by Peter Selgin
More recently I purchased a hundred assorted daffodil bulbs. When fall comes around I’ll invite some of my students to help me plant them. I’ll serve them mimosas and brunch.
Yeats spoke of the choice artists face between perfection of the art and perfection of the life. At times I wonder if by making my new home so attractive I’m jeopardizing my art, lessening the impetus toward creating – let alone perfecting – this or any other work of art. If all’s fine in the present, why, oh why, delve into the past?
The answer, of course, is that with all its imperfections the past lives in the present, that before we can live peacefully in the latter, we have to make our peace with the former. Yeats was wrong. For an artist, perfecting the art and perfecting the life go hand in hand. So I keep working on this memoir, reaching back into the past to try and grasp my former self.
This is what I’m trying to write about: how, one way or another, by hook or by crook, often with the help of others, we all invent or reinvent ourselves. My father helped invent me by bringing me into the world, the teacher by bringing me into his cottage and his classroom.
U.S. Patent Number 27,270, “NULL TYPE COMPARISON REFLECTOMETER WHEREIN NULLING IS ACCOMPLISHED BY MOVING THE LIGHT DETECTOR.” Originally filed March 9, 1966. Reissued Jan. 11, 1972. “A device for measuring light reflectance or light transparency in order to obtain color data on both opaque and transparent surfaces. The device utilizes a single photocell or photosensitive element which is activated by the entire light beam reflected from the standard and the test surface in alternate sequence.”
VII.
On the Banks of the Pactolus
Bethel, Connecticut, 1970
AS OFTEN AS YOU COULD, AFTER SCHOOL AND ON WEEKENDS, you’d visit the teacher at his cottage. He would greet you in his drawstring pants and the gray sweatshirt with the word OXFORD in blue letters across the chest. It got so you couldn’t imagine the blue door not opening for you, the teacher not welcoming you, looking at you through his round glasses, smiling and saying, Come in, Peter.
You spent hours together, you and the teacher, sitting at his low wooden table, talking to each other in hushed voices about the books he’d lent you and that you had read, or about other things, or not talking at all, just sipping tea and playing chess, the silences between moves accompanied by the hisses, roars, and snaps of wood burning in the cast iron stove.
Occasionally the teacher would have you and several of your friends over for tea. He’d perform a Chinese tea ceremony, explaining the importance of sealing and washing the cups, of filtered water and brewing twice. And of waiting – especially of waiting: five minutes for the first brew, three for the second. Once brewed, the tea should never be poured one cup at a time, but passed over all of the cups in a gentle circle so they fill equally. With each of you holding his small cup, the teacher instructed you not to gulp but to sip the tea through your lips and teeth, making a hissing sound.
Like so, he said, demonstrating.
You enjoyed these tea ceremonies. You liked having others experience the teacher as you experienced him, in the privacy of his home, to wish themselves as close to him as you were, to see them full of awe for you who, of them all, had been chosen.
Still, as much as you enjoyed it, you preferred having the teacher all to yourself.
SOMETIMES YOU AND the teacher read books to each other, novels and works of classical philosophy, Camus, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Plato, Freud, and Jung. Sometimes you would discuss the passages you read, sometimes not. The mere act of reading the books aloud, of turning them into sounds with your tongue, lips, and breath, brought them to life for you. By uttering their words you invited their authors into the teacher’s cottage.
Of the many books on the teacher’s shelves, one of your favorites to recite passages from was Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Usage:
cheeser. An eructation: low coll.: C 19-20, ob. – 2. “A strong smelling fart” (Lex. Bal., 1811); ob. – 4. “One who is, or whose feet are, smelly is known as a smelly cheeser”: since ca. 1965.
dingleberries. Impure deposits about the anus or the pudenda: low: C. 19-20 (Lex. Bal.) Cf. dingle-berries.
When not reading passages from books, you read each other’s minds. You’d be sitting there on pillows across from each other at the low table when suddenly one of you would look up at the other and see the other looking at him, and you’d both smile, or laugh – knowing, or anyway assuming, that you’d both been thinking the same thing.
You wouldn’t need to verify it. It would be obvious. You’d just smile or laugh and shake your heads, then go back to reading or doing whatever else you’d been doing.
* * *
SOMETIMES ON YOUR WALKS YOU WOULD ACCOMPANY the teacher to the Laundromat. As if taking part in a totemic ritual, you’d help him fold clothes. Afterward he’d treat you to a milkshake or burger at the local ice cream parlor. Other times, you’d accompany him to the First National supermarket. While discussing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the theory of the übermensch, the teacher would fill his cart with cereal, eggs, milk, and produce, each item taking on a philosophical import that supplemented its nutritional value.
A few times, you went bottle hunting together, the two of you prodding sharp sticks into soft mounds behind abandoned houses and hat factories, prizing bottles for medicinal bitters and tonics, and blue Bromo Seltzer, Noxzema, and apothecary jars. You would take the bottles back to the carriage house, scrub them clean in the sink, and array them on the windowsill.
Or you’d walk along the railroad tracks in search of telegraph line insulators, thick mushroom-shaped bulbs of glass in various shades of watery blue that you’d find half-buried in the swampy weeds, some still clinging to sections of rotting poles. Like jewelers you examined them for imperfections, for chinks and cracks, squinting as you held them to the sky, tossing the rejects back into the weeds and keeping the flawless specimens to adorn the teacher’s jerry-rigged bookshelves or the headboard in the bedroom you shared with George, the one with the intercontinental blue curtains.
Whatever you did together, as you walked along the tracks or searched for bottles or folded laundry or ate hamburgers or sipped milkshakes, you and the teacher talked.
Years later, recalling those conversations, you would imagine something like the dialogues Plato had with his students in the shade of that olive tree along the path between Athens and Elefsina.
* * *
WHETHER BIG OR SMALL YOU TOOK THE TEACHER’S SUGGESTIONS to heart. Avoid sugary foods. Don’t slouch. Never dog-ear the pages of a book or leave it lying splayed. Look at the stars whenever you can. Meditate. Save water and electricity. Stand up for and be true yourself, but be courteous. Accept praise. Say thank you. Listen to your parents …
You took his praise to heart as well. He admired your ability to draw, something he could barely do. Amazing hand-eye coordination, he observed watching you sketch one day. You had an obsessively sharp eye for details and a probing, inquisitive, argumentative nature. You weren’t afraid of strong opinions – including your own.
The teacher could be critical, too, of your impulsiveness, your impatience, your at times crude bluntness, your atrocious spelling. He took you to task for not keeping your fingernails trim and clean. Here, he said, giving you a shiny chrome nail clipper with a built-in file. Use it regularly so people won’t think you’ve been scratching your ass. He said it with a smile so you knew he was only half serious, but damned if you didn’t use that nail file religiously thenceforth.
Another time, while you sat reading in the cottage together, the teacher pointed to your leg that you’d been bouncing up and down. It was something you did all the time, in classrooms and elsewhere. You’d never given a thought to it.
You know what Freud would call that, what you’re doing with your leg?
You shook your head.
Mental masturbation.
You never bounced your leg again.
* * *
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br /> YOU AND THE TEACHER WERE WALKING SIDE BY SIDE down a shady side street having one of your dialogues when suddenly you found yourselves being shadowed by a police car. It had been following you for some time, creeping slowly behind you – so slowly you heard the scrunch of its tires on the pavement and the rumble of its exhaust. When you pointed it out to the teacher he said:
Keep walking; pay no attention.
You did, but then your legs started trembling. You’d done nothing wrong; you had no reason to be afraid, but you were. The police car followed closer and closer until it was rolling beside you. The officer, who had a large mustache and was chewing tobacco, leaned over and spoke through the rolled-down window.
Where are you going? he asked.
Ignore him, said the teacher, not turning. Just keep walking.
The officer asked you your name. You told him.
Don’t answer him, the teacher said. He has no right to detain or question you.
Who’s your big friend? the officer wanted to know.
At last the teacher stopped walking. He stepped up to the passenger window of the police car. Are we under arrest? he said. If I’m not mistaken, unless we’re under arrest we’re not required to answer any of your questions. Are we?
The officer admitted that this was so.
In that case I’ll thank you to leave us alone.
The officer waited a moment or two. Then he spit out a gob of tobacco juice, cursed, burned rubber, and sped off.
Shithead, said the teacher.
* * *
APART FROM YOUR DATES WITH MOLDY MAGAZINES IN the woods, your sexual experiences had been limited to playing Spin the Bottle at a sixth-grade party at Jane Dolan’s house near the sand and gravel pits. Still, you knew you liked girls, having had a series of crushes since kindergarten, where you fell hard for Beverly Gruman, who with her skinny neck and round freckled face reminded you of Olive Oyl.4
A fan of Popeye – who I emulated by eating spinach raw from cans – I considered this to be a good thing.
The latest of your crushes was Jill Butterworth, who had freckles, though her neck wasn’t skinny. Her curly orange blond hair reminded you of the marmalade your father spread on his morning toast and the flames that leaped from abandoned hat factories as they burned. Jill lived in a development at the north end of town. On freezing cold winter days you would walk there and stand in front of her boxy house, rubbing your freezing hands together, hoping that she would see you out there and invite you in for cookies and hot chocolate, which of course never happened.
When summer came, hoping to see her there, on weekends you’d go to Muckauer Park. The park’s real name was Meckhauer, but you and your friends called it Muckauer since no amount of chemicals or dredging could rid the waters of its recreational pond of whatever turned them a nasty shade of greenish-brown. You would scan the bodies sprawled along the pond’s ersatz beach, looking for the burning torch of Jill’s orange hair. With luck you’d find her sharing a blanket with her family, whereupon you would screw up your courage, suck your belly in, and make your way there, intent on dazzling her with some latest item of trivia you’d committed to memory: Cats can’t move their jaws sideways. Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards. Crocodiles can’t stick their tongue out. Common houseflies hum in the key of F. … As if they were manna laced with honey from heaven, you’d share these and other delectations. Instead of the looks of awe you hoped to elicit, Jill would roll her eyes and her mother would stare while her father smiled in sympathy and her kid brother sucked on a popsicle.
More often than not, though, you would find Jill out on one of the park’s two floats, wearing the aquamarine swimsuit that perfectly complemented her flaming hair, preparing to backflip off the diving board into that murky water – which, however murky, her flaming hair would consecrate. Your own inability to do a somersault, let alone a backflip, kept you from swimming out there and joining her. Meanwhile other boys your age luxuriated in that grubby water rendered holy by Jill’s presence.
You consoled yourself at the Good Humor truck, which pulled into the parking lot at exactly three o’clock every afternoon, heralded – like a summertime Santa’s sleigh – by the tinkle of silver bells, its boxy white body packed with frosty treats. Among featured offerings that summer of your thirteenth year was the Banana Split Supreme – a banana flavored ice cream bar on a stick, sheathed with chocolate and coated with graham cracker crumbs, with a slab of fudge at its center, a frozen masterpiece. It helped dull the ache of surrendering Jill Butterworth to the water and other boys.
Then came the Saturday toward the end of that summer when two disasters struck. First, while conducting your reconnaissance of the park, you caught Jill kissing Harvey Keebler – the same Harvey Keebler whose mother your brother would inadvertently tell to go fuck herself – behind one of the two floats.
In a state of grief you approached the Good Humor man and asked for a Banana Split, to be told that it was no longer, that it had been a summer special, that something repulsive to do with strawberries had taken its place. It took every last measure of your will to keep from grasping the Good Humor man by his spanking white uniform lapels and sullying them with salty tears.
* * *
SOME TIME BETWEEN HALLOWEEN AND THANKSGIVING you arrived at the carriage house to find a girl’s green Schwinn parked by the blue door. You heard voices inside. With an ear pressed to the door you heard the words “quotidian” and “sanctimonious” and identified one of the voices as that of Vivian Y., who shared the teacher’s special class with you. Vivian wrote and recited impenetrable (at least by you) poems stuffed with words that fell well beyond your (admittedly restricted) vocabulary. Vivian was well read and articulate and tended to monopolize class discussions. Thanks partly to this but mainly because she’d made it so abundantly clear that she had no interest whatsoever in you, you found her intriguing, albeit annoyingly so.
It was a cloudy day. The murky atmosphere turned everything gray – the carriage house’s clapboards, the roof shingles, even the blue door. From inside the cottage you heard a burst of feminine laughter. Feeling instantly jealous you knocked extra loudly on the blue door. Through it you heard the teacher’s voice:
Come in, Peter.
You entered to find the teacher and Vivian seated at the table. You saw the pottery teacups and chess pieces scattered around the chessboard. As you took off your sneakers Vivian sat there in a desultory air. She didn’t look at all happy to see you. Vivian had long straight brown hair that she parted in the middle and that fell two thirds of the way down her slim back. Her forehead was high, her chin pointy, her nose narrow and straight down to its tip, where it curved suddenly up into a little ball – like (you thought scornfully) the meatballs in a can of Progresso Chickarina soup.
Hey, Vivian, you said with forced cheer.
Hey, she responded with unalloyed indifference.
The teacher asked you if you wanted tea. Yes, you said, that would be lovely. As you said the word “lovely” you turned in time to catch Vivian’s look of disgust. You tossed her a smirk and crossed to the kitchen area, where you pretended to search for the teacup you always used, one with a little fish design etched into the clay and fired with a delicate cuprous oxide glaze, though you had already seen the cup on the table and knew that Vivian had been using it.
Have you seen my cup? you asked, searching, or pretending to search, for it. You know, the one with the fish design on it? I could swear I put it back last time I used it.
You extended this burlesque for a few more minutes, moving cups and other items in the cabinet. Then: Oh, wait, there it is on the table. Were you using my cup, Vivian? No, no, no, that’s perfectly okay; I’ll get another.
You took another cup and sat down. That’s when you noticed all the black chess pieces gathered on Vivian’s side of the table, with the solitary black king on the chessboard surrounded by white pieces. The teacher always played Black. Vivian had beaten the teache
r at chess – something you had attempted many times but never managed to do. For this alone you wished her dead and in hell.
Been playing chess, I see, you observed.
Yes, said Vivian contemptuously. We were playing chess.
It’s a challenging game, isn’t it? You touched one of the pieces.
Yes, said Vivian, rolling not her eyes but her voice. Quite challenging.
Have you tried the Queen’s Gambit? Or the King’s Indian Attack?
You made awkward chess chatter for a while, until finally Vivian excused herself, saying that she had “a ton” of homework to do.
Gee, that’s too bad. Anything I can possibly help you with?
Thanks, but no, Vivian – who by then was already putting her red vinyl boots on – replied. Before leaving she gave the teacher a peck on the cheek, balancing herself on the toe of one of the boots as she did so. Then without looking at you she went out the door, got on her Schwinn, and pedaled away into the gray afternoon.
You waited a moment or two before saying to the teacher, as you twirled the vanquished black king:
Too bad I didn’t get here any sooner. I might have spared you the agony of defeat.
She’s very good, the teacher replied while doing dishes.
At what?
Don’t be a jerk.
If you ask me I’d say she’s got a crush on you.
I didn’t ask. Anyway Vivian’s a lovely woman.
A woman?
That’s right.
What makes her a woman, other than the fact that she swallowed a thesaurus?