Eye to Eye (7 page)

I grab my keys, ready to rush out the door to see Bita, when I hear Earl's bike pulling up, deafening everyone in the neighborhood. It's strange he's home so early, but then I'm happy that he is. When I hear the key turning in the lock, I stand near the door so I can jump on him and tell him my news. When Earl comes through the door though, he doesn't quite seem himself. He's clearly tired and in a bad mood—which for Earl is never mean. More like distracted and worried.

“Hey, baby.” I hug his thick torso before peering up at him. “What's the matter? You're home early.”

“Yeah.” Earl squeezes me before he walks to the fridge to get a drink. “There's nothing but half a can of Diet Coke in here.” He sighs.

“And an egg,” I say, waiting for Earl to pop his head up from the fridge and grin at me. But he doesn't.

“I sure could use a beer. Something cold.” He straightens up and comes to me on the couch.

“What kind of bartender are you, anyway?” I say, pulling him down next to me. “Living in a house with no booze, just a pitiful can of Diet Coke.” I pat his firm belly and settle in close to him. Earl only gives me a weak smile. He pulls away from me so he can take off his boots and then he sinks into the couch with a sigh.

“You sure are sighing a lot and saying a little. What's the story?”

“Just got tired out is all. Didn't feel much like going for a ride after all.”

“What? You're not getting along with Jake and them anymore?”

Jake's a guy Earl works with from time to time. He doesn't bartend so much because he's just okay, not a pro like Earl. But he's a homeboy—of sorts—because Jake's from Illinois and claims the Midwest, like Earl does. He's younger than Earl, a kid mostly, only twenty-one, with dreams of “making it,” and so on and so forth. Still, Earl likes him because he likes to ride, too, and isn't prone to “get carried away with himself,” as Earl calls it.

“Naw,” Earl stretches his arms behind our heads and pulls me close with one of them. The way Earl says “naw” seems to have an ellipsis at the end of it, but he doesn't volunteer much more. He's closing that whole strong-silent-type business, but I'm not having it.

“Cut the shit, Erardo Lo Vecchio. What the hell happened?”

Earl sits up and straighter, then turns to me so we're not side by side anymore. He's finally grinning, he likes it when I get my version of badass on him. I do sugar and spice and everything nice as often as I can, but I can go from sweetie pie to motherfucker, like going from zero to ninety.

“Wellll,” Earl says, dragging his proverbial foot right away. “It ain't nothin, not really, but at least part of this story, you ain't going to like it.”

What Earl is saying is code for “You're going to want to snatch that skinny Katie bitch baldheaded.” But since I'm trying not to be jealous, I don't say a word. I just tell Earl to go on and give me his story. “So?”

Earl scratches at his wavy, sandy hair and then folds his big arms across each other. “I was all set to go out with Jake…” Earl pauses and looks at me for what seems like longer than he needed to, as if he were considering something.

I nod. Jake was hot, though I didn't say much about that to Earl. He was a tall, lanky brother with a shaved head and dimples not dissimilar to Earl's. He's always greeted me with a smooth, “Whas happenin', sistah?” whenever I came through the door. His smooth, flawless, dark skin puts me in mind of Lavarian Laborteux, who I knew was for sure by now
Dr.
Laborteux and never letting anyone forget it.

“So me and Jake and them had made plans, but they had to cancel, except I hadn't heard all about them needing to cancel before I said yes, when Katie asked if she could come along, ride with me on the back of my bike.”

What a pro, that one.

“And so I said yeah. I didn't see no harm in it, and then when we was all set to head out the door after work, Jake says hadn't Katie told me they wasn't going to go.”

I raise my I-told-you-so eyebrows at Earl, because I'm always teasing him about his
very
well-fitting,
tight
-fitting Wranglers that show off
everything
Earl doesn't mean to advertise about himself. Earl wears them like the good old boys wear them, and shakes his heads at the hipsters with their jeans sliding damn near down to their ankles.

“I know it,” Earl says. It's a phase he always uses when he gives me credit for being dead-on right. Earl strokes his face and stares at nothing in particular for a bit. He used to stroke his beard but now it's his face out of habit. “Anyway,” he goes on, after a while, “Katie was standing right there and was put on the spot, said she thought they were talking about something else, not
tonight.
”

“So you blew her off then?”

“Yep.” Earl held my face by my chin and kissed me on the nose. “Told her I wasn't going out with only us two and then she said, ‘What's the matter, Mr. Earl? Scared of your
girlfriend?
' And I knew she was making a joke, but I didn't like the way she said that. Something about it made me mad so I just had to get on away from the bar and come on home.” He levels his eyes at me and then closes them. He sinks down into the couch. “I'm beat,” he says. “Need to rest my eyes some.”

I stare at Earl's face, then kick off my flip-flops so that I can lie down lengthwise on the couch and stretch my legs across his lap. He runs his fingers up and down my thighs, but keeps his eyes closed. “This is all I want to do for the night. Sit here like this with you. Beer or no beer.”

I think about everything that he has just told me and he was half-right. I hadn't liked what he told me, but it really isn't Katie trying to pull her crap that bothers me, it is more the fact that something about it really bothers Earl. He was a good sport, quitting the Midwest and coming to crazy L.A. for some broad (me) that he'd met bartending. But it isn't that alone. I knew from the moment I took my first ride on Earl's Harley that we weren't going to ride off into the sunset, that we would have to work at this. And now, it's happening, the work. Something is up because Earl is confused over some puny little girl who's chasing after him.

“Erardo.”

“Mmm-hmm?” Earl murmurs. His eyes are still closed and he is still touching my legs. He smiles. “Am I in trouble about something? You calling me Erardo. I cut the shit like you asked me to.” Has he?

“Something else is bugging you, I know it. Start talking, bud.” I sit up and poke him in the side.

“Ain't no getting around you, is there?”

“Nope.” I swing my legs off of Earl and then I straddle him. I take both of his arms and hold them back behind his head. “You're my prisoner until you tell me the truth.” I kiss him on the lips and then on his neck. His favorite place. And then I put my hand on his belt buckle and lift the buckle. “There's more where that came from, but you gotta be good. You gotta be a good boy and tell the truth.”

I know I'm not being quite fair: a man can't have a serious conversation about his
feelings
with a woman grinding up against him on his lap. But Earl tries. He looks down at my hands on his belt buckle and I kiss a tiny bead of sweat that has formed on his temples. He tries to put an arm around my waist, but I put it back and keep his arms pinned behind him. Of course he could break my hold with a sneeze—if he wanted to. “Uh-uh,” I say. “That's only for good boys. Now tell me the truth.”

Earl's breathing hard and he locks his gaze with mine. I know that look. He's just about done playing. I put my face close to his so that our noses are almost touching and he tries to kiss me. I pull away. “Uh-uh.”

“All right,” Earl says, slow and steady. “You listening?”

“Yes.”

“What's bothering me is this—I don't like people trying to come between us. I don't like people looking at us like we're strange when I grab a hold of you out on the street. I don't like people treating me like I'm some ass-backward, ignorant hick the minute I open my mouth. I don't like people talking at me slow, like I cain't hear, just 'cause I talk the way I do, I don't like people carrying on about me like I'm some cute dog they just found on the street, so goddamn amusing. I don't like you thinking and worrying about all of this because I see that you do. And I don't like the way folks try so damn hard to be seen around here. Don't like the Vietnamese food place you're always taking me, too, neither,” Earl adds. “I know it's cheap, but a person cain't get full.”

I don't know what to say. Earl's really not laid it all out like this since moving to L.A. I'm usually the complainer, the one's who's telling him what I don't like. He's been
my
rock, the guy who goes along. The guy who says everything is fine. “You should have said all of this before.”

“I know it.”

“We have to do a better job of talking.”

“I know it.”

I finally let his arms go, lie down on his chest and slip my arms around him. He smells like soap and sweat and feels nice and solid on our soft couch.

I notice that one of the sleeves of Earl's white T-shirt has a smudge of what looks like peach-colored make-up. There's a smudge of lipstick, too, which is too light to be mine. I wonder where it came from, wonder if I should ask Earl about it. I feel strange though, because these smudges had to come from
somewhere.
Somewhere I wasn't going to like. Still, he'd already told me about his night, and that had to be good enough for now.

“Hey.” Earl smiles. “I've been a fine prisoner.” He's rubbing my neck and lifts the back of my tank top to run his fingers up and down my spine.

“But we're not through talking,” I say, thinking about the smudge. Earl puts his finger to my lips. He tugs one of my arms out from behind him and puts my hand on his belt buckle, keeps his hand on top of mine and holds it there firmly. He levels those blue eyes at me again. We've sat and talked so that it's gotten very dark and there are no lights on in the house. Only the moonlight coming through the windows.

“We're through talking,” Earl says.

August 31—Day one in the classroom.

T
here is nothing quite like teaching to make one question the path one's life has taken. My first class at Atlanta State University is American Literature, and having been only mildly shaken by the stalker-y note in my box, I am prepared to meet the issue of politics in the classroom head-on. What I realize upon entering the fluorescent glow of the bleakest and most dingy classroom I've seen since the two-dollar showing of
Dangerous Minds,
is that my students could almost assuredly not give two cents for what will come out of my mouth in the next hour. I'd say that twenty-eight of the thirty seats are filled, and unlike Langsdale's farmboys, these students represent a far more polished demographic. Two women are texting furiously, three gentlemen in the back are actually sleeping, in the second row sits a woman who could be Paris Hilton's more attractive twin, looking long, blond and expensive. Although she's the genetic standout, they're a good-looking crowd to a one.

To steel my nerves I go to the chalkboard and write something that still feels alien, yet somehow empowering: DR. DORIS WEATHERALL, and underneath it, AMERICAN LITERATURE SURVEY. And then, to the right, I try to draw the “no politics in the classroom” symbol. I hear a weighted sigh from behind me like the air slowly leaking from an overfilled balloon, but turn to meet stone-faced silence.

After a brief round of introductions, I gesture to the chalkboard and ask:

“Does anyone know what this means?”

“No P.C.,” says one of the former nappers, a tall, jockish young man with triple pierced ears and a barbed-wire tattoo on his arm below. Clearly this is an acronym with which these students are familiar, as I hadn't even thought of shortening “politics in classroom” to “PC.”

“Right. It's Tommy, correct? Tommy Evans?”

“Just T,” he responds. “The letter,
T.
”

“Okay,” I say. “T. So I received a rather ominous and anonymous letter in my mailbox the other day.”

Paris Hilton's hand goes up.

“Name first, please, I'm trying to get these down.”

“Paige Prentiss,” she tells us. “And it's not anonymous. Every new teacher received a greeting from the Concerned Conservatives for Constancy in the Classroom. It's not meant to be threatening, it's just a little tap on the shoulder.”

All of this said in a Scarlett O'Hara, buttery-sweet as I twist the knife in your back, Southern accent. And, might I add, delivered in a tone so condescending that you'd have thought I was some hysterical nut-job ranting about creatures living in the yellow wallpaper.

“You don't think that an unsigned letter that reads ‘We are watching you,' is hostile?” I ask.

Ms. Prentiss shrugs and gives her best “what an idiot” look to the girl sitting next to her.

“Then riddle me this, girl and boy wonders,” I say. “How does one create an apolitical English classroom? What's the value of a liberal arts education if you can't question and challenge what you've been taught and believe? For instance this American lit survey, I'm mandated to teach four texts and authors Ben Franklin, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain. You can see Gatsby, Huck Finn and Moby Dick on the syllabus. Now, don't get me wrong, I love all three books, but why might a person consider this choice of books political?”

(Chirping of crickets faintly heard in the distance.)

“Okay. What do all of these books have in common?”

Ms. Prentiss raises the lone hand. Curses!

“They're all classics of American literature.”

“Yes,” I agree. “But so is Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and so is Toni Morrison's
Beloved
.”

“All dead white men,” T. interrupts.

“Correct. And when the only four required texts are dead white men, that sends a message. Every choice we make is political, the very act of what we bring into the classroom is political, so while I will never judge you or grade you on what you think or believe, there is simply no way to make this an apolitical space. If that's what you're looking for, I suggest you find another teacher and classroom.”

Although I'm quite pleased with my rendition of today's homily from the church of liberal humanism, with two minutes left, the notebooks are being closed and backbacks being non-discreetly zipped. “Okay, go on, we didn't get to my Franklin intro, but next class, it's all Franklin and the American dream. So get cracking.”

 

On the way back to my office I pass the closed office door of Dr. Antonius Block, professor emeritus. He's retired but for the occasional poetry workshop he teaches once every two years. Professor Block is one of the reasons I was most excited to get this job at Atlanta State. He's the sort of prima-superstar that every department likes to have on their rosters regardless of how often they teach or how difficult they are with daily departmental duties. Antonius Block, who was born in the southernmost extremity of Mississippi, has claimed that not only did he pre-date Bergman's knight, but that his parents wouldn't have known enough to name him after the iconic figure if they tried. Block's name fits his poetry: sparse, existential and merciless. Okay, to be fair, at times it's most merciless to
women,
especially the not three but four women he's been married to in his sixty-three years, but he's the sort of artist that I forgive every bit of misogyny for, for the sake of his art.

I'm reading the various articles posted on the front of Block's office door. There's critical praise for his National Book Award-winning collection of poems, the cover of his first book, which won the Yale younger poets prize, and a sarcastic cartoon about two cows reading poetry. Asa Davies comes out of her office, coffee cup in hand, and gestures dismissively at the brag sheets.

“It's as if Hitler were actually an artist with talent,” she says. “You know he hasn't taught an actual class in three years, yet he's managed to sleep with two undergraduates in that time.”

“Really?” I say, pretending to be scandalized when I know this sort of behavior is far too routine to be scandalous. “But the man can write. His book of sonnets is the best since Hopkins.”

Asa's lips are pinched together. “Tell me how you like his sonnets when you've had the pleasure of a department meeting with him where he argues against every form of literary analysis since close readings. How was the first class?”

“Okay,” I say, heading toward my office. “They're an interesting crew.”

“By interesting you mean slightly above root vegetables, right?”

I smile, and try to remain positive. “I'd say they're turnips at the very least.”

 

After spending the next hour prepping for my evening class, I hear a faint knock on my half-opened door. Silhouetted in the door frame like some film noir movie star is Paige Prentiss, looking far less surly than she did in American lit. Let me stop for a moment to paint a better picture of Ms. Prentiss. Long blond hair curled Farrah-style, a Tiffany heart necklace around her neck that looks both authentic and platinum, white wifebeater tank-top, flowing aqua peasant skirt. I know from my lust-tour of the Nieman-Marcus shoe department that she'd managed to afford gold Chanel sandals which crisscrossed thinly up her calves, revealing perfectly manicured toes and a perfectly even mystic tan. She opens a large Coach bag (the straw tote trimmed in lime-green leather after which I salivated, but could also not afford) and faces me with a nose so straight, teeth so white, and eyes so blue that the
Village of the Damned
comes to mind. Paige Prentiss, whom, might I add, as one of my advisees, I had been looking
forward
to meeting because of her outstanding test scores and Phi Beta Kappa–level grades.

“Take a seat,” I offer, gesturing at the empty chair across from my desk.

“I just wanted to apologize,” she begins, smoothing her dress against her thighs and crossing her legs demurely at the ankles. “I'd so been looking forward to meeting you, and I know that you're my advisor, as well, but so many of the professors here are disrespectful about the beliefs of others, and I assumed from the way you started the class that you were one of them. But I really like the books you've picked, and I can't wait to get started reading them. Dead white men and
all.
” And then she whispers conspiratorially, “And it's nice to have at least one woman around here who knows how to dress like a lady and not some angry feminist.”

“I may not be angry,” I tell her, trying not to lose my cool. “But I am most definitely a feminist.”

Paige shrugs, looks at my trim pencil skirt with the slightest flare at the bottom, and says, “Well, at least you don't look like one.”

Arrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

“I came to see you because I do so want to graduate with honors, Ms. Weatherall, and I want to make sure that I do whatever it takes in your class to make an A.”

“Dr. Weatherall,” I correct her. “And you'll get an A in my class if you show up for all the classes, do the homework, write brilliantly and participate actively.” First day of class and the grade-grubbing has already begun.

“Yes,” she acknoweldges, as though the title were somehow unseemly. “Dr. Weatherall. It's just that you
look
so much like a Ms.”

And then she gives me a smile as if I'd been knighted. No wonder she has such glowing letters on file from the male faculty. She was playing me like I was judging Miss Georgia Peach.

“Well, I worked very hard to become a doctor.”

“Yes, I saw your book of poems. I thought that one about shoes was sweet. I think that women
ought
to be allowed to write books about shoes if they like. You'd never know it goin' to school here.”

Who did this child think she was?

“Well, Miss Prentiss. If you read the poem carefully, I think you'd have noticed that it was about more than shoes. There's careful attention to class and class markers in that poem. Manolo slides versus department-store copies…” I was starting to sound defensive. “And the rest of the poems are hardly about shoes.”

“Oh,
that,
” she says. “That whole tired class thing. Lord, you try escaping this place without a whole wagon-load of that hooey. That's why I felt I had to say something in class today, I get so
tired
of it all. Dr. Block says it's only the words on the page that matter, not what your professors try to slop on it. Some mornings I wake up and wonder if this is America or communist Russia.”

She smiles at me, and for the first time I see the intelligence behind the act—the Paige Prentiss who could score 1460 on her SATs and still play Scarlet for anyone willing to watch. It wasn't a pretty sight. And then it vanished.

“I guess I'll be seein' you in class,” she concludes, extending her hand. “French sandals and all.”

I honestly don't know whether she means her sandals or my own, so after she leaves my office I untuck my right shoe and check for the brand.
LaParda.
My latest designer shoe warehouse purchase. I assumed the shoes were the dollar-store equivalent of deodorants marked “Seekret” or “Shure,” but evidently these shoes are not your everyday knockoffs, but super-deluxe knockoffs. Faux French Prada. So either Ms. Prentiss was speaking narcissistically, or she was making fun of me. Looked to me like the two of us would be gearing up for a real brand war at the O.K. Corral. An age-old showdown between money and irony, “the real world” and academia.
Chanel,
one;
LaParda,
zero.

“Doing research?” I hear from the doorway.

I look up to see Asa, who has clearly had some Sibyl-like personality change since the last two times that I've seen her. She's smiling, and I realize that she's one of those women whose face totally transforms when she's in a good mood. She was an effortlessly pretty, cherub-faced platinum blonde—hair cut in a chic but functional short bob. She had on salmon-colored Capri pants and a pale beige shirt and a pair of Birkenstocks that I knew were part of the Heidi Klum line, designed to bring a bit of glam to the hippie-set.