Out of the Blue (3 page)

“That I’d encourage you to go out with him.”

“Well, it didn’t take you long to get cozy.”

“I told you I liked his voice.”

“He could be a serial killer for all you know.”

“Well, then he’s a very engaging serial killer with a nice voice.” She tore off a hunk of parmesan baguette and scraped it around the inside of her salad bowl. She pretended it was a procedure equivalent to atheroscopic surgery so she wouldn’t have to look at me.

“Kurt Finnegan,” I said.

The scooping stopped briefly, then resumed. “I admit I overstepped in that case. A tiny chat on the phone can’t compare.”

“Overstepped! You got the man fired from his job!”

She looked up at me now and her eyes were smoking. “He deserved worse. The guy was a shit.”

“For two-timing your daughter.”

“With the boss’s wife.”

I sighed. “Ma, I’m not starting up with Joe Malone. If he’s on my case, that means he’s got something wrong with him, and I’m not interested.”

“So basically you’re saying you’ve taken yourself off the market.”

“Right.”

“You do remember your reaction to spending the afternoon with him last summer? The tears, the
sturmund drang?”

I got up and started clearing dishes. “I’m more vulnerable when I’m in my chair. He was symbolic of something, that’s all.”

“What a crapperful. You’ve decided you can’t handle a relationship because you’re sick. So, what, you’re going to just cancel that part of you right out of the picture forever?”

I turned on her so fast that I lost my balance and had to grab the back of a chair. “Yes! That’s
exactly
right. It’s hard enough just dealing with myself. The last thing I need is some masochistic social-worker type breathing down my neck and congratulating himself for taking me on.”

Ma’s eyeballs drilled into me like mean little lasers. “I’m ashamed of you.”

That’s one thing Ma had never said to me in my life. I could feel my own eyes filling up as we stared at one another. Then a weariness passed over her face and she pushed her chair back and patted her lap. I sat down. It’s pretty absurd, I suppose, but we’ve been doing this since I was a toddler and just never got out of the habit. We both took a little time out for some deep breaths.

“Anna, how do you see your life when you look into the future?” she asked after a while.

“I try not to,” I said over her shoulder.

“Well, it’s time you did.”

“Does the future have to include a man?”

“It would be nice.”

I sat back and looked at her. “You’ve done all right without one.”

She smiled. “‘All right’ is a fucking relative term, honeybun.”

“Well, I don’t need one. I’m a feminist.”

That brought a laugh. “Look, I know how tough it was for an independent type like you to move back home with your mother. When I’m dead and gone I won’t care if you live alone or with a pair of Rottweilers. That’s not what this conversation is about.” She plucked a thread off my sweater. “Is it?”

I shook my head, feeling about six years old. My nose was probably running.

“Joe Malone is not a symbol of anything,” she went on. “He’s a person you’re drawn to, and you’re scared. Be brave and admit it.”

I took another breath. “Okay. I admit it.”

“I’m not saying you should do anything about it. Just don’t sling bullshit at me. I have no tolerance.”

Ma always carried the warm scent of the bakery on her skin. Hugging her was like squeezing a giant loaf of bread. Then I climbed off and picked up her empty salad bowl.

“I’ll figure it out,” I said.

“Atta girl.”

I listened to a lot of Mozart over the next week. I don’t know what it is about Mozart, but he seems to cut to the core of things; there’s no place to hide. It was in the depths of the final heart-rending movement of the
Requiem
that I got up and called the number I’d erased but not forgotten. I’d made this deal with Mozart that if I got Joe’s machine, it wasn’t meant that I should see him and I could just hang up.

“Joe here,” his voice said. No hello.

“Well, Anna here,” I answered. Wolfgang Amadeus could just wipe that smirk off his face.

There was a brief silence. Then, “Your mother’s a piece of work.”

“I’ll say.”

“The Met’s open late tomorrow night. Want to meet me there to look around and then let me take you to dinner?”

“Okay.”

“Six-thirty, so we’ll have time with the pictures.”

“Okay.” Nothing if not pithy.

We hung up in a hurry, both of us grateful to get this part over with.

It was aggravating how happy I felt all day Tuesday. After spending one class cracking inappropriately jolly jokes about poor mad Mrs. Rochester locked away in the attic, Michelle Cross came up and asked me if I was using some new kind of moisturizer on my face.

He was waiting at the bottom of the steps. Nobody ever meets at the bottom of the steps, always in the grand foyer. I had to think it was because he was aware I might need help getting up that long marble sweep. I could feel a faint brush of stubble as he bent to kiss my cheek. Then he just grinned at me for a moment in a boyish kind of way. I confess a penchant for a well-delivered boyish grin. Joe took my arm to head up the steps. “I’m glad to see you. What shall we investigate?”

“Would you be depressed by the Dutch portraits?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking about them.”

He laughed. “I don’t know why I should be surprised. They’re my favorites.”

“How come?”

“Oh, all that drama, I guess,” he said.

Everybody else was looking at the Impressionists, so we had the Old Dutch Masters almost to ourselves. He was very knowledgeable, talking about Vermeer’s balanced composition and use of light.

“She looks like Mrs. Hendrix, my seventh grade teacher,” Joe said, pointing out a particularly dour specimen in a gilt frame. “She carried a metal yardstick and whacked us with it if we didn’t pay attention.”

“Good God, where was this, the gulag?”

“Black River Falls, New York. She introduced me to the first book I actually enjoyed reading, so I have a warm spot for her.”

“Let me guess.
Bleak House.”

“Nope.
Our Town.
Then she took us to Syracuse for an amateur production. I thought it was great even though Emily Webb was pushing fifty.”

“I don’t think of plays as books.”

“That’s what I read, almost exclusively. Sam Shepherd, Mamet, Ibsen. Shakespeare, to lighten things up.”

“When I teach a play just from the text, I feel like I’m cheating the dramatist.”

“There’s a Tom Stoppard in previews. Will you come with me?”

“Maybe,” I said. I was thinking we’d see how things went.

“Fair enough.”

He chose a quiet neighborhood place that served homemade pasta. Over linguini, he told me that he rarely stayed in the city if he could possibly get back up north. “It’s ironic. My mother and my brother are much more urban, and they’re stuck up there in the boondocks running the day-to-day. And here I am, Farmer Jones, wheeling and dealing in the big city.”

“Oh, sure, Farmer Jones, I read about you in
Crain’s.
That was a cute picture of you milking cows in your overalls.”

“You read that?” He looked pleased.

“And the
Times.”
What the hell. I’m too old to be coy.

“Then you’re completely informed.”

“Mm.” Not quite. There was that little item about Lola Falcon.

“You said you’d tell me about the MS.”

I obliged, describing the litany of early symptoms, the fruitless trips to specialists, the misdiagnoses of Lyme disease, hypochondria, Guillain-Barre, brain tumor. Ma didn’t tell me about that one until later, and just lived through four days of hell all by herself. “It was actually a relief by the time I found a smart neurologist who figured it out.”

“Are you on steroids or one of the ABC drugs?” He smiled at my look. “I’ve been putting in some time at the medical library. I also have a physician friend upstate who won’t take my calls anymore.”

He was exaggerating, of course, but it was disarming just the same. “I’m on prednisone,” I said. “One of these days I’ll balloon up and they can use me in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

“Well, it hasn’t happened yet.” He called the waiter. “The lady will have the Chocolate Sin for dessert.”

“You’re very bossy.”

“It’s how I got to be in
Crain’s.”

“I see. Okay, Joe, I paid my dues. Now let’s hear about the airplanes.”

He pushed his chair back from the table just an inch or two. “I’m not very good at introspection. Sometimes when I think about where I’ve wound up, I feel as if it had more to do with everybody else than me.”

“In what way?”

“Well, back in high school, for instance. I always got elected class president, but I never looked for it, never wanted to run. It just happened, year after year.”

I laughed. “I was president, too, but I was always in there electioneering like a madwoman. Selling favors for votes, kissing babies … well, maybe not kissing babies. The thing is, you’re obviously good at running things.”

He nodded. “I know it.”

It was hard not to smile. He acted as if leadership ability were some terrible character flaw. “Maybe you’re just not interested in airplanes,” I suggested.

“Actually, I like how they look. They’re very pleasing. The shape. The grace. I’d rather fly in them or photograph them than sit in those endless board meetings with a bunch of people who think spread sheets carry the same moral weight as the Gettysburg Address.” He actually ran out of breath. “Quite a speech. Sorry.”

“I’m not so sure you’re in the right line of work.”

“Well, it’s what I’ve spent a lifetime training for.”

“Top of your class at the B-school.”

“That’s right. We’ve got a few hundred employees in an economically depressed county up there depending on us to keep things percolating. That’s pretty gratifying.”

“What about your father? Is he still… ?”

“Oh, he spends all his time puttering around with antique planes and talking to his cronies about the good old days. Your Chocolate Sin is melting.”

I poked at it. I felt like poking at Joe some more, too, but he was looking so haunted that I took pity. And I suddenly had one of those waves of fatigue that feel like somebody dropped a heavy black drape over my head. He noticed.

“Are you all right, Anna?”

I tried to give him a reassuring smile, but my hand chose that moment to deck my water glass. If I could only predict when these things were going to happen I could just check into a padded cell until it passes and I’d do a lot less damage. The goblet went careening across the table, teetered at the edge and crashed to the floor. There was a fuss as the waiter mopped and swept. I wasn’t so much mortified as very, very tired, so bone weary that it was an effort to open my mouth to speak.

“Do you want me to get the check?”

I nodded.

While we waited, he stared at me through the candlelight. “You are so beautiful it’s scary,” he said.

“It’s just the candles.”

“You know that I’m in way over my head here.”

“You can’t be. It’s too soon and I’m a really bad bet.”

He smiled. “Anna, you’re so sleepy I can say whatever I want and you’ll forget I made a complete fool of myself.”

Not bloody likely. Oh my, talk about beauty. His eyes were like jewels in that light, shimmering facets of blue and green and gold.

“Can you take me home now?”

He held me very close in the cab, and when he walked me to the apartment door, he gave me a gentle, lingering kiss on the mouth.

“Tell your mother hello for me,” he said. I clung to the doorknob for support until he walked away and I could let myself in.

Ma was in bed already with her reading light on. She was always careful not to intrude on my privacy after I’d been out. If I went in to see her, that was one thing, but I could count on her to keep out of my way otherwise. I’d thought that the moment I got home, I’d collapse for ten hours of sleep. But I sat down in the dark in the living room and stared out the window. Joe was out there in some Manhattan apartment, throwing his keys down on the table, shrugging off his jacket, pouring himself a glass of water. Maybe he’d stand at the sink a minute, lost in thought, remembering the soft glow of the restaurant. I looked out at the lights in the distant buildings. They seemed magical, like Joe’s eyes across the table. The fatigue crept over me again but I forced myself to stay awake. I knew the way I felt wasn’t going to last for long.

Joe phoned Thursday night to say he’d been called out of town for a couple of weeks, but wanted to know when he could take me to the theater.

“Oh, any time,” I answered, with a private nod to the little subtitle that flickers through my thoughts whenever I make plans:
Assuming I’m not in the hospital.
One of the characteristics of relapsing/remitting MS is a disconcerting element of surprise. Just when you think you’re on an even keel, or maybe you’ve even had a day when you’ve forgotten you have the disease, it jumps out at you and yells “Gotcha!” Last summer, I was working out on the treadmill at the “Y.” Other than a slight tingly sensation when I lifted my feet, everything seemed normal. Of course, normal doesn’t mean the same thing it did when I was on the track team. Then, about ten minutes into my routine, everything simply shut down. My legs disappeared from under me and the treadmill spit me out onto the floor in a heap. I hit my head pretty hard and came to with one of the supervisors trying to lift me. I wound up in the hospital for a couple of weeks until they got me stabilized on steroids, did another series of MRI’s that boasted an increase in brain lesions, and sent me home in a wheelchair. That’s relapsing/remitting for you. So when I told Joe “any time,” it was delivered with a certain amount of poetic license.

“Sorry I have to be away so long,” he said before he hung up.

“Me, too.” But I was lying. In fact, I was having too much fun savoring the afterglow. Why rush into screwing up a perfect memory? Besides, I’m a sucker for the instant replay.

In my mental video of
Joe and Anna: The First Date,
I watched the charming couple walk side by side on Madison Avenue, backlit by elegant storefront windows. Joe drapes his arm around Anna’s shoulders. Hear the music swell? The shadows merge and I can almost feel the pressure of his hip against mine. Delicious. And the climactic good-night kiss is surveyed from every conceivable vantage point. The movie camera makes its slow turn around them, Joe and Anna, mouths melting together. Surely I can get six months out of this before the faint taste of wine from his lips fades from memory and the video dries up into a stale rerun.

“You still awake?” Ma called.

“Sort of,” I answered.

“Don’t you have parent conferences tomorrow?” she asked.

“Oh. Yeah.” What a jolt. Instead of lying in bed indulging my adolescent fantasies to the accompaniment of Nina Simone, I should be poring over my notes in preparation for one of the most harrowing days of the academic year. The video of
Joe and Anna
slid out of my brain, and in its place snapped the one called
Anna’s First Parent Conference.
I keep it filed under
Horror and Suspense.

At
the Cameron School, it’s the homeroom teacher who gathers up the academic reports and reviews them with the student and parents twice a year. It’s an excellent system, but not without moments of unexpected drama. For my first conference, I had stayed up until three
A.M.
committing the reports to memory. I was nervous, and I guess I thought that if I didn’t have to refer to the pages, I’d come off looking like a veteran instead of a scared amateur.

I congratulated myself that my earliest appointment was with the Steinbergers and their son Eric, older brother of Rudy, who at that time was still in grade school. Eric was a prodigy in mathematics, but he didn’t have Rudy’s gentle charm and he despised anything that required movement, like walking or breathing. It was interesting to watch Eric raise his hand, as if it were attached to a string and the puppeteer was dragging on it ever … so … slowly.

The Steinbergers had arrived promptly, carrying their copies of the reports they’d picked up in the lobby downstairs. We said our good mornings, and then I launched into my little speech about Eric’s refusal to attend gym class. Mr. Steinberger promptly had a fit. I mean a real fit, where he fell out of his chair and frothed at the mouth. I remember thinking for a split second, Mr. Steinberger cares
that
much about athletics? But it turned out, of course, that the poor man was an epileptic, an affliction with which I can now easily identify. What happened as a result of this initiation rite, however, was that every time somebody mentioned Parent Conference Day, the first thing I visualized was Albert Steinberger writhing on the floor with his eyeballs popping out.

I flipped on some Vivaldi to buoy my spirits and settled down at my desk. Joe was now safely banished from my mind, terror being a singularly effective antidote to reverie.

Our homerooms were made up of kids from all four high-school classes. I hit the ground running with a freshman whose father spent most of the conference on his cell phone arguing with the absent mother about pool repairs for the country house. Then an inspiring session with Marti Guzman who lived in the South Bronx and had been mugged four times trying to get to school on the subway. Marti had to translate everything I said into Spanish for his mother, and if she didn’t like something she heard, little sparks flew out of her eyes. After that came Will Simmons, the Johnny Depp look-alike, whose parents listened to the litany of F’s, D’s, and Incompletes with the same charming insouciance as their son. Then a horrific half hour gnashing my teeth as I was told to arrange for Sukey’s transfer out of Grant Hurst’s math class or else: one, Grant would be fired; two, I’d be fired; three, the school would be brought up on charges of criminal cruelty to Sukey, who hadn’t handed in a single homework assignment since September.

But at long last there were the Steinbergers, Maria and Albert (of
grand mal
fame) who were gracious enough after Eric to request me for Rudy’s homeroom. The Steinbergers were what Sukey would call
nerdesque.
Maria had prominent teeth and glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. Albert’s haircut was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, complete with cowlick. But Rudy appreciated them despite their lack of cool. I loved that he still held his mother’s hand straight through his conference. Rudy got A’s in my Classics and Composition class, but he had difficulty with foreign languages. The Steinbergers nodded politely at my raves, but it was the C-minus in French that elicited their unrestrained pleasure.

“Rudy’s worked very hard to pass the course,” Albert said. “It’s wonderful to see him begin to grasp the material.”

“We’re so proud of him,” Maria said.

No hysteria about never getting into Harvard with a C-minus on his record. It wasn’t the grade, it was Rudy’s self-esteem and triumph that mattered to them. When Albert in his tie clip and too-short trousers reached over to touch his son’s cheek with pride, I felt my throat grow tight. Something about good parenting—it slayed me every time.

I was perhaps alone in my assessment that Rudy Steinberger had sex appeal. There was just something about his mouth, a sort of semi-dimple at the corners, that I found provocative. I predicted that one day he would break hearts. His classmates, in the manner of enlightened teen-agers the world over, called him Rootie the Cootie.

I grabbed an early dinner with Grant Hurst, my friend from the Math department. The thing about Grant was his dignity. Were he ever to slip on a banana peel, you’d want to get it on videotape and stash it alongside Nureyev and Baryshnikov. I had a crush on him a few years ago, presuming that he only
thought
he was gay and surely I could make him see the error of his ways. He discouraged me in a most tactful fashion and became a close friend. Instead of the “Smelly Deli” or the “Ill Grill” near the school, we hung out at this Mexican haunt that even the kids avoided. The thing was, I could never find a Mexican there. The owner’s name was Weiner, the waiter wore a turban, and the guy who made home deliveries was Korean. New York, the great melting pot.

“Who’ve
you
been having sex with?” Grant boomed. The primary reason I opted for this place was that it wasn’t too close to school. Any discussion with Grant was shared by everybody within a five-block radius. The Sikh waiter pricked up his ears.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“Come off it, Bolles. You’ve got postcoital gratification oozing from every pore.” He tipped his margarita at me and took a swallow.

“I kissed a person. Big deal.”

“Must have been some kiss.”

I tried for an enigmatic smile à la Mona Lisa.

“Spill,” he commanded.

“He’s just a guy I met last summer. I’m not going to talk about him. I might jinx it.”

Grant peered at me out of close-set eyes. At such moments, you got the feeling you were being scrutinized by an extremely alert bird of prey. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said, a temporary reprieve. “Don’t fret about Sukey,” he went on. “She’ll do a lot better in Frieda’s section. You sailed through Report Day as is your custom?”

“Oh, sure. The usual mix of Eugene O’Neill with a soupçon of Ionesco. But thanks for the kind words re Rudy Steinberger.” I accepted a second Coke. I felt I needed reviving. “His parents think his every breath is absolute perfection. I tend to agree. They brought me marmalade.” Even though he was only a Sophomore, Rudy took Grant’s Advanced Calculus class.

“What do you make of this?” Grant took out a pen and scribbled on a napkin: M-U-S-C-L-E-B-R-A-N.

“Musclebran,” I read. “A health cereal?”

“It’s a homework assignment.”

“I don’t get it. What’re you supposed to do?”

“I didn’t tell them either. Think it over.”

I chewed on my burrito. I wasn’t sure it was supposed to be so crunchy. “Oh,” I said.
“Unscramble.”

He nodded. “Only one student figured it out.”

“Had to be Rudy.” I watched Grant nod and take a bite of his taco. I know it seems inconceivable, but he never lost so much as a tendril of lettuce. “Should I be worried about Michelle Cross?” I asked him.

“She’s certainly acquired that lean and hungry look,” Grant said.

“The mother never leaves her alone, picking lint off her sweater, dabbing at her face with a tissue.” I reached across the table to demonstrate how Filona Cross, brow furrowed with disapproval, fussed compulsively with Michelle’s hair. “I don’t care a rat’s eyelash about your education, Michelle, dear,” I mimicked. “What concerns
me
is that you’re physically
defective.”

“Burn the fucking parents!” he bellowed.

“Do you always have to turn up the volume when you say things like that?”

“Did I mention names?” He scraped the last grain of rice off his scrupulously clean plate. My place setting, on the other hand, looked like roadside litter. “Teaching means you walk around with cracks in your heart,” he went on. “Forgive me if I feel the need to vent.”

“I know. But to my continual amazement, there’s nothing else I’d rather do.” I sighed. “It was just supposed to be a job.”

Grant was silent for a moment, always an ominous sign. “Anna,” he said, and folded his long hands, even worse.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Somebody’s been complaining again,” he said.

Inside me, the half-digested burrito stood on its end as my stomach flipped over. “Now what?”

Periodically, a parent would phone our headmaster or a board member to protest that I’d been absent too many days or that I fell down in the hall and did I have a drinking problem? Once, someone took issue with my wheelchair, arguing that the sight of it was traumatic and embarrassing to their child. But up to this point I’d managed to elude serious trouble, probably because my students tended to do well in their test scores. That was the bottom line, as they say, in Manhattan private schools. But my having MS made a lot of parents queasy, and since Grant was on the administrative advisory board, he heard all about it.

“Apparently the gist of it is that your illness is becoming intrusive, as evidenced by your misplacing Jennifer’s architecture project last week.”

“But anybody could have done that, even you. Well, maybe not you. Anyway, I found it right away.”

“Somebody ratted to her parents, who went straight to Duncan Reese. Rumor has it you’ve got cognitive problems.”

The worst of it was, I couldn’t even dispute it. Sure, anybody can misplace things, but there was that spooky sensation that accompanies such lapses, as if my mind were staring at a blank screen. I had tried to picture myself holding Jennifer’s model in my hands. But when I finally found it, carefully pillowed in the spare sweater I kept in the top of my closet, I couldn’t remember putting it there.

“I suppose I can take a wild guess as to how the word got out,” I said.

“The oleaginous Chubb,” he said. “You knew him in his youth, Anna. Tell me he was a party animal. Tell me he’s got a navel ring under all that tweed.”

“Sorry.” Leonard Chubb and I graduated from Cameron together. He had been the kind of kid who sneaked into the library and hid resource material so his classmates couldn’t get their term papers in on time. For some reason, it had disturbed him that, like him, I’d been accepted by Harvard but was drawn instead to Brighton’s unconventional, lively intellectualism and the serious commitment to athletics. “I’ve been trying to feel sorry for him for years,” I said.

“Don’t be such an asshole, Annie!” Grant boomed. “He’s after your job!”

A mother with two small children glared at us. I could hardly blame her.

“He pines to be chairman of the English department and then headmaster,” I said. “All I want to do is teach, so why is he always on my case?”

“First of all, he rightly judges you the biggest threat.” He barreled along over my protests. “And furthermore, he’s got a thing for you.”

“Oh, Grant, that’s absurd. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me this before? That I’m in trouble.”

“I’m not saying you’re
in
trouble. Anyhow, Report Day is stressful enough.”

“Don’t do that to me.” I could hear the peevishness in my voice and reached out to touch his hand. “No, I appreciate the impulse, truly. But I’m not feeble and I need to know. How else can I protect myself?”

“Righto. Point well taken. Okay. No, I’m getting this one.” He grabbed the bill. I didn’t object because I was just too worn-out to argue. When I thought of getting fired, what came to mind were the things I’d miss the most, like the odor of the halls—sweat, feet, teen-agers. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most delicious smell this sorry world has to offer.