How Do I Love Thee? (34 page)

For the past twelve months, the routine which had kept her sane had been work and home, work and home. She occasionally went to the movies with her mother, and every third Saturday she’d visit her parents for dinner, but she hated these events more than the recuperative loneliness she’d imposed upon herself.

And if Bob or Romeo or whatever he decided to call himself, thought that he could … and then it hit her like a ton of bricks. She hadn’t picked it up before, thinking it must be a strange coincidence, but a few weeks ago, they’d been studying Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Bob had started calling himself Romeo.

She stopped dead in her tracks, a giggle of girls nearly colliding with her on the pathway into the main entrance of the Upper School. He’d been stalking her all this while, and she’d been too thick to pick up the clues. Ever since he’d met her on the internet, he’d been into her computer, finding out everything she had on her hard drive.

Liz bit her lip in anger. How could she have been so gullible not to have realised that she was being stalked? Oh, how he must be laughing at her. What fun he must be having at her expense! Or was it her class? No, it couldn’t be … she would have picked up on the sniggers as she’d walked in, or the unsubtle references like ‘Been on the computer today, miss?’ or some such infantile remark.

So if it wasn’t her class, then who was he? He’d told her that he was a thirty-six-year-old migrant from South America, but she knew little else about him. He was a widower whose wife had been killed three years earlier in a terrible car accident which had claimed the lives of ten people when a car driver had lost control of his vehicle on a sharp bend, crossed the road and wiped out four other cars. She’d searched Google to read about the horror of what had happened, finding the story with difficulty because many details had been suppressed, in contrast with Australian media where every salacious detail of an accident was likely to be reported. Not wanting to pry into his personal life, Liz hadn’t told him that she knew about the accident, but empathised and hoped that his new life in Sydney would prove rewarding.

But was he telling her the truth, or, like so many cyber-romances, was it all based on packs of lies built around avatars, self-promoting exaggerations at best, deceit and duplicity at
worst. For all Liz could currently prove, he could be one of her students. Somebody in the class she was entering in a few minutes to teach a sonnet by Petrarch.

That would be the test. She hadn’t put this particular sonnet onto her computer. She’d only read it the previous night and made handwritten notes about it. If her cyberlover wrote her an email tomorrow quoting words from Petrarch’s sonnet, then she’d know that her putative lover was a student.

It was a long and excruciating day and night. Every thought she had was unfocused. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering whether Bob would write her an email tomorrow morning which would include the lines from Petrarch, because it would prove conclusively that he was a student and that would be hugely dangerous for her professionally, personally and socially. She began to imagine the shame attached if it ever became public that she was having a romance, however cyber and innocent, with one of her students. No explanations from her, no amount of pleaded ingenuousness would ameliorate the scorn, derision and innuendo she would suffer. She’d be dismissed. Maybe she’d even be charged with some obscene crime.

Despite her manic desire to know whether or not Bob had written to her, Liz forced herself to make a cup of coffee,
read her mail and attend to freshening herself from a busy day in the classroom. Yet no matter what she did, she knew it was a deliberate delay and the computer screen summoned her like a seductive Lorelei. Pressing the start button, she watched the computer burst into life, and moments later, she was reading in horror what Bob or Romeo had written.

Hello again Miss Bloom. How was your day today? Mine was average, as it so often is without a woman to share it with me. You could be that woman, you know, if only you’d come off your high horse and agree to meet with me. Only to meet. If you still say no, I shall never tire of your unwearying flame, even though you make me weary. You’re a kind but a cruel woman, you know, Miss Bloom. If you joined me, met with me, our names could be conjoined … together … who knows what could come of it? My heart is amorous and demands that you feel some affection for me, but I know that no matter how cruel and hard you make my life, I will thank the Lord forever that you’ve at least written to me and given me such hope.

Petrarch! Straight from his sonnet. Dear Lord Almighty, for the past three months, she’d been doing an Eloise and Abelard with one of the students in her class, being seduced by him (or her). This was no hacker, no stalker, no mad rapist or molester … this was a lovesick schoolboy going through at least a couple of the seven ages of Man, a student who’d made an entrance into her life from which she’d very soon
exit if she wasn’t exceptionally careful. She was making love on the world wide spiders’ web to a schoolboy! A student in her class who might be creeping like a snail unwillingly to school, but was all muscular braggadocio on the internet. Dear God, did he know he was writing to his teacher?

She immediately wrote back to him.
Can’t talk now … somebody is at the door. Speak tomorrow
, and turned off her computer. This silent sentinel was no longer a friend who gave her support to face the outside world. Suddenly, her computer had become her enemy, the towering accuser of her inadvertent misdemeanours, an instrument of her downfall. Where once she’d found refuge in her computer, suddenly she viewed it as an alien intruder, a menace which had taken over her world, no longer a companion and co-conspirator but a weapon in somebody else’s armoury, an arrow which could penetrate her inner sanctum and destroy her security. The four walls of her bedroom no longer protected her. Liz had always assumed that she could sit anonymously and direct her thoughts outward, but now she realised that her room had been invaded by others.

Okay, she thought … what can I do? Tell the principal? Yeah, right, and within ten minutes everybody on staff would know and snigger behind her back. Confront the class and demand to know who was writing to her? Worse … a thousand times worse.

No, thinking coldly, calmly and logically, the only thing to do was to break off the relationship; tell Bob or Romeo that she’d met somebody else and it was goodbye forever. The more she pondered, the more sure she became that Bob had no idea who she was. Nobody could be so stupid as to try to seduce her using her own words, and all the kids in her class were bright—some were brighter than others, but nobody was a dummy and certainly nobody would be so unsubtle and obvious as to do what Bob had done, knowing that she’d deduce immediately that her supposed lover was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. Or girl!

She composed the email carefully so as not to hurt him. It was, she decided, just the right tone. A gentle putdown, a severing of a friendship and not an artery.

Hi Bob, I’ve decided not to write to you any further. I think that the differences in our interests mean that even though we could be friends, we could never develop beyond that. Even though you’re obviously trying hard to use the words of great poets and writers to impress me, it isn’t part of your make-up, culture or education. So it’s goodbye Bob or Romeo. Good luck in meeting somebody who’ll appreciate your qualities more than I have been able to during our correspondence … Miss Midlife Bloom.

And that was it. In case he wrote back begging, she turned off her computer and determined not to turn it back
on for a week. Instead, she’d phone up a few friends she had barely seen all year, surprise them, admit that yes, she still was alive after all this time, and busy herself in preparation for throwing a dinner party this coming Friday night.

It was apparent that he was struggling with some of the concepts of the French literary theorists. Nobody believed for one minute that Shakespeare, Donne and Plath were easy, but while most of her students understood the generalities, poor Tomas was having difficulties in understanding the concept of deconstruction. So Liz suggested that he come to her classroom as soon as school had finished, and she’d take him slowly and carefully through the intricacies of the work.

But when she was ten minutes into explaining to him the mysteries of Derrida’s thesis of the hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture, Tomas nodded sagely, and told her, ‘I know all about prejudices, Miss. Especially in this culture.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

He just shrugged and hunched his shoulders.

‘Tomas, have students here been racist because you’re from Spain?’

‘I’m not Spanish, Miss. I’m Bolivian.’

‘Oh, sorry, I thought you were …’ The words hung in the air as the import of what he’d said suddenly hit her. She had a number of Filipino and Spanish students in her class, but she hadn’t realised that Tomas was South American. Her throat was suddenly dry.

‘Why do you know about prejudice, Tomas?’ she asked cautiously.

He looked at her diffidently and seemed unwilling to answer.

‘Tomas, if it’s affecting your work, then it’s better to tell me so that either I can deal with it, or I’ll tell one of the school’s counsellors. They’re really good at handling prejudice and racism and bullying, and I promise you we’ll put a stop to it. Now, in what way do you know about prejudice?’

She held her breath, hoping that he’d open up.

‘I go on an internet site for my father. You know, Miss, one of these dating sites. My father, he’s very lonely and can’t speak very good English. He’s only been here in this country for three years, and he works hard and goes to the Simon Bolivar Club to meet his friends on a Friday night, but in the rest of the week, he’s lonely since my mother died and I’m trying to find him a girlfriend. I pretend to be him on this site and he tells me what to say in Spanish, and, as best I can, I write to this woman and she’s very nice, but suddenly she stops writing. In the beginning, she was
very friendly, and I tried to make a date for my father, but suddenly she won’t write to him. I think she’s prejudiced against South Americans. I don’t understand why. What do you think I did?’

Liz’s heart was pounding. Could it be so simple? Had she misunderstood the honourable and loving intent of a young son acting as amanuensis for his father? Was he her Bob? She wanted to reach over the desk, to hug Tomas, to tell him how wonderful he was for trying to help his tragic father make a new life, to apologise for making his father’s loneliness even more forlorn.

That would, of course, have been grossly inappropriate, and instead she said, ‘But Tomas, why didn’t you tell this woman the truth in the first place? I’m sure she would have understood the circumstances.’

Tomas shrugged. ‘Miss, how would you feel if a sixteen-year-old boy was writing to you?’

‘But maybe if you were to write to this woman, Tomas, and tell her the truth, that you were acting as your father’s translator, she’d change her mind?’

‘No,’ the boy said. ‘I have given her away. She doesn’t want my father … well, he doesn’t want her. I will try another. There are many lonely women. My father is lonely. Every night he comes home from work and he and my sister and me eat together; then we do our homework and he watches
television or plays his guitar or reads a paper trying to learn English. He’s a good man and he shouldn’t be alone. I will find a lady for him who isn’t prejudiced.’

Liz looked into Tomas’s dark, deep-set eyes and saw a young man struggling under the weight of the world. She wished she could clear up this stupid misunderstanding. But without exposing herself to ridicule, she had no idea how to resolve the situation.

The Great Hall was crowded with over a thousand people. Teachers and parents sat opposite each other, separated by a desk of authority. Parents on one side hoped to hear a teacher’s rendition of their child’s genius at best, growing competence at worst; teachers on the other side struggled to find an acceptable and honest pathway to impart the reality of some child’s ability to hopeful parents. It was a tortured transit area, littered with diplomatic stumbling blocks.

Liz had seen seventy sets of parents so far and both her voice and her mood were beginning to fray. It would have been so easy to praise an unworthy student and send the parents off with a song in their hearts, but that would have been both dishonest and short-sighted as no amount of cushioning could prevent them coming face to face with the uncompromising reality of exam results. She smiled and
told Melissa’s parents that their child could turn around her performance if she only put more effort into homework, bade them goodnight, and watched them meander off to another appointment with another teacher, shoulders sagging in defeat. Liz sighed in despair; yet one more set of parents who had come to the cruel understanding that their daughter wouldn’t be gaining the Nobel Prize for Literature any time soon. How often had surprised and defensive parents said to her tonight, ‘But she’s so expressive’ or ‘I don’t understand why she isn’t doing well in English … I’ve read her emails and they’re really clever and brilliantly written …’

Liz looked at her list. She was startled by the name of the next interview. She looked up, and saw Tomas walking towards her with an attractive, swarthy man, proud yet somehow unsure of himself.

‘Miss, good evening,’ said Tomas sitting in the chair normally occupied by the mother. ‘This is my father, Silvio Roberto. In Australia he calls himself Robert.’

He looked identical to the picture he’d sent her in the early days of their cyber correspondence. No dissembling, no little white lies; Liz felt ashamed that she’d not been honest and straightforward with this man.

‘Good evening, Miss,’ he said to her. His voice was deep and resonant with the delightful lilt of a South American accent. He was also taller than she’d expected, taller than
Tomas, and broader … he had the broad shoulders of a manual worker.

‘Good evening, Mr Rodriguez. It’s delightful to meet you at last.’ She realised that her voice had attained a higher-than-normal pitch.