He stared at the grounds sinking, at the steady drip of coffee through glass: a fully formed bad joke of a memento mori. Inez had finished high school a few weeks ago. When he dared himself to think about her not being here, about her really leaving, he felt the floor beneath him threatening liquefaction. This was the first summer of the rest of her life. He should be pressing college, job, travel, something, but felt no urgency. Cara, he supposed, would be doing that anyway, more on her case than he could ever be. Not that Inez seemed to require plans. She wasn’t like other people. She moved in her own world, or made her own world, or, rather, the world seemed to make itself around her. Or maybe this was just lovestruck parental idiocy. He refilled her cup, raised his eyebrows at the boy.
“Ah, no thanks, man, I’ve gotta run.”
“Run,” Inez repeated, with an edge, but it was unclear whether this was an echo or a command.
God, these poor boys. These poor fuckers. Was he going to have to counsel his daughter in womanly chivalry? He engrossed himself with dishes in the sink so as not to have to witness their parting.
“Don’t forget your shirt,” he heard Inez say flatly.
He pretended not to hear a perfunctory kiss. Then the youth, wavering, said, “Uh, bye, man, thanks for the coffee.” Bill didn’t look around, just raised one hand stiffly behind him in manly salute, a gesture both sincere and mocking its own sincerity. Man to man. So long, bro, take it easy, buddy, later, dude who just bedded my daughter. Hand in the air, Bill felt tepid dishwater trickle down his wrist, under his dressing-gown sleeve, right into his elbow crook.
When the door of the apartment had clicked, Bill turned. Inez was gathering up her hair, sweeping it around her shoulder and beginning to braid.
“You didn’t want to see him out?” he said.
She winced and he stood where he was, wet dishcloth in one hand.
When Inez was twelve or thirteen, he had begun to hope the hope of most fathers of daughters: that she might be beautiful enough for the world to smooth her way, but not so beautiful that her beauty might become a morally compromising force. Her cheekbones began to sharpen, her limbs to lengthen, and he’d felt an inadmissible dread. Each Friday evening when he opened his door to her, sullen and slouched, he’d appraise her face anxiously as he silently confirmed that, yes, her features had indeed grown even more exquisite since the week before. How to explain to her that the server in the diner brought her cheesecake with “for you!” written in chocolate cursive on the plate because he was in a kind of trance—enchanted by and a little fearful of this otherworldly creature and her eerily perfect face. And there was, of course, the dog incident a year or so ago. She’d come in with a shih tzu under her arm, red leash trailing at her feet, and said: “A guy on the street just gave her to me. Cute, right?”
He’d pictured it all right away: her exclaiming casually on its cuteness, then some googly-eyed owner looking up at her and saying, before he knew what words had left his mouth, “You like her? You want her? Here, you should have her!” All while staring at his daughter’s face like a man seeing God.
Would she remember the shih tzu affair when she was thirty? He failed, as he drank his coffee now, to imagine Inez at thirty, just as, at her age, he’d been unable to imagine his own future self. Had been calmly and completely convinced of dying young. Had believed that he would never, ever, be forty-seven years old, divorced, the more-than-beginnings of a belly on him, in a dressing gown, with delirium tremens, sipping gourmet coffee—coffee made from beans shitted by Indonesian civets at $122 a pound. All in the presence of his teenage daughter, unmoved by the departure of last night’s lover.
“What?” Inez said now, as he stared at her braiding her hair.
Bill shrugged. “Seemed like a nice guy.”
Pathetic.
“You met him for about forty seconds.”
“Inez, I’m just being nice.”
She made a noise of dismissal and he turned back to the sink.
“Which I know,” he said, “you think is terribly bourgeois of me or something.”
“Oh, Bill,” she sighed, with all the world-weary extravagance of a mom in a sitcom.
“You know,” he said, “sometimes I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
“It’s your name. What do you want me to call you?”
Why argue, really. He ran hot water, squeezed the detergent bottle into a plangent belch, and thought, as it ejaculated bright green soap, Here I am again, inhabiting the refuge of quotidian hurt that is the kitchen sink. Every martyr’s best-loved activity, doing the dishes.
But then something astonishing, the soft slap of bare feet on linoleum as she hopped down from the counter, and then her arms were around him and squeezing, squeezing so hard that his dishwashing wrists were immobilized. She rested her head against his back for a moment.
“It’s nice that you’re nice,” she said. Then added, heavily, “Dad.”
She left him staring down at his dangling hands like some newly freed prisoner in a movie.
He was teaching this afternoon, last class of the semester, and he wandered the mile or so there on autopilot. Inez had two sources of income, and he allowed himself to acknowledge one of them: the barista job. She’d told him that if he ever walked through the door of the Bushwick café, she’d never speak to him again. He had laughed out loud—as if he would ever go to Bushwick. But then there was the other thing. At least it’s not crack, went his feeble mental sotto voce. The business of pretending to himself that he didn’t know about this other job of hers was so successful that, truly, he didn’t really know about it. If Cara found out, and confronted him, he’d be able to say, “What? Oh, Jesus . . .” and it would be mostly ingenuous. Inez’s Adderall clients—he was pretty sure it was Adderall—could easily be the same NYU students whose parents’ money Bill occasionally took in exchange for teaching their offspring. He tried not to think of these channels of exchange, because they made him dizzy: the mothers and fathers who paid the institution that paid his salary, and enabled him to support Inez, who made extra money from selling the students drugs—the very same students who, before or after (or during?) taking these drugs, wrote stories that they gave to him. It seemed an endless loop of pointlessness.
His charges were four boys, four girls, all with parents rich or foolish enough to part with tens of thousands for their offspring’s year at NYU. Some of the kids sort of worshipped him, he knew that. Even when he railed at them—especially when he railed at them—for how little they’d read, for how fucking shackled they were in timidity or incuriousness or laziness. And he sensed, sometimes, that he was the professor they told their friends about. William Marrero, whose book they’d all read or pretended to have read after watching the film. The version that had Trent James on the cover in his Vanity Fair–gracing prime, working his Clint Eastwood sex scowl. Bill had been to the premiere, and for every single frame of that movie he’d been acutely aware that he was watching Trent James, movie star, acting. The thing had been a kind of existential agony. He’d had lunch with the guy months before. He’d been charming, inscrutable, and Bill had left not knowing whether he’d been fascinated or bored by him and by their forty-nine minutes of Sancerre, seared scallops, and small talk. He hadn’t really been able to compute the words the movie star was saying; it was hard to when that chiseled face was in front of you, doing a perfect impression of its hyperfamiliar self. Above Trent’s face on the cover of the reissued paperback was some gold-embossed bombast from The New York Times, and below it, that craven addendum: “Now a major motion picture.”
Nineteen months after that, Trent had been found dead in a bathtub at the Chateau Marmont. An accidental overdose of OxyContin and Xanax. A too-perfect celebrity tragedy. The finely tempered blend of glamour and abjection. And a tragedy made visible by footage of pretty, tearful girls lighting candles and laying flower
s and sending sales of the book soaring, day by day. Those pretty girls had made Bill a rich man.
The people at his publishing house had put on somber voices to clothe their delight as they ordered print run after print run. But not Betsy. Foul-mouthed, lipsticked, eighty-something Betsy, who terrified and awed everyone there and whom he believed would never die.
“Honeybun!” she’d said, slapping him with a baton fashioned from a rolled-up New York Post. “The next best thing to you kicking the bucket! Fabulous!” Aneurism, no warning, a year ago, and she was gone too. His royalties soared on the death of the movie star—sales peaked, then waned, and then died. He took a teaching job.
He was twenty-four years old when it was published, in 1988. When he looked at his author photo, black and white, sexy frown, leather jacket, he felt both embarrassed and secretly proud. He’d been a handsome fucker then, and did twenty-four-year-olds not seem younger now? His MFA students still seemed to bear the soft, not-quite-formed features of children.
A semester had almost passed, with who knows what private heartaches suffered or revelations made, but here they were, on this hot afternoon—themselves, much the same selves he remembered from their first class.
Kwame Okafour, a sober young man with an erect posture and serious gaze that made Bill, a grown man, feel inexplicably chastened. Kwame was Nigerian nobility of some sort, he’d heard, or perhaps that was just something he’d once assumed—a notion that had accreted facticity over time, calcifying into something like truth. Leila Ryan, a funny, faraway bird with the bad breath of the self-starving who wrote quietly fucked-up fairy stories. Meghan Peterson and Hannah Kulz, Girls Who Liked to Bake, as evinced by their scrupulously updated, surprisingly prolix blogs. Both took notes assiduously, in rounded letters neatly squeezed against each other on pretty stationery that they’d given each other (he supposed) as birthday gifts, apologizing for their own presence in the world with cupcakes and pathological kindness. Tim Chan, who never seemed to question his place in the world, or really anything at all. He kept the hood of his thin black sweater up at all times, constantly drumming skinny fingers on his knee, and most weeks turned in anhedonic g-chats that Bill suspected of not being fiction. Dana Matthews, Inez’s friend, who wrote spare, angry stories about lesbian heartbreak. Occasionally caustic with her classmates, she had a sharp wedge of dyed black bangs slashed over her forehead. His favorite, probably. And Daniel Edelstein, with his sad brown eyes and blond hair and thrift-store sweaters, who, at the end of the first class, had appeared at Bill’s shoulder and softly—so softly that Bill had to make him repeat it twice—asked if he might submit his assignments in person rather than by e-mail; he liked, you see, to type them.
“Like, on a typewriter?”
Daniel had nodded.
“Why?” Bill asked, eventually.
Daniel looked flustered.
“It just feels more . . . proper,” he’d said, and gone very red in the face, and Bill had felt bad, so he’d cuffed him gently on the arm: “Oh. Sure. You do whatever you need.”
His stories were hopeful. Bill had once thought of them as faux naïf. Now he felt there might be nothing faux about them.
Daniel and Dana sat next to each other today, as always, she grateful to have someone to gently bully, he grateful to be gently bullied. He took them in, these faces arranged around this large table.
Adam Boener—who would have had to suffer not only that surname in high school, but also his manifest gayness, yet seemed unscathed, a bear of a young man, who moved through the world slowly and with an air of semiprivate amusement—had baked! Peanut-butter-banana muffins that Meghan-Hannah cooed over appreciatively, eager to generously cede the baking crown.
“Adam, you master baker,” Bill said. But Adam just smiled, passed napkins, and gave a small tilt of his head as if to say, “You know me.”
But Bill didn’t, of course. He didn’t really know any of them, despite the fact that he was the person to whom they offered up their (mostly) made-up shit each week. Did he feel any shame that more of his mind went into constructing his own fictions about them than reading their fiction? No, none. There was nothing intentional about the stories he told himself, they were just unbidden daydreams that unfurled along their own lazy trajectories, and they became muddled with what he knew, or thought he knew, to be the truths of their lives. So Kwame maybe was a prince, Leila perhaps did live in an apartment full of cats.
Bill’s desire for a cigarette announced itself with the same cartoon clarity as a lightbulb snapped on. Nothing in him now but a desire to smoke. Last class of the semester, what were they going to do, fire him?
“All right all, just ignore me for a moment,” he said, positioning a chair under the smoke alarm. He knew that even when he was claiming not to perform, he was performing. That the most performative things were moments like this, affecting unteacherliness, performing not giving a fuck. How much it delighted them; how he fed on that delight.
There was a little rustle of amusement and anticipation as he tested the chair, stepped on it, and reached up to the ceiling, aware of the sweat stain on his back, the armpit patches of damp. He had to stretch so much that he felt his shirt lift and expose a section of flank, and he felt this slice of nakedness acutely—pale and hairy—as, hands in the air, he fumbled with the alarm as all their gazes rose to him.
For the second time today he found himself experiencing the sensation of blood draining heavily down his upraised right arm: a goodbye salute to the kid who’d just fucked his daughter, and now, well, a goodbye to professionalism, too. He felt their attention tighten. Their rapture was always at its most intense when they sensed he was a little lost. It excited them, and frightened them. When he finally dismounted, triumphant, there was a tepid noise of congratulation and he put one fist in the air in a desultory pantomime of victory.
Once it was over, once he’d shouted after them to read a load of books this summer, and no fucking vampires, it was just him alone in the room, with an unexpected feeling of deflation. He flailed in his mind for some poem about this, grasping at words. Who was it, miserable old bastard Larkin? Something about the sadness after something? He lit the packet’s final cigarette, crumpled the box in his pocket, and sat. Light came through the windows in two generous rhomboids, dense with sparkles of dust. The room looked beautiful. As he smoked—the final cigarette, this final class—he stared at those dust motes and thought, This is exactly the kind of moment in which I am meant to think great, stirring, amber-hued thoughts. Thoughts befitting a writer in his middle age. Late middle age. If someone were to appear in the doorway right now they’d see him, illuminated and solitary, and the whole scene would be filmic in its predictable perfection: a teacher lost in reverie in an empty classroom, on the last day of the semester, a summer day swelling beyond the windows.
And then he felt a sort of inward burp of shock. Dana was in the doorway. How long had she been there?
“I think I forgot my book,” she said in a near-inaudible voice.
There was no book.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
The question was so stupid, but what else do you say? As she nodded, her face crumpled with the lie of it and she shrank into a chair. For a moment, he thought she was having some kind of seizure, and his mind scrambled. Epilepsy? Peanut allergy? Am I meant to have one of those insulin pens? And then, ah, it was only this: emotion. Not a thing you stabbed and stopped with a pen.
He drew out the chair beside her very gently, and sat down very slowly, like she was a wild animal.
“I’ve just smoked my last cigarette,” he said, very quietly, “or I’d offer you one.”
She shook her head, a sobbing half laugh escaping.
“But you’re probably too sensible to smoke anyway, right.”
She shook her head again.
“Well,” he said, conciliatory. “We all need vices.”
He wanted to put a hand on her back. It felt unhuman to sit there beside her without touching her. But he knew that touching her would technically be a professional breach, if not a personal one, too. Like she wanted some old guy, her friend’s dad, rubbing her back.
Then again, she was here, crying. She’d come here to cry. So.
He put his hand awkwardly on the middle of her back, made two small pats, rubbed very lightly. He felt her body recognize this touch, but whether in appreciation or affront he couldn’t quite tell.
He removed his hand and said, “You can talk, or not talk, whichever you need. But I’m sorry to see you so upset. And if you do want to talk, you can talk to me.”
This was what teachers were meant to say. They were meant to be wise and sane and patient and caring. She was saying something. He couldn’t make it out. The words—already shaken through with tears—were lost in the fabric that covered her arms. He leaned forward to listen harder.
“I think I’m, like, in love with this person . . .”
Well, that was just nothing and everything. What do you say to that? He nodded, but then reminded himself she couldn’t see him, with her face still buried in her arms.
“Love can be painful . . .” he offered, and winced as soon as the words were out of his mouth, excruciated by his own banality.
“Duh,” she said, shakily, tearily, and he laughed and she laughed, still crying. And then the crying got harder. He put a hand on her back again, gently.
“Well,” he said. “Maybe you should . . . talk to them?”
She shook her head emphatically, sat up a little, wiped her face, and stared at the desk in front of her. He removed his hand from her back. She cried for a while, quietly, as though it were simply a task.
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