The English Teacher (5 page)

When Peter had learned Tom was a widower, he’d been relieved. It meant his kids lived with him full-time, and didn’t just visit every other weekend like Craig Hager’s stepsisters. It meant, ultimately, a real union, a true synthesis, without any loose ends. He’d put their mother in the same category with his own father: permanently absent, wholly and completely unpresent. How mistaken he’d been. He could
feel
her. It was like she was standing beside him here in the dark, saying, You’re touching my flowered curtains, you know. I know, he said back. I’m sorry.

Through the closed door, out in the bedroom, he heard footsteps on the carpet and then breathing, long, whistly, staccato breaths. Inhuman breaths. Then a final heave out, nearly a whimper, and his mother’s voice: “I can’t do this.”

For many more minutes there was only silence. Peter kept his hand on the knob, to prevent her from coming in and finding him lurking in the dark of her bathroom.

Then he heard the bedroom door shut. He relaxed his grip, deciding to wait a few seconds before escaping.

“Hey.” It was Tom’s whisper, playfully loud and exaggerated. “What’re you doing in the dark?”

“I thought I’d get out of this dress.”

“Oh no you don’t. I’ve been waiting all day to take this dress off myself.”

Please no. Peter looked around for another exit from this room. His bathroom at his old house had had three different doors. This one didn’t even have a closet, and the window was too high and too small. He’d make a racket just hoisting himself up. Maybe he should at least hide behind the shower curtain.

“You look so serious.” Tom’s voice was closer now, on the bed with her, only a few feet from where Peter stood.

“Marriage is serious.”

“Not all the time.”

“It’s like teaching a class. You have to make all the right choices at the beginning or it’s a wash.”

“Trial and error.”

“No, no errors.”

He laughed. “Maybe not on your part, but I’m going to make some.” Peter heard the beetlelike buzz of the long zipper of his mother’s dress. “But not tonight. I’m not going to make one mistake tonight.”

“Maybe I should go say good-night to Peter first.”

“Not yet.” His voice was muffled.

“Quickly, I promise.”

The zipper went back up, the door opened and closed. He had to go now. His mother would call the police when she couldn’t find
him. But Tom was pulling off his shoes. Item by item his clothes fell to the floor. Now he was going to come into the bathroom. Peter held the knob firmly, readying himself for the fight he would surely lose with one shoulder shove from Tom.

Instead, his mother returned.

“How is he?” Tom asked.

“Better.”

Better?

“What’s he up to?”

“They’re all still glued to the tube.”

“Where’d you find that?”

“In the fridge.”

“Must be vinegar by now. Now let’s get this thing off and see what’s going on under there.”

“One sec.” A pause, then a glass being set on the bedside table.

The dress was unzipped all the way down this time. Peter heard it rustle to the floor. He moved in swift silence to the other side of the room and stepped into the tub. His shoes squeaked but the sound was drowned out by Tom, whom he could still, unfortunately, hear clearly. “God, you are beautiful. So long and smooth. You’re like an oboe. I’m finally going to learn to play an instrument.” After a while he said, “Do you know how long I’ve waited to have you, have all of you? God, we’ve been living like teenagers.”

At first Peter tried to fight the great and horrifying waves of words, but soon he surrendered and let them crash over him. At least he could hear none of his mother’s responses, and it became easy, after a while, to imagine she had left the room. The problem was, once he got his mother out of the room his disgust abated, and other feelings began to creep in.

“God I want to fuck you.” Tom started laughing, then said in a wholly different, tender voice, “Oh, Vida, you are the first thing I’ve wanted in so long.” He said other things, some vulgar, some tender,
and suddenly Peter understood the word juxtaposition, a term Miss Rezo had introduced recently. Juxtaposition of words, of tone, of mood. He understood it all now. He felt it in his body.

“Are you ready now, Vida? Are you ready for me?” There was shifting, rustling, Tom laughing. “I can’t quite. Let’s … Is this hurting? Am I hurting you? Let’s try a different.” More shifting and swishing. “Oh Vida you are so. I just want. I can’t seem. Let’s try.”

Peter didn’t know it was so complicated.

“Let’s try some of this stuff.” It was quiet for a long while, then, “Oh sweetheart, I am so sorry. It’s all my fault. We’ve got to get you relaxed. I’m so sorry. We should have taken a honeymoon, a big fancy hot-weather honeymoon. I did this all wrong. All wrong. Here, there’s a little more wine left. What can I do? Let me give you a back rub. God, you are all clenched up like a big fist.”

When he left the room, he no longer cared if they heard him. He didn’t even try to be particularly quiet. His mother was lying on her stomach, her arms bent beneath her like tiny wings. Tom’s big arm lay on top of her. Defeated soldiers. He’d never known sex was such a battle, and that people who wanted to win could lose. He slid out the door. The glow of the TV, like moonlight along the living room wall, and the murmur of voices, Stuart and Fran’s, and the smell of something warm like toast or muffins, all seemed like things from another era of his life. His legs were stiff.

Stuart was sprawled on the floor. “Holy shit, where have you been?”

There was no hiding where he’d been. There was only that one room down the hallway he’d come from. “I got trapped. In the bathroom.”

“No way.”

“I did.”

“We thought you’d gone to bed,” Fran said.

“I wish I had.”

“They didn’t know?”

Peter shook his head.

“That’s fucked up.” Stuart chuckled.

“Yeah, it was.” At the sound of Stuart’s chuckle, he felt suddenly a huge well of laughter inside. “It was really fucked up.”

One after another they began laughing, and their laughter fed upon itself and slowly became that airless, throat-clicking, stomachaching kind of laughter Peter had imagined only in the very best of his Belou dreams.

THREE

ON MONDAY MORNING VIDA WOKE UP ALONE. TOM HAD LEFT AT FIVE
, off to some fabric sale in Massachusetts. She’d pretended to be asleep while he rose, took a shower, and returned to the bedroom to dress in the dark. The towel fell from his waist. It was like being in sudden possession of a horse, having this tall firm naked man beside her bed. What thin light there was fell on his pale buttocks and upper thighs, and she wished she could reach out and stroke them without him noticing and wanting to stroke her in return.

The loud nearly debilitating question that had pounded through her body like a pulse since the wedding reception—what have you done what have you done—subsided once he was gone, and she was able to fall back asleep until seven. She stretched her limbs in the enormous bed, her left arm and leg venturing across to Tom’s side, still slightly warm. She rolled over into his impression, and put her head just beside where his had lain. She thought of the grisly iron-gray hair at the end of “A Rose for Emily.” She would learn how to do this properly. “I promise,” she said into Tom’s absent ear.

The odor of food slipped through the cracks in the door: toast, bacon, something sweet but burned. Then voices, Fran’s and Caleb’s, not Peter’s, and the clatter and ping of utensils. All these voices, all this commotion, after years of waking to a silent house. Peter is fine, she told herself.

In the bathroom water hung in the air and smelled like Tom.
She could see where he had swiped at the mirror to shave. The basin was clean of stubble but on the glass shelf above it a few tough bristles of his mustache were caught in a scissors’ bill. If only she were the girl she had once been. He deserved that. He deserved someone who would walk into this bathroom, breathe him in, and cave to her knees with joy and thanks.

But the sorry truth was she was eager to get to school where her life would resume its familiar course after this aberration of a weekend. Her body felt strange, like she might be coming down with something. The
what have you done
hammering was back. A shower and her school clothes would snap her out of it.

But her nakedness beneath the weak drizzle of water only reminded her of failure with Tom, and she hurried to wash and cover up her body again. In his damp towel she leapt across the bedroom to her boxes. Close to the top of one she found her favorite gray cardigan and deeper down a soft shirt and denim skirt. From another she managed to pull out a pair of tights and her moccasins. She was not the flashiest dresser on the planet—no rival for Cheryl Perry, who taught French in clingy pants and short furry sweaters that swung above her perfect little bum. As she dashed across the room with her armful of plain clothes she remembered the sky-blue velvet dress her grandmother had sent her from Boston, the matching hat, and how she’d worn them to threads, despite the teasing and the Texas heat. Back in the wet warmth of the bathroom, she toweled her hair upside down into a damp frizz, tamed it with Tom’s comb, then realized she had no clip. She couldn’t teach with her hair down. She rifled through every box but found nothing. She probably had a spare in the car, and the thought of being in her car with Peter, headed toward school, was a soothing one.

She moved swiftly down the corridor. They didn’t have much time—school was a good fifteen-minute drive from here, not the forty-second walk it used to be. Her wet hair thwacked at her back.

And today of all days she had to start
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
with her tenth graders. And Peter, too, was starting it in the other class with Lydia Rezo. She had always dreaded his reading
Tess.
And here it was.

In the living room, Stuart was curled up sideways on the sofa in a little egg, his eyes fixed on the morning news.

“This is some serious shit,” he said to the knees just below his chin.

Weren’t high school dropouts supposed to be sacked out until noon, instead of following international crises at 7:22 in the morning? Still, there was something self-pitying in his fascination with this aggression halfway around the world.

“How about a little air in here?” It was always so stiflingly close in this room. Only one of the four windows actually opened. What they need, she thought, shoving it wide open, is to toughen up a bit. People die—and die unexpectedly. Both her parents were dead. That was hardly the worst thing that had ever happened to her. People disappoint and horrify you in a thousand different ways, Stuart, that you cannot possibly imagine. You move on. You move on, she told him with her eyes as she picked up his cereal bowl and juice glass and bade him a good day, whatever that consisted of.

She pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. Walt scrambled and strained on the slippery linoleum to rise and greet her.

“Here you go. Here you go,” she cooed. She got behind him and hoisted his quivering flanks level to his front shoulders. He bristled—he didn’t like her having to help him—and headed for the back door as if he’d lived here all his life. Before letting him out she squatted down by his face. “You didn’t sleep in my room last night. Why not?” He put his head on her shoulder and sighed. His nose was cold where it touched behind her ear. She ran her hands from his skull down his neck and along his long rib cage. His hair was coarse and camel brown except on his face, which was a silky, distinguished white. No one knew what kind of mix
he was, though people loved to toss out suggestions. Shepherd, collie, retriever, boxer, Great Dane—she’d heard it all. He probably did have some Rhodesian ridgeback, because of how his hair tufted along his spine. She’d found him on the way out of Texas all those years ago, in a cardboard box at a gas station. He’d looked at her as if he knew exactly where she was going and why. She didn’t have those answers yet, so she paid the man five dollars and Walt slept on her lap as they headed East.

Walt sighed again, then lifted his head and pressed his face to the seam of the door, to the tiny wind blowing through. She let him out and when he just stood at the top of the back porch, she tapped at the window and said, “Go on, baby.”

He took the steps slowly, nearly sideways, his hind legs flopping together, then separating once on flat ground. He looked back briefly before trotting forward to sniff the snarled remains of a flower bed.

She had been aware, when she came into the kitchen, of others at the table, but once beside Walt she’d forgotten them altogether. It was as if all their noises had been suspended, and now, as she turned around, the memory of their chatter came back in a delayed but clamorous rush.

She was startled to see Peter among them, dressed, combed, with a plate of something in front of him. He usually emerged at the last possible minute. Relief rushed up, weakening her, relief and the awareness that her fear was just as strong here as anywhere.