by Jill Malone
“Is that your wife?” I asked.
Ryan Grey looked up and shook his head, “My wife wears serious clothes. That is not my wife.”
The girl was laughing now and I understood that it was Emily. I climbed up and shook her hand, “This was a marvelous party. I’ve really enjoyed myself.”
“I have no doubt. Obviously I’ve missed all the fun.”
She picked up the Jameson bottle that we’d spilled and took a swig. I stood as straight as possible and walked down the steps toward my studio. The garden was underwater; there were bats flitting on the surface like gulls. I’d kissed a hippie and shaken hands with an heiress. Oh, how we unravel and gleam.
IV.
The light filtered through the trees with a smoky gleam like gold dust. My meeting with Dr. Grace Adams was scheduled for nine o’clock, so we put off surfing and I stayed up all night worrying about whether or not I would fulfill this woman’s expectations and my own ambition. When I biked to campus the morning of the meeting, there were only a few people milling about the grass courtyard. Sprinklers droned by the language building and I darted between their cycles and up the wide stone steps.
Inside the chilled building, the sound of my footsteps winged through the hallway with a lonely hollow thump. Dr. Adams’ office—a large triple-windowed room with old-fashioned dark leather furniture and four walls of bookcases—was on the second floor. When I arrived, she wasn’t in her office, so I waited in the doorway, surveying the books I could see for anything I might recognize. A coffee cup on the table had steam rising from it and her computer monitor’s screensaver flashed alphabet shapes bouncing like raquetballs.
“You must be Dr. Elliot?”
I turned to face her and discovered a petite tanned white woman with puffed brown hair and very red lipstick, who did, in fact, resemble Barbara Stanwyck. She wore jeans and a sleeveless blouse, which I took to be a good sign. Her earrings were violently blue, dangling in a haphazard shiver.
“Jane Elliot,” I said stupidly.
“Come in, Dr. Elliot. Do you want tea?”
She held a cup out to me, which I accepted, hoping that I wouldn’t spill it in a bout of self-consciousness. I followed her into the office and sat in the large leather chair directly across from her desk—swallowed instantly in the palm of the slick cushion. The tea was orange, extremely acidic, even though she’d added honey. I twirled the cup in my hand and tried to remain calm. I was a child in the chair, scrunched and dwarfish, stretching my neck to see her over the expanse of her cluttered desk.
“Dr. Elliot, you have impeccable qualifications and I’m pleased to have you join us. I worked with James Montgomery on several different exchange programs and his Latin instruction is superb. I had no reservations about offering you the instructor position.”
I wished I had a cigar, to go with the chair, or a snifter of brandy.
“Dr. Montgomery,” she went on, “gave a glowing review and your transcript made the decision obvious. I’d like you to teach second-year Latin. The students are disciplined and the coursework interesting. I think you’ll enjoy these classes, and they’ll be an excellent way to prepare you for the more rigorous graduate-level courses.”
She went on to describe the small, handpicked staff and the various teaching schedules—I would teach three classes in the afternoon, five days a week. This first year, I thought, watching her earrings flutter, would be a respite—a relief—while I learned my craft.
“Yes, Latin is very popular at U.H.,” Dr. Adams was saying. “It’s the only language that doesn’t require a lab. All Latin classes meet five days a week for an hour a day and every student must have two full years of a language in order to graduate, so the department stays busy—especially now.”
I nodded. The pungent orange tea had dazed my senses; I chugged the rest of the tea and tried not to swoon.
“Our undergraduate classes are always full, so we cap them at twenty-four students.”
“A friend of mine,” I said, “took Latin as an undergraduate, and he told me the homework is reviewed each day during class and there’s a test every other Friday.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Ryan Grey.”
“Oh, Ryan. He was quite a student. He took Latin for two years. I was trying to get him to take the third year, but I think he panicked about the research paper.”
I smiled. It sounded just like him.
“Our classes do function as you mentioned. Latin, as you know, is essentially about memorization, so the students must review constantly and be tested often. You’ll teach the second-year courses for fall and spring term and next year we’ll discuss adding some graduate courses to the mix—based on the review of your students’ progress, of course. Do you have questions, Dr. Elliot?”
“Which hours will I teach?”
She took a sip of tea and flipped through a ledger on her desk.
“Your first class begins at one-fifteen and you’ll have classes throughout the afternoon with fifteen-minute breaks in between. I work in the afternoons as well, as does Dr. Greer; Drs. Myers and Delvo work in the morning and the TAs are split with four handling morning classes and four working in the afternoon down the hall from you. I’ve brought you the course books for our graduate as well as undergraduate classes, but don’t worry about reviewing any except your own course book right away; take your time to adjust to our pace here: you have a whole year to familiarize yourself with these.”
She pointed to my right and I followed her gesture to one of the many piles of books on the floor, noting she’d marked a particular stack with a pink Post-it note and my name in a loopy grade-school script. Standing, she eased her way around the desk, relieved me of my cup, and paused a moment, her earrings rocking hypnotically.
“Oh, Dr. Elliot, you’re required to have one hour of office time every day, just in case a student needs you, but most of the time you’ll find that you can use that hour as prep time. Most of the students do very well in our program and rarely require tutorials.”
I nodded. The class structure was so well planned, so meticulously designed that I could focus all my attention on the language—the reinvigorating pursuit of Latin—the interactive exchange with the students, and the stimulating environment of a classroom. This ideal of the classroom as a forum appealed to me after years in the more clinical, dispassionate post of a researcher.
“Would you like to see your classroom and office?” She walked briskly for a small woman, her puffed hair moving in rhythm with her footfalls. The Classics Department, Greek and Latin, was contained in Moore Hall: the classrooms on the first floor and the offices on the second. Down the hall from Dr. Adams’ office, was a narrow room with one bare metal desk, three swivel chairs, and a second desk swathed by precariously stacked binders, workbooks, frayed hardbacks, and piles of rubber bands. A long thin window in the center of the room viewed the grass courtyard where considerably more students now lounged, books cast open beside them. I set my own stack of books on the bare desk. Outside the door, the office was tagged Dr. Jane Elliot and Dr. Samara Delvo.
Dr. Adams led me down two flights of stairs to the classrooms I had hurried past that morning. Mine was the last room on the left just at the corner of the building. The two exterior walls were constructed entirely of windows so that the room seemed like a high-ceilinged greenhouse. One wall had a dry eraser board and there were four long tables gathered around an overhead projector perched upon a podium in the center of the room.
“Your teaching method is your own as long as your students perform well on their exams. Of course, my office is open to you for anything you might require. I expect that you will perform very well here, Dr. Elliot. I try to give my teachers a lot of latitude, in the hope that reducing their stress levels will in turn reduce the stress on their students.”
After Dr. Adams left me, I stood beside the podium and stared about me. The ceiling was at least seventeen feet high and coupled with the two walls o
f windows the room took on the haloed quality of a cathedral. In two months’ time I would be conducting a choir in the basic chant of language, urging them to see the significance of each intonation, the clues for translation disguised in each part of speech. And somehow all I could think of was my mother’s story about language.
The gods made cats in the shape of letters and told them to work together to form words. But the cats stretched their shapes out of proportion when they woke from their daylong naps, and bickered so mercilessly when they were together that the words were distorted and illegible. Finally, the gods made each cat a complete alphabet so that words must be pieced together over a lifetime. With all this pressure, the cats slept even more often, and spelled very short words.
V.
One scorching morning in July, Emily suggested we try a new beach and leave our boards at home.
“Ever been to Cockroach Cove?”
I shook my head.
“It’s the beach they used in From Here to Eternity—Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around like juveniles. Good place for sea turtles.”
We packed her Miata with poké, juice, and towels, slathering each other with sunscreen for the two-lane drive out to Koko Head. In the parking lot a group of young men flew Chinese kites high above the cliff face, the wind rattling through their colors nervously.
On the far side of the lot, a thin trail plunged down through the cliffs to the cove below. As we snaked down I watched the waves break in brilliant plumes of white—the ocean a stark, accusing blue—and thought of the Cliffs of Moher on Ireland’s west coast. The Belfast dentist—her crow-colored hair whipped to a spectacular frenzy by the breeze—and I had hiked up late in the afternoon with a couple of backpackers from Australia and eaten tomato and cheese sandwiches while the sea raged 200 meters below. “There be dragons,” she had said, capturing the mythical quality of the view and the hike and the future.
Above Emily and me, the sun crouched. We spread our towels on the dark sand and ate some raw ahi, grateful to stretch our long legs. Behind us, the mouth of a cave gaped and giant scalable boulders reared up as if to challenge the looming cliffs. Just above and to the right of the surf, a rock shelf stretched along the cove floor like a sidewalk.
“Let’s sit up there, yeah?” I pointed at the shelf.
Sitting at the edge, we held our feet above the water as the waves cradled into the cove, occasionally spattering us in a salt-spray after an especially furious break.
“Should have brought some beer,” Emily said.
I looked at my watch; it was not yet 10:00 a.m. She saw me and waved her hand absently at the horizon.
“OK, OK.”
“This beach is amazing,” I said. “Have you actually seen turtles here?”
“Yeah. There are always divers down here too. I think they hold training sessions in the cove. Masked people will suddenly pop up, making this gasping noise—extremely disconcerting. This used to be my favorite beach when I was in school. I’d come down here a couple of times a week. In fact, I came down here the day after the whiskey party. It’s kind of my what-the-fuck-were-you-thinking beach.”
“How’s that?”
“Haven’t I told you about the whiskey party?”
“No.”
“The week we graduated from U.H. we had mad parties. We were practically drunk the entire time. So the night of graduation, I have a whiskey party at my place. Only whiskey—no chaser, no dilution—and Jesus, I have never seen so many wretched, groping, vomiting, bleary-faced drunks in my life. It was sick. Of course, I was as drunk as the rest of them. I slept with this guy who was dating one of my friends at the time, Laura Dragan; she was also at the party and ended up sleeping with Erica. We found them the next morning, naked, in the king-sized bed in my mother’s room. Erica, who was bi, just looked kind of embarrassed, but Laura freaked out. She kept screaming: ‘I’m not bi, I’m drunk.’”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, it was priceless. We repeated that line for years. Last I heard, Laura was teaching in a public school in New York City. She was never stable.”
Emily and I sat side by side, the ocean at our feet so blue it might have been white. Beneath us, the rock shelf felt smooth and warm. I watched chicken skin creep up her arm.
“How is that a what-the-fuck-were-you-thinking story?”
“I woke next to Laura’s boyfriend just hating myself. The night of the whiskey party, I’d been hanging with Erica and there was this vibe between us that I’d never felt before. We were smoking pot on the balcony and she leaned her face really close to mine and whispered something into my ear. I have no idea what she said, but I panicked and bolted. That’s the only time I’ve ever done that.”
I speculated which that she meant: flirted with a girl, slept with a friend’s boyfriend, panicked and bolted, hated herself. Emily wore a white bandana low on her forehead and her hair furled out behind her like one of those Chinese kites. The sea yawned to the edge of the world. I wanted to touch the scar beside her eye. I wanted to name things without language. I wanted to tell her about my mother.
By the time I was a senior in high school, being the suicide kid had lost all of its novelty. Some of my classmates had forgotten and would slip occasionally, asking if my folks were going to the Class Day Parents’ Potluck, or if my mom could volunteer to chaperone the next field trip. Slips like these were a relief to me; I wanted so much to have parents like everybody else. But each one hurt as well, reinforcing my otherness.
I took Graphic Arts all four years of high school as my cruise class: we had a couple of official projects every term; otherwise our time was our own. Higashi, our instructor, drank whiskey from a thermos and spent his free time harassing us about crushes and rumors of crushes. He decided that I needed a pal and would call me into his office to chat about all kinds of bullshit, from surfing in Australia (which I revered) to fishing for swordfish (which I abhorred).
Higashi always wanted me to confide in him about my feelings. Was I overwhelmed with high school, because it was OK to be overwhelmed with high school. Did I miss my mom, because it was OK to miss my mom. If I ever needed to talk to anyone about um, women’s issues, he’d had four daughters and three wives and was an expert on, um, women’s issues. Higashi was a huge Japanese man with pockmarked cheeks and giant calluses on his thumbs.
“From my lawnmower,” he’d say. “All year in this place: the relentless green.”
He was the teacher you could swear around, the guy who let you bitch to him about whatever angst you’d stored up since the last time you’d bitched to him. I couldn’t ever tell him anything important, but I loved to sit in his tiny office with the Macintosh on the metal desk like an altar and listen to his raspy grunt of a voice. Higashi was the only person who talked about my mother’s death casually—unreservedly—as if there were no reason, neither shame, nor sadness, not to discuss it.
After the police came to report my mother’s suicide, my father kind of stopped speaking. He became more gesture than person: a knife brushed against a plate at the table, boots scuffing the floor in the morning, shoe indentations in the long orchard grass, a palm rested lightly on my head. We moved around each other comfortably like dogs, often walking through the orchard at night until I was so exhausted that I could barely climb the stairs to bed.
Sometimes I felt that we were two old men, waiting in the house where our lover had left us. The house and the orchard a relief of ourselves: hollowed and austere. At night I would dream of sitting on his shoulders, the scary thrill of being taller than everyone else, my legs hugged against his chest like a newborn. I dreamt once that I was in the car with my mother, that I was driving, and my father was the one who found us. He sat on the hood of the car and looked at us through the windshield.
“Why?” he asked finally.
I waited for my mother to answer him, but when I looked over she was already dead, her glass eyes staring. My father waited.
“She was so tire
d,” I said. “She was just so tired.”
My first semester in Dublin, I was wild with grief. Somehow the city reminded me of my mother—my isolation made her keen again—and I couldn’t shake the sense that somewhere in the streets or shops I would meet her and have to introduce myself because I’d changed through the years though she hadn’t. Eventually, I gathered some mates and settled into the restlessness of school, but I never lost the sensation that she might pop around any corner: her dark face a blot among the impossibly white Irish.
My father and I wrote letters; I held more words from him than he’d spoken for years. I couldn’t tell him about hunting my mother. Instead I’d describe the battering music, my classes, the sea’s drum, all the ruins scattered about the countryside, and the grandparent-like couple who’d claimed me as their own.
During my undergrad, as in high school, there was a succession of boys: boys who wrote poetry and boys who read poetry, painters, a sculptor, several actors, and two teachers. I never told any of them about my mother. Over Christmas, my last year of graduate school, I took a train to Belfast and stayed at my friend’s flat while he went to Greece. The city was not derelict or frightening in the way I’d been led to expect, the brick buildings were beautiful and Victorian, all the neighborhoods tucked behind green hedgerows. And I met this dentist in a pub and wandered away with her. What if I had panicked and bolted then instead of later? What if my mother had been braver? What was Emily trying to tell me?
She stood, tall and exquisite in the glaring morning, peeled the bandana from her head, and sprang from the shelf into the sea, her toes pointed back at me before they too vanished. In the fall, I would discipline my energies to focus exclusively on teaching Latin to undergraduates.
“Come in,” she called. “The water’s fine.”
Oh the relentless green, I thought. All year in this place.
VI.
Above me in the tangled branches of the banyan trees, bats flung themselves in the pitch of dark as I lay on my futon beside the opened French doors, waiting on sleep the way a soldier might wait for reinforcements. Maybe I was already having visions of her moving through the hollowed house, barefoot and a little drunk: her fingers sweeping along the walls, a streetlight grazing her brown hair like a bullet. Maybe I already felt desire tugging at me in the early summer while I tried to remember Ireland, to hold it against me in the smother of close dark.