teacher was gathering papers at his desk, putting them into his briefcase.
It was meant to be funny, you said. I guess it wasn’t.
The teacher said nothing. He kept putting away papers, not looking at you.
Anyway, I’m sorry, you said.
Friends don’t apologize, said the teacher.
You were officially his friend.
BEFORE YOU MET the new teacher you’d been an average thirteen-year-old boy, with an average thirteen-year-old’s interests and ignorances, a child’s innocently circumscribed view of the world.
You had absolutely no interest in worldly affairs or events. You watched the news on television, anyway you saw and heard it while your parents watched, the avuncular anchorman’s voice reducing wars, assassinations, droughts, earthquakes, and other calamities to a murmur as monotonously assuring as that of the ceiling fan thrumming away through hot nights at the top of the stairs.
You loved ships, especially ocean liners with many funnels, old cars with running boards, and warplanes, Spitfires and Spads, sea anemones, and starfish. You were lousy at sports. You preferred to draw – especially ocean liners, especially the Titanic, which sank the year your father was born. You would spend hours alone at the dining or kitchen table with your box of colored pencils rendering the doomed ship’s porthole-pocked counter stern rearing up against the starry sky, with tiny stick-figure passengers leaping like fleas from its decks.
You assumed that you were smart. Your papa was a genius, after all. Yet at times you had to wonder. Your school grades were good, but then they were skewed by your habit of adorning book reports and other papers with free-hand maps and drawings of paramecium that charmed your teachers into awarding you A’s. On Standardized Aptitude Tests where your draftsmanship was confined to filling in ovals with a sharpened Number 2 pencil, you fared less well. Your verbal and your math scores were abysmal. No wonder, since you guessed at every answer, filling in those little ovals like they were portholes on the Titanic.
One day – when you were old enough – you’d wear Old Spice (for the clipper ship on the bottle), smoke Viceroy Cigarettes (you liked the package design), and drink Cutty Sark whisky (yellow label, clipper ship).
AT THIRTEEN YOU were already vain. You couldn’t get enough of mirrors. You never quite saw what you were looking for. Yet there were hints, intimations. What you were looking for was me, your future self, a self you tried to will into premature existence by staring with grim determination at your reflection.
You’d be famous someday, the mirrors told you. A famous artist, or movie star, or a designer of ocean liners with five, six, a dozen funnels. The mirrors supported your conviction that you were special, one that, until the teacher invited you into his cottage, the rest of the world for some reason stubbornly refused to honor.
Your looks were a work in progress, the mouth and jawline still soft, the eyebrows insubstantial, your lips a tender bow of flesh. Someday (you promised your reflection in the mirror) you would have a chiseled jaw and steely, squinty eyes like James West of The Wild, Wild West, a popular James Bond/Western TV show in which Secret Service Agent West and his trusty sidekick Artemus Gordon toured the country in their private railroad car, averting the dastardly deeds of a colorful array of diabolical villains exemplified by Dr. Miguelito Loveless, a dwarf bent on avenging his smallness by conquering the world. Jim West wore skintight brocade vests and bolero jackets with retractable derringers, exploding buttons, and hidden daggers, and would dispatch a half-dozen bad guys at once with a medley of fists, kicks, and karate chops.
You were less mature than others your age. Your friend Christopher was much more mature than you. He was always helping people, Christopher, especially old ladies like Clara, his neighbor across the street, shoveling her sidewalk and bringing her string bean casseroles that his mother baked. Unlike you and your brother, Christopher was a Cub Scout. You’d see him in his blue uniform edged with yellow piping and festooned with badges and medals. He went to church every Sunday, made his bed, and picked up after litterbugs.
On the table in his waiting room Dr. Randolph, your pediatrician, kept old issues of a magazine for children called Highlights that featured a cartoon strip entitled Goofus & Gallant. It contrasted the behaviors of its eponymous duo, showing each responding to similar situations, with Gallant exemplifying kindness and generosity and Goofus being selfish and irresponsible. Goofus takes the last apple. Gallant shares his orange … Gallant was a pussy; Goofus was a dick. You were Goofus.
THOUGH FOR YEARS you’d been hearing whispers and rumors about it, you’d only recently discovered sex for yourself. You kept a so-called “girlie” magazine, the kind dignified by the phrase artist’s models and packed with black-and-white photographs of naked, large-breasted women gazing into the camera lens, rolled up in a tube and hidden in the crags of a stone wall in the woods behind your home. When the mood struck, you’d go up there and – with some difficulty, since you wouldn’t always recall where you last hid it – find the magazine, a little worse for wear than last time, its pages stuck together with dampness and mold so you had to peel them gingerly apart to get at your favorite photograph, the full-page one of the dark-haired lady making a “come-hither” gesture with her right hand while running her tongue over her lips. You’d convey the magazine to the nearest shady patch of moss (made for the purpose, so it seemed) and stand there, all alone in the woods with your dungarees down around your ankles and dappled sunlight filtered through the overhead branches. As you held the magazine with one hand and your dick in the other with the thrust of rushing rivers all the dark splendid forces of nature converged, the primitive mysterious forces of life: they were at your command, merging, mounting, flaring, drawing everything around you – trees and rocks, moss and lichen, ferns, insects, birds, air – into a vortex that spread outward, absorbing the woods and hills, the neighborhood, the town, streets, buildings, houses, hat factories, churches … spreading its whirlpool arms wide to embrace the Milky Way and all of the other galaxies, the whole universe, everything sucked into a churning maelstrom as you stood with your head thrown back and your breath catching in your throat holding back the urge to scream. Then, before you knew it, it was over, the wave crested, its energy expended, its remnant force backing off, until nothing remained but you standing alone there in the woods on the side of the hill with your pants down around your ankles, the universe a wad of limp flesh in your tired, wet hand.
Afterward you’d hike to the top of the hill and, as fast as you could, run down it through the woods, leaping gazelle-like over rocks and tree trunks, all the way back to the house, your feet barely touching the ground. Except for in your dreams this was as close as you’d come to flying. By some miracle you didn’t break your neck.
YOU WERE AS seductive as you were easily seduced, especially by the surfaces of things. Certain colors and textures you found irresistible. Anything vermilion, golden-yellow, or striped. Your superficial fascinations made it hard for you to grasp things on a deeper, more intellectual level. You cultivated these superficial captivations, turning them into drawings, charming others with them as you had been charmed. The moment you presented Mrs. Decker, your kindergarten teacher, with a drawing of the Queen Elizabeth or the Empire State Building, and she gave you a kiss, you learned the value not only of art, but of seduction.
You were vain, selfish, cunning, impudent, brash, sullen, sneaky, earnest, charming, naïve, lazy, impatient, sweet, sarcastic, and shy. You were not yet intense, obsessive, depressive, nostalgic, melancholy, regretful, arrogant, or an insomniac.
You were an invention in progress.
* * *
MOST OF WHAT YOU LEARNED FROM THE NEW TEACHER he taught you outside of the
