Inukshuk (16 page)

As ever, another part of his mind stood aside, occupied with the
poem and working it out. In particular, one of the three girl debaters, Carol, he thought might possibly embody the most accurate physical model available to him for the seal-man's human lover. He needed to pay attention. She'd be about the same age, sixteen or seventeen, with that greasy northern skin and tied-back scarf of dirty black hair, those seemingly unyielding hips, and not quite innocent eyes. Was she pretty enough—sexy? He supposed not. Something odd about her mouth, its shape or proportions—down-turned, vaguely Muppet-like. Not that it mattered. What drew his attention was the stiffness or detachment about her generally—not yet in possession enough of her own sexual potential to control or participate in any of its effects, but not unaware, either. That's what the seal-man would respond to and desire in her. She yanked her hair over her shoulder. Twirled the strands together and picked at the split ends with bitten fingertips. Wrote something on a note card, slid it across the desk, and wiped a hand under her nose. Caught Franklin's eye and shifted abruptly in her seat, looking away; said a few words to the girl she was working with. Again, her eyes met Franklin's. Cheeks flared.

He'd been caught staring.

At the same time, he realized they were short one boy. Misha. Where was Misha and how had he not noticed until now? Silver-tongued Misha, the only one with a three-year history in the club and a real gift for argument and oral presentation. Diligent, sweet-natured, reliable, Misha had come to represent to Franklin both an ideal and an aggravating paradox: Here was the high-water mark, where every member of the club should be by now—tangible proof it could be done, and easily, so why? Why weren't they all as good? Why only Misha? Again, Carol looked his way, and this time, without his own prurient-by-proxy examination of her, all strangeness went out of it.

“Where's Misha?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Hey, kids,” he said, louder. “Anyone know where Misha is today?”

More shrugs and blank eyes.

“Anyone?”

One boy, perennially twirling and flipping a pen around his
thumb, said, “I saw him before.... I think he, like, signed himself out early sick? Pretty sure . . .”

“Never mind, then. Change-up time. Benjamin!”

“Mr. Franklin!”

“Everyone! Listen up. Eyes here. Are you ready, Benjamin?”

“Yes!”

“Approach the desk and grab a topic.”

Benjamin's sneaker laces were two different colors, and not for the first time Franklin noted the hairs growing from the butterfly-shaped mole on his right wrist, sleek and long as whiskers. Seal hairs. Part Métis or Inuit, he guessed—dark skin and hair, owlish gold-green eyes. The boy twisted his chin to one side, squinting as he fished a slip of paper from the “topics bag” on Franklin's desk.

“Shopkeepers,” Benjamin said, glancing around the room, nodding. He handed the paper to Franklin.

“Indeed. Shopkeepers it is. Two minutes.” Franklin looked at his watch. “Go!”

“In today's economy, I think there should be more shopkeepers because of the whole idea of your corner market, you know, where you used to go and pick up your daily paper and a quart of milk, you know, and talk to your neighbors, pick up some bread. I'm talking about community here, and that's the important thing—that's what I'm saying we need a lot more of these days. That's my number-one criterion. Because, you know, there just isn't a lot . . . with all those malls going up, there just aren't so many corner markets and.... OK, strike that. To define community. Community is where you get a lot of like-minded citizens together? Civil-minded anyway”—here he glanced nervously at Franklin, and Franklin understood these must be something like his own words or concepts coming up now, albeit scrambled and reconstituted—“according to . . . Rousseau? . . . which is to say people acting together for the greater good and always caring for his fellow man. One man can change the world. That value right there is the founding cornerstone of civilizations, that civil-mindedness, like the corner store, you know, as you can see in the Old Testament and Gandhi as well as Rousseau, so you can
see why shopkeepers today are so crucial and why we should have more of them. . . .”

He tried to keep his attention on the boy. Stared and nodded and stared harder, until his eyes stung, as if by following his every singsong phrase he might cause what Benjamin was saying to add up or make better sense. Might cause the argument to gel, the sentences to untangle. But the longer he spoke, the more difficult it was for Franklin to follow. He narrowed his eyes to fuzz the room. Heard the boy's voice droning on—his typical up-and-down local inflection not connected with any particular stress or emphasis. Leaned back on the heels of his hands and drew in a breath, which he held for as long as he could, still staring, still trying to hear, and like that, he was face-to-face with the central fundamental puzzle of his teaching life: ignore the stuttering and incoherence of his students, try to see through it to some implied meaning and authority, and then supply that meaning to them in an attempt to lead them through their own confusion to a better statement of truth, or say,
No, stop right there. Please. What did you just say? You're making no sense. Get command of your language before you try to say one more thing
. Well, of course, and of course. Some of both and never either one, exactly. Always a balance and an approximation.

Benjamin seemed to be winding up to a premature conclusion now, having drifted from Gandhi and Rousseau to a consideration of architecture, fountains, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin, and the function of the cornerstone. He was positively free-associating. Better to study the girl through this fuzzed field of vision and imagine the scene of her deflowerment by the seal-man. Firelight. Mounds of wet, dirty laundry. Her clothes in a heap on the floor. Those stiff hips and plump little hands. And then it wasn't her at all anymore. It was Moira or Jane, the curve of some unknown other woman's hip.

“ . . . Which by the commutative property, you'll have to agree, applies equally to the shopkeepers, because what's a corner store without shopkeepers? A shop without commerce, which is to say without community . . . commerce equals community? I rest my case.”

Franklin glanced at his watch. “Twenty more seconds! Keep going . . . redefine the topic. Take the opposition. Doesn't matter. Just keep it going!”

“When I was a kid, my grandfather and I used to go to this store where we'd get sour balls. . . .”

Hands waved at them. “Personal narrative!” someone blurted. “This isn't story time!” One mouthed words but didn't say them, another tapped his pen restively, and several rolled their eyes. Carol, the girl he'd been studying too long, for inauspicious reasons, added, “Plus, I heard a lot of
be
verbs there.”

“Yes, you're right, you're right. You're all right. That was very strong up to the point where you broke off, Benjamin. But I have to agree that after that you were waxing a little personal. Folksy. Go back and find the argument. Keep on topic.”

Benjamin's eyes went ceilingward and he began squeezing his pencil at either end, pushing out against it with both hands like he meant to snap the pencil in half. Franklin had seen him trapped in this kind of funk before. Thrown off track, he could become weirdly, tragically withdrawn in a way that made everyone anxious. Franklin was never sure how much to apply the brakes—when or where.

“Hey. Benjamin. What are you doing to that writing pole?”

Benjamin shoved the pencil in his pocket. Grinned. Went back to studying the ceiling, his blinking accelerated.

“OK. Now, think. Ten more seconds and we'll restart you. You were on a tear with Gandhi and Rousseau—remember?—just shredding it up.”

He nodded, brushed aside hair.

There were points Franklin was going to have to mention later, aside from the general praise and confidence bolstering, but delicately:
Eyes forward; don't look up or to the side; avoid fidgeting; stay focused; seem confident even through the fluff; avoid the question form, which includes
you know,
you know? And yes, avoid the
be
verbs. Ms. Alison, our
be
-verb buster, got you on that, and it's true. Stronger verbs a stronger argument make.
The point of this exercise was to be
free—extemporize and get validated. Get comfortable. Gain confidence. But also practice doing a few things right.

Franklin's phone was buzzing in his pocket. At first, he misidentified it—thought someone had pranked him or thrown something at him to hit his breast pocket. He swatted at it, hit himself in the chin, and, realizing the cause, blushed, waving at the students who'd noticed. “You keep it going. Paul, start him when he's ready. Make it thirty more seconds for good measure. And you can get into some good comments without me. I'll be right back.”

He slid from the side of his desk, flipping open his phone and clicking the door shut behind him almost fast enough not to hear the chorus of mock love-struck oohing and aahing from his students. They knew. How did they know?

“Moira,” he said into the phone. “Just a second.” He looked up and down the hall and crossed to the empty, unlit classroom facing his, pushing the door half-shut behind him. Crouched into one of the desks there and folded his legs one over the other, phone to his ear. She'd begun saying something else to him already, most of which he'd missed. “Sorry. Didn't catch that. Hello? Moira?”

“Right here, John. I was just asking. Is this a bad time?”

He peered into a corner of the darkened ceiling, reflexively imagining it pierced by arrows. Shot full of arrows. This was a habit of perception he'd developed during his last few months with Jane, all those nights lying awake beside her, or talking with her in the living room, bedroom, or not talking, but still silently trying to work out solutions. He hadn't been able to control it. As his mind chased after ways to balance their mismatched lives, some final formulation to make sense of the impossible situation, his eye created this visual analogue: a flight of arrows, each seeking the exact point where wall and wall met ceiling.

“Bad . . . not really. Debate team. I've got a few minutes here. They're critiquing. . . .”

“Do you teach them to become master debaters, or merely cunning linguists?”

He laughed in spite of himself. “That is such a
bad
joke, Moira.
You know, I can't believe . . . it's about the first thing I hear from
anyone
when I say I run the debate club.”

“Proves how depraved we all are, I guess, John. And unoriginal. Always sex on the brain.”

Heat prickled his face. Such directness, he knew, could as easily be a bluff as a genuine provocation—a form of indirection, and a way to conceal vulnerabilities. Like all flirtation, he supposed. How to respond? In her poems, too—one in particular, a striptease from the perspective of an onion—there was often this disjunction between form and content, appearance and essence, the one merging with the other, drawing you in deeper, deeper, until at the heart of it all . . . nothing. Mortality or some grim, empty joke. A gimmick and a farce, he supposed, but also always smart enough, true enough, and relevant anyway to keep him going.

“Well. If I
had
a brain, I'm sure I . . .”

“Poor you! I hear it's a man's one true erogenous zone.”

He laughed. “Uh, I'm going to have to ask for a source check on your information there, as we say in debate.”

“You'd question my authority on the matter?”

“Maybe not. Just saying. Need some supporting evidence and documentation. What have you got?”

Her breath fluttered into his ear. “Hard evidence? Let me think. . . .”

He was still anxiously peering into that darkened corner, envisioning it shot full of arrows, none finding its mark. “Please! Only the evidence. No personal narrative.”

“Is that how you coach them?”

“More or less. Though the subject matter is, shall we say, a good deal drier, but . . .”

“I'm sure. Listen, though, I wasn't . . . I was calling because I had a little break here and wanted to share with you this bit of just incredible, incredibly wonderful weirdness.”

“And I thought you were calling to arrange the drink you texted me about last night.”

“That's a possibility as well, for sure.”

“Impossibility?”

“
A
possibility”

“As in
a
moral?”

“You
are
a cunning linguist.” She laughed. Something in her laugh he'd forgotten—a brashness or quality of emotional extroversion that sometimes caught him off guard. He pictured her alone, leaning over a table at her house and doodling pen and ink designs on a sheet of paper or writing notes to herself as she laughed. Some static on the line suggested it—an intermittent noise like a fountain pen scratching over paper. No, she'd be at work in her office or a conference room in downtown Calgary, or telecommuting from her desk at home. He tried to remember what she'd ever told him about her work—part-time at the Securities Commission and some pro bono work for the Alberta Arts Foundation—but it'd never seemed to interest her enough to talk about beyond a passing detail.
I shuffle papers. Sometimes a lot of money
.

“Well,” she said, “bad jokes aside, here it is: Jeremy has taken it into his head to convert your son.”

“He
what
?”

“He says it came to him all of a sudden yesterday that he needs to quit being such a bully. Anyone can be a bully. It's nothing. Proves nothing. So he says he wants to get your Thomas on the ice. Build him up and give him a chance. Try to like him a little. If he's to take it out on him in the end for being such a wuss and a weirdo, it should at least be a fair fight.”