Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

“To do anything. Ever.”

“Like what?”

“Did he stop the war by getting arrested? Did he bring an end to all governments?”

“It isn’t about that,” I said.

“It’s all gestures,” he said. “Showing off.”

“It is not.”

“You sit on your can all day and you think you know about the real world, but you don’t.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“The queen of fake purity.”

I went inside the apartment to get away from him, and then I kept going, out the door, down the five flights to the street. How far away could I get? The street had the summer smell of ripe garbage and incinerated soot. Our sweltering block was at its quietest, with all the Jewish shops shuttered for Saturday, but on one stretch of sidewalk the Puerto Rican kids were playing, yelling and chasing each other and calling out dares. I’d made a great mistake in marrying Ted. Nothing could be clearer. What was I going to do now? I walked east, block after faded-brick block, till I got to where the streets ended, and past the bank of seared grasses, the glaring water of the river rose like a mirage. I’d fought so hard to get him. There were clues all along but I’d had no use for them, I might’ve paid attention but I didn’t want to. I thought the world was love-love-love.

And if I left his bed and board, how would I live? Back to the bakery? I was so dazed and stricken that I sat thinking about Boston cream pie and peanut butter cookies, soothing thoughts, brainless dreams, until the fading light scared me and I walked home.

When I got back to the apartment, Ted was lying in bed, facedown. He turned when I came in. “If you want to leave, just leave,” he said. “You can go back to your parents. That’s the simplest thing.”

How reasonable he sounded, how hoarse and desperate.

I could be free in an instant if I wanted to be. As I was taking this in, I heard myself crying, loud as an infant; I made horrible sounds of real anguish. “Don’t make me leave,” I managed to say. How choked and pathetic my voice was. I said weepy things about how I loved him, I said we were meant for each other and he knew it too, didn’t he? — I knew he did. The words flew out of me, as if they were true. Was I lying? The whole time I was speaking, I felt that I had to put this over, I had to act with as much conviction as I could. Did I believe it? I did and I didn’t.

And I made Ted happy. Under my wails and moans and tears, he softened. His eyes lost their stunned, dead look and took on their old, intelligent shimmer. I was pulling us back from a very dangerous precipice. We could be safe, we could be. A bliss of relief went through both of us.

All that suffering had a good effect on us in bed, as if we had been through a battle together as comrades, not enemies. Our natures were more fully bared to each other. We had only to take off our clothes to be our more audacious, less naïve selves. We knew more, we went further. It startled us both, and we laughed in astonishment after.

When Ted went back to school in September, he was given an extra class — could his day be any fuller? — and I was outraged for him, which he liked. When he had to appear at Meet the Teachers Night, I decided to be eager to be in the audience. I sat with other wives in the big wood-and-linoleum auditorium, surrounded by a sea of parents, while our spouses stood and explained their educational goals. Ted said he hoped to bring students to an understanding of the power of the English language. A Mr. Sloan, whose wife was next to me, said he believed that algebra refined all thinking. “Well, they have to say something ,” she whispered.

“Or take the Fifth,” I said. A Latin teacher in the school had been fired for taking the Fifth Amendment when asked about Communists in the Teachers Union, and I suddenly thought this was not my best joke. Not funny to me. But the woman smiled.

“At least they’re not talking about locking the bad students in the closet,” she murmured. “They used to do that when I was a kid.”

“Some of them need it now.”

“I’ll say,” she said.

“My husband bribes them to rat on each other,” I said. “He gives them rewards for it.”

“Does he?” she said.

Someone shushed us, and I flinched in my seat — it was right to shut me up. What sort of person had I become now, with spite leaking out of me? If Ted had started baiting and buying off his ninth-graders, what did it matter to me? I had to hope she would forget my words, why would she bother to remember, and I got away from Mrs. Sloan when we all filed into the gym for punch and cookies. “You were excellent,” I said to Ted.

“Aw, shucks,” he said.

But I knew what I was. At the slightest opportunity, at the first instant that offered, I’d informed on my husband, just like that. Speaking against him had been very easy. Every day people were hounded for refusing to bear witness against someone — they were fired or arrested or blacklisted for being un-American and still they kept their mouths shut, on principle. And me? I leaped at the chance to spread a small bit of damage about the man I slept with every night.

Mr. Sloan was, in fact, the vice principal, I later found out. This was not good news. Ted was on a one-year contract, and if they dropped him, what school would take him? I had never been like this before I knew Ted. Who knew what I would blurt out next? Look what love has done to me , I thought.

One night, after we’d had perfectly good sex and Ted fell asleep and I lay awake for hours, it struck me with horror that I had never been a good liar but now I was. I could scarcely take off my clothes and turn to my husband without some degree of fraudulence and calculation. I, who’d been raised to be always truthful, had somehow taught myself to be one of those women who lure and lie for their survival. How had this happened? This is what gives carnal relations a bad name , I thought, as if I could joke to myself about it.

Maybe all marriages, if you looked too hard at them, were riddled with corrupting compromises. Maybe other people had a higher tolerance for the bargains they struck, and that was just the way of it. I was going to have to live with this particular insight. It wasn’t something I wanted to shout from the rooftops to anyone. I had a long, bad night, with Ted’s steady breathing next to me in the bed and the noise of trucks going by in the street below. In the books I liked to read, and in the politics of my parents, people changed once they got hold of a new way to see things, but I wasn’t going to change. I wasn’t.

In the spring Ted got official word that his contract wasn’t being renewed. No reason was given — they would only say another teacher was filling the spot — and a number of people thought it was because my parents were Communists, even if they weren’t. Someone said the vice principal had been especially against Ted. I was so upset I could barely tell people, my voice broke when I gave the news — while Ted, to my complete surprise, went in for cheerful irony. “We don’t need to eat, what’s so great about eating?” he said, and “I love a character-building experience,” and (his favorite), “Exploited today, fired tomorrow.”

How little I knew him. This wisenheimer flintiness, this hearty valor, was not at all what I might have expected. I was the vile, small-minded, petty, treacherous one. I was the one who had burned our ticket to a decent, straightforward life. And now I gave long speeches about how we lived in tainted times, and how all the higher-ups were jealous of Ted’s star teaching. “Hey,” Ted said. “We’ll get by. Not the end of the world.” He comforted me, my husband who’d been robbed.