Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  “I shouldn’t cry in school,” she sobbed to William, and he shook his head.

  “Chemicals in tears release stress. It’s good to cry,” he said. “Plus, you’re in touch with your feelings. I wish I were that open.”

  She looked up at him, astonished. “You are. Of course you are,” she said. “You’re the most open person I know.”

  He shook his head again. “I try and fail.”

  He handed her tissues from a box on his desk. “Keep crying. Let it all out,” he told her. He smelled good, like pine or new wood floors, and it made her stop crying a little. When she was finally finished, snuffling into a bloom of Kleenex, he picked up her journal and browsed through it and she sat frozen, because she had begun to write stories on her own, not just for class. It was fun to write, to be someone else, but she wasn’t sure whether her stories were any good. She wanted to tear the journal out of his hands, but instead she watched his face, his eyes unwavering. He read the first story, about a pregnant waitress whose boyfriend has left her, and the whole time she was terrified he was going to tell her to write about what she knew or to watch her spelling and grammar. Instead he shut the journal. “Well, well. This is really excellent,” he said.

  She blushed, looking down at her hands, at her bitten nails, painted red.

  “Why didn’t you show this to me before?”

  She shrugged, embarrassed.

  “You have real talent. You shouldn’t hide that.”

  “You think so?” She looked up at him.

  “This is really good, but you need to tighten it up.” Casually, as if he were telling her how to put in a kitchen faucet, he pointed out how she didn’t need all the backstory about her main character, how the waitress didn’t have to yell at a nasty customer but should simply slam down the coffee cup instead to show her anger. “I could work with you on your writing,” he told her. “If you want. You could come in during lunchtime. Or after school.” He leaned forward and she felt the heat from his body. “Are you willing to work hard?” he asked. “Are you willing to struggle for greatness?”

  Every day after that they ate lunch together and talked about her work. He covered her pages with red marks, like slashes with a razor, but she didn’t mind because she knew he was on her side. “Go deeper. Think harder,” he said. He made her rewrite and rewrite, crossing out her adjectives and adverbs, which he said made you see the writer trying to craft a beautiful flow of words instead of letting the reader get lost in the story. “I want you to disappear,” he told her. “There should be no Lucy on this page.”

  When they were done working, they talked. He admitted that the reason this mattered so much to him was that he was actually a writer, too. “You’re kidding!” she said. They had something in common. “You never told us that in class.”

  “I don’t share it with everyone,” he said, and she felt herself gleam. He said that he had a novel that was almost finished, that there was real interest from a New York publisher about it, too. “I just need the time to finish it,” he said.

  “Can I read it?” she asked. “What’s it about?”

  “Let’s focus on you, first,” he told her, which both thrilled and disappointed her.

  “Did you have someone who helped you, like you’re helping me?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “My father was a CEO of a big business company that made sprockets. He wanted me to come work for him, but I refused. He pulled all these strings to get me into business school, and I wouldn’t go. Every interview he set up for me I deliberately flubbed. As soon as he figured it out, he lost all interest in me. And in my mom.”

  “What does he know?” Lucy said. “What a doofus.”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think he was right. The truth is that here I am, at a fifth-rate high school with an unfinished novel sitting in my sad, tiny apartment.”

  “All the kids love you. I hear them. I know. And you’ll finish your book. I know it’s genius, I just know it. And I bet your apartment’s cool, too.”

  “Sometimes I think that the kids love me because I’m their friend. Not because I’m a good teacher.”

  “But that’s just not true. You’ve taught me so much. You really helped me. No teacher’s ever taken me seriously before.”

  He studied her. “Maybe we should start sending your stories out and get you published. There’s lots of great magazines for young writers.”

  She met his eyes. He had a fleck of gold in his left iris and she couldn’t stop staring at it. “Really?” She looked at him in wonder.

  IN THE WEEKS that followed, Lucy began to be more careful about how she dressed for school, trying to look older, more sophisticated. She borrowed Iris’s soft silk blouses and rolled the waistbands of her skirts to shorten them as soon as she left the house. (“Don’t you look pretty,” Iris said.) Lucy couldn’t do anything about her hair, so she festooned jeweled clip earrings into her curls like barrettes. She made lists of things she could talk to William about, topics of conversation that might make her seem more interesting, more valuable to be around, more grown up. He had brought a camera to class to snap all their photos. She lied and told him she was learning photography, maybe he could give her pointers. She knew he loved the country, so she spent one evening in the library reading about birds and plants and chickens, and the next time she saw him, she casually mentioned how wild dandelions greens could make a spectacular soup, how brown speckled eggs might not be the prettiest but they were the most nutritious. “You are full of surprises,” he said.

  One morning at lunchtime, she walked into William’s room and he was grinning. He waved a letter at her. “Well, would you look at this,” he said, and when she took the paper, her hands were shaking. Honorable mention in Boston Kids magazine, a little journal held together with staples. No money, but still, it was a prize, and she would be published in their next issue. He was smiling at her.

  “You did this,” she said.

  “I think we can say that we both did.”

  She impulsively hugged him, her arms around his ribs, her cheek against his neck. His stubble scratched. He smelled like cigarettes and toothpaste and she couldn’t help it, she kissed his mouth, feeling a shock of heat, her eyes fluttering. “I love you,” she blurted out, and he pushed her away from him, so that she stumbled, bumping into a chair. She felt like an idiot, as if she had ruined everything. He brushed himself off and moved behind his desk.

  “No. You don’t,” he said. “You’re a student. I’m a teacher. It’s totally inappropriate.”

  She wavered on her heels, blinking back tears. “You like me. I know you like me.” She felt as if she were pleading.

  “I like all my students,” he said. His voice was metallic. “But not like that. Never like that.” He shook his head. “I think you had better go, Lucy.”

  After that, he kept his distance. He didn’t call on her in class, even when her hand was the only one raised, and when she spoke out anyway, he looked as if he hadn’t heard her. She sat hunched over. When she came to see him at lunchtime, stories gathered under her arm, he said curtly, “I’m busy.” One day she came by and he was talking to Miss Silva, the French teacher, smiling sleepily, and when he touched Miss Silva’s hand, Lucy felt as if she had been sucker punched. “Tonight would be great,” Miss Silva said. “But this time, I’m beating you at pool, buddy.”

  “Mr. Lallo,” Lucy said, and then he turned and looked at her as if he didn’t recognize her. Miss Silva took a step back from William. “I have a story. Would you read it?” she asked.

  “You can leave it for me on my desk,” he said. He turned back to Miss Silva.

  The next day in class, William returned her pages. Her story was covered in red marks, his usual slashes. He crossed out all her adjectives and adverbs. Be more precise, he wrote. She touched the red ink with her fingertips.

  SHE WALKED HOME crying. Everything was ruined. How could she have been so stupid? What was wrong with her? She was crying so hard sh
e couldn’t see in front of her. It was cold out, starting to snow, and she was shivering. She swiped at her eyes, at her running nose. A woman walking past gave her a strange look but kept going. Two girls in identical red maxicoats stared at Lucy and then whispered behind their hands.

  She didn’t go to school the next day, lying to Iris about a fever. She skipped the day after that as well, sitting in her room, painting watercolors on a card, blue stars and moons floating out of a silver cup. It looked impossibly beautiful to her. She thought about signing it but instead tucked it into an envelope and then looked up William’s address in the white pages. Iris was watching a movie on TV, so engrossed that she didn’t hear Lucy slipping out the front door. Lucy hitchhiked to William’s, and as soon as she got into the foyer of his apartment building, she hit all the buzzers except for his until someone let her in. Then she ran up the stairs and slid the card under his door. Her boots made snowy prints on the hallway rug. By the time she got home, she was feverish with need. She lay on her bed, feeling sick that she had left the card. It was something someone crazy would do. Someone obsessed. At least she hadn’t signed her name. She hadn’t written anything that would give her away.

  On the third day, she returned to school and walked into William’s class. “Nice to see you back,” he said shortly, and then she felt his hand on the small of her back, just for a moment, like an electrical current. “Go take a seat,” he said, and, flustered, she did. She sleepwalked through her classes, but the teachers thought she had been sick, so they gave her leeway.

  At the end of school, as she was about to walk home, she saw William standing by his car, in the lot, looking at her as if he were waiting for her. He was perfectly still until she was close to him, and then he bent, as if he were going to tell her a secret. “Do you think you could get to Belmont today?” he said finally. His voice splintered.

  “What?” The sun was in her eyes and she squinted at him. It looked as if he had a halo shimmering around his head.

  “We can’t go there together,” he said. He wrote something on a piece of paper and then folded it like origami and handed it to her. She saw his hands were shaking. She opened the paper. 1214 Winston Drive. Apartment 4B. It was the same address where she had delivered the watercolor. She saw the same elevator she had snuck up to give him the card, his hallway carpeted in blue. She nodded and tucked the paper into her hand.

  “I’m suffering, too, Lucy,” he told her.

  SHE FOUND A pay phone to call Iris. “I’m hanging with friends,” she said. “Be home later.” Then she hitched a ride from a woman in a purple snow jacket, who was silent the whole time. When they arrived, Lucy practically ran into the apartment building. She rang William’s buzzer and walked up the two flights. She could hear music, an itchy slide of jazz, and when she got to William’s floor, she smelled coffee, and there he was standing in the hall, in jeans and a white shirt, his door open. His hair was loose around his shoulders and she thought she had never seen him more beautiful. He looked away from her, pained.

  “Did you change your mind?” she said.

  “Yes. No. Come inside.”

  His place was small and bright with sun. There was a big painting of a red dog on the wall. She didn’t know what to do, so she waited. “Sit,” he ordered. “We have to talk about this.” She moved gingerly to the edge of his nubby white couch, but he kept moving around the room, pacing.

  “You think it’s just you, and it’s not,” he said finally.

  “What’s not?”

  “I get to school and you’re the only person I want to talk to,” he said. “How insane is that?”

  “Me, too—” she said, but he lifted his hand. “Let me finish,” he said. “All day, things happen and I keep thinking, I want to tell Lucy this. I want to show Lucy this article. I wonder what Lucy would think of this piece I heard on the radio, if she likes this song, this dish, this color—”

  “I feel like that about you.”

  “Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. This whole situation is ridiculous. All I wanted was to help you get better as a writer, help you shine a little. That was my job as a teacher and I did that.”

  He dug his hands into his pockets, his face tense and miserable. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said abruptly. “What’s wrong with me that I can’t?” He shook his head. “You don’t look sixteen. You don’t act sixteen.” He hesitated. “You sent me that card. I know it was you. It was the most shockingly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Who knew you could paint?”

  “I can’t. Not really. I sort of mess around—”

  “No. No. This wasn’t messing around. This was truly amazing. It spoke to me.”

  She flushed.

  “I have a friend who met his wife when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five. Everyone told them it would never work, that he was too old for her, that it was wrong. But they didn’t listen. She’s seventy now and he’s eighty. The age difference means nothing. It’s a blink. Can you imagine? Way back then, they just knew. They just recognized something in the other. What’s age, really? Haven’t you known some impossibly immature adults? Some really wise young people?” He finally stopped pacing. “You’re an old soul, Lucy. You don’t think like sixteen.”

  “You don’t think like thirty,” she said abruptly, and he laughed, dry as a cough. “How would you know what thirty thinks like?” he said.

  “My dad was a lot older than my mom,” Lucy said.

  “Well, there you go,” William said.

  Lucy stood up and moved toward him and kissed his mouth. His lips were soft and warm and she sighed against them. He pushed her back but she kissed him again and then she felt him kissing her back, gently at first, and then harder, lowering her to the floor as if she were a captive. She had had sex with only one boy before, at a party, in a dark bedroom, when she was drunk, and he had jammed himself into her, finishing in what seemed like seconds, and then, as soon as it was over, he had freaked out at her for getting blood on the sheets.

  But William took his time. He traced the curve of her hip with his hand. He touched her hair and she flinched, smoothing her hands over it, but he grabbed at her wrists so that when she tried to move, she couldn’t. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Your hair is beautiful, exotic. It’s all you.” His voice sounded strange and foreign to her, as if he had a fishhook caught in it. He set her hands free and she felt a roaring through her body. She took a breath when he unbuttoned her blouse. He slid her skirt off her hips, down her legs, taking everything off as gently as if it were made of glass. She was naked on the floor and then he moved his hand along her knees, up along her thigh, and then he touched her ass, staying his hand there for a moment, and she tensed, a pulse of fear running along her spine, not sure what he was going to do, whether she’d like it or not, and only knowing that she didn’t want him to stop, that she had to move closer to him. “You’re a beautiful woman, Lucy,” he said, and when she heard that word—“woman”—she shut her eyes. She heard a pulling of plastic—a condom—and then he was inside her and her eyes flew open.

  Her head bumped on the floor. Something was digging into her naked hip, but his breath against her face was warm. His hands cupped her ass and then he slid a finger into her, and she gasped and felt a flare of desire. “Look at me,” he said, “please. Look at me,” and when she did, he shuddered inside her. Afterward he held her, sweaty and close against him, rocking her, the two of them sticky and damp. He fell away from her, panting. “It will get better,” he promised. “I’ll show you.” He kissed her nose, her mouth, the curve of her shoulder.

  He helped her up. He ran the shower for her, hot the way she liked it, and set out a soft green towel for her, and when she came out, he had cheese and bread and apples for them on the table, though neither one of them could eat. Finally he got up and went into the other room, coming back with money that he pressed into her hands. “For a cab,” he said. He told her why he couldn’t come outside with her to wait for the
taxi, that they couldn’t risk anyone’s seeing him with her, because now everything was different. If anyone saw her alone, they’d think she had come to visit a friend. “Get home safe,” he said, cupping her face with his hands, and she thought she had never felt so happy or seen him so sad.

  OF COURSE THEY couldn’t tell anyone. “Some people wouldn’t understand this,” William told her. “I’m not sure I understand it myself.” Every time she came to his place, which was at least three times a week, he acted strange at first, as if he wanted her to go, as if he was furious with himself for wanting her there. “It’s my fault, not yours,” he kept saying. He wouldn’t touch her, and he flinched when she touched him. He was curt with her. “You’re a child,” he told her, but then gradually he’d soften. He’d move closer and talk about her being an old soul again.

  He gave her cab fare to and from his apartment because he didn’t like her hitching. He didn’t care that everyone did it, he didn’t want her to. In class, he treated her the way he treated everyone else, polite, teasing, respectful, not calling on her more than on anyone else.

  Lucy began to feel as if she had a sparkler inside her, glowing and growing. She couldn’t sleep at night but got up and alphabetized her books or rearranged her closet and once did a hundred sit-ups. She leaped out of bed in the morning, her heart jittering as if she had just drunk coffee. Though sneaking around really seemed to disturb William, Lucy had to admit she found it thrilling. Everything seemed heightened. Every color seemed to vibrate, from the grass on the abandoned ski slope near Piety Corner to the way the air drifted against her skin like a swatch of silk. She used to think that Waltham was a stomach cramp of a town, a way station to the more exciting Cambridge and Boston, but now she loved everything about it, the brick library smack in the middle of town, the winding suburban streets, the little fire station down the block—even the terrifying psychiatric hospital, which boomed an air horn when someone escaped. When she was at home, she looked at Charlotte and thought: If you could only be this happy, too. If I could only tell you and share this.