by Robert Cohen
“For a second I thought you had died,” Gail said, assessing him thoughtfully over the bloodied quarters of her grapefruit. “Lying on the floor in your smock that way, with your eyes all rolled up in your head. It was a pretty dramatic sight, let me tell you.”
“Actually it was very peaceful,” he said. “It just seemed, I don’t know, the next thing.”
“Peaceful for you maybe. The rest of us were frantic. Then the smelling salts didn’t work and even that cool customer Wainwright got freaked. You didn’t hear him bellowing at the nurses? Like it was their fault?”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
“The luck of the oblivious.” She probed the tip of her spoon experimentally into the pinkish pulp. “You know, we can joke about it now, but it wasn’t funny. I thought you’d left the building. I said to myself, ‘He’s not coming back.’”
“Sorry if I scared you.” It occurred to him however that he didn’t sound sorry, he sounded weary and proud and a little bit exhilarated, as if he’d won something from her. He chewed his dry wheat toast, eyeing the marmalade jar with its shreds of jellied fruit, the stick of butter softening in its dish. The toast would taste better, he knew, if he covered it in these things. But he didn’t want it to taste better; he wanted it to taste like what it was. “Anyway, no harm done. I’m back now.”
“Are you?”
She made a soft clicking noise with her back teeth and examined him through narrowed lids, not so much thoughtfully as clinically. He knew more or less the picture he presented. The terry-cloth bathrobe with its frayed belt and broken loops. The plump white potato of his belly. The calico stubble in the hollows of his scalp, the jutting slopes of his cheeks. Even sitting up, he knew he looked vaguely like a slob in a Barcalounger, lying down. An invalid. A sicko.
Yet, as things had turned out, he wasn’t sick. He did not feel like an invalid exactly; if anything he felt more valid. More alive.
“I have to go to work in a minute,” Gail said. “You’ll be okay here?”
“Of course.”
“Well, okay. If you’re sure.”
A stark, lacerating thought bloomed in Teddy’s mind like a cactus flower: Gail too had steeled herself for that other word. Prepared herself for the crisis of malignancy, for full-out assault, radioactive war. Those whispered phone calls, those late nights hunched over her computer, squinting through her reading glasses, browsing the Web for what-ifs…after so much work and so little consequence a certain letdown, he supposed, was only to be expected. After all, what was there to celebrate? A victory by default? The opponent had simply failed to appear. It was a forfeit, a nonevent, an apprehension of something large that’s passed you by, like not getting hit by a truck.
Benign: 1. of a gentle disposition; 2. of a mild kind.
And was this how the years would now go? Dry crusts swathed in marmalade and butter. The soft mesh of routine. Everything mild and regular as the tick of a watch. And all the while waiting for the crisis that would shatter the glass, and arrest time for good. You spend half your life erecting a canopy over yourself, and the other half anticipating the brilliant jagged flash that splits it open, and lets the elements come raining in.
Outside, birds were lined up in the locust trees, singing the same old chirpy, unvarying songs. Shut the fuck up, he thought.
“I’m trying to decide what to make for dinner,” Gail said. “Any ideas?”
“None.”
“Fine,” she sighed. “We’ll improvise.”
He looked at her, his wife, his partner, his running mate. The skin had loosened under her jaw; her hands were veiny and thin. How long did they have left? Nothing had changed. He was still healthy, still operating in a world of relative happinesses, relative disappointments, where people had breakfast with their spouses and discussed their affairs. All he had to do was get up, get dressed, and go to work like everyone else. And yet herein lay the problem. For better or okay, maybe for worse, he no longer felt like everyone else. The sight of his X-ray on the illuminated screen in Wainwright’s office stayed with him, that dark sheet with its twiggy, outflung arms, the brittle cage of his ribs…like a snapshot of the inner man, the corpse you carried under your clothes. A stick figure! A cartoon! And so much empty space between the luminous bones! It was as if some benign nonfunctioning organ had died in the hospital and been scraped away, in order that another, more singular organ might live.
But live how? And want what?
He wished he were hungry, but he wasn’t. He wished he were thirsty, but he wasn’t. He wished he were horny, but he wasn’t. He could feel his appetites flaking off one by one, like so much dead skin. Shaving his head had, he saw now, been only the first step. There would be others. The body lightening its load, stripping itself down, as if in preparation for a voyage. To make the new, you had to discard the old. Leave a little slag heap in back of the factory.
“So are you going to school today?” Gail had slung her bag over her shoulder and was checking her keys. “I’d imagine they miss you down there.”
“Zoe is exceptionally capable.”
“True. Of course, so are you.”
“It’s only been a few days. Give me some time to recover.”
“To recover from not being sick, you mean? How does that work, exactly?”
“I’ll tell you when I know.”
“Fine. So you’ll be here when Mimi gets home then. I mean, really here. Like, present. Like, back in the swing or whatever you want to call it.”
“The swing?” Under the circumstances, it did not seem wise to confess to Gail how he’d spent the day before, how much solitaire he’d played, how much television he’d watched, how much empty space he’d surveyed through the window, how much coffee he’d made and consumed; how, lighting the stove in his terry-cloth robe and his fake-suede slippers, he’d idly toyed with the idea of holding the oven mitt over the jet’s blue fluttering flame, wondering how long it would take to burn. A stupid, random impulse, it came and it went. He had not moved the oven mitt into the flame; he had not moved the oven mitt at all. Whether it was courage or cowardice that restrained him, Teddy didn’t know. There was no way of knowing why one didn’t do the things one didn’t do. Just as there was no way of knowing why one did the things one did do, without going ahead and doing them. “But I never got out of it,” he said.
Thank God it was June: the budget was already passed, the new curricula set, the school year, that bloated epic, already inscribed in the books. Teddy could stay home and recuperate for as long as he felt like. Let Zoe deal with the field trips, the band concerts and honors assemblies. She was better at such functions than he was anyway, as she often made a point of reminding him.
“Why not take graduation off too?” she’d said. “No need to rush back. We’ve got everything under control.”
Normally Zoe’s cool, authoritative tone, so effective with boys in detention, along with her cunning imperial use of the first-person plural, would have annoyed Teddy no end. In fact it annoyed him now. Nonetheless her proposal was tempting. How many years had it been since he’d last enjoyed a graduation? Since the solemnities of the event, the tearful parents, the earnest speeches, the piping choir, had roused any emotion from him at all?
“I may just do that,” he said. “I’ve got some sick days stored up. If you’re sure you’re on top of it?”
“I’m on top,” Zoe said.
“Gretchen can step in if necessary. Or Mary Anne. They’ve done it before.”
“I know.”
“Don’t forget Pierce. He’s single—he doesn’t have to run home after school. Plus he’s a fan favorite.”
“Not with me,” Zoe said. “There’s something about that man. What is it? His eyes are all over the room.”
“He’s just a kid. Give him time. He hasn’t settled in yet.”
“I was a kid too when I started. Weren’t you? But we weren’t like that.” Her voice had taken on the steely, imperative tone he dreaded. Lik
e most number twos, Zoe was known for her hard work; it was part of her long-running advertisement for a school of her own. That this campaign seemed doomed to failure—that school boards preferred to hire principals who made their job look easy, not hard—was unfair of course, but unfair in a good way, for it kept Zoe around, working harder than everyone else.
“I’ve got another call. Take care of yourself, Teddy. Let me know if you need something.”
Teddy was nothing if not open to instruction. Boy, did he take care of himself. And boy, did it agree with him, this pared-down, horizontal life. He had the house to himself. The phone rarely rang; when it did he didn’t answer. He wore no watch, cooked no meals, took out no trash. Light poured through the curtains and pooled at his feet, dreamy and sluggish, like a golden benediction. He was on the other side now. One of those people who stay home in the middle of the day doing nothing, a master of that lost, esoteric art, sitting still. Robe drooping open, bare calves plunked on the hassock, he leaned back in his reclining chair like some contented provincial aristocrat, plucking grapes—black, seedless—from a ceramic bowl. Around him the house lay tranquil. The rocker sat at rest, the tulips held their petals. The mail and newspapers piled up on the sideboard, unread. Out on the streets, the postmen and cable guys and housepainters and lawn-maintenance people and the other day workers made their noisy, oblivious rounds. What a waste, Teddy thought. All that effort just to travel in circles.
In the bathroom he’d find Bruno curled in the tub, white flanks rippling liquidly in dreams. So this was how old dogs spent their day. He felt like a man with a secret, a second life. Wars and the suffering of innocents were in the news, but the news was far away, the news wasn’t new the way this was new. This was a feeling he’d have liked to hold on to forever, as one wants to hold a fresh-plucked flower forever, knowing all the time it isn’t possible, that soon enough the petals will dry and fade, crushed into powder by the weight of one’s palm. And God knew his palms were weightier than most.
The thing about not-dying was this: in the end, it turned out to be, like flower-petal-holding, a lyric condition, transient and bright, a moment snatched from the jaws of eternity. You couldn’t live that way forever, all lit up and indolent and marveling. Soon the old motors would begin to race. Soon the weight of gravity would come bearing down, the old habits begin to impose themselves, as habits do. But before that happened, before the slow, exquisite, otherworldly quality of those June days was gone and forgotten, Teddy took two preemptive measures: he ordered himself a treadmill and enrolled in a summer photography course at the college.
VA 103: Black and White Photography, with instructor M. McVay, met in Sunderland Hall, high on the western slope of College Hill. Sunderland, with its tortoiseshell façade of concrete, wood, and steel, had been designed to provoke—the shock of the new and all that—but now that it was no longer new, it stood revealed as the cheap, shabby construction it was. The gray pockmarked walls and industrial-looking floors put one more in mind of a bunker in which to sit out a bombing raid, Teddy decided, than a studio for the pursuit of fine arts. But when he paused to look over the bulletin boards, all littered with colorful flyers, and surveyed the summer internships, the cars and laptops and stereos for sale, the rides being offered to Montana and San Francisco and New Orleans, the seniors looking to share their off-campus houses with nonsmoking vegans and bisexuals, it all came back at once—the giddy socialist élan, the fuzzy vibe of shared intense experience that made every year in college seem as rich and eventful as five years outside it. He knew then it was the right decision, to return to school.
He’d always wanted to take a photography course, back in college. But math had been such a restrictive major; he was usually holed up in the library, or washing dishes in the dining hall, or peer tutoring in the Math Center, bulling his way through. Such were the joys. If he had it to do over again, he’d have bulled and holed up less and done more of that other stuff, the smoking and drinking and creative arts courses and so on. But he did not have it to do over again. Time’s odometer moved in one direction only; it could not be rolled back.
He found the right room on the right floor and took a seat out of habit in the back row. Students were milling about, catching up on each other’s summer achievements and dissipations.
“Dude, how was India?”
“Sweet. How was Peru?”
“Sick.”
It was 7:08. No sign yet of Professor McVay. Teddy opened his rucksack and rummaged through its contents, the notebooks and pens, the rulers and erasers. He was both disappointed and relieved to see he was not the oldest person in the room. He counted three other people “from the community,” as it was known on campus, though in this case, judging by their sweat-suits, it appeared to be the retirement community. The rest of course were college kids, Danielle’s age. For a change Teddy was glad she wasn’t around to get mad at him for encroaching on her space, as she used to back in high school when he’d linger in the kitchen on Saturday nights chatting up her friends, or, as Danielle put it, “bothering everyone.” Yet in truth he could not have felt more harmless, more benign, than he did at this moment, holding his new Montblanc pen over the first unmarked page in his new Wilson Jones Nomad binder, as some skinny young thing with hennaed hair clunked up to the lectern in her clogs and peered out at them skeptically.
“VA 103?”
He looked at his watch: 7:16. He was about to lean over and ask the nearest student what time the class started when he realized what everybody else appeared to know. Class had started. Which made that lost waif at the lectern, the one who was now speaking to them in an irresolute, weirdly transatlantic voice, her sleeveless T-shirt dangling halfway to her knees, her long, willowy neck bent like a pretzel from the weight of her head, adjunct instructor M. McVay, for whose services he’d just written the Carthage College registrar a $600 check.
“This is, as you’ve surely noted in the catalog, a beginning course in theory and practice. The lecture portion will emphasize historical trends, contemporary applications, and an appreciation of the art and craft. In the lab portion we’ll concentrate on camera technique, film exposure and processing, darkroom techniques, lighting, and composition. Any questions so far?”
No one had any questions so far.
“I am, as you’ll see, a great believer in asking questions. Making pictures is an interrogative experience. You don’t make a picture from an answer; you make it from a question. When all your questions are answered, you’re no longer an artist, are you? You’re either a guru or a corpse. So you see, if you do have questions, any questions at all, I’d like you to just go ahead and ask them.”
She hesitated, tidying her notes against the lectern with her long, tremulous fingers. Surely, Teddy thought, Professor M. McVay had not intended to come off quite so runic and kung fu–ish as she had. But this early in the hour, with the air conditioner humming senselessly in the window and the sinking light of a spectacular sunset slanting through the maples, the effect of her remarks was to shut down any prospect of inquiry at once. Nobody had questions, nobody had ever had questions, and moreover nobody would ever have questions: that was the basic state of things in VA 103.
“Well, down to business then. Please don’t fail to correct me if I mispronounce your name.”
She peered down at the computerized roll sheet through her blockish black-framed glasses, and proceeded to do just that. Of the thirteen names, she tunelessly butchered half of them, and nobody corrected her. She looked jumpy enough as it was. She had the posture of some oversize mantis, nervous and twiggy, sharp-jointed. Had she ever taught before? According to the catalog she was currently in residence at the New School; but whether she taught there or studied there—or hung on the wall—wasn’t clear. Her face was a kind of survey course all its own. Her skin had the milky-blue glow of a Vermeer. Her eyebrows had a Gothic arch; her cheekbones a modernist severity; her lips, a glossy, sullen impasto. Yet compared to Gail, she seemed, like
most young women, somehow rather vain and shallow, unformed. Which did not prevent him from noting the steady undulations of her pelvic mound moving rhythmically against the lectern, or the bouncy musical way she walked over to the blackboard, her heels clicking on the linoleum, her bracelets jangling away like tambourines. She made a considerable racket all right, this tiny, anemic-looking person to whom he’d committed the next six weeks of his life.
She picked up the chalk and his heart gave a squeeze. Oh, he did love these first days of school—walking into a strange classroom, being handed a new set of tools, and getting down to work. Already the blackboard was filling up with perplexing new equations:
Art’s one subject = the human clay.
Professor McVay turned to face the class. “Anyone want to hazard a guess about what this means?”
Apparently no one did want to hazard such a guess however.
“Well, I’ll give you a hint. It’s from W. H. Auden.” She kept up her smile for as long as she could, but her gaze was directed downward, at the fluttering sheaves of her lecture notes. “The poet?”
All hope of pleasure now fled the room for good. It was fifteen minutes into the first class, the thermometer read eighty-five degrees, everyone with any money or sense was off in Europe or on the coast of Maine, and already the first deadly warning signs of pretension—quotes on the board, the invocation of poetry—were flashing yellow on the long road to nine thirty. Was there to be any actual photography component to this photography class?