Suddenly, he stops in front of one of the bone white crosses. The John Williams music swells loud and an American flag whips overhead—though we’re in France. Whatever. You’re right, Amy Taubin, it’s schmaltz. Obviously, I’ve got bad taste, I’m moved by schlock. In front of the headstone, the old guy seems to be tossed to his knees by an electrical shock. He is on the ground before the grave, weeping, not dead. He turns to his wife.
“Tell me I’m a good man,” he asks her.
His family stands behind him, kind of appalled. They’ve got no idea what he means. Clearly, he has never mentioned the war, or how he was spared, or why his friends died.
His family doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, but I do. He wants them to know what it’s like to have the worst thing happen, to lose everything and never discuss it, so that you lose it twice, both in the moment, when it actually goes, and afterward, in the official record of its going. So two things are gone, Dave is gone and you’re gone. And maybe you get a moment to cry for what, now, you will never be able to tell: that all the people you loved for a season had died, and that you, for years and years after, quite simply, had not.
Rivals
David McConnell
Darius was neat and prompt. He arrived early in homeroom and sat quietly while the other boys played chess or flicked triangular paper “footballs” across their desks. Sometimes he made a flowery gesture to himself before recomposing his hands on the glazed plywood.
In his teacher Jane’s opinion he had an average mind, but every so often he spoke at length in class. On these occasions he was riveting and made no sense at all. He’d twitch. He’d flinch at the loud ticking of the clock as the words poured out. He’d only go still when his eyes rolled up at a patch of the acoustic-tile ceiling and he looked ready to faint. “Sharks are animals! Sharks are animals! You look at them and they have these major senses we don’t have. And they’re animals, so ... Also, the fishermen don’t know about the cancer cure thing!”
Waving for his attention, his teacher put in, “Are you saying they’d be more careful not to overfish sharks? Our speaker made the point that even though sharks are dangerous, they may benefit us.” Jane Brzostovsky knew the sense she tried to make for Darius wouldn’t calm him.
The student who’d just given his “homeroom speech” on sharks and who was still jumpy and flushed in patches squealed, “Yeah, because of what I just said—the cartilage!”
“No, no,” Darius groaned. “Because sharks are animals!” His gaze made an appealing but haughty sweep of his audience before drifting to the ceiling again like oracular smoke. He made a passionate gesture with one arm in a way that caused giggles. He seemed not to hear them. “This, this is not what they see!”
Jane began to wonder, as always, whether he were making sense too sophisticated for his age. Then she heard, “They’re as scared of us as we are of them!” An age-appropriate banality.
And then, again Darius: “I have a tooth from an extinct shark two thousand feet long.” Snorts of disbelief and No way’s went unnoticed. “I threw it in our pool. I won’t say why.” Was it a contentless compulsion to perform? Pure, childish rhetoric, in other words? “I know he loved his tooth.” Much laughter. And Darius laughed, too, as if for a moment allowing this was all a joke. The moment passed. “But he’s an animal—was. So you guys might be useful for cancer. You could be! This!” Thrillingly he seized the homeroom speaker’s hand and tried to hold it up. But the boy shook his arm free with a stormy look and blocked-sinus wheezing. Darius talked on. What could one say?
When the boy finally wound down and the bell rang, Jane reminded him to stay after class to discuss his own speech, next on the schedule. Darius sat, crossed his legs tightly, and put a jaunty hand on his hip. He looked exhilarated, proud, which somehow annoyed Jane. The truth was, she disliked him. Jane disapproved of irony, the vice of the age. And unseriousness bubbled up from Darius—like that moment of laughter today—even when passion had seized him. Most ironical and maddening of all, he adored her. She was his favorite teacher. He took her winces, her reserve, her dutiful encouragement as some kind of hilarious flirtation. She sighed, “Maybe you should think about doing a follow-up, more on sharks, since you feel so strongly ...”
“I’m doing it on the Borgia family,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He’d moved to the desk closest to hers. “They’ve probably never heard of them.” He chucked his head at the empty room.
“Darius, don’t be so arrogant. You come off looking foolish. I’d wager some of them have heard of the Borgias.”
He smiled at her, an oddly prying expression, and repeated, “‘Foolish’?”
“I only mean it takes a lot of hard work to do well and . . . to explain your thoughts clearly. I do get a sense that you have something to say sometimes. But let’s get on with it. What about the Borgias?”
“Well, the Pope had a homosexual incest relationship with his nephew, who was really his son.”
“I think there was a lot of nasty gossip about the Borgias. I mean . . . a very evil family.”
“And the son was in love with his sister.”
“I don’t think you need to be . . . sensationalistic in your speech.”
Again he raised an eyebrow at her.
“Darius, do you know what all that’s about?”
“Of course.”
“What?”
“Sex. The Borgias, you mean?”
“I don’t know if that would be such an appropriate thing to dwell on. Maybe if you talked about the dark side of the Renaissance.”
“You want me to hide the truth?” he asked in the most insinuating tone.
Jane made a face at the window. Outside, healthy-minded boys were playing flag football, plastic streamers, red and blue, dancing from their narrow hips.
“Don’t look out the window on me,” Darius said, outrageously, baselessly intimate.
“Darius!” Jane snapped. “A little respect!”
His face went slack. She closed and rolled her eyes briefly, causing herself an invigorating pain. The boy’s global ignorance didn’t make him endearing. He had no clue about her feelings. Or his own.
The bowdlerized Borgia talk didn’t go over well, but Darius seemed to get the taste of stardom anyway. He talked in almost every class in the days following. When he was on the brink of one of his talking ecstasies near the end of homeroom, Jane Brzostovsky called on others and tried to overlook his waving arm, double-jointed with yearning. At intervals a grainy, silvery thunder of cheering came through the open windows from the middle school playing field. “I know everybody wants to get out, so I’ll try to wrap up,” Jane said.
“I have something to say,” Darius couldn’t contain himself.
“Not sure we have time, Darius.” Jane tried to sound offhand. She snuck a glance. Sure enough, Darius looked betrayed, his brow pinched.
In a snide tone of voice he addressed the class, “She just doesn’t want you to hear the true thing that will go against her small-minded—”
“Hey! Watch it! I don’t like the sound—”
“Of course, she doesn’t. She’s—”
Jane grabbed his upper arm and flung open the classroom door. She dragged Darius into the hall. The other students, vocalizing like monkeys, peered after them.
The door had revolved on its hinges and struck the outer wall. The pewter glare from a glass pane shuddered on the tile floor, and an aqueous clangor re-echoed up and down the hall. Jane’s muscles felt like frothed milk, her eyes actually hurt in their sockets—she was so enraged. Darius’s head rolled with flowerlike indifference. “You’ve been wanting to touch me for a long time, haven’t you, babe?” he said.
She struck him with the flat of her hand. His expression wrinkled up. “And all of you, shut up,” Jane snapped at the murmuring class.
The slap was a serious matter. Jane dutifully reported it to the head of school. Together they settled on a risky course of inaction: not even a phone cal
l to the parents, the exceedingly rich Van Nests. The calculation paid off. Darius never told anyone what had happened. Pleased with their discretion, the head of school bunched his lower lip whenever he saw Jane over the next few days. It looked like he meant, “I do feel for you—these kids sometimes. ...” Other parents who might have heard about the slap would assume a disciplinary word had been spoken. And that was that.
Jane felt an irritable sort of remorse. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so hard on him, maybe he could have aroused her compassion—by all accounts his parents were horrendous—if only he hadn’t been so close to Barry Paul. Barry was Jane’s favorite student by far. She often laughed to herself about her more or less full-blown crush on him. Or “crush”—when it came to Barry her stream of consciousness bubbled with giddy scare quotes and, she had to admit, sputtered with irony. Seeing the two boys together drove her crazy. Annoyed her, she told herself, on Barry’s behalf, because even he might be affected by exposure to such a “twisted” companion.
The two boys were always together. Inseparable from the first day of class at Lawrence Academy. Jane had no clue how their friendship suddenly sprang into existence. It was one of those kid things. It had to be very pure, very beautiful, and very mysterious. At least on Barry’s side.
Next to Barry, who was husky, Darius looked svelte and crafty. He effaced himself. Chin scratching his clavicle with feline strokes, he’d eye his friend. If he needed attention, there weren’t any outsize ecstasies. A rapid whisper passed his lips. Then, as soon as Barry turned, frank and grinning and, for some reason, amazed at what he’d heard, Darius’s fingers squirmed. They formed a white-knuckled spider on the white denim stretched tightly across his thigh. He smiled at the floor. Jane didn’t care for the too-tight pants or the flowered shirts the boy, or his mother, went in for.
Since Jane’s thoughts about Barry were over the top as well as energetically secret, her love was also funny. To her anyway. The scare quotes tickled. Self-deprecating amusement creamed inside her, becoming more abundant affection for the loved one, then diffuse happiness, then a barely visible smile.
Barry had a special quality, didn’t he? Who knew what it was? Jane tried pinning it down. Too simplistic to say he lacked irony. The universal mistake people made—this was Jane talking to herself, for she really believed Barry’s appeal was widespread and that was no joke—the universal mistake people made was thinking that the quality didn’t belong to him. They thought they were content, they were having a good day, they were interesting, their personality was bearable, even admirable, whenever they had some little dealing with Barry. Since he wasn’t memorably beautiful and never said anything a suburban New Jersey boy wouldn’t say, he was able to go about his business in the healthful anonymity that suited him. His star power—that’s what Jane called it—was slow-acting, subterranean. A tribute to her, in a way, that she’d picked up on the—uh, “star power,” no? She tried laughing but failed. In subtle stages, she’d given up the notion that sometimes she was content or interesting or to be admired or that she could ever become that way through an effort of her own. It was objective, this quality Barry had. Like those naïve maps that placed the Garden of Eden exactly here, so many miles northwest of Ur, fulfillment seemed to be local, tangible, the fragrance of sour candy on this one boy’s breath. She was like any of us when we’re starstruck. We squirrel away tiny facts about our idols, whether to take them down a peg or draw them closer is unclear. But sometimes all the detail in the world is insufficient. They have one more thing. An invisible thing. And we swear it’s real.
Barry’s eyes were set wide. He squeezed the right one closed when he didn’t understand something—often enough. In repose his mouth looked straight, grim, and countrified, but it was always moving. He was an avid, poor skateboarder. He sometimes tied a spare wheel truck to the flap of his backpack, a sort of tradesman’s token. He had no particular passion for any of his classes, though he liked the biology unit of science best.
Even at eleven, a year older than most of the boys in his class, he seemed lumbering. He wasn’t above trouble. Somehow, bigger in body, the trouble seemed a bigger deal than it was, too. He was caught shoplifting Rock Climber Magazine from a 7-Eleven. There were plenty of successful thefts, as well.
No matter how amiable, he liked popping out a cruel remark from time to time and thought them pretty funny. Jane and Darius were both—independently—shocked. Like the time he mimicked his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s a week before she died. He wasn’t not good-hearted, just not mincingly good—a distinction neither Darius nor Jane happened to be strong on. Plus, the down at his ankles and another patch of down that often showed over his huge red-eyed death’s-head belt buckle were going coarse prematurely, a little too sexy for a kid. When you glimpsed it, you imagined he was secretly manly, despite the beardless baby face.
He had one quirk. He claimed to be a communist. He insisted on it. Though he knew a few Maoist aphorisms and pretended to celebrate May Day, his communism wasn’t a thought-through political position. Sometimes the most normal boys in the world develop a healthy consternation about being so normal. With a simplicity that’s really anything but eccentric, they seize on a single eccentricity and make a hobby of it. Being a communist, especially at the time, 1989, made Barry feel more like a particular person. And of course, it suited Jane, a brazen leftist till reality dumped her in the hallowed halls of Lawrence, perfectly.
All the humor—the irony, ironically—mostly shielded Jane’s “crush,” her love, from her own eyes. But Jane wasn’t stupid. She knew there was something out of hand about so unwieldy an emotion for a student. She once tried to finesse it. Too smart for her own good. As all the world knows, secrets want to come out.
There happened to be a scandal that got a lot of play in the Star-Ledger around this time. Thuggish football team. Slip of a boy raped with an Eskimo soapstone carving of a seal. Then, comfort in an assistant coach’s arms! A two-year chronicle of forty-eight “incidents” between man and boy. Jane wasn’t the only one to follow this story. But she stayed up late one night typing a memo to fellow faculty members. “Thoughts before We Formulate a Policy on Inappropriate Behavior” was the long title, and “Glasnost! Openness!” was the short first paragraph.
The memo went on about a friend of Jane’s, a first-time mother who discovered that her nurturing feelings toward her infant actually had an erotic component. “Perhaps new parents often give up having sex for a time, because they’re experiencing a perfectly normal displacement of erotic feeling onto their children. Nor should any of us feel alarm if we acknowledge that this might be part of our ‘job description’ as teachers. Not that anybody’s talking about reviving the Greek example! Ha ha!” Jane got through six revisions and had made thirty copies of her memo without ever realizing that to stuff the thing into the banks of cubbyholes in the teacher’s lounge would be insane.
A prudent sixth sense took control of her body, and she handed the sheet to elderly Emmett Drinkwater (New Jersey history, lacrosse). “You have a minute, Emmett, to take a look at this for me?” Why was she clearing her throat so much?
After skimming it, then reading it through again while he tickled a wrinkled earlobe, Drinkwater hemmed, “I’m not so sure, Ms. Brzostovsky.” He grimaced as if a strong wind were coming from the memo. “Do we want to get into this? Seems a bit of a personal statement.”
“Personal?” Jane said, with a note of miffed laughter.
“I’m just not sure it’s something you ought to embark on. Though you . . . you make some points.”
Two months later felt like a thousand years when she found the thirty pages at home, read the first couple of sentences, and started hyperventilating. She threw the sheets away as if they were thirty pieces of silver. What on earth could she have been thinking? The alarm passed eventually, but to this day it could come over her like malarial fever.
There was another time that her crush struck her as not such an amusing thing. Ma
ybe this was when love began to elbow “crush” out of the way. Jane was renting a small house in a so-so section of Monmouth County. Her neighbors were all old, mostly working-class retirees who reminded her of her parents. So it seemed a dream when she was sipping coffee at her kitchen window one Saturday morning and saw Barry Paul, wearing only white jockey shorts, mowing the lawn of the backyard next door. She felt a flood of . . . loving concern. He could easily be injured. His big feet were bare and he was handling the flimsy mower carelessly, snapping the orange cord over the grass like a bullwhip. She watched him until concern for his toes spiraled off like steam and her coffee got cold. She moved from window to window watching him. A secret seventh sense had taken control of her body as she studied him, a little thick and well made for so young a boy. She eventually woke from that dream. Even though it wasn’t a dream.
It turned out Barry was a friend of Hi and Betty Malcolm, the elderly couple who lived in the house next door. He’d gone with them that morning to inspect some dreary square footage their son-in-law had rented for a card shop. Because Barry wore dress clothes to meet the son-in-law (and his mother always made a stink about taking care of dress clothes), he sloughed them later to do a chore for the infirm couple. Hi had a sore arm, Betty an enlarged heart. Thus yard work in underpants.
Jane didn’t make herself known that day. But Barry visited the Malcolms from time to time, and months later Jane flagged him down, “Look who’s here!” He gave her his squinty, one-eyed look. She put her hands on her hips and heard a flutter in her long sigh. They were both clothed. They were bemused seeing one another in the civilian world. Barry seemed to find it funny. Not Jane. She was horribly depressed all that afternoon.
What was that very pure and very mysterious connection kids can form? That just uncurls like a leaf? Jane felt, frankly, excluded, and it almost made her angry—anger she turned on Darius, no matter how unfair. She just didn’t like him. It happens.
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