inlet. No matter how hard I concentrate, at around 150 strokes I always lose track. By my best estimate it takes between 180 and 200 strokes to cross, a figure that’s bound to mean very little to you, though it helps me judge my progress and choose intervals of rest.
At this hour there are no boats out. That’s something lake swimmers have to worry about: powerboats. They don’t always look where they’re going, especially when towing skiers or screaming kids on rafts or tubes. Jet skiers, that exuberant subspecies, are the most worrisome. Still, I’ve made my peace with the possibility of a watery death, preferring that to any death on dry land.
Having counted around 200 strokes I know when I put my feet down they’ll touch sandy bottom. The patch of shore by that stand of pines is a favorite hunting ground for herons. Often I’ll surprise one, just in time to see him spread his smoky wings and alight – with a primordial squawk – across the water.
Then back to the dock, to my chair and towel. There’s enough privacy here so if I wanted to I could swim in the nude. Most of the homes dotting the shore belong to vacationers and retirees. I rarely see my neighbors and they rarely see me – a good thing, since by Georgia standards my skimpy Speedo amounts to indecent exposure.
Back indoors, having changed and hung my goggles and dripping Speedo on a brass hook by the door, I make an espresso and take it up to the loft where I have my desk and where – facing the triangular window with its view through the trees of the dock – remembering, I write.
Description of the Preferred Embodiment
From IMAGE COLORIMETER: “This invention generally relates to colorimeters, and more particularly to a colorimeter for measuring color and spectrum distribution, based on the formation of an optical image for an object prior to measurement.” The illustration is of “a sectional view of a third embodiment of the invention, which illustrates the components at the front-end of an instrument adapted to make color measurements of soft or loose material.” Filed April 4, 1974.
III.
The Blue Door
Bethel, Connecticut, September, 1970
THE RUMORS ARRIVED BEFORE THE NEW TEACHER DID. That he was young, that he had gone to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, that he wore cable knit turtleneck sweaters with bell-bottom jeans and square-toed leather boots with big brass buckles on the side. He wore his blond hair almost to his shoulders, like Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He planned to teach a special class, an experimental class for gifted students that he would hand pick. When the time came you, your brother and your mutual friends waited anxiously to learn which of you had been chosen.
The others made the cut. You didn’t. You got stuck in Mrs. Schnabel’s fifth-period English class, Mrs. Schnabel with her so-called “port wine stain,” the purple birthmark on one side of her jaw that constantly changed shape, looking like a rooster’s coxcomb one moment, and like a giraffe or the state of Florida or one of the Great Lakes the next. During your first class with her, as Mrs. Schnabel droned on about subordinate and independent clauses, you gazed at her birthmark with horrified fascination, convinced that it would burst open at any moment, splattering you with a mixture of blood and pus.
You made up your mind then and there. Somehow you’d get into the new teacher’s class. You were determined.
LATER THAT DAY, when the last bell rang, you ran down the hall to the new teacher’s classroom and watched from a distance as a group of his students, including your brother and your mutual friends, gathered to talk to him.
That’s when you got your first good look at the new teacher. He was tall, but not as tall as you had expected. His hair was blond and long, but not down to his shoulders. He wore blue jeans – but they were new, clean, and neatly pressed. And he wore boots, too, but without brass buckles. He looked serious and even a bit concerned while listening to the students, nodding gravely every so often, then suddenly breaking into a smile. When it was time for him to speak he did so with theatrical gestures of his large hands.
While waiting for the others to leave, you tried to come up with something clever to say, something dry and clever and witty to set you apart and prove you worthy of membership in the new teacher’s special class. Surely you were as worthy as the others. How could you not be worthy? That you hadn’t been chosen – it had been a mistake, an oversight, an aberration. The moment he saw you the new teacher would realize his mistake. He’d take one look at you and say I’m so sorry, I must have made a mistake, an awful, terrible mistake. Can you forgive me?
The teacher’s ears – the parts not hidden under his long hair – were long, so was his nose, long and curved, with deep notches hollowed out by the bridge of the round, gold- framed glasses that he wore. His voice was soft, high, and nasal. His lips were thin and hardly moved when he spoke, like a ventriloquist’s lips.
But what impressed you most about the new teacher was the way he listened to the other students, his eyes blinking and curious under his round glasses, his head tilted toward whoever spoke to him, his hands propped on his thighs, his elbows relaxed. Everyone, you thought to yourself as you stood and watched from a dozen yards down the hallway, should be listened to like that.
As you kept watching you noticed the scar running down one side of the teacher’s face – a thin, pale scar that went from the side of his nose to the bottom of his earlobe.
At last the students left, leaving the new teacher standing alone in his empty classroom. You took a step forward, but then you stopped, realizing you had failed to come up with anything clever or witty to say. You stood there chewing your lip, not sure what to do next.
The new teacher put some papers and books into a battered briefcase, snapped it shut, and left the classroom carrying it. He locked the door and walked right past you and down the corridor. You followed him.
A CLOUDY SEPTEMBER day, the overcast sky the same gloomy gray as the sheets of stainless steel and aluminum your papa slathered with steel blue and scored for the saw, the drill press, the bending machine.
The new teacher walked quickly, his briefcase swinging with each stride, the thumb of his free hand hooked into a front pocket of his jeans. His long strides carried him past the library and Mullaney’s store, across the train tracks, past the lumber yard and Vaghi woodworks and Dolan’s hay barn and the fuel oil storage tanks and Stevenson’s Sunoco station, with its inadvertent museum of recently wrecked cars. You followed the teacher as he continued down Greenwood Avenue, toward the Sycamore diner and the First National supermarket, past the Catholic Church, with its wicked witch’s hat of a steeple.
This was Bethel, the town to which, in 1957, when you and your brother were six months old, with your father’s eighty-year-old mother in tow, your parents moved from Bethesda, Maryland, your father having quit his high-paying job with what was then the National Bureau of Standards to try his luck as a freelance inventor. It was where you would spend the next seventeen years of your life.
Once, the towns of Bethel and neighboring Danbury were known for their hat factories. “Danbury Crowns Them All” claimed an elaborate sign mounted on the roof of a coal shed, where it greeted travelers arriving from parts north. The sign showed a derby in red neon hovering over a crown outlined with hundreds of incandescent light bulbs.
According to local legend, the man responsible for bringing hat
