Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  Raul had two kids, Rosa and Enrique, at P.S. 205 in Queens. His wife was a bookkeeper at an auto parts store. He was always worrying, even as he licked the cream cheese from his lips, about the buttons of his uniform that pushed over his belt. But who can find time for the gym, you know? he’d say, examining Patrick, effortlessly lanky in his khakis and corduroy sport coat. It’s easier when you don’t have kids. You got no idea, he’d grin. Just wait.

  Patrick looked at Silverstein, hands folded on his desk, doing his best to appear sanguine. He couldn’t be happy—that future superintendency the staff always joked about must have seemed tangible when the chancellor left Garvey. “You might want to have Mr. Roselli here,” Silverstein said before Officer Rodriguez showed up. C? Patrick thought. Why would he want C there? Silverstein paused. “He is your union rep. He might be useful to you.” Patrick nodded. “And a lawyer. Though I don’t think that’s necessary yet, no charges have been filed.” Charges? Patrick stared at his principal. Silverstein examined his knuckles, coughed. “The Mishkins mentioned something about assault.”

  “You met with Josh Mishkin after school last week, Mr. Lynch?” It was almost funny—almost—Raul in his cop-show persona. Was he holding in his gut? “One of your students,” he fingered his notes, “Abdul Phillips, said he heard you and Josh arguing loudly. Some noise, maybe a desk knocked over. Then Josh ran outta your room. Is that correct? Can you tell me about that?”

  He’d interviewed second period! Patrick glared at Silverstein. Odd, he hadn’t mentioned that. Patrick left school yesterday thinking he’d witnessed a random, bloody—all right, horrifying—accident. He returned to an episode of NYPD Blue. Or worse, Rashomon. He knew how it went: Who started this fight? Who took Jamar’s bus pass? Thirty-five witnesses, thirty-five stories. Never any bottom to it. Dorie was the best at it: I’m leaving the room for two minutes, she’d tell them, and when I come back, I expect to see the missing money, watch, bracelet on my desk, no questions asked. She’d stand in the hall for a couple minutes, listen to the turmoil within, then enter her classroom to find the missing quantity on her desk, some boy in the back holding his nose, some girl drying tears. There was no truth to be found, just street justice.

  Questions and answers, questions and answers. He wasn’t prepared for this inquisition. Picking up the pieces, he’d prepared for that. The class may be traumatized, Susan said, prepping him, slipping into social worker mode. The kids who’ve been abused at home, and those Afghan girls, they might be post-stressy for a bit. Let them talk to Betty, if they need to; let her do her grief thing. And Josh’s parents, whatever they want from you, give. You’ve seen blood in your classroom before, Patrick, you know what to do. She caressed his cheek and smiled. Strange how his skill in dealing with these situations was the touchstone of their romance.

  But he didn’t know how to deal, not with this. Raul Rodriguez looked down from his pad, revolver bulging at his hip. Surely he always wore it, but Patrick never took it in before. And what was he telling his uniformed pal from the street corner? He was babbling. It was like recounting a film you’d seen. Not Rashomon, not To Sir With Love—the movie that’d inspired him into this mess. No. Something B-grade. An unusually violent “Afterschool Special.” Josh grabbed the office pass from him and walked through the door. He was gone. Patrick turned and touched, just touched, the door. Then the slightest flick…it seemed. And then the wind, the wind through the windows he’d opened because Josh said it was too hot.

  “Are you finished?”

  He almost laughed, looking up, expecting to see Raul Rodriguez and his bulging holster but instead seeing the Board of Ed secretary—bulging. She looked peeved, the secretary did, as she jabbed an index finger at the stack of essays before him. But Patrick didn’t laugh—restraining impulses was a specialty where he came from—and good thing, too: this woman didn’t come from the land of self-control and the size of her forearms told him that when she slapped you, you stayed slapped.

  Before he could answer her question, she seized the stack and thumbed through it, shaking her head at the unfinished portion. She looked down at him through narrowed eyes, no doubt taking his measure: so lazy and so randomly violent? Another Bernie Goetz. These skinny, milquetoast-y white boys, when they snap, they snap. She turned and walked out, still shaking her head.

  He was alone again, alone with the plastic plant and the perky blonde teacher and her multi-hued moppets. She was an Audrey, Patrick decided. Clueless Audrey. Yes, they’re so cute and freckled and pig-tailed now. But they grow up and come back as teenagers, armed with anger and sarcasm and malice, armed with—arms. Audrey just kept smiling, along with her adorable students, too busy changing lives to listen. One of them, Audrey, he thought, maybe that boy on the end with the dimples and mischievous grin, will attack you some fine day and they’ll charge you—you—with assault. And that fine day, Audrey—

  “You can leave now.” The secretary had a fresh look of concern on her face and it occurred to Patrick that he’d been railing at Audrey aloud. The secretary shook her head. This one was falling apart fast. She placed the clipboard in front of him, with the timesheet he’d signed at 8:00 this morning. The clock read 2:57; he’d keep school hours even with no school.

  “Sign 3:00,” she said. Patrick did as he was told. “You can go home now.”

  He handed her the clipboard, afraid to move.

  “Go home, Mr.…” The secretary fixed her glasses on the end of her nose and peered down at the clipboard. “…Lynch.” She looked at him over her glasses. Her face was weary, but, he suddenly saw, not unkind. “Go home.”

  You Can’t Go Home

  Home? When he’d left their apartment that morning, he’d called back to Susan, “I’m leaving—” but swallowed the reflexive “for work” or “for school.” For what was he leaving? Even now that he’d been there, he couldn’t say. And “home,” so linked—forever linked—to school in his mind, home, like school, always a constant, was now, like school, not. Susan had bounded out of the bathroom, fresh from the shower, a towel gathered at her chest, another round her hair. Susan, towel-wrapped, always an arresting sight, in better times cause for being late for homeroom. “Have a—” she said and filled the space with a peck to his mouth. She wasn’t the optimist his mother had been, who, the week after his father’s funeral, could still send him off with a “…good day in school,” as if the notion of days being variable, in school or out, still had currency.

  “You’re wearing that?” Susan asked. He’d almost made it out the door.

  “What?” Patrick had jerked around, smoothing down his shirt. “I should iron it?”

  “You look like you’re going to a ballgame. With the guys.” She’d looked him up and down. But not like she used to. Like his mother.

  “No one cares what I wear…there,” he’d mumbled, running a hand through his uncombed hair. He was speaking to his mother. And he was fourteen.

  Now, catching bits of himself in the mirror behind the single malts, his face pale dough in the darkness of Marty’s Bar, he saw what she saw. The collar of his shirt, a lime green polo his mother sent him for a long-ago birthday, was wrinkled, the left side curling toward his unshaven chin. He looked down at his jeans, one of the knees worn through, a scrim of loose threads.

  He looked up. Why, yes, Marty, he would have another Guinness. Good man, Marty. Good listener, asked no embarrassing questions. Just nodded that ginger-colored head and pulled the best pint in Brooklyn with those massive freckled forearms. Never asked why Happy Hour started at 3:17 every day for the past two weeks. Never asked why Patrick always drank Guinness as he choked down the bitter stuff. Never asked where he was coming from or going to. No unanswerable questions about home or work. No evaluations of wardrobe.

  Who was it that said Life looks better through the bottom of a glass? Patrick mused. Byron? His old buddy Gunther? Gunther quoting Byron? Patrick had never been one to f
ind solace, or great pleasure, really, in potent liquids. But he was beginning to see the point. The pint.

  He scanned down the bar at Marty’s regulars. Definitely not the young after-work crowd. Instead, cheeks, noses, rear ends told of long hours logged on a barstool. The regulars, three elderly men and Dolores, a woman impersonating young middle-age, nodded at Patrick, then looked up at the antique black-and-white screen above the gin collection, where the Mets had runners at the corners. The protocols here were different than any he’d learned in Manhattan singles bars, where drinking was a means to an end, alcohol a device to grease the social skids. At Marty’s, drinking was an end. The end, judging by Izzy, the wizened gent trembling three stools down, who stood a greater chance of toppling schnozz-first into his bourbon-on-the-rocks than the Mets did of bringing Bonilla home from third.

  But Patrick wasn’t there to make judgments. Far from it—this was a darkened land of no-judgments. Outside, the city radiated heat from stone, steel, and nine million striving New Yorkers. He’d never been one of them, could never be, not if he lived here the rest of his days. But in the cool, smoky dark of Marty’s, they were a fraternity, sorority, family. No, family was too extreme, even after two pints. Community—yes—Marty had made a community of sorts. With its own rules, its own silent understandings. Rule number one: never question anyone’s reason for being here. Marty set a foamy glass of stout before Patrick. Three, Patrick had decided, was his limit. Enough to go gently, toddling to the No. 7 train with a lethean buzz, but not to stumble from his barstool. Rule number two: no sloppiness. All the regulars achieved a boozy equilibrium and maintained it. Even Izzy in his spotted tie and rumpled suit reached a level of sustained instability and held it improbably.

  Patrick sipped the foam off his Guinness. When he’d first entered Marty’s, after his second day in solitary, Patrick paused when Marty asked, What’ll it be? He’d never considered what to drink on a Tuesday at 3:17––not since college. Patrick heard himself say pint of Guinness and Marty nodded as if that had been the right answer. Guinness had been Grandfather Lynch’s drink. His beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, deer-hunting grandfather had driven to Irish St. Paul for his supply; none of the Scandinavians in Peterson’s Prairie would have gone near it. Patrick kept ordering it, despite himself, smacking at its earthy leatheriness. By his third day at Marty’s he’d acquired a taste for it. Or maybe it was just genetic memory kicking in.

  Delores offered him one of her Pall Malls. He took it, smoking being another sacrament at Marty’s. Delores had red hair and nails, violet eye shadow, and a black skirt that pulled well above her knees. Delores, he saw as she leaned in to give him a light, was never going to see sixty-five again.

  Patrick said thanks and blew a plume of smoke out a corner of his mouth, a Bogartism that reminded him of his college days, the last time he smoked regularly. He’d been a smoker as he was a drinker, something he engaged in as the setting required. Never truly an addict, he’d stopped altogether when he and Susan, never a smoker, became a couple. She was trying to be supportive through his present ordeal, but this new beeriness and smokiness were more than she could abide.

  Following his first session at Marty’s, he’d left at seven, caught the train at Court Street, picked up a six-pack and TV dinner at University Market, and indulged in a bachelor meal. Susan had a staff meeting Tuesday nights at the shelter and could never say when she’d be home. The interns from Columbia and NYU went out for coffee after the meeting, plotting strategy against the new mayor’s assault on the welfare state.

  Susan had found him in a soggy heap on her couch, nothing but bones remaining of his Hungry Man chicken dinner with X-tra peach cobbler, the third open can of Bud, half-empty, spilling onto the tray. She’d taken pity on him that night, clearing his bachelor detritus, stripping him down to his shorts, bringing him a pillow and letting him sleep it off on the couch. But the next evening, coming home from the shelter to find him in her bed, reeking of tobacco and hops, Susan decamped to the couch. Patrick took the hint. Miraculous enough she’d chosen him to share her bed in the first place, best not to risk changing her mind. He made a point of showering, gargling, changing into fresh clothes, putting his smoky work clothes in the hamper.

  Late one night he felt an elbow to the ribs.

  “I can’t sleep like this,” Susan said.

  He felt another jab. He rolled over.

  “You smell like a brewery.”

  He was waking. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Brush my teeth again.” He sat up.

  “I can smell it through your pores.” She plopped his pillow in his lap. “I can’t sleep like this.” Susan put her head down. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding his pillow. Chauncey lifted his whiskers off his paws, blinked at him.

  “Sorry,” Susan said.

  Sorrow—pity—thought Patrick, swallowing a mouthful of his third Guinness, was the best he could summon from Susan now. He found himself in the scotch line-up again, smoothing down that cowlick on the crown of his head.

  “Pat,” she’d sighed at him this morning, surveying the ruins of her boyfriend in the doorway. “Pat. I know this is hard. Really hard. But it’s going to blow over.” Susan had stuck one hand in the pocket of her Indian print summer dress, the other adjusting those arty glasses, the better to scrutinize. “What you wore last week—your school clothes—that was just right. You’re a teacher, you want to look like one.” She crossed her arms, cocked a hip. “And you gotta impress Brunhilde, right?” The Board of Ed secretary, whose actual name he’d never know, was the one remaining source of levity in their household. Where once he’d regaled his sweetheart with classroom tales, recreating student monologues in Nuyorican, he now depicted the BOE secretary, her officious movements and mountainous dimensions.

  But he wasn’t feeling comical just then; he felt like one of her homeless women, being job-counseled. She was trying to be helpful, he knew, keep it light. Susan was trying hard. The night after she’d woken him up with the rib-jab, she’d roused him again, taking him in her mouth so tenderly he wasn’t sure, at first, if he was awake. In the past few nearly passion-free months, he’d sometimes woken, sweaty and stiff, confused then embarrassed to realize he’d been sex-dreaming about the woman sleeping next to him. Yes, he’d dreamt of getting it on with movie stars, unavailable colleagues, his Sunday school teacher. Who hadn’t? He’d dreamt of his exes. But dreaming of the woman sleeping mere inches from him—his lover, ostensibly—was a new low on the manhood scale. And now that he was clearly awake, his most intimate wish fulfilled, he was unable to enjoy. It felt ministrative, unsexy. A kinky Aspect of Modern Social Work. Even in his grogginess he was aware of her generosity, the gift of it, given his current unappealing state. But it was no use: alcohol, fatigue, anxiety. He remained soft until Susan—game girl that she was, and not unskilled—gave up. He bent down to reciprocate but found her, and her cat, softly snoring.

  Susan was throwing all her moves at him—smart, tough, cute, sexy—like a stand-up working a listless crowd and he wanted to appreciate the effort. It was more interest than she’d shown in a long while. But as he stood at the door of their—Susan’s—apartment, he couldn’t lose the feeling that she was ashamed of him, that she couldn’t bear the thought of her man going out in the world this way. All this advice-giving, coping-instruction. It wasn’t that he couldn’t take counsel from a female; he’d grown up on it. Like most men, he’d been raised in a matriarchy. Dr. Lynch had the title, but. Patrick could take direction. Where did it leave him, though, the older man, the allegedly streetwise one?

  He missed that sparkle in Susan’s eye when her preppy friends repeated seven after he told them how many years he’d been teaching in the city, when she heard that tone of awe that he’d made it past the Teach for America phase they were familiar with, the résumé-building stage, one, two, three years, just long enough to make law school sound fun, or, maybe, if you were creative, gathe
r enough local color to write that Young White Idealist Touches Troubled Ghetto Hearts screenplay. In those moments he’d had a glimmer of achievement, of having answered, in a small way, that question Gunther had tossed at him years ago, like a grenade in his lap, about who he’d be––rebel or star. Those moments, when he allowed a scintilla of pride to seep in, he felt he’d been a bit of both: going somewhere his dad wouldn’t and, possibly, couldn’t go.

  “This—situation—will be resolved, Pat, you know it will,” Susan said, taking in his sneakers, his third best pair. Lawn-mowing shoes, his dad would have called them. “But, till then, you can’t look like you’re giving in.” She leaned forward, uncurled his collar, frowned as it sprang back up. He couldn’t help noticing her odd tone, the Silversteinian passivity. How his dilemma would resolve itself. Why was everyone else so certain of the outcome? Were they being naïve or humoring him? Or was it just entertaining, watching him stumble over the cliff?

  Patrick couldn’t keep himself from flipping the paper open across the bar top, peeling the Band-Aid off to check the sticky sore. There he was again: the Post, second piece on the Op/Eds, page seventeen.

  “Blackboard Jumble”

  While reading and math scores across the city plunge, in-school violent crime rates rise, and the best young teachers flee to the suburbs, the mayor huffs and puffs at the chancellor, who scurries about his Livingston Street house of straw, daring the mayor to blow it away.