Роберт Паркер - Love and Glory

I looked at the watch on the wrist of a guy next to me. 8:20. Jesus, class lasted till 9:00. I couldn’t last. My eyes kept closing and when they closed my head would begin to sag forward and then jerk back as I caught myself. I shifted in my chair again. My underwear was damp with sweat and felt too tight. I looked at Jennifer. She didn’t look hot. I wouldn’t think about her underwear, or sweat. I knew that the laws of nature required her to have many of the same bodily functions I did, but that was only technically true. My imagination never accepted it as real.

Mr. Crosbie was getting mad, or desperate. “What do you think an expository essay is?” he said. The class, wretched in its hot boredom, coalesced into mute submission. I gave up. With my feet propped on the empty chair next to me, I tipped my own chair back against the wall, folded my arms across my chest, and let my head relax forward.

Mr. Crosbie was leaning forward over his lecture table looking at his seating plan. “Mr. Franklin,” he said, “define exposition.”

Franklin was hunched over his notebook and text, staring at them blankly. The more he looked the more they didn’t tell him what exposition meant.

“Mr. Franklin?”

Franklin was very ivy with his oxford button-down and chinos. He wore his blond hair in a crew cut, and his white bucks looked pre-scuffed. He was in college on some kind of church-related scholarship. He looked up finally from the unobliging textbook and said, I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I don’t know.”

Crosbie said, without looking up from his seating chart, “I’m afraid you don’t Miss Grayle, do you know?”

I felt a little thrill in the delta of my breastbone when he said her name. She sat up straight and looked right at him, but I could see the faint flush of embarrassment darken her face.

“It’s a kind of story that’s true,” she said.

Crosbie smiled without humor, “Oh,” he said, “really? What kind of a story exactly?”

Jennifer said, “Not a story that’s been made up.” She gestured slightly with one hand.

Crosbie placed both hands on his little lectern and leaned over it, looked straight at Jennifer.

“Miss Grayle,” he said, and let the name hang there in the stifling room. He shook his head. “Miss Grayle, an essay is not a story. It may or may not be about something that, as you so cleverly put it, ‘is made up.’ Mr. Franklin’s answer revealed that he didn’t know, but yours reveals how much you didn’t know.” His eyes swept the room. Jennifer looked down at her book. Crosbie’s eyes settled on me, slouched in the back. He checked his seating plan.

“Mr. Adams,” he said. “If I’m not disturbing your rest, can you define expository for us.”

“If an old man shows himself to a little girl in the playground,” I said, “that’s an expository act. If he writes it up after, it’s probably an expository essay.”

Billy Murphy, sitting in the other back corner of the room, burst out a loud “Haw.” Everyone else was silent. Crosbie’s face got red. He looked at me. I looked back. I could feel anxiety and anger mingling in my gut. I was still tilted back with my feet up.

Crosbie said, “I think we’ve had enough of you in this class for today, Mr. Adams. You may leave.”

I shrugged, let my chair tip slowly forward, closed my book and notebook with exaggerated care, took the unlighted Camel cigarette from behind my ear, stuck it in my mouth, and walked slowly toward the front of the room. I looked down at Jennifer as I went by, and her eyes glinted with sharp, repressed humor. She understood what I’d done. It made my back tingle.

“Promptly” — Crosbie glanced down at the seating chart — “Mr. Adams.”

At the door I stopped, looked at Crosbie, and said, “The thing is, my answer was right.”

Then I looked at the class, made a short wave to Billy Murphy, whose face was bunched with amusement, and walked out. I left the door open behind me.

I looked at myself in the mirror back of Onie’s bar. Five foot ten inches, weight 160 pounds, hair medium brown, crew cut, complexion fair, some acne. Whiskers, none to speak of. I didn’t like the acne much, nor the lack of beard. Lots of my buddies had dark heavy beards and shaved daily. I sucked on my cigarette, holding it between my thumb and middle finger.

The bartender said, “You ready yet, Boonie?”

I nodded. He took my glass, drew another beer into it, and put it back. “Fresh barrel, Boonie, you’ll like it.”

I grinned. “Thanks, Reenie.”

In two months I’d made some progress. I was first name with the bartender at Onie’s and at school I was already on the dean’s other list. The smoke in Onie’s was fog thick, and it eddied in the narrow crowded room as people went to and from the rest rooms and shifted about in the booths. Someone played “Mixed Emotions” on the jukebox and I tried to listen through the noise that was as thick and eddied as the smoke. It was the Rosemary Clooney version, not Ella’s, and I liked it better, although it made me feel disloyal.

“Hey, Boonie, I hear you got bounced out of soc class?”

“Just for the day,” I said.

“You shoulda seen it, Pat. Boonie was passed out in the back with a bad hangover and old Schlossberg says to him ‘Mr. Adams, do you mind if I interrupt your rest for just a moment?’ And Boonie’s got his eyes still closed and he says ‘Yes.’ ”

“Honest to God? Booner, you are a hot shit, I’ll give you that. So did Schlossie kick you out?”

I nodded.

“You’re never going to make it, Boonie. You won’t last the year, never mind four.”

In the mirror I saw Jennifer come in with a date. It was the tall kid from Long Island she’d danced with the first night I’d seen her. His name was Taylor and he was supposed to be the best basketball player ever to come out of Douglaston High School. I drank the rest of my beer and gestured at René. He drew another and put it before me, took a dime from the change on the bar in front of me, winked, made a sort of clicking sound out of the corner of his mouth, and moved down the bar. I lit another Camel in the corner of my mouth and let the smoke drift up past my eyes. Through it I watched Jennifer in the mirror. She took off her camel’s-hair coat and Taylor hung it on the hanger by the booth. She was wearing a white cashmere sweater and a Black Watch plaid skirt. When she slid into the booth I saw her thigh for a moment. Taylor said something, and she put her head back and laughed. I couldn’t hear the sound of her laugh across the boisterous room, but her face colored slightly with it. I’d already noticed that when she laughed she flushed slightly. I had already noticed, too, that her mouth was slightly crooked. Her upper and lower lip did not center exactly.

“Hey, Nick Taylor’s going out with Jennifer Grayle?”

“Yeah, since the homecoming dance. I’d like to get a piece of that, uh, Guze?”

“I’d like to go over right now and take a big fucking bite out of one of those thighs. How about it, Boonze, you like some of that?”

Their voices came sifting through the smoke as if they were in another room. I looked at them.

“Want to get into Jenny Grayle, Boonie? I’ll bet Taylor’s getting his share.”

The smoke swirled and thickened and mixed with the noise until I felt enclosed in a kind of transsensual element of which my own soul was but an inlet.

I shrugged. “But how much beer can she drink,” I said.

“I thought she was going with Dave Herman.”

“She’s gone steady with three guys already this year.”

I watched her in the mirror. Her hands resting quietly on the table, her head forward slightly, her eyes on Taylor’s face. Taylor tapped each of her fingernails with the tip of his index finger. She smiled. Her beer was barely touched. I knew she didn’t drink much, although it was said that she did. But she didn’t. The music changed on the jukebox. Billy Eckstine, “I Apologize.”