Strangely, Jane’s heart froze. “I don’t think . . . well, maybe.” Her hands had stopped on the word processor keyboard. She looked down.
They were in a small ground floor office in the “new”—1967—wing of the Lawrence middle school building. Several teachers shared the room, using it to scribble class plans, grade homework, or meet with students, though the space was cozy for two. The glazed brick and blond woodwork, the turquoise-painted door, and the crank windows (oxidized shut) made modernity feel painfully outdated. Barry had twisted in his seat and rested his elbows on the desk. He wore a monster truck T-shirt and khaki pants. When Jane looked down, just as compassion for her hooligan was welling up in her, she glimpsed—it was almost unmistakable—a khaki tumescence lounging along the crease of one of the boy’s thighs.
She turned away, of course. She tried to look like she was hunting for a word. Unfortunately, being shared space, the room had almost nothing in the way of decoration to occupy her eyes. She felt an ardent ... embarrassment for Barry.
When she opened her eyes, he was looking at her candidly. “We don’t have to write about him, if you don’t think it’s—you know—appropriate.”
Jane looked out the window. “No. No, it’s—whatever . . . what about him?” she said randomly.
He shifted wonderingly in his seat as he answered, “He’s a great guy. Sometimes I feel bad about that whole Richie Rich thing he’s got going on there. Not that I usually get worked up about the oppressor. You just got to string them up at some point, even if they never meant to do anything.”
“Are you—starting to be enemies, then, or ...?”
“Nothing like that. Come on! No, I’m just messing around. I’m getting bored with this thing.” He reached out and gave the paper in the word processor a fillip. He arched his back. His hands made fists and reached for the ceiling. He closed his eyes and inhaled.
Jane got a good view. The bowed thing shifted unmistakably. He even scratched at it with an ultraquick peck of a forefinger. Jane looked out the window and answered him a little sharply, “Barry, look, this is important. Please, take this seriously. Because if you don’t, I have an awful feeling . . . with the way this year went—with this, that, and the other thing . . . Well, your mother’s a bit fed up. I offered to tutor you next year. If she—if she thought it might help.”
Barry looked at her quizzically a long moment. “My grades are really bad, huh?”
“No, it’s just ...”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So should we say Darius is, like, a good example? Like, I want to be a good kid like him?”
“Barry. You are a good kid!”
“I mean more like smart. You just said I need to get tutored.”
“Barry, wake up! You’ve got so much more going for you than . . . Darius Van Whoever-he-thinks-he-is.” She dared to lay her fingers encouragingly on his knee, though she didn’t look at him when she did and lifted them at once. She brought her hands together in bony prayer and kicked her wheeled chair as far from Barry as she could get. Not more than a foot. The back of the chair butted the aluminum windowsill.
The boy appeared to notice something odd and looked at her. Really looked at her. Even before he spoke, she snorted self-consciously. He said, “You don’t look like you used to.”
“Same me,” she said in quiet hysteria. “Let’s get back to it.”
“I think you dress different. Like, this whole year you dress different than you did at first.”
“‘Differently,’ but I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” She did know. Coral nails. How had that started? She was all but certain Barry couldn’t figure it out. He was a kid, for God’s sake.
“Well, like those,” he said uncannily. He meant her black stockings.
“This is just a French style. Tights.”
“And that stuff,” he said unerringly.
She wiggled her fingertips. She softly clapped several times. “OK, OK, OK, Barry. Let’s get back to it, please.” She looked at her watch for effect. But she had the fluttery idea that he didn’t care in the least about his tumescence. That he knew she’d seen and didn’t care about that, either. Or he did, just not in an embarrassed way.
Apart from glimpses and waves when Barry visited the Malcolms, Jane and he saw each other only once over the summer. Barry had been thrown out or ran out of his house after calling his mother “Marie Antoinette” one time too many. Although he’d never had bratty, childish thoughts of running away from home, now that it had happened, he liked it. Solely out of pity for his parents, he decided, he wouldn’t stay out the whole night.
At a strip mall Barry let himself be picked up by a police cruiser—two mustachioed, friendly cops. Reluctant to go back home so soon, 9:00 P.M., he gave them Hi Malcolm’s address. He made up a story, not too elaborate, about Mother leaving him at a store—she’d had to rush home, sort of an emergency. For some reason he faked a limp. The cops, as is their way, appeared to believe nothing. Turning onto Meadowlark Lane, their eyebrows rose. They saw an ambulance flinging its drunken, unfestive lights across the somnolent housefronts. So the kid hadn’t been lying.
“Shit oh shit oh shit. See!” Barry couldn’t resist acting a little, even now. But he was also trembling with nerves. He was more or less certain Betty’s enlarged heart had burst (as it almost had). When the cruiser pulled up he saw Hi Malcolm, fluttery as a snared heron. Barry didn’t run over and shout “Dad!” or anything grotesque. He hung back with the officers. A very bewildered Hi climbed into the ambulance without ever seeing him. “Barry! Oh, Barry . . . isn’t it . . . scary!” came a familiar alto from the tree lawn. Seeing a responsible-looking woman, short hair and a terry robe, the two officers melted away with mumbled condolences. And Barry was left in mother Jane Brzostovsky’s hands, still faking the limp. In fact, the story became much more elaborate. He’d spotted some kids trying to break into a Sam Goody’s through a mall loading bay. He’d been chased. He’d taken a spill down a ravine. To Jane, his clothes did look, at least, messy.
This is how it happened. Eat? No? Bed? Her rapid-fire ideas caused her to jerk. It was a little disturbing. She put him to bed. She washed his clothes. She sat in the kitchen in wordless argument with the telephone, looking at it reproachfully, as if it were at fault for not being used. Her heart was pounding. She had a glass or two of Chardonnay. Silent as a mouse she crept upstairs. She fore-fingered ajar the door to the darkened bedroom. She sidled in and stood there a long time.
“I’m not asleep, you know. It’s really kinda early.” Confusion about Jane’s twitchiness and worry about Betty and Hi had made Barry tractable about going to bed so early. Though how this had gone from striking out on his own to a weird sleepover escaped him. “What are you doing? You get my mom?” he asked.
Jane sighed a tragic, an operatic sigh. She posed a hip on the bed, then tipped over softly onto the pillow. Her trembling made the whole bed shudder. She lay facing him, parallel, a foot and a couple decades between them. Her hunched shoulders were in awful pain, but the trembling got worse if she tried releasing them. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness. She saw that he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. His dark eyes hovered at her throat. He frowned slightly. He was bashful beyond belief. More bashful than Darius, even he realized it.
In the slowest of slow motion Jane plucked a corner of the duvet at Barry’s shoulder. Just as slowly, she folded it off him and tipped it to the floor. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. His tone, meant to sound like humorous skepticism, sounded oddly like a whimper.
He was holding his body awkwardly, rigid. Any more tense and he’d start trembling like her. But the luster of his skin, flawless as a new baseball, seemed to illuminate the room. It was shining, however dusky. The angelic freshness of his scent was like nothing Jane had ever smelled. He lay so the front of his Jockey shorts was partially hidden, shyly turning his buttocks to the ceiling. The white cloth twisted and rode up between his legs. Still, what he was hiding wasn’t so hidden. In th
e confusion of gray tones, Jane could see an untimely swelling stretch at the cotton fabric, causing the elastic to yawn in a shadowy gap at his hip. His wisecracking whisper came again, “I don’t know.” His mouth worked. He shut his eyes, crumpled them tightly in the way of children. Jane slipped her hand between the mattress and his unbreathing chest. The nipples seemed as hard as jujubes, the skin as soft as—ha ha!—kid. She pried. He seemed unable to move himself. As her hand went lower, his hip obediently rose until he was facing her. Her trembling hand rode over the swollen cotton, and, though he didn’t recoil this time, he started trembling, too. Which made them both laugh a little. Barry’s eyes were still tightly closed.
A moment later—or so it seemed—Jane was downstairs, arms folded, staring at the duvet she’d left trailing on the carpeted steps. Her shoulders were killing her, and there was something familiar about the hunched way she held them. Wildly, for some reason, she analyzed this. She stood in front of the window, in front of a desk, now over the stove in the kitchen, now bending slightly into the open refrigerator. All the time she was holding her shoulders more and more tightly. Then she pretended to remember what had caused her shoulders to hurt like this before. (She believed, hysterically, this was a real memory.) She dropped her shoulders and laughed in horror. She’d only hunched her shoulders exactly this way when she used to play with the miniature people in her dollhouse as a little girl!
Back upstairs, the duvet wrapped around her like a wedding gown, she found Barry sitting cross-legged on the stripped bed. He stared at her with his cheery, know-nothing, raised eyebrows. This expression kept morphing, like a candle flickering, into a stagey version of his old cockiness. He shrugged a few times. His penis was centered now, sticking straight up past the waistband as if he’d arranged it there with simple-minded artistry, as he had. Jane let her eyes fall closed tragically. She let the duvet fall. She fell to the bed, curled on her side, abased her head at the boy’s crossed ankles. She was crying.
“I’m sorry about two seconds ago,” he said. “Really, I’m sorry.” She turned her head to look up at him. Her eyes were streaming. He crossed his pale arms and shrugged, making the mattress bounce. “I wish you didn’t feel bad. I hate that. I’m really, really sorry.”
“I love the way your ankles smell, Barry. I love you,” she whispered.
After this Jane would have been wise to cancel. It almost came as a surprise to her when tutoring began on schedule at the start of the school year. Barry and Jane met at her house.
Three times a week for weeks and weeks, everything passed with Jekyll-like civility. Jane’s schedule was light, so she was able to drive back from Lawrence to meet with Barry in the afternoons. Barry was dropped off after school by his mother or biked over himself. On warm September days Jane and Barry went out in the backyard and were full of innocent waves for Hi Malcolm staking his delphiniums in hopes of a second bloom. When they met indoors, Jane was inhumanly patient with Barry’s flirting: his obstreperous and/or continuous erection, the tickling of his sneaker toe under the table, sudden bouts of exhaustion when his head and arms fell to the kitchen table and his overgrown child’s fingers accidentally brushed her shoulder or trapped her hand. He was pushy, except when Jane occasionally fell into a sort of trance and they got to real sex. Then he was immobile, awed by her.
He tolerated the suspense. Maybe the game of being held off wasn’t that different from what it always feels like to be a child, and Barry assumed this affair was the natural sequel to childhood. Besides, what he was after, or what he played at being after, though he was getting a taste for it, was still a bit much for him. Jane realized this early on. The odious mother stopped in for chats at first when picking up her son and once let slip, “He didn’t want to do it! As usual he fought me and fought me. I told him, ‘Barry, don’t be an idiot like you always are. This is your favorite teacher! Or was. And she’s nicely offered. ...’” Barry shrugged hugely and gave Jane, who blushed with shame, a raffish smile. “Furthermore,” Jeanette waved an envelope in Barry’s face. All demure sweetness, she turned to give it to Jane, “I’m more than aware fifty an hour is about as low as any sliding scale can slide. We’re enormously grateful. Even this idiot.”
Jane later whispered to Barry, “If you don’t want to come ...?” He was able to convince her he did. Still, coming was a problem—his coming but not coming, that is. Jane became scientifically obsessed, though quite emotional, about this hydrologic detail. (Moralists make the best sinners. So twisted!)
The first time they had sex, Jane had no greater inspiration—no thoughts in her head at all—than to mannequin Barry into missionary position with her hands. Her hands were busier and more aware than she was. Propped on his arms for a lazy push-up, he did it, swaybacked, arrhythmic, eyes closed. After a short while he stopped. He rolled off her. With a pleased grin, he wiped his brow and lithely sat cross-legged. He flipped at the fat penis rising past his ankles, stiff as ever, gleaming and insistent, and made an uncertain stab at humor, “Boing, boing.” He seemed to feel the same friendly companionship for it as he did for Jane. He lowered his voice, quoting some movie, “That was . . . amazing.” Though she had no idea why he’d stopped, Jane didn’t dare suggest they go on. The boy didn’t seem to realize there could be any going on. Was he too embarrassed to leave a puddle on her or in the bed? Over the months, the next three times they had sex ended just as inconclusively, with the same childish and abrupt change of subject. Since he never made the first move (beyond general and constant flirtiness), Jane was confused by the decided way he kept breaking it off.
Then Jane grasped something awful. She’d been premature a year or so ago with her zany, nerve-wracked question about nocturnal emissions. However knowingly he’d pretended to answer at the time. He was—the problem was moral, not hydrologic, after all, and Jane almost fainted—too young for the sap to be flowing yet! Or else he was so painfully innocent that he knew of no connection between blurting at midnight in his own bed and what it was he and Jane had started to do in hers. He knew nothing!
Barry could have lived with sex or without it. But now that it was happening to him and Jane was making him happy on the whole and he was getting all the adoring attention he could want, he tried to reconceive this as something he’d decided on. He tried on outsize words like, “my love affair.” Though he didn’t have much gift for fantasy, he came up with an enjoyable way to imagine the relationship. He adopted a cool, James Bond-like persona. In bed he made odd facial expressions, cold seeming or supercilious, which mystified Jane but were supposed to “drive her wild.” When given an opening, he stroked Jane’s chin with avuncular tolerance. He either didn’t guess or ignored her power.
When he started opening his eyes, there was too much for him to admire. The breasts with their forbidden, V-shaped pallor lurched in drunken, separable ways. Their sponginess needed so much restraint that it worked on his nerves. Even the slightest touch sometimes made her cringe. And the miraculous tubular muscle her hand led him to (because he didn’t have the confidence to look and wasn’t even sure how the link was supposed to be made)—when he knelt over her and did look at it for the first time, leaf upon leaf upon leaf parting, until she had him just graze the jack-in-the-pulpit with his ink-stained finger, he wore no expression at all, his heart in his throat. The thing was like some minute dungeon-master secreted behind pink curtains that were half animal, half fluid like honey. He tried raising his chin to give her a taste of Bond-like arrogance, but he couldn’t stop staring. He was under her power. After pulling his hand back, he reached out again, measured her, or concealed her, with his palm. For a moment he seemed to rest his eyes, really rest them, on a blue haunted house rubber-stamped on the back of his hand. His mind couldn’t take so much detail all at once. Or he was so young he didn’t know the words for the details he did see, which may be the same thing.
But sex was rare between them. Jane made sure. To a surprising degree she was still his teacher. Except in the darkes
t recesses of her heart—where who knew what wounded and virginal drama was playing out?—Jane refused to “play” at anything for Barry. He got no Miss Moneypenny, at least none he ever observed. She calmly stared at him across the kitchen table’s piles of dog-eared worksheets until she was sure he really didn’t know whether a comma was needed before a prepositional phrase. “It’s not. Generally the fewer commas the better,” she smiled. With an identical expression and calm, she’d pull away his inky finger, “Don’t be a brute with a girl’s clit, Barry.” The uniform matter-of-factness went over well with her student and lover.
This sort of thing has to blow up, doesn’t it? As long as it was tutoring, as long as they only met in the parallel world of her house, Jane could go on. Not that the situation didn’t take a toll. She had the occasional panic attack. She had a trailing and ominous bout of hilarity when she and Barry once conferred with the mother about progress and the truth seemed right there on the surface, obvious to anybody. Apparently it wasn’t. But when she and Barry relaxed, left the house, close calls became closer. A Schwarzenegger movie at the mall after wrestling with the Pythagorean theorem: “Mr. Drinkwater! Hello!”
At Lawrence Academy, Jane was in a constant agony of indigestion, waspishness, and gloom. She’d arranged to have no classes with Barry and never drove him to their sessions after school. Still she mistrusted herself. She assumed she was trying to get caught. Other teachers commiserated that she was obviously having a tough year.
Barry was insufferable. She walked past him in the hall. “Yo, B, you bringin’ that Coke for me?” His insolent wink caused some surprise, only kids, thank heaven. The Coke can made a metal ribbet as Jane swept past. Her sandwich had deep finger marks when unwrapped. She told herself Barry was stupid. Not even attractive compared to the obvious standouts, who left her cold.
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