Plan B for the Middle Class (2 page)

Of course, Hartwell and I couldn't be more different. That's clear. But I had a sensation after he'd left that afternoon that reminded me too strongly of when I had my troubles, such as they were. Years ago, a lifetime if you want, a student of mine became important to me. She wasn't like Hartwell's Laurie—at all—her name isn't important, but it wasn't a pretty name and—in fact—she wasn't really a pretty girl, just a girl. She came to my notice because of an affliction she carried in her eyes, a weight, a sorrow.

This is not about her anyway, but about me in a sordid way. I saw what I wanted to see. What I needed to see. She was frail and damaged somehow and I was her teacher. Well, who needs details? It was the same story as all these other shallow memories, some professor off balance and a young person either willingly or unwillingly the victim or beneficiary of it all. My student, this strange girl, received an A for B work, and I waited for her to pick up her term paper a week after the semester ended. Let me explain this to you: there was no reason for me to be on campus, sitting in my office in Normal Hall, no reason whatsoever. I had my door cracked one inch and I waited. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Friday afternoon I was still on the edge of my chair. Just having her paper (which I read and reread, held in my lap as I waited) was enough, and undoubtedly, it would have powered me through the weekend. I am the kind of professor who is in his office more Saturdays and Sundays than he will ever admit. On Friday evening, when I was preparing in my routine way to leave and go home, she came. I heard a step on the stair, the first step which was not the janitor's step, and I knew she was coming. How long could it have taken between the sound of those beautiful footsteps and their pausing at my opened office door? Twenty seconds? Ten? Whatever the time, it was the eon between my young and my old selves. I had a chance, as the old scholars put it, to know my tragic flaw. Not that I'm any more than pathetic, and certainly not tragic, but I came to know in that short moment that I was a fool and that I was about to join a legion and august company of the history of all fools. The girl came to my door and paused and then knocked on the open door. She acted surprised to find me there. She acted as if she expected to retrieve her paper in a box outside my door. I told her no, that I had it. I handed it to her, still warm from my lap. She nodded and averted her eyes and said something I'll never forget. “This was a good class for me,” she said. “You made it interesting.” And then she turned and touched the rippled floor of Normal Hall for the last time. Without her paper and with no reason to be on earth on Friday night, I became a fool, and in a sense the guardian of fools.

Like Hartwell.

But what could I do? This Laurie was as shrewd as any I'd seen come along. She not only accepted his poem—she'd commented on it. I'd quizzed him on what she had said, but he'd just smiled until his eyes closed, and shook his head. He was so far gone that I had to smile.

But Laurie hadn't stopped there. With no reason whatsoever, she had invited him to the Spring Carnival. There was no reason to do this. She'd already won her victory. Hartwell was absolutely incandescent about it. He was carnival this and carnival that. I should come, he said. Oh go with
us
, he said. It was as if they were engaged. I told him no. It was a sunny spring afternoon in the Pantry, too hot really to be drinking coffee, and I told him no to go ahead, but for god sakes be careful. If you want to know the meaning of effete, just say
be careful
to a fool in love. My advice didn't get across the table.

The Spring Carnival on our campus is a bacchanalian festival. It is designed with clear vengeance: victory over winter has been achieved and this celebration is to make sure. Years ago, it was held on the quad and consisted of a few quaint booths, but it has grown, exploded really, to the point where now every corner of campus is covered with striped tents and the smell of barbecued this and that clouds the air. I haven't been in years.

But. Hartwell's invitation was tantalizing, and then it was all tripled by something that happened the last week of classes. I was packing my briefcase in my office in Normal when the door opened. There wasn't a knock or a hello, the door just swung open and Hartwell's Laurie was hanging on it, half out of breath, her blond hair swinging like something primeval. “Oh, good,” she said. “You're here. Listen, Downey,” she said, using my nickname without hesitation, “Hart and I are going to the carnival and he mentioned you might like to go. Please do. You know it's Friday. We're going to eat and then take it all in.” Hartwell's Laurie looked at me and smiled, her tan cheeks not twenty-two years old. “It's going to be fun, you know,” she said and closed the door.

Well, an interview such as that makes me sit down, and down I did sit. I took the old old bottle of brandy out of my bottom drawer, a bottle so old my father had bought it in Havana on one of his trips, and I had half an ounce right there. Downey. I was jangled. So she and Hartwell called me Downey, when they called me anything. The prospect of being talked about set part of me adrift.

To the carnival I went.

But I didn't go with them. I told Hartwell that I might see him at the carnival, but to go ahead. It was the last week of classes and I had a lot to read. Friday afternoon I was plowing through a stack of rhetoric papers when—outside my window—I heard the Gypsy Parade, the kazoos and tambourines that signal the commencement of festivities. A feeling came to me that I hadn't had in years. I had heard this ragtag music every spring of every year I'd been in Normal Hall, but this year it was different. It called to me. I felt my heart begin to drum, and I put down my pen like a schoolboy called outside by his mates. It was the last Friday of the school year and I was going to the carnival.

Part of all this, naturally, was a sympathetic feeling I had for Hartwell. Laurie had invited him to the carnival, after all. I was—and I'll admit this freely—happy for him. At the corner I stopped and bought a pink carnation and pinned it to my old brown jacket and I thrust my hands into the pockets and plunged into the carnival. The crowds of shouting and laughing merrymakers passed around me in the alleyway of tented amusements. It was just sunset and the shadows of things ran to the edge of the world, giving the campus I knew so well an unfamiliar face, and I had the sense of being in a strange new village as I walked along. Bells rang, whistles blew, and a red ball bounced past. I saw Melissa, Hartwell's former wife, on the arm of one of our Ph.D. students, eating cotton candy. By the time I'd walked to an intersection of these exotic lanes, I had two balloons in my hand and it was full dark.

I bought some popcorn and walked on beneath the colored lights. Groups of students passed by in twos and threes. They didn't see me, but I know that I had taught some of them. I felt a tug at my arm then and it was Laurie, saying, “Downey. Great balloons!” She had Hartwell by the other arm.

“Yes,” I said, smiling at both of them and tugging at the two huge balloons. “They're big, aren't they?”

Hartwell was in his prime. He looked like a film actor and confidence came off him in waves. He wore a new white flannel jacket and a red silk tie. “They're absolutely grand!” Hartwell said. “They're the best balloons in this country!”

Laurie pulled us over to a booth where for a dollar a person could throw three baseballs at a wall of china plates. The booth was being managed by a boy I recognized from this semester's rhetoric class, though he wouldn't make eye contact with me.

“I want you two to win me a snake,” Laurie said, pointing to the large stuffed animals that hung above our heads.

“Absolutely,” Hartwell said, reaching in his pocket for the money. Hartwell was going to pitch baseballs at the plates. It was a thrilling notion—and when he broke one with his final throw, that was thrilling too.

“Well,” I said. “If we're going to ruin china, I'm going to be involved.” I paid the boy a dollar and threw three baseballs, smashing one plate only.

We stayed there awhile, acting this way, until on my third set, I broke three plates, and the boy, looking as shocked as I did, handed me a huge cloth snake. It was pink. Hartwell was right there, patting my back and squeezing my arm in congratulation, and I imagine we made quite a scene, Laurie kissing my cheek and smiling as I handed her the prize. I'll say this now: it was a funny feeling there in the green and yellow lights of the carnival—I'd never been patted on the back before in my life. I am not the kind of person who gets patted on the back, which is fine with me, but when Hartwell did it there, calling out “Amazing! Magnificent!” it felt good.

We floated down the midway, arm in arm after that, until I realized we had walked all the way down to Front Street, which is the way I walk for home. I said good night to them there, Hartwell and I bowing ridiculously and then shaking hands and smiling and Laurie kissing my cheek lightly one more time and calling, “Good night, Downey!” I turned onto Front Street and then turned back and watched them walk away, Laurie tightly on Hartwell's arm. They stopped once and I saw them kiss. She put her hand on his cheek and kissed his lips.

As I moved down Front Street, the noises of the carnival receded with every step and soon there was just me and my two balloons in an old town I knew quite well.

It is not like me to enter houses uninvited. I have never done it. But I was in a state. I can't describe the way I felt walking home, but it was about happiness for Hartwell and a feeling I had about Hartwell's Laurie. I had begun to whistle a lurid popular tune that I'd heard at the carnival. This should tell you something, because I do not whistle. And when I came to Old Tilden Lane, where all the sorority houses are lined up, I turned down.

I'd been to all of the Greek houses at one time or another. Each fall, the shiny new officers invite some of the faculty out to chat or lecture or have tea in the houses, and we do it when we're younger because it counts as “service” toward tenure or we're flattered (we're always flattered), and I had done my canned “English Department” presentation at Tri-Delt years ago.

I found Tri-Delta, halfway down the winding street tucked between two other faded mansions. It was almost ten o'clock. The lights were on all through the house and the windows and doors thrown open. I walked up the wide steps and into the vestibule. Everyone was at the carnival at this hour and I felt an odd elation standing in the grand and empty house.

This was among the strangest things I have ever done as a college professor—wander into a sorority house. But I did. I went through the living room and up the wooden stairway to the second floor and I went from door to door, reading the nameplates. The doors were all partially open and I could see the chambers in disarray, books scattered on the beds and underthings on the floor. The hallway smelled musty and sweet, and the doors were festooned with collages of clippings and photographs and memorabilia so that many times I had to read the notes to discover whose room it was. It was kind of delicious there in the darkened hallway, sensing that hours ago a dozen young women had dressed and brushed their hair in these rooms.

At the end of the corridor, on a dark paneled door, there were several sheets of white typing paper, and I saw instantly that this was Laurie's room, even before I went close enough to read any of it. It was, of course, Hartwell's poetry. The poem I had seen was taped there, along with five others he had typed and not shown me. Now, however, each was scrawled with red-ink marginalia in the loopy, saccharine handwriting of sorority girls. Their comments were filthy, puerile, and inane. Obscene ridicule. My heart beat against my forehead suddenly, and my eyes burned. Through her open door, I saw Laurie's red plaid kilt on the floor next to a black slip. I felt quite old and quite heavy and very out of place.

I fled. I rattled down the stairway, taking two steps at a time, and across the foyer and back into the night. A couple, arm in arm, were coming through the door. They were drunk and I nearly knocked them over. I recovered and hurried into the dark of Old Tilden Lane, where I found something on my hand, and I released the two balloons.

I am a man who lives in six rooms half a mile from the campus where I teach. I like Chopin, Shostakovich, Courvoisier, and Kona coffee. I have a library of just over two thousand books. After these things, my similarities with Hartwell end. He has his life and I have mine, and he is not like me at all. We are lonely men who teach in college. I'll give you that.