by Holly LeCraw
When May and Divya were gone, I stretched my legs under the table. Nick and I both had frees now. It had become our new habit, on Mondays, to linger here. As he drank the rest of the coffee I said, “So. May.”
He put the cup down. It looked small in his long hand. “She’s a tough one,” he said.
“She likes the straight and narrow,” I said. “That’s new.”
The cafeteria was emptying. But inside was warm and bright.
“You know that whatever was between May and me could not be more over,” I said. “That is God’s truth.” He played with the food in front of him that he hadn’t eaten. Which was most of it. He hollowed out a roll and balled the soft part up between his palms, examining it with an empirical seriousness, then dropped it on his plate. “What is it?” I said, patiently. “Tell me. Fingers? Earlobes?”
He smiled at me like I was crazy, like he was merely tolerating me, but didn’t meet my gaze. “Whole package. Not that it matters.”
“But I thought it didn’t work that way.”
There was a long silence while he grinned to himself, and finally he said, “Eyes.”
“Ah.”
“They’re blue. I just realized that today. Just now. The way the light shone in.” I nodded helpfully. Father confessor. “They’re so dark— I’ve never seen that color. I didn’t realize.” He was filled with wonder, at May’s eyes, at the shift that had happened, in him, again.
AFTER LUNCH. After that free. Last class of the day. “Okay, people. Time for an indulgence. I’m going to indulge myself. I’ve been waiting for this one.” They didn’t know it, but I said this every year. Every year, when we had finished Gatsby, I read the last page aloud.
Also, every year, I wept. I hadn’t realized the words moved me so much until one year I just teared up, right at And one fine morning—After that, I was Pavlov’s dog. I almost looked forward to it. Crying once a year is probably necessary. Not that it was full-on sobbing, not at all. More a welling up. But it was involuntary, almost external, like being rained on, a nourishment, and it made me glad that I could feel that deeply, or had once.
So I read the closing passage.
He had come a long way to this blue lawn. I read along, anticipating the tick, the turn, the switch flipping as it always did—it was outside feeling now: my eyes would suddenly heat, and there we’d be. His capacity for wonder. The collective embarrassment would be thick; they’d be thinking, Is he really crying over a book? But I figured my annual display was good for them. If not your English teacher weeping over literature, then who?
And I always wondered: why did no one ever point out that Fitzgerald wanted it both ways? Which eventually I would do. Show them the time circling. The dream behind him, the future receding in front—which was it? Both? The orgastic future—ah, Nick Carraway, ah, Scott, he felt and felt. And the tears would come.
But then, that day, I came to the end. The boats were beating against the current: I held the class in my hand, one more moment; borne back ceaselessly into the past. And my eyes were dry.
I paused, and of course they thought I was being dramatic. Their eyes on me—Candace’s, Dex’s, Celia’s. But really I was waiting. Just waiting. Nothing happened. The streak was broken. And that was that.
AFTER PRESTON DIED, and after May left, I began to have a dream. I’d dream of an ordinary day, and how I was waiting for her, my student. The reality of the present crept in and wound into the past, and time lost all its markers, and I dreamed that I had loved her when she had been a child, that I had seen her in mist and she had looked up and known me, that we had been infants in the same crib. In the dream she was so familiar she was faceless. I knew exactly when she would walk into my classroom and sit down, exactly when she would walk into lunch, and she would float over to me in this dreamworld Abbott and we would take each other into ourselves.
The dream was day after day after day all twined into one. I waited, and then she was there. Over and over, disappearing, appearing, dream, forgetting, remembering. Is it true? Is it true? and it always was. As I woke, though, transgression would begin to pollute the softness; I would start to scream my innocence, but either I was voiceless or no one listened, and when I woke the warmth and the dream and May were always gone.
I WENT TO HER CLASSROOM. Again I leaned against the doorway, just inside. No, I wouldn’t go farther. Probably ever. “Hi, Charlie,” she said.
“I only have a minute,” I said.
She cocked an eyebrow. For some reason she sensed a joke. And she wasn’t wrong, really. “What’s up?” She smiled. The joke was going to be good. She’d chosen to forget our tension at the game. She took a sip of coffee, as if to fortify herself.
But I had frozen. She didn’t seem surprised. She suffered me the way you’d suffer a child. Tolerantly, she began to chat: She’d been to visit Zack. Out for another week. It was driving him crazy—said he felt fine. Funny how he’d opened up to Nick, wasn’t it? Before Nick ruined it with his hippie talk—and she smiled.
I cleared my throat. “Well, that’s why I’m here. In a way.”
“What is?” she said.
She had leaned out over the labyrinth and laughed. Her face and body had been so clean, unmarked—better than innocent. Instead waiting and confident. Like Nick, like Nicky should be.
“Charlie?”
I said, “You need to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“My brother is twenty-six.”
“Yes,” she said politely.
“And he’s a better man than I will ever, ever be.”
“Oh, now. Charlie.” She smiled a faux-wise smile. Her back was stiffening.
“I’m not just talking about his recent heroics,” I said. “He always has been.”
“Oh, please—”
“Since he was a child. Since the moment of his birth.”
She put down her coffee. I saw her shoulders tense, her fingers stiffen on the lip of the mug. But oh, I wanted her to be laughing! Howling! I wanted to pick her up and rattle some joy loose! “Why are you saying this?” she said.
“Because it’s something I want you to think about.”
“About how Nick is better.”
I thought of Nick glowing. “Yes. I’m irrelevant.”
“That’s one word for it.” Then her control cracked. “Oh my God, Charlie. Spare me the narcissism of your self-loathing.”
“That’s pretty good,” I said. “Have you been saving it?”
“It’s completely accurate.”
I shook my head. “No. You’ve got it wrong.”
“I know what you’re doing. This is absurd.”
“It’s not.”
“Charlie, I didn’t come back here because of you.”
“I believe you.”
“I know you wanted my father, and not me. That was pretty clear. Weird, but clear. To me. Eventually.”
And I didn’t protest because it fit, fit perfectly, so I’d deny it at my peril, or hers. Instead I said, “I told Nick it was all right.”
“I don’t need your fucking blessing!”
She realized what she’d said.
“I just don’t want you to think he’s underhanded,” I said. “That’s all. He’s the finest man I know.”
The anger in her eyes was white-hot. “I don’t need some kind of consolation prize, either.”
“I know you don’t!” I snapped. Nicky as consolation? I could be angry too.
There was a long pause. On her face, feelings fought to surface, were quelled, mitigated, transformed. It was like looking out the window of a speeding car: the scenery was almost homogeneous in the blur, details were impossible to discern, and yet the progression, the fact of it if not the substance, was unmistakable. You began on the mountain, ended in the cool green valley. She fought the journey, fought this destination I’d suggested. I knew though that if the idea had not also been her own, she never would have moved an inch. Would not have arrived where she did,
which was considering it. Considering Nick. In spite of herself.
I was seeing Preston in her now, too. A haughty, highly defended frailty. Maybe I’d exacerbated that quality in her—although I didn’t want to claim that kind of influence. Maybe it had always been there. Maybe I sometimes looked the same, had that same set of shoulder. Who can see essences? Who can see himself?
“You should see him when he talks about you,” I said.
She was silent for a long time. Her face had finally gone completely still, the current of thought now deep, deep. Oh, I wanted inside her mind. All the doors opening and shutting. The maze she was in. I was sorry, I was sorry. But Nicky—beautiful Nicky! Here he is!
Finally she said, “Is that all?”
“That’s all.” When I left, I closed the door behind me.
AT THE OLD, unlovely Atlanta stadium, years ago. Nicky is five. It’s the summer before I go to college, the summer after Hugh has died. I’m leading him down to our seats, ten rows above home plate. In those days, you had your pick.
There are many stories I could tell to explain myself. This is only one.
I say that Hugh brought me here, and then feel an irrational fear that Nicky will envy me this knowledge of his father—irrational because for one thing, Nick’s too young to make that kind of connection, and for another I already believe that the capacity for envy is not part of his nature.
I tell him everything I know about baseball, which is not much. But Nick looks at me like I’m a genius. I say, “Your daddy knew a lot more than I do.”
He gives me a serious nod, because what greater truth could be spoken, and then turns to the game. His stare is straight ahead. His feet don’t touch the ground. “Hey, you want a Co-Cola?” I say, like Hugh, old Atlantan with his few, gentle affectations. “I’ll get us a couple of Co-Colas.”
I also buy peanuts, hot and dusty. I show Nick how to shell them. He barely believes me when I say we can drop the shells right at our feet. A few minutes later I buy hot dogs. He holds the food stiffly in each hand. “Are you hungry, Nicky?”
“Okay, Charlie,” he says, answering a different question altogether.
Every time a hawker goes by, I raise my hand. Nicky watches me without surprise: grown-ups (and to him I am a grown-up) do this around him. I buy Cracker Jack, and a hat, and a souvenir pennant. A deluxe commemorative program. Cotton candy. I scan the crowd for anyone selling anything and pay attention to the game only if I hear the crack of a hit. I will leave no junk unbought.
Anita watched us leave earlier this evening. She’d stood in the doorway as we went down the front walk to my car, me holding Nicky’s hand, and I’d felt that with every step I was shouting Don’t worry, don’t worry: not about this particular night, or my driving, or muggers, or that Nicky might get beaned with a fly ball or anything as mundane as that, because my mother was not a worrier—no, it was that Anita, and we, were on a ship, an ocean liner, enormous but empty, devoid of crew, a situation we’d grown accustomed to, and now Nicky and I were rowing away in a leaky dinghy. Maybe we were seeking provisions; maybe this was a practice run; or maybe this was what we would have to do, now or someday, to rescue ourselves. And my mother didn’t care about being left, or being alone or even wasting away, once the hardtack and water were gone; she just wanted to know that I would never abandon that tiny vessel, tonight, ever.
She watches us drive away and it is July in Atlanta and the humidity is thick and sweet and the green grass damp, and the trees not yet tired and dusty looking, and the light long.
I love my mother and she loves me, but the feeling between us is quiet, and more and more Nicky has become the conduit between us—Nicky the young and open, the mascot of us all.
At the stadium, there is a home run. The men, miniature even from these seats, run their geometry on the floodlit green. I can scarcely believe this is my life, Nicky beside me my brother: How did we get here? How were we given each other?
When I buy a mini bat, glossy and light, and perch it on the top of the pile in Nick’s lap, it slides off, but I catch it before it reaches the ground. “Sorry, buddy,” I say, and place it again, more securely, a tiny weapon against the world, Nick watching me all the while, the look on his softly rounded face one of infinite patience.
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, late in the afternoon when classes were over, I saw Nick walking toward May’s classroom. His face was pale and filled with concentration and a faint exaltation, as though he were processing to the gallows. Dear God, he was doing it. He didn’t see me at first and, suddenly panicked, I looked around for an empty room to duck into, but I wasn’t quick enough and he saw me and his face filled with light, it glowed at me. For one dicey moment, I thought he was going to give a thumbs-up.
But I gathered myself and looked back with an expression that was patient, encouraging, and the faintest bit stern, since that was what he always seemed to want. He gave a nod and then stepped to the closed door. His chest rose with a cleansing breath, and that was when I turned away, but as I walked in the other direction I could hear his gentle knock, and May’s muffled voice.
I went straight back up to my own room, my errand to the copier abandoned, and closed the door. I couldn’t decide if I felt like a wounded animal in its den or an expectant father in the waiting room, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Nicky would be standing there, unaware, as usual, of his assets. Was that true? Raking the hair out of his eyes. And maybe May had not yet decided. Maybe she too felt cornered, maybe she’d be as cool with him as she was with me—oh, I could see her, on the road to becoming forbidding, to being the sort of teacher students both feared and secretly pitied—oh, May-May.
Nicky would be looking reflexively at the clock above the door. Had she already politely shut him down? It would be quick. And inevitable—oh, I saw it now. Madness.
But then May, not yet lost, would blurt, “Don’t go.”
The corner of Nicky’s mouth would begin to lift and he’d look just like Hugh. (Hugh who, before he was so thoroughly broken down, could manage to look both serious and amused, or wry and impatient, or regretful and unyielding. Hugh both complicated and gentle, Hugh who was always on one’s side.) Nicky would say to May, not knowing where the cojones came from, “Calm down.”
And of course she can’t believe it. She can’t believe any of it. How can he say that to her? How can Nick stand there, the blush flaming on his cheeks, and look both tentative and confident at the same time? How does he emanate this delight?
Was her face hungry? Incredulous? Outraged? Did her eyes never leave his?
The thing is, she knew what I said was right: that I was irrelevant. She didn’t want to admit I was right, but she certainly didn’t want to admit I was wrong. She didn’t want me, Charlie Garrett, to influence anything she did, and so what would she do if I didn’t exist, and this man were standing in front of her, grinning like an angel?
Sound. The doorknob turning. And there he was. “God,” he said, walking into the room. “This is crazy.” He ran one hand through his hair, for the tenth time in as many minutes, by the looks of it. “I thought she was going to put me in detention or something. I hope it isn’t always this hard.”
“So you didn’t—?”
“Oh no,” he said, meaning Yes I did. “This Saturday. Seven o’clock.”
He couldn’t stop smiling.
I knew that what was supposed to happen next was a debriefing, a discussion of local restaurants, and a pep talk. I did my best. I recommended a new place in Northfield, half an hour away. “If you go to the Abbottsford Inn, you might as well put up a billboard. Write a news item for the paper.” I don’t remember what else I said; I do remember that he looked a bit disappointed in me. Maybe I wasn’t enthusiastic, or wise, or jocular enough. Perhaps I seemed cold. I think though, honestly, that by that time we were each too distracted to care.
After he left I spent several minutes gathering papers and putting them in a pile—the neatest, most squared-off pile that had ever
been or would be. I realized I was waiting for May to walk through the door. I thought of calling Anita. She’d be surprised I was calling her. Still, though, she’d ask what she usually did, both of us understanding that Nicky was our main, our only link now, and I would say, He’s good. He’s really good. The satisfaction of it! Of telling the truth! Of the yawning wound, the wholehearted sacrifice! What more could I do now? I’d done everything.
Books in the briefcase. Papers in a pile. I was going. Here I went. Going, going, gone.
Fifteen
Zack Middleton was back, Celia at his side again. But the ease he’d had when she was near him had evaporated. I had always assumed the intensity around and between them came from infatuation and sexual frustration (or not: surely they’d found hiding places; there had to be some), but now the agitation seemed different, more urgent. Sometimes, also, Celia was bolder. I’d see her alone, or with her friends—but then she’d be folded into his side again.
One day, Zack waited till everyone else had gone after class and then sauntered up to my desk. Celia wasn’t waiting for him. “Mr. Garrett,” he said. “I need an extension on the paper. I’m still … catching up. I guess.”
“We had some great discussions while you were gone,” I said. “I missed you. We talked about erasure. Presence and absence. Origins. Exactly what you brought up.” He looked blank. “On the first day of class.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, why don’t you and I get a cup of coffee, and I’ll get you up to speed?” Students usually loved it when you asked them to meet for coffee. It sounded so adult and urban.
“I’m pretty busy. Practice and all that. I’m sorry.” There was a quick, hooded shame in his eyes. “I’ll get the paper done, I promise. Just a couple more days.”
“No rush,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to be taking it easy. Right? Maybe we could just skip this paper.”
“I can’t have incompletes.”