Teacher

            You’d talk about the midfield lacrosse you played, never about your father—those cold eyes—or your mother. She’d died or she’d left, you weren’t clear about which. You’d get tanked on Jack Daniel’s on college Saturdays after the game and give guys no hope in the fraternity hall. You’d smirk and slam a shoulder into their chest.

            “Whaa . . .?” they’d say.

            “Whaa . . .?” you’d mock.     

            But not me. Why didn’t you slam me?

            It was 1964 and friends were off to the civil-rights South or the dead John Kennedy’s Peace Corps. You weren’t having it, were you? Life was no cloud-cuckoo-land, our fathers said.

            I was a public-school kid from a Rhode Island mill-town in search of what, I wasn’t sure. I groped through books and marked each passage. I scribbled notes, line after line, page after page, sheet after sheet. Would I find answers? I read and reread and rethought, and wrote and revised and wrote nothings, and tried to fool myself, tried to fool teachers too.

            My favorite professor handed a third paper back: “When will you get serious?”

            I thought he’d understood how little I knew, how unaware, how helpless I felt.

            “I’m doing the best that I . . ..” My voice cracked. I turned to the door before he saw I might cry.

            You said you’d slid through Phillips Andover and read Hobbes and Machiavelli “without any bullshit from Jean-Jacque Rousseau.” I was so fresh and pink, I must have made you ache. You’d be the teacher, or you would try.

            Your Triumph TR3, its black paint fading, you were looking for money and your father owned a company. Money? Earn it, he said. Earn the damn stuff any damn way you can, and don’t come knocking. I’m not in.

            You drove the Triumph into the middle of a New England nowhere. I longed for that car, its rag top down, a girl, the wind on our faces, longed to drive it just once. You stripped it—wheels, radio, carburetor, what else?—and abandoned what was left by the side of the road. You were about to call the police and report the car gone, but they called you before you got to a phone. The wreck they found, did you want it?

            The insurance company said it was totaled and wrote you a check.

            Simple. Nothing to it. You had the Triumph back and cash for what you wanted. I didn’t ask. I didn’t know how. The police? the insurance? You bragged with a grin. I’d appreciate your daring, you thought. And I did. How you’d gotten away with a thing others wouldn’t try, and still, your flat tone said there was more. You’d learned a lesson. You’d seen how the world might work for us. Another way, and not my earnestness.

            Was that it? Was that what you wanted to teach? A hard world, our fathers said. They understood the way things were.

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            Twenty-five years later, I make films for non-profits, dreamers like the ones you despised. What have I become? And I teach hard men in prisons who write stories they don’t easily share, skeletons, they say, that explain who they are.

            I drive to our college reunion and search the nice part of town where I find you sealed in a mansion with wife number two, the children from your first wife now grown, a memory nearly forgotten. You run your father’s company in tasseled loafers and a J. Press suit and take a German car to the Club for a racquetball match. You say they serve the finest filet.

            I climb to a third-floor room to dress for tonight’s class dinner, and near the bed under a high window, on the tiniest of delicate tables, sits a cut-glass dish of caramel chocolates wrapped in paper-thin tinfoil. Next to a selection of Waterford snifters. Beside a carafe of brandy. On a doily of off-white lace.

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