Gryphon (17 page)

“You
used
to want to hear.”

“I shouldn’t’ve asked. That was a mistake.
Glückschmerz
. Besides, couples
don’t live in bed. You can’t insult a waiter or cash a check in bed. As a paradigm for life, it’s inadequate.”

Eric was showing an unsteady smile. “I want to throw myself at her feet,” he said. “We’re the king and queen of lovers. Love. God, I just lap it up. We can go and go. I don’t want life. I want love. And so does she.”

“Have we always talked this way?” his father asked. “It’s deplorable.”

“We started getting a little raw about two years ago. That was when you began asking me about my girlfriends. Some pretty raw questions, things you shouldn’t have been asking. I mean, we all know
why
, right?”

“Just looking out for my boy.” In the cold, he could feel his eyelid twitching.

“You could mind your own business, Pop. You could try that.” He said this with equanimity. Darlene was running back toward them. She ran awkwardly, with her upper torso leaning forward and her arms flailing. Three children were following her. As she panted, her breath was visible in the cold air.

“Sometimes I think I lead a strange life,” Eric’s father said. “Sometimes I think that none of this is real.”

“Yeah, Chekhov,” Eric said. “I read him, just like you told me to.” Darlene ran straight up to Eric and put her blue mittens, which had bullet-sized balls of snow stuck to them, up to both sides of his face. She exposed all her teeth when she smiled. She took Eric’s left hand. Then she reached down with her other hand and grasped Mr. Bradbury’s doeskin glove. Standing between them, she said, “I love winter. I love the cold.”

“Yes,” Mr. Bradbury said. “The bitterness invigorates.”

Not letting go of either of their hands, she walked between them back to the apartment building.

They sat around for the rest of the afternoon; Darlene tried to take a nap, and Eric and his father watched a basketball game, DePaul against Marquette. When the game was half over, Eric turned to his father and asked, “Where are your cigarettes, Pop?”

“My little friends? I evicted them.”

“How come?”

“I quit in December. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I was fixing to die. The outlines of my heart were all but visible
under the skin, it hurt so much. I felt like a corpse ready for the anatomy lesson. So: I stopped. Imagine this. I threw my gold Dunhill lighter, the one your mother gave me, down the building’s trash shaft, along with all the cigarettes in the house. I heard the lighter whine and clatter all the way to the heap at the bottom. What a scarifying loss was there. And how I miss the nicotine. But I wasn’t about to go. I may look like Samuel Gompers, but I’m only fifty-two. I figured there must be more to life than patient despair, right?”

Sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa on which his father was sitting, Eric held his hand up in the air behind him. “Congratulations,” he said. The two of them shook hands. “That took real guts.”

“Thank you.” He checked his fingers, still yellow from nicotine stains. “Yes, it did. I agree.” He thumped his chest. “Guts.”

At dinner Darlene was gulping her wine. “I don’t get to drink this much at home. And furthermore, I shouldn’t. Wine keeps you awake. Did you know that? What is this, French?” She peered at the label. “Romanian. Well. That was my next guess.”

“A nice table wine,” Mr. Bradbury said. “And when it turns, you can use it as salad dressing.”

She looked at Eric. Eric shook his head, shrugged, and continued eating.

“He never says much at dinner,” Darlene said, pointing at Eric. Mr. Bradbury nodded. After a pause, she said, “I don’t think I ever told you about the time I met Bill Cosby.”

At one o’clock Mr. Bradbury found himself lying awake, staring at the curtains. His back itched, and as he rubbed his neck he thought he felt a swelling. The damnable Romanian wine had given him a headache. Sitting up, he lowered his feet to the floor and put on his slippers. Then, shuffling across the bedroom, he opened the door that led out to the hallway.

He was halfway to the kitchen when he stopped outside Eric’s bedroom door. He heard whispering. He stood and listened. It wasn’t whispering so much as a drone from his son. “ ‘The only completely stationary object in the room,’ ” he was saying, “ ‘was an enormous couch
on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.’ ” As Eric went on—Daisy and Tom and Jordan Baker undramatically droned into existence—his voice, indifferent to the story, spread out its soporific waves of narration. His father turned around and padded back into his own bedroom.

Three hours later, still feeling sleepless, Mr. Bradbury rose again out of bed and again advanced down the hall. All the lights were blazing. Halfway to the kitchen, he looked toward the refrigerator and saw the two of them huddled together side by side at the dining-room table, Darlene in her bathrobe, Eric in a nightshirt. Randomly he noticed the width of his son’s shoulders, the fullness of Darlene’s breasts. Her head was in her hands. Unobserved, Mr. Bradbury watched his son butter the bread, apply the mayonnaise, add the sandwich meat and the lettuce, close the sandwich, cut it in half, remove the crusts, and then hand it on its plate to her. “Thank you,” she said. She began to eat. She chewed with her mouth open. She said, “You’re so sweet. I love you.” She kissed the air in his direction. Mr. Bradbury moved back, stood still, then turned toward his bedroom.

He closed the door and clicked on the bedside lamp. From far down on the other side of the hallway, he heard Darlene’s loud laugh. He started to slip in under the covers, thought better of it, and went to his window to part the curtains. Getting back into bed, he switched off the bulb; then, with his head on the pillow, he gazed at the city skyline, half consciously counting the few apartments in the high-rise across the street that still had all their lights burning.

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter—dazed and infrequent—sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see his face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. “I’ll bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.”

Carol sat at the desk in front of mine and was a bad person—when she thought no one was looking she would blow her nose on notebook paper, then crumple it up and throw it into the wastebasket—but at times of crisis she spoke the truth. I knew I’d lose the dime.

“No deal,” I said.

When Mr. Hibler stood us in formation at the door just prior to the final bell, he was almost incapable of speech. “I’m sorry, boys and girls,” he said. “I seem to be coming down with something.”

“I hope you feel better tomorrow, Mr. Hibler,” Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brownnoser, said, and I heard Carol Peterson’s evil giggle. Then Mr. Hibler opened the door and we walked out to the buses, a clique of us starting noisily to hawk and raugh as soon as we thought we were a few feet beyond Mr. Hibler’s earshot.

Since Five Oaks was a rural community, and in Michigan, the supply of substitute teachers was limited to the town’s unemployed community college graduates, a pool of about four mothers. These ladies fluttered, provided easeful class days, and nervously covered material we had mastered weeks earlier. Therefore it was a surprise when a woman we had never seen came into the class the next day, carrying a purple purse, a checkerboard lunchbox, and a few books. She put the books on one side of Mr. Hibler’s desk and the lunchbox on the other, next to the Voice of Music phonograph. Three of us in the back of the room were playing with Heever, the chameleon that lived in a terrarium and on one of the plastic drapes, when she walked in.

She clapped her hands at us. “Little boys,” she said, “why are you bent over together like that?” She didn’t wait for us to answer. “Are you tormenting an animal? Put it back. Please sit down at your desks. I want no cabals this time of the day.” We just stared at her. “Boys,” she repeated, “I asked you to sit down.”

I put the chameleon in his terrarium and felt my way to my desk, never taking my eyes off the woman. With white and green chalk, she had started to draw a tree on the left side of the blackboard. She didn’t look usual. Furthermore, her tree was outsized, disproportionate, for some reason.

“This room needs a tree,” she said, with one line drawing the suggestion of a leaf. “A large, leafy, shady, deciduous … oak.”

Her fine, light hair had been done up in what I would learn years later was called a chignon, and she wore gold-rimmed glasses whose lenses seemed to have the faintest blue tint. Harold Knardahl, who sat across from me, whispered, “Mars,” and I nodded slowly, savoring the imminent weirdness of the day. The substitute drew another branch with an extravagant arm gesture, then turned around and said, “Good morning. I don’t believe I said good morning to all of you yet.”

Facing us, she was no special age—an adult is an adult—but her face had two prominent lines, descending vertically from the sides of her mouth to her chin. I knew where I had seen those lines before:
Pinocchio
. They were marionette lines. “You may stare at me,” she said to us, as a few more kids from the last bus came into the room, their eyes fixed on her, “for a few more seconds, until the bell rings. Then I will permit no more staring. Looking I will permit. Staring, no. It is impolite to stare, and a sign of bad breeding. You cannot make a social effort while staring.”

Harold Knardahl did not glance at me, or nudge, but I heard him whisper “Mars” again, trying to get more mileage out of his single joke with the kids who had just come in.

When everyone was seated, the substitute teacher finished her tree, put down her chalk fastidiously on the phonograph, brushed her hands, and faced us. “Good morning,” she said. “I am Miss Ferenczi, your teacher for the day. I am fairly new to your community, and I don’t believe any of you know me. I will therefore start by telling you a story about myself.”

While we settled back, she launched into her tale. She said her grandfather had been a Hungarian prince; her mother had been born in some place called Flanders, had been a pianist, and had played concerts for people Miss Ferenczi referred to as “crowned heads.” She gave us a knowing look. “Grieg,” she said, “the Norwegian master, wrote a concerto for piano that was …”—she paused—“my mother’s triumph at her debut concert in London.” Her eyes searched the ceiling. Our eyes followed. Nothing up there but ceiling tile. “For reasons that I shall not go into, my family’s fortunes took us to Detroit, then north to dreadful Saginaw, and now here I am in Five Oaks, as your substitute teacher, for today, Thursday, October the eleventh. I believe it will be a good day: all the forecasts coincide. We shall start with your reading lesson. Take out your reading book. I believe it is called
Broad Horizons
, or something along those lines.”

Jeannie Vermeesch raised her hand. Miss Ferenczi nodded at her. “Mr. Hibler always starts the day with the Pledge of Allegiance,” Jeannie whined.

“Oh, does he? In that case,” Miss Ferenczi said, “you must know it
very
well by now, and we certainly need not spend our time on it. No, no allegiance pledging on the premises today, by my reckoning. Not with so much sunlight coming into the room. A pledge does not suit my mood.” She glanced at her watch. “Time
is
flying. Take out
Broad Horizons.
”

She disappointed us by giving us an ordinary lesson, complete with vocabulary and drills, comprehension questions, and recitation. She didn’t seem to care for the material, however. She sighed every few minutes and rubbed her glasses with a frilly handkerchief that she withdrew, magician-style, from her left sleeve.