Class Dismissed Read online

  “All right, everybody,” Mr. Lynch said, finally, in a voice that sounded weary even to himself, giving last rites to their class discussion with that universal admission that things were irretrievably out of control. “Remain calm.”

  Mickey finished his circuit of the room and disappeared into the broken boards. Patrick scanned his options, knowing he had only one, the one he’d hoped to save for May, Plan D: “Please open your texts to chapter six.” Second period moaned but submitted. As his students hauled out their texts, a text their teacher loathed more than they, a text that portrayed the moon landing as a recent event, Patrick noted that Sleepy Josh was back, slumped on the editing table, his Medusa head nestled in the pillow of his arms.

  That hard place returned to Patrick’s throat. He cleared it with a cough. “Page 127,” he announced. “A nation is born.”

  “A nation is bored,” muttered Abdul. Julio giggled.

  Sleepy Josh—who’d lost his third American history textbook two weeks before—sighed deeply, as if already dreaming. But as Patrick read the first sentence aloud, “Nations, like people, are often born in turmoil,” he lifted one eyelid, dropped it, and puckered those fuzzy lips.

  Susan

  I don’t know what it is with this kid, Susan. By this point I’ve usually got them in hand. He’s running my class. It’s humiliating.”

  “You’ve been complaining about Josh all year, Pat. Have the mother in for a chat. You can bring her around. You always do.” Susan tugged the blue comforter over her lap and slapped the three pillows behind her into a more comfortable shape.

  “But she’s not like the other mothers. The other mothers don’t have PhDs. The other mothers don’t use Latin in their ‘please excuse my son’ notes.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “When I left a message that Josh hadn’t finished his Malcolm X reflection, she wrote back ‘Nolo contendere.’”

  “Didn’t happen.”

  “Did.”

  Susan looked doubtfully over her glasses. Chauncey, Susan’s cat, followed the conversation from his perch on her dresser, blinking his clouded ancient eyes, shifting his puffy head back and forth like an overfed Wimbledon umpire. The judgmental edge, thought Patrick, when did that sneak in? She looked so uncompromising in those glasses, her dark hair pulled back, a style he used to enjoy thinking of as naughty librarian.

  Patrick didn’t like the turn this was taking, that too many nights were taking. But he had to defend himself. He set the stack of papers on his lap and turned to her. “Josh can’t fully express his disdain for his mother as an Upper West Side, middle-class white boy; it’s easier to do in blackface. And Dr. Mishkin likes telling her pals at NYU how much her son loves his public school—their kids, of course, are at Collegiate and Spence. No armchair Marxist, she. Her son has friends in the ’hood. Which was all good, until he decided to be Black. And she didn’t count on him getting the same attention as the other thirty-five kids in my second period. She wants public school props and private school perks.”

  Susan, ignoring his bon mot, let her book rest against her chest. “I think Dr. Mishkin is a bright, hard-working woman who wants her privileged but learning-disabled son to grow up in a racially and economically diverse environment. And she’s trying to make that work while he goes through a particularly difficult developmental phase.” Susan hunkered down into her pillows and hoisted her tome, Aspects of Modern Social Work, concealing, he knew, that expression of disapproval that had become her face when they were together. “God, Patrick, when did you get so cynical?”

  He sucked in a breath, ready to respond, but it was a question that couldn’t be answered without self-indictment. And clearly she had meant it as the end of their discussion, as her face remained covered by her book. He picked up his stack of papers and continued his grading.

  This had once been a cherished ritual, she reading a novel or something from her social work program, he editing papers from his creative writing classes. They’d interrupt one another when they came across something significant. Susan especially loved the raps. I’m the greatest mack in this whole world/now don’t you front, jus be my girl. The boys’ raps moved her. They always said the same thing—I’m the baddest, my dick’s the biggest—but to her they always meant respect me, love me, don’t hurt me.

  Providing entree into inner-city life was, amazingly, how he’d won her. No other woman in New York City had been so moved by his choice of careers.

  He’d followed a college girlfriend to New York. Helene. Raised in an old-world Armenian neighborhood outside Boston. In her family, teaching was viewed as a woman’s task. Not a profession, really, teaching children. A professor, yes. Helene had slept with her classics professor. He was refined and worldly. Business, law, medicine—these were acceptable pursuits for a man. Soon after Patrick settled in New York and it became clear that this urban teaching gig was more than a short-term, domestic Peace Corps affair, she dumped him.

  The rest of Patrick’s twenties were years in the romantic wilderness. There was the occasional interlude with females equally at loose ends: undiscovered actresses/barmaids, office temps, publishing house gofers. No real connections, just things that went bump in the night. But there was always teaching to consume his days and working on his master’s degree to absorb his nights.

  It was Oscar, Patrick’s college chum and sometime roommate, who pulled him into the swim. Oscar was short, dark, proudly half-Puerto Rican. Hunting women struck him as a noble venture; he claimed it was his “Latin blood.”

  “I know just the place,” Oscar said as they stalked Columbus Avenue. The saloons they passed seemed interchangeable to Patrick and some held unfortunate memories. They were always crammed with brokers, lawyers, bankers and, although he was tall, reasonably attractive, and appropriately groomed, the body language always constricted at the words public school teacher; the hair-flicking and arm-touching stopped and the pretty associate from Smith, Fletcher & Boyd would cross her arms in front of her little black dress and begin looking over his shoulder. This man will never summer in the Hamptons said the suddenly hunched shoulders; his children will never attend Dalton said the elbows that now hid the breasts.

  Oscar tugged Patrick into Jake’s Last Chance and ordered a couple of upmarket beers. He pointed his chin at a group of young women, maybe five or six, in after-work dresses.

  Oscar ambled toward the pack. He glanced at the TV behind the bar and shook his head. “Can you believe how lame that show is?” He smiled at a petite blonde. She smiled back. That’s all it took. The circle opened; they were in. So obvious, Patrick thought, so manipulative. Then again, all his Midwestern ingenuousness had gotten him nowhere.

  The place got louder. The girls got looser, flirtier. The little blonde, assistant to an assistant on Wall Street, offered that the men in her office were all jerks.

  “What kind of men do you like?” asked Oscar.

  “I like my men the way I like my coffee,” she smirked.

  “Café con leche?” asked Oscar, playing the Latin lover card. She asked him how he liked his women. He showed off his white teeth. “Like my beer.” Dirty laughs from the group.

  Thus began a can-you-top-this of sexual preference similes:

  “Like my universities, well-endowed.”

  “Like my paintings, well-hung.”

  The quips circled round and Patrick no longer heard them above the ambient hum of chatter, TV, and ice-on-glass, so focused was he on his turn. He’d not made a dent yet; the wingman had barely kept up with the leader. It was like the fifth-grade spelling bee: they were all standing, and he was waiting, waiting for his turn. He’d get one shot and spell it right and remain standing or miss it and sit down in humiliation. His turn was coming. His mind was empty.

  “I like my men like my cheese: hard, French, smelly.” This from a slender, pale, dark-haired woman with tortoise-shell glass
es, her head canted at a saucy angle. How had he not noticed her? Everyone laughed, but she just looked up at him, expressionless.

  “I like my women…” he began, and seconds passed as they do on stage when an actor forgets his line, “…like my oil: light, sweet, crude.”

  She smiled at this. He had, improbably, named her.

  Ultimately, Susan pried him away from the herd. And though she looked, in outline, like the rest—young and lovely and rather corporate—her response to him was the reverse of all he’d experienced in Manhattan watering holes. She’d come to Jake’s straight from her job at her father’s insurance company, but she’d recently decided that her parents’ suburban dream wasn’t for her, that she wanted to do something valuable with her life. Her background may have been East Coast cliché, prep-schooled and Darien-bred, but to Patrick’s Midwestern eyes she was exotic: that rare pretty girl—unknown in Peterson’s Prairie—with the crush not on the quarterback but on her English teacher.

  And so, to his surprise and delight, the very thing he was loath to reveal was the thing that captivated her. She nodded earnestly at the mention of his occupation and listened, rapt, to his teacher war stories. Her pupils dilated at the knife fights he’d preempted; she laughed and tossed her head at the stairwell couplings he’d forestalled; her hand went to his knee as he described the scrawny Haitian boy who’d slashed himself with his own box cutter, how he’d helped him wash off the blood in the custodian’s sink and wrapped his hand with a T-shirt from Lost and Found, only contemplating exposure to HIV later, after an oblique inquiry by Kupczek. And your doctor? Susan said, raising an eyebrow. He gave you the all clear? Patrick laughed a little too loud and smiled. She took his hand and took him home.

  Soon Oscar was looking for a new wingman and roommate. Patrick gathered his few effects and moved into the little condo near Columbia, where Susan was getting her MSW, which Susan’s parents had purchased as an “investment.”

  Susan’s parents, Bryce and Pepper (parents in Darien had names that retrievers had in Minnesota), were impressed by Patrick’s manners, and that his father had been a school superintendent. But Patrick detected a bemusement, bordering on concern, over his prospects. There was cachet, a reverse-snob appeal, in having one’s daughter choose social work over running the family business, but Patrick couldn’t help noticing that those of Susan’s girlfriends who had also chosen morally elevated careers had, in addition, the good sense to mate with investment bankers and litigators.

  Though Susan referred to herself as a “refugee from Darien,” she carried on a love-hate affair with her class. She was embarrassed by her privilege, fought it in ways large and small: never taking a taxi when she could hop a bus; ordering chicken instead of the shrimp; refusing to let Patrick pick up a check, a custom both “sexist” and “bourgeois.” But vacations at her family’s place in the Adirondacks were a cherished tradition. Patrick kept finding tiny jars of Corsican anchovy remoulade from Zabar’s on their shelves.

  The differences in class and region were both their core and fault line, and the first fissures spread in an argument over money. Susan paid a token, below-market “rent” to her parents every month and only expected Patrick to pay half of that. When Patrick insisted that he pay what he’d been paying for his previous apartment, that he didn’t expect her parents to subsidize him, she called him stubborn. What did it matter who paid what, as long as it was fair? She was going to be a social worker; he taught poor kids. If her parents underwrote those projects, where was the harm? From each according to his ability, she argued. Susan gave in, though, publicly miffed but secretly pleased at his self-reliance. He overheard her discussing this with her mother on the phone. Her words revealed little, but her tone said See? I found a man. Not one of those trust fund babies my girlfriends married.

  And that was the newest and widest crack in their relationship: marriage. She broached it first, in the abstract. I’d want to get married outdoors, she’d sigh as they strolled the rose garden in Central Park; Venice would be a fun place to honeymoon, she’d say, thumbing the Times travel section. He would nod, agreeing in the abstract, not tipping his hand. Susan was annoyed, though, then hurt. And who could blame her? He was thirty-one; she was twenty-seven. It wasn’t an unfair expectation, Patrick could see that. Even Oscar, ever the hound dog, said “Cabrón, she’s hot, she’s smart, she’s rich. Don’t know what she sees in your sad schoolteacher ass but jump that train before it leaves the station.”

  Eventually, there were fights. Yes, he loved her. No, no, he wasn’t carrying a torch for Helene. Or anyone. He wanted to get his master’s degree first, make a little more money. Why is it always about money? she said. Only someone from your background would say that, he thought but never said.

  Something essential changed, though, some emotional jujitsu took place, with her internship at the women’s shelter. Later and later she came home at night, exhausted but exhilarated, her dark eyes shiny, those pale cheeks flushed.

  “She is the sweetest woman, Pat,” Susan would say between bites of the now overcooked stroganoff or stir-fry or enchiladas he’d made. “She’s had the hardest life, but she’s still really hopeful,” she’d continue, listing the abusive stepfathers, baby-daddies, and society that had led this client to this place. Then Susan’s eyes would widen as she detailed the job counseling she’d scheduled, the gynecological exams, the day care arrangements for the woman’s children. She’d tilt her head in that adorable way, her favorite shiraz from that little wine shop on 106th staining her lips, adjusting those funky glasses, geeky-beautiful. Then she’d look at him, dreamy, the way she used to after he’d told one of his long teacher war stories, or after they’d had sex—back when they had regular sex—and say, “You can’t imagine, Pat, what it’s like to help someone who has never been helped before. Who has no idea why some white lady cares one way or the other about her life.” She sipped her wine. “It’s the greatest feeling.”

  He could imagine, actually. But, clearly, he was no longer the source of her greatest feelings. Now every teaching move he shared with Susan was deconstructed according to the latest lefty theory they’d fed her at Columbia, and found wanting. Where once he’d been her Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love, now he was a functionary, a drone in the public school hive. Later and later she came home from the shelter, aglow, afire. Fleetingly, he wondered if it was another man who was keeping her out, some hyper-feminized, goateed, over-educated Marcusian, and not the addicted, abused, hyper-fertile women she described with such fervor.

  Finally, desperate, he’d even dipped a toe in that marital pond.

  “Venice,” he said, perusing the Sunday Times, “that would be a great honeymoon.”

  “Hmmm,” Susan said, erasing an answer from the crossword, dismissing more than that faded, sinking city.

  She was withdrawing, Susan was, pulling in on herself, just as the blue comforter always ended up wound around her, girding her loins, that social work tome her breastplate.

  Chauncey leaped down from Susan’s dresser and up on the bed, circled a spot at the foot two times, and plumped his fat body down. (Why always two times? Patrick asked when he first moved in. I don’t know, she’d replied. It’s what cats do; it’s how they find their place.) This was his place, Susan made clear. He had slept there since she was in junior high; she wasn’t sure she could sleep without him. And so, though Patrick was mildly allergic to him, there he stayed. No amount of sleepless thrashing could unseat him. Patrick, awakened by his own sneezing, would find himself bolt upright, glaring at Chauncey; the cat would be sitting up, staring back, blinking occasionally. Back in the early, steamy days of their relationship, Chauncey liked to sit there and watch. It alarmed Patrick at first, looking up after a frantic bout of lovemaking, sheets, pillows, underclothes all about the room, to see Chauncey in his place, placid as the Sphinx.

  The cat opened wide his jaws in a slow yawn, thrusting out his tongue a
t Patrick. Patrick sneezed.

  Susan looked over her book. “Did you get the cat food?”

  “We still have some Purina.”

  “The vet said Chauncey needs the special food for senior cats. The Purina’s bad for his kidneys.” Susan swept her long black hair from the pillow and smoothed it with one hand, draping it over her freckled left shoulder. This had always gotten to him, and still did. Even now.

  “I’ll get some on the way home from school. I promise.” Susan lifted her book, nodding her head behind it a little too vigorously in that way that said, I know you won’t.

  Patrick could feel he’s your fucking cat worming its way up his esophagus, but he swallowed as it reached his soft palate, remembering the new regime, how Chauncey was their cat now. Having taken marriage off the table, Susan had renegotiated their contract: Patrick was now the primary caregiver, removing Chauncey’s litter-leavings and swabbing his nocturnal regurgitations, giving Patrick the chance to prove his worthiness as a mate. Somehow that obese, blind, fur-vomiting creature had become the measure of the husband, the father, he was likely to be.

  Susan closed her book and stretched to stroke Chauncey, who was sprawled at her feet, lapping the thick fur on his belly, gathering material for his next eruption. She clicked off the light on her nightstand, the understood signal for Patrick to turn off his light and go to sleep, or, in better times, make his move. He turned to put the stack of papers on his nightstand, paused to consider its heft and that most of the papers had to be returned first period, and leaned back. Normally he would have gotten up early and dealt with them, but he wasn’t feeling generous.

  Susan turned to him. “You weren’t that different, you know,” she said, gently.

  He ignored the shift in tone. “Different from what?”

  “Josh. When you were a kid.”

  “Says who?”