The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  About his students, Bob had more of a blind spot. He believed he was helping them grow up, teaching them . . . he was gentle. “Foreplay” sounds wrong—always has—but there were preliminaries, opening acts. That sounds wrong, too. I just know the only tears I ever saw were jealous ones or from normal injuries—anger, loss.

  Yet then there’s a story like Tamsin’s. I don’t remember holding her hand, but I believe her. There must be so much I don’t dare remember, even now. You think of your young self as being just like your grown one—I do. But there must have been a time in my life where I was two people, or four, or eight: enough versions of me to thin out the horror, enough different pairs of eyes and ears that it was possible to bear witness from a distance, even right there in the same bed.

  19

  Nora

  Ibacktrack to Hicks Street to say hello to Sami at the pet store and thank him for sending Everett to me. He’s not at the front counter—it’s too cold to sit down there by the door—but he’s up in the loft where his television is, watching the news. He recognizes me and greets me: “Nora! How are you?” He starts down the stairs.

  “You don’t have to come down,” I say.

  “For you? Anything is possible.” He’s such a flirt but would obviously never overstep by even an inch. At least, I believe this about him—he fasts during Ramadan. He comes downstairs anyway.

  “I just wanted to thank you for spreading the word to Everett.”

  “Everett?”

  “The cat rescuer? Little guy with freckles?”

  “Sure, that guy. Of course. He found Tin Man?” His already generous forehead softens further, anticipating the joy and relief of my reunion with my lost cat. I hate to disappoint him.

  “No, false alarm. But it gave me hope. Maybe someone has him. I’d decided he was dead. It’s been so cold . . .”

  “No, no. Don’t give up hope. Tin Man will return to you! Or I’ll find you a nice kitten!”

  I laugh. “You just hate to lose a customer,” I joke.

  “Every customer counts,” says Sami.

  “Well, thanks again,” I say, as the door opens and a woman with an immense blond dog enters to replace me. The dog sits obediently in front of the counter and Sami provides it with a treat without taking his eyes off its owner, with whom he is already fully engaged.

  Outside the pet store, I turn right and walk into the west wind. This last block is the hardest part of my day sometimes—after the commercial part of Montague Street ends, and there is no reason for me to keep walking except to get home, even though it is not yet six o’clock. My apartment is essentially empty as well as haunted. The building is just past the entrance to the Promenade—it’s like a vast ship of red brick and white cornices, moored at the edge of New York Harbor: the “best address” in Brooklyn Heights according to some, although as a child I always thought it would be better to live in a brownstone. I assumed such a home automatically included a more conventional family than the isosceles triangles I lived in: Adeline, me, and my grandfather; or later, briefly, my stepfather; or later still, our Siamese cat, Anna, named for Freud’s daughter. God help us all. My mother’s practice was on the ground floor. I have known José, the head doorman, and Victor, the super, for longer than I’ve known anyone else in the city, or the world. They are unfailingly nice to me still, which is another thing I hate about coming home now that I live here again. José is on duty most evenings, and he greets me so warmly, and I am grateful but I have no small talk in me. I never have.

  I smile and say hello as brightly as I know how, and I ask him how he is and look him in the eye when he gives a pro forma answer, but the follow-up questions about family and vacations and everything else are just beyond me.

  “Still no cat?” he offers.

  I shake my head.

  “I look for him every night, by the dryers, after my shift. I keep an eye out.” He nods as he says this. He must be almost seventy by now, but his hair is black and shiny and beautifully combed. Sometimes I wonder if he is gay—if working here, in this neighborhood, gave him a bigger life than was available for a Cuban-American guy in Queens in 1970, or whenever he first put on that green-and-gold-piped uniform. It could be the last job in America that still requires a costume.

  “Thanks, José,” I say. I am waiting for the day when I add, “Don’t bother,” or “It’s okay,” but that day hasn’t arrived yet.

  The first thing I see when the elevator door opens into my apartment is the telephone nook, a wood-paneled alcove with a built-in secretarial table, kind of like an old-fashioned phone booth but bigger. If I were going to take a photograph that represented the peculiar blend of luxury and exhaustion that characterizes this apartment, it would be of this strange piece of furniture, struck by late-afternoon light. The phone is a block of olive-green plastic with a rotary dial. In the center of the dial is a disk that tells us the number, which begins with the word “ULster.” Most of the people who had that number memorized are probably dead. On the floor underneath the phone, garlanded in its grimy spiral cord, is an answering machine—perhaps the last of its kind. The outgoing message has my mother’s voice on it so I can’t throw it out.

  I thought she’d never leave, is the truth of it, because when I was a kid, she never could. We’d get to the door and go nowhere. Then she would unpack her purse: lipstick, tissues, Belairs, matches, paperback, checkbook, address book, perfume atomizer—good God, what else? It was like a magic trick, the bottomless handbag. “Keys, where are my goddamned keys?” She kept them on a sandwich-bag twist tie. I have barely cried since her death, hardly even spoken her name. Sometimes I think that’s because I had Tin Man, who used to greet me at the door, who stopped me from falling into fugue states like this one.

  With my coat still on, I wander down the hallway to the library and turn on the stupid floor lamp I had to get to replace the Tiffany sconces that I sold, along with my grandfather’s collection of first editions, and the oriental rugs, and the Stickley chairs and the Spode and the side tables and everything else that paid for my mother’s last folly: dying with no will. My grandfather, Virgil Falsington, was a poet made famous by the success of just one poem, an artifact of its time called “The Pursuit of Virtue at Brooklyn Heights.” No one’s ever heard of it now, except the occasional scholar, even though it’s in every American poetry anthology published before about 1950. This apartment, the “poet’s mansion in the sky,” was crucial to the prestige of the building when they first opened it for rental in 1922—I’ve seen the old ads on the internet.

  Sometimes I wonder if, born fifty years later, Granddad would have been a rock star. He had the flamboyant affect and enormous self-regard—and his big hit turned out to be an eyelash in the fossil record of American self-definition, comparable to, say, “Build Me Up Buttercup,” or, perhaps more fairly, a lesser Bob Dylan ballad—it was topical but ultimately insipid. In it, he represented the principle of virtue as a girl-child in a nightgown, awakened from a bad dream. At least, I think that’s what she represents, otherwise I have no idea what the title refers to. When he wrote it, they were still working on the first draft of the great American archetypes: cowboy, vamp, gangster, robber baron, gentleman explorer . . . “The Pursuit of Virtue” doesn’t seem to be about America, but it has to be, on some level; how else could it have been both so successful and so ephemeral? It rhymed like a motherfucking sewing machine and still I couldn’t memorize it. Because it was my legacy, I guess.

  The library was always my favorite room—with its Greek key cornices and rolling stepladder—a temple of learning, et cetera, but now it just looks like a ruin. What’s left are the books no one wants: the collected works of Granddad; well-toasted Harper Colophons from my mother’s college days— Erich Fromm, Rollo May—and, behind the door, my own special hutch of childhood favorites: Oz, Kipling, Harriet the Spy, Cress Delahanty, the Lang fairy tale collections bound in colored cloth. On the shelf above these, the top shelf, are my journals, notebooks, a
nd other paper keepsakes, including the Tis Bottle, which I unshelve and carry back to the windowsill and to the lamplight. I haven’t opened it in twenty years, maybe more.

  The pasteboard covers of the binder are velvety and almost colorless, though inside I can see that they were formerly blue. The prongs of the ACCO fastener have rusted where the tiny sliders have been holding them, and the lavender mimeo ink is so faint it’s almost invisible. The title page, like everything else in the volume, is hand-lettered by Naomi Rasmussen: the sight of her handwriting, with its typewriter-style lowercase a’s and g’s, twangs some inner guitar for me. I must have spent hours trying to imitate that clear, even hand.

  Tucked among the first few pages I find a folded piece of purple stationery: a letter I wrote to Beth on July 10, 1973, and apparently never sent.

  Dear Beth,

  I am still mad at you and I don’t think it has anything to do with my “competitive streak” or that I need to be right all the time. What if I am legitimately worried about you? I can’t believe you forgot everything we said. I’m not saying he’s going to take you into white slavery but the point is he actually could. Some of those states out west, you can like marry a girl at 12. And also prostitution is legal. Remember how he said there was no such thing as rape because the girl has to want it for it to work? He lied. You should read the article in Ramparts. So I didn’t “chicken out,”I made a smart decision. I bet someday you’ll agree with me, too.

  My summer is going OK. Camp is not as fun this year because everyone is “going steady” or spending a ridiculous amount of time walking around with their hands in each other’s pockets, etc., which makes me a little sick because it reminds me so much of you-know-who. Except the boys my age are such unmitigated morons I can’t believe my friends can even tolerate them for five minutes. I always wish I went to school with boys until I get to camp and remember what they’re like. I have a crush on a counselor named Adam. He gave me this amazing book called The Dharma Bums and it’s changing my whole way of thinking. There are so many things Rasmussen never even talks about. All he knows is politics and folk music and oppressed black people. I wish I could write like this Kerouac guy does. It’s all in a rush but it makes sense in a different way. Tumbles of mad-poet meaning like crazy rivers full of genius Buddhas swimming with salmon upstream. (I am mixing it up with the trying to write like Holden Caulfield, I think.)

  The letter ends there. I guess I was embarrassed by my attempt to write like Kerouac, which Beth would never have gotten, anyway. I tried to write like Holden Caulfield in my journal once, and Rasmussen scribbled in the margin with his red pen, “Nice try, Phoebe!” I was half-humiliated by my own need for approval but also half-exalted—because the reference to Holden’s kid sister indicated that he’d seen what I was trying to do. But no one was going to “get” my Kerouac riff, except maybe that cute counselor, who kissed me on the lips at the end of that summer. No tongue, but it was still my first real kiss, and time cooperatively slowed down enough that I was able to record and later replay the moment for myself many times—the softness of his lips as well as my realization that I must have actually meant something to him, that he wanted to kiss me. We had only talked a few times before dinner and once after he had put his campers (the littlest boys) to bed. Mostly, I’d admired him from a distance, memorizing his helpless-looking eyes when he took off his thick eyeglasses, his funny way of ushering his kids around with his hands fully spread like starfish, flapping at the wrists. In his tattered madras shirt, open on a hot day, he had the chest of a boy.

  I turn the brittle pages of the Tis Bottle carefully until I see Beth’s name under the heading “My Son, the Doctor.”

  Harvey, Harvey, my son, my son

  Listen while I kvell

  My boy, you will outshine the sun

  Your pop can go to hell.

  You are my bar mitzvah boy

  Today, you are a man.

  You’ll be as good as anyone

  A doctor, like we planned.

  No schmatta trade for you, my peach

  Nothing but the best.

  We’ll move down to Miami Beach

  When your father’s laid to rest.

  I don’t remember Beth being witty. I don’t remember her trading in Yiddishisms, either. She must have been listening to Alan Sherman records. I was always certain that I was smarter than she was—although the fact that I bothered to think that means I felt uncertain. In any case, her poem surprises me. Her mother was way too much of a sophisticate to be the mother in the poem—she always reminded me of Anne Bancroft/Mrs. Robinson, in fact. Her older brother Jerry died at twenty of an overdose, but that was later. Or was it?

  I flip around, looking for my own contributions, but there aren’t many—maybe I was too engrossed in photography to bother with writing that year. It’s too bad I didn’t keep any of the pictures I took—maybe I would be able to look at them now without thinking of him. I don’t remember destroying them, but I guess I did.

  20

  Nora

  Looking at the evening sky through the library window, I try to remember sitting here with my mother. I used to do my homework at the desk here while she sat across from me reading—not every night, but sometimes. We used to talk a lot, back then. I told her everything—that I was taking LSD when I was sixteen, that I was smoking pot when I was fifteen—so I must have also told her that my teacher was having sex with my best friend, and that he had stuck his hand up my shirt in the darkroom.

  I can vaguely, in the corner of my mind, recall a conversation she and I had about the man himself—a typical gambit of my mother’s would have been to ask some “we’re just adults comparing notes” question like, “Well, what do you think about this Rasmussen character, Nora?” Or, “Your teacher is quite the Lothario, isn’t he?” But how would I have answered?

  I picture us late on a Saturday morning, sitting at the kitchen table—the only table we ever used. I am drunk with sleep—so recently returned from my elaborate preteen dreamworld that I’m still angry at reality for being real. My eyes are swollen and the gray-white T-shirt I sleep in every night must smell like dirty bed linen, but my mother is oblivious to the dust, dirt, scum, and other slatternly manifestations of our apartment. It’s too big for one single working mother to clean. So there we are, me in my child’s dishabille and she in her Moroccan djellaba—obtained while I was away at camp.

  “So Mom,” perhaps I said, “I don’t know what to do about Beth. She’s my best friend, my only real friend, but she’s spending all her time with Rasmussen, and it gives me the creeps.”

  “What gives you the creeps?” my mother the therapist would have asked me.

  “The way she acts around him, the way she looks at him. It’s like she’s a different person when he’s around.”

  “Oh, she has a crush.”

  “You make it sound so juvenile. She just likes him and wants to hang around with him. It’s just that most of the time that means at his house, listening to his stupid records or looking at his stupid books or playing with his kids, and none of those things are things that Beth and I used to do together.”

  “Well, maybe you need to learn to branch out a little, my dear.”

  She actually called me that, “my dear.” It never sounded like a term of affection, though; it sounded more like “old chap.”

  “Are you saying I should become one of his pet girls, too?”

  But no, I wouldn’t have said that, either. I didn’t call them “pet girls.” “Teacher’s pet” meant something different or, at any rate, impossible to align with that teacher and that classroom in that school. There was no one polishing apples for Rasmussen or trying to get a better grade. We didn’t get grades—all our work had equal merit. We weren’t even allowed to compete in “gym” (during which we did folk dancing, yoga, and relay races). Maybe being a Rasmussen groupie was a way for some of us to win at something—but then why didn’t it appeal to me? I am as competitive as they c
ome, as it turns out, a constant comparer of assets and a greedy collector of defeats. I was almost fifty before I was able to identify this trait, unfortunately. Back then my way of understanding it was that I was “just insecure,” or “had low self-esteem”— suitable character flaws for a female—not even really problems to be solved. My mother, a child of lapsed Puritans, had embraced psychological explanations. For her, it had been liberating to admit to having complex emotions and a difficult mind. For me, the habit of self-analysis is a trap.

  So, what could I have said to Adeline about Beth and Rasmussen? “She’s fucking him” comes to mind. I didn’t often say that word around my mother but if I did she would not have scolded me. I would have said, “She’s fucking him,” to make her see the gravity of my abandonment. I would have stared at the battered edge of the breakfast table and picked at the peeling white enamel paint. When I looked up at my mother’s face, she would have looked serious, her mouth an unspoken “no.”

  “That’s quite impossible.”

  “Are you saying I’m a liar?”

  “No, I’m saying that, possibly, Beth has misled you or is herself confused.”

  “But she’s not the only one, Mom.”

  Her head is shaking from side to side, decisively. “Girls can be extremely cruel and silly at your age.”

  “But what about him?”

  “He told you this?” Finally, I see shock in her eyes but just for a second. I am too young to pounce on this crack in her denial, too invested in trying to get someone to see things through my eyes, to acknowledge my truth. I didn’t need her to see him as a rapist, then; I needed her to see him as an agent in Beth’s betrayal.

  “You’ve met him, he’s obviously a pervert”—she hates it when I abuse technical terms—“a sex fiend, whatever you want to call it.”