengrant, twisted up in electrified embrace with Izzy at his new apartment within walking distance of hers—
ours
. Then I saw him later, cashed, a shell buried under the sheets as Izzy pried herself away to return to me, her husband. “Could be. Sure. Yeah, of course. But not limited to that.”

“Like if we got ripped off on eBay?”

“Yes,” I said. “Right. Like Sally says. There are probably times you recall having been swindled in a transaction.”

“This one time, I was, like, fucking this hooker, but she couldn't make me come, so I, like, didn't want to pay her,” Kevin, one of the thugs, offered. It was a rare moment of volubility for him. The guys in the room laughed. Most of the girls looked off to the bookshelves that lined the perimeter between the windows. I shook my head, my official response to an interruption. I was secretly pleased that I'd gotten one of the thugs to speak.

“What I'd like you to concentrate on,” I began, once the students were no longer amused or appalled by Kevin and returned their attention to the front, “is an instance in your life when someone led you to believe something was one way and you found later on that the situation was something quite different.”

A girl with a square face and a rectangular torso said, “Like . . . when somebody starts dating a guy and finds out he's still hooking up with his ex-girlfriend?”

“Yes, Dana. That's a good example.”

“Danielle.”

“Sorry?”

“My name is Danielle.”

“Shit,” I said. A few nervous giggles fired around me. “Sorry. Danielle. What did I say?”

“You called me Dana.”

“Did you once go by . . . Dani?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Anyway, yes, Danielle.
Danielle
had a very good example, everyone. Hello? I'm glad to see you've already gotten started. Can I have just one more moment of your time? Hello? Guys?
Please?
”

The pens came down after this last exhortation. Most of the eyes turned to me.

“Thank you,” I said, sincerely appreciative. I was in no condition to battle unruliness. “Just write about a time when you got cheated. Fooled. Misled. Basically any opportunity you've had to disabuse yourself of misconceptions about a situation you were in. Okay?” I waited for someone to ask me to define “disabuse.” Luckily for me nobody did.

“Is it only if we've
been
cheated on by someone else? What if we did the cheating?” T. J. asked. By this point everyone else had begun working. I answered T. J. individually, with a consenting wave of the hand. We both knew he was going to write what he wanted to regardless of whether or not I approved. But in the classroom, ceremony triumphed.

I pretended to scrutinize a piece of departmental junk as though it contained critical information. It was a flyer for a talk. An emeritus professor lectured on “The Declining Significance of Prose.” A Q-and-A, light refreshments, and non-alcoholic beverages followed. I'd found it newly delivered to my mailbox a week after the event was scheduled to take place. “Because sometimes that happens,” T. J. continued.

“Yes, T. J. Sometimes we do cheat and lie and swindle.”

T. J. looked scandalized. I thought I was only agreeing with the boy.

“Are you writing yet?”

He pointed at his iBook. “Already done.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I'm serious,” T. J. said, his voice low. He leaned in my direction as though we were buddies chatting next to each other over beers at a pub. “I started writing about this pyramid scheme for fiction workshop. I can just add to it.”

“Well, do something with that,” I said. I had to cut him off. I simply didn't have the wherewithal to argue with T. J. I returned to the flyer in front of me. The boring but, strangely, soothing design of the Microsoft Word template the advertiser—Shelley Schultz—used to frame the event details put me into a moiré trance.

Twenty minutes later, the students with little sympathy for those still locked in concentration started to get itchy. First two whispered back and forth. Then another two turned to each other. I ignored them. The conversations joined forces. Before long, most of the students were chatting, even those whose scribbling pens suggested they probably still had more to write. It was too loud for me to keep pretending I didn't hear.

“It seems like you're more or less done, so who wants to read?” I asked.

Danielle raised her hand first. I was panicked by the earlier name mix-up and stammered when I went to call on her.

“Danielle?” she gave me, with a linguistic hip shake. Some of the other girls snickered.

“Yes. Read yours.”

She opened her mouth, but I stopped her.

“Do you want to tell us what it's about first?”

T. J. looked at me disapprovingly.

“I'd rather just read it, Mr. Hapworth.”

God, she really was pissed off. “Okay, fine. Let's hear it.”

“Do I have to stand up?”

“Do you ever?”

We were silent as she breathed. It appeared to take a great deal of effort for her to ready herself to recite. She'd only used one side of a piece of lined paper. I could see through the translucence when she held it up that the text was dense enough to keep us occupied for a while. One of the thugs opened a bottle of Pepsi. The crack of the plastic top separating from the safety ring and the carbonated high-fructose hiss that followed jarred me. He leaned back in his chair, as if at a theater, settling in to see an action film.

“‘His name was Conrad,'” Danielle opened. The sentence was likely an unconscious nod to the well-anthologized Joyce Carol Oates story we'd spent two classes at an earlier point in the semester, along with every other entry-level comp course around the planet, attempting to learn how to deconstruct.

The discussion of Danielle's draft began haltingly. A thug spoke first. He mumbled something I couldn't make out. The thug was a boy I was fairly certain slept through entire lectures. I'd never completely seen his face, since he'd never taken off his sunglasses. I assumed his contribution was a derisive remark about the basketball team Danielle referenced. I offered “
Okay, okay,
” in a sharp, admonishing pitch, which was surprisingly effective in keeping everyone else from coming unglued. The thug offered no more and lapsed back into the silence we were accustomed to.

Lindsay asked, “What happened after that?”

Danielle seemed almost surprised to find that she had ended without concluding. She performed a short forensic examination of her paper. “I guess I stopped writing then.”

“I wanna know what happened, though.” There were murmurs of concurring.

“I don't know. He wouldn't delete her number from his phone.”

“Damn,” Lindsay said softly.

The essay had very obviously shaken the guys. Either they were embarrassed by their gender collectively or felt inadvertently exposed for romantic misdeeds of their own. To mask their discomfort, they made obscene gestures. They mercilessly excoriated Danielle for being so naïve in the first place.

I slapped my sweaty palm on the conference table. This immediately commanded Danielle's—and everybody else's—attention. “And you broke up with him.”

She looked out the window.

“This is what I'm trying to get at, people.”

One of the thugs asked, “What is?” His question betrayed an earnest curiosity.

“I can't believe I just called you ‘people.'” I shook my head, in an attempt to return to diction that more closely resembled my own. “The point of this exercise, the point of writing these narrative essays, of writing anything, is to take something confusing from life and, through language, and distance, try to see if the character—”

“You mean us, if it's a personal essay,” T. J. said.

“Well, that's probably an ideological discussion for another class, but for our purposes at the moment, you, the character, whomever's narrating,
whatever
, has an opportunity to reassess before . . . before . . .”

“Before we fuck up again?”

Out from behind her intricate canvas of freckles, Lindsey opined, “Guys like that always do.” She shivered, almost imperceptibly, as though shaking away an unpleasant recollection. “She was better off losing him.”

“Actually, she didn't say whether she did or not yet,” canny T. J. pointed out.

“Professor Hapworth?”

“Yes, Nikki?”

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

I groaned. “Nikki, this is college. You don't have to ask my permission.”

“But what if I have to go?”

“You just . . . go.”

Her cheeks reddened. She remained in her seat until I resumed speaking. It allowed for an exit that went mostly undetected.

“Where was I?”

“We can learn about ourselves from writing.”

“Yes. Thank you. I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but I think there's something we can take away. Oh, yeah. I remember the point I was trying to make: Why is this important?”

Silence.

“Discovering, like, you know, that you thought you knew someone and then you didn't?”

“Have any of you seen
Manhattan
?” I asked the class.

Those weeks Izzy and I were first dating, when we didn't have to go to a food and wine festival or a dinner or a law firm or bank speaking engagement or a shortbread cookie launch party, we stayed in and watched movies on my couch. It was a phase we'd moved on from so quickly that we'd already taken to reminiscing it. She called it “When Our Love Was New.” We covered much of Woody Allen's early oeuvre. In my mind now was the famous concluding scene of my favorite of his films. It was a part Izzy didn't know. We'd gotten too tired that night to watch the second half and had never returned to it. I conjured the shots I had mostly memorized from having had in front of my eyes easily fifty times along the past twenty-nine years. As I did, Danielle, with her dark-blonde hair and tragicomically prosoponic face, began to channel Mariel Hemingway. She had even vaguely echoed the actress's youthful soubrette register while she read her consciousness stream's most vulnerable admissions to us.