Brief Encounters with the Enemy Page 12

  George the custodian was mopping the floor. He’d been mopping the floor for twenty-five years. When we passed, he stopped and said, “Welcome back, Mr. Mattingly.”

  “I’m glad to be back, George,” I said.

  “I prayed for you every day,” he said. He was being obsequious, and I liked it.

  The typing teacher came out of her classroom and said, “Oh my God, Jake,” and hugged me. It was the first time a woman had touched me in eighteen months and I thought about resting my head on her shoulder. Her voice filled the hallway, which brought the spelling teacher out of her room, and the art teacher, and the English teacher. They all came running. Soon the hallway was filled with two dozen teachers and George, standing around waiting for me to regale them with war stories. I gave them platitudes. I told them it had been an honor and a privilege. I told them I’d do it again. They enjoyed the platitudes. They mistook the platitudes for details. Dr. Dave raised my arm like a boxer who’d won the championship.

  But an hour minutes later I had fourteen boys and girls staring at me, wanting to know where Mrs. Tannehill was.

  “Mrs. Tannehill was your substitute,” I informed them.

  Their faces were blank. They didn’t understand. A substitute was someone who replaced the teacher. They had begun the year with Mrs. Tannehill, who was now being replaced. The seventh-graders before them had only ever known Mrs. Tannehill as well. As far as everyone in the near vicinity was concerned, I was the substitute.

  The students sat in two rows of five and one row of four. They were the children of those who could afford prep school tuition—bankers, lawyers, doctors. They would grow up to be bankers, lawyers, doctors. This was the cycle and I was a part of it. They dressed in clean, pressed uniforms in the school colors of gold and black. The girls wore dresses, the boys wore ties. Their ties were gold or black. They might have appeared like well-behaved students, with their hands crossed, their pencils at the top of their desks, but their expressions were vindictive and mistrustful. They wanted me gone.

  I explained to them that Mrs. Tannehill had been covering for me while I’d been “off fighting a war.” This was supposed to impress them, but it made no significant impact, even on the boys. It left me at a total loss as to what to say or do next. I’d been prepared for a rousing reception from these twelve-year-olds and now there was silence. Perhaps they thought I was inventing my military service. No doubt they’d grown accustomed to being lied to by adults. It would have helped if I’d been wounded in the line of duty, just a minor wound, something that had left a mark. I could have rolled up my sleeve and said, “This is where the bullet went in.” There was a soldier in my battalion who lost the tip of his pinkie finger. Brandon. It was only the tip and only the pinkie, and he’d done it while cleaning his gun one morning. He was an idiot, but it wasn’t a gruesome disfigurement, nor would it hinder him in life, and it was something he would forever be able to tell an unprompted story about. In lieu of my own wound, I thought about passing around my military ID, but that struck me as defeatist and emasculating. No, they wanted something tangible. They wanted the tip of my finger.

  I tried a different angle. “Who here can tell me how the war ended?” Even as I said it, I could hear the honeycoated quality of my voice, pedantic and condescending. It was too late to take it back. I was talking down to them and they knew it, asking them a question that even a five-year-old could answer. Still, I waited, arms crossed in the pedagogical style, looking for someone to provide me the correct response, which, of course, was “We won.” This was the pivotal moment that I had studied in my teacher training courses; it was where I would gauge if the students respected my authority and viewed me as an educator. All I needed was one child, one out of fourteen, to give me the answer and I’d be able to move on organically to a discussion of what I’d been doing the last eighteen months. They would demand descriptions and I would give them descriptions. All the brutal descriptions their hearts desired. I’d hold nothing back and they’d be spellbound. Death by drowning, by burning, by whatever means available. That was how we had won the war.

  While I waited, I could feel a prodigious amount of silent time slipping past. My mind wandered dangerously. It began to fade. I realized how jet-lagged I was. The manual had cautioned about fatigue. I became absorbed in the dioramas, little resting Newton being crowned by a clay apple, and I contemplated what historical events came after 1959 and how much work it would be for me to piece those events together. Through the window, I could see the gray sky hovering over the edge of the woods. The sprinklers oscillated across the baseball field, shuck, shuck, shuck was their sound, their reach long and powerful, and most of the time they missed the field altogether and shot straight into the pond.

  Finally, mercifully, a little girl in the back row raised her hand. Her name was Bethany and she wore a gold ribbon in her hair and sat with perfect posture. “Bethany is bright, introspective …”

  “Yes, Bethany?” I said.

  “Is Mrs. Tannehill sick?”

  It was three weeks after I’d gotten home that I was finally able to see Molly. It was supposed to have been only two weeks, but that’s the nature of an affair. We’d had a few phone conversations along the way, breathy and furtive and yearning, and each time she’d had to hang up in the middle. “I’m trying my best, honey,” she’d promised. But she didn’t seem all that bothered. This was not how I’d envisioned my homecoming.

  She arrived on a Saturday afternoon with Lola. They were en route to a pottery class and had one hour to spare. Lola leaped into my arms straightaway. At least she was happy to see me. “What’d you bring me?” she wanted to know. She was heavy in my arms. She’d become a little woman. I wanted to bury my face in her neck and weep at the passage of time. I wanted her mother to see how much I had missed them.

  “I was at war,” I said. “I didn’t bring you anything.”

  She shrugged. She jumped from my arms onto the futon. She jumped up and down on the futon. The futon was pushed against the wall and doubled as a couch, in the same way that my desk doubled as a table. My kitchen cabinets doubled as a place to file papers. This was life in an efficiency. With three people it was crowded.

  “Don’t jump on the bed,” Molly said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I wanted to be permissive.

  Molly let me kiss her on the cheek. It was a casual, platonic, meaningless kiss that I had perfected. Molly wanted to make sure Lola was protected from the effects of “our transgression.” If Lola were ever to innocently mention something to her father, it could be explained away as a harmless kiss from a harmless friend. “Mommy’s old friend Jake.” “Mommy’s dear friend Jake.” That was the parameter we worked within. We’d been working within it for three years. In three years, Lola had never said anything to her father. She seemed to notice nothing and be affected by nothing. As far as I could tell, she seemed to love me. I often wondered if she loved me most of all and was aiding and abetting us, perhaps unconsciously, because I was the one she really wanted as her father. “He’s absentee,” Molly had told me when we first met. She didn’t mean that her husband traveled, she meant that he was emotionless and humorless. He was an entrepreneur. He owned shopping malls or shopping centers. “I’m trying to help the world,” she said he’d tell her. He spent his weekends on the phone.

  We sat around my desk/table, the three of us, eating muffins that I’d bought for our reunion. Lola wanted to eat only the tops of the muffins. “The muffinheads,” she called them. She pulled them apart, stuffed the heads in her mouth, and put the unwanted portion back on the plate. She was disgusting.

  “Eat the whole thing,” Molly instructed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I wanted to be the good guy.

  Six muffins later, Lola had to use the bathroom. The moment the door was closed, I pulled Molly onto my lap. Her body was warm and her hair fell in my face. “No, no, no,” she cooed, but she straddled me anyway. She was always sure to offer
resistance. The resistance only increased the desire, of course, but it seemed to put her mind at ease and resolve the moral dilemma.

  She’d married too young. That was the dilemma. She’d had Lola too young. That was another dilemma. She’d wanted to be an artist—now she was thirty-eight and a housewife.

  “It’s too late,” she’d tell me.

  “No,” I’d say, “it’s never too late.” But I didn’t really believe it myself.

  We’d met by chance at a museum three years ago. She’d had her sketch pad and I’d had my students. I’d brought them on a field trip to show them a traveling exhibit of antiquities from the Ottoman Empire. They were disinterested and I was distracted. Molly kept walking past with her high heels and her hoop earrings and her red hair. I tried my best not to have my students catch me looking at her ass. I’d shown off in front of her by doing an imitation of Mehmed II. The class had roared and she had smiled. They loved me, those students. They would do anything I wanted, answer any question I asked. As we were leaving, I happened to run into her at the coat check. “If you ever want a guided tour …” I said. I had no idea she’d take me up on it. I had no idea she was married. A week later we were back at the museum. She’d brought her sketch pad again. In truth, she was the expert, telling me about the artwork and the artists and the brushstroke. She showed me some of her own drawings. They weren’t of paintings and sculptures but of people looking at paintings and sculptures. She was obviously talented. “They’re amazing,” I said. “Do you really think so?” she said. We sat close to each other in front of Monet’s water lilies while she talked for twenty minutes about the painter’s failing eyesight. I was fixated on her hip pressing against my hip. Later we made out in my car, and when we were done, she pulled her wedding ring out of her pocket. It had one huge diamond. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. She thought that would be the end of us, but it wasn’t. I didn’t care about any nameless, faceless husband. It was every man for himself in this world.

  We’d seen each other about once a month since then, sometimes twice a month. We avoided phone calls, we deleted emails, we met at out-of-the-way places. Once, when her husband was preoccupied, we managed to see each other two days in a row. We took Lola to the circus on Saturday and the amusement park on Sunday. It was like we were a family, or trying to be a family, laughing and sliding down the water slide. It had seemed like a grand achievement at the time not to exhibit any trace of desire. “Mommy’s friend Jake.”

  Now Molly was on my lap. Her legs wrapped around me. Her skirt rode up high.

  “Come back,” I gasped.

  “I will,” she whispered.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Soon,” she said.

  “How soon?”

  By the time Lola came tearing out of the bathroom, flinging herself on my couch/bed, and screaming, “Let’s play war!” Molly and I were sitting in our respective seats talking about the weather. We were pros.

  The days were getting longer and warmer, but the sky was overcast and it still hadn’t rained. To get to school each morning, I drove over the bridge heading east. Down along the river, I could see the factories all in a row, their smokestacks going. A few of them had closed since the war had ended. That was an unintended consequence of the peace. The people who had come in from the outskirts for work were heading back to the outskirts.

  As for my classroom, it was established that the students hated me. Even those Mrs. Tannehill had described as “loving,” “caring,” “forgiving” loathed me. In the beginning I tried to curry favor by handing out candy from a large glass jar that I kept on my desk—a blatant disregard of teaching ethics—but it didn’t achieve the desired result. The children would eat the candy sullenly and in a manner of obligation. I had become the enemy in their eyes, and even when the enemy gives something good, it is received with suspicion and resentment. Naturally, I began to hate them in return. I fantasized about failing them, each and every one. I would fail them through no shortcoming in their classwork, but it would serve them right all the same. I would teach them a lesson about the vagaries and the violence of the real world. Unfortunately, failing them would require more work from me than passing them. It would require written explanations and conferences with parents. Dr. Dave would want to know what had gone wrong and where. In the end, it would be simpler to pass them. A’s across the board. But those A’s would come at a price. There would be no drawings, no dioramas, no excursions to museums. No candy. In short, no fun. That would be our pact. If I were the enemy in their eyes, then I would play the role of the enemy.

  Meanwhile, they made quick work of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Victorian Era, the Great Famine. Decades fell by the wayside. Their collective rigor and acumen were impressive. They wrote thoughtful, insightful essays about the reasons one million people had to starve to death. Their grammar was excellent, their spelling perfect. I could find no fault. The twentieth century loomed. It wasn’t until the Civil War that I managed to bog them down. War made their shoulders slump and their eyes glaze over. I punished them all the more for it. I spent whole classes standing at the front of the room, reading aloud from eyewitness accounts about Harpers Ferry and Bull Run—“Yonder down below, I descried a figure …”—trying to draw subtle, meaningful parallels to our present. Other times I copied long passages verbatim from the textbook onto the chalkboard, and as I copied, they copied. For an hour the only sounds in the classroom were the scraping of chalk and pencil and the sprinklers going shuck, shuck, shuck. On Thursdays they read aloud, on Fridays they read to themselves. On Mondays I turned obscure. “Who was General Zollicoffer, Chloe?” Chloe didn’t know. Chloe must memorize. “Where was the Battle of Pea Ridge, Trevor?” Trevor must study more.

  “History is dead,” I said one day, apropos of nothing. “The past doesn’t exist.” I slammed the textbook closed for emphasis. The idea had come into my head fully formed. I thought it sounded profound, but the students looked weary. I opened the jar of candy on my desk and took out a handful. They had not had any in quite a while. I jiggled it in my hand as if considering. They stared at the bounty. I went from desk to desk, slowly giving one colorful piece to each student.

  The enemy sometimes gives spontaneously and for no apparent reason.

  They unwrapped their treats reflexively. They stuck them in their mouths. They waited for the bell to ring. They thought of Mrs. Tannehill.

  It was during the Gilded Age that Dr. Dave showed up one morning unannounced. I was content with the Gilded Age. I had slowed the class perfectly, and with summer vacation approaching, we would have enough time to dip a toe into the twentieth century. That was all we needed to do in order to say we had done it. Then they could go on to seventh grade.

  “Is it okay if I sit in today, Mr. Mattingly?” Dr. Dave asked. There was a hint of agenda in his voice.

  “Of course it is,” I said. But I was ill prepared for observation. I made a grand sweep of my arm toward a desk in the back, as if my hospitality were immense.

  I instructed the class to welcome Dr. Dave and they obliged mechanically: “HEL. LO. DOC. TORRRRRR. DAY. VE.” I scanned my students’ faces, trying to determine who among them had betrayed me. Someone no doubt had said something to their parents, who had called Dr. Dave. He had decided to come investigate for himself. The first thing he was sure to notice was the jar of candy on my desk. It glowed multicolored and bright.

  He took a seat in the back row with his blue jeans. He was too large for the desk and he crossed his legs, trying to find purchase. He waited. The students waited. They knew something was amiss. They sensed my predicament. The enemy was being watched. Crimes would be revealed. As the bromide goes, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Dr. Dave may very well have been the students’ enemy too. He had it in him. I had observed him once bring to tears an eighth-grade girl who’d made the mistake of referring to him as “Mister.” “Good morning, Mr. Dave.”

  �
�I worked very hard for my doctorate, young lady,” he’d explained, inches from her face.

  So we stepped lightly, the students and I, we groped for détente.

  I loosened my tie and smiled. They smiled in return. I asked if they had plans for the weekend. They murmured some response.

  With small talk depleted, I broached the subject of the Gilded Age. “Who here can tell me about the Gilded Age?”

  There was a great, wide silence. I had overwhelmed them with too broad a question. They couldn’t have responded if they had wanted to. My technique had ignored the principles of how a young mind was equipped to think. Begin with relatable details, work toward larger concepts, expand outward into interpretation. It took everything I had not to glance in the direction of Dr. Dave. It took everything I had not to open the jar of candy.

  “Who here can tell me,” I tried again, “about the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt?” Again silence. I had whittled the era down to the size of one human figure, though I wasn’t sure whether the students would have given me an answer even if they had one.

  The enemy was hunted. The enemy was cornered. The enemy would capitulate. Now was not the time to show mercy.

  It was warm in the classroom and I was beginning to sweat. To buy time, I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. I was sure that patches of sweat were visible around my armpits. One of the drawbacks about teaching in a quaint one-hundred-year-old building was that no provision had been made for air-conditioning. When the temperature rose, we suffered for it. The best you could hope for was that George the janitor would bring you a fan. Outside, the sprinklers toiled over the baseball field, but the grass was turning brown. Grass all over the city was turning brown. Rain was what was needed.

  On the last day of the school year, Dr. Dave summoned me into his office. “Can I have a word with you, Jake?” is how he asked. I’d been expecting something of this sort but hadn’t prepared an able defense.