The Natural Order of Things (17 page)

In a halfhearted attempt to get her head straight before leaving for work, she stands in the shower under a spray of scalding water until her fingertips prune and her skin turns red, then she changes into the most conservative ensemble she owns—a sleeveless ruched top, wool pencil skirt, gray blazer, maroon silk scarf. The priests do not approve. They frown as she marches through the halls in her platform shoes, but she is a committed teacher, a brilliant and ambitious editor of the school literary magazine, and they pity her, the disconsolate, childless widow, but this at least puts them on equal footing since she pities them, too, especially when she catches them lingering in the doorways, their eyes moving dreamily across her plentiful breasts.

At seven o’clock, she drives to school. Already the bisecting contrails of a hundred jets obscure the sky like the crisscrossing telephone cables and the tangled grid of electric lines suspended above the neighborhood streets, corralling her within this gilded pen like some mindless beast of burden and inspiring her, as it does every morning with ritualistic inevitability, to light her first official cigarette of the day. She inhales a gratifying lungful of smoke, the one and only drag that tastes any damned good, the rest merely a form of habit and imprisonment like much else in life. The idea of ritual pleases her, however, because it suggests something communal—an agreed-upon set of beliefs, values, collective grievances—and it gives her great comfort to know that all across the country, thousands of addicts are simultaneously taking that first puff with a fanaticism that is, if not exactly religious, then certainly sacramental.

For nearly thirty minutes, she sits in the faculty parking lot with the engine idling and wonders if the exhaust pouring from the broken tailpipe might kill her once and for all, making quick work of what the cigarettes will take another decade or more to do. Scanning the plaza to see if anyone is observing her and feeling not unlike the
femme fatale
in the final scene of a film noir, she removes the .38 from the glove compartment. A fine weapon. Short recoil. Good accuracy. The Jesuits would be aghast if they knew of it, but Batya has a prepared response should they discover her secret. This neighborhood is a dangerous one, the streets are teeming with lunatics, and at the beginning of the semester she wrote a letter to the editor, arguing that teachers should have the right to carry a side arm into the classroom. Full-time faculty only, of course. Substitutes are clearly too inept, not to be trusted. When they read her op-ed, the priests laughed at her
candor, thought she was joking. A splendid work of social satire! No one took her seriously.

She checks her watch. Almost time. She flicks the smoldering butt out the window and places the pistol in her purse. For a moment, she stands in the parking lot, breathing the noxious air. The blast furnaces of the nearby steel mill taint the city with ammonia and coke dust. She looks up. A flock of ugly blackbirds, common grackles, slide feverishly between the telephone lines and, before disappearing into the yellow sky, drop their heavy white payloads on the hood of her car. With fury and revulsion, she stares after them but somehow stops herself from taking aim and firing.

It’s just a short walk to the main building.

With its pointed arches and sandstone sculptures depicting the Devil tempting a group of foolish virgins, the building looks not unlike a cathedral, smells of incense and candle wax and cigarettes, echoes with the imagined sounds of vows yet to be broken. Batya bounds up the creaking stairs two at a time to her office on the sixth floor. Because most of its windows face west, the nicotine-sodden hallway is encased in an umber gloom, and she fumbles against the wall until she finds a light switch. The sound of a hundred fluorescent bulbs buzz like things alive, agitated, angry, seconds away from showering her in white dust that stings and burns, choking her with a cloud of argon and mercury. Someone once told her that florescent lights cause certain people to have seizures. Saint Paul, they say, was afflicted with seizures ever since witnessing the blinding light while on the road to Damascus. Funny that God would prefer fluorescent lights to some other, but then God torments his slaves in the unlikeliest ways.

She, for instance, is burdened by the spectacle of dozens—maybe an even hundred, who knows, she never bothers to count them—World War II army soldiers, plastic men in green fatigues lobbing grenades, firing howitzers, hoisting bazookas on their shoulders. Some crawl on their bellies, others shout into walkie-talkies. All are assembled in a wide arc around her door so that she is forced to tiptoe between them like Gulliver among a maniacal horde of Lilliputians. They look as though they might storm her office, pillage her shelves, pin her to the wall, and one by one commit heinous acts upon her before filling her torso with a million rounds of tiny ammunition.

She has never been the victim of a prank, not on a scale like this, and she feels unsettled by its sick immaturity. Perhaps she has made the mistake of being too political in class, of having said some disparaging things about war, the ridiculous myth of manifest destiny, upsetting the more unendurably ideological and reactionary students. “Mind you,” she tells them as they shift restlessly in their chairs, “I’ve always considered myself a true patriot.” The sincerity of this statement is not to be questioned. There is the gun after all—can anything be more American than that?—and she has a permit to carry it, even to conceal it on her person. To her the law still means something, even if it doesn’t to the delinquents who straggle into her classroom each semester. She is also a staunch believer in self-reliance and cringes at the idea of calling campus security, that bumbling band of retired patrolmen better suited to writing parking tickets than dealing with an unstable and potentially dangerous 17-year-old stalker.

With a broom and dustpan, she sweeps up the army figures, tosses them into a trashcan, then locks her office door. After adjusting the mirror that hangs on the wall behind her desk, she begins her regiment of facial exercises. She smiles, frowns, pulls the skin taught against her cheekbones. She tries to ignore the faint lines at the corners of her eyes and the way her makeup seems to accentuate rather than camouflage her age. In the soft light, she still looks almost youthful, certainly younger than her forty-three years, but there is no way to disguise the roughness of her sun-damaged hands, the flat brown patches, the veins and tendons that stand out through the thin skin. She applies another daub of lotion and works it vigorously over her fingers and wrists.

Today she is determined to look her best for the confrontation that has now reached a boiling point.

“Good day, gentlemen!”

Rarely does she greet her class with such mawkish enthusiasm. Usually she snaps terse commands (“You will now turn to page 101 of your text!”); this has always been her way, and the more diligent students, the handful of overachievers, the ones with an instinct to sense trouble, hide behind their books as if for protection. A few of them ogle her with smoldering lust, their bodies steamy fumaroles oozing musk and sweat. They dream of a torrid love affair that ends in madness and death. Most of the boys, however, are crass and guileless. They take no interest in her at all. With folded arms, they sit at their desks, their chins drooping, their eyes puffy and crusted over with sleep. Among the latter is the culprit, the plagiarist. He slouches low in his seat, yawns, sighs, snorts with derision. His boredom she can understand. It’s his lack of respect that she finds so irritating.

“I finished reading your essays last night, gentlemen. The majority were adequate. Others were quite disappointing … to say the least.”

She shoves the paper at the culprit and searches his eyes for that defiant glimmer of the psychotic, a quick flash of seething fury, a glimpse of the wild animal that thrashes around inside his skull and yearns to feast on her bones. They call him the Minotaur and for good reason. His shoulders are enormous, monstrous really. Too much time pumping iron at the gym, not enough time studying at his desk. A child with no priorities and overactive genitals. She has watched him from the bleachers, has seen the carnage he leaves behind on the football field, has heard the shocking screams from his opponents as they are trampled under his powerful legs. Now she waits for him to grab her by the throat, strangle her, toss her body beneath the floorboards, brick her up inside a wall. No, he isn’t so imaginative as that. When it comes to death, Americans prefer their guns. Guns are simple. A quick bullet to the head, and it’s all over. People have no sense of the romantic anymore, a flair for the exquisite details of murder.

After handing back the essays she begins her normal routine, pacing up and down the rows, reciting a long passage of antiseptic prose from a composition textbook. Though it has taken her many months, she has finally learned to accept the dreariness of the new curriculum. The Jesuits, after much “soul searching” as they described it, have decided that because the majority of their students are primarily, and often exclusively, destined for the worlds of business and law (or, with God’s grace, the clergy), and that
there is no need for them to “analyze Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man monologue. Our students require
practical
writing classes, a refresher course on grammar and mechanics. You understand. The poetry of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems a bit … superfluous.”

Yes, she understands. Remediation is what they need. Instead of teaching the great books, she finds herself analyzing the hastily written essays and editorials of partisan hacks. It makes no difference to her any more. She isn’t naïve enough to think she can cure these prep school boys of their indolence by injecting them with a douse of intellectual curiosity. School has cretinized these boys. They are immune to learning. Regardless of the topic, most students pay no attention to what she has to say. Their intellects have shriveled and turned to dust like dog feces baking on the pavement under a blinding white sun. Their interest in academics extends no further than seeking new ways to cheat on exams and essays.

As the hour comes to an end, the students grab their bags and scramble into the hallway, relieved to survive another excruciating hour with Batya Pinter. But she won’t allow the culprit to leave, no, not before she lustily chastises him.

“Mr. McSweeney!”

The Minotaur sighs. He lifts his hands, feigning innocence, and with a swagger approaches her.

“I trust you read my comments?”

He nods.

“I’ll give you until six o’clock to submit a new paper.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t have it done by six o’clock.”

“Then I suggest you enroll again in this class next semester. At this point, you cannot possibly pass.”

“Give me until Monday, okay?”

“No, that won’t do.”

“You don’t understand. The big game is tomorrow night—”

She crosses her arms. “Mr. McSweeney, when
I
was in high school, we had a thing called standards.
My
teachers weren’t so accommodating, especially with students caught
cheating
on their term papers. No, I had to submit my own work, and in a timely fashion, or face harsh disciplinary action. Plagiarism, as I’m sure you know, is the worst kind of crime. Expulsion is not out of the question.”

Why is she boring him with this? She’s starting to sound like a stern headmistress, rattling off a string of clichés. There was a time, and not so long ago either, when just by sitting at the corner of her desk, crossing her legs, adjusting the hem of her skirt, lowering her voice, and batting her eyes in a certain way, she could manipulate a boy like Frank McSweeney and make him do almost anything she wanted.

“But I can’t lose my scholarship …” His voice cracks a little, betraying his cool exterior.

“Then do as I say, and bring your essay to my office. Tonight. After school. You have until six o’clock. No later. It may surprise you to learn that I have a life outside of this classroom.”

“But I have to study the playbook and—”

“That’s my final offer, Mr. McSweeney. Well?”

As he leaves the room and walks through the long tunnel of pale blue light, he seems to shudder. This boy doesn’t see deeply enough into life to understand that she is still a force to be reckoned with. To him, aging is a myth and beauty eternal. He will never wear on his handsome face the hardened scowl of defeat and resignation that he sees on the faces of so many other men. For the young, there is no future, just as there is no past. How easily they shed their memories, these boys, like snakes shedding their skins, but life soon leaves an awful and indelible mark, and experience is the most uncompromising teacher of them all.

Rather than visit the teachers’ lounge at the end of the day, Batya Pinter retreats to the gray silences of her office on the sixth floor, where she stands at a window overlooking the city’s scarred industrial valley. There, sitting on the dusty sill, she drinks her tea, smokes a cigarette, and watches the ghostly flames dance atop the tall vent stacks of the steel mills. Fire singes the sky, turning the low gray clouds black with ash.

Ever since taking this position at the Jesuit school, Batya has generally shunned the company of her colleagues. There are invitations, of course, to parties, to gallery openings, to the symphony, but she has no real desire to socialize with her fellow teachers at the quaint coffeehouse crowded with eccentric poets from the old neighborhood. Orchestral music, especially the unceasing bombast of Wagner, makes her nauseous, and Impressionist seascapes with small purple men in wooden dinghies bobbing along on rough brushstrokes of thick vermillion bore her to death, as do those ancient Greek serving bowls with unexpurgated depictions of pederasty between sinewy boys glistening with oil and their erect wrestling coaches wearing only lecherous coyote grins.

Most conversation she finds tedious, especially since the small talk these days centers around which aging faculty members have been whisked away to the clinic because Death has dropped by for an unexpected visit, perhaps not with glimmering scythe and hooded robe, no, but with a sly “Boo!”—just enough to put the fear of God into them, make them sink to the floor with a minor stroke, leaving them with a noticeable slump to their shoulders, an angry downward scowl to their mouths. To everyone’s relief, the clinic employs a battalion of overpaid and self-important quacks who know their trade just well enough to keep Death temporarily at bay, oblivious to the fact that Death will wait good-naturedly for the inevitable, silently paring his talons and stoking the fires of hell in preparation for the multitudes who have failed to seek redemption before the final hour.