Grace (16 page)

Banks sucks in air. The intake is audible. “That’s deep,” he says. “Deep. And she didn’t write any for you?” He does not say this to hurt Justin, and Justin does not take it as such.

“When I met her she wasn’t writing poetry,” Justin says.

“Deep,” Banks says again.

“It was a bunch of love poetry.”

“So you don’t think she got over him?”

“The boyfriend?”

“That’s who we’re talking about,” Banks says. “The boyfriend. She still has it on for him?”

Under other circumstances the expression Banks uses would have annoyed Justin.
Deep
was bad enough—he, too, has found himself mimicking his students—but
has it on for him
would have sent his pressure up. He hates when faculty—any older, responsible person for that matter—speaks in the street vernacular of the students. Nothing is more pitiful to him than
this foolish attempt to regain lost youth. But there is no space in Justin’s mind at this moment for Banks. He is thinking of Sally, of what Sally said to him. He is wondering if he is boring, if that man were not more exciting than he can ever possibly be.

“She says she doesn’t love him,” he says to Banks. “She says she no longer had feelings for him when she met me.”

“Women lie,” says Banks. “They lie to get what they want. We are fools, man. We get stuck in their web. What’d you do when you found the poetry?”

“What?”

“What’d you do when you read them?”

“I showed them to her. And she burned them.”

“That was all? You didn’t talk to her about it?”

“What was there to say? She said it was all in the past and she burned them and that was that.”

“That was where you made a big mistake. A woman only burns things that mean something to her. If you told me that she threw them away or tore them up, that would be something else. But burned them? That’s heavy, man.”

“What are you trying to say, Lloyd?”

“Nothing. But you should have talked to her. You should have had your heart to heart right then. It was bound to come up sooner or later. You should have had your heart to heart when she burned those poems.”

This is more than Justin can bear. It is thin ice he is on. He wants reassurance, not confirmation of his fears. He wants Banks to tell him Jack Benson no longer occupies a place in
Sally’s heart. He wants him to say that when she burned those poems, she burned her memories of him.

“You are somebody, you know, Lloyd,” he strikes out at him. “Talking to me about having a heart to heart. You’ve had a heart to heart with your two wives lately? You know if they like their situation?”

“Hey, don’t jump on me because you can’t keep things at home copacetic.”

“Copacetic?”

“Yeah, copacetic,” Banks says, and they both laugh. The word spares them of an argument neither wants.

“Cool,” Justin says. “That’s what they say these days: Keep things cool.”

But they are facing each other now and have broken the rules of the confessional. Each man knows too much of the other. The confessional, when it works, depends on anonymity, or the semblance of it: a darkened coffeehouse where eyes do not meet, a curtain drawn between the one confessing and the other pardoning.

“Time for some shut-eye,” Banks says. They stand up. Justin puts money on the table. They shake hands and part.

SALLY ASKS ABOUT Mark. Justin tells her he will recover. They got him in time. He does not tell her that Mark found his girlfriend in bed with a woman.

Giselle is groggy in the morning. She had a bad dream, she says. A wolf was in her room. It almost ate her up.

Sally murmurs to Justin, it was because of
Red Riding Hood.
She had read the story to Giselle last night.

Justin murmurs back, he would have read the same story. It was next in Giselle’s favorite book.

They are generous with each other. Mark’s attempt at suicide has put their quarrel on hiatus, their differences now, as often happens when one confronts a tragedy of such magnitude, seem petty and insignificant by comparison.

They comfort Giselle, and when she leaves the room they talk about changing the stories they will read to her. They should have known better, they say to each other.

Giselle is not ready for stories about little girls who get lost in the woods, Sally says. Little girls who can’t find their grannies. Sally does not think that what she says can ever apply to her, to the plan she had to move in with Anna. She does not think that little girls who live apart from their daddies can sometimes get lost in the woods.

Giselle is too young to know wolves come in sheep’s clothing, Justin says. Justin does not think that what he says can ever apply to him. He does not think that one day perhaps he will reflect on Mark’s near suicide, and wonder if he were not that wolf in whom Mark had placed such trust.

“At least she found her way back home,” Sally says, speaking of Red Riding Hood.

“Yes,” Justin says. “She found her way.”

They make breakfast together. As Justin pours coffee for Sally, she says to him, recalling their conversation in the restaurant
last night, “You were wrong, Justin. I care about you.” They kiss each other lightly on the mouth.

JUSTIN SEES BANKS in the cafeteria at lunchtime and joins him at his table. Banks says he cannot stop thinking of Mark. He was on his mind all night.

Justin thinks it is not Mark who is distracting Banks; it is the trouble Banks is having at home. That was obvious to him when Banks launched into a non sequitur about women lying so men could get stuck in their web. Mark is a warning of all the things that could go wrong when women are unhappy.
I think men better straighten up and fly right
, Mark said. Mark is a warning to him, too. But they are men. They do what men have learned to do. They circumvent. They hover on the periphery of their emotions; they do not move inward.

“Do you think Sandra was always a lesbian?” Lloyd asks, but Justin knows the true question on his mind:
Will my wives leave me if they get fed up with having to share me?

And there is that other impossible, but nagging, follow-up:
Could they become lovers?

On one of the few times they spoke of his wives, Banks told Justin that everything was going great in his home. “All that stuff about women being jealous of each other and scratching out each other’s eyes over a man is misogynistic Eurocentric bullshit. My wives,” he said, “get along like a house on fire.”

“I think Sandra found someone else because things weren’t going well between Mark and her,” Justin says.

“Mark, Mark. Poor Mark. It’s such a big responsibility we
take on with these students.” Banks shakes his head. “We are teacher, mother, father, friend, therapist, social worker, lawyer, minister, even banker. I find myself lending my students money to pay the rent. The male students work the night shift and can barely keep their eyes open in class the next day, and the women students have babies to look after. Do you allow your students to bring their children to class, Justin?”

“Still judging me, huh, Lloyd?”

“Well, do you?”

“If the children are quiet and don’t disturb the class.”

“It’s a big responsibility,” Banks says again. “I shouldn’t have been so flippant with Mark.”

“When were you flippant?”

“I should have guessed there was something serious going on with him when he was so obsessed with that Morrison story. You know,
Beloved.”
His eyes are shadowed by the thickness of his eyebrows converging above them. “It was such an extreme position to take,” he says. “How could he think Sethe would kill her children because she wanted to hurt Halle?”

“He didn’t say that was the only reason. He said she had two motives.”

“You’re not agreeing with him, are you, Justin?”

“I am the one who should feel guilty. Mark has been telling me about Sandra. I should have suspected that his comments about lesbians weren’t theoretical.”

“We, ”
Banks says. “We should have suspected.”

“I didn’t stop him when he told me what he thought about Sethe. I told him to write it up.”

“I dismissed him,” Banks says.

“There’s more,” Justin says. “He borrowed that book from me, the one he was holding.”

“The poetry?”

“Sylvia Plath committed suicide by turning on the gas and putting her head in the oven.”

The admission silences them. Finally Banks says, “There’s a big difference between life and fiction.” He says this as if he is lecturing to his class.

Justin does not respond.

“Literature is all make-believe.” Banks sits up straight in his chair. “These kids,” he says, “take all that fiction stuff for the real thing.”

“It
is
the real thing.” Justin is unable to keep silent any longer. “Good literature is about truth,” he says.

“You mean the big
T
truth.” They have had this discussion before. “Yes,” Banks concedes, “it is about the big
T
truth, but it is not about the real thing. These kids need to know that. They imitate what they see on television and in the movies. Look at what’s happening in the high schools. And I don’t mean high schools in the inner city. Kids are bringing in guns to school and shooting down their classmates. Did you ever think the day would come when we’d have to have metal detectors and police patrols in schools? Something’s missing in this generation of young people. They are missing some essential factor, some essential element in their brains that will make them connect, make them feel the pain of others, make them have compassion. They have become inured to violence, to killing.

All they see is the glamour. The macho man with his guns. Did you ever see them at the arcade? They are pumped up, adrenaline high, testosterone to the sky. Zap! Zap! That’s the thrill for them. That’s what they learn to like: bombs exploding, blood and gore. They have no sense of the consequences. Their brains get so rewired that they seem to confuse a computer graphic with a human being. It’s as though they think death is not final. You can shoot somebody down today, and fight him again tomorrow. And that gangster rap. It’s the same thing. They seem to have lost the ability to tell the real from the make-believe and I think we may be to blame.”

“We?” Justin asks carefully.

“Not you and me specifically. Our whole generation. We have been careless. We have been so concerned about our own agendas, we have let television and movies raise our children for us. The video arcade. Fiction. What did we expect?”

Justin twists uncomfortably in his chair. “Literature does not do that to them,” he says.

“You want to tell me that when those young girls see those soppy movies and read those romances they don’t get their heads all turned around? They think the be all and end all of their lives is to get married, to get a man. And look at poor Mark. Reading all that romantic stuff.” Banks stops short of pointing his finger directly to the book Mark borrowed from Justin, but Justin knows he is accusing him all the same.

“I don’t have my students read pulp literature,” he says. “We read good literature in my classes. There is a difference between good literature and the junk you see on TV or in the
movies, the stuff you say they read. Pulp literature does not exercise their imaginations, their minds. It tells them what to think, how to react. There are no easy answers in the books I have my students read. The writer doesn’t tell them what to think. They have to discover that themselves. Reading good literature is not a passive activity. Good literature is about grays.” He pauses.
It is grays Sally cannot bear. She wants blacks and whites. She wants clear-cut answers.
“That book did not cause Mark to want to take his life,” he begins again. “Mark was already in trouble. He found comfort from Plath.”

“Yeah, but it was the wrong comfort, wasn’t it? He tried to take the easy way out.” He pushes away his plate and gets up. “Like she did,” he says, and walks away.

They meet again later that afternoon, after their classes.

“Man, I wasn’t implying …” Banks has a sheepish look on his face. He is scratching the back of his neck and shaking his head, struggling to find more words.

Justin is forgiving. “It’s all in the past,” he says. “Don’t give it another thought.”

Still Banks insists. “I only meant to say these kids today are so vulnerable. It’s the breakdown of the family. They look anywhere for their values.”

Justin frowns and Banks tries again. “I apologize, man. I didn’t mean to imply that you were to blame. That poetry book couldn’t have made Mark think of suicide.”

Yet that morning Banks blamed the violence on television and in the movies and the blood and gore in arcade games for
the rash of killings that has flared up recently in high schools in leafy suburban communities.

Justin shrugs his shoulders and Banks slaps him on the back. “You’re okay, you know. Mark likes you. It’s good that he has someone like you who believes in him. If he turns out to be any kind of a writer, it will be because of you.” He backs away and points his finger at Justin. “He trusts you,” he says.

I accuse you.
That is how Justin reads the motion Banks makes with his finger.
I accuse you.
Banks narrows his eyes and lifts his finger up and down close to Justin’s face. “He trusts you, man.” And the nursery story he and Sally read to Giselle the night before suddenly returns to Justin and fills him with dread. “Why didn’t Red Riding Hood know the wolf was pretending to be her granny?” Giselle had asked him.

No, he is not responsible. A book of poems or the story of the author so despondent, so crushed by her husband’s infidelity that she would put her head in an oven and turn on the gas, could not have led Mark to this.