Teacher Man. Frank McCourt
boss on the piers once said I was a tough little mick.
Oh, well. Take that remark and a dime and you can ride the subway two stops. You’re a lost soul. That’s easy to see. Norm likes lost souls.
Words jumped from my mouth: I don’t care what Norm likes.
Oh, God. She’ll get up and walk away. No. She laughed so hard she nearly choked on her wine. Then everything was different. She smiled at me and smiled and smiled. I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin.
She reached across the table and put her hand on mine and my heart was a mad animal in my chest. Let’s go, she said.
We walked to her apartment on Barrow Street. Inside, she turned and kissed me. She moved her head in a circular way so that her tongue traveled clockwise in my mouth and I thought, Lord, I am not worthy. Why didn’t God tell me about this before my twenty- sixth year?
She said I was a healthy peasant and obviously starved for affection. I didn’t like being called a peasant—Jesus, hadn’t I read books, every word of E. Laurie Long, P. G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, E. Philips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace and good old Dickens—and I thought what we were doing here was more than showing affection. I said nothing because I had no experience of activities like this. She asked me if I liked monkfish and I said I didn’t know because I’d never heard of it before. She said everything depended on how you cooked it. Her secret was shallots. Not everyone agrees with that, she said, but it worked for her. It’s a delicate whitefish best cooked with a good white wine. Not an ordinary cooking wine, but a good one. Norm cooked fish once but he made a mess of it, used some piss from California that turned the fish into an old shoe. The poor dear knew his literature and his lecturing, but nothing about wine or fish.
It’s strange to be with a woman who takes your face in her hands and tells you to have faith in yourself. She said, My father came from Liverpool and he drank himself to death because he was afraid of the world. He said he wished he was a Catholic so he could join a monastery and never have to see a human being again, and it was my mother who tried to get him to say good things about himself. He couldn’t, so he drank and died. Do you drink?
Not much.
Be careful. You’re Irish.
Your father wasn’t Irish.
No, but he could have been. Everyone in Liverpool is Irish. Let’s cook that monkfish.
She handed me a kimono. It’s OK. Change in the bedroom. If it’s good enough for a samurai it’s good enough for a tough little mick who ain’t so tough.
She changed into a silver dressing gown that seemed to have a life of its own. One moment it clung to her, then hung in a way that let her move freely inside. I preferred the clinging part and it kept me alive inside my kimono.
She asked if I liked white wine and I said yes because I was learning that yes was the best answer to every question, at least with June. I said yes to the monkfish and the asparagus and the two flickering candles on the table. I said yes to the way she raised her wineglass and touched it against mine till they went ping. I told her this was the most delicious dinner I’d ever had in my life. I wanted to go on and say I was in heaven but that might sound forced and she might give me the kind of strange look that would ruin the whole night and my life beyond.
Norm was never mentioned in the six nights that followed the night of the monkfish except that there were twelve fresh roses in a vase in her bedroom with a card that said love from Norm. I drank extra wine to boost my courage enough to ask, How the hell can you lie in this bed with me in the presence of Norm’s fresh roses? but I never did. I couldn’t afford roses so I brought her carnations, which she put in a large glass jar beside the roses. There was no competition. Beside Norm’s roses my carnations looked so sad I bought her a dozen roses with my last few dollars. She sniffed them and said, Oh, they’re beautiful. I didn’t know what to say to that as I hadn’t grown them, just bought them. Norm’s roses in the glass jar looked dry and it made me happy to think my roses would replace them, but what she did then gave me the greatest pain I ever had in my heart.
From my chair in the kitchen I could see what she was doing in the bedroom, taking my roses one by one and placing them delicately among, between and around Norm’s roses, standing back, looking at them, using my fresh roses to prop up the roses of Norm that were going limp, stroking the roses, his and mine, and smiling as if one set of roses was as good as the other.
She must have known I was watching. She turned and smiled at me, suffering, nearly blubbering, in the kitchen. They’re beautiful, she said again. I knew she was talking about twenty-four roses, not just my dozen, and I wanted to yell something at her and storm out like a real man.
I didn’t. I stayed. She made stuffed pork chops with applesauce and mashed potatoes and it tasted like cardboard. We went to bed and all I could think of was my roses mingled with his, that son-of-a-bitch in Vermont. She said I seemed low in energy and I wanted to tell her I wished I was dead. It’s OK, she said. People just get used to each other. You have to keep it fresh.
Was this her way of keeping it fresh? Juggling two of us at one time, stuffing her vase with flowers from different men?
Near the end of that spring term I met Seymour on Washington Square. How’s it going? he said, and laughed as if he knew something. How’s the gorgeous June?
I stammered and shifted from one foot to the other. He said, Don’t worry. She did it to me, too, but she had me only two weeks. I knew what she was up to and I told her to go to hell.
Up to?
It’s all for old Norm. She has me up, she has you up and Christ knows who else she has up, and she tells Norm all about it.
But he goes to Vermont.
Vermont, my ass. The minute you leave her place he’s in there lapping up the details.
How do you know?
He told me. He likes me. He tells her about me, she tells him about you, and they know I’m telling you about them, and they have a hell of a time. They talk about you and how you don’t know your ass from your elbow about anything.
I walked away and he called after me, Anytime, man, anytime.
I scraped through the teacher’s license examination. I scraped through everything. Passing score on the teacher examination was sixty-five; mine was sixty-nine. The passing points came, I think, through the kindness of an English chairman at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn who judged my demonstration lesson and my good luck in having a skimpy knowledge of the poetry of the Great War. An alcoholic professor at NYU told me in a friendly way that I was a half-assed student. I was offended till I thought about it and realized he was right. I was half-assed all around, but promised that someday I’d pull myself together, focus, concentrate, make something of myself, snap out of it, get my act together, all in the good old American way.
We sat on chairs in the corridors of Brooklyn Technical High School waiting for interviews, filling out forms, signing statements declaring our loyalty to America, assuring the world we were not now, nor had we ever been, members of the Communist Party.
I saw her long before she sat beside me. She wore a green scarf and dark glasses and when she pulled off the scarf there was a dazzle of red hair. I had the yearning ache for her but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of turning to look.
Hi, Frank.
If I were a character in a novel or movie I would have stood and walked away, proud. She said hi again. She said, You look tired.
I snapped at her to show her I was not going to be polite after what she did to me. No, I am not tired, I said. But then she touched my face with her fingers.
That fictional character would have pulled his head back to show he hadn’t forgotten, was not going to soften because of two greetings and a few fingertips. She smiled and touched my cheek again.
Everyone in the hallway was looking at her and I thought they were wondering what she was doing with me: she was that gorgeous and I