The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “I guess I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said dejectedly, shredding a paper napkin and ignoring his cappuccino. “Sometimes I just don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot about love these last few weeks.” He seemed far away, preoccupied, as if this talk had propelled him into precisely those private regions inaccessible to a casual acquaintance such as herself. Was it Arthur he was in love with, a dying man?

  “It was very good to see Arthur Branson again,” she offered bravely.

  Tracy looked at her blankly.

  “Oh,” he said. “That was a real disaster, wasn’t it? I mortally offended Louis, didn’t I?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that,” Claire lied impulsively. “It’s just that—”

  Tracy finished bluntly for her. “It’s just that the last person on earth Louis wanted to see was Arthur. Plus he finally figured out I was gay. Aren’t I right? Two home runs in one evening. And now he’s gone and crossed me off his list.”

  She dropped a curling zest of lemon into her espresso and wished he hadn’t put it quite so accurately.

  “I hope you know this doesn’t change anything between you and me,” she said awkwardly. “Whatever issues Louis may have, as far as I’m concerned, your being gay is just another aspect of who you are.”

  He smiled miserably. “Thanks, Claire. I appreciate that. And I guess with Louis, well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

  “He’s very conservative,” Claire said. “He gets anxious when people go about flaunting their sexuality. That’s where the trouble with Arthur comes from. After he left the Forge School he changed. He became more, well, flamboyant. You didn’t know Arthur back in those days. He was very different, very quiet and studious. I’m afraid Louis took it personally when Arthur came out of the closet with such a bang.”

  Claire had never seen the slightest trace of anger in Tracy, so she was surprised at the sudden flare of rage. “He made Arthur cry,” Tracy said, so fiercely that the proprietress of Chamonix, trying to keep herself busy behind the display counter, looked their way in alarm. “After the two of you left, he just sat there and wept. Arthur feels such great loyalty to Louis, after everything he did. He can’t understand why Louis turned his back on him. After going to such lengths for him. After single-handedly rescuing him from a living hell the way he did.”

  “That’s very generous of Arthur. Louis was certainly very fond of him, very supportive—but then, everyone was fond of Arthur. He was really the Forge School’s great dazzling hope when he was a student.”

  “Some, I guess, were fonder than others,” Tracy said with a hint of sarcasm.

  “Oh, Louis was quite fond,” Claire defended. “He thought Arthur was the real thing.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Louis.”

  “Oh,” Claire said, a bit puzzled.

  “I was thinking of Dr. Emmerich.”

  She thought for a moment, but failed to see the connection. “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she told him.

  He looked at her as if, for some reason, he didn’t quite believe her. He patted down the little pyramid of napkin he’d shredded onto the table, then spoke cautiously but mysteriously. “All I know is what Arthur told me.”

  “About…?” she prodded, genuinely curious now.

  “You really don’t know what I’m talking about,” Tracy told her in a tone of mild surprise.

  “I haven’t a clue,” she said honestly. “You’ve got to fill me in.”

  Tracy pulled another napkin from the dispenser and began to add its shreds to the pile. “I don’t even know if I should go into all this. It’s ancient history. And all I’ve got is what Arthur told me, and Arthur does have an extravagant imagination. But I don’t know why he would make something like this up.”

  “Now you’ve got to tell me,” Claire urged, even as she reflected to herself how many troubles began with just such an innocent demand.

  Tracy took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “About Dr. Emmerich, and how he used to, you know, invite his favorite students out to his farm, and it was a real honor to get invited out there.”

  “This is all true,” Claire told him, though it was odd how an almost infinitesimal kernel of dread appeared in her heart.

  “Well, I guess Arthur got invited out there quite a bit his senior year. He’d never felt the experience of being so…appreciated by somebody, and I think it gave him this tremendous sense of security. He said it felt like finding his balance in the world.”

  “Jack Emmerich was very charismatic that way,” Claire said.

  “Only things went bad. Dr. Emmerich weirded out on him, pulled the rug out from under their relationship. He was very cruel.”

  “Tracy,” she said, feeling hot and flushed. She pushed her espresso cup aside and stared intently at her young interlocutor. “Are you trying to tell me there was something sexual between Arthur and Jack Emmerich, of all people?”

  He nodded gravely. “Intellectual, emotional, physical. It was a romance. Only Dr. Emmerich panicked and decided he wanted out. That’s when it got ugly. And that’s when Louis stepped in.”

  He spoke with such arid certainty that Claire listened with an ache in her heart as dull and gray as the parking lot beyond Chamonix’s plate-glass window. For a panicked moment she thought she saw Libby get out of a beige BMW—what better time for Libby to decide to stock up on chocolates, and what worse time to run into her friend?—but fortunately it wasn’t Libby, only another large-hipped woman who occupied too much sad and baffled space in the world.

  She had never heard any of this that Tracy was telling her, and surely, if it had happened as he said, she would have known about it. Her husband was a man of many secrets, but that he would have kept something like this from her seemed impossible to believe. How many years ago would it have been? Fourteen? Fifteen? All that time in their life seemed so very distant: Louis was not yet headmaster; she had not yet returned to school; Lux, gentle, faithful, gone-forever Lux, was not yet in their lives (he’d been such a mouthy little puppy when they first got him, she remembered with a pang). Had they been good times or bad? She honestly couldn’t say, so intermixed were her memories.

  “From what I understand,” Tracy continued, “it must’ve taken a huge amount of courage to stand up to Dr. Emmerich. You knew him pretty well: is that right?”

  She had indeed known him, though no one, with the possible exception of her husband, had ever known him “pretty well,” as Tracy so casually put it. She found herself resisting the young man’s blithe incursion into the complex terrain of her past. Knowing Jack Emmerich even to the limited extent she had known him had been neither simple nor easy. All of them—she and Louis, Reid and Libby, the only four still left from those years—had lived in some varying degree of awe and fear. She remembered Jack’s invariable courtliness toward her, and how, beneath it, she had felt a force like steel. He had mesmerized Louis, and why not, with his encyclopedic knowledge of Wagner, his command of German that Louis could only envy, his manly and forthright sense of mission in the world? But she liked to think he had never succeeded—quite—in mesmerizing her.

  “I hardly know what to say,” she told Tracy, shaking her head in consternation. “I’ve never heard a whisper of any of this. I find it very difficult to believe.” Or rather, she found—to her distress—that she could not immediately discount Tracy’s tale. They had all known, through the years, about Jack’s utter devotion to certain of his boys. That was what made him, they unanimously agreed, such an extraordinary educator. And he had been an extraordinary educator. But she had harbored, even then, doubts she could never voice: how there was something slightly troubling about some of Jack’s infatuations, how he could praise endlessly the virtues of boys who turned out, when you met them, to be rather dull, who certainly did not blaze with the bright flame he claimed to detect in their souls. But as far as she knew—and she’d know, wouldn’t she?—there had never been the slightest whiff of scandal, not even a stray rumor throu
gh all these years.

  Wouldn’t it be strangely, even tragically, fitting if that extraordinary man had succumbed, in the end, to those very qualities that had made him extraordinary?

  Nonsense, she thought warily.

  “Louis never said anything to you?” Tracy asked.

  She shook her head. “And what does Arthur say my husband did, exactly?”

  Tracy shook his head in return. “He made Dr. Emmerich back off. What else can I say? I’m not sure even Arthur ever knew the details of that confrontation. Just that he did manage to graduate, which Dr. Emmerich had given him cause to doubt, and, even more surprising to Arthur, that Brown never rescinded his admission, which Dr. Emmerich had also threatened. So he went off to Brown in the fall, and I guess he came out of the closet there. And then—isn’t this right?—Dr. Emmerich died not too long after.”

  “Yes, there was a car accident,” Claire said. She had never seen anyone so devastated as Louis; she had feared for him, his sense of loss was so immense. Seen through the lens of that grief, still so vivid to her, Tracy’s story seemed utterly implausible, schoolyard gossip at best. Perhaps Arthur Branson had indeed become unreliable; perhaps AIDS had begun to affect his once-remarkable brain.

  She wished she knew if they were lovers, he and Tracy. She wished she knew how to ask that simple question of a young man. It might explain Tracy’s motives in telling her this story. But he, apparently, wanted to dwell a bit longer in the past.

  “It’s a funny thing,” he said, “about Arthur and Dr. Emmerich. It didn’t have to turn out badly. That’s the sad thing. It could have been this incredibly positive experience for Arthur.”

  The wistfulness in his tone struck her. “Tracy,” she advised, “I wouldn’t romanticize. Relations between teachers and students are inherently volatile. I don’t think any of these affairs end well. I think they do terrible damage to the kids involved.”

  “You don’t think there’re any exceptions?” he wondered.

  She considered for a moment. When she’d been in college, several of her professors were married to women who had once been their students. But that was different, somehow, though she wasn’t sure, when she thought about those marriages, that they had been particularly advisable or, in the end, especially for the wives, very happy. She respected power and its differentials, but she also understood the insidious damage it could wreak, quietly and over time, on a relationship. “No, I don’t really know that there are exceptions. Certainly there’s no way a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old can possibly know what he or she is getting into with an adult ten, twenty, however many years older. I think it’s a flat-out abuse of power, and I think in those circumstances the teacher’s always the one to blame.”

  “I guess there has to be blame,” Tracy said. “Plus it’s against the law. Unlawful sexual activity with a minor. It’s a felony in New York state.”

  “Well, there you have it,” she told him.

  “Which means a fairly severe penalty,” he went on. “Like ten years in prison. It would pretty much ruin your life.”

  “I should think so,” Claire said.

  Tracy looked troubled.

  “You’re not saying that Arthur was thinking of bringing charges against Jack Emmerich, are you?” she said darkly. She steadfastly refused to believe the car accident could have been anything more than what it was.

  Her words seemed to startle him. “Oh no,” he said. “Not at all. I was just thinking. I wonder what kind of evidence. I mean, it seems to me a student could invent a story, if they wanted to get back at a teacher. I wonder what happens when it’s one person’s word against another.”

  “I honestly have no idea,” Claire told him. He could be like this, she’d noticed; he’d get an idea in his head and obsess over it for quite some time.

  “You and I”—she patted his arm fondly—“have nothing to worry about. Let’s leave it to the criminals and the police to work all that out.”

  Beyond Chamonix’s plate-glass window, the sky looked pregnant with threat; a light snow had begun to fall and it occurred to her that she should get home. Louis would worry.

  “I think the blizzard’s upon us,” she said. “And we’re provisionless as ever.” She noticed he’d barely touched his cappuccino; the cinnamon-flecked foam head was still intact. “Do you want to finish your coffee before we go?”

  “It wasn’t very good,” he said, reaching in his pocket for his wallet.

  “No, no,” she told him. “This is on me.” She took from her purse a ten and, perhaps defiantly—the cappuccino had been perfectly good the few times she’d tried it—folded the bill under her saucer, a one hundred percent tip, the kind that would make Louis fume. And perhaps Tracy as well. But she liked Chamonix; against very long odds, she wanted it to succeed. She wanted all noble ventures to succeed.

  “Thank you,” she told the proprietress, wishing she could remember her name. Was it Ann Marie? Marie Therese? Something that sounded Swiss.

  “Bye-bye,” said Ann Marie or Marie Therese.

  “Bye,” Tracy echoed.

  “Well,” she told him in the parking lot. “I’m very glad I ran into you. It’s been too long. And remember what I said. Louis doesn’t dictate my life. Let’s get together again sometime soon. Perhaps lunch?” Dinners, of course, remained out of the question. What would she say to Louis: I’m going over to Tracy’s for dinner?

  “That would be nice,” Tracy said. He seemed sad, subdued.

  Uncertain how to make better whatever it was that was wrong, she told him, “I’m very sorry Arthur’s feelings got hurt. You’ve given me much to think about this afternoon.”

  “Don’t worry over it too much,” he said. “The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.”

  She was about to shake his hand good-bye when he clasped both her shoulders and pulled her to him, planted a dry kiss lightly on her cheek. “I consider you my friend,” he told her with what sounded more like desperation than affection. “I could really use lunch with a friend from time to time.”

  “Our power’s out,” Libby said in an aggrieved tone. “How about yours?” Claire cradled the phone between ear and shoulder and peered out the window. In the cone of light cast by the street lamp thousands of snowflakes swirled about like avid moths drawn to their doom. The television weatherman had been right: this third storm was proving just as mighty as its predecessors.

  “We’re fine here,” Claire reported. “We’re holding tight. Louis is outside shoveling the driveway right now.”

  “Isn’t that a little optimistic of him?”

  “You know Louis. He has this theory that if he shovels the drive every hour while it’s snowing, then it’s not that onerous. By the time the snow’s through falling, the driveway’s all clear. And guess who gets to feel virtuous?”

  “He’s going to have to stay up all night,” Libby observed.

  “Oh,” Claire told her friend, “these days he does that anyway.”

  “Well, you’re lucky, I suppose. Two shovelfuls and my husband would die of a heart attack.”

  Claire felt herself stiffen. What whisper or shadow in her friend’s voice provoked such a sudden ache of dread? “Libby,” she said warily. “Is everything all right?”

  Libby laughed mirthlessly. “What’s the bright side of being without electricity?” she asked. Then, in that brittle, too-bright voice Claire hadn’t heard in years, Libby answered her-own question. “You don’t have to see your situation quite so clearly.”

  Claire had always known that her friend’s black river had only plunged underground, that it still seethed beneath the apparent calm of the landscape, unseen but hardly vanquished. She had always known that, one day, in the middle of some placid field of flowers, its dangerous torrent would burst forth to the surface.

  “Is Reid there with you?” she asked in alarm.

  “Oh, Reid,” Libby said carelessly. “Reid hasn’t been here in two days. No, three days. Three days and c
ounting.”

  She paused, and Claire was aware, in the sudden silence, of her own heart knocking breathlessly in her chest. “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “Haven’t you heard? I thought everybody had heard except me. It’s love, Claire. That ridiculous emotion. After all these years of playing at one romance or another, now he tells me it’s finally happened. He’s fallen in love. Devastating, don’t you think?”

  “But he always imagines he’s in love,” Claire said desperately, repulsed, as always, by Reid’s priapic unruliness. “What makes us think this is any different? Weren’t we laughing about it just last month?”

  “This time I’ve lost him,” Libby said with such certainty that Claire, despite everything, knew it might indeed be true. “What he said was, ‘The night before Constantinople fell to the Turks, the Virgin appeared to the emperor on the walls of the city and asked him to return to her her icon, the most sacred icon of the empire. Why? the emperor asked her. Because, the Virgin told him, the spirit of God has forsaken the city.’ How’s that for announcing the end of a marriage?”

  Claire refrained from mentioning that she thought Reid Fallone was a pompous ass.

  “Don’t ask me if I understand,” Libby went on. “Because I don’t. All I know is this: that I’m in love too. Have been all along. With him. It never mattered much before, when I knew I had him, but now it’s all that matters. And I can’t stand it.”

  “You and Reid will outlast all the rest of us,” Claire assured her, but even she could hear how that old truism had lost its luster.

  “The demons never go away,” Libby said in a voice gone icy and remote.

  “Libby,” Claire commanded sternly, though she felt herself gone shivery inside. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “You never had demons,” Libby told her. “You’re the only person I know who never had demons.”

  “You’ll get through this,” Claire rallied her friend. “I’m there for you. Remember? You have me always.” But she was aware, even as she said those words, that she was no longer talking to Libby Fallone. The phone line had suddenly gone dead. “Hello?” she said. “Libby?”