Lily King: The English Teacher

“Those lunatics are going to burn themselves up, too, while they’re at it,” his mother said.

“They’ve seized our embassy,” Tom said gravely. “Goddammit they’ve taken our embassy.”

Peter didn’t know who they were. He glanced at his mother for an explanation but he could tell she didn’t know either. She didn’t follow the news very carefully. All on-campus teachers got a paper delivered to their door every morning but theirs usually ended up in the trash can, the rubber band still fastened around it.

“Why did they agree to let him in?” Stuart said. “He could have had that operation in Mexico. They knew it would stir up trouble.”

“He’s been our ally for many years. We owed him.”

“Ally? He’s been our stooge. Our oil guy.”

“What are you talking about?” Fran asked.

Tom began explaining about the Shah of Iran. Peter tried to focus on what he was saying but a man on TV came up to the camera shouting angrily through brown teeth, then spat at the lens. The spit was thick and green. A hand reached around quickly with a cloth and wiped it off. It was eerie to Peter, the hand and the cloth, like a taboo had been broken. He’d missed Tom’s explanation.

“Is President Carter in there?” Caleb asked from his chair. Peter was certain that when he was seven he’d had no clue who was president.

“I doubt it,” his mother said, though what did she know. “It’s probably just a bunch of functionaries.”

“What’s that?”

“Good decent hardworking diplomats who were brave enough to remain in the country during a revolution.” He’d never heard Tom use that tone of voice before.

“Mom?” he said quietly. “Do you know where my room is?”

“I don’t even know where mine is.”

“I’ll show it to you, Peter.” Caleb slid dramatically off his chair.

Peter followed him out of the room and down a corridor to the first room on the left.

“We dragged your boxes in this morning.”

“Thanks.”

Caleb slipped his hand behind a bookshelf. “The switch is a little tricky to find.”

Peter waited, surprised by his desire to be alone, when just this morning being alone was what he’d hoped to renounce for good.

“There.” A single bulb, painted green, cast the small room in lime-colored light. At first glance, it looked like a decorated storage room. The walls were covered with pen-and-ink drawings of body parts: ears, fingertips, knees. Some had Chinese characters beside them; others had typed-out English quotations Peter couldn’t decipher. There was only one full-size poster, also handmade, of a pair of closed eyes and below it the words

What is one is not one

And what is not one

Is also one.

There was nothing in the room immediately identifiable as furniture. It simply looked like a huge mound of junk — notebooks, winter coats, football pads, coin wrappers, a stapler, a fishing rod, balled clothing, a rubber Richard Nixon mask, a bike pump, a rumpled suit — that spread from the doorway to the far wall. As Peter leaned closer, he could see, beneath the only window, jutting out through all the crap, the flowered corner of a mattress.

“So that’s my bed?”

“No. That’s Stuart’s bed. You’re here.” Caleb pointed to the near wall, which was stacked with boxes — his own boxes, Peter realized. “It folds out of the wall. It’s pretty cool. Look.” Caleb pushed into the cluttered center of the room all of Peter’s boxes, then lifted a metal lever and caught the bed as it exploded out of the wall. “Ta da!” he exclaimed, gazing at the whole room — at the exploding bed, the warty cactus, the burnt thumbs of incense in a dish — with un-disguised reverence.

“So why didn’t you move in here?”

“He didn’t want me to.”

At this Peter felt a small bit of pleasure mingle with his horror, but it was short-lived. No one had told him he’d be sharing a room with Stuart. Stuart frightened him. Stuart didn’t even speak to him.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“Right next door,” Caleb said, still eager to please.

Peter stepped into the little bathroom and locked the door. He stood at the sink, a hand on either side of the basin, as if he were bracing himself to throw up. Maybe he’d feel better if he threw up. He tried to coax something out. Then he noticed a tiny little screen fastened to the drain and a clot of moist hair caught in it. With his fingernail, he pried up the screen, tapped it empty on the side of the plastic bucket below, and snapped it back in place. All this he did without thought. He was in a state beyond thought. In the mirror he saw, for an instant, the real Peter, the Peter he was when he was not conscious of looking. But after that all he saw was his mirror face, flattened out by self-awareness. Usually, when he looked in mirrors, he tried to figure out what it was about his face that no longer attracted Kristina. He’d read somewhere that handsomeness was not the result of a certain combination of features but of symmetry. The human eye gauged the degree of symmetry of the two halves of a face because, research had shown, people with symmetrical faces tended to be less prone to disease — thus a better biological choice. But tonight Peter did not try to find the asymmetry in his face. He knew that wasn’t it. He wasn’t unattractive. Girls who didn’t go to Fayer often thought he was cute at first, before they spoke to him. It was something else. He was undeveloped in some way that was not physical and seemed beyond his control. He suspected it had to do with being an only child, or having only a mother, and there was a part of him that had hoped the Belous would help him change. Now he feared they would only make it worse.

“Are you all right?” Caleb said through the door.

“Yeah.” His voice came out funny, more a breath than noise. He wasn’t sure Caleb had heard him, but after a while his feet scuffled away back down the hall.

At the toilet he unzipped his fly. He had already begun to pee when he saw her photograph. She was looking right up at him, grinning. Love, she seemed to be saying. Yes, he replied. All this happened in the interval between conscious thoughts, between recognizing that this, this woman tying the shoelace of her sneaker on an overgrown path, was Mrs. Belou, the real Mrs. Belou, and remembering that she was dead. When that last thought came, his stream of urine stopped abruptly, painfully. She had died in this house. She had stood right here, and there by the sink, and in his room. She had touched everything he would soon touch. There was no place he could ever be in this house where she had not breathed. He put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat, the black and white tiles on the floor flashing in time with his slamming heart. He didn’t want to live here, in the house of a ghost.

He went back out to the living room.

“Mom?”

She wasn’t listening. “We need air in here,” she was saying, lifting up a window near Caleb’s chair.

“I don’t feel well.” He didn’t know what he wanted, what he expected from her. I want to go home, he wished he could say, even though he didn’t completely mean it.

“Go rest on the couch for a bit,” she said without looking at him.

“Could have been the shrimp,” Fran said. “I spat mine out.”

“Maybe that was it.” He was unsure which cushion to choose — the middle one right next to Fran, or the far one, so far away it felt rude, unsibling-like. Finally he sat between the two and now they lifted like wings to either side of him and their stiff edges were not comfortable beneath him. But still he felt frozen, unable to choose a direction. Everyone else was focused on the TV. His mother had never allowed TV. Even now by Tom’s side she wasn’t watching. Her eyes were wandering off — to the lamp, to the curtains, to the little dish on a table in the corner. She wasn’t interested in the present. For all her reading, she never bought a contemporary novel. The books she read always had some gloomy old portrait on the cover. He couldn’t ever remember having a conversation about a current event with her. And here were the Belous, every one of them, even Caleb now, transfixed by this indecipherable mayhem that had not changed in the hour since they’d been home, Tom looking as if the hostages had been seized from his own house.