She communicated with her former life by way of her little sister, Lisa, with whom she Skyped once or twice a week, and who sent her emails that were at once intensely loving and vaguely threatening: a Cosmo article that directed young women to catch husbands early lest they end up thirty and alone, competing with the ceaseless parade of twenty-two-year-olds behind them; a fertility chart captioned only Food for thought, xoxo. These emails annoyed her—why did married-with-children people feel so compelled to pull her into their web?—yet she couldn’t help wondering about the life she might have had if she’d stayed and given Josh, her college boyfriend, what he wanted: the Central Valley version of the life her landlords were living, brightly and blondly, just across her yard.
It was easier to think about Damon. What more could she do for the kid? A flock of bad ideas flew through her brain: write an email, phone his parents, find out where he’d been taken and show up there. She had enough sense not to make these mistakes. Instead, she invited Doug Ellison over for dinner.
—
Molly didn’t see quite how small her studio apartment was until Doug Ellison was standing inside it. She offered beers; he hovered behind her as she bent to pull them from the mini-fridge. They went to the love seat. The room was intimately lit, and her bed asserted itself, making its presence known like an alpha male spreading his legs in a bar, as they sat together sipping beers.
Finally Molly turned to Doug and asked, “Have you ever had a student disappear?”
He laughed. “Wishful thinking.”
“Be removed, I mean,” she said. “Legal issues.”
“Sure, why?”
“I’m not allowed to talk about it.”
“Now, Molly. If we only did what we’re allowed to do, would we ever have any fun?”
She rolled her eyes. “I keep thinking the strangest things. Where he is. What he’s doing right this minute. I keep seeing him in one of those awful orange jumpsuits they make them wear, behind barbed wire or something. Don’t laugh.”
“You’re sweet.”
“I keep thinking, what could I have done? What could I have done to make it different?”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Doug said. “You know, these kids have resources you and I can only dream about. Damon Flintov—of course I know who you’re talking about—he’s got a mansion, a Beemer, parents with more money than God.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just saying, he’ll be fine. Damon Flintov may be a belligerent moron, but trust me. In ten years he’s living the high life while you and I are still droning on about the five-paragraph essay.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I became a teacher in order to teach.” As soon as she heard this, her voice tight with righteousness, she knew it was untrue. “I wanted to help them. I wanted books to save them the way they saved me.”
Doug nodded. “I might’ve felt that way once. But there are other aspirations.”
“Like what?”
Doug took a swig of his beer. “Look,” he said. “Some people get what they want. Some people don’t. We tell kids life is fair, hard work, bootstraps, et cetera, but you know, and I know, that it isn’t. The deck is stacked. You and I, for example. We’re smart, we did well in school, we work hard. And our kids’ worst nightmare is to end up like us.”
“You’re wrong,” Molly said.
They were quiet. Molly could see, on Doug’s jaw, where he’d nicked himself shaving, a small, dark bead of dried blood. She had the urge to push him out of her apartment—her hand closed around her beer bottle as if it were a weapon. But why? He’d made no threats.
Or every threat. He was scanning her garnet bedspread, her stacked books, the single framed snapshot on her bedside table. Her college graduation, on the sun-browned lawn of Fresno State. In the photograph Molly was flanked by her sister and her dad, her black gown open in the heat. “You look like a baby,” Doug said.
“It wasn’t that long ago.”
He leaned forward, squinting at the picture. “That your guy?”
“Who, my dad?” In the photo Molly’s father hunkered unsmiling, eyes shielded by dark glasses.
“The other one.”
“Oh. That’s Josh.” Her ex-boyfriend was there, she realized, at the edge of the photo, grinning into the sun. The frame cut off his right ear. He wore the same wraparound sunglasses he always wore, as though his life were one long river cruise on the San Joaquin. Maybe it was, now that she’d gone.
“You broke his heart, didn’t you?” Doug said. “Crushed it. Ground it into tiny little pieces.”
She winced. He’d hit a tender place, one she hadn’t known was still vulnerable to thoughtless blows. She said, carefully, “I couldn’t give him what he wanted.”
“Go on.” Doug set down his beer and stared very seriously into her face, as though plotting to pry her open with a churchkey. His glasses magnified his eyes. She saw the teenager in him, nerdy and guileless.
“We met my sophomore year of college,” she explained. “Josh was outgoing, popular; I guess I intrigued him. We were happy when we were alone. But at parties, we were strangers. He’d make instant friends with everyone—it was so easy for him—and I would want to join in but I couldn’t, somehow. Then we’d fight. Of course he got fed up with me. ‘Why do things have to be so heavy all the time?’ he’d ask. ‘Why can’t you just be happy?’ I’d tell him, ‘I hate parties, you know that.’ But I couldn’t explain what I wanted instead.”
Doug nodded. After a moment he said, “Well, he looks nice. Not for you, though.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I see you with somebody different, is all. Less Mr. Nice Guy. More like—”
“You?” she ventured.
“More like you, I was going to say.”
She drank her beer. It had gotten warm. She set the bottle on the floor. “What am I like?”
He turned toward her. His knee nudged hers. He smelled of sandalwood cologne: alcohol, pencil shavings, cream. There were freckles on his knuckles.
“Do you want to know a secret?” he asked.
—
They were manuscript pages, printed in Courier and scrawled over in red pen. The Beauty and the Darkness, A Novel by Douglas F. Ellison. He was watching her face as she read.
Most of Professor Brent Cumberland’s students at the University of Northern California admired him, many harbored secret crushes, but in the end only one of them made any difference.
It was a Monday morning in September and the clock was striking nine. Cumberland stood in front of his class. Today he was giving a lecture about his own award-winning novel. He was comparing it with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. (It was not Cumberland himself but numerous literary critics who had introduced this comparison.) A Beauty was his first published novel but it had been enough to earn him a large advance and launch him from the wilds of public high school to the ivory tower of University. Now he had everything. Successful career, full bank account, attractive wife. But when he was alone he wondered: What was the point of it all? What did it all mean?
Cumberland paced in front of his whiteboard. A former athlete, he was tall and broad-shouldered. He had full dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He wore stylish jeans and a tweed jacket and a braided leather belt that had been the best he could afford after his college graduation ten years before. His students gazed up at him. Some of them were like adoring fans and others were like deer in the headlights. The girls wore short skirts and ponytails. They leaned over their desks to show their cleavage and bounced their bare legs under their desks. They must know what they are doing, Cumberland thought. Girls like that always knew.
Midway through his class the door opened and a girl barged into the room and took a seat in the front row. Flushed and panting. She was pretty, Cumberland thought. But in a way you had to think about. Her hair was blonde. Her ey
es were gray. She had the lithe graceful body of a ballerina. He could wrap his hands around her wrist or neck and snap it like a twig. He did not know—yet—that this was something he would want to do.
After class the girl approached him at the podium. He braced himself for the usual fawning. “Can I ask you something?” she said hesitantly.
“Of course my dear,” Cumberland said grandly. She seemed nervous and most females found it comforting when he spoke this way. “How can I be of service?”
The girl bit her lip. “I wanted to tell you how much I love your novel. Especially the love interest. Rosalie.” When she talked she leaned closer to him. Her breath was lovely although a little rancid—laced with black tea. He pictured her in a disheveled student apartment, on a bed strewn with velvet and silk, reading his book. When she spoke about Rosalie it was clear that this young girl understood him better than his own wife did and better than any critic. The girl was inspired by his words and he was inspired by her passion. Now she put her hand on his arm. Innocently white.
Cumberland cleared his throat authoritatively. “Oh. Yes. Thank you, Miss…”
“Angelica.”
“Angelica,” he intoned in a deep bass that gave her pleasure. He was pleased too. “Call me Brent.”
She giggled. Her gray eyes danced. This girl was young and free. She was not run down by life. Had he really once been like her, so young and unafraid?
Angelica. The name was quite appropriate. He felt his spirits lifting just being near her.
“So?” Doug asked Molly. “What do you think?”
In that moment there was no force on earth that could make her lift her eyes from the manuscript pages to meet his gaze. What could she possibly tell him? Doug, this story is not just technically incompetent, but pathetically implausible.
And yet—Doug’s story was so vulnerable, like a brash child’s handwriting wobbling over a page of lined paper. Amid the delusion and misogyny there were just enough glimmers of intelligent sensitivity to pique Molly’s interest: she wondered which aspect of Doug Ellison’s being would win out in the end. It was like a brief affair she’d had her freshman year of college, with a guy who’d played bass in a campus rock band—ninety-five percent of what she’d known of him had told her she should run the other way, yet she was held captive by the five percent that suggested deeper waters: an impressive vocabulary, a volume of E. E. Cummings poems on the nightstand, the tender way he would pronounce his mother’s name. Now Doug was waiting to talk about his book, wanting to know what Molly thought. Because she could not possibly tell him what she thought, she kissed him.
His kisses were clumsy, or hers were. His breath was beer-bittered, as was hers. They kept missing each other—they clinked teeth, bumped noses, she tongued the corner of his mouth. They caressed each other’s elbows, gripped each other’s shoulders like eighth graders dancing. She wasn’t small, and he seemed not to know what to do with her. He tried to pull her onto his lap; her shins banged the coffee table. She yelped. He apologized, she forgave. She wanted to help him. She stood and led him to the bed.
They sat side by side on the edge of the bed and slid off their shoes: her black flats, a skin of nylon stockings underneath; his battered loafers revealing the surprise of silk socks, finely striped navy and green.
“So fancy,” she teased, pointing toward his feet. “Trying to impress me?”
He looked at her as though she’d caught him shoplifting. “They were a gift,” he said.
Now they were awkward; their kissing seemed wrong and so did the way that they sat there, inches apart on her pilled red comforter, avoiding each other’s eyes. Molly sensed that she’d caused it, although she didn’t know how.
“Should I put on some music?” she asked finally.
“Sure.”
She reached down to click on the CD player she kept under her bedside table. This relaxed him, and he laughed: “Didn’t think they made those anymore.” What played was a Green Day CD from her high school days, a sentimental favorite. It was wrong for the moment and she offered to change it, but Doug said no, it was perfect. He kissed her again, and they lay down together. It was nice to have him on her bed, she felt, although strange. It was nice to be touched, although strange. He’d brought condoms. Hot pink. She recognized them as the ones the HIV Awareness Club gave out at school and thought, He wasn’t willing to buy his own?
She said, “Presumptuous much?”
“Once a Boy Scout,” he said, grinning.
As their bodies moved together, she remembered being sixteen, when all she’d longed for was to kiss a boy and cuddle. She remembered being twenty, when Josh’s arms around her had felt thrilling and safe and not stifling hot. She wanted to ask Doug Ellison to lie beside her without speaking. She wanted to ask him to leave. She wanted him to feel familiar, she wanted him to be someone she wanted and knew. But he was only someone.
THE STRIVER
In the front row of Mr. Ellison’s SAT workshop one sunny April day, Dave Chu leaned over his desk, neck craned, eyes blinking. His forehead was curtained by a shining swoop of black hair. Whenever he looked down at his notes and then back up, the swoop fell forward and he jerked his head to flick it out of his eyes. This happened approximately every twelve seconds. He would have cut it, buzzed it to the scalp, but his mother said his hair was the only part of him that looked like her.
His mechanical pencil scratched across the page. He wrote everything Mr. Ellison said, even the jokes, the stories and asides, even as around him kids like Emma Fleed and Ryan Harbinger were staring at their phones or dozing at their desks, as beautiful Elisabeth Avarine sat silent and still in a halo of sunlight at the back of the room.
In the middle of his lecture, Mr. Ellison stopped by Dave’s desk, smiled, and told him, “You don’t have to remember everything I say. Just write down what feels important.”
Dave stared back. This was ridiculous advice. How was he supposed to know what was important? Maybe in math class these distinctions could be made—here are the relevant formulas, here are the steps to solve the equation—but in English everything was random. Even the rules were not rules. In SAT prep, Mr. Ellison would say, “Here are the rules about prepositions,” and then, five minutes later, “But remember—when it comes to writing, there are no rules!”
These contradictions were slowly driving Dave insane. He had written them all in his meticulous notes. Crisscrossed the pages with arrows, underlines, exclamations that were inadequate to express the madness in his head.
He wrote:
Mr. Ellison does not like semicolons! But you can use them sometimes.
Pronouns: Mr. Ellison does like He. He does not like You.
There is a rule about They. It is bad for some reason. Choose He or She instead!
“But,” Dave said, his hand crawling uncertainly into the air, “excuse me, Mr. Ellison, what if you don’t know if it’s a he or a she?”
“Check for the Adam’s apple, Dave, everyone knows that,” Mr. Ellison chuckled. Dave wrote:
?!?!?!???
Mr. Ellison said that adverbs were bad except when they were not. One adverb that was bad was “run quickly.” Mr. Ellison had once told Dave’s class that he’d run track in high school but had been cheated out of first place in the all-county track meet his senior year. Perhaps this was why Mr. Ellison disdained this particular phrase. Perhaps it raised a secret pain that he tried to cover over with his brave pacing through the classroom and big block letters on the whiteboard, his attempts to flirt with Abigail Cress, who sat upright in her desk next to Dave’s.
Dave wrote:
One adverb that is good is “carefully worded accusations.”
This is from a book that Mr. Ellison likes called Confederacy of Dunces.
This book is good because Mr. Ellison likes it.
Other books (Twilight) are bad because Mr. Ellison does not like them.
Mr. Ellison first read this Confederacy book in college at UC Berkeley.<
br />
UC Berkeley is a very prestigious school.
Mr. Ellison said, “Very is the most useless word in the English language.” Dave wrote: Do not use very. Mr. Ellison said the good news was that very would not be tested on the SAT. So never mind. Dave scratched through his notes. The very rule was not important.
There was already too much to remember.
He had to prepare for the fill-in-the-blank questions on the SAT Critical Reading section. He had to learn the Master List of 100 Most Common SAT Vocabulary Words: abstinence, abstract, aesthetic, alleviate, ambivalent, apathetic, auspicious, benevolent, candor, cogent, comprehensive. There were eighty-nine more Most Commons. Dave would Google them later. He wrote:
Remember to make flashcards and memorize and use them in a sentence!
Remember that on the actual test there could always be more.
Mr. Ellison said, “If you’re struggling on the SAT, just use the strategies!” At this Dave felt a tug of optimism, the string of a high-flying kite.
Mr. Ellison said, “The most important strategy is Process of Elimination.” Mr. Ellison was about to explain this (Dave’s mechanical pencil hovering over the page, his fingers vibrating with anticipation), but then he forgot because Abigail Cress was asking about the word hedonistic.
“So, would you call that a negative-tone word or a positive-tone word?” she asked, crossing and uncrossing her skinny legs. Mr. Ellison chuckled, although what Abigail said was plainly not funny.
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