Undercover (13 page)

A
FTER CHRISTIAN DIES on the battlefield, Roxane retires to a nunnery to mourn the man she thinks she loved. Cyrano, for her sake, maintains the charade—visiting Roxane to lift her spirits, suffering injustices he won’t speak of, assuring the woman he loves that she is right to go on loving the memory of another. Cyrano has grown poor. His coat is wearing thin. His words are making another playwright famous. But what does he do, for fourteen years? He attends to Roxane’s fantasy. “It was written / that I should build for others and be forgotten…” he says. “I stand below in
dark—’tis all my story— / while others climb to snatch the kiss of glory.”

Here’s what I think, when I think about it more: Beauty is a cruel deception, true. But the greatest tragedy of all is letting invisibility win. It’s choosing to give up the thing you want because you think you don’t deserve it.

I got to school extremely early the next morning. Most of the classrooms were still dark behind their doors, and the janitor was whistling a tune from years ago. The sun through the front windows was hitting the lockers just so, forcing a little spray of gleam, and from beneath the door of the teachers’ lounge came the high-in-the-nose stink of coffee. Down the hall, just near the auditorium, was Theo’s locker. I’d seen him there a million times before, holding court with Lila, and I’d seen him there in the early morning, before her bus rolled in. I was taking my chances, I understood that. I had brought my 1922 with me, for courage more than luck, and I’d clipped up my hair, and I wore my
best jeans, and I roamed that hallway, waiting—running my hand across the silver beaks of all those lockers, giving each a touch. Up the one side of that hall of lockers, down the other, until finally I saw him.

He’d come in through a side door with his hood lifted like a monk’s. There was some old snow crud in the wedges of his boots that made them go
pa-phaaaa, pa-phaaaa
as he walked. It wasn’t like we were the only two about; already the empty spaces between things were filling up with elbows, backpacks. Over by the corner where Theo had come in, Mr. Sue and Mrs. Sue were in the midst of some long talk, and suddenly Mr. Marcoroon was there, holding tea in a Styrofoam cup. When Theo saw me, he tucked his chin toward his chest. He headed for his locker, dialed in, opened the thing with a crack.

“Hey,” I said, for I’d followed him.

“Hey,” he said. He swung the locker door open to where I was. I circled behind him, to the other
side. I waited for an apology. An explanation. Nothing.

“You know this is ridiculous,” I said, “don’t you? There’s no reason why we can’t be friends.”

“Just doing my part to keep the peace,” Theo said.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “But I miss you.” My mouth was wads-of-cotton dry. I fished for the coin in my pocket.

He pulled his head out of his locker and looked up at me. His eyes seemed bruised and contradicted. “You should leave it alone, Elisa,” he finally said, standing and slamming the locker door.

“Isn’t it just a little bit bizarre—being afraid of the person you love?” Maybe I was desperate and therefore desperate sounding, but he had started walking down the hall. Away from me and into the crowd. Away and farther away from us. We split and came together, like a river over rocks. I grabbed his arm and held it, wouldn’t let go. I didn’t care if Margie slunk by. Or if Bolten saw. Or Lila.
Mr. Marcoroon was back and headed our way, and suddenly there was Dr. Charmin, pale as a snow-drop flower in a royal purple suit, some of her hair already loose from the knot she wore. Her eyes traveled down to my hand on Theo’s arm. She stopped, I shook my head, she walked on past.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Theo said at last, pulling us both toward the lockered wall, out of the way of things.

“Get what?” I freed his arm, turned to face him.

“That I’m not afraid for me. I’m afraid for you. You don’t know what she’s capable of.” He looked so deep into my eyes that I felt my stomach turn, my heart go wild and helpless.

“What can she do to me, Theo?” I said. “Honestly?”

“You have no idea,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep you safe.”

“I’m skating in that competition,” I said. “The one you left me the flyer on.”

“Yeah?” He smiled faintly. “You better win.”

“Will you come to watch?” I almost pleaded with him.

“Are you kidding? That would start a war.”

“Is it really going to be like this?”

“At least for now.”

“But do you love her?”

“I’m
caught up
with her,” he said, “and there’s a difference.”

“You could choose, you know, not to be.” And I was about to say more. About to retrace the sad history of Roxane and Cyrano. About to say that tragedy is not inevitable, that it works far better in old books than in real life, but then I saw her—saw Lila—fuming down the hall with all her ardent anger. She had the snap-snap walk of a model on a runway, and her jacket was open so that it winged away from her, making her seem like some prehistoric bird. Anyone near her dodged her. The corridor went wide empty before her, the crowd scuttled off to either side.

“Didn’t I tell you, Cantor,” she said when she
reached the two of us at the lockered wall, “to leave Theo alone?”

“Isn’t this,” I asked, “a free country?”

“Give it up. You’re a charity case. You’re not in his league and you never will be.” She pressed a hand to my left shoulder and put her mouth up near my ear: “You’re going to pay for this, Elisa. You wait.”

“Lila,” Theo said, in a placating voice. “We were just—”

“Don’t you dare say it’s Honors English again. I’m not that stupid, you know.”

“—talking,” Theo said. “We were just talking.”

“There’s no ‘just’ here, Theo. This is crazy.” She looked as if she were about to blow. Her hand pressed harder against my shoulder. A little crowd had formed, but at some distance. I didn’t know, I really didn’t, what would happen next.

And then I heard a familiar voice; I saw a familiar royal purple. “Everything okay here, I presume? You’re all now headed off to classes?” She stood
there for a moment, Dr. Charmin did, eyeing us, with her arms crossed against her chest.

“Yes, Dr. Charmin,” Theo said.

“Yes,” I said. And: “Thank you.”

After school that day I went straight to Dr. Charmin’s classroom. She was there, at her chalkboard, ghosting the day into the past, and she’d removed her suit jacket and set it aside, let her hair all the way out of its knot. I could almost see her then as she must have been when she first began her Book of Words. When there were still a million poems, stories, plays that she hadn’t yet learned to decipher.

“Dr. Charmin,” I said.

“Yes?” she turned, and whatever thought she’d been having had by now been replaced by another. She seemed pleased to see me, relieved almost, as if I’d had a choice to make and finally made the right one. “What can I do for you, Miss Cantor?”

I didn’t actually know. I couldn’t tell her why I’d
come. Maybe it’s easier, not being invisible alone. Maybe it’s better to find an ally. I walked to the first row of seats, unharnessed my backpack, sunk down into a chair. Dr. Charmin leaned against her desk, facing me. “I’ve been thinking,” I finally said, “about Cyrano.”

“He’s hard to forget,” she said, “once you know him.” There was a little puff of dust on her cheek. A tired crease above her eyes, kindness in them.

“I was thinking about his last monologue. That line he says: ‘It is the hope forlorn that seals the poet.’”

“Ah.” Dr. Charmin looked past me then, to the windows beyond. “Well. Many things seal a poet. Courage, for example. And a particular way of seeing.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“No,” she said, looking directly at me now. “That’s true. Poems are there to be discovered. And poets stand right there, behind them.”

“What does Cyrano have in the end?” I asked.

“His panache,” she said after a moment. “His dignity. The love of his beloved.”

“But he’s dying,” I said, “and he still has that stupid nose. And what good is Roxane watering his grave with tears going to do?”

“Well, that’s why you were right, Elisa. It is a tragedy.” She gave that word a little sun. She shrugged her shoulders slyly.

“You know what I hate?” I declared, feeling emboldened.

“What’s that?”

“The rules of love.”

“Rotten.” She smiled. “Through and through. But if they weren’t so rotten, what would poets do?”

“Hope less forlornly, I guess.”

“Yes. Maybe they would. But oh, how the poems themselves would suffer.”

She looked at me and something caught in her throat. The lines above her forehead crossed, and all of a sudden, she was laughing. Just the smallest oddest ripple of a laugh, a rueful laugh that, it
seemed to me, mixed the present with the past. The thinnest tear ran down her cheek, a minor stream of mascara.

“You know what I love?” Dr. Charmin said after she’d caught her breath.

“Tragedies,” I said, “and teaching them.”

“True,” she smiled. “But there are other things. Like a poem called ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver. I have a copy,” she said, “that I’ve been meaning to give to you. To have for when you need it.” She turned and rifled through some papers on her desk. She handed me a Xerox copy. “For you,” she said.

I leaned across the space between us and took the paper from her hands. “Courage,” she said, “is all. Remember that.”

A
LL THROUGH the next several days I kept the poem with me—in the front pocket of my pants, on my nightstand, tucked inside a sock. I left Theo and Lila in their tangle. I steered clear, for all our sakes. I wouldn’t look up when Lila steamed at me, refused to give her the slightest chance to make good on her threats.

I focused, instead, on the skating. Went out to the pond with my new pair of skates and slowly broke them in, bending the creases into the ankles just so, sitting right on top of the blades. I could go so much deeper on my edges because of this, and
also I could carry more speed, get greater height on my toe-pick jumps, hold the landings longer. I took whole songs to the pond in my head and choreographed my way straight through them, because that, of course, is what an interpretive free skate competition is: They play the music. You interpret. Mom had called and they’d read her the rules, and this is what she told me: That we competitors would hear a chosen clip of music three times on the rink, then be escorted back to the dressing rooms, which were supposedly soundproof. Then, one by one, they’d call our names and we’d be returned to the rink and asked to skate to the music as if we’d always known the music, to its stresses and accents, to its story, though Mom didn’t say the last part, of course. It was just something that I knew from loving poems, from the things that Dr. Charmin taught me. Out on the pond I was skating to remembered songs, riding the crest of violins.

At home Mom had settled on spearmint green. Long sleeves, she’d decided, and a scooped-out
neck. She’d cut a pattern, and after dinner I’d stand as she pinned the pattern to me, talking height and length of skirt with a mouthful of pins. Jilly’d decided to front the dress with rows of pearly beads, each pearl set into a sequin base that shimmered in the light. She’d spent hours at the crafts and fabric store testing combinations.

“Jilly,” I said, “you don’t have to do that.”

“This,” she said, “is what I’m good at.”

And then one night, right before the competition, I found a letter on my pillow—not a postcard, but a letter, postmarked San Francisco. I tore it open and sat on my bed, then stood, then sat, then paced my room, then stood in the window, near the shimmer star, and read. And then I walked around my room again and read the letter three times more.

Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.

T
HAT SATURDAY I rose before dawn, when the stars were still out and the moon had traveled to the far end of the yard. I reread Dad’s letter and I reread Mary Oliver’s poem, then I tucked both inside my Stash O’ Nature box for when I would need them again. Courage is the step you take after the step just taken. That was something else that I was learning.

The night before, Mom and Jilly had hung my competition dress on a wooden hanger and hooked that hanger over my bedroom door; the dress shone like a second sweep of stars. Every seam of that dress
was tight, every pearl sewn into its shell of sequin. Mom had found my color at last, and my color, just for the extremely permanent record, is spearmint green.

It had been decided that I’d wear a pair of spandex pants to the rink, a purple turtleneck, tights, one of Jilly’s white sweaters. That my hair would be straightened, then curled, that I’d wear three coats of mascara, that we’d go with a ruddy color for my cheeks and a reddish brown for my lips, that we’d do all the primping in my room. Talk about tedious. You need a talent for sitting if you want any shot at beauty, a high tolerance for mirror glare. And then you need to fit your real face into the face you’ve been drawn into, which is an art in itself.

“You’ve got to stop twitching,” Jilly said.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said back.

“You’re a girl,” Jilly said. “Get used to it.”

“There are all kinds of girls.”

“Will you stop?” my mother called from down the hall. “You’re giving me a headache. Both of
you.” I thought about Mom, and all she did not know was coming. I imagined her with her tubes and her brushes before her mirrored glass, orchestrating her own metamorphosis. I smiled a little covert smile as Jilly glossed my lips. She sighed and rolled her lovely eyes.

“You are the worst beauty client,” Jilly said, reaching for a Kleenex to dab away a smudge. “Ever.”

I shrugged.

“I’m doing my best here,” she said.

“You’re a pro.”

I sat quietly while she finished the job. Put my mind on the ice and the edges of my skates, set my conjured skates to song. Thought of all the different ways the coming competition might go, of how it might feel to skate before a crowd. I did not hear the doorbell when it rang. I did not hear (though Jilly told me later) when it rang again. Maybe vaguely I heard Mom say, “All right, you two. I’ll get it.” Maybe vaguely heard her open her door. Did hear her heading down the stairs.

“You expecting someone, Jilly?” I said, finally snapping out of my daze.

“Nnnhnnmm.” She had the hair clip in her mouth, the finishing touch.

“No one at all?”

“Nnnnhmm.”

Suddenly, acutely aware of all things, I leaned toward my door and listened to the goings-on downstairs. It couldn’t be Dad, I thought. It couldn’t be; that wasn’t our plan. And if it wasn’t Dad and wasn’t one of Jilly’s billion friends, who had come to visit? I heard my mother’s high voice and a lower, shy voice. I heard a mumble and a laugh. “Jilly, will you excuse me for a moment?” I said. I opened the door and unceremoniously flew.

My mother swiveled as I rumbled down the stairs. “I was just about to go and get you,” she said. She had a sly, sweet smile on her perfectly tinted face. She had a glimmer in her eyes, small reflected parts of Theo.

I stared past my mom, toward him. “But what are
you doing here?” I asked. I touched my fingers to my face, felt every inch of spandexed, turtlenecked skin go red. I looked up the staircase, saw Jilly smiling. I turned the other way, and there was Mom. I turned and there was Theo again, no ring in his ear, no spikes in his hair, no fear in his eyes. Just Theo.

“Choosing,” Theo said. “To come. To wish you luck, in person, on the big day.”

“You’re choosing,” I said. I hoped my smile was where Jilly had drawn it. I hoped my eyes looked like mine.

“Yes.” He smiled.

“Good choice,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought so.” I wanted to laugh. I wanted to dance. I wanted to grab that guy and kiss him.

“Were you planning on introductions, Elisa?” Mom asked.

“But you’ve already met.” I felt my face go red again.

“He hasn’t met me,” said Jilly, who had made
her way down the stairs.

“This is Theo,” I said, giving Jilly the don’t-you-dare-ruin-this stare. “And this”—I bowed faux fawningly—“is Jilly. My personal beautician.”

“And sister.”

“Excellent work.” Theo nodded.

“Can you stay awhile, Theo?” Mom interjected. “We have chips, I think. And salsa.”

“If we’re lucky,” Jilly said, and laughed, then stopped after she caught Mom’s eye.

“I can’t,” Theo said. “At least I can’t today.”

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Skate your heart out, Elisa.”

“I will.”

“Don’t get a swelled head if you win.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Call me later, if you want to.”