Man of the Hour (23 page)

“This is David Fitzgerald.” He held up one finger, asking the kids’ indulgence.

“Hi, this is Amy Grossman from the mayor’s office,” she said. “God, they had me on hold forever—your phone system stinks. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that the awards ceremony for Wednesday has been postponed.”

“Oh?”

Something about her tone made him feel like he’d just had an ice cube dropped down his back.

“Yes, we have a conflict,” she said. “The governor has to fly up to Buffalo and the mayor needs to be in Queens.”

The mayor
needs
to be in Queens? She made it sound like some sort of irrational compulsion. “So when will our date be rescheduled for?” he asked, flipping open his appointment book.

“Our office will call you when that information becomes available,” she said with a firmness beyond her years.

David looked over at Kevin in his black Dollar Bill baseball cap trying to nuzzle Elizabeth.

What the hell happened?

In the space of a few hours, he’d gone from being at the center of the media universe to nonentity status. He’d known he wouldn’t lead the news today—the Speaker of the House had shot his mistress, her cat, and himself last night. But were his fifteen minutes really over? Half the shows he was scheduled to appear on had already phoned today to postpone his appearances and the other half, like
Nightline
, had simply stopped returning his calls. Everyone was busy chasing the Speaker’s story. Geraldo and Barbara Walters didn’t need him anymore. He’d dropped off the map.

“Okay, so we’ve spoken,” said Amy Grossman of the mayor’s office.

This came off like an ontological statement. Okay, so we’ve spoken. Okay, so we exist. Now what?

“Well, I’ll be around when you need me,” said David, not quite sure what else to say.

“Yes, we’ll be in touch.” Amy Grossman hung up, consigning him back to obscurity.

David sat there for a moment, staring at the pile of uncorrected papers and manila folders on his desk. All at once, disappointment fell over him like a stench. Suddenly everything seemed second-rate. The cold cup of coffee in the morning; the long lines for the ancient Xerox machine; the secondhand books and tedious meetings with the department chairman; the draftiness of the classrooms; Larry Simonetti and the school budget. Just a few days ago, the President had mentioned his name.

He was feeling the difference between real life and the hot thing. The hot thing was
swoosh
; real life was a grind. The hot thing was fabulous—it was orgasmic—it was insouciant—attractive—
sexy
—witty. Real life was hard work; it was frustration; it was pimples and cellulite; it was struggling along and then not having things work out. Much as he hated to admit it, it had been fun being a minor celebrity. Riding in limos and sitting in greenrooms with movie stars. Having strangers make a fuss over him in front of his son.

He leaned his head against his fist. It was time to get on with the rest of his life. He wasn’t going to be like that fireman who’d rescued the little girl from the well down south and then committed suicide after people stopped paying attention to him. He had responsibilities. Classes to teach, students to talk to, a shy and troubled son to take care of. There were phone calls to be returned, evaluations to be written, Byzantine bureaucracies to be navigated, credit card bills to be paid, a dissertation to finish.

He turned back to the students standing in front of him. Kevin was still trying to make time with Elizabeth, but she wasn’t giving him any. When he tried to snake an arm around her waist, she straight-armed him and raised her knee just slightly.

There was an analogy here, David decided: publicity and teenage sex rituals. The more you got, the more you were going to get. And the less you had, the less you were going to get.

“Okay, where were we?” He forced himself to focus again. Remember: you’re a teacher, not a former talk show guest.

“Yo.” Kevin snorted and started trotting in place like a stallion in a stall. “Like, about this paper?”

“What about it?” asked David, tugging on his ear.

“I was wondering if I could write about Shawn De Shawn,” he said with his slight lisp. “Since you liked that in class the other day.”

David half-smiled, tuning in on the little scam being pulled here. “Well, really, it would be better if you wrote a paper comparing Shawn to someone we’ve read about in one of the books.”

“Aw, man …” Kevin’s mouth fell open, flashing gold caps with dollar signs instead of monograms today. “You mean I gotta read one of them?”

“You seem incredulous, Kevin.”

“Can’t I just give you something from my journal?”

David shook his head. Yeah, okay, he thought. This is what I’m here for. To cut through the jive.

“I was touched by what you shared in class the other day,” he said. “But I’m not going to let you keep using that. Okay? Because if you tell the same story the same way enough times, it starts to lose its meaning. And I speak from experience.”

Kevin looked down at his Nikes, only slightly abashed at being caught. “So what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to stretch a little bit. Be a little bit better than the rest of the neighborhood. Reach into other people’s spheres of experience. I mean, all the things we teach about improving your self-esteem are great, as far as they go. But then you have to make the leap beyond that. I mean, like, what, are you more brilliant than Shakespeare or Tolstoy?”

“No,” said Kevin, amused by the thought.

“Then don’t just keep writing about yourself. Read the books. You might even get something out of them.”

All right, sliding back into the groove again. Kevin bobbing his head, getting it. Elizabeth listening intently, with that foxy little squint of hers. David felt his spirits lifting: yeah, okay, this is where I belong.

“Come back this time tomorrow.” David made a mark on his desk calendar. “I’ll have a novel picked out especially for you. I-ight?”

“I-ight.” Kevin gave him a limp power salute, and then walked out.

“And now for you.” David swiveled in his chair to face Elizabeth.

She smiled shyly and then cast her eyes down. He hoped he hadn’t embarrassed her. No
hijab
today; her hair was loose and dark over her shoulders. In her denim overalls, she almost looked like an average American teenage girl. If you’d never seen her before, you probably wouldn’t be able to put a finger on the difference. You’d just sense some fine long-boned
otherness
about her.

“I still need to talk to you,” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. There’ve been too many distractions lately.”

Yes, exactly. Distractions. He felt like he’d allowed a part of himself to get reconfigured these last few days.

“Well, I, um …” She waved one hand in the air, smiled again, and looked down at his chair leg, wondering how to begin. “I …”

“Yes?”

She took two very small steps toward his desk and then stopped. Not ready to cross the breach. She seemed off-balance today. Something was on the agenda besides a paper.

“So I picked a topic,” she said too quickly. “For the imperfect hero.”

This sounded like a little detour but David went with it anyway. Kids were like that sometimes; you had to let them work their way around to the real point.

“Okay.”

“Yes.” She prompted herself, as if she was in danger of losing her place. “I was thinking of writing about
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
.”

“Really?” David scratched his beard. “Whose class did you read it for?”

“Nobody’s. I read it on my own. For fun.”

He loved this girl, and in a weird way, he loved this school too. Where else would you have a class where a scruffy little aspiring thug like Kevin, who could barely make it through the sports section, would think he’d stand a chance of dating a swan-necked Arab girl who read
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
in her spare time?

“Well, Tess as the imperfect heroine,” he said, tapping his fingers on his desk, mulling it over. “That sounds promising. I’ll be interested to see what you do with it. You’ll have to come up with some solid comparisons with more traditional heroes.”

“Right, yes, of course.” She frowned and moved her jaw around as if she was admonishing herself. “I should have thought of that before.”

She fell silent and looked down at the floor. One black sneaker-clad foot was pointing toe-down, like a painter’s brush poised on the canvas.

He peered up at her expectantly, not used to having the low angle. “Is there something else you wanted to talk about?”

There was a scuffle of activity behind him—most of the other teachers in the English department pulling themselves together in eager anticipation of the period buzzer.

“Yes, there is something,” Elizabeth said, hugging her book bag to her chest and looking over her shoulder at students passing in the hall. “But, um, I don’t know how to begin.”

Was she pregnant or something? She didn’t look pregnant. She looked somber, worried. But not pregnant-worried. There was a Spanish expression for anxiety:
eating your own head.
She looked like she’d been eating her own head.

He decided to take a guess and try to help her along. “Is this about your brother coming to see me the other day?”

She closed her eyes for a second; it was hard to tell whether she was relieved or mortified. “Well, yes. I mean. Sort of.”

Donna Vitale brushed by, giving him a wink with her good eye.

“He’s okay, your brother,” said David. “I had him when he was a student here a few years back.” He shifted his legs under a desk that was too low for his knees. “I think he means well.”

Elizabeth went slightly pigeon-toed, standing before him. Looked twice over her shoulder, sucked in her cheeks, adjusted the straps on her bag. The windup, now the pitch.

“He has his … intentions,” she said finally.

Hmm, a curve ball. “So what do you want me to do when he comes to me with his concerns about you?”

“I don’t know.” He had a feeling he’d fouled one off, rather than hitting it solidly. He’d have to wait for the next one.

The period buzzer went off, triggering stampedes in the halls and avalanches in the stairwells. David looked up at the clock and saw it was 2:30. In an hour he had to be in Manhattan to meet with his divorce lawyer, Beth Nussbaum.

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. I’m running late. Can you walk with me to the subway a little?”

She threw her bag over her shoulder and followed him out of the office, through the hall, and down the caged-in stairwell. The first-floor corridors were clogged with thick knots of kids being noisy in the way kids always were: rude, exuberant, and absolutely certain that no one has ever thought to make such a racket before. Larry Simonetti roamed among them, waving his arms and bellowing, “Move on, people, move on!” to little effect.

Everything had almost gone back to the way it was. One or two kids even jumped up and touched David on the top of his head. But somehow he felt different and separate from all the activity.

He saw Noonan and another detective heading into a classroom down the hall and wondered when they were going to get around to picking up a suspect. Christ, the weekend had passed since they’d announced it was a bomb. In the back of his mind, he was still worried that someone within the school was responsible.

“Anyway, your brother,” said David, holding the door to the parking lot open for her. “He doesn’t want you to go away to college.”

“He doesn’t want me to do
anything
.” Elizabeth came out and dropped her bag on the asphalt. “He’s always watching me. Coming by school to check up on me. Insisting on picking me up, like today. He can’t reconcile himself to the way things are here. I mean, he came back to this country so he could make money like my father, but then he can’t accept the way other people live. Everything rubs him the wrong way. How people dress, how they talk. He doesn’t like for me to have my head scarf off because boys will look at me on the subway.”

“The imperfect brother.”

“Yes.” She laced her fingers between her dark curly ropes of hair, absently braiding the strands. “I remember once, just after he came back, my father took the whole family to the circus. And so one of the clowns got up and started doing this silly dance, I think it was the lambada or something. But then Nasser jumps up and starts pulling my father’s arm, saying we have to leave immediately, because it’s not proper for a girl to see this. It’s
haram
. Can you believe that? The circus is
haram
. Movies are
haram!
Boys are
haram!
”

“So college is
haram
too?”

“Yes, but …” She touched the back of her neck and let her fingers trail along her collarbone. “But there’s a lot more going on than that. There’s something else I really need to tell you about. I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it keeps coming back to me.”

“What is it?”

She looked toward the boardwalk, past Astroland, out to the old Parachute Drop, a giant rotting metal mushroom, near Steeplechase Pier. He had a sense something was ripening in her, about to burst out. He hoped she wasn’t going to say she had a crush on him. Oh, to be eighteen again; he’d have her out on a date by nightfall. But you had to be vigilant about these student-teacher boundaries.

“God, why can’t I just
say it?
” She looked back at him, stomping her foot in frustration. “You know how sometimes you talk in class about being willing to risk something? That’s what I’m trying to do now.”

“It’s all right.” He found himself putting a hand on her shoulder, and then quickly withdrew it. Rule number one, never touch the kids.

From across the parking lot, Nasser was watching them. He’d been there for twenty minutes in the Lincoln Town Car, waiting for his sister to come out the back entrance.

He’d been worried about her, ever since she’d mentioned the police stopping by the house the other night. He wanted to
know more of what she’d told them, what kinds of questions they’d been asking. Would she tell them he’d been late to take her shopping? After his own cold interrogation by Dr. Ahmed, he wasn’t sure how his little sister would stand up to such scrutiny.