Author: Post Road

Lessons from the Masters

JT Price

In 1993, he found a job teaching English to elementary-age kids in Aguilar de Campoo, a town in northwestern Spain with a hill at its center. On top of the hill at the edge of the town stood the ruins of a castle among patches of tall yellow grass. A constant breeze stirred the grass and Bruce would climb the crumbling stone to look down over the town. They made cookies there. Standing in the ruins, Bruce could smell sugar wafting to meet him. He would find himself a nook in the weathered stone and lean back with For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Sun Also Rises or the short stories of his idol and read the words in the country his idol had loved. Occasionally he paused to flick tiny black ants from his exposed forearms. Like his father, Bruce always rolled up his sleeves.

Lessons Bruce learned while living abroad and traveling through Europe and Morocco, hiking whenever possible, through El Camino Santiago, the Pyrenees, the Picos:

1) Do not expect to break up fights that you did not start without getting hurt. Bruce had been naïve to think that men he did not know and toward whom he bore no ill will would not strike him, and he paid for his naïveté, in a bar lit by candles, with the original shape of his nose. Narrow, sharp, Anglican—no more. Even as the blood coursed through his hands, even as he could feel with his pressing fingertips the rubbery, disjointed mess there, he had the thought, could not help it: this will make a fine anecdote someday in my biography.

2) Writing is the only thing that can redeem time spent traveling alone. Otherwise, it all somehow evaporates. And yet when Bruce became too self-conscious—for example, when positioned in the window booth of the bar car of a train passing below the Swiss Alps alongside a lake whose tempered surface shone with the progress of the sun across it, while he looked out with pen and notepad unable to stop thinking about how beautiful the lake surface appeared and perfect for him to be looking out on—he was then unable to complete a single satisfactory sentence.

3) The solitude of hiking provides the nearest physical allegory for what it must be like to complete a novel. Since the summer following his junior year of high school, when his father paid for an eleven-day excursion through Nepal, Bruce had known he wanted to be a writer. His memory of that clean blissful remove was what motivated him to drop out of Cornell. Short of committing words to the page, there was no other method he knew to preserve the startling beauty he encountered on rising from his tent in the morning, where the sheer ice-encrusted expanse of the mountain climbed silent before him. The sound of prayer flags chattered nervously in the wind. His deep breaths, that vision—he wanted to slow his heart-rate, his sense of time—functioned as a perfect antidote to the social pressures his mother had enforced on him growing up in a Kansas City suburb: the people he simply had to talk to; the way he had to dress; the grades he had to achieve. He lost his virginity on the Nepal trip to a girl from Nebraska with a sly sense of humor and a tongue ring. In his backpack, Bruce carried Siddhartha, On the Road, and a collection of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, the first time he had read any one of those books, each handed over like an album of old family photos at the airport by his father. “You might find something of significance here too,” his father said gravely. Embracing the girl from Nebraska, Bruce made a promise he did not verbalize. In the melodrama unfolding in his mind, he had to speak for and beyond his era.

4) There are well-off, older, irresponsible Americans who live abroad, having fled their lives in the States out of some kind of shame. One such American offered Bruce all the hashish he could possibly desire and sat there cross-legged, watching him, as the breeze coursed through the open arches of the villa near the beach where this American lived. His cat-like smile would haunt Bruce for years, the way it lounged. “Have you ever read Aleister Crowley?” the American asked, his teeth slightly gray, perhaps entirely fake, and in that moment Bruce knew he had to go from there and never return, even if the name Crowley is one he did not forget. It is what he took with him from Alicanté.

5) Women will spoil you abroad in ways they never would at home in the American Midwest where you knew their families and they knew yours. There were too many examples to name, the identities of the women blurring in his mind, so that he was left with a need to elaborate lessons, and swear by the wisdom of those lessons in order to keep from miring in the horror of his own forgetting. It was exactly the fragmented way Bruce came to know trusting girls and then, more frequently, the women who would recognize and take without any apparent misgiving the pronounced signals of Bruce’s faithlessness—his gradually becoming someone whose like he had not been raised to respect—that allowed for the proliferation of experience. Fragmentary visions of an encounter would return, as acid flashbacks are said to, unbidden. In this manner, Bruce came to understand literary metonymy: one taking his hand as the paddleboat beneath them rocked gently along the Guadalquivir, past a statue on the eastern bank that she said looked in the dusk-light like “a man fucking a dog”; one leaning quietly against his ample shoulder in the back of a bus on the way to Pamplona, an old-school camera around her neck whose pictures he would never see developed; one putting on hot pink exercise shorts in her rooms in Aguilar to signal a readiness to field his explorations, while the image of Frank Sinatra on the TV, overdubbed by a deep male voice singing the lyrics in Spanish, looked on; one, a native, speaking to him of her Catholic God, Padre Nuestro, while leading him at night to a secret, scratchy spot on top of the ancient aqueduct in Segovia where she curled her body into his, the little spoon, and passed back a silver packet whose purpose Bruce did not grasp until he tore it open and felt the slipperiness on his fingertips. Each of these women posed an unspoken question to Bruce, one he was not ready to answer, or that he went about answering with his every waking minute. By saying, in effect, Wait and You’ll See. Wait and You’ll See. As if he possessed an ability to return to moments long past and redeem inevitably broken endings. That is why it felt essential for him to publish. It was in the indulgence of the absent women’s regard that Bruce started taking his identity as a writer seriously. Their beauty possessed him in his loneliest moments.

6) Unlike in books, where all that happens remains suspended as in amber, time does not typically stand still while you are alive. On returning to the States after eight years, he felt hopelessly behind—a guy out-of-step, his hard-earned lessons mostly useless. Memories of life in Spain began to feel like a story that had happened to someone else, a character he knew from movies—or from books? Maybe Hemingway? Yes, he had hiked the entirety of El Camino Santiago over the course of his final April in country, burning the clothes off his back on the outcroppings of seaside Finisterra, the same way the early pagans did, but he had no e-mail account, no cell-phone. When he met a woman in New York City, he looked at her as if they were both already naked. This did not usually go over well with women his age, those who had already sown their wild oats and now sought an anchor of some kind. In their late 20s, his peers were drawing up arrangements, buying property, taking vows, birthing infants. He told himself the ill-defined situation in which he found himself was fitting for an aspiring writer and would compel him to write his way out of the obscurity his ambition had propelled him into. New York City announced itself as the overwhelmingly obvious destination.

And that is how he felt on first moving to New York City: overwhelmingly obvious.

He hated it. He hated living in New York City. He hated living and writing in New York City. His unpublished fiction swelled with evocations of his hatred for the place, his disdain for its most privileged avatars, their shallowness.

Friends told him he was crazy. Not regarding his writing, which no one read. They told him he was crazy regarding certain things he did and said on the spur of the moment, apparently failing to recognize his brilliance.

The woman he was sleeping with, Molly Fisk, laughed at him, right to his face, as if he meant to be cute. But he was earnest in his hatred.

So he broke up with her even though he liked her. Then he kept thinking about her while sleeping with other women—the kind of courage it took for her to be that unguarded with him. To punish her for making him think about her, he said to her over the phone and by e-mail the cruelest things he could think to say and write.

Bruce was speaking to his father over the phone more and more frequently, a landline for which the monthly charges were exorbitant, another facet of the city he hated. In these conversations, Bruce suggested he might soon return to Kansas City. Perhaps he would teach Spanish to Americans in the suburbs as he had formerly taught American to Spaniards.

There was a way things ought to be and the way things were—and no one in New York City seemed to care about the former, except as sound bite, a form of vamping, the ever fewer friends not embarrassed to spend time with Bruce and his fiscally restrained lifestyle, his growing bitterness, his disorientation. He had beheld mountaintops, ecstatic, near holy visions, and these city-dwellers had—what?

“That reminds me of…” he would start, thinking of some precious memory from Spain before trailing off. His friends—acquaintances old and new, extended family, one constant childhood companion now working in the city as a corporate lawyer—voiced the concerns they divined from his brooding, a manner of suggesting their empathy for his struggles. Bruce would hover behind a half-heartedly explored dinner plate, studying its outer edges. It was as if they thought empathy were all that was needed to ease his distress.

Holding eye contact with his dinner companion, whomever it might be, he would think to himself, on the one hand, “My friend is trying to understand.”

And then, on the other, “Fuck this friend!”

All of them were better off than he was, some very well off indeed, while Bruce grew into a dense ball of ire sinking down through the pavement stone. He attended fiction readings, but felt threatened by the success of others, even the most casual conversations turning up another writer paid to provide content at some ludicrous website. People said the future was blogs; they said e-books; self-publishing. He continued reading analog fiction and writing analog fiction and submitting analog fiction, even if doing so proved inevitably painful.

On more than one occasion, guys took what felt like a sexual interest in him, something to do with the transparency of his suffering. He smoked a cigarette bummed from a man outside an East Village gay bar, then walked away with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his tattered cargo jacket.

Two things happened next.

Bruce befriended Aaron Ungarth over the course of a week in early September. Aaron was five or six years older but acted younger. He worked as an editor for the magazine where Bruce recently had started proofreading, at an office building off Houston St. Aaron was an alarmingly thin guy who dressed in punk rock tees and sandals no matter where he was going, the latter holdovers from his childhood on Nantucket.

Aaron, it turned out, harbored literary aspirations of his own. For the better part of a decade, he had been chipping away at a novel. It was about a former astronaut struggling with alcoholism and his brother, an ex-con stunt skydiver.

“It’s not a race,” Aaron said of writing. “But we probably need to feel like it is. Or no one’d ever complete a thing.”

They went out for drinks at the end of his first week, and Aaron dished on the magazine and the office-staff. Aaron Ungarth’s candor served as a kind of invitation: You Could Do What I’m Doing Too If That’s What You Really Wanted. Bruce felt immediately ready to pledge himself as Aaron’s most loyal ally.

The other thing was the worst.

One Tuesday morning a few blocks west of the subway stop, Bruce looked to the sky and saw a shroud of smoke spreading across it. He had noticed without slowing his step the clusters of murmuring people pointing and looking south. There was a story in his head and he did not want to lose it and felt he might if he stopped. As he stood on the sidewalk among onlookers—”Are they doing a movie?” one asked—another plane appeared at first like a tiny speck. Bruce already knew what would happen, as the speck became a bird, as if he had been dreaming it for years. People cried out. He studied the varicolored complexions of the faces around him. Their protesting and agonized faces were what he watched as the impact sounded.

He walked onward to the piers with his head down, willing the forward progress of his own feet. If he kept moving, maybe the guilt would leave him, the guilt of complicity, his hatred for the city, what he’d been stewing in. He stopped at the river running black and oblivious, the smoke rising higher in the sky.

He stared south.

Then turned around.

He must have looked composed because passersby met his eyes as if they felt there was something he could do to help them. As he approached 8^th Avenue, an older, round-chinned, bespectacled woman, propping herself up against a mailbox, called out that she felt faint. For ten minutes, while the sirens wailed and the first trickles of the exodus from the tip of the island arrived north, Bruce walked with her at his side. They walked for blocks. It was a moment he would never forget and knew he would never forget while experiencing it. Like an abject wedding ceremony of some kind: the older woman’s arm across his shoulder, his own holding her up as they advanced step by step.

She had on a designer coat and a black button-down shirt. Her name was Victoria. Her parents and sisters lived in San Francisco, but her boyfriend, Truman, worked in the south tower on the 68^th floor. Bruce asked her to recite the names of her family. Her phone was not working and Bruce did not own one. Crossing an intersection, she spotted a bench and said it would be OK to leave her there, she felt OK. She only needed to breathe. The smoke in the sky had grown denser. Bruce looked at the towers with their swirling dark coronas, then helped Victoria down to the bench. When he looked again, only one tower stood against the southern horizon. Cries rose over the rumbling, tremors passing underneath their feet.

“What has happened?” Victoria asked. “What has happened?”

“It’s bad,” said Bruce, watching through the canyon of the south-running avenue as a debris cloud surged over top the buildings in their direction. Maybe it would wash over them all, wipe away his life along with Victoria’s along with the rest.

It didn’t, settling and dispersing far from where they stood.

Victoria called out her boyfriend’s name, her eyes wheeling around wildly, wanting for focus.

“He’ll be OK,” said Bruce. “You’ll hear from him soon.”

“Oh God! Truman!” she said again, looking at Bruce as if he were her absent lover.

Victoria uttered some form of prayer and whispered words to the sky. Bruce thought of the Spanish girl on the aqueduct. He thought of Molly Fisk. He thought of his mother.

Ordering words on paper was the most idiotic thing. His entire adult life amounted to a series of wayward impulses, a long wandering from the path of the secure and the judicious.

That night, periodic shrieking of fighter jets overturned the sky’s silence.

Bruce called Molly Fisk. She was still angry but agreed to meet him for a drink. Afterwards, in her apartment, he found himself mired in her silence. She was on the coffee table, and staring at the ceiling, her sweater and jeans and panties on the floor beneath her feet, while he was lying flat on the floor to her right looking at her red hair draped over the side of the circular tabletop. She told him she was seeing someone else.

Those next few weeks he slept poorly, eyelids snapping open hours before dawn. The quality of his proofreading tanked and he quit his job before Aaron or one of the more senior editors was forced to fire him. Trucks freighted with destroyed remnants shuddered north through Manhattan. Thin contrails of smoke rose from the southern tip of the island.

A friend arranged for him to take a job as a custodian, which amounted mostly to wandering empty Midtown office corridors under fluorescent lighting. They asked him to clean the coffee machines. He found a used condom on the floor of a bathroom stall. Those who worked the longest hours would meet his approaching face under the fluorescence as if their crossing paths were not a real occurrence. Some smiled with exaggerated goodwill and moved briskly by. Some showed no affect at all and moved briskly by. Bruce felt keenly conscious of his displaced manners, egalitarian midwestern notions of politeness with no outlet for expression. These glancing encounters felt, in truth, not so different from the rejection notes he received for his stories, notes which seemed to become progressively more terse and less illuminating as time passed. Occasionally, “the Editors” misspelled his name or the title of his story. He stared at his own flesh with greater frequency, his palms, his forearms, his chest, alone in his apartment on waking in the early afternoon, the hair, the freckles, the absence of any trace of the women who had touched him. The appeal of tattoos dawned on him like an epiphany.

Molly did not return his calls, so he went in the afternoon to the East Village café he knew she frequented. She did much of her writing there, a set of reporter’s notepads spread across the ceramic tabletop in front of her. It was true that she wanted to see him—she could not hide it, the way her eyes widened, her expression an involuntary smile—but that did not prevent her saying the appropriate thing, which was that he should go. He told her to say it like she meant it, his tone passionate and vulnerable, and she looked down at her laptop for a moment, deciding what to do next.

She stood up to leave, and he followed her out of the café without speaking, feeling creepy and conflicted until he touched the small of her back. She did not flinch, and for a few strides he kept his hand there. She did not speak a word. They walked up the stairs to her third-floor apartment and began fucking while still in the hallway, moving into the apartment and slamming the door only when they heard someone enter on the first floor of the building.

This was Molly’s downstairs neighbor alongside Molly’s boyfriend, who had arrived outside at the same time. As the sound of footfalls on the stairs kept rising to her floor, Molly stared at Bruce, wide-eyed, wearing an expression of horror he had never seen before—and she rarely showed fear. A soft double-knock before a voice spoke from the other side of the door, Molly’s boyfriend’s voice, speaking Molly’s name. In her labyrinthine green eyes was the fact of her and Bruce, the inexplicability of their actions. As if she expected Bruce, the fiction writer, to speak some palliating truth she could repeat for the guy on the other side of the door. From the coffee table a half-carved pumpkin looked back at him with a smile but no eyes, only triangular outlines in pen. When all Bruce did was break eye contact and reach for his jeans on the floor, she hissed at him to go.

“Go how?” he whispered.

She pointed at the grated window to the fire escape. Carrying his boots by their laces between his teeth, he climbed the metal rungs in his socks and was still on the roof, putting on his boots and plotting how he would get down to the street, when Molly’s boyfriend surfaced on the ladder, a grizzled guy with an earring in each ear. Bruce did not like the look of him at all. He was not the sort of guy for Molly to be dating. The guy was stocky but shorter than him, and if Bruce had wanted a fight he was sure he could have taken him.

“What the fuck you doing, man?” the boyfriend said.

“What do you mean?”

“What’re you fuckin’ doing here?”

“I’m putting my boots on.”

“You’re fuckin’ up our lives, man,” he said.

“Let’s not be drama queens about this,” said Bruce.
The boyfriend punched him in the face, breaking his nose again.

Bruce did not lose his feet and would not meet the boyfriend’s gaze as blood from his nose dripped onto his shirt and his boots. The boyfriend made gasping sounds of disgust, maybe even fear, then returned to the fire escape, shaking pain from his fist.

He was standing at the front ledge of the building, pinching his nose with head tilted back in the October chill and looking through his vertigo at the street below, when Molly approached from behind him. She handed forward a bunch of tissue paper. He could taste the copper in his throat.

“I’m way off the fucking rails,” said Bruce, eyeing the empty sky.

“You said it,” she said. “Not me.”

The rising breeze stank of exhaust.

“I’m moving back to Spain.”

“Don’t move back to Spain.”

He looked at her intently with his head tilted, and Molly said, “You can’t look at me like that. I need you out of my life right now.”

Bruce nodded.

“I only mean, I don’t think going back to Spain will help you,” she said.

“My nose is fucking broken,” he mumbled.

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said. “The hospital’s only a couple of blocks away.”

“I love you,” he said.

“You need to leave,” she said. “I mean it.”

“I can make this better.”

“You have your own situation to deal with, dickhead.”

When he didn’t move to go, she said, “Love and desperation are not interchangeable.”

“Molly, I think they are, though.”

“Find someone you can talk to about that. I’ve already got a therapist.”

Aaron Ungarth was the one he found to talk to. Aaron was setting his novel aside in light of recent events, which “changed everything,” and had now embarked on a regimen of illicit pharmaceuticals to color his evenings and power his workdays. He assigned Bruce freelance articles that Bruce completed under a pseudonym and invited Bruce out wherever he went, nightclubs launched a couple of decades too late to appear in Bright Lights, Big City. Aaron conferred on Bruce a sense of belonging, the brotherhood of rebellion. The rhythm from the massive sound systems provided scaffolding for their spirits. Aaron bought the drinks as their nights drew onward. They had to shout to be heard. They had to choose their words well. Bruce swore he could see the circles around Aaron’s eyes turn darker, the skin of his face stretch thinner before his own eyes.

And then it was as if—as if it were just them, the conversation of two brothers, Aaron the older and more reckless, Bruce not too far behind and with scars to show for it. In a cab, Aaron told Bruce about the older brother he had grown up with, the motorcycle wreck and downward spiral he had helplessly witnessed, with that tone of there being facts in this life nothing can ever set right so why not leave the pretending and self-deception to those with an appetite for it? They were on their way somewhere, or returning, and it could almost have been romantic, thought Bruce, if Aaron weren’t speaking from the crest of a ‘shroom-high, Bruce himself extremely drunk, forehead pressed to the cool of the vibrating window. They passed across the Williamsburg Bridge and reentered Manhattan.

Bruce slept on the floor of Aaron’s spartanly furnished tenement apartment, a yoga mat someone had left behind providing a thin measure of comfort. In a corner at the front of the room was a tall black vase with a giant-leafed plant by the windows, the sole effort at decoration. Aaron emerged from the shower naked and stumbled into the darkness of his bedroom.

Bruce woke in the morning alone, replaying his memory of the night before.

“I knew what was going to happen,” Bruce had said, lying on the floor and eyeing the ceiling. “I saw it and already knew where the plane was going. It kills me I had that feeling inside of me, that hatred, that nihilism.”

“They are media whores like us,” said Aaron.

“I want to fucking disappear,” said Bruce.

“Making art’s always a kind of disappearance.”

“I’m just sick of my own striving. Sick as hell, you know?”

“Aleister Crowley lived his entire adult life either making art or fantasizing about humanity’s end—how we’d all disappear.”

That name again.

“Who’s that?”

“Aleister Crowley?”

Aaron had said a number of things that Bruce only retained on looking up the name later online. Yet he remembered how he felt, the excitement, a sense of dawning recognition as he trawled the internet the next day.

Frater Perdurabo.

Cambridge drop-out.

Intelligence agent.

Mountain climber.

Heir to a brewing fortune, occultist, bisexual, rebel idol, rock ‘n roll inspiration, writer and artist, straddler of the gap between Eastern and Western religion, founder of Thelema: pastiche spiritual code of the ascendant Will.

The atomizing reach of the internet, each user a node of quantifiable desires, had its spokesperson and prophet in the madman Crowley, whose entire life was striving to fulfill the insurrectionary power of the individual will. In Crowley, Bruce Copeland had the subject of his first novel, Mount Ire.

While researching Crowley at the 42^nd St branch of the New York Public Library, Bruce grew quantifiably more like him, or maybe always had been and only now realized it. Like Crowley, Bruce revered his well-spoken father who, like Crowley’s at a much younger age, was dying of cancer. Like Crowley, Bruce found he had a talent for writing about sex, which he transmuted under a pseudonym into a steady paycheck from a nervy website. Like Crowley, Bruce lusted after long hikes, hard climbs. Like Crowley, Bruce had burned for sexual experience, holding it to be somehow synonymous with his desire for recognition as an artist-individualist. He would fall asleep with his head hanging back in the library chair, then startle awake to the image of Crowley’s face posed like a sun beaming through the expanse of time. Bruce, or the un-Bruce he had become, grew into the story of this man, this iconoclast.

And yet there were also ways Bruce was not at all like Crowley. Recognizing as much, Bruce considered how he might serve as a corrective consciousness, the one who could set right Crowley’s own corrective consciousness—calm the excesses of Crowley’s misogyny, the crippling cocaine addiction, the belief in magick. An earthy scent rose from the library copy of the autobiography’s pages.

Magick was the pretense Crowley needed to make his acts of transgression socially palatable: the drug intake, sexual barriers overthrown, cavalier adventuring, his means of inculcating new seekers, new pupils. Remove the title of master and Crowley would only have been—what? One more dissolute maniac. So, while Bruce initially condescended to the idea of magick, his understanding of the term gradually evolved, taking on deeper meaning: what was the difference, after all, between the obscurity of Bruce’s present life, selling his writing under fake names, and his desired future where his actual name appeared on the cover of a novel, if not, in some sense, magic?

Or magick, as spelled by Crowley, clever at making everything his own. The fantasized transformation in Bruce’s life had mostly to do with a transformation in the way he would be perceived, which, above all other games, was Crowley’s most passionate:

1) Invoke an authority seized from history.

2) Commit yourself to actions considered transgressive by the standards of your time.

3) Show no qualm about propagating the myth of yourself.

4) Convey how your work stands as a corrective to, or an escape hatch from, the faults of the present-day.

5) Welcome followers; ravish them; make them see as you see.

6) Number all lists in sixes as Crowley would appreciate your doing if alive to see it.

The manuscript for Mount Ire did not sell for three years.

Molly Fisk embedded with troops on the way to Iraq, her work in the months-long interregnum between invasion and insurgency prescient of the chaos to come. When she returned to the states, she returned to a book deal and a position as a foreign correspondent for the Paper of Record. Her agent read Bruce’s work and recommended another agent, who signed Bruce on.

Before she moved to Jerusalem, Bruce memorized a poem by William Carlos Williams, and early one evening, recited it to Molly in Battery Park. Until she interrupted.

“Is there a better way to say what you want to say?” Molly asked.

“Without you, I’m nothing,” which brought tears to her eyes.

Over her shoulder hovered the dented sphere salvaged from the plaza beneath the towers. People milled around it, taking photos.

“Fuck you,” she said, brushing her cheeks with the back of one hand.

He reached to her face to help. “I love you, too.”

“We’re making a scene.”

“No,” said Bruce. “Nobody cares.”

Mount Ire sold.

Bruce was not expecting much.

His father died, and Bruce returned to Kansas City for the funeral. He gave his mother a box of autographed copies of the novel.

A TV book club chose the novel for the month of May, 2005.

Bruce surprised Molly in Jerusalem. By the time of his departure, they were engaged.

The novel sold well and Bruce was offered an adjunct position at Columbia. He stopped writing porn-for-hire and quit what he imagined would be his final odd job.

Crowley already had dimmed in memory, buried beneath the demands of the following two manuscripts, each of which subsequently sold to a prominent publishing house for seven figures.

Bruce found himself possessed of the sort of wherewithal he had resigned himself from ever knowing.

A movie was made of Mount Ire.

Molly returned to live in New York City, taking a job as a talking head on a foreign affairs TV show.

Bruce invested in the stock market.

He donated generously to charity.

“The famous Bruce Copeland,” Molly called him.

“Shut up,” said Bruce.

The Woman in the Barn

Jaclyn Gilbert

Joseph and I are soon to be hitched in my sister’s house with white sideboards and purple geraniums sprawling from black pots.

     Joseph didn’t give me any kind of engagement ring. He gave me a wooden clock. I told him, Joseph, let’s be more like the English and go for carats, our value in carats, with a thirteen grand baseline.

     But he said: Lydia, our people bequeath clocks and china and tools, family tokens and borrowed things, useful things.

     There’s a woman outside—she’s still locked up in Joseph’s family barn like a cow.

     I’ve only seen her once, caught a glimpse through a crack while I waited for Joseph to finish his plowing. It was April, just before our fourth courting walk. The woman’s hair was flying wild from her mull cap as if someone went and took all her bobby pins, and she was screaming something about Martyrs Mirror:

     I am but dust and ash approach thee, she said.

     Usually, in church, we see it as our sacred privilege to recite, O my savior and redeemer, those defenseless lambs, who were sacrificed by water fire sword and wild beasts.

     The woman kept asking for chalk, a board, something to write on.

     Listen, my hands are dry as flint. I had to tell her.

     Later during our walk, I asked Joseph:

     Is she a wild beast? The kind of woman who’d scrape out her own eyes, knock out her own teeth? Like a rabid dog I once saw my father shoot when it stole chicken eggs from the coop because there was no mercy, God had no tolerance for that!

     But Joseph answered me, Lydia, she can’t be any of those things. The devil Himself has possessed her. She’s not fit to marry or bear any kind of child. We can’t trust her hands for needlework.

     Our winter seasons for sewing have always been long like a slumber while the men dry tobacco the little boys speared. They work the cows too hard in the barn milking up the light of day. Dusk at four and dinner at five. We go to bed early. We pray before we sleep.

     Dark blue, they tell us to wear on our wedding day. O be humble before God. Like a bruise. And dark colors to absorb the light. We will have to keep the lights dim for the ceremony.

     There was something like dust in the woman. The way her dry lips cracked. Screeching out words like chalk scraped over hard dark black. That chalk she kept asking me for, to write out symbols and things about God’s consuming flames.

     She said to me: Here’s rue for you, some for me….I would give you some violets!

     Violet, whose violet? Violet the color of my eye when Joseph hits. He started when I wondered, pressed him, whether the barn woman truly deserved this. Sometime not long after, he asked for my hand, and I gave it.

     Next to the Bible, Martyrs Mirror is our most sacred book. I’ve begun pressing fresh lilac between some of the pages.

     Luke said, Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh.

     I am waiting for the flowers to dry.

     I’ve seen a picture of an English wedding. In the house of a family I clean for every week. On Thursdays I scrub for twenty an hour this English house, but don’t I dare touch a current of spark. No vacuum or washer and dryer either. No electric iron.

     In the picture, the bride, she’s let her hair down: lilac-strewn. I’d like that too. Some flowers in my hair to scatter after all’s been said and done.

     I am seventeen and Joseph is twenty. We don’t go by legal age, more by what our family thinks is a good fit and these weeks of courting we took. Long walks barefoot by the far creek holding hands and hiccupping words like chimes. The soft sound bells make I used to mistake for laughter.

     The woman in the barn did smile at me, said she too had wanted more than china, more than a clock. Perhaps she asked for chalk so she could write out a different story.

     Mankind: the essential thing, the useful thing, she said. But it isn’t always! she howled.

     Joseph noticed me during volleyball practice one Sunday after Church, after choir. I have never liked running much. He used to watch me slap my hands wildly. I would giggle, but during our first walk in the woods Joseph told me to stop that. He told me I wasn’t very intelligent.

     My mother has asked about my eye. I said wedding china fell down from the hutch when I was getting the new house ready.

     She told me to be more careful. This is your sacred life beginning, Lydia, she said. Your house with Joseph will be under God.

     At first bruises are purple, like broken moonlight. I’ve started counting the nighttime stars. Someone’s missing teeth, I think. More sweet lilacs pressed next to the words of Timothy:

      If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him.

     The creek where Joseph and I took our first courting walks glittered with shadows from the spring tree leaves. Against the water there was a sallow color like ripening corn, white to greenish gray and yellow. Joseph once kissed me there. I tasted sunlight and the fields and plough wheels turning around the soft dead dirt.

     I’ve practiced twisting lipstick tops when cleaning the English family’s bathroom. Stole the matron’s rouge into my apron pocket and caught myself doing it in the mirror.

     I had stared at the barn woman’s face that day and wondered about violets and lilies and hundreds of colors bleeding into flowers and how different each petal looks depending on which way you turn it under the sun.

     Eye bruises, they must take a long time to heal. We aren’t allowed to watch our reflections in this community.

     I started coating the tender rings round my eye with flour dust. I tell my sisters and brothers it is leftover from so much pie baking these final days before the wedding.

     In school they taught us to write out Sorry in chalk. Our Father Our Creator we had to write. I’m Sorry we wrote it one hundred times over on the blackboard: I will not talk when someone else is talking.

     The barn woman approached me when I told her. Then she licked my wrist.

     Devil’s tongue, it gets us into trouble! she screamed, We are full of sin! She lay down in the hay then, laughing.

     I am pressing more lilac next to Samuel who said:

     Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes.

     The English have lace underwear. I found some in that matron’s vanity drawer while cleaning. The word is lingerie, but I would never say it out loud:

     Joseph, would you love me in lingerie?

     The woman in the barn was small like early daisies. She wrapped herself around rafters with arms like frail stems, skin like pollen dust. Sunlight leaked through the sideboard cracks, got caught in her eye: a fire like the sharp dots English tools make. Electric saws splitting wood. She stared into me.

     What if I go blind, the bruises leak to my eye, my brain? I want to go back and ask the barn woman. I would tell her I clean houses to pay for prescriptions, fancy ointments and stark white swathes.

     It’s been weeks since Joseph last hit me by the far creek. My bruises faded shadow blue, like pearls. Joseph says he’s giving me this short time to heal before the wedding.

     Stray straw fell out into the barn as the woman howled among the rafters. She touched her face like it hurt, like it was mine.

     Maybe I’ll bring her more than chalk if I go back. I’ll bring her dry corn fodder and tobacco leaves, cow grease, swine oil, saddles, harnesses, ropes, discs, and wheels. I’ll bring her eyehooks and nails and twine. Some truss board too. I’ll bring her water from the river.

     I want to believe the sun is enough to tell the time, that Joseph and I won’t need a clock beside our bed after we marry.

     The creek water drips into a river that winds long away from the community. It gurgles under the highway, grows murky from black underthings and inky spiders. It laps and eddies around sediment making clay. We could build things, I cried to Joseph when he last struck me, we could, if we let our hair go and wandered past the perimeter.

     But Joseph’s hand continued down, and he said he had no urge. To follow the flickering silver tail of the river out of our farm. The water tastes like metal, or has the blood finally dried into my mouth like black clay ebony?

     I want to believe cold sunlight in the morning and fire at night for warmth are of the same piece. That the quake of lightning shooting sparks along the English lines chattering during storms are needful, natural wants.

     Joseph doesn’t believe in fear. He doesn’t believe lightning can kill. The second time he hit me in the woods he told me to thank the rain. To kneel before it.

     I wonder if the woman in the barn ever touched an electric hand-mixer, power drill, reciprocating saw, immersion blender, dishwasher, fuel rotary hammer, pressure cooker, or automatic rifle. Joseph says it’s violence. Technology, electricity, all of it Godless and violent.

     Daniel was cast into a den of lions, to be torn by them, but God protected him. The dried lilacs crackle beside his name where I’m moving them, the dust of purple faint by black words the woman in the barn would like scratched into chalk white light.

     The woman in the barn said there were more than four seasons. Hundreds more than that. Millions, because light is all tiny particles exploding at different speeds and pulses. She said she wanted to read Physics and History and Biology. Evil subjects of war and vanity, she wants to know more than God, but how can we know that?

     The last time Joseph hit me he said that fear and love were not the same, especially false love, idol love, which is wanting things, and I am not supposed to want any more than exactly what I have.

     Black sparrows and ravens have a sheen of violet satin in their feathers, as if they’d been hiding them all along. The light brings it out in them: lavender silver and gold as natural things more than any useful thing that flutters my pulse, a batting of my eye and quiver in my mouth like that first kiss I blew for Joseph during volleyball.

     He would hit me with a pitchfork in the hayloft if I said lin-ger-ie, puncturing each syllable, and hearing the song of it with my sweet lavender voice.

     Did she sit at a wedding table, alone, the woman in the barn? Did she shield her face with her hand as we do against the sunlight? Her eyes crossed and dizzied by the closeness of a corner, where she sat and stared and waited?

     She was watching me as she ate chaff in the barn, her mouth frothing white from it: this leftover dust we feed to the cows. I wish I had recited out words like lilac lingerie and black lace spiders and daisy lips and cordless drill through the barn door wall.

     Joseph took back my stolen lipstick. He hit me and said I’d burn in hell.

     I’ll burn for it, this sin, he told me—until I am but nothing but dry spark and dust and ash. A feeble flame hobbling from his hands rubbing together and clapping me out.

     Tomorrow they’ll prop us up blue-dressed and mull-cap-pinned like dolls.

     Joseph, with his heavy clock, black hat, and long dark beard will be waiting for me.

     I found the lipstick buried in with Joseph’s wool cutting shears. I placed it back in my apron with blackberry jam from the cellar, and carried a leather harness with swine oil and my Martyr’s Mirror to the woman in the barn. I let her choose the words she wanted. She asked for those of Samuel. Lighten mine eyes, she said.

     Together we crushed and let loose the pale dust of dried lilac.

Nine Inches

by Tom Perrotta

Ethan didn’t want to go to the middle school dance, but the Vice Principal twisted his arm. He said it was like jury duty: the system only made sense if everybody stepped up and nobody got special treatment.

            Besides, he added, you might as well do it now, get it over with before the new baby comes and things get even crazier.

            Ethan saw the logic in this, but it didn’t make him feel any less guilty about leaving the house on Friday evening with the dishes unwashed and Fiona just getting started on her nightly meltdown—apparently her busy toddler day wasn’t complete unless she spent an hour or two shrieking her head off before bedtime. Dana smiled coldly at him from the couch, as if he’d volunteered to be a chaperone out of spite, just to make her life that much more difficult.

            “Don’t worry about us,” she called out as he buttoned his coat. “We’ll be fine.”

            She had to speak in a louder-than-normal voice to make herself heard over Fiona, who was standing in the middle of the living room in yellow Dr. Denton’s, her fists balled and her face smeared with a familiar glaze of snot, tears, and unquenchable fury.

            “No, Daddy!” she bellowed. “You stay home!”<br />

            “I’m sorry,” Ethan said, not quite sure if he was apologizing to his wife or his child. “I tried to get out of it.”

            Dana scoffed, as if this were a likely story. She was usually a more understanding person, but this pregnancy wasn’t bringing out the best in her. Only five months along, she had already begun groaning like a martyr every time she hoisted herself out of a chair or bent down to tie her shoe. She was also sweating a lot, and her face had taken on a permanent pink flush, as if she were embarrassed by her entire life. Ethan couldn’t say he was looking forward to the next several months. Or the next several years, for that matter.

            “Love you guys,” he said, inching toward the door.

#

His spirits lifted as he got into his car. It was a crisp March night with a faraway whiff of spring sweetening the breeze, and he couldn’t help noticing what a relief it was to be out of the house, going somewhere— anywhere—in the dark on a weekend. He just wished his destination could have been a little more exciting.

            When Ethan first got hired at the Daniel Webster Middle School, teachers weren’t expected to babysit the kids at social functions. But that was back in a more innocent time, before the notorious Jamaican Beach Party of 2006, a high school dance that degenerated into a drunken brawl/gropefest and scandalized the entire community. Six kids were arrested for fighting, three for misdemeanor sexual assault, and two for pot; eight more were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. Cellphone videos of some shockingly dirty dancing made their way onto the Internet, causing severe embarrassment for several senior girls-gonewild who had stripped down to bikinis during the festivities and become the focus of unwanted attention from a rowdy group of varsity lacrosse and hockey players. Dances were cancelled for an entire year, then reinstated under a host of strict new rules, including one that required the presence of faculty chaperones, who would presumably impose the kind of professional discipline that had been lacking in the past.

            Ethan thought the new rules made sense for high school, where the kids were old enough and resourceful enough to get into real trouble, but it felt like overkill to extend it to the middle school, one more burden added to a job that already didn’t pay nearly enough, though he knew better than to complain to anyone who wasn’t a teacher. He was sick and tired of people reminding him that he got summers off and should therefore consider himself lucky.

            Yeah, he didn’t have to teach in July and August, but so what? It wasn’t like he got to while away eight weeks at the beach, or lounge in a hammock by the lake. He didn’t even get to sit home reading fat biographies of the founding fathers or taking his kid to the playground. He was a thirty-two-year-old man with a master’s degree in history and he still spent his summer vacations the same way he had when he was sixteen— standing behind the counter of his father’s auto parts store, ringing up wiper blades and air filters to make a little extra cash.

            <br />For the second time in less than twelve hours, he parked in the faculty lot and made the familiar trudge around the side of the building to the main entrance, where a crowd of boisterous seventh and eighth graders had already begun to gather; there was no such thing as being fashionably late to a dance that went from seven to nine thirty.

            Ethan was popular with the kids—he was, he knew, widely considered to be one of the cool teachers—and a number of them shouted out his name as he passed: *Mr. Weller! Hey, it’s Mr. Weller! *Oddly gratified by the recognition, he acknowledged his fans with a quick wave as he approached the double doors, onto one of which someone had taped a single sheet of red paper, its message printed in big black letters: THIS IS HOW WE PARTY.

            The main hallway was deserted, faintly ominous despite—or maybe because of—the Mylar balloons taped to classroom doorknobs and the festive hand-lettered signs posted on the walls to mark the big occasion: *Dream Big! The Sky’s the Limit!! Prepare to Meet Your Future!!! *Ethan was a little puzzled by these phrases—they seemed off-message for a dance, more like motivational slogans than manifestos of fun—but he wasn’t all that surprised. The kids at Daniel Webster were products of their time and place, dogged little achievers who were already taking SAT prep courses and padding their resumes for college. Apparently they were ambitious even when they danced.

            As far as he knew, the other chaperones on duty were Rudy Battista and Sam Spillman, so he wasn’t sure what to make of it when he spied Charlotte Murray checking her reflection in the glass of a vending machine outside the cafeteria. She turned at the sound of his footsteps, looking unusually pleased to see him. Her expression changed as he got closer, her mouth stretching into a comical grimace of despair.

            “Help,” she cried, flinging her arms around his neck as if he were a long-lost relative. “I’m trapped at an eighth grade dance!”

            Charlotte was an art teacher, a bit of a bohemian, one of the more interesting women on the faculty. Ethan patted her cautiously on the upper arm, struck by how pretty her reddish-gold hair looked against the green of her sweater. There was a nice clean smell coming off her, a humid aura of shampoo and something faintly lemony.

            “I’m filling in for Sam,” she explained upon releasing him. “His father’s back in the hospital.”

            Ethan nodded solemnly, trying to show the proper respect for his colleague’s ailing parent. Secretly, though, he was delighted. Sam was a social black hole, the kind of guy who could buttonhole you in the teacher’s lounge and kill your whole free period telling you about the problem he was having with his dishwasher. Trading him for Charlotte was a major upgrade.

            “It’s your lucky day,” she said, as if reading his mind. “No kidding.”

            They smiled at each other, but Ethan couldn’t help noticing a slight awkwardness in the air. He and Charlotte had been good friends during his first year at Daniel Webster. He was single back then, always up for a movie or a drink, and she was separated from her husband. For a little while there—this was five years ago, ancient history—they seemed on the verge of maybe getting involved, but it didn’t happen. She went back to Rob, he met Dana, and their lives headed off on separate tracks. These days they only saw each other at school, and limited their conversation to polite small talk.

            “So how are you?” she asked.

            “*Okay*.” Ethan pronounced the word with more emphasis than it usually received. He was suddenly conscious of his thinning hair, the weight he’d put on since knee surgery had ended his pickup basketball career. He was three years younger than Charlotte, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from looking at them. “You know, not bad. How about you?”

            “Great,” she replied, making a face that undercut the word. In the past year or so, she’d taken to wearing oval, black-framed eyeglasses that made her look like a college professor in a Van Halen video. “Nothing too exciting. How’s your little girl?”

            “Adorable. When she’s not screaming.”

            Charlotte took this as a joke; Ethan didn’t bother to correct her. “And you’re having another?”

            “Yeah, figured we should do it now, before we get used to sleeping through the night.”

            She said she was happy for him, but he could see it took some effort. Kids were a sore spot in her marriage. She wanted to start a family, but her husband—he was a struggling scrap metal sculptor, deeply devoted to his art—refused to even consider the possibility. This had been the cause of their separation, and nothing seemed to have changed since they’d gotten back together.

            They were saved from this tricky subject by the arrival of Rudy Battista, barely recognizable in khakis, a brown turtleneck, and a checkered blazer, a far cry from the crinkly nylon sweatsuits he wore to teach gym every day.

            “Look at you,” Charlotte called out. “Got a date?”

            Rudy adjusted his lapels, his face shining with health and good humor.

            “It’s a special occasion. I believe it calls for a certain elegance.”

            “I wish you’d told me that an hour ago,” Charlotte complained, but Ethan thought she looked just fine in her simple skirt and sweater combo, the black tights and ankle-high boots adding a slightly funky touch to the ensemble. He was the slacker of the group in his baggy—the technical term was “relaxed”—jeans and suede Pumas. At least his shirt had buttons.

            “I brought you guys a present,” Rudy said. He reached into his pocket and produced two identical strips of soft yellow measuring tape, the kind favored by tailors. He handed one to each of his colleagues. “Exactly nine inches long.”

            “Are you serious?” Ethan asked. The Vice-Principal had briefed him on the Nine-Inch Rule a couple of days ago—it stipulated that students had to keep their bodies at least that far apart while dancing—but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that was meant to be taken literally. “We’re actually supposed to measure?”

            “Just during the slow songs,” Rudy explained. “The kids think it’s funny.”

            Charlotte shot a skeptical glance at Ethan, who shrugged and stuffed the measuring tape into his pocket. She pulled her own piece taut in front of her face and pondered it for a couple of seconds.

            “If that’s nine inches,” she said, “someone’s got some explaining to do.”

#

Ethan spent the first half-hour of the dance manning the table outside the cafeteria, taking tickets, checking IDs, and crossing names off a master list, while a uniformed cop hulked in the doorway behind him, scrutinizing the kids for signs of drug or alcohol abuse. Lieutenant Ritchie was an older guy—he had to be pushing sixty—with a brushy white mustache and none of the mellowness you might have expected from a small-town cop coasting toward retirement. He introduced himself as a special departmental liaison to the school board, appointed to oversee security at dances and sporting events. He said the position had been created specially for him.

            “One of my nieces got caught up in that Jamaican mess,” he said, shaking his head as if the trauma were still fresh. “We let that thing get outta hand.”

            Ethan had to turn away two kids at the door, but not because they’d been partying: Carlie Channing had forgotten her ID and Mike Gruber hadn’t realized that the tickets had to be purchased in advance. Both of them begged for one-time indulgences that Ethan would have been happy to provide, but Lieutenant Ritchie made it clear that no exceptions would be permitted on his watch. He seemed to take it for granted that he was the final arbiter, and Ethan had no reason to assume otherwise. Carlie left in tears, Mike in sullen bewilderment.

            “It’s a good lesson for them,” the Lieutenant observed. “Follow the rules, you got nothing to worry about.”

            Ethan nodded without enthusiasm, vaguely ashamed of himself for knuckling under so easily. Carlie returned ten minutes later with her ID, but he was haunted for the rest of the night by the thought of poor Mike wandering the empty streets, exiled from the fun on account of a technicality.

            <br />It was a relief to slip into the cafeteria, where the lights were low and the music was loud. Assuming an affable, *don’t-mind-me *expression, Ethan joined his colleagues at their observation post by the snack station. Every few songs one of them would venture out on a leisurely reconnaissance mission, but mostly they just nibbled on chips and Skittles while commenting on the action unfolding around them.

            “Look at that.” Rudy directed their attention to Allie Farley, a leggy seventh-grader teetering past them in high heels and an alarmingly short skirt. “That can’t be legal.”

            Charlotte craned her neck for a better look. She was the chaperone in charge of dress code enforcement.

            “It wasn’t that short when she came in. She must’ve hiked it up.” Allie was chasing after Ben Willis, a shaggy-haired, delicate-looking kid who was one of the alpha jocks of Daniel Webster. When she caught up she spun him around and began lecturing him on what appeared to be a matter of extreme urgency, judging from the slightly deranged look on her face and the chopping gesture she kept making with her right hand. Similar conferences were taking place all over the cafeteria, agitated girls explaining to clueless boys the roles they’d been assigned in the evening’s dramas.

            For his part, Ben just stared up at her—she had at least half a foot on him—and gave an occasional awestruck nod, as if she were some supernatural being, rather than a classmate he’d known since kindergarten. Ethan sympathized; Allie had gone a little crazy with the eyeliner and lipstick, and he was having trouble connecting the fearsome young woman on the dance floor with the giggly, fresh-faced girl he taught in fourthperiod Social Studies. She seemed to have undergone some profound, irreversible transformation.

            “I wish I could’ve worn something like that when I was her age,” Charlotte said. “I had scoliosis and back then you had to wear this awful body brace. It looked like I was wearing a barrel.”

            “I didn’t know that,” Ethan said.

            “I never told you?” Charlotte seemed surprised. Back when they were pals, they’d stayed out late drinking and talking on numerous occasions, and had covered a fair amount of personal history. “Junior high was a nightmare.”

            “Must’ve been tough,” Rudy said.

            “Long time ago,” Charlotte said with a shrug. “But sometimes I wish I could have those years back.”

            Allie turned away from Ben and began signaling to Amanda DiCarlo, a petite dark-haired girl who was standing nearby. Eyes widening with horror, Amanda clapped one hand over her mouth and shook her head. Allie beckoned again, this more emphatically, but Amanda wouldn’t move. She was wearing a white lab coat with a stethoscope slung around her neck, an outfit that marked her as a member of the Social Activities Committee, the group that organized the dances. The S.A.C. apparently insisted on picking a theme for each event—tonight’s was Dress as Your Future, which at least explained the cryptic signs in the hallway—but no one seemed to know or care about the theme except the committee members themselves. In addition to the cute physician, a basketball player, a ballerina, a CEO, and a female astronaut were circulating throughout the cafeteria, looking a bit sheepish as they interacted with their uncostumed peers.

            Overcome with impatience, Allie seized Amanda by the arm, forcibly tugged her over to Ben, and then scampered off, leaving the newly constituted couple to fend for themselves. They barely had time to exchange blushes before “Umbrella” began to play and Amanda’s shyness suddenly vanished. It was like she became another person the instant she started dancing, mature and self-assured, a pretty medical student just off work and out to have a good time. Ben hesitated a few seconds before joining her, his movements stiff and a bit clunky, eyes glued on his partner as dozens of classmates surged onto the floor, surrounding and absorbing them into a larger organism, a drifting, inward-looking mass of adolescent bodies.

            Ethan wasn’t sure why he found himself so riveted by the spectacle of his students dancing. Individually, most of the kids didn’t look graceful or even particularly happy; they were far too anxious or self-conscious for that. Collectively, though—and this was the thing that intrigued him— they gave off an overwhelming impression of energy and joy. You could see it in their hips and shoulders, their flailing arms and goofy faces, the pleasure they took in the music and their bodies, the conviction that they occupied the absolute center of a benign universe, the certainty that there was no place else to be but right here, right now. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like that.

            He was so busy staring that it took him a little while to notice Charlotte’s arm brushing against his. She was swaying in place, her elbow knocking rhythmically against his forearm, lingering a second or two before floating away. When he turned to smile at her, she responded with a long quizzical look. In the forgiving darkness of the cafeteria, she could’ve easily been mistaken for twenty-five, a young woman full of potential, a stranger to disappointment. She leaned in closer, bringing her lips to his ear.

            “You okay?” she asked. “You seem a little sad.”

            <br />The trouble started during a moment of deceptive calm, a lull he recognized too late as the eye of the hormonal hurricane. It was a little before nine o’clock—the home stretch—and Ethan was feeling loose and cheerful. If pressed, he might have even been willing to admit that he was enjoying himself. The kids had prevailed upon the teachers to join them for a few line dances—the Electric Slide, the Cotton-Eyed Joe, the Macarena—and he felt like he’d survived the ordeal not only with his dignity intact but with his good-guy reputation enhanced. Then he’d been invited to preside over the raffle, pulling names out of a Red Sox cap and bestowing gift certificates for pizza and frozen yogurt on winners who couldn’t have been more excited if he’d been handing out iPods.

            He was making his way back to the snack station when a vaguely familiar slow song began to play; Charlotte later told him it was “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. He felt something stirring among the kids, a sudden sense of urgency as they scanned the room for prospective partners. At the same time, the DJ turned on his special effects machine, a revolving sphere that shot off an array of multi-colored lights, painting the cafeteria and everyone in it with a swirling psychedelic rainbow.

            There must’ve been something hypnotic about the combination of that song and those lights, because Ethan stopped in the middle of the dance floor and let it wash over him. All around him, kids were forming couples, moving into each other’s arms, and without fully realizing what he was doing, he found himself scanning the room, searching for Charlotte. It wasn’t until he located her—she was wandering among the dancers, checking for compliance with the Nine-Inch Rule—that Ethan finally emerged from his trance, remembering that he had a job to do. For the first time since Rudy had given it to him, he reached into his pocket and withdrew his yellow tape.

            There’d been slow dances earlier in the evening, but the kids hadn’t seemed too interested. Relatively few couples had ventured onto the floor, and the ones who did had been extremely well-behaved. This time, though, maybe because the night was winding down, Ethan sensed a different mood in the cafeteria. Most of the dancers still kept a safe distance, but a significant minority were inching closer, testing the limits of what was permissible, and a handful had gone into open rebellion, pressing together with moony looks on their faces and no daylight between them.

            When Ethan came upon one of these pairs, he tapped both partners on the shoulder and held up the measuring tape as a helpful reminder. He was pleased to discover that Rudy was right—the kids seemed to enjoy the intervention, or at least not mind it. Some smiled guiltily, while others pretended to have made an honest mistake. In any case, no one protested or resisted.

            The song must have been about halfway over by the time he spotted Amanda and Ben. They had drifted away from the herd, creating a small zone of privacy for themselves on the edge of the dance floor. Even at first glance, something seemed strange about them, almost forbidding. The other couples had at least made a show of slow-dancing, but these two were motionless, clinging to each other in perfect, almost photographic stillness. Amanda was melting against Ben, arms wrapped tight around his waist, her face crushed into his chest. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted; he appeared to be concentrating deeply on the smell of her hair.

            Ethan knew what he was supposed to do, but the role of chaperone suddenly felt oppressive to him. They just looked so blissful, it seemed wrong even to be watching them—almost creepy—but for some reason he couldn’t manage to avert his eyes, let alone move.

            He wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at them before Lieutenant Ritchie appeared at his side. Ethan nodded a greeting, but the Lieutenant didn’t reciprocate. After a moment, he jutted his chin at the young lovers.

            “You gonna do something about that?”

            “Probably not,” Ethan replied. “Song’s almost over.”

            The Lieutenant squinted at him. Bands of red, yellow, and green light flickered across his face.

            “That’s a clear violation. You gotta break it up.” Ethan shrugged, still hoping to run out the clock. “They’re not hurting anybody.”

            “What are you, their lawyer?”

            By this point, Rudy and Charlotte had arrived on the scene, the combined presence of all four adults creating an official air of crisis. Ethan could feel the attention of the whole dance shifting in their direction.

            “What’s going on?” Rudy asked. He was all business, like a paramedic who’d happened upon an accident.

            Lieutenant Ritchie glared at Ben and Amanda who remained glued together, oblivious to anything beyond themselves. Charlotte looked worried. The damn song just kept on going. Ethan knew when he was beat.

            “It’s okay,” he assured his colleagues. “I’m on it.”

            <br />Later, in the bar, Ethan tried to describe the look on Amanda’s face right before he pried her away from Ben. The way he remembered it, her expression wasn’t so much angry as uncomprehending; he’d had to call her name three times just to get her to look up. Her eyes were dull and vacant, like she’d been jolted out of a deep sleep.

            “I don’t think she even knew where she was,” Ethan said. “She’s a sweet kid,” Charlotte pointed out.

            “Tell that to the Lieutenant.”

            “Ugh.” Charlotte’s mouth contracted with disgust. “I’m surprised he didn’t use his pepper spray.”

            Lieutenant Ritchie had insisted on formally ejecting Ben and Amanda from the dance, a punishment that carried a mandatory two-day suspension and required immediate parental notification. Ben’s dad had at least been polite on the phone—he apologized for his son’s behavior and promised there would be consequences at home—but Amanda’s mother treated the whole situation like a joke. *It was a dance*, she told Ethan, pronouncing the words slowly and clearly, as if for the benefit of an imbecile. *They were dancing at a dance*. She made him explain the Nine-Inch Rule in great detail, correctly sensing that he found it just as ridiculous as she did.

            “I still remember the first time I danced like that,” Ethan said. They were working on their second drink—Rudy had joined them for the first round, but left after receiving a phone call from his wife—and the bourbon was having a welcome effect on his jangled nerves. “Must’ve been seventh grade, with Jenny Wong. She was just a friend, a girl from down the block, but it was such an amazing feeling to have her pressed up against me like that, with all those people around. One of the highlights of my life.”

            “You’re lucky,” Charlotte said, sounding like she meant it. “When I was that age, I used to sit alone in my room and make out with my arm.”

            “Really?”

            “It wasn’t so bad.” She glanced tenderly at the crook of her elbow. “I still do it sometimes. When nothing else is going on.”

            Ethan smiled. It felt good, being here with Charlotte. McNulty’s had always been their bar of choice—they’d sat more than once at this very table—and he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the past five years had never happened, that they were right back where they’d left off. He had to make an effort not to blurt out something inappropriate, like how much he missed talking to her, how wrong it was that such a simple pleasure had vanished from his life.

            “By the way,” he said. “I really like your glasses.”

            “Thanks.” Her smile was unconvincing. “I prefer contacts, but my eyes get dry.”

            He studied her irises—they were hazel with golden flecks—as if checking on their moisture level.

            “Something wrong?” she asked.

            “Not really,” he replied. “This is just kinda weird, isn’t it?”

            Charlotte looked down at the table. When she looked up, her face seemed older, or maybe just sadder.

            “I don’t know if you heard,” she said. “Rob and I are getting divorced.”

            “No, I hadn’t. I’m sorry.”

            She shrugged. “We’ve been thinking about it for a while. At least I have.”

            Ethan hesitated; the air between them seemed suddenly dense, charged with significance.

            “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I never understood why you went back to him.”

            Charlotte considered this for a moment.

            “I almost didn’t,” she said. “I was all set to leave him for good. That night I slept on your couch.”

            He didn’t have to ask her to be more specific. She’d slept on his couch exactly once, and he remembered the occasion all too well. Her thirtieth birthday. He’d made lasagna and they’d killed a bottle of champagne. They both agreed she was too drunk to drive home.

            “I waited for you all night,” she told him. “You never came.” A harsh sound issued from his throat, not quite a laugh.

            “I wanted to. But we had that long talk, remember? You said you still loved Rob, and couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.”

            “I was stupid.” Charlotte tried to smile, but she seemed to have forgotten which muscles were involved. “I was so sure we were going to sleep together, I guess I overcompensated. Rob and I had been together since freshman year of college. I just wanted you to know what you were getting into.”

            “You’ve gotta be kidding.” A bad taste flooded into Ethan’s mouth, something sharp and bitter the whisky couldn’t wash away. “I was dying for you. That was the longest night of my life.”

            “I thought you’d abandoned me.” “But you said—”

            “I was confused, Ethan. I needed you to help me.” “You went back to him two days later.”

            “I know.” She sounded just as baffled as he did. “I just couldn’t bear to break his heart.”

            “So you broke mine instead.”

            Charlotte shook her head for a long time, as if taking inventory of everything that might have been different if he’d just come out of his bedroom.

            “I’m the one who lost out,” she reminded him. “Everything worked out fine for you.”

            Ethan didn’t argue. This didn’t seem like the time to tell her about the weeks he’d spent on his couch after she went back to her husband, the way his world seemed to shrink and darken in her absence. He didn’t go on a date for almost a year, and even after he met Dana—after he convinced himself that he loved her—he never lost the sense that there was a little asterisk next to her name, a tiny reminder that she was his second choice, the best he could do under the circumstances.

            Charlotte wasn’t making any noise, so it took him a few seconds to realize she was crying. When she took off her glasses, her face seemed naked and vulnerable, and deeply familiar.

            “I don’t know about you,” she said as she wiped her eyes. “But I could use another drink.”

            <br />It was late when he pulled into his driveway, almost one in the morning, but he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t drunk either, not anymore, though he’d felt pretty buzzed after his third drink, pleasantly unsteady as he made his way down the long dim hallway to the men’s room. There were ice cubes in the urinal, an odd echo of his bourbon on the rocks, and an old-school rolling cloth towel dispenser, the kind that makes a thump when you yank.

            He wasn’t too surprised to find Charlotte waiting in the hallway when he stepped out of the bathroom—it was almost like he’d been expecting her. There was a peculiar expression on her face, a mixture of boldness and embarrassment.

            “I missed you,” she said.

            Kissing her just then felt perfectly normal and completely selfexplanatory, the only possible course of action. There was no hesitation, no self-consciousness, just one mouth finding another. Her ran his fingers through her hair, slid his palm down the length of her back, then lower, tracing the gentle curve of her ass. She liked it, he could tell. He spread his fingers wide, cupping and squeezing the soft flesh.

            It was the voices that made them pull apart, two young women on the way to the ladies’ room.

            “Excuse me,” one of them said, turning sideways to slip by. “Don’t mind us,” chuckled the other.

            It was no big deal, just a brief, good-natured interruption, but for some reason they never recovered from it. When they started kissing again, it felt forced and awkward, like they were trying too hard. Charlotte pulled away after only a few seconds.

            “Oh God, Ethan.” Her glasses were askew, her face pink with shame. “What are we doing?”

            “It’s okay,” he told her. “We’re just having a good time.”

            She didn’t seem to hear him. Her voice was barely audible. “I better go.”

            “Come on,” he said. “You don’t have to do that.” “I do.”

            She turned swiftly, heading for the exit. He followed her out to the parking lot, pleading with her to stay for one more drink, but nothing he said made any difference. She just kept muttering about his pregnant wife and child, and how sorry she was, all the while fumbling in her purse for her car keys.

            “You have to forgive me,” she said in a pleading voice. “I’m just going through a hard time. I’m really not the kind of person who—”

            He grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at his face.

            “I love you.” The words just popped out of his mouth, but in that moment they felt true, undeniable. “Don’t you understand that?”

            She shook her head. The only thing in her eyes was pity.

            “You need to go home, Ethan. Just forget this ever happened. Please?”

            Then she got in her car and drove off, her face ashen, her eyes fixed straight ahead. He thought about chasing after her, but he knew it would be useless. There was nothing to do but go home, just like she told him.

            Now that he was here, though, he couldn’t seem to get out of the car. Maybe in a minute or two, he’d unbuckle his seatbelt and head inside, into the house where his wife and child were sleeping. In the meantime he was happy enough to stay right here and think about kissing Charlotte outside the men’s room and the dreamy look on Amanda’s face when he showed her the measuring tape and explained that she and Ben were dancing too close, the way she just smiled and closed her eyes and let her head fall back onto her partner’s chest, as if the two of them were the only people who mattered in the world, as if they had no one to answer to but themselves.