Only Love Can Break Your Heart (17 page)

My first stabs at the form were the casual, unconscious type, inspired by the hasty versions generally found on public restroom walls next to scrawled phone numbers promising a “good time.” At some point, however, my ding-dong doodling escalated from the odd scribble into a sort of creative compulsion. I began to experiment with elaborate variations: actual rocket ships, with swollen thrusters and fins and tiny little smiling astronauts peering out from, yes, cockpits; World War II–era tanks and bombers; the Batmobile.

I was very careful to hide my creations. One day during study hall, however, a series of phallic Russian
matryoshka
dolls slipped out of my binder in full view of Stevie Lanier.

His mouth twisted into a lurid smirk.

“You’re quite the artist, Askew,” Stevie said. “A regular cocksman, as it were.”

My face grew hot. Knowing Stevie, by the afternoon my drawing would be seen by half the school. Boys I didn’t even know would point and snicker at me in the hallways. I’d be forever branded Dick Artist Askew.

I lunged for the drawing, but Stevie snatched it away.

“Give it back,” I snapped.

“Now, now,” Stevie said. “Calm down. Your secret’s safe with me, Askew. As a matter of fact, there’s something I’d like to show you.”

He tucked the drawing into his own binder and shifted in his chair so he could reach the shelf of reference books behind our table.

“Here,” he said.

He handed me the
P
volume and opened the front cover to reveal a full-color schlong over the phrase
P IS FOR PENIS
.

“Flip to the back,” he said.

There, I found another enormous, elaborately detailed member over the words
P IS ALSO FOR PRICK
.

“When did you do this?” I asked.

“I get plenty of time alone in here on the weekends,” Stevie said.

Of course he did. Stevie played no sports and refused to involve himself in any nonmandatory activities. I appeared to be the closest thing he had to a friend. His roommate was a loutish lacrosse player—a classic thug jock who was far less likely to befriend a guy like Stevie than dunk his head in a toilet. And anyway, it wasn’t like Stevie would have been all that interested in spending his free time in the fitness center with the lacrosse team, lifting weights and practicing stick skills. Instead, Stevie had whiled away the hours alone in the library, vandalizing the reference section.

“Here,” he said.

He handed me the
A
volume. In the front cover was a shapely if somewhat androgynous rear end, with another hairy thruster floating above it, poised to take the proverbial plunge.
A IS FOR ASS
, read the inscription below.

“I’ve been working my way through the alphabet,” Stevie said. “But I’m running out of ideas.”

Stevie didn’t even have to ask. Before long, I had all but taken over the project. It was just the sort of misdeed that could get me kicked out of school before my mother started selling blood plasma to pay down my tuition bill.

Stevie had the right idea, I thought, but he needed a little more vision. We could do much better than
D IS FOR DICK
. I began with a full-color naval destroyer with a dozen pink “guns” peeking out from hairy turrets. Other similarly puerile metaphors weren’t difficult to come by. By the first day of exams, we’d defiled close to half the volumes of the encyclopedia.

As the days passed, however, I began to worry that the project wouldn’t be enough to achieve the goal I had in mind before the end of the semester. Hardly anyone ever looked at the
World Book
, after all, except for a research paper or a history report, and no one would be working on that sort of assignment until after the holidays. There was also the added complication of Stevie Lanier. Stevie thought we were just having a little fun. He talked about the dick-art encyclopedia sitting on the shelves for years to come, a private joke among the few students who stumbled upon it. He had no idea he’d tossed his lot in with the one kid in school who actually wanted rather urgently to get expelled. As resolute as I may have been, I didn’t want to take Stevie down with me. I had to make sure both that the project was discovered and that I would be held solely responsible for it.

With three days left before the holidays, I was working on the front cover of the
F
volume, sketching out a map of Florida with a thicker, hairier, more orbicular version of the panhandle and a circumcised peninsula while silently trying to imagine a more reliably effective way of disgracing myself. Maybe a big hairy johnson spray-painted onto the walls of the faculty room?

“Heads up, Askew,” said Stevie.

Mrs. Carswell, the new librarian, was making her rounds through the study hall tables. We hastily closed our volumes of the
World Book
and pretended to be working on math problems when she peered around the stacks. Mrs. Carswell smiled and waved and floated off to the next set of tables.

“How old do you think she is?” Stevie asked me.

I peered up to get a look at Mrs. Carswell. It was her first year at Macon. I knew nothing about her and didn’t have a clue how old she was. Like most of the women at the school, she was purposefully modest in her appearance. She was pretty, but her appearance seemed calculated to deflect rather than attract our attention. She dressed, well, like a librarian: knee-length skirts, buttoned-up blouses, a string of pearls, and so forth. I guessed she was older than Patricia, who was around thirty, but younger than my mother, who had just turned forty-three.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Thirty-five, maybe?”

“Good guess, Askew,” Stevie said. “Did you happen to know that a woman reaches her sexual peak around thirty-five?”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means,” Stevie drawled, “that at thirty-five, a woman’s body is perfectly ripe. She’s nearing the end of her child-bearing years. Her body is screaming for one more chance to procreate. All her hormones are exploding.”

“Exploding?”

“Exploding,” Stevie said. “When a woman is thirty-five, she’s insatiable.”

Insatiable, I thought. Patricia wasn’t quite thirty-five, but she was close. She had seemed fairly insatiable to me. Maybe it was just hormones.

Pondering the image of demure Mrs. Carswell in a state of orgasmic frenzy, I had an epiphany. As an artist, I was ready for a new motif. It was the beginning, you might say, of my Blue Period.

The sketches didn’t require much imagination. At lunch, Mrs. Carswell often sat with Dr. Giffen, the headmaster, who was newly single that year. Everyone knew the embarrassing story behind the end of poor Old Giff’s marriage. A student who had gone back to the wrestling room to collect a forgotten textbook had walked in on Old Giff’s wife with Coach Cranmer on top of her, performing a move the wrestlers referred to as the Saturday night ride. The word filtered up to Old Giff and the board, and a few days later, Coach Cranmer and Mrs. Giffen were both gone. There were numerous other faculty members whose sex lives were frequent topics of discussion in the dorms and around the lunch tables. Mr. Dewerson, the chemistry teacher, was not yet thirty but already had five kids crammed into his little dorm apartment with his blowsy, buxom young wife. Plenty of jokes about the Dewersons involving minks and rabbits proliferated around the halls of Macon. Then there was Miss Sunday, one of the guidance counselors—a hopeless flirt who was rumored to annually select a second-semester senior for “initiation.” Most of us thought this was pure fantasy, but after what I’d been through with Patricia, I had no problem believing it to be true. It didn’t matter anyway; I wasn’t looking for facts—just inspiration. With my remaining study halls and a little extra time logged in the afternoons, I managed to complete a series of panels I knew would be more than enough to get myself booted, effective immediately. The last step was to ensure that it saw the light of day, sooner rather than later.

On the morning of my history exam, I crept into the library alone. The place was empty; everyone else was in a classroom, including Mrs. Carswell, who was proctoring my own American History exam. One by one, I placed the volumes of the World Book around the library tables, covers open, making sure all the drawings from my new series were—ahem—exposed.

I needed only one added flourish for insurance purposes. With my favorite black Sharpie, beneath the drawing I’d made of Dr. Giffen mounting Mrs. Carswell from behind atop the library checkout desk, I drew my initials—not just RA, but RVA Jr. As far as I knew, I was the only person in school with a middle name that began with the letter
V
. I’d always hated my middle name—Vernon—but in this case, such a distinct initial came in handy.

I thought it wisest not to show up at the scene of the crime; hence I didn’t witness the look on Mrs. Carswell’s face when she saw her image defiled alongside that of Dr. Giffen, or her reaction to the pictures I’d drawn of Mr. and Mrs. Dewerson, Miss Sunday, and several more of their colleagues, depicted in flagrante delicto with students, fellow teachers, and the school mascot, the Red Devil. I winced when I heard she was found with tears streaming down her face as she struggled vainly to hide my work behind her desk while a chorus of guffaws echoed through the library and down the hallways. Stevie Lanier was seen running from the building, cursing my name under his breath.

Within the hour, Mr. McMahan, the dean of students, found me waiting on a bench in the quad outside my classroom building and escorted me to the inquisition. He deposited me in a holding room in Leggett Hall, where I was left to stew for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually, Dean MacMahan opened the door.

“Let’s go, Picasso,” he said.

The headmaster’s office was a warm den of polished wood and leather. When we entered, Dr. Giffen was slumped in his chair, his fingers laced atop his chest. His face was gray and his eyes bleary, like he was fighting off a nasty cold. On the desk before him was the complete set of the
World Book Encyclopedia
. He did not stand when I entered the room.

“Have a seat, Richard,” he said.

His voice seemed tired and jaded. I thought of the picture I’d drawn of his ex-wife entangled on the wrestling mat with Coach Cranmer. Old Giff was having a rough year. Only when I was sitting before him did I begin to think of him not as a remote, indomitable embodiment of authority but rather as a human being, with feelings and emotions just like anyone else—just like me. I wished I could apologize, or make it up to him somehow, or even take it back. But it was too late for that. I swallowed hard and silently vowed to finish what I’d started.

Giffen removed his rimless eyeglasses and began wiping the lenses with a paisley-patterned silk handkerchief.

“I’m very sorry about your father, Richard,” Dr. Giffen began. “That’s a difficult thing for a boy your age to go through. It probably explains a lot.”

He replaced his glasses and rose and walked around to take a seat on the edge of his desk in front of me. He took the volume from the top of the stack nearest to him and opened its front cover. There I saw the image I’d drawn of him behind Mrs. Carswell—both clearly identifiable, he by his bow tie and rimless glasses, she by the hairstyle and the string of pearls and the tweed dress bunched up around her hips. Beneath the image were my initials.

“Is this your work, Richard?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mrs. Carswell is humiliated, young man,” Old Giff said.

“I know, sir,” I said.

I glanced up at Old Giff. Rather than anger, his expression suggested a sort of calm bewilderment. I think I’d have been less frightened if he’d been red-faced and bellowing, or if he’d gone back to his desk drawer, pulled out a paddle like Mr. Powell’s Swift Justice, and ordered me to assume the position.

“So these are your drawings, Richard?” Old Giff asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“How many?” Giffen said.

“All of them,” I replied.

“And you did this all alone?”

“Yes, sir,” I croaked.

“You’re quite sure Stevie Lanier had nothing to do with this?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “It was all me.”

“That’s what he told us,” Dr. Giffen said, “though given the trouble he’s had in the past, I’m not inclined to believe him.”

So Stevie had already been brought in and had thrown the full blame onto me! The bastard! I thought. It was what I wanted, but still—what a little shit!

“It seems far more likely,” Giff continued, “that you were drawn into this whole business, and that Mr. Lanier put your initials on this . . . work of art . . . in order to ensure it would be you and not he who bore the brunt of the punishment.”

I shook my head slowly.

“No, sir,” I said. “It was all me.”

Giffen turned the book around and studied the picture.

“Not a bad likeness,” he said. “It’s a pity you haven’t made use of those talents on more appropriate subjects.”

Despite the circumstances, I felt a smile begin to creep up at the corners of my mouth. What the hell, I thought.

“I’m only good at drawing one thing, sir,” I said.

“Richard,” Old Giff said sharply, “this is no laughing matter.”

The momentary sense of mirth evaporated.

“I know, sir,” I said.

“What do you suppose I’m to do about it, then?”

I tried not to seem too eager.

“If I were you,” I said, “I’d expel me.”

Old Giff was no fool.

“You’ve never been in any trouble here, of any kind,” he said. “Why would you do such a thing now, of all times?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

It was mostly an honest answer.

“Could it have anything to do with worries about things at home, son?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“I’ve already spoken to your mother,” he said. “She’s on her way here now.”

Back when I was plotting my own demise, I hadn’t completely overlooked the possibility—nay, the certainty—that my plan, once enacted, would cause my mother considerable pain. It hadn’t seemed quite so unpleasant, however, when it was only an idea. With the announcement of her imminent arrival, I felt a powerful roiling of remorse and the first glimmering of the tears I had promised myself not to shed.