Chapter 12

 

Ron fell asleep quickly. He remembered thinking that he wished that Zoe was there to sleep alongside of him and then he didn’t remember anything at all. From somewhere inside of a dream he felt heat, very hot on his face, on his hair and it pulled him awake. He lifted his head and stared into a very real wall of fire that was crackling and dancing with devouring merriment.

Jumping up quickly he stared at it, was transfixed by it. The flames were climbing up the side of his wall. A calm came over him as he pulled himself into his jeans and made sure that his pot tray was tucked away in the drawer under the writing table that doubled as his eating table. Then he opened the door and ran down the hallway to the fire extinguisher. Turning it upside down as he knew you were supposed to do, he took hold of the hose and nozzle. When he got back to the apartment the entire back of the hide- a-bed was engulfed and he pointed the extinguisher at the conflagration and then nothing happened. The god damned thing was empty. He shook it and cursed and dropped it on the floor and ran into the hallway screaming “Fire!” He screamed as loud as he could scream. It was only then that he realized that he’d been choking. He tried to clear his voice and screamed again, “Fire!”

Ron heard doors begin to open and people coming into the hall and he ran back into the apartment and dragged his Aunt’s Dottie’s chair as far away from the flames as he could. He tried to fill something with water; anything that he could throw on the flames that were eating everything around him. He saw the paint on the dresser that he’d had since he was a little boy begin to blister and peel away. His feet were bare and now the floor seemed very hot. The water that he flung at it did nothing. It disappeared into the flame and belched out one quick thick puff of black smoke.

He could hear people around him now and someone said, “Get him out of there,” and another voice screamed, “Get out into the street.” Ron was dazed but he kept filling this bowl with water and flinging it at the fire. His lamp shade went up in a brightly lit crackle that surrounded it and then seemed to engulf it and then it wasn’t there anymore.

Ron was dazed and staggering around what was once his apartment and then hands were on his shoulders and he was being moved and large men in hats and rubber coats were moving passed him and there was a burst of white powder everywhere in the apartment and he was being carried out into the hall and down the steps into the street.  He stood there transfixed at the sight of the truck and the people coming out of the other buildings. More and more firemen were arriving now and they ran passed him and through the double glass and wrought iron doors and up the few steps and down the hall. Ron watched them pass like shadows. No one was talking to him, but people were staring at him.

Two firemen wearing heavy gloves and coats carried the smoking remains of his hide-a-bed out the front door and dropped it on the small lawn in front of the building. People gathered around to stare at it. Then he saw his landlady and she looked scared and even more horrified when she saw Ron. “Are you hurt?”

Ron stared back at her. “I don’t know what happened. I was sleeping”

“I think he’s in shock,” said the landlady’s son.

Ron looked over at his couch and wondered if he could sleep on the floor of his apartment for the rest of the night. It seemed like only a few moments later when the firemen came out and said that people could go back inside. Maybe it had been longer than a few moments. Ron started to walk back inside with the rest of the occupants of the rather large apartment house.

Men were milling around in his studio. Ron wondered if they’d found his pot and whether he was going to be arrested.  He walked up to one of the men and said in a voice that was very strangely soft and raspy and thick, “Will I be able to sleep here tonight?”

The men looked at Ron with disbelieving eyes. Ron looked past them and saw that everything that he owned in his life was covered with white powder; his records, his books, his papers, his furniture, except for Aunt Dotty’s chair that he had somehow managed to drag into the bathroom. Had he dragged it in there? Had someone else realized the value of it and dragged it in there for him. Ron looked for someone to thank.

His landlady was standing in front of him now. “What did you do to cause this?” she demanded.

Ron just repeated, “I was asleep.”

One of the fireman said, “It wasn’t the kid’s fault. Look over here.”

The three of them walked towards what had been his wall and the man pointed at the black char, the flash point spidery web that spread out from the electric socket on his wall. “What did you have plugged in there? said the landlady.

“My radio, I think, and my alarm clock,” said Ron.

The radio was a melted mass of plastic on the floor and one of the firemen kicked at it. The alarm was nowhere to be found. There were two gaping holes in the wall where someone had taken an axe to it. Ron stared at the slashes and felt wounded.

 

It was the middle of the night in Minneapolis when Robin’s phone began to ring. She answered on the third volley with a sleepy hello.

“Robin, this is your father.”

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” There was instant concern and anticipation in the timbre of her voice.

“Your boyfriend’s had a fire.”

Robin looked over confusedly at Richard, who snoring softly next to her in bed. “Who?”

“Robin, Ron was burned out of his apartment tonight. You know that he lives on my street now and that he took that apartment just a block from where you used to live on Cherry Street. I think they took him to the hospital.”

Robin’s voice was filled with fear. She said accusingly, “Didn’t you do anything to help him?”

“I tried to talk to him Robin. His eyebrows were singed and his face was very red and I could smell burning hair on him.”

“Oh God, Daddy is he OK?”

“I think that they took him to the hospital Robin. He was very dazed. I don’t think that he was burned badly but he kept apologizing to everyone in the street and saying that he was sorry for disturbing their night.”

“OK, Daddy thanks for calling and letting me know. I’ll take care of it.”

“I didn’t know whether I should tell you or not. The two of you are hard to figure with each other.”

“It was good that you called.”

Robin put down the phone. Her hands were shaking. Leni looked back out her from her shadows in the corner and gave her a plaintiff “meow.” She shook her head and picked the phone up again, wondering if she would ever look at that damn cat without thinking of him. She dialed the number from memory.

Laureen answered on the fourth ring like she was wide awake even though it was almost 4am. “Hello?”

“Laureen, its Robin.”

Laureen felt herself brighten into a nervous laugh. Ron’s not living here anymore, Robin. He hasn’t lived here in two years.”

“I know,” said Robin with a patient cool in her voice. “And I know that it’s very late and I’m sorry to call so late but Ron was burned out of his apartment tonight. I think that they took him to the hospital.”

“Did he call you?” said Laureen with a touch of amusement in her voice.

Then Robin outflanked her as she was invariably able to do. She never dealt with Laureen from anything but a position of strength. They were too much alike. “My father lives on the street. He saw Ron and tried to talk with him. Ron didn’t know who he was and he was burned. I can’t call his mother, but if you or Warren could help him.” Then she didn’t say anything.

“Do you know which hospital they took him to?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’ll see what Warren wants to do.”

“I’m sure that you will,” said Robin.

Laureen walked back through the kitchen and through the middle room that was now equipped with a dining room table and chairs and paintings. She went to the bathroom, had a pee and straightened her hair and then she knocked on Warren’s door.

Warren answered with a, “Hang on just a moment and then he got up and moved to the door. He was wearing a t-shirt and jockeys. Laureen looked down and then up at his face. “Robin just called. It seems that Ron had a fire down in Elizabeth and that he was taken to the hospital.”

“How bad was it?”

“She didn’t know. Her father is one of Ron’s neighbors. He called her. She wants to know if we can do anything to help.”

“Alright, give me a moment.”

“Warren, he can’t live here. I’ll leave if you move him in.”

“That’s not why she called,” said Warren.

 

After the doctor looked Ron over and they took his blood pressure and gave him a breathing test and inspected his body for burns, they released him. Ron felt himself moving from somewhere deep inside of him, but all he could see was that wall of flame in front of his eyes and the way the fire danced, like something that he was in love with, something that wanted to hurt him.

Warren called Elizabeth General and tried to get some information. Yes, there had been a Ron Tuck, who had been in a fire. No they had no information about whether he had been admitted. Yes, he might still be in the emergency room, but he might not be. It was a busy night. Yes, they would see if someone could get a message to him but they could not promise anything. Warren said, “Tell him that Warren Lashly called and that he’s welcome to come here if he needs to.”

Ron got the message as he was walking out the door of the emergency room. He was wearing a white bracelet with his name printed on it. There was a band-aid on his hand from where they had put the heparin lock and where they had pumped a bag of fluid into him. He got into the first of a line of 3 cabs in front of the hospital and sent the driver back to Cherry Street. The sun was just coming up when he got out and paid the driver and looked around for his car. He felt for his keys reassuringly. He thought that he remembered that it was the weekend. He wanted to take a shower. He wanted to change his clothes, but he had no clothes to change into and he had no place to take the shower.

He walked over and stood in front of his building staring at the remains of his couch and saw that his rug was in a pile next to it along with his melted radio. Someone had taken a knife to the couch and exposed the stuffing to the air. He could smell the fire. He could see the fire. He could feel it still on him.

He walked over to his car and got in and thought about driving towards Rahway. He hadn’t wanted to go there. The last thing that he wanted was to be broken at Rahway again. It was too early to drive up to his mother’s house and he wasn’t ready for her to be angry with him for having had a fire and demanding that he come back there and live. Then a thought hit him. He didn’t have his book bag. A feeling of panic swept over him. Then the next thought. Why couldn’t he go back to his apartment and get the things that he needed? What was going to stop him? He got out of the car and walked up through the double doors.

The quiet of the building was thick with the smell of something stronger than a burnt dinner. It didn’t smell like charred food. It smelled like catastrophe. His door wasn’t locked. When Ron pushed it, the door squeaked on its swollen hinges. Ron saw that it was wavy on the inside. Things were strewn everywhere on the floor in the center of the room where his couch used to be. And there was the smothering white powder on everything. Ron’s eyes searched until he saw his book bag and he smiled for the first time since he didn’t know when. It was slid under the coffee table over by the window under the fan that had been pushed out of the window and was lying in the side alley. He picked the bag and shook it just once the way that he always shook it. He smiled again. He was feeling a little better. He went to his dresser. His mood swung hard in the other direction when he saw it. It was the only dresser that he had ever owned. It was part of the set that was in his room in Newark when he was a small boy and slept on one of the twin beds, his great- grandmother in the other. The beds were long gone and the chest of drawers was up in the garage in Glen Ridge, but he had loved this dresser. He found a roll of plastic trash bags under his sink and stuffed handfuls of clothes into them. He went over to his writing desk and held his breath and opened the drawer under the white powder covered material. It was there. He emptied the tray into the baggie and stuffed it into his pants and then, without looking back he walked out dragging the plastic bag stuffed with smoky clothes in one hand and holding his schoolbag in the other.

Chapter 11

 

The next day Ron was invited to the principal’s office. Sister Irene was in back of her desk. There was a large arrangement of cut flowers underneath the picture of the Blessed Virgin. Off to the left and directly over her desk was a crucifix. “Things seem to be going rather well for you, Mr. Tuck, but we have to talk about some things.”

“Yes Sister.”

“First of all the girls are very excited to have you here and I’ve already had two calls from parents asking about who you were.”

Ron stiffened. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. “It must be a tad difficult for a man like you being here with us, Mr. Tuck. These girls are very young and sometimes very obvious in their interests.”

“I like them very much, Sister and it’s not at all difficult. I know my place.”

The nun smiled. That was exactly what she was worried about and she liked that he was bright enough to anticipate what could have been a tense conversation.

“I came from around here, Sister, and these kids deserve someone who is willing to see them as what they are.

“And what is it that you see them as, Mr. Tuck?”

“Young girls who could benefit from learning the language, Sister.”

The nun smiled and came around from behind her desk. “We’d like to have you over for dinner next Wednesday. Do you think that you can make it?”

“I’d like that very much, Sister.”

“Good, then we’ll expect at six o’clock. We’ll be back from prayers by then. Enjoy your day, Mr. Tuck.”

And Ron did enjoy the day. The pattern of his classes was a constant in his life now. Whenever he had nothing to do, he had preparation for the next class and papers to grade and pieces to read again with an eye towards what he would say to them the next day or the day after that. Twice a day, he dutifully went to the coffee shop and got his coffee. He didn’t sit on the fire escape and drink it and smoke the way that he had done on the first day or two. Now, he took it back to his car and sat there with a stack of papers, the front seat rolled back, his watch placed on the dashboard so that he didn’t lose track of time. Each story or each fragment of a larger piece of literature that he read was seen with a new eye, in a new light. He wasn’t seeing them for himself as much anymore as he was studying them for his students.  He found that his thoughts went deeper into the ideas. He saw not only what the ideas were but what the ideas were meant to do. It was an entirely new way of looking at what he read that he’d never experienced before. What would his classes think of this? How could he structure something to attach it to an earlier idea? When should he say this? He didn’t take notes, he absorbed what he read. He felt himself wrapping around it and internalizing it. It grew inside of him and became part of how he looked at everything. The stranger thing was that it didn’t only happen with literature, it happened with everything he saw and everyone he saw.

When he wasn’t teaching or preparing he was with Zoe and that was magical. He never told her that he’d heard from Robin. In fact, he told himself that he had not heard from Robin and made the lie stick, although it didn’t stick too deeply. He was unable to do that. If he saw the truth of something a certain way, he didn’t seem to have the ability to consciously lie to himself. He couldn’t lie to himself. It had always been a problem and he knew that he’d gotten it from his mother

She had been told so many lies as a child that she had taught him and re-taught him the value of truth. She seemed far away now. Although she was always just a telephone call away, or a short drive away. If he needed her, or more possibly if she needed him, he could be there.

He’d gone to see Quimpy’s office and had been duly impressed by its size and the wonderment that Quimpy actually had a secretary. It would take about two weeks to process his forms and put his name in front of the board of education. Ron didn’t understand any of that but Quimpy had said that it was all bullshit and not to worry about it. They had agreed to get together for the games that Sunday.

Zoe was going to visit her youngest sister up in Boston and Ron was alone on Friday afternoon. His phone rang.

“Hello, Ron,” said Chris.

“Chris, how are you doing?”

“I’m getting blasted with the law round the clock. It’s like the Sheriff’s revenge.” Ron laughed hard and genuine. “Anyway, what I was thinking was that if you weren’t doing anything tonight that you could drive in and we could get some dinner and maybe play guitars.”

“I’d love to do that,” said Ron quickly. “I’m on my way in.”

“See ya then,” said Chris.

The drive into the lower east side on a Friday afternoon was a nightmare. Ron fought his way down to the parkway and then up to Route 82.  That would take him to the tunnel. The skyway was a stinking crawl. It was a warm afternoon and the industrial combination of smells rose like an uncomfortable tweed suit that assaulted his nostrils and would not let them go. The cars rolled and then stopped for no apparent reason. They sat idling and then would roll forward less distance than he hoped that they would. Ron had brought some joints with him but he refused to light one. Everyone that he knew that smoked in their cars got busted. He’d seen it after Hank, who had been so careful about the way that they smoked in the car and where they smoked in the car, got popped. Even Chris had been popped. Joseph had been popped. Ron was not about to get busted. He had learned a long time ago when and how to pull back so that didn’t happen. It was only with Chris that he stretched those limits.

The tunnel squirted him onto the streets like he was ejaculate. He moved around a circle in a tight speeding line of other cars that moved around the circle, and then he saw the street and turned and he was on Broome Street and he careened his way across town, wincing at every pot hole and uneven street over which he rolled and bounced.

East 6^th, between Avenues A and B, was humming. Windows were up and some people were cooking their dinner on the fire escapes so as not to heat up the small kitchens. Ron parked, grabbed his guitar from the trunk and walked down the street feeling very cool but scared at the idea that someone might actually think that he could play and ask him to play. He remembered the looks on faces when he played his guitar for them, how people would just start to talk to each other by the third verse of some of his songs. The idea made him wince and grip the guitar case handle tighter.

Ron was never sure how many flights he had to walk up to get to Chris’s apartment. He only  knew that it was the landing after the strong smell of gas that always gave him the feeling that the building was unsafe. He could hear Chris’s stereo as he turned the corner for the last half flight. The door was slightly ajar but Ron knocked anyway. “Hello?”

Chris called out. “Come on in.”

He was on his knees in a small living room that had large windows that faced the south.  There were rugs, a thick oriental rug on the floor and wall hangings and pictures that reminded him of Rahway. Chris put down the guitar that he had been playing along with to the stereo and reached in back of him for a large pasta bowel that was filed with pot, along with various seeds and stems. He had a playing card and was sifting through the shake and ridding it of seeds and twigs.

Ron reached into his pocket and dropped his contribution of three joints into the bowel. He put his guitar case down and sat cross legged across from Chris, who looked somehow thinner than Ron had remembered him and focused in a different way that Ron had seen him before. On the other side of a large pillow that was on the window side of Chris there was a stack of law books and notebooks.

Ron said, “How’s school?”

“It’s almost over now, but then it’s the fucking bar exam.” Chris shook his head with amazement at the thought. The fucking bar exam where it mattered how many people took it at one sitting as much as it mattered what they wrote.

Chris handed Ron the bowel and lifted up from his knees in a fluid unfolding. “Listen to this.” He went to the stereo that was mounted halfway up one of the floor to ceiling book shelves that were filled with books and records and piles of papers.  Ron lit one of the pre- rolled joints that he’d wanted so much when he was stuck in traffic. Chris was careful with the needle and got it down into the perfect hissing silence between the tracks.

“One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends, trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in”

It was Springsteen and his voiced hissed and wailed and glistened with hope, disappointment, strength, the past and the present all at once. They smoked the joint. And then they smoked another. Chris turned off the stereo and picked up his guitar and began to play it softly. He was playing blues and the single notes slid out of the sound hole and teased Ron’s imagination.

“Do you ever think about Rahway, Chris?”

Chris looked down at the guitar, not making eye contact with Ron. There was a pause and then Chris said, “Have you ever been to Zabars?”

Out on the street Ron and Chris set a good pace as they moved east up 6th street and then they turned south and went into a delicatessen. Ron realized that he’d been hungry. Chris just wanted to buy cake or donuts, but they each ordered a sandwich and walked back to the apartment. The opened things up on the floor of the living room and Chris said, “I try not to think about it because it just makes me feel bad and I want to have something other than feeling bad connected with my memories of the place. It’s just Sheriff’s place now and it will never be anything else than that while he’s there.”

Ron took his guitar out and they began to play and the night got a bit cooler and the sounds from the street turned into night time sounds. There was a siren and there was a radio and there were the sounds of people speaking different languages and hollering their greetings. Ron thought about how much it reminded him of Newark, not that New York City was like Newark but that this part of it was.

In the middle of one of their songs a mouse dropped down from the chimney and ran frantically surprised along the wall and into Chris’s kitchen. Chris laughed. Ron had jumped when he’d seen the rodent but Chris went looking for it with a cardboard box and was talking softly as if he could lure it out and make it come to him and then Ron heard the box slam down and Chris exclaimed, “Ah, now I got you.” Then he carried the box down the four flights of stairs and let the mouse out. When he came back he said, “I suppose that isn’t the smartest approach but I didn’t feel like killing it.” They settled back into their play with the guitars and in just under an hour another mouse or perhaps the same mouse dropped down the chimney and Chris laughed very hard and said, “That’s what I get for not killing it when I could.”

Ron tried to tell Chris about Zoe and about his students. And Chris tried to listen, Ron noticed that he didn’t have any questions and that it seemed as if he was just waiting for Ron to finish what he was saying.  Finally Ron asked, “Are you seeing anybody?”

“Just law books and mice,” said Chris.

It was very late when he drove home and it was a clear sail over the same streets that had been so congested when he’d come in. Chris’s apartment seemed larger and somewhat more private than his one room studio. He did have a real bathroom and Chris’s apartment only had this alcove with a box and pull chain.  Chris had a stall shower in the middle of the kitchen, but at least there was no limit on sound and Ron was sure that there was no landlady keeping tabs on what Chris was doing or not doing. It was always that way when you wanted real privacy. You had to sacrifice a certain amount of comfort in order to get it.

 

Chapter 10

Monday morning: Mr. Tuck stood in front of his 9^th grade reading class grateful for the faces and the immediacy of their needs. They were reading “An Open Window” and it was painful for all of them.

Ron said “Close your books.” And then he told them the story of the nervous guest and the imaginative girl who played with his fears and her longings. They listened quietly and understood. Then he said, “Now, I’m going to read it for you.” And then he did and they understood. Then he said, “Let’s go line by line and when we find words you don’t know, raise your hand and I’ll put them on the board and we can see what this is about together.” They did.

It was a two page story but he filled the three panels of the chalkboard once and then he filled them again. He had no time for a dictionary and so he told them what the words meant as he understood them.

He paced down the aisles as they copied everything that he had written. His handwriting frustrated them and so he printed, which only added to the frustration because his printing would lapse into a combination of block and cursive writing and sometimes m’s had three humps and sometimes they just had two.  He said that that night they should take the story home and tell it to their families. Tomorrow he wanted to talk about what everyone had said.

“Suppose nobody’s home?’ said Connie DeMatteo

Ron thought for a moment and then said, “Tell the story to yourself like you are somebody else. Imagine that you are somebody listening. That’s what I used to do. My mom was never home and so I’d turn the TV on to a news station and turn the sound down and talk to the face like it was someone I knew.” They all giggled He could be very silly.

After lunch, he met with his senior class. Returning their essays, he thought about what Andrea had written and his response to it. “Poetry can cause an emotional reaction, a deep thought or even a physical response. The power is not in the language alone but in the connection that the reader makes to the language. All by itself, the poem is powerless. It needs you, even more than you need it.” Was it a copout considering the nature of what she had written? He decided that it wasn’t. It was what he could in good conscience communicate to one of his students in a high school.

The class was surprised that he had their essays ready. Rosa said, “Didn’t you go out at all this weekend, Mr. Tuck?”

Ron grinned at them showing them his white teeth and his dimples. “Why would I go out when I could stay at home and read your papers?” he said. They laughed.

“It’s ok,” said Rosa. “Most of us don’t have a life either.”

“Rosa has a life,” chirped Tina. Then she muttered under her breath, “She spends it on her back.” Two or three of the girls closest to Tina began to laugh and Rosa shot the group a hard look that dissolved into a deep smile.

“I know, I know,” said Rosa, “but I just can’t help it.”

“How is Beowulf a story about people who are partying too hard?” asked Ron.

“These men don’t do anything but brag about themselves,” said Tina.

“Why do you think that?” asked Ron.

Tina was thoughtful then she said, “Look at the way that they go on and on about themselves. They have more titles for each other that there are grains of rice in a Carolina box. It’s all exaggeration. They just exaggerate everything.”

“Why would they do that,” said Ron.

The class was silent. He waited. He liked it when they were quiet like this. It meant that they were thinking. It scanned their faces trying the read their thoughts. Ron’s mind was running full speed. They had been right of course, but Lashly had taught him that it was easy to put characters down and that it was important to learn to defend literature. How could he teach them that? How had Lashly taught it to him? Ron thought, by doing it. He taught me that it should be important by how important he made it to himself. That wouldn’t work on these kids. There were too many other things competing for importance in their lives. But Rosa had said that some of them didn’t have lives either. Ron smiled to himself about the “either” as he paced around the room rolling chalk between his palms, listening to the way that it clicked on his ring. He looked down at the Minnesota Jasper that Robin had given him the day that he’d arrived in Minneapolis. “This is for getting your ass out of New Jersey,” she said to him.

Then an idea hit him. “When I was growing up around here reputation was really important. For girls, it meant that you couldn’t have dated too many guys and for guys it meant it mostly had to do with how tough you were.”

Rosa whispered to Andrea, “Or how big a dick he has.” Andrea laughed.

Ron ignored them. “Why would a guy want a big reputation?” said Ron. Rosa and Andrea burst out laughing. This time Ron turned to them. He walked straight towards Andrea not realizing that at their seated height they were right at cock level. The girls laughed harder. “Come on,” said Ron, “stay with me here. Why is it important to have a reputation for being a tough guy?”

“So that people won’t try to step on you,” said the girl looking up at his face and seeing his green eyes very intently looking first at her and then at Rosa and then at the rest of the class.

“Why would it be any different for them?”

“Because they were like from biblical times. Everything was different,” said Barbara, a chubby girl who shifted from side to side in her seat as she spoke.

“Maybe some things don’t change,” said Ron.  “Maybe that’s why it is important to read this stuff to see that some things don’t change.”

Rosa said, “Does that mean that after we learn that some things don’t change that we can stop reading this corny stuff and read something that is interesting?”

The class laughed. Ron laughed too. Rosa was right. It was kind of boring but he didn’t think that their studying it had to be boring, not if he could make them see the connection between them and it. “All these people thinking about a lot of the same things that you and I are thinking about. Maybe they’ve thought of some things that we haven’t. Maybe some of them were smarter than us and we can learn from them.” Ron hesitated. It wouldn’t do any good to scold them, not yet. He hadn’t hooked them deeply enough yet. He needed to lure them in just a little more first. “When does the monster appear?”

“At night,” said Tina quickly.

“What have they been doing before the monster comes into the mead hall?”

“Sleeping,” said Andrea.

“And before that?”

There was the silence again Ron sent them back to the book, to the story. The read together about the first time that Grendel had appeared. Then he sent them to another section and another.

“They’ve always been drinking,” said Ron finally. “What do men do after they’ve been drinking?”

The girls laughed. Rosa said, “They pee.” The girls laughed again.

Laughing with them, Ron said, “What else do they do?”

“They get all hot,” said Rosa loudly. The girls laughed very hard now.

Ron said, “And what do they do after they get hot?” Then he blushed realizing that they would take it differently from the way that he meant it. Rosa said in a mildly mocking voice, “Mr. Tuck, you don’t want us to talk about that.”

“Do they ever fight?” said Ron. The room got very, very quiet. “Could people sometimes get hurt?”  The room was so quiet now that he could hear his own footsteps as he paced back and forth in front of the room. “Maybe this is a story about the monsters that come out from inside of men after they’ve been drinking too much. These were violent men.  Men who were used to killing and fighting. Is it any wonder that if you put a bunch of them together in a bar, that someone would get hurt?” And then almost as perfect punctuation to what he said, the bell rang. He smiled. His timing was getting better.

Ron got into his car and drove back towards his house. His mind was still back with his classes. He could see their open faces and their deep, dark eyes like they were indelibly printed somewhere inside of him. He asked himself for at least the tenth time if what he was trying to do was any good for them. Did he have anything that he could really give them that was any different or better than what the other teachers had to offer? They looked at him with faith in their eyes. They trusted him, or at least it seemed to him that they trusted him. Suppose he fucked it up? Suppose some Catholic thing just made him go off and somehow they were taken away from them. He would be just another in what he knew to be a long list of disappointments for them. He couldn’t let that happen. If he had to pretend to still be a Catholic, he would. Then another voice said inside of him said, “They’re just kids. Who are you, the fucking Catcher in the Rye?” He screamed back at the voice that he was sane. That he would battle for his sanity. That he would not let himself go crazy again. It was giving up. He didn’t want to give up on them and he didn’t want them to know how quickly, how completely, he wanted to be part of their lives. He wanted to be a teacher that they would smile about when they were older and to do that he had to give up some things and be there for them now. Nothing that he had ever done was as important as what he was doing right now, and he would not allow himself to let them down.

Back at his apartment, he found a note from Zoe that said that she had taken the train back to her father’s house. Ron noticed that she never called it her parents’ house. It was always her father’s house. He missed not having her there and yet he didn’t want to miss her. He had learned to be alone again. Robin had taken that away from him and he had it back now. He could be alone without waiting for someone to call up and save him. It had been so hard without the aid of being a kid who could have imaginary friends and games. What he had now was music and pot. He rolled a joint and turned on the radio. He lit the joint and sat next to the fan so that the smoke would be sucked out into the alleyway. He sat back in his Danish rocking chair, one of the two chairs that he had taken from his Aunt Dottie’s house after she died.  He looked over at the place of honor that he gave her fan back chair. He didn’t sit in it as much as he stared at it and imagined her when he did. She wouldn’t like these kids. She would think that he was wasting his time and that they didn’t pay him enough money.

The phone rang twice before he moved towards it. He expected to hear Zoe’s voice but it wasn’t Zoe. Robin said, “I was thinking about you and wondering how you were.”

In a stunned voice, he said “I’m teaching in a little Catholic school in Newark.”

Robin laughed. “Are you pretending to be Warren?”

“I think that I can do this, Robin. These kids grew up on the same streets that I grew up on. I can help them to learn what they need to learn to get out.”

“So, you want to save them?”

“I don’t know. I wish that you could see what happens to me when I’m in class. It’s very strange and kind of wonderful really.”

“Are you smoking pot again?”

“Not so much,” said Ron, stubbing the joint out in his ashtray.

“I’m coming back for a visit.”

“When?”

“In three weeks.”

“How long will you be staying?”

“I haven’t decided. Can I count on you to pick me up?”

“You can always count on me. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“Things change.”

“Yeah, they do,” he said. She was fully alive in his mind now and he could see her face so very clearly, the high cheekbones, the blonde straight hair, and the blue eyes that saw everything.

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“No,” he lied.

“You should see other people, Ron.”

“I want to see you.”

There was what seemed like an incredibly long silence over the phone line.

“I’ll call you again when I know when I’m getting in.”

“OK,” said Ron. And then she was gone and he was alone in his one room apartment in Elizabeth and the radio was annoying him and he felt very lonely. He picked up his book bag and began to prepare for the next day’s classes. He relit the joint and in a while it felt as if he must have imagined that she had called.

It was dark when the phone rang again. This time it was Zoe and her voice sent a wash of guilt that felt like a cold shower run through his mind and then down over his body.

She said, “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

He said, “I had to work.”

“Is it too late to come and get me?”

Ron broke into a grin and said, “I’m half out the door already.”

 

Chapter 9

 

On Sunday morning, Ron told Zoe that he was going to need to spend most of the day with papers. She smiled and stretched in front of him. His eyes grew perceptibly larger as she spread her legs and said, “Are you going to want to visit me later?”

Ron cleared his throat but he couldn’t take his eyes away from in between her legs. “I assigned all these essays,” he said unconvincingly.

She laughed and snapped her legs shut so quickly that it made him blink. “Maybe I’ll spend the day at my parents’ house and go for a swim and show my face. Do you want to drive me there now?” The angular shape of her jaw had a strong curve and with the way the sunlight was dancing off of her hair he could have sworn that she was throwing off a radiation of light that came from within her.

“Do you think that maybe we should talk about living together?”

She smiled broadly and slid her arms around his neck and said, “We just did.”

He drove her home feeling very close to her and not wanting to send her off anywhere, almost as if some spell would be broken if she wasn’t in contact with him. She talked to him about her sisters and how they used to put on puppet shows for their parents on Sundays. The girls had constructed a miniature stage and Zoe painted the comedy and tragedy Greek theater masks on it. They would practice all week long. Hiedi would write the script and Barbara, the only one of the daughters named for someone on their father’s side of the family, would make clothes for the dolls that they had converted to hand puppets. Zoe would paint scenery. Her face became very dreamy when she said, “Do you think it’s possible to have a childhood that is too happy? So happy that growing up can’t help but be a letdown?”

“You’re asking the wrong guy that question,” said Ron in a voice that at that moment felt very old and far away from childhood. Except that childhood was sitting right next to him in its entire splendor. That thought made him smile.

Back at home, he unpacked his briefcase and spread the papers onto the bed. The scent of her in the sheets made him lie on his back and just close his eyes, turn his face into the bed sheets and inhale her. He felt a stirring between his legs and his eyes opened like some kind of alarm sounded in his head. He needed to work.

Coffee and papers and a red pen carried him through the next hours. He learned that they had uniform difficulty with the placement of nouns and verbs. He drew circles and wrote to each of them. By the time he was finished with a paper, there was as much red on it as there was any other color ink.  When he could link a face with a paper, it made him smile. To each of them, he wrote a few sentences at the end. He told them what he thought were their best ideas and what they needed to work on to express themselves better. Lashly had very rarely paid him any compliments at all and he wasn’t going to be one of those teachers who made it an ordeal for students to read their graded work.

He was insatiable for their ideas. He almost sighed when he finished reading some of the papers. He wanted to talk to the authors right then and show them what could make their papers better. They were so vulnerable and transparent. He was almost finished with his senior essays when he read he came to Andrea’s paper.

In the second paragraph, she wrote about the power of language. She had learned the year before that poetry could inspire emotional and physical responses with the power of words. Then she wrote, “I once read a poem that said the words ‘a candle between my thighs’ and when I read it I felt jolted. Then I read it again and again and it made me want to have that feeling.” Ron read to the end of the paper and then started reading it again. He noticed that he was sweating and that he hadn’t turned on the widow fan even though it was a warm day. He got up and to his shock saw that he had an erection. He walked to the fan and switched it on. Then he lit a cigarette and read her paper again. The words “a candle between her thighs” jumped out at him again and he stared at them. She said that it came from Dylan Thomas. What was he supposed to say about this? Was he supposed to ignore it? It was the most powerful line that he’d read all day but how was he supposed to respond to a seventeen year old girl who was writing about a candle sliding between her legs? She deserved a response. That was exactly what poetry was supposed to do: stop you dead in your tracks and make you want to go back, but how was he supposed to tell her that. He was sure that he’d never heard the line before. He would have remembered it if he had. He wanted to know where it came from. Then he saw again that she said it was Dylan Thomas. What was this girl doing reading Dylan Thomas? He went to his bookshelf and looked for his complete Dylan Thomas poems. He had to admit that he hadn’t read them ardently. He loved the prose things like “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and of course “Do Not Go Gentle” but he didn’t know this piece and now he was determined to find it.

The phone rang and it was Zoe. “I want to be there with you,” she said.

“Can I come and get you?” he answered.

“Come now,” she whispered.

He left the book of poems lying on the bed but carefully packed away each of the stacks of papers. He glanced over at his clock. It was 6 o’clock. He’d been reading for more than 5 hours and he hadn’t once looked up at the time. He hadn’t straightened up the apartment. Before he left, he pulled the sheet up and tried to smooth it out and put the pillows at the head of the bead next to the rougher fabric of the sofa portion of the hide-a-bed. He left the book in the middle of the bed and was out the door.

She had run to the curb almost before the car stopped. She dove in and ran her arms over his shoulders and kissed him and straddled him so that she was between him and the steering wheel. Then she said, “I guess you can’t drive this way can you?”

She settled onto her side of the car, rolled down the window, the first rays of the sunset were bouncing on the sides of her glasses and her presence warmed him. She waved at the closing drape as he pulled away.

When they were back inside his apartment, she said, “I did something for you today. I hope that you like it.”

Ron looked at her quizzically. “What did you do?’

She pulled her shorts down and unbuttoned her top. He lay back on his bed and she tucked her hand into the waistband of her panties and slowly wriggled them down until they were just over her knees.

Ron’s eyes were drawn and then they saw the bareness, the nakedness of her pubic triangle. “I waxed myself for you.” She stood very straight until the panties gathered below her knees and then slid down to her calves. Then she stepped out of them. Ron was transfixed. He knew that his mouth was open but he didn’t care.

“I want to kiss it,” he murmured.

She crawled onto his bed and lay on her side and then her left toe raised and pointing at the ceiling, she let it slide down to the back of her right knee so that he could see her the way the flower of her opened and swelled with the feel of his gaze.

She tasted moist and fresh like a saturated breeze and he let the tip of his tongue wiggle along the slit of her sex; appreciating her with soft licks. She slid from her knees to the mattress and raised herself up for his mouth. She held herself up like a delectable morsel and quivered for him. He shifted his shoulders between her thighs, inclined his head and placed his lips on her. She tightened her cheeks and thrust up at him. He bit into her naked lips and shook his head like a warm, feral lover and she felt the waves of the first orgasm pulse through her.  It caused her to buck against his hard teeth. He swallowed. He sucked and shook his head, gulping her. His lips pushed against her hips, his hard teeth squeezing her like a fruit that he wanted to split open. Then he rubbed the wet of her all over his face; he glistened with her. He pressed the chin that he hadn’t shaved since the day before against her lips, while his fingers peeled back the hood of puffed flesh that gathered in protection of the small bundle of nerves that was throbbing and pulsing and sending electric shocks like Morse code.

 

His sandpaper chin was pressing to her lips, his fingers were exposing a swollen clit, his tongue was lapping at it like a soft gentle whip; she exploded again. Juice was squirting out of her. She tossed her head as the erotic explosions rolled over her.

His eyes traced the tender shape of her flowered lips, blinking so that his long lashes brushed her into deeper frenzy. She locked her elbows in back of her knees and rocked for him, incoherent moans formed in her brain. She was not at all sure that they came out of her mouth that was locked wide open and gasping, head in jerking spasm that moved it from side to side. He had never seen a depilated vagina before.

Robin had been covered in a soft angel hair, a tangled swirl and she had told him it felt funny when he sucked on her and drove his curled tongue wiggling in and out of her, just as he was doing now with Zoe. She screamed with this orgasm or maybe it was a continuation of the last one that hadn’t stopped, but the urge to mount her was overwhelming.

He was so hard and he wanted to feel the silky warmth of that tight wet glove that she slid around him. He needed to feel her fingers on his ass urging him in and out. Wait! She didn’t do that, Robin did that! A voice inside of him screamed, “No!” and he sat him with a dazed expression.

She panted and tried to relax and managed to say, “I was about to pass out.”

He sank deep inside of himself, clawing and screaming against the silence like a man that had been tossed down a well, fingertips ripping against the stony sides of the chasm. He blinked up at her; had he been blind? What had he been seeing? Where had he been? Then his thoughts merged into clarity. It was Robin’s hand that slapped on his bucking ass, her small voice in his ear saying “I love you,” repeating it over and over.

He looked Zoe straight in her face and realized that what he wanted was that Robin would be this way with him. He told himself it wasn’t true. Zoe was in tune with his spirit; he loved the way that she saw him. For Robin, he had been all potential and doubt and now it was himself that he doubted.

How could he let a woman inside of him again? What was wrong with him? Look at what had happened the last time that he’d made that mistake! And then Zoe had his head in her arms and she was holding him to her breasts and he realized that he had been crying.

Chapter 8

 

Back at Ron’s apartment she took her clothes off and then took his clothes off smiling and squirming as he caressed her. Then she ran the first bath that Ron had ever seen in his tub and filled it with bathing salts that smelled of vanilla. She knelt on a towel that was folded on the tile floor next to the tub in which he lay back and closed his eyes.  Her egg-shell blue eyes followed the progress of her hands as she stroked his shoulders and his ribs and his thighs that she knew would become hard, unyielding and forceful. She wanted them that way. She dabbed exploding bubbles onto his nipples and admired the taunt hard kernel that stood out for her. She slid her strong forearm muscles in ascending and descending waves of soapy pleasure along the length of him. Her nipples were hard and her clit was swollen as she worked her thumbs higher and higher on his thighs and then saw his cock swell so that the head poked through the top of the water.

His eyes were deep green when he opened them and stared at her from a dreamy haze. They startled her as she worked over his wet body. He sat up and turned the hot water on full blast. He stood up and lifted her with a cooperative ease, his body dripping.  He lowered her into brim filled, warm, sudsy tub.

Starting with her toes he silently rubbed the bubbles from the sponge into her flesh with the help of his trailing hand. One hand was holding the loaded sponge and slowly squeezing it. The other was rubbing slow, soft, smooth circles into her thighs, into her breasts, along her belly. When she thrust her pelvis up he emptied the sponge onto her sex and then massaged it with those concentric maddening circles and she moaned, fitfully.

Ron carried her dripping body to the bed and stretched her legs up over her head and entered her with the thrust of a suitor. She bucked for him; pelvis unable to stop and he pounded into her and then shot seed  inside of her and she hoped that he had impregnated her, and wrapped her arms around him holding him  until she was asleep.

In late September, the coolness of the evening comes late to Elizabeth. Ron was reading papers when she opened her eyes. His body was long and relaxed but his eyes were intent on the words. When he saw that she was awake, he turned the stack of papers over and said, “I loved watching you sleep.”

She said, “Can we go for a ride?”

He said, “We’ll have to get dressed”

She frowned. He said, “I have to get dressed but I can wrap you in something.” She brought a pad and they drove into the hills, curled in a plaid comforter, sketching with a pencil, as the fading light softened the full rich greens into shades of dark.

Ron wondered what his students were doing right now; the voices of the essays were whispering in his mind. Zoe repressed her feelings of hunger with the need not to vomit again.