Tampa (5 page)

Suddenly a gray Buick pulled into Jack’s driveway and the
garage
opened to a jumbled arrangement of home-improvement tools and sporting gear. A man of banal stature emerged from the garage’s shadow; his belted dress pants sat slightly too high on his waist and his square plaid dress shirt, impervious to time, could’ve been from any one of the past three decades. He was an obvious multitasker. One hand held a phone to his ear; the other wheeled an oversized green trash bin behind him casually, like a suitcase—he could just as easily have been walking through the airport terminal. There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human
relationships
had value?

Seconds after he parked the bin on the corner, I turned and spied two joggers, each one coming from an opposite direction in a way that seemed synchronized, round the corner and advance down the street. Moments later a third appeared. It was as though they were racing toward the garbage, had been waiting all day,
raccoon-like
, for it to be set out. For a moment I imagined the bin filled with nothing but weightless, wadded-up puffs of Kleenex: the week’s toll of Jack’s feverish masturbating. There could, I reasoned, actually be such a treasure inside the trash—one tied, recycled plastic shopping bag of waste from Jack’s bedroom: candy wrappers, pencil shavings, awkward starts to homework assignments that were crumpled up in frustration, and then, perhaps, a sweet ball of tissue or paper towel, crisped at the center, smelling of metallic salt. I’d happily have dug through rancid coffee grounds and tufts of middle-aged hair
extracted
from brushes in order to find it if the hour had been later, the street more isolated.

Jack’s father walked back inside the garage, a trailing burst of
laughter seeming to activate the sprinklers on his lawn as the
automatic
door protectively lowered. One jogger, a thirtysomething woman whose exertions of breath were thundering, stomped by. She had the haunted look of someone who’d come from a dire place and was on her way to an even worse destination to deliver awful news. This expression contrasted sharply with her caffeinated ponytail, which was perched in the top center of her skull like a plume on the hat of a Napoleonic infantryman. There was no way for women, for anyone, to gracefully age. After a certain point, any detail, like the woman’s cheerleader hairstyle, that implied youth simply looked ridiculous. Despite her athletic prowess, the jogger’s cratered thighs seemed more like something that would die one day than something that would not. I didn’t know how long I had
before
this window slammed down on my fingers as well—with
diligence
, and avoiding children, perhaps a decade. The older I became, the harder it would be to get what I wanted, but that was probably true of everyone with everything.

Another jogger lapped my convertible, his face the color of
sunburned
meat. His chest was sweating the way a fatally wounded stab victim might bleed. A wave of desperation coursed through me that nearly made me jump from the car and run—shorts still around my ankles, buzzing vibrator dropping onto the asphalt from between my legs—to Jack’s window, to rap on it loudly with my fist, then press my buttocks against the glass and turn behind to look at him with one panicked fish eye on the side of my face and offer no command or explanation beyond,
Take me right now, through this window. You’re too young to realize we don’t have much time.

I stared back into the binoculars, but Jack was no longer in the room—summoned by Father, apparently. I scanned all the front
rooms I could see into for activity, but Jack wasn’t visible. With a sigh I removed the vibrator, placed it into the car’s center cup holder and let its droning buzz fill the vehicle. It was time to flip down the driver’s-side visor and perform a quick check in the mirror. I looked deceptively satisfied—sweating, flushed, rosy-cheeked. “Patience,” I said out loud, “is a virtue.” It was so funny I started cackling. A very unattractive, near-snort of a laugh, to be honest. I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart. Shitting is good this way as well.
Occasionally
in college, my roommate would enter the bathroom right after I’d done some business and scream out at the lingering smell with a sense of shock that left me deeply gratified. With her square, Germanic jaw and wide-set shoulders, it was easy for me to picture her hearty dumps—I pictured them to be somewhat orthogonal, favoring the rectangular. But I had a face that denied excretion.

“Good-bye for now, Jack,” I called. One good thing about
returning
to the house in sweaty aerobic gear was that Ford had to believe me when I claimed to be too tired. The concession was
always
that I’d lie down on my side for him and he’d get to lower my spandex shorts to reveal my buttocks, pull down my sports bra so a profile of nipple was showing as well, and masturbate standing above me while I closed my eyes and pretended to have fallen asleep.

Seeing the students’ actualized youth up close made me
double
down on my age-preventative spa visits and my purchase of
vigilant
creams and potions. I cycled through the weeks of the month with oxygenating facials, DNA-repair enzyme facials, caviar
illuminating
facials, precautionary Botox, microdermabrasion, LED light therapy. To unite body and mind for the best results possible, I always tried to envision myself literally getting younger during the treatments: I pictured my fourteen-year-old self standing off in the distance, waiting for me to come repossess her body; each one of these sessions allowed me to take one step further toward reaching her by turning back the clock a few months. Though often,
well-intentioned
compliments on behalf of the aestheticians would derail me from such vision quests.

It was not uncommon while I was receiving a glycolic peel (I don’t find its biting sting unwelcome—in general with beauty
treatments
, pain feels like an assurance of progress to me) for the
aesthetician
to gush, “You know? You really could be a model.”

“I’m too short,” I’d quip. “Five foot seven.” Though I’d flirted with doing print ads for a small time during college, I couldn’t stand taking direction. I also had the fear that with the right
photographer
, the real me might accidentally be captured—that in looking at the photo, suddenly everyone’s eyes would widen and they’d actually see me for the very first time:
Oh my God—you’re a soulless pervert!

The lobby of the plastic surgeon’s office had a clinical asceticism to it; with its white pillar columns and brushed chrome accents, it seemed to be part church and part laboratory. I suppose that was the message they were trying to convey: staving off decrepitude
combined
the miracles of religion with the progressive advancements of medicine. Yet the elderly patients in the waiting room made it clear what a pseudoscience the whole thing was. They’d often look up at me, raising vast draperies of throat skin that hung above their crepe chests like crumpled ascots. Knowing the miseries of my
future
body, most of them couldn’t help but give me a smile filled with sadistic delight. “You have beautiful skin,” one told me once. She seemed to squirm with relish as she said the words; it was no different from kicking me in the ribs and saying,
Everything on you will one day sag.
But for now, every inch of my flesh was perfectly taut—if I were to run out to the lobby midtreatment and shed my bathrobe, the sight of my immaculate abdomen would likely have caused these withered creatures to fall to their knees crying and break a hip.

Spa days were usually paired with shopping sprees. These were a necessary cushion against the realities of my pretend marriage: buying nice things helped me temporarily forget the vulgar angle to which Ford’s stubbled jaw hung open while he was snoring, the moist smacks his tongue made when he chewed a steak, and even my rare though inescapable duties in the bedroom. But they
certainly
couldn’t help divert my thoughts from Jack. Lately I’d begun packing my closet with body-clinging tailored suits and silk shells with low-cut backs: this way I could wear a jacket into the
classroom
, then remove it so only the students could see my exposed flesh, never the other teachers; occasionally I also wore long sateen
scarves that covered my chest. Only upon entering the class would I wrap them up around my neck or sling them back across my
shoulders
so the air conditioner paired with my open-nipple bra could put on a show. Until I was engaging in true contact with Jack or
another
student, I needed the boys’ hungry stares for sustenance: these young men were so new to life, they didn’t yet know how to mask the direction in which their eyes were peeking nor their wonder and delight at what they were looking at.

Even in this competition of the involuntary gaze, Jack proved himself to be far superior to his peers. While others looked upon my chest with a gleeful smirk or pleasant shock, Jack stared in the way one might watch a waterfall—there was something profoundly hopeful in his glance, an optimism that the world held more wonder than he’d ever thought to guess. It was a feeling I tried to
encourage
in him with an affirmative glance or a nod, one that told him, simply and plainly,
You’re seeing exactly what you think you’re seeing.

In retrospect perhaps
it was also his name that set me on his trail—I hoped Jack Patrick’s two first names meant he was two boys in one: public Patrick, a regular fourteen-year-old schoolboy, and private Jack, who might willfully submit to every smutty thing I wanted to do to him.

His behavior in the classroom was promising: self-doubtful but alert; laughing when I or one of his classmates made a joke, but not making them himself or asking for the class’s attention. Each day he wore a T-shirt and sportlike mesh shorts that fell just below his knees, but his lower calves suggested that his upper thighs were covered in a thin layer of blond hair. In the light these tufts seemed
like a gossamer confection; if licked, I imagined they would dissolve on my tongue.

The reading list for the nonadvanced eighth-grade English classes was preselected and not to be deviated from:
Romeo and
Juliet
began the fall semester, then we would be moving into
The Scarlet Letter
and
The Crucible
. To begin I had students draw names from a bucket: in each class, we’d read Shakespeare’s play aloud to kill time. Jack drew the character of Paris, and visibly blushed when Marissa Talbet, an annoyingly theatrical redhead who on the first day of class asked if she could, from time to time, make pertinent student council announcements, spoke of Paris’s legendary attractiveness in her role as Nurse. Marissa was the first student to modulate her voice for the part, raising it several octaves higher and attempting a British accent. Her classmates found this hilarious, but Jack never doubled over with sugar-induced laughter. Instead he simply smiled, all the while looking at the text of the play, hardly ever raising his virginal brown eyes—but when he did glance up, he found me watching him, and we’d lock into a stare for the briefest second before his head lowered back toward the safety of the book.

Reading aloud, his voice was steady overall, though he
stumbled
a bit between antiquated words and spoke with the misplaced stressors of one who doesn’t fully grasp a line’s context. “Thou wrong … sit … wrongs … it … more than tears … with that
report
,” he spoke to Juliet, whose name happened to be drawn from the bucket by the exacting Frank Pachenko (when the teasing about this role immediately began, Frank was quick to remind his peers that in Shakespeare’s time Juliet and all of the female
characters
would have indeed been played by male actors). In general
Frank’s appearance and organized demeanor bucked the
stereotype
of the typical fourteen-year-old male: his hand always went straight up in the air when a question was asked, and his glasses had lenses too large and too circular for his age. Occasionally I saw him speaking with Jack, usually a quick question or two that Jack answered with a low, short phrase, but there was a
familiarity
between them that suggested they’d known one another since childhood despite the different paths the social jungle of
adolescence
was beginning to put them on: Jack was an accepted outlier in the circle of the popular jocks, while Frank took geeky solace in social failure by channeling his energy into academics. Frank wasn’t an outstanding mind—his response papers formed
simplistic
arguments with an average vocabulary—but he looked the part of the young academic: his shirt tucked into his slightly too-
high-waisted
shorts, his bulky white sneakers that somehow didn’t
appear
to ever have been worn.

Since lunch directly followed Jack’s third-period class, I made it a habit to drop into the lunchroom and take note of his
whereabouts
, even watch him eat if the opportunity presented itself. Less than a month after school started, I’d already begun to shut his peers out with the myopic blindness a focused goal brings. I’ve no doubt there were others, throngs of students not in any of my classes, who were watching me as I stood in the humid fog of the cafeteria and sipped a carton of chocolate milk through a straw, placing myself in front of one of the large industrial fans positioned at each corner of the cafeteria and letting it lift stray hairs from the gathered bun at the base of my neck. A sound-based traffic light at the cafeteria’s front entrance registered how loud the collective sound in the room was: green meant the students were talking at
an acceptable volume, yellow was an intermediate warning, and red would sound a bell that meant a punishment of total silence would be invoked—once the light turned red, a staff member sounded three whistles, and anyone caught talking afterward was given
detention
. But I stared into the green light—
The Great Gatsby
was
assigned
to the ninth graders but not the eighth—and thought about being inside my convertible with Jack, the top down, both of us completely undressed, me flooring the gas and letting the wind hit our bodies as a type of foreplay.

Janet liked to ruin these daydreams—I could’ve wrung her neck the day that Jack brought a pack of Twizzlers in his lunch. I had a clear view of him, framed between the hunched shoulder blades of two small girls, likely sixth graders, who were sitting at the table in front of Jack’s. One at a time, he bit down onto the red rope of the candy, pulling a little, revealing just a bit of aggressive tooth, and then he would slowly chew, his lips flushing with wetness. I was so fixated I didn’t even hear her until she was right next to me, her respirator-like breathing falling upon my ear.

“Rosen is on a goddamn witch hunt,” she declared. I came out of my trance, suddenly vulnerable to all the room’s wretched smells and sounds. It was chili day, and massive yellow trash bins around the room were brimming with garlicky waste. Janet began a series of wet coughs, reaching into the pocket of her wide elastic pants to bring out a stained handkerchief. “He dropped by in the middle of my class this morning. Totally unannounced. I’d given them a group assignment and the little punks were all over the room. A few were climbing on the desks like baboons.”

“Hello, Janet.” I looked back up and felt a bolt of panic in my
stomach; suddenly I couldn’t see Jack. I desperately began a right-
to-left
scan of the room; I had to swallow repeatedly to avoid the urge to yell out his name.

“I’d like to see Rosen try and teach them about the former USSR. It’s not exactly flies to honey. He sits in his big air-conditioned office half the day, never has to manage a classroom. He couldn’t walk a mile in my shoes.”

I nodded, solemnly looking at her feet. If I gifted her a pair that weren’t Velcro, would she wear them? Likely not. She frequently removed her shoes in the teacher’s lounge—“Letting the dogs breathe,” as she called it—and when she put them back on there was no need to bend down and tie anything. She simply latched the Velcro back up by running the opposing foot’s callused heel along the straps.

When she stood in front of the industrial fan, Janet’s sacklike clothing pressed against outlying regions of her body normally
hidden
by baggy fabric. “Just play his game for a little bit, Janet. Let him see what he wants to see, get him to stop breathing down your neck.” The charcoal frizz of her perm hovered above her scalp like a rising cloud of smog. With one eye open farther than the other, she looked like a stoic survivor: pillaged by the elements but still here against all odds.

“Says he wants me to ‘foster an environment of mutual respect.’ What a bag of horseshit. These feral little dogs wouldn’t know
respect
if it bit them on the privates.”

“Would respect really bite them on the privates?” I asked.

“Just look at them out there. It’s like
National Geographic
. The future is hopeless.” Janet’s caustic remarks were drawing the
attention
of a husky student eating alone at a nearby table. A chili dog rested limply in the side of his mouth, his mastication paused so he could stare straight ahead at Janet.

“Perhaps this conversation is best reserved for after hours,” I whispered. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a familiar blip of gray shirt and turned—Jack and his buddies had moved outside to the courtyard and were now sitting along the edge of a brick planter. The guys in the center were talking to two girls in
short-shorts
, saying something that was making the girls slap them on the forearms with pretend outrage as they all laughed. Jack sat at the corner, not speaking to the girls directly but in on the
conversation
. “Excuse me, Janet.” She was still talking, still continued to talk as I walked away and unbuttoned another button on the front of my shirt. Heading through the doorway out to the courtyard and looking straight ahead, I did my best strut, veering as close to Jack as I could without brushing against him on my walk by. His crowd of friends grew silent; I could feel all their eyes transfer to me as I passed. When I was several feet away, I heard one of his friends whistle. “She is smoking hot,” he said. There were laughs; next came the overenunciated voice of one of the girls. “Oh my
god
, Craig,” she chided. “She’s a
teacher
.” This was the attitude I knew I had to conquer in Jack’s mind: he had to be convinced that I was more like him than like his mother.

In my afternoon classes I sat as close to the window AC unit as possible in an attempt to stop the electricity circulating in my body, so close that one side of my face grew nearly numb. I knew it wasn’t good to be hung up on one specific student so early on, that I shouldn’t feel a sense of desperation just for him. My obsessing over Jack meant I was growing increasingly willing to try to speed
up contact. These urges might blind me to warning signs or cause me to engage in unnecessary risks. I needed to stay objective, but it seemed like a losing battle.