Staten Island Noir (16 page)

I wasn't off about the beauty pageants, though. Two years in a row one of the students was crowned Miss Staten Island. Not the same one twice.
Two
different Miss Staten Islands, back to back.

The student who came to my office that afternoon took off his varsity jacket—he was on the baseball team—draping it over the back of a chair which he then turned around and straddled. His arms were crossed and he leaned forward as if he were in an acting class. Method acting. He told me that he'd been reading the Beat poets. This semester he was taking Survey of American Lit I—Whitman and Dickinson. "Professor Lodge suggested I read some of the contemporary poets."

"John Lodge? You're in John's class?"

"Yeah, he's great. He said I had to read John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney. What do you think of them?"

"Definitely worth reading," I said. "Who else did he recommend?"

"That's it for now. But he's going to give me copies of his books. His books of poetry. Ones he wrote."

"You know what I really think?" I said. "I think you should transfer to some other school."

Professor John Lodge. No, no relation to the fancy-schmancy Lodges, but oh, please, if only you assumed he was, he'd be afforded a moment's pride. It wasn't that he wanted to be rich. What he wanted was to be a snob, or at least have some excuse to be a snob. His books of poetry—his books of poetry were not books. They were xeroxed copies of maybe twenty poems or so laid out two on the front and two on the back of five or six sheets of regular paper. Regular paper folded in half and three staples made the spine along the crease. Also, there were cover pages: an illustration set between the title and the
by John P. Lodge,
an epigraph or two or three epigraphs, a notation of copyright which was too sad to consider, and a page devoted to a dedication of
this book
to his wife. His emaciated wife, with a clavicle that would snap like a wishbone, had an emphatic nervous twitch that put me in mind of Bette Davis smoking a cigarette, although entirely unlike Bette Davis, John's wife had no juice. John aspired to be a snob, but his wife succeeded because she believed that to be painfully thin and in possession of one very good suit entitled her to be condescending to others.

John wrote a new "book," on average, every six weeks. He'd leave a copy of this "most recent volume" in my mailbox where I'd find it with a Post-It affixed on the front asking me to
Enjoy!
Or beseeching
If you have time
, causing my heart to twist like a wet washcloth wringing out that last drop of pity. Pity that, after a while, turned to resentment because of the responsibility of it. What was I supposed to say to him about his "books" of poems? Never mind the sorrow of book form. Each poem, individually, judged on its own merits, stunk. Seriously stunk. Mostly they were about gin and alienation. The very worst ones were about sex. If the author of these poems were a student and not a professor, I'd have been less embarrassed by them but I would not have encouraged them, either.

It wasn't possible to avoid John. The department was small. We both often took the 4:20 ferry home to Manhattan, and he urgently wanted to be my friend. I didn't dislike the guy. Wagner College was no different from any other college when it came to the professorial pecking order. As the newest member of the faculty, I was expected to prove myself somehow, and until I did, I was to be excluded from the circle. For that first year, John was the only member of the faculty who was at all nice to me, which I sort of appreciated.

One morning, near the end of the last term, I found yet another of John's "books" in my otherwise empty mailbox. I took it to my office where I was intending to spend the twenty minutes before class whipping up that day's lesson plan. John's "book" I tossed in the previously empty wastebasket where it landed with an appropriately dull
flump.
Flipping the pages of my legal pad past the to-do lists and doodles, I reached a page that was pristine and on the top line I wrote:
Compare and Contrast
. That's as far as I'd gotten when John interrupted me. He had a Styrofoam cup in each hand. "Coffee," he set one cup on my desk. "Black, right?"

I nodded and thanked him, which he took as an invitation to pull up a seat. "Did you get the book I left for you?" he asked.

"Yes. Thank you. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but I will."

"You don't have to read it now, but I just want to see you open it."

Sure, I could've looked under my notepad and fished through my briefcase, pretending I'd misplaced the damn thing—except, as guilty as the cat with the canary in its mouth, my gaze went like a laser beam, a straight line of light from my eyes to the wastebasket, and John too saw his book discarded. After an extremely uncomfortable pause, he said, "Don't worry about it."

As if I didn't already feel like four pieces of crap, it was dedicated to me:
A new friend, but a valued one
.

I apologized of course. More than apologized. I apologized in writing. I wrote him a letter of apology about how my own writing of stories wasn't going well and how I'd had a fit of envy over how prolific he is and how it was a rude tantrum for which I am ashamed, and I thanked him profusely for the honor of the dedication. All of which I thought was remarkably kind of me, self-sacrificing, in the way that allowed me to think I was a good person.

My apology was accepted, and everything was the same as it was before with John and me, which amounted to chatting for a few minutes before classes began, and some days sitting together on the ferry going home. And let me not forget the time John was able to cajole me into joining him for a four o'clock cocktail in the back room of the chapel which had been turned over to the faculty, a designated place for them to gather for lunch or a drink at the end of the day. I would've gone there a second time if ever I needed a reason to kill myself.

The Kerouac-enthralled student sitting in my office told me, because I'd asked, what led him to choose to come to Wagner. He was not from Staten Island, and he lived in the dormitories. "The photographs," he said. "The old buildings, the lawn, people carrying books. It was how I imagined college would be."

Along with a list of contemporary poets, I gave him a list of some other schools where the buildings were old and the students carried books and where there was no John Lodge teaching in the English Department. And no me either, for that matter.

On his way out I called the student back and said, "Read those poets first. You can read Professor Lodge's poems later. After you have a foundation."

When he left, I stayed for a while longer in my office. A fairly long while, just thinking. That's how I came to be there in the evening, and I was glad of it. The quiet reverberated in the dark. Quiet, this kind of quiet, did that: it reverberated like a pulse of a heart until the wind picked up and brought with it another kind of quiet.

Evenly spaced lampposts illuminated the footpath.

The leaves rustled.

The Trautmann Square Clock Tower, a four-sided clock showing the time no matter where you stood, was lit.

That night, when the hour seemed much later than it was and the clouds, the incandescent night clouds, moved across the sky, and the dried leaves swept along the path, for a fleeting moment, I considered the notion that teaching forever at a small school set on a bucolic campus might be a good life for me after all.

The footpath narrowed. The trees were more dense. If this were a movie, here's the part where the heroine would get that creepy feeling, a sense that maybe she was not alone. She'd pause to listen. And of course the sicko following her would also pause because he might be a sicko, but he's not stupid. But this wasn't a movie, and I stopped only because I was no longer in a hurry.

It was then that I knew for certain that I would not return the following semester. And with the decision not to return absolute, I was overcome by cheap sentiment for a place where my connection was slight. Cheap sentiment that manifested as longing, a reluctance to part when the parting was inevitable, which was why I lingered there to experience the cottages deep in the shadows of a perfect autumnal night.

I was maybe twenty feet away at most, looking head-on at the smaller cottage. A halo softened the light above the door, and even though I knew for a fact that Albee's play was meant to be set at Trinity College and not Wagner College, this cottage, in the dark, evoked the very essence of the house where George and Martha tormented each other and their guests.

Yet, it was from the porch of the larger cottage, the chapel, that the noiselessness broke like a glass when I heard a woman say—no, no, that's wrong, she didn't
say
, she enunciated. As if the words were scripted, she enunciated, "You. Disgust. Me. There. I've said it now. You. Disgust. Me."

I could not have recalled all of Martha's lines verbatim, but surely this had to have been one of them, and the voice, the woman's voice, also sounded familiar. I was trying to place it—a student or maybe that professor from the history department, the one who wore serapes and necklaces made from walnuts—when the man said, "Please. Don't do this." His voice I knew. John Lodge said, "You're upset."

John Lodge and his twitchy wife.

They were not directly under the porch light, but off to the side. Having no idea if they were able to see me or not, I stepped behind a maple tree where it was less likely I'd be spotted. I'm not proud myself. They thought they were alone, and I should've respected their privacy. I should have, but I didn't.

"I'm upset," she said, "and you are pathetic. Where does that leave us?"

"Let's go home."

In all likelihood they'd been in that makeshift faculty room hitting the hooch since the onset of happy hour or maybe lunchtime. John always struck me as one of those sad-sack drinkers, the sort who drink a lot and often but never get sloppy drunk or have any fun, either. And her? I'd have bet she hadn't seen a sober day since her Sweet Sixteen.

"Home? You dare call that a home? It's a closet. We live in a closet, a broom closet, but what choice do we have, on your salary,
Professor
Lodge? Oh, excuse me.
Assistant
Professor Lodge."

That explained the address. When the ferry docked in Manhattan, John and I would part company. We did not take the same subway line home, and I did wonder how he afforded that neighborhood, that address which declared,
I have old money. I am stuffy. I am not even the least bit hip
. His wife, I knew, did not work. Supposedly she was going for her PhD but the particulars of that were never clear.

"Claire, please. I'm tired," he said.

"Tired? You're not tired. You're dead. And boring. You are deadly boring."

She was right. He was boring, but it wasn't like she brought sparkle to a room either.

"Please," John said. "Please stop."

"A pathetic, boring loser and you are never going to be anything but—"

"Stop it. Please. Stop it."

"A boring loser. And if you think anyone is ever going to publish that drivel—"

"Please, Claire. Don't."

"That drivel you write—"

John let go with a groan, a groan that I would've associated with a spectacular orgasm except that it was impossible to think of John Lodge or Ms. Twitch in such a state. The groan was followed by a thud. Or a crack. A sound of some sort or another.

If I hurried, I could catch the 7:20 bus and make the 7:40 ferry.

The next day John's class waited the twenty minutes allowed a tardy professor. I can safely assume that some of the boys high-fived each other before all the students flooded from the room. A no-show professor was as good as a snow day.

The chairman called John at home. He called again. And again. No one had seen Professor Lodge or his wife since the day before when a lot of people saw her waiting in the hallway for his class to end, pacing as if she were anxious, nervous about something, which was a lead to nowhere. Anxious, nervous was her natural state. A professor from Romance Languages said that as he was going into Main Hall, they were walking out. Holding hands, he claimed. But after that—nothing. John Lodge and his wife seemed to have vanished. After two more days of calling, the department chairman gave up and hired someone to cover John's classes for the remainder of the semester.

Unless there is some sort of evidence to the contrary, the disappearance of a husband and wife does not constitute a crime, which means nothing in terms of rumors spreading and theories zinging around like electrons in an atom. Everyone had an idea as to what really happened: they were the victims of a psycho-killer, they'd been kidnapped and were being held for ransom, they joined up with a cult, they had a suicide pact, they moved to Paris on a whim, they were abducted by aliens, devoured by coyotes. I steered clear of the gossip. I accepted the fact that sometimes that's how it goes, that sometimes you'll never know what really happened.

After that semester's end, I did not return to Wagner College.

Time passed and I can't say that I gave John or his wife a whole lot of thought, but when I did, I wished for them a rosy scenario: that the light of the next morning brought clarity; realizing how perilously close they'd come to
being
George and Martha was sobering, so they decided to make a fresh start and move to a small town where he would teach school and write bad poems and she would be super-snooty to all the rubes and it would all turn out happy in the end. That's what I wished for them because—why not?

More time passed. Years. It was three years later when I got the envelope in the mail, a five-by-seven manila envelope, the return address a post office box in Maine. No name, but I recognized John's handwriting as surely as I had recognized his voice that night.

There was no Post-It affixed to this "book" but there was a letter paper clipped to the "cover," which read:

 

Dear M.,

 

I look back on our days at Wagner College with love. Yes, I loved teaching there. I loved having an office in Parker Hall (which, did you know, was once an orphanage), and I loved having you as my friend and colleague. I greatly valued our talks, our time on the ferry. I believed that you understood me, and I continue to believe that to this day. It is that very faith in our friendship that enables me to swallow my pride and tell you that, although I live modestly, I am not always able to find work. I now have found myself in difficult circumstances of a financial nature. It is terribly awkward to ask for money, and I am intending this request to be a loan, but on the chance that I can't pay you back, I will give you the publishing rights to my books. Please know how hard this is for me.