Precious

by Sandra Novack

  She picked up her cup of tea. “I thought you were trying not to curse anymore.”

  “No,” Peter said, without looking up. “You were trying to get me to stop cursing, as I recall. The newspaper says that Bundy bit some poor girl’s ass. Why is that fashionable to report, the violence? Why the attention on Bundy, like he’s some superstar?”

  “Another debate?”

  “I’m trying to have a conversation. I thought you wanted to talk.”

  “I get tired of these kinds of conversations.”

  “You told me what bothers you; I’m telling you what bothers me.”

  “Bundy is a sadist,” Amy said. “Why would I want to hear about him ?”

  “I’m just trying to talk.”

  “You’re reading to me from the paper. That’s not talking. It’s not. And I hardly have the time to think about every single thing you read. Last week you went on about beavers, dams, and the health of forests. You don’t even understand what’s important.”

  Her words hit him, and they seemed to finalize something. He was angry but he kept his voice perfectly level. “You can tell a lot about dams and about the health of a forest by studying beavers, and I happen to find that important.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know what’s happened to you.” She got up and placed Sophie’s bowl in the sink.

  “Me?”

  “Us, then. Us,” she said without turning. “I don’t know what’s happened to us.”

  And then later there was the shirt. When he complained, Amy stood in the bedroom doorway, and he thought he saw a flash of victory in her. He pulled off the shirt, intent on finding another.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “They’re all like that.”

  “Who’s the sadist?”

  “Apparently that would be the dry cleaner,” she told him. “Life gets you in more mundane ways than serial killers do.”

  It was only a few weeks ago that he ran into Eva at the library when he was browsing through the aisles, looking for a copy of On the Road. He was killing time, really—there was a woman with wavy hair, a friendly conversationalist, who worked the stacks. He’d been secretly hoping to bump into her, having already decided that she was a good candidate for the affair he knew he needed to have. But that day she wasn’t working, and, while Peter stood there and contemplated what to do next, self-pity crept up on him. He was so engrossed in his thoughts that at first he didn’t realize Eva was standing at the end of the aisle, watching him.

  “Mr. Fulton?” she said, peering down a bit, uncertain.

  He looked up, momentarily surprised. She was a tall, lean girl with a mass of hair difficult to miss. He caught himself staring, and she shifted uncomfortably and smoothed her skirt. She almost always wore skirts that made her look attractive. He could admit that—that she was very attractive. Embarrassed, he joked with her as he might with any student he saw, musing over her confusion and curiosity, as if she couldn’t quite fathom that any of her teachers had a life outside the classroom, or interests other than Watson High. “I’m not Mr. Fulton,” he said, changing his voice. “It’s Alien Fulton to you.” He held out a stiff arm and made a motion, like a robot.

  It was a lame joke, a foolish attempt at a conversation. He could admit that, too, but she indulged him anyway.

  “You seem different,” she said, smiling. She looked around. “I mean, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that much to see you here, should it? It’s a library after all. Where else would teachers hang out?”

  Peter laughed. “Of course here. You know after school all your teachers turn into vapor. They only rematerialize in time for homeroom the next morning. We live and die for Watson High! It’s a motto we keep pinned up on a banner in our secretive teachers’ lounge.” He raised his eyebrows a little, watched as she took a book and opened it. “Reading?” he said. “For goodness’ sake, why do that?”

  “It just so happens I like to read. Now, if you’re going to be mean about it …” Eva pushed her hair back so that he could see the sharp line of her jawbone and her star-shaped earrings. Then she looked over to him and bit her bottom lip.

  This pleased him, her defiance, her bit of flirting. “I’m only mean when I’m at the library and talking to a pretty student,” he said. It slipped, and he regretted it, but she didn’t seem to mind. She edged forward and read aloud. Peter felt the weight of possibility bloom in him. It all had a slightly treacherous quality to it, a moment alone in a quiet aisle with a young girl, reading. After all the nights Amy pushed his hand from her thigh, after all the times she didn’t want to talk and squirreled herself away in Sophie’s room instead, rocking the baby back and forth, he found the thought of screwing in a library both titillating and frightening. It flashed before him: sex against books, the smell of dust all around. Afterward, a heartfelt discussion on the beat poets.

  “My sister is downstairs,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “It’s a madhouse down there, twenty kids at story hour.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I was getting bored.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” he told her, smiling. “I’m almost always bored.”

  The next day, Peter found a handwritten poem, left on his desk. It was awkward free verse and contained two typos. During study hall, she came up to him. “I had to ask,” she said, her face expectant, her voice so intimate it sent him reeling. They already shared a secret then, didn’t they? Her poem, his confession that he believed she was attractive.

  “Ask me what?” he whispered back. He leaned forward over his desk, pushing the papers forward as he did.

  “Was it awful?”

  “The poem? No, it was fine,” he said.

  “I’m not very good,” she said, suddenly bashful. “I know that.”

  “I write sometimes, too.”

  “Poetry?” she asked. “Can I read them?”

  “You don’t want to read my poems.”

  “I do.”

  The next day, when they met after class, he said that he’d forgotten his work. He felt boyish as he said it, realizing that he was frightened of what she might think, that she would see he wasn’t as good as she believed him to be, or that his poems were doomed to a drawer where they’d gather dust and where someday his daughter might stumble upon them and realize that her father once had aspirations beyond what she knew or believed.

  He began to meet Eva that last week of school, and then beyond that. He told himself he had time, that he was helping to nurture a young student who seemed to need from him something he could offer—conversation, a bit of fun. It seemed to him they shared a common desire for life to be different, more than a day-in and day-out routine. They both wanted something magical, he told himself, even if that magic were fleeting. It might eventually come to an end, but he didn’t want it to. The feeling it fostered in him was too grand, too wondrous.

  She always dressed up, and sometimes he found himself wanting her to want him. He began to fantasize that she was, as he’d often heard the boys in class say, that girl who didn’t wear underwear, that girl who would do anything on a dare. You can fill her up like a car, they’d say, in and out. All the teachers had heard the rumors. Mrs. Stiley would talk about Eva over doughnuts and coffee in the lounge, saying she was worried that a girl like that was a bad influence on the entire female student body. “One takes a turn for the worse, they all do,” Mrs. Stiley said, snippily “Have you met her mother? She’s a real piece of work.”

  “I met her father,” Peter said, recalling a parent-teacher night that had taken place in spring. Eva’s father had waited in the back of the room, letting all the women who had gathered around Peter’s desk go first, listening as they asked questions about next year’s curriculum and their children’s progress. When the mothers finally shuffled out to other rooms, Frank Kisch sat down at one of the desks in the front. “I have to get back to work by eight,” he said, and it was clear he felt awkward, lumped up in the chair the way he was. “
Eight-fifteen at the latest. I took a long break.”

  “That’s fine. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “I’m Eva’s dad. Frank Kisch.”

  Peter looked over a sheet of paper. “Usually your wife comes, doesn’t she?”

  It was innocuous on his part, but Peter remembered how Eva’s father had shifted uncomfortably. He couldn’t judge if Frank Kisch was irritated or was simply made uneasy by his question; he imagined that the gruff man in front of him wasn’t used to such conferences and perhaps had come as a favor to his wife. What he hadn’t thought was that there were problems at home, or that Natalia Kisch had left the house entirely. There were too many students to keep track of, too many reasons to not press the moment beyond the peculiar lapse in dialogue. “Well, then,” he said.

  “Eva,” Frank said. “Does she seem okay to you? Is she doing a good job in school?”

  “She’s fine,” he assured him. “A’s and B’s and an occasional C. The normal stuff.”

  In the teachers’ lounge, after discussing his interaction with Eva’s father, which he also deemed normal enough, Peter thought to add, “Eva’s probably just going through a stage. I wouldn’t believe all the things the football team says. They’re not exactly credible sources.”

  Mrs. Stiley tsked him, and he thought of the name students had given her—Old Ironsides. “Four sources on the football team,” she said, “seems credible enough to me.”

  After school ended, Peter and Eva continued to meet when Amy would visit her parents, who had recently relocated to be closer to the baby. When summer classes started, he’d see Eva on his way home, sometimes meeting her at an out-of-the-way park or the usually vacant lot behind the grocery store off Main. Once, wanting to see where she lived and perhaps wanting to imagine her there, waiting for him, he picked her up from her home, though soon afterward he regretted this action. He didn’t remember who had first suggested meeting after school ended. He might have said, “We could still meet if you want,” knowing what would happen, but when he thought back, he preferred to remember Eva making this request. He preferred to think he was obliging her in some small way.

  “I want to,” she said one day, kissing him suddenly. She stepped back, waiting, and it was as if something were about to burst in her.

  “Want to what?”

  “You know.”

  “Here?” he asked. They were in his van.

  “No,” she said. “A bed. I’d like to have a bed.”

  He rented a room at a motel on the other side of town. He paid in cash to the clerk, a woman with dull blond hair who asked if he wanted an hourly rate. Although he wanted it to be perfect for Eva, the bed sagged and the room smelled of smoke. He felt an abject guilt come over him, a sense that he was beyond absolution. “We can go someplace else,” he said. “Someplace nicer.”

  “It’s fine,” she told him, but then she sat on the bed for twenty minutes, deciding.

  These days they usually meet in Peter’s van, peace stickers half scraped from the back, feathers dangling from the mirror. The shag mobile, Eva sometimes calls it, referring to the carpet that lines the floor, walls, and star-shaped windows in the back. “You’re hiding me,” she told him once, after their first few romps there. He responded, “You require hiding, don’t you think?”

  When the dismissal bell rings, Eva waits until all the students exit and then slips into the classroom. She closes the door, flicks off the lights, and turns. She bites her lip. She walks over to where Peter stands, by his desk, threads her arms around him, and buries her head in his chest. “Finally,” she says. “I’ve been waiting forever.”

  His body tenses as he eases away from her. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

  “I wanted to surprise you. You’re not surprised?”

  He hears the hurt exasperation of a child, the disappointment. Although a part of him would like to soothe her, the larger part of him sees this as a dramatic entrance, a girl’s naïveté. He rubs his neck. “I am surprised,” he says disapprovingly. “But we could get in a lot of trouble. That’s the point; I’m not supposed to be surprised, and you’re not supposed to be here. We plan these things, remember? I call, say I’m a boy from school if anyone else answers but you.”

  “I know the drill. I thought it would be good to change things up a bit. I thought you’d be happy to see me. You come over. My sister’s seen you. It’s not like you’re invisible or anything.”

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” Peter says.

  “And besides, I thought—”

  Peter walks away from her. He stacks the free-writes on Donne and then sits down and folds his hands on top of the desk. He might ask what she really expected. He pulls at his shirt and thinks, irritably, that she’s going to get him fired. Or worse, she will further disrupt the already frail condition of his marriage. “Thought what?”

  “That you cared. That you wanted to see me.”

  “It’s not that simple. You know that.”

  “No one noticed,” she says. “I’ll make it up to you if you’re angry. What do you want?” She swings her hips a little, then leans on the desk. She traces her finger over the grain in the wood.

  “This isn’t a game.”

  She walks over to the blackboard and takes a piece of chalk. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll leave.” On the board she writes, “I will not be seen at school anymore.”

  “Don’t be difficult,” he tells her. “Don’t make things so complicated by acting like a kid.”

  She writes again, “I will not be seen …”

  “Fine,” he says. He throws a pencil onto his desk, gets up, and walks around. He leans back, crosses his arms. “A hundred times, then,” he says. “Don’t stop until you’re exhausted. How’s that? You want to act like a kid, I’ll treat you like one.”

  She looks over at him, plainly hurt. Something in her face grows smaller. He isn’t sure if, on Eva, that means she’s remorseful or only planning an insurrection, as if she might throw the chalk at him and walk out the door, leaving him to wonder about her for weeks.

  “Keep going. Don’t stop.” The tone in his voice unsettles him and reminds him of his own father when, as a child, Peter would do something wrong.

  Eva pauses.

  “I didn’t say to stop.” Such stern formality might be a cruel thing— possibly it is sadistic, like Ted Bundy, he thinks—but he is feeling cruel, he is feeling sadistic, and he is angry not only with Amy, but now with Eva as well, for coming here. He watches the movement of her skirt as she writes. Her hand presses down harder on the board, causing the chalk to shed copious amounts of dust. She postures, one leg bent, her skirt now quaking with each loop she makes. After several minutes, his anger wanes. No one has come through the door asking questions. Eva is correct—no one has noticed at all. Her handwriting is loopy, childish, and it scrawls downward on the board. Her outstretched arm holds his attention— honey-colored, the smooth layering of dark hair, small wrists, fingernails painted the color of amber. She will not condescend to turn now, nor will she speak to him, and when she ignores him so completely, he feels a boyish longing return. That day they talked in the library, didn’t he feel the same way as she turned to go? Didn’t he suddenly want to give Eva what a girl like her so desperately wants—to see herself through another’s eyes and to find that she is precisely as she wishes but never quite believes— beautiful, full of possibility? Didn’t he want, even then, to go down on her? And that day, and days after it, didn’t she make him feel differently than he normally does—less cynical, more vibrant, his senses blissfully alive?

  Finally, he says, “Stop.”

  “I’m doing what you want me to,” she says. “A hundred times, until my hand gets tired.”

  “Eva.”

  She puts the chalk down and turns.

  “Look,” he says. “It’s been a shitty day. It’s not your fault.” He extends his arm and she takes it, pulling back first so that he must lean forward. Then she pulls him toward
her hip, as if she has been waiting to take him to herself, to feel bone against bone.

  “Me, too,” she says. “You have no idea what it’s like at home.” She places her leg around his, so that he can feel the heat from her skin.

  “You always say that.”

  “I always mean it.”

  He runs his hand over her arm. “Beautiful.”

  “These arms?” She looks down. “They’re invisible. I’m not seen at school, so these arms can’t be touched.” She shirks away, but now they’re both playing. She edges closer a second later, takes his hand, and places it under her skirt, on her thigh.

  “No,” he says absently. He looks over her shoulder.

  “I locked it. I’m not an idiot, you know.”

  “I know.”

  She pulls at his belt loop. “Anyway,” she says, “I love these jeans. I can’t believe they let you wear these jeans to school, like you’re a student. I bet every girl in class likes to see you in jeans.”

  She unbuttons his shirt, slowly. His hand drifts from her thigh upward. He kisses her collarbone. He thinks of telling her he loves her breasts, that her breasts have quite possibly undone him, and he thinks, too, that he is glad there isn’t a baby attached to her breasts, but this thought leaves him displaced, and he stops, thinking of Sophie.

  “What did I do wrong now?” she says, pulling back again. Her mind races over her planned conversation, even though a part of her realizes it is futile. Her imagined conversations with people are so rarely called upon in the reality of the day.

  “Nothing,” he says.

  And it begins like this: Another button undone, a pull at his jeans, a kiss, and him giving in to all of this, his hand threading through her hair, which he has come to think of as a mane, and his finger then traveling under the wire of her bra; and now she props herself up on the desk, and the room seems to close around him, and he is in the process of forgetting—forgetting his anger, forgetting his guilt, forgetting Amy, even forgetting for this moment and for the next several moments Sophie. Eva opens her legs. The smell of her. The cotton fold of her skirt drapes between her thighs, and he sees this and feels this, and for a moment he convinces himself that he has found true passion—and there is, in that, a beauty, and there is, in that, terror that he tries to shed, and there is behind the moment a brief, fleeting thought of Amy and a rush of emotion he chooses not to examine too closely. He tells himself that, Yes, this, here in front of him, is love—he need only grasp it, the moment, and that, Yes, love disappears only to reappear in another face, and it is this thought that both destroys and resurrects him. The saltiness of skin. The coarse hairs under his fingers, the stickiness. He is struck by a moment of possibility, that moment when something unfolds in the world.