What Comes Next Page 2

  I’d like to suck the nipples of her big soft tits.

  She was wearing a pale-yellow dress which made her look like a goddess. The white queen of some lost tribe. Her hair loose. I walked her home. She kept glancing at me, big white queen, Chris the soldier loading between my legs ready to fire. My hands in my pockets.

  When she went in, I cursed myself for not going up with her. I stood in front of the building, thinking of waiting for her. Finishing what I started. A cop told me to move along. I could barely walk.

  I was out of my head to talk to her.

  DEFENSE SEC’Y

  BARS STEP-UP

  IN BOMBINGS

  ADMITS IT WOULDN’T HELP

  Read the Post on the subway. A record number of bombing raids in the North, two short of the record in the South. Report enemy defectors at new high. Allied spokesman says reason for guarded optimism. “We’ve killed more of them this month than at any time in the past. The worm is turning.” A picture of a headless corpse, unidentified—neither side claims him.

  Harris poll says 51 percent of the population approves the President’s conduct of the war. A sixteen-year-old boy is shot to death by an off-duty cop when trying to break into a car which had a SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE sticker in the back. The car, it turns out, belonging to the boy’s father. The father, a former war hero, embraces the cop (on page two), says he was only doing his duty.

  I have this sense, which gets me nervous, of not seeing things. As an exercise, I looked around me in the subway. Stared at faces. Photographed them in my mind, pasted them together, heads on bodies. They were gone as soon as I stopped looking. Only shadows remained.

  My mother answered the door—I had forgotten my key. Daubing at her eyes with a wadded Kleenex. (I could hear my father typing away in his study—the typewriter the sound of his presence.)

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, blowing her nose, her face scarred with mascara and rouge, like the inside of something.

  I went to my room, closed the door to shut out the noise of his typing. Head burning as if the typewriter were inside. He pounds on the keys.

  “Don’t expect any dinner,” my mother called through the door. “I don’t feel up to it.”

  “That’s all right. I’m not hungry.”

  “What?” she called, though it was impossible for her not to have heard me.

  She opened the door. “I’ll make you dinner, Chrissy, if you want some.”

  “I told you I didn’t want any.”

  “There’s some leftover pot roast,” she said. “Your sister’s marriage is breaking up. I’m afraid to tell your father. He’ll just go out of his mind when he finds out. You know how Dad gets.”

  “Is she coming home?”

  My mother took a letter from her apron pocket. Shoved it into my hand as if it were the kind of bad news I deserved.

  “Hey, I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “We all share the blame for this,” she said. “There’s no need to blame anyone, Chris. No one’s to blame for this. Sometimes with all the goodwill in the world people don’t get along.”

  It was all Hank’s fault, according to Phyllis—who blamed no one but herself, who had suffered like a saint, cooking and slaving, while her husband was having other women. Having endured all she could humanly endure, she threw him out.

  My mother sighed. “It’s probably all for the best.” Her voice a prayer for the dead. “He wasn’t any good. He wasn’t our kind of guy, as Dad would say.”

  “You used to like him,” I reminded her. “When she married him you said he was a dream of a son-in-law.”

  “It’s probably just a squabble, a temporary thing. You’ll see, Chrissy, in a week or two they’ll be together as if nothing had been wrong. Even in the best of marriages, I don’t have to tell you, the course of true love—which Dad will say is cliché …” She went on as she always does, lamenting her life, discovering consolations on all sides.

  I told her I had a nuclear-theory final to study for and asked her to leave.

  She hung on another five minutes, talking, hardly aware who she was talking to. Once she called me Ludwig.

  I called her Phyllis back, but she didn’t notice.

  “We don’t speak clichés in front of Ludwig, but between you and me, Chrissy, sometimes there isn’t any other way. There just isn’t, precious.”

  When she turned to go I almost goosed her.

  “If you knew how happy it made your father, you’d study more,” she once told me. I turned through the pages of my physics book. “Our progress in the area of atomic knowledge has been so overwhelming in the past decade that the science fiction of just a few years ago seems old-fashioned in the light of the discoveries of true science. For example, what is popularly called the relativity theory …” My eyes burning, I fell asleep.

  I was at a wedding. It was held on an enormous lawn in some kind of magnificent park. A place I had never been before. The bride and groom were on a podium (like a launching pad), facing away from their audience. I was trying to remember whose wedding I had been invited to. From the back, the groom looked like my brother-in-law Hank. It seemed to me strange that Hank was getting married again. Could the divorce—I was sure the girl wasn’t Phyllis—have gone through already? I was wondering what to do, if I should say anything or not, when the ceremony started. (My hands were bleeding so I kept them in my pockets.) I was trying to get closer to hear what was being said, but couldn’t get through the crowd. I asked a few of the watchers around me if they knew who was getting married. No one seemed to know. The couple, the bride and groom, began to dance. It looked to be part of the ceremony. They separated, did a series of push-ups on the stage, then moved to dance with their guests, who were lined up in two columns. Men on one side, women on the other. I wanted to leave—I don’t like to dance (I don’t know how)—but there was a high wall at the other end with a DANGER sign on it. No way else of getting out. I decided that when my turn came I would tell the bride that I didn’t know how, and we would just talk or she would go on to the next person. I explained how I felt to the man ahead of me—an old math teacher of mine—who nodded without saying anything. Before I knew it, she was dancing with the old math teacher. The bride danced beautifully. I had the sense, without any empirical evidence for it, that I knew her from somewhere. That she was someone I knew from somewhere. Waiting my turn, I thought maybe she would let me lift her veil so I could see who she was. If she said no, I would pull it up when she wasn’t looking. When I looked up she was dancing with the man who had been behind me in the line. Some guy in an Air Force uniform. I complained that it was my turn, that by mistake my turn had been skipped. No one seemed to care. I got mad. I wanted what was coming to me. I went on the stage where the dancers were. A guard tried to stop me, but I knocked him down. His head bleeding. A bullet hole in the forehead. I caught the bride’s arm and pulled her away from her partner. “Excuse me, but I was next in line.” “You renounced your turn,” someone yelled. “Get off the bloody stage.” Shaking his fist. It was Hank. I picked him up and threw him against the wall. “All I said was I didn’t know how. I want my turn. I have a right to my turn.” “Do you know how?” the bride asked me. I didn’t want to lie to her so I admitted I didn’t. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If you can’t dance, you can’t dance,” and went back to her partner, who was a tired-looking middle-aged man. She called to me over her shoulder, “Maybe later, honey.” They danced off, leaving me. I was alone. Standing at attention in the dark. The stage empty.

  Dreaming.

  TWO

  Curtis Parks the Previous Fall

  IF HE HAD REALLY believed the things he said he believed, he might have taken it for a sign. The past fall, in despair at the dull competence of his students, thinking of giving up teaching altogether, Curtis Parks had received an extraordinary paper from a dark, sullen-looking boy who when he came to class, which was rare, sat like a shadow in the last row. The paper
, poorly typed, full of misspellings and crossings out, seemed to Parks astonishingly responsive to its subject: “Two Presidential Assassinations, Lincoln and Kennedy—The Murderer in the Mirror,” also in part the subject of his own unwritten study. At first he thought plagiarism, no student can be this good—the occasionally clumsy writing a means of disguise. But if stolen, where from? In preparing his own book on Booth and Lincoln, he had read, intrigued by the parallels, everything he could find dealing with the assassination of important men. (His four years of research down on 1,600 note cards.) And the student’s essay was amateurish in technique, too personal and insightful to have been written by a professional. It was more than likely the real thing. A discovery. A discovery of discoveries. He had shown it to his wife, who said—the kind of remark she was always making—“Why don’t you kill him so you can use it in your own book?”

  It was as if all his years of teaching had converged to this moment. A rare gesture in his career, Parks invited the student to his office, holding the paper instead of returning it with the others in class. For the first time since the beginning of his days as a graduate student—nine years back, though in feeling a distant past—he felt that he might be after all some kind of teacher.

  Steiner’s generation was, on reputation at least, more straightforward than his own, so he started out as straight-forwardly as he knew how. “This is a remarkably fine paper,” he told the stooped, dark-haired boy who sat stiffly in the wooden chair, head down, as if he were a prisoner of war. “I can’t tell you how much I admire it.”

  The boy looked amused, his head turned away. “I didn’t plagiarize, if that’s what you think.”

  Parks admitted that he had thought plagiarism initially, but that he was convinced, working on similar concerns himself, that the essay was an original. It was perhaps the most gifted student work he had seen in all his years of teaching.

  Steiner said thank you, though his face, distrustful, as if he knew from prior experience that praise meant deceit, was saying something else. His look—Parks reading it—said, What do you want from me; what are you after, mister? and, You can’t know how smart I am. No one can.

  Parks brought to bear all his charm, which women—some, his wife not among them—had told him was considerable. Uncharmed, charmless, Steiner gave nothing in return, answered in monosyllables, sometimes just nodded or shook his head. The idea just came to him, he said, out of the air, but now that he had written on it, it didn’t interest him anymore. He didn’t think the paper was too good. He was sorry about the messiness but that he had more important things to do than write papers.

  “What, for example?”

  “Nothing.” He jutted impassively from his chair like a pop art assemblage—the chair more real than the boy.

  Parks took a deep breath, his impatience like a clock next to his ear, began again. The thing was to do with your life the kind of thing you did best. To fulfill in some sense your role, your calling. The titans of history, tyrants and saints, presidents and assassins, were, in fulfilling their destinies, enacting the deepest needs of self. (Steiner nodded.) The sin was not to do what you were meant to do.

  “How can you not?”

  “By not recognizing what it is.”

  He smirked, looked frightened, as if some secret nerve had been touched by Parks’ remark.

  With a sense of being off the ground, in unrecognizable danger, Parks told his student that he thought he had the makings of a gifted historian. Steiner was impassive. He’d rather make history than write it, he said. Besides, he was a math major.

  “Are you a first-rate mathematician?”

  He shrugged. “Good enough.”

  “Why do something you’re second-rate at?” Parks rose and fell to eloquence. Steiner had the possibility, even if small, of being among the handful of first-rate historians who were poets (no less at least than poets), the conscience of a time, seismographs of their race—the Bible, in fact, a work of history.

  The student smiled darkly. When relaxed he was not without charm—a handsome boy in his dark way. “The Bible’s already been written,” he said.

  He felt like an officer, leading a charge, who discovers inside enemy lines that his troops are no longer behind him. With faint heart, he went on: “I don’t want to pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do, Steiner. I’m not going to put any pressure on you. You can continue in the class you’re now in, which may be what you want to do. My idea is to give you a private class instead. A tutorial. Does that interest you? We could try it for a few weeks and see how it works. It should be useful whether you go on in history or not.”

  Steiner looked around the office as if it had been offered for sale. “Do you have more to teach me?”

  “If you have more to learn,” Parks said.

  They agreed on a time for their next meeting—the coming Friday at three—and Steiner, leaving the paper behind, made his escape.

  Before leaving that night, Parks reread the essay and, though there was no doubt of its accomplishment, it seemed less remarkable than before. It struck him that it was something he himself might have written if he were less well-trained, less knowing. It was the complexity of things—a vision that met itself in paradox at every turn—that stood in his way.

  The next day, Parks did some research on Christopher Steiner. It would have surprised him less if the boy were some kind of orphan. So he was not an innocent, as he had hoped, a natural, it was disappointing to discover. His father was Ludwig Steiner, a comparative-literature scholar of note with a reputation—some comic stories about him floating around—for being a brilliant crank, irascible in defense of himself. With pain, Parks recalled the interview. He had made a fool of himself, and his student, with that aggressive cool of his generation, had let him. Still, Steiner was, as he had said, a math major, his humanities grades undistingushed to poor, including one failure. It didn’t make sense and Parks, working late at his desk, his mind a page of German (a language he had never been able to read), suddenly saw what he had not been seeing.

  It was the obvious that was often hardest to see. His father was a formidable man and Steiner, despite his predilection to be like him, was scared of falling short. Unable to compete without killing the old man, he had opted out of the competition altogether. Curt knew how it was. His own father had been a career Air Force officer, a professional killer, and Curt had chosen to go the other way, becoming a man of peace.

  Conceivably, if handled with care, Steiner could be helped to realize his potentiality. It would take someone other than his father to do it, someone not personally involved, who could approach him as a friend, older and wiser in the ways of things, as an equal. As a teacher, for God’s sake. Parks felt—the word sticking in him like a pin on a map—chosen. To succeed where the student’s real father had failed.

  When he told Carolyn what he was about, understating as much as he could his enthusiasm, she looked as if, eyebrow raised, someone had stuck a hand up her dress. “If you have nothing better to do,” she said, “you can make an historian out of me.” He had put up with her crap for eight years—God knows why—a woman pretentious as hell about the latest mode, unable to take the really serious seriously.

  She had been a student of his briefly at a small California women’s college, a place he had taught at the year he got out of the Army. That was nine years ago. He remembered how serious she seemed then, how sensitive, how bright. She had told him one day, nervously shy at confronting him, that he was the best teacher she had ever had. Since it was the first class he had ever taught, it was an opinion he found hard to resist, wanted to keep close at hand. And yet, even now, soured by mutual disillusion, he knew that she wouldn’t have said it if she hadn’t meant it or thought she had. Carolyn didn’t flatter, told as a rule the harshest truth she knew—it was the one thing about her he could trust. In her version of things, he had pursued her madly and she, too innocent to resist, had given him her virtue, and, in marrying him, he
r life. He knew better. She had hung around his office, giving him no peace, until he married her. The rest was history, full of wars and peace and unrecorded small violence. Six months after their marriage, she told him she had outgrown him. She had been outgrowing him, in her heart’s malice, ever since.

  Parks found himself preoccupied with past mistakes, reviewing his life as if he were telling it to someone as a story, when his student, in faded blue jeans and black turtleneck, arrived for their first meeting. The Army phrase “out of uniform” came to mind, though it was not what he meant, not what he wanted to mean. What did uniform have to do with anything? His student without a pencil, Parks offered him a pad and pencil, which he refused, slouching in his chair, saying he didn’t believe in taking notes. The tension between them almost palpable. Curt asked what his plans were when he got out of college.

  “Everyone asks me that,” he said, his nervous eyes turned inward as if he were wrestling with the question. But though Parks waited, nothing more was said.

  Curt, habitually neat, loosened his tie, talked about how as an undergraduate he had first been premed—not sure of his interests—then an English major. It was only after he had been in the Army that he had decided on history.

  He looked remote, lost in himself, though his eyes as if peering through keyholes were frighteningly alert.

  “I want you to feel you can talk openly to me,” Curt said.

  “What do you want me to say? Maybe if you had stuck it out, you would have made a good doctor, Mr. Parks.”

  Curt had thought so once himself, but saw it now as a vanity—the notion his father had blown him up with that he could do anything well he committed himself to. He had no calling to be a doctor. “What do you want to be?” Curt asked.

  He scowled. “What do you want to be?”

  “I want to be a good teacher,” Parks said. “I want to—” He stopped himself.

  His student nodded.