Love May Fail (15 page)

“Albert Camus,” I say when I wake up. “I had the strangest dream.”

When I realize I’m on the couch, I search my memory. I’m pretty sure I was not in a high tower looking down on Edmond Atherton trying to kill Albert Camus with a baseball bat, but is my dog really dead? And was there actually a wingless angel woman here last night?

“Good morning, Mr. Vernon,” a woman says from the kitchen, and I jump.

“Who are you?” I say as I turn around. “What do you want from me?”

She hands me a cup of black coffee. “Perhaps you’d like to see some ID?”

The woman hands me a small rectangle of plastic. It looks like a driver’s license at first, but on second glance, when my bloodshot eyes focus, I realize it’s one of those ridiculous Official Member of the Human Race cards I used to give to my students on the last day of school. What a colossal waste of energy it was to make those things—it took me days of my own personal at-home free time. Why the hell I ever made those, I couldn’t tell you. I used to find half of them on the hallway floors, discarded thoughtlessly like candy wrappers.

“Do you remember me now?” she says.

I read the name on the card.

Study the photo.

Look up at Portia Kane—she’s just standing there in my living room, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

She has long brown hair and is dressed casually, in the same jean jacket she’s wearing in the photo, which seems downright bizarre. Her face has aged, but she’s still remarkably pretty. She sits down next to me on the couch.

“You’re the girl who used to talk to me about her mother? The hoarder, right?”

“So you
do
remember me. I hoped you might, but it’s been twenty years and—”

“What the hell are you doing here in my home?” The coffee cup warms my hands.

“I told you last night—I’ve come to save you.”

“How did you know I was going to kill myself?”

“Were you
really
going to kill yourself?” she says.

“Albert Camus, he jumped out the window and died. I had to burn him in the chimenea. We made a suicide pact, and—it sounds ridiculous now. I can’t explain it to you, and I don’t particularly feel like doing so anyway.”

“Is that your truck outside, smashed into the tree? I hope you’re not concussed, because you aren’t making any sense, Mr. Vernon. And I don’t think people are supposed to sleep when concussed. Shit, I hope that—”

“I’m making perfect sense!”

“Okay.”

“What do you want from me?” I say.

“To save you and—”

“You students always want something. You never come without ulterior motives. Never once in my entire tenure of teaching did I encounter an altruistic student. Students by their very nature are
designed to take and take before they disappear, never to be heard from again, unless they need something—like a letter of recommendation, or some sort of free advice, or a shoulder to cry on. So what do
you
need? Tell me, because I’m very busy trying to drink and smoke myself to death at the present moment, if you haven’t noticed. So let’s get this over with.”

Portia looks at her hands. When I subtract a few wrinkles and poof up her bangs, I remember a sweet girl who hung on my every word and used up every free minute of every single one of my prep periods. She was so wounded—father issues, if I remember correctly. Used to drop by my apartment uninvited too, now that I think about it. Was there something about a pregnancy scare? Young foolish heart-on-his-sleeve I-will-make-a-difference me gave her free therapy, allowed her to squeeze me like a sponge, all the emotional energy I had to give for an entire year, before she graduated and vanished without so much as a good-bye, let alone a thank-you.

“What do you want?” I say with a little less cynicism, because she looks sad now, and I am tired—too exhausted to fight.

“You were the best teacher I ever had,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “But I’m not a teacher anymore. Did you not hear about my last day in the classroom? It made the news—pretty much every market.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she says.

“Yeah, well. I got this very fashionable cane out of the deal.” I reach down to pick it up. “See? Top quality. Makes me look almost old money—and on a teacher’s pension too.”

She gives me a look like I just admitted to something heinous, like drop-kicking infants for fun. “My life didn’t turn out the way I dreamed it would either. I’ve met some truly awful men in the last twenty years—was married to one, actually. But when I needed to
believe there was better out there—at least one good man in the world—do you know who I thought about every single time?”

I have a strong feeling she is going to say me, which means she is delusional and maybe even psychotic, so I say, “How did you get my address?”

“I thought of you and your class,” she says, quite passionately, completely ignoring my question.

“How did you find me?”

“Don’t you even care about what I’m telling you? That your teaching had an impact that affected me for two decades, that forced me to seek you out twenty years after—”

“Sounds like you sought me out when it was convenient for you, because your marriage fell apart and you needed something to take your mind off your own problems. I have some experience with this—all veteran teachers do. Trust me. We exist as public servants who are expected to uphold the morals of an entire community and drop everything just as soon as anyone has a problem.”

“I’m not doing this for me,” she says. To her credit, she does a good job of appearing to be completely astonished.

“Okay then. You
really
want to help me? This is about
me
for a change? I get to be on the other side of the teacher-student relationship? Are you sure?” I stretch and yawn here, because I’m exhausted.

“Absolutely,” she says, clearly choosing to ignore my indifference. “I owe you a gigantic debt of gratitude.”

“Then help me kill myself. I entered into a suicide pact with my dog, Albert Camus. He kept his end of the bargain two days ago by jumping out of my bedroom window. In a dream last night he said you’d come to help me. I want to be Zagreus—the cripple from Camus’s
A Happy Death
. You can be a female Patrice Mersault. Patricia Mersault, maybe. Kill me, and you can have my house and
all of my money. We can draw up a will, even. You can sell this dumpy place, which has appreciated remarkably since the local skiing mountain has expanded, and you can buy a beautiful house on the beach and begin your search for happiness and meaning, completely free of responsibility for the rest of your life.”

“You need to teach again.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“You have a gift, Mr. Vernon.”

“I most certainly do not, and more importantly, I no longer even care.”

“There are kids who need you. Troubled kids who need to believe in good men and hope.”

“Look at me—take a long hard look.” I wait for her to take in my disheveled, puke-covered, and still legally intoxicated appearance. I haven’t shaved in days. I must look and smell like a homeless person babbling nonsense on the side of a highway on-ramp. “I am not a good man, Ms. Portia Kane. My dog committed suicide, most likely because I blathered on and on at him night and day, spilling the poison of my brain indiscriminately. And I am done giving. I have nothing left.”

“You are a
good
man,” she says quietly.

“How would you know that, when we haven’t even spoken in decades? Tell me. Please.”

“I remember your classes and all of the time you gave me during my senior year when I was going through a really—”

“That was twenty years ago. Are you the same person now? Has time not changed you? You’ve romanticized your high school experience—and me. Whatever horrors you’ve faced in the last two decades are easily trumped by imagination and—Why am I even having this conversation with you?”

“Because you care.”

“I absolutely do not, Portia Kane. Maybe I did once, when I made you this card.” I glance down at the face of eighteen-year-old Portia Kane, and my heart softens for a second. I vaguely remember now a Christmas Eve when she showed up uninvited at my apartment and spent an hour or so sobbing in my arms, and we somehow ended up listening to Frank Sinatra holiday songs on AM radio as we sipped nonalcoholic eggnog and watched snow fall from the tenth-floor apartment window. Did she call me the father she never had? And do I remember thinking she was entirely unstable but in great need of kindness? I hand the card back to her. “When you are beaten almost to death for caring about young people, it takes a rather hefty toll.”

“That’s why I’m here,” she says. “That’s what this is about!”

“I’m afraid you may be a bit too late. I’m sorry. I don’t know what sort of fantastical idea made you go digging through your memories to find me, but—”

“You would have choked to death on your own vomit if I hadn’t—”

“I
wanted
to choke to death on my own vomit!”

Her mouth is open, her eyes well up, and then she is in my kitchen washing dishes.

This is the absurd
, I say to Albert Camus in my mind as I sip my stronger-than-I-like coffee.
My suicide attempt results in being stuck in my own home with a former student who wants me to teach again. This is any retired teacher’s hell. It’s like that Stephen King novel. My own personal version of
Misery
.

My dehydrated brain begins to throb, and so I just sit on my couch, staring through the windows at the distant mountains.

But then my own stench overpowers me, so I shower and change my clothes before resuming my sulking on the couch, now wrapped in a fleece blanket.

I sit in silent protest.

Portia Kane begins to clean the rest of my home once she is done with the kitchen. She’s found my cleaning supplies, and she scrubs and wipes and vacuums and mops for hours as I sit and stare, completely dazed and apathetic and resigned as Gregor Samsa. Turn me into a cockroach, and I wouldn’t even blink. At one point she even goes outside with pots of boiling water and washes my vomit off the deck.

“Cleaned up all the shit on the floor,” Portia Kane yells down from the loft above.

“That was Albert Camus’s excrement, not mine,” I yell back.

“He jumped from this window in the bedroom?” she yells down. “Why was the window open?”

“He was jumping and scratching at it in the middle of the night, which was unusual. I wanted to see what was out there, so I opened the window.”

There is a long pause.

She yells down, “Why didn’t you stop him from jumping?”

“He was very fast about it. I tried. Don’t you think I tried?”

“That must have been horrible. I’m so sorry.”

“You have no idea.”

When Portia Kane finishes cleaning my entire house, it’s midafternoon, and I am still on the couch, staring at the distant mountains.

She brings me a sandwich—turkey and American cheese on marbled rye with pickles and lettuce.

“Enjoy,” she says.

I take the plate. “You cleaned my house because you aren’t allowed to clean your mother’s, am I right? The hoarder. You clean when you want to feel in control. So don’t say you did this for me.”

“Eat your fucking sandwich,” she says, and then leaves my house.

After a few minutes I cane my way to the window and confirm that her car is still in my driveway. She must have gone for a walk
wearing only her jean jacket, which is entirely inadequate for this kind of cold.

When the sun begins to set, I open a bottle of wine and pour a glass, but after my two-day drinking binge, I just don’t have the stomach to take a single sip.

Portia Kane returns shortly after dark looking a bit pink and sweaty, picks up the full wineglass, downs it, refills, carries the fresh pour into the kitchen, and begins making dinner.

“Did you walk down to the lake?” I ask. “Albert Camus loved the lake. Although we had a hard time doing that in winter. Cane and a dog leash are a tough marriage in snow.”

She doesn’t answer but prepares asparagus, snapping off the ends and then coating them with olive oil, salt, and pepper before popping them into the oven.

From the dining room table I watch her bring water to a boil, dump in wheat pasta, and heat a small pot of red sauce over a low gas flame.

“I can’t remember the last time someone prepared me a home-cooked meal,” I say as she sets the table.

She doesn’t respond, but pours herself another glass of red.

When the meal is ready, we eat in silence.

I can tell that Portia Kane is very upset with me, but what can I do about that? How could I begin to fight twenty years’ worth of mythmaking and romanticizing the past? Even if I wanted to—which I don’t—I could never live up to her expectations for me now. I start to pity her. To think, this is all because of those stupid little cards I used to give my seniors at the end of the year.

Official Member of the Human Race.

Ha! A lot of good that ever did any of us. Why does she even still have hers? She must be a hoarder like her mother.

As Portia Kane clears the table, I find myself saying, “The kid who knocked me out of the teaching racket—Edmond Atherton was his name—they let him out of the nut house last year. I hear he attends college now in California. Received a letter from an old teaching buddy. Mr. Davidson, if you remember him. Maybe Edmond Atherton will go on to lead a fulfilling and productive life. Isn’t that nice?”

No response.

Portia Kane cleans my dishes by hand, even though I have a dishwasher.

“You’re not going to leave, are you?” I say.

“I made a promise to your mother.”

“My
mother
?” I squint at her. I haven’t spoken with my dreaded mother in years. This is getting seriously weird. “How do you know her?”

“We met on a plane just almost a month ago.”

“What?”

“A bit of a coincidence, although she’d call it divine intervention. I prefer coincidence, because I’m not really sure whether I believe in God. Full disclosure—I was drunk at the time, so I don’t remember much about our initial talk. But she gave me her address, and we began corresponding. I sent her my contact info in a letter, and then she called my cell phone out of the blue and I began to visit her. We talked. She confided in me. And I eventually ended up making her a promise that I intend to keep.”