(A) Religious or philosophical beliefs.
(B) No desire to engage in sex.
(C) Lack of opportunity.
(D) Timidity.
(E) To avoid disease.
(F) Other.
Or:
Why do you engage in sexual activity as you have defined it? Check one:
(A) Peer pressure.
(B) To stay in a relationship.
(C) Pleasure.
(D) Curiosity.
(E) Generosity: desire to please.
(F) Other.
After each section there was a space in which the student could write anything she wanted.
Karen knew how easily the students could turn her project into comedy. She could have done a fair job herself of lampooning it, and she giggled when she imagined the seniors filling out the questionnaires together, agreeing to claim orgies with gangs of sex-crazed people of both genders and all ages and shapes who sneaked out of a local prison and invaded the dorms each night, and cooking up a sexual life at home on vacation that featured practices so grotesque they required positions which could only have been achieved with the aid of chiropractors and only induced by drugs. Well, if that was how the seniors would react, that’s what she would report, but she didn’t think it would happen, and she was right: The seniors trusted Karen’s skepticism and her detachment, and so most of them filled out the questionnaires as accurately as they could.
She decided she needed a partner in evaluating the questionnaires, someone less virginal than she, to assure a balanced interpretation. So she enlisted her friend Claire Nelson, a senior colleague on the Clarion staff, who was poised beyond her years, long legged, raven haired, and so beautiful that people’s eyes were always on her. Nothing had happened yet to Claire to dissuade her that the power her beauty gave her to project herself on the world was something she deserved rather than merely a stroke of genetic luck.
Karen stored the answered questionnaires in a safe in the Clarion’s office, to which she’d changed the combination so only she could open it, and on an evening in early December she removed them and carried them to Claire’s room where they could work more privately than in the Clarion’s office. She didn’t ask herself why she chose Claire’s room rather than her own.
Karen sat at Claire’s desk with half the questionnaires, and Claire, languid on her bed, read the other half. As they finished each one, they handed it across to the other. After a while Claire sat up on her bed, swinging her feet to the floor. “Upper East Side,” she said, handing a questionnaire to Karen. She knew it was wrong to try to identify the participants, but that was not what she was really trying to do. Her remark was simply her way into a conversation. She wanted to talk, to really talk.
“What?” Karen looked across the room at her friend. She thought it would be a distraction to be so beautiful. Besides, she knew that there was always a bottle of vodka hidden in Claire’s bureau right there in her room. She worried that Claire was an alcoholic. But Claire didn’t consider herself an alcoholic. She just drank because she liked to. Whatever Claire liked to do, she did.
“New York,” Claire said. “It’s obvious. I can tell. I used to live there, you know. I can tell by the bragging tone.”
Karen knew Claire had lived all her life in Manhattan until last year, when she moved with her father to London. And she knew Claire’s mother had deserted the family when Claire was eight, but she didn’t know that the real reason Claire’s father, a vice president of an international investment bank, had managed to get himself transferred so suddenly was because his daughter had been caught having sex with a young teacher by none other than the headmaster of her well-respected independent day school in the city. Claire’s father had wanted to get her far away from that scene, so he moved to London and enrolled her at Miss Oliver’s because he traveled a lot and needed to put her in a boarding school. He’d learned from his daughter’s recent adventure the value of a school’s acting in loco parentis. Besides, he reasoned, at Miss Oliver’s there was a dearth of young men with whom to go to bed.
Claire had been caught because the headmaster, much admired by his board of trustees for his thrifty management, made the rounds at the end of every day to make sure the lights were out, and on a Friday evening had found Claire and her paramour in flagrante in the faculty room. The headmaster, who might have been in his job a few too many years and who’d never believed the stories he’d heard about this kind of thing, had assumed that the teacher, a year out of college and thus five years older than his victim, was the predator. Or at least the headmaster pretended to, for no one knew how well the headmaster knew Claire, though he did tell his wife, who was also good at keeping secrets, that what had surprised him the most about the scene that confronted him when he opened the faculty room door was that the teacher was more naked than Claire—and Claire was on top. He fired the teacher immediately, of course, glowering and quoting the school’s lawyer at anybody who wanted to know why. He was this secretive to protect Claire’s honor, a word he’d learned the meaning of long ago while studying English novels at Yale, where all the males in his family always went, and where he belonged to Skull and Bones.
“RICH KIDS,” CLAIRE went on. Her voice was filled with contempt. “They do anything they want, but they don’t do it because it’s fun. They do it because others do.”
“We’re not supposed to be guessing. It’s supposed to be anonymous,” Karen said.
“I know, but it’s so childish, it’s hard not to know. Look at how she’s marked it.” Claire wanted Karen to see how bold and large the marks the kid had made to affirm how wide ranging her sexual activities were and how, just as enthusiastically, she’d marked only Pleasure as the motivation. Claire didn’t think anybody did it just for pleasure.
But Karen wouldn’t look at the questionnaire. She handed it back. The girl who had filled this out could come from Toledo, for all they knew.
“I don’t want to be a voyeur any more than you do, I just wanted to talk,” Claire said, surprising herself at this confession. It gave her power away to reveal how lonely she was.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that you were,” Karen said. She wondered why she’d been so slow to understand that Claire’s beauty and worldly charm didn’t bring her friends; they set her apart. The way she never talked about herself created an aura. For some of the girls their world would be less exciting if that aura ever melted. They’d rather be paparazzi to Claire than friends. Karen knew it was Claire’s fault, that Claire made plans, created her aura on purpose. But just the same, she felt she hadn’t been a good friend.
“Hey,” Karen said, “if you want to talk, let’s talk. We’ll finish this later.” She started to reach across the small space to pat Claire on the knee, but Claire drew away from the gesture, retreating back inside herself.
“Some other time,” Claire said.
And an hour later, as they finished, Claire said, “You left a big one out when you made the questionnaire.”
“What did I leave out?” Karen felt just a little defensive.
“Power.” Claire said. She looked intently in her friend’s eyes. She’d added Power in her own handwriting on her questionnaire as her motivation, the only one to do so, and had marked the kind of sex she had too. But nothing about the teacher. Nor that she had been a virgin until her affair with him. Those were still her secrets. “Now you know which one is mine,” she said. “I really wanted you to know. I get lonely sometimes.”
Karen was touched. “You know, I’d kind of figured it out myself,” she admitted. “Because you’d marked all those things and I knew how—” She paused. She didn’t want to say “active”; it sounded too clinical. She started again. “I knew how busy you were,” she tried. She paused again, and then she said, “But I don’t think you could be so mean. You wouldn’t do it just for power.”
“I made him do it,” Claire heard herself confessing. “I made him want me so much he’d do the worst thing he could do, even
though he knew the second it was over he’d wish that he hadn’t.”
“What?” Karen asked. “Who?” She was fascinated.
“A teacher. That’s why I had to leave the school, that’s why my dad got transferred. It’s why I’m here.”
“A teacher!”
“He cried every time we did it. Right after we were finished he’d start to weep. The only time he didn’t was when we got caught.”
“A teacher did it to you?”
“More like the other way around,” Claire said. “I made it happen. I fucked him.”
Karen winced. The word, used that way, made her think of guns. “What happened to him?” she asked.
“He got fired,” Claire said and got up from her bed and went to her bureau and opened the drawer.
“I don’t want any,” Karen said. She was thinking about the teacher getting fired.
“Oh, sure you do,” Claire said. Her tone was very matter-of-fact. She crossed the room with the bottle in one hand, two glasses in the other. She put them on the desk next to Karen and poured vodka into each. Then she handed one to Karen.
Karen shook her head. Claire took a drink. “I didn’t mean to get him fired,” Claire said. She could see the teacher in her head. He was very tall and thin, his hair as black as hers, and his thin chest naked, moving in and out with his sobs. “I’m really sorry about that part,” she said.
“I know you are. I know you’re not mean, but just the same—”
“Yes, just the same,” Claire said. She picked up Karen’s glass and handed it to her. Karen shook her head again, and Claire put the glass back down.
“I don’t drink,” Karen said.
“You never break the rules, do you?” Claire said. “Why are you so nice?”
“I guess I just don’t want to break the rules.”
“Of course you do. Everybody does. You just don’t think you should. Somebody told you not to, and you don’t think you should. Good for you, but I read an article in some magazine saying that kids who never do drugs or booze or sex frequently have big problems in their adulthood. What do you think about that?”
“You just made that up,” Karen said.
Claire hesitated. She really had read it in some article, maybe in the New York Times; she wished she could remember where. Maybe she would find the article and make Karen read it.
“Don’t ever do that again with me,” Karen said. “You don’t need to. I like you just the way you are.”
There was a silence then, while Claire thought about that. And then she heard herself saying, “Yeah, I was just making it up.” She faked a giggle to cover her lie.
Karen giggled too, the tension dissolved. “It really was pretty funny,” she said.
Then Claire said, “Please. Do me a favor. Just join me in a little drink.” She slid Karen’s glass across the desk toward her.
“Because we’re friends?”
“Yes, because we’re friends.”
“Or to prove I’m not timid?” Karen thought about Claire’s made-up article. Even though it didn’t exist, it could be true.
“We’re friends,” Claire insisted.
“All right, because we’re friends.” Karen picked up the glass and looked at Claire. How beautiful you are! she thought, and took the whole drink down in a single shot. And winced. She hated the taste.
“Thank you,” Claire said, and slugged down her own. Then she got up, capped the bottle, and crossed the room with it to her bureau and put it away. “Well, that’s all for tonight. I hope you’ll come again.”
“I will,” Karen said, standing up. “We’ll have a little drink to keep each other company.”
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the next evening, Rabbi Myron and Rachel Benjamin, Karen’s parents, who were hosting a recruiting meeting, opened the door of their home in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Fred Kindler, Nan White, and Francis Plummer. The rabbi, tall and thin like his daughter, was bald and wore a worn sports coat. He shook hands with the three of them. Rachel, dark haired and shorter than her husband, smiled at Nan and Francis and took Fred’s hand in both of hers. “Our daughter tells us you’re very brave,” she said, then she kissed him on the cheek as if she’d known him all his life.
The room into which the Benjamins ushered them was big and lined on every wall with books. The guests were already seated, eleven teenage girls among them. Eleven potential students!
They had a good plan: After the rabbi introduced them, Fred would focus on the culture of Miss Oliver’s School as a life-changing experience. He would describe what he had witnessed in his visits to the school as a candidate, and show how he had been drawn to the school, how he had fallen in love.
Then Francis would focus on the excellence of the teaching at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. He’d know when he stood up and looked at the faces in the audience what examples to use. Perhaps how in science the students discovered the truth before they learned it rather than the other way around, maybe history as research, maybe for English he’d teach a poem. Something short and succinct, like Richard Wilbur’s “Two Voices in a Meadow” to show how charged language can be.
Yes! He’d recite the poem, then start by seeing if any of them heard how the structure of each verse mirrors the other, and go from there to get the girls thinking and talking, drawing the parents in too. Don’t talk about teaching and learning, give them the experience instead. Then tomorrow, he’d mail a copy of the poem to each of the families and ask them to talk about it together. That would keep the school in their head, that would draw them in!
BUT WHEN MYRON Benjamin finished introducing his three guests, he didn’t sit down and give the floor to Fred. He went on talking, though it wasn’t really a talk, it was a meditation in which he discovered—as if he’d never known—why he and his Rachel were willing to part from their beloved daughter at a time in her life they could never have with her again. First he listed the teachers’ passion for their subjects, mentioning in particular Gregory van Buren, who had engendered in his daughter a love of language and a desire to write, and went from there to claim that because the teachers expected so much of his daughter she demanded even more of herself, reminding himself out loud that the other word for subject was discipline. He meditated aloud this way for a full twenty minutes or so, never once speaking of the value of single-sex education for girls.
Near the end it came to the rabbi that great teaching was an act of love, a love that was disciplined, chosen, and that had nothing to do with whether or not the teacher liked the child. “Not like the love of my Rachel and me for Karen, our daughter. That we can hardly help, for she’s our own flesh and blood,” he said. “So when you choose a school, don’t think so much about preparing for the future, getting into college,” he told them, leaping now to their misguided obsessions. “As if your children were squirrels hoarding for the winter. Look for that passion instead, that adoration of life. Tell me, would you withhold an education from a child who you knew was going to die before she was old enough for college?” Then he stopped, coming out of his meditation like a man waking up, a little sheepish for having wandered from thought to thought and being so personal.
What could Fred say after that? Whatever it was would be anticlimactic. Besides, two talks would be enough, three would be redundant. So, though he was disappointed not to give the talk he had been so eager to give, he decided that instead of following the rabbi’s talk with one of his own, he’d prove the truth of the rabbi’s praise of the school by showing these people how committed the headmaster of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was to its great teachers, how much he revered them and supported them, how much he trusted them. He introduced Francis Plummer as Miss Oliver’s most celebrated teacher, who embodied the school as much as any one person could. So much more empowering of himself publicly to give the floor to the little creep than have him steal it like he had in San Francisco!
As Francis stood up, it didn’t even cross his mind that he wouldn’t talk, as planned, abou
t great teaching at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls. But when he opened his mouth to speak he knew he would not. He saw on the faces of the audience that they were thinking about the rabbi’s talk, building on his thoughts, making them their own. Francis was disappointed. He wanted to give his talk, he wanted to teach this poem he loved so much! But he was much too good a teacher to know that what was needed right then was not for him to talk but for him to invite questions about the school in which Myron Benjamin had caused so much interest.
When he began, it was soon obvious to him that some of the questions were best answered by Nan, or Fred, or even the Benjamins, and so he directed them to the appropriate person. The result was that the questions were answered well; the guests, already inspired by the rabbi, were satisfied that the school was managed judiciously and saw how well Miss Oliver’s people worked together. When Nan finished her slideshow a few minutes later, the audience applauded, and before they left, several families asked Nan for an application. Clearly, the evening had been a success.
After the guests left, the Benjamins invited the three recruiters to sit with them at the kitchen table to drink coffee for a few minutes before the drive home. Francis was delighted with this lingering: a chance to savor his satisfaction over his part in the evening’s success. He’d been a good teammate to Fred Kindler, felt the beginning of his redemption. He leaned back in his chair, sipped the coffee, felt his muscles relax.
“You did a wonderful job,” he heard Fred Kindler say, and for an instant thought Kindler was talking to him, but then he realized that Kindler had directed the comment to Myron Benjamin, sitting close to him on his right. “Coming from a parent rather than a staffer—”
“It was a pleasure,” the rabbi interrupted; he didn’t need this praise. But Francis did. His disappointment was a surprise. He waited now for Kindler to acknowledge his work too, his decision not to give a talk, his deft handling of the questions.
But that didn’t happen because now Rachel Benjamin was explaining that she and her husband would have started recruiting for Miss Oliver’s three years ago, as soon as they saw how Karen was thriving there, if they hadn’t heard the rumors that the school might have to close. “That’s right,” Myron Benjamin agreed. “We didn’t want to entice families into a school that might not be able to stay the course for them. But then the changes were made,” he said, looking right at Francis and choosing those neutral words on purpose, “and that was the sign for Rachel and me that the school was going to make it.”
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