Love May Fail

by Matthew Quick

  “Girls rock your boys,” Danielle sings as she jumps around the room like we did when we were just a little older than Tommy, back when “Cum On Feel the Noize” was being blasted on MTV and every radio station in the country, back in hair metal’s commercial heyday.

  And before I know it, I’m jumping around the room too, getting wild, wild, wild, because how can you not jump and sing along with “Cum On Feel the Noize”? That song is genius, a litmus test for your love of life. If you aren’t banging your head to the beat of that tune, you suck.

  Suddenly we are all doing the guitar solo—Tommy on the futon, Danielle with one foot on a chair, me kneeling on the floor, because I rock hard—and I think about the pre-Ken poor-metalhead-from–South Jersey days, that hopeful young Portia who hadn’t yet been touched and tarnished by a misogynistic porn king. I existed free and clean of Ken Humes before, back when hair metal ruled, and so maybe I can again.

  They call this nostalgia, Portia, I tell myself, banging my head to the beat, and it feels great. Like being a kid again.

  Tommy probably gets his ass kicked every day at school for liking this old music, instead of Flo Rida or Ke$ha or Justin Bieber or whoever, but I see why Danielle shares it with him.

  She gets her ass kicked every day at the diner too, no doubt—just because she’s a woman and poor.

  My tongue is out as I switch from air guitar to air drums, which is perfectly acceptable when you are rocking out with friends and their children to metal.

  I think about Gloria Steinem and how metal objectifies women constantly as we all chant, “Girls rock your boys!”

  But I also catch my reflection in the mirror—me in the old white jean jacket with my mane of hair rising and falling to my head banging, nose scrunched, eyes squinted in some sort of “cool face”—and I tell myself just to rock.

  Even though he is wearing a mask, I can tell Tommy is smiling, and Danielle is too as she sings into her invisible microphone.

  This is what these people have.

  All they have.

  And right now, it’s what I have too.

  The song ends, and we give ourselves a round of applause.

  “Did you feel it?” Tommy says to me as he pulls off his Quiet Riot mask. “The noize?”

  I nod and even tousle the kid’s hair.

  What the hell was that? I’m never affectionate with children.

  “Time for bed. You can show Ms. Kane your bedroom, and then it’s lights out, mister!”

  “Uncle Chuck made this when he was little.” Tommy hands me the mask.

  I look at the inside and read these words:

  Chuck Bass

  Quiet Riot Rocks!

  1983

  “I turned twelve in 1983,” I say absentmindedly.

  “So did I, remember?” Danielle answers.

  “The mask keeps the bad dreams away.” Tommy snatches it out of my hands. “Uncle Chuck promised. And it’s true!”

  Danielle smiles at me, and we follow Tommy into his bedroom. He jumps up on his bed and hangs the mask on a nail over the headboard, just like in the old music video where the kid wakes up, his room is shaking, and the band finally breaks through the walls.

  I think about Chuck being a boy himself, watching that video on MTV just like Danielle and I did, back in the day.

  “Uncle Chuck made the mask. He sleeps over there.” Tommy points to the single bed on the other side of the room. Over the headboard hangs a collection of everyday objects painted in bright colors on little four-by-four-inch canvases: a cell phone, a TV remote, a coffee filter. Weird.

  “This is actually Chuck’s place,” Danielle says. “We’re temporary guests.”

  “I like living with Uncle Chuck!” Tommy says as he slides into his bed.

  “You better scrub those pearly whites!” Danielle says and begins to tickle Tommy. “I don’t kiss boys with rotten teeth!”

  When Tommy runs into the bathroom, I return to the futon and wait for Danielle.

  I wonder why Tommy sleeps in Chuck’s room and not Danielle’s.

  A few minutes later Tommy comes out in PJs to give me a kiss on the cheek, says, “Keep rocking, Ms. Kane,” gives me the devil horns, which I return twofold, and runs back into his bedroom. I hear Danielle reading a book to him—something about a shark who wants to be a librarian and makes books out of shells and seaweed so that she can teach fish to read, because literate fish “taste better,” which seems like a very creepy children’s book. Danielle seems to be rushing the story a little, like she’d rather be out here with me.

  As I wait, I start to think about Mr. Vernon again, and I wonder if he’s dead. Could the news be that dramatic? I mean, it’s been more than twenty years.

  Danielle returns. “Jack on the rocks?”

  “Hell, yes.” I join her in the kitchen, which is just the left side of the living room really.

  She puts ice into two small plastic cups and pours the Jack liberally.

  My cup is from a fast food restaurant and advertises an Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr. in a robot suit. I remember when Robert Downey Jr. was just doing regular roles about regular men.

  I also think about the Baccarat crystal glasses Ken and I drank from nightly in Tampa and wonder how many hours working at the diner it would take Danielle to earn enough money for just one of those. An entire week’s worth of pay and tips, maybe more.

  “To good ol’ Haddon Township High School,” Danielle says.

  “To rock and roll,” I say.

  We touch plastic and sip.

  The burn is the same, but whiskey definitely tastes better out of fine crystal, no matter what your roots happen to be.

  That’s the problem with money—it changes your tastes. You can never go back to liking some things, like drinking alcohol from plastic cups, as much.

  We return to the futon, and Danielle puts on Mötley Crüe’s first album Too Fast for Love with the volume much lower than when we listened to Quiet Riot.

  “You have this on vinyl?” I say.

  “Original pressing,” Danielle says proudly as Vince Neil sings “Live Wire.” “It’s Chuck’s. He has quite a collection. Tells Tommy it’s his when Chuck dies.”

  “Cool uncle.”

  “Did you fuck Mr. Vernon back in high school?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That was the rumor. It was decades ago, Portia. No one would care anymore anyway. They’re not going to send him to jail now.”

  “There were really rumors about that?”

  “Sure. You were always spending time with him alone after class and before school. Some girls are into older men. Daddy issues. I heard you used to go to his apartment too. So of fucking course there were rumors. It was high school!”

  “Unbelievable.” I shake my head. “Mr. Vernon was the closest thing I had to a father figure in high school, so thanks for making my one good teen memory weird. Jesus Christ, Daddy issues? Yuck!”

  “So you didn’t fuck him?”

  “No. I did not fuck Mr. Vernon. You didn’t know him if you could even think that.”

  “Was he gay?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “People used to say he was gay.”

  “Kids said everything and everyone was gay back then. It was the default adjective of our homophobic MTV generation.”

  “So what did you talk about all alone with Mr. Vernon?”

  “Literature, writing, what I wanted to do with my life, becoming a novelist, if you can believe that,” I say, leaving out the thing we talked about most—my mother—and the Christmas Eve I spent with Mr. Vernon senior year because Mom thought the government had bugged our house, so she was refusing to let me speak, and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone else but him. “What’s happened to him? I’d really like to know.”

&n
bsp; Danielle studies me for a long moment, and it strikes me that she seems to be enjoying withholding the story. But then I tell myself that she doesn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, that’s all—she doesn’t want to upset me. And yet I’m starting to wonder if the years haven’t been downright cruel to Danielle Bass, and whether the bright, cheery side she’s shown me so far isn’t a bit of an act. The look in her eyes now seems almost sadistic, as dramatic as that sounds.

  Finally she says, “One of Mr. Vernon’s students beat him up during class with a baseball bat a few years ago. Fractured his legs and arms before the other kids broke it up. I remember a kid being interviewed on TV, saying that the attack seemed to come out of nowhere. In the middle of class one of the baseball players pulled a bat from an equipment bag—which he apparently had with him, who knows why—and just started swinging away. I remember the kid said he could hear the bones breaking and Mr. Vernon screaming in this very high-pitched squeal. ‘Like a pig.’ Some other students saved Mr. Vernon by tackling the baseball player, which I thought was heroic. The student they interviewed on TV hadn’t helped take the baseball player down, and I remember thinking, Why the hell are they interviewing him? Get the heroes on camera! I heard Vernon sued the school for a lot of money and then retired. I got the sense—mostly from people gossiping in the diner—that there was some bad blood and some shit may have gotten covered up. A few people said Mr. Vernon was paid to retire quietly, whatever that means. And so he did.”

  Paid to retire quietly?

  I’m shaking my head in disbelief. “Why?”

  “Wouldn’t you retire if a kid beat you almost to death with a baseball bat? I hear he has a permanent limp.”

  “Why would anyone attack such an amazing teacher as Mr. Vernon?”

  “Maybe he did something fucked up to the baseball player? I mean you hear about teachers doing pervy things all the time, and then all of the community members being shocked as hell afterward. Some people seemed to think Mr. Vernon was having a gay affair with the boy who attacked him, or at least that’s what a few were implying.”

  “No way. Not Mr. Vernon. He’d never do that to one of his students. Never.”

  “Well, then, maybe the kid just started swinging away for no good reason at all.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Why would anyone blow up the World Trade Center? Why would anyone put a bomb in their shoe and try to take down a commercial airplane? Why do school shootings keep happening? People are sick, crazy, fucked up. It’s a scary world we live in these days. No one can deny that.”

  I understand what she’s saying, but she didn’t know Mr. Vernon like I knew Mr. Vernon. He really cared about his students. He was a good man, the only teacher I ever heard of who would meet a student at the diner on a Saturday afternoon just to talk about fiction—reading her first fumbling attempts at short stories, even—because her own mother’s insanity made her home uninhabitable, and no other adults seemed to notice or care.

  Nobody’s one hundred percent good, I suddenly hear Ken saying in my head. It was one of his favorite mantras. Everyone’s a little bit evil.

  And he proved it time and time again by seducing young girls into making degrading pornography with his company. He’d send out good-looking, smooth-talking young men with alcohol and free lingerie and legally binding contracts with a lot of small print, and they’d never once come home without footage.

  “Just put people in the right circumstances, and they’ll do just about anything,” my asshole husband would say as foul cigar smoke curled around his cocky, Tom Selleck–y head.

  Every time Ken said something depressing like that, I’d think about Mr. Vernon and feel satisfied that Ken was wrong.

  For all these years, Mr. Vernon has been my anti-Ken.

  It was enough just to think of him teaching at HTHS—putting good into the world, one lecture at a time. At least one man on the planet was all good.

  Why didn’t I ever write to Mr. Vernon after I left high school?

  Why didn’t I ever thank him for all he did for me back then?

  Do people actually do that—go back and thank their teachers years later, when they’re no longer handicapped by youth and ignorance, when they figure out just how much their teachers actually did for them?

  I mean, Mr. Vernon was probably the most influential person in my entire life. He believed in my potential. He gave me a handwritten card on my graduation night and wrote me a beautiful letter—the sort of thing you’d hope a father would write. I never even acknowledged it, never even said thank you, maybe because I didn’t know how or what to write back. Maybe because I was leaving high school behind and Mr. Vernon was high school to me. Or maybe because I was a selfish white-trash bitch, too self-absorbed or too ignorant to show my favorite high school teacher common decency, let alone gratitude. And then when I dropped out of college I was too ashamed to face him again.

  The young consume; the old are consumed.

  “Are you even listening to me, Portia? Hello?”

  I blink and say, “Where is he?”

  “Mr. Vernon? How the hell would I know that?” Danielle starts talking about other teachers from Haddon Township High School.

  “When did it happen?” I blurt out. “You know—the attack.”

  “Shit—I don’t know. Maybe five years ago? Maybe more?”

  “So he hasn’t been teaching for more than five years?”

  “I’m not sure, Portia. Are you okay? This really upsets you, doesn’t it? I didn’t realize that—”

  “Do you still have that card he gave all of us on the last day of school?”

  “That little driver’s-license-looking thing with our picture on it? That was twenty years ago!”

  “But didn’t you keep it? The Official Member of the Human Race card?”

  “You remember the name of it? Wow.”

  I wonder if I’m the only freak who actually kept the card. Then I start to wonder if it’s because I’m my mother’s daughter and will one day be a hoarder too, all alone in a shitty house, wearing pink sweat suits covered in stains and watching the Buy from Home Network among endless piles of carefully collected and stacked junk.

  “It seemed important, that card—special. No one had ever given me anything like that before.” Admittedly, my voice sounds too defensive, maybe even like Mom’s when I start talking about getting rid of her junk.

  “I might have it somewhere in a drawer or something, but—Jesus, Portia, you’re sweating. Are you sick?”

  “You know what, I’m actually not feeling great. I just left my husband last night. Caught him cheating and just took off.”

  Why am I bringing up Ken now?

  “Last night? Like yesterday?”

  “Yeah, I left him and Tampa all at once. It sort of just happened.”

  “What you told me in the diner about that teenage girl—that really happened last night?”

  “Yeah. It’s just sort of hitting me now. The finality of it. And someone really attacked Mr. Vernon in his classroom with a baseball bat? Really? You’re not fucking with me? That actually happened at our high school?”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s true. It was in all the papers. Like I said, on TV even. I’m really surprised you hadn’t already heard. I assumed it was national news.”

  I’ve never really read the papers or watched the news, mostly because it’s too depressing, as lame as that sounds.

  I can’t stop shaking my head no. “That’s just so . . . so . . . so fucking fucked.”

  “Yeah, it really is. But I’m worried about you now. You’re pale as a ghost.”

  “Sorry. I better go home. I’ll call a cab.”

  Danielle glances at her cell phone. “Chuck’s off in ten minutes. He can drive you.”

  “I don’t want to put him out,” I say, remembering Lisa the
waitress’s threat.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Before I know it, I’m in a shitty old pickup truck with thick white stripes across the sides and a blanket covering the presumably ripped-up bench seat, being driven home by Chuck.

  The engine is making a horrid whistling noise, like it’s smoked two packs of unfiltered Camels a day for fifty years and decided to jog for the first time in decades.

  “I’m sorry you’re sick,” Chuck says as we leave Oaklyn.

  “I’ll be okay. I dug your record collection. Very impressive,” I add, just because he seems slightly freaked out by me, and I don’t want to make this any weirder than it already is.

  “How do you like the old man’s Ford?” He pats the steering wheel.

  I glance at the emblem on the dash. “Isn’t this a Chevy?”

  “Yeah, it is. Can’t get anything past you. But I was just making a reference to eighties rock. And sort of hitting on you at the same time, but in a completely lame way. I suck at being cool. It’s true. I’m really terrible at women. Fuck, I’ve said some pretty weird shit already, haven’t I? Well, I’ll just shut up now and drive.”

  His actually admitting to hitting on me is a surprise, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. He’s obviously a great guy, based on his interactions with Tommy, and he’s in shape—I glance over, confirm that his jeans and shirt bulge in all the right places and none of the wrong, notice his luscious biceps. He has an amazing body. And he even has kind eyes. Really kind. Turquoise, almost—they seem to shine every time oncoming headlights illuminate his face. So unlike Ken’s oily shark eyes. Chuck’s actually pretty cute in a nervous-innocent kind of way. I think about why the hell he might ask if I like “the old man’s Ford” when we’re in a Chevy. Where have I heard that phrase before, “the old man’s Ford”? Then suddenly I understand the reference. “Poison. ‘Talk Dirty to Me’? Were you really referencing that song? ‘In the old man’s Ford!’ ” I sing.

  “Yeah, pretty stupid, right? I don’t actually expect you to talk dirty to me, but I wanted to impress you with my knowledge of hair metal lyrics from our shared youth, and I get nervous around exceptionally beautiful women. Really nervous, if you haven’t already noticed.”