The Teacher - Chapter 1

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good
—W. H. Auden, “Funeral Blues”

When I was a boy, the job I wanted most when I grew up was The Prince in Sleeping Beauty. First, I wanted a job that came with a quest. A quest meant purpose. But a quest also meant peril, and it seemed to me that if I was going to face peril, if I was going to pick up my sword and stare down a dragon, if I was going to wade through thorns and climb a high tower, then I ought to do it in the name of love. Even at seven, nothing else seemed worth it. As I grew up, I continued to believe that I would make a good prince, but to give you an idea of how well I kept this ambition a secret and how hard it was for me to uphold those romantic ideals on a daily basis, by the time I reached high school my closest friends had nicknamed me King Gloom and Doom.

I suppose if I had only one story to tell in my life it would be this one, though I regret that it took place in the summer before I started college as it might be mistaken for a coming-of-age story. I have nothing against coming-of-age stories, but this isn’t one of them. I believe this could just as easily have happened when I was twenty-eight or sixty-eight. In retrospect, I’m glad it happened at the princely age of eighteen. The earlier the better, I say.

But I delay. Such is a problem of mine when no matter how glad I am for a story’s ending, a small part of me still rather dreads the actual telling. Yet tell it I must, and so to get things started, I have chosen a moment when, ironically, I thought to myself, “All right then—that’s the end of that.” Those were my exact words as I stepped out of the shower on the evening of June 15, 1983.

Because they knew what day it was, my good friends Ray, Ian, and Gus took me out that night. I had just finished toweling off when Gus called and said he would be by in ten minutes. I appreciated the urgency in Gus’s voice—I felt it was commensurate with my situation. My situation was that the only girl I had ever loved had just left town for good. As I said, I regret that this happened when I was eighteen. Even my mother, loyal romantic that she was, fell prey to the natural adult opinion that my “tragedy,” as I earnestly put it, was only so much teenage drama when I tried to explain to her the night before that I did not know if I would ever meet another girl like Amy again. How could you take your eighteen year-old son seriously when he tells you this? In my case, as the lawyer says, there were mitigating circumstances, or, more specifically, a mitigating circumstance—namely, The Teacher. Still, as I addressed my reflec-tion in the mirror that night, I wondered if I wouldn’t need his council any more.

I had just finished tying my sneakers when I heard the familiar chug-chug-thunk of Gus’ ’68 Volvo expiring in my driveway. Gus never wasted any time getting from one place to the next, and after the car door slam came the footsteps on our porch and his sharp, urgent knock. I could pick Gus’ knock out in a lineup. He was smiling beneath his great shaggy mop of black hair when I opened the door, and I welcomed him in with a handshake. Gus was a year older than I, and the first peer with whom I had ever shaken hands. In fact, I was not a hand-shaker at all until I met him, but he had inadvertently trained me through habit, and I had lived silently grateful for the education ever since.

“Hey, Tom.”

I still got a certain satisfaction hearing one of my friends say my name. It was because of Ray, Ian, and Gus that I was Tom instead of Tommy. When I met them I introduced myself as Tommy Wicker, because that was my name. I was young Tommy Wicker, fourteen years old and almost six feet tall. But they didn’t call me Tommy. They called me Tom. I have no mem-ory of any of them ever calling me Tommy. It was as if they had settled the matter in conference ahead of time. However they arrived at the decision, the first time one of them said my name, I thought to myself, “You know? I am a Tom.” And I have been one ever since.

“You ready to go?” This actually meant, “Let’s go—now.” With Gus, there was always the feeling that something exciting would be missed if we didn’t hurry.

“Yeah, let me just . . .” I was already headed back into the living room where I found my mother sitting on the couch reading a magazine. My mother was an attractive woman, tall with broad, swimmer’s shoulders, though she had a kind of natural masculinity to her born of a quiet-ness that people who didn’t know her well enough frequently mistook for stoicism. I, however, knew she was anything but stoic, that she was instead someone doing the best that she could, which, in 1983 in particular, sometimes required a great deal of concentration.

“I’m heading out with Gus.”

“Oh, good old Gus.” She raised her chin in a little cheer for Gus.

“Yeah. So anyway . . .”

I paused, offering her an opportunity to say something that would make it all better. I had not spoken with her since I had returned from saying good-bye to Amy, so this was her chance. Whether or not she knew this to be her chance, all I got was a rather perfunctory, “Have a good time.” I suspected that what I had been hoping for was unfair. The problem with mo-ments like these is that saying the wrong thing somehow strengthens the case for hopelessness, and certainly no one knew that better than my mom. Still, I lingered there a moment by the couch, dragging my finger along the armrest, to see if she had one more thing to offer. Apparently she didn’t.

But as I turned to go, she called, “Oh, but tomorrow . . .”

I poked my head back in the living room. Her face was at once stern and conflicted. “We’re going to see Calvin.” Her voice lowered with authority and resolve as she said her father’s name.

“I know,” I grumped. I had begged out of the last trip to see my grandfather.

“Okay, but all of us.”

Now I was annoyed. And embarrassed. My mother was attempting to parent me. If she was not going to do this on a regular basis, she really had no right to pull it out when it suited her. But worse, she was hinting that I might try to beg out again, which I had secretly been planning to do.

“I know.”

She glowered at me. I had been caught. I was not, however, one to admit any culpabil-ity, and so I pressed on. “I know.”
“I just don’t want to be pulling you out of bed. We’re leaving a 10:00.”

This was a warning—not that she didn’t want to wake me at 10:00, but that she could smell an argument on the wind and that everyone needed to stay alert and steer this conversa-tional ship to safe waters. If someone had told Franny Wicker that there was a pill she could take to avoid all arguments until she died, she would have swallowed it without water. There was no satisfaction in arguing with her, anyway, and it was nearly impossible to do. If you went looking for a fight, she’d heard you coming and packed up camp. If you did surprise her, she immediately assumed a stance of moral indignity: Arguments were brutal, so why were you dragging her into one?

“Ten?”

I’d done it. I’d pushed back. But I hadn’t meant to sound so worked up over the time; the time had nothing to do with it. The problem was that someone in this family somehow or other had to admit that going to see Calvin—our favorite, no-discussion-about-it grandparent—had now become a chore, if for no other reason than it was impossible to look forward to. Yet it wasn’t the chore part that bothered me so much, it was all the dishonesty surrounding it. The Wickers were honest people overall, but when it came to death, apparently we preferred to look the other way.

She turned away from me and snapped her magazine open. “That’s right.”

End of argument. She had successfully framed the debate: On her side, her dying father; on mine, mere sleep.

I mumbled my acquiescence, feeling a vague deprivation at having not said what I had meant to say, and found Gus pacing in a circle by the front door. That night Gus wore what was more or less his uniform from May until September—shorts, rock T-shirt, and sneakers. He be-lieved this is what a teenager should wear. Gus seemed to have a rule for everything from hair-styles to music to movies to fast food. Question a rule and you were in for some vociferous de-bate, which gave Gus, despite his dedication to atheism, a kind of fervent religiosity. Plus, eve-rything for Gus was brilliant or idiotic, the best or the worst. It was a Heaven or Hell world he lived in, which could be a little exhausting sometimes. I wouldn’t have wanted him for a room-mate, but all in all I liked Gus’ company because he was not about to let life lack purpose on his watch.

I followed him out to the car and climbed into the passenger seat. Gus had inherited the Volvo the day he turned sixteen, and as he was the only one of my friends who owned his own car, it felt like our car. That the seats were torn, that one of the back windows wouldn’t open, that it had a vague, musty, old-beer smell was irrelevant. It’s advancing state of dereliction felt like our handprint upon it, and every flaw was another detail of familiarity we could lay claim to.

He fumbled with his keys, pumped the gas once, twice, and started the engine. “I’m tak-ing you to Burger King,” he announced with the weight of a connoisseur’s authority. Nothing for this evening would be below careful consideration.

Good old Gus, I thought. I don’t think I have given Gus enough credit yet for being the one to pick me up. That was not by chance. He was always at his best during moments like these. Gus lived for drama, and while a lot of it had to be drummed up, when confronted with the real thing, he was right there, unafraid. He was like a soldier always looking for a battle, and while it was easy to get tired of him wanting to fire his gun all the time, who better to call when the enemy was on the hill?

Finally in possession of a firm destination, Gus flipped the gearshift into first, grabbed the wheel—and stalled the car. “God, this car sucks,” he barked. “The clutch is loose, it’s got zero acceleration . . ..”

I wasn’t listening. We were stalled beneath an oak tree that shaded the street in front of our house, and I was reminded of sitting in Amy’s car in this very spot one night when I should have been kissing her. That night I managed to stretch saying good-bye out to a full fifteen min-utes without kissing her. As I remembered this, a thought came into my head. It was a very par-ticular thought, a thought to which I had been hoping I was immune but which it appeared now I was not because I was thinking it and it was this: “Why didn’t I tell her?” The thought was like a stray dog that had appeared at my heels. “Don’t you start following me around,” I said to it. But the dog just panted back at me, tongue over teeth, waiting for me show him his new home.

This triggered a series of wishful thoughts, such as that I had met her when I was junior instead of senior so we would have had another year together, and that I had kissed her on our first date as she later confessed she would have been happy to have had me do, and . . . and—and that Gus would stop talking about skiing! We were driving now, and lovely summer Providence rolled by, all evening shadow and green grass. I had never skied in my life, but Gus was explain-ing that given the opportunity he believed I would be an awesome skier. The problem with talk-ing to me about skiing was that I might have wanted to talk about skiing at a different time, but now where my interest in talking about skiing might have been there was only an empty hole, which made me feel as if I’d never want to talk about anything, which reminded me of one of The Teacher’s favorite aphorisms: “No one understands anything.”

“Oh God, Gus.”

Gus stopped talking about skiing.

“You see the problem is it didn’t end with her because we argued,” I began, because if he was going to be a good friend then I needed to explain myself. “Or because we didn’t like each other anymore, or because of anything other than her father decided he had to open a goddamned bed & breakfast in Hastings fricking Maine. You see? That’s the problem. It’s that she just left. You know what it was like, Gus? It was like we had an appointment with a guillotine. You know it’s coming, and then it comes, and then there you are—and then what? I mean then what the hell are you supposed to do? I don’t get it. I don’t get how that works.”

Gus shook his head meaningfully. “It’s a damn shame.”

He was aiming for a kind of world-weary sympathy, but he wasn’t anywhere near weary of the world yet. It’s impossible, I thought. It’s going to be impossible to make anyone else un-derstand. Only The Teacher, I decided with some regret. Only he would understand. This reali-zation had all the durable earmarks of inevitability, which would have pleased The Teacher mightily. The Teacher was very big into inevitability. I should point out that The Teacher was not your ordinary instructor. He had not been hired, for instance; he had arrived on his own and stayed because there was simply no one else around capable of doing the job. Say what you want about him, but in his own way The Teacher was always looking out for me. That’s cer-tainly something. I had not, however, heard much from him since I’d met Amy. After all, The Teacher was, first and foremost, company, and even when she and I were apart, Amy had been a kind of constant company for me. But now, of course, Amy was gone.

That past summer I had read T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock for the first time. I thought it was great, and eventually memorized the entire poem so I could recite it the same way I would learn and sing songs to myself. My favorite lines were these:

Do I dare
Disturb the Universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I so loved this stanza that I read it to my mother. It was evening, and she was sitting up in bed. “Mom, listen to this.” I read the lines. “Isn’t that great?”

She nodded and shrugged. What’s this? I thought. Usually my mother delighted in my sharing a line of poetry with her. Yet this is all I get? I pressed on. “It’s just so great. I mean—what do you think of it?”

I must not have been paying close attention to my mother up until that moment. I must have just been reading my poems and asking my questions to the unsinkable ship that was Mom. But it was too late to pay attention by the time I looked up from my poem. As I looked up, I fi-nally saw the expression on her face, and even as I was thinking with a shudder that I’d never seen it before, I knew that it was not the first time she had worn it.

Staring straight into the void of her oncoming question, she said, “I think it means: What’s the fucking point?”

I don’t remember what I said before I backed quickly out of her room and retreated to my own. And there was The Teacher, coiled around my bedpost. Like I said, I hadn’t invited him. He came when he was needed. I was not, however, particularly surprised to see him, nor was I surprised when he told me he’d been eyeing me for a while now and thought I had great poten-tial. He said he thought I was just the sort of person worthy of his advice, and that he rarely chose someone as young as I. I was flattered. He made me feel all grown up. He said he would always be close by to answer every question; he said he would always tell me how everything worked. I wasn’t sure at first. It seemed too simple. “You have to trust me, Thomas,” he said. “I’ve been a companion of your mother’s for years now, you know. Don’t you respect your mother?” “Oh, yes,” I said. “More than anyone.” “Well then,” he concluded, “I guess we can be-gin our lessons.”