The Ghosts of Lovely Women (6 page)

They would look at me with those sarcastic smiles, certain as they were that I had no life to speak of and that I was someone to be pitied — I and my smudgy board and my chalk-covered clothing. I and my sensible teacher shoes.

The students filed to their seats, although a few, predictably, either hovered over their friends’ desks to talk or lined up in front of mine. There were always questions, and that was a good thing, but I didn’t like it when they wanted to ask them before I could present my agenda for the day. Some kids, just like some adults, would drone on forever if you let them.

I marched to my desk, trying to project impatience, but Javier Romero was oblivious. He gave me a mournful look and held out a typed piece of paper. “I still need help with my thesis statement,” he said.

I was pretty sure that very sentence would be carved into Javier’s tombstone in eighty years or so, since he had been unable to advance beyond the thesis for the last four weeks.

“Okay, Javier. I’ll give you some time at the end of class, not at the beginning,” I said, pointing to his desk. He sighed and slumped away; he was replaced in line by Rosalyn. She said, in a low voice, “Ms. Thurber, I wanted to talk about our journals.”

“No extensions on that due date, Rosalyn,” I said.

“No, no. It’s just — I know that your last year’s class kept them, too, and a lot of the kids never picked them up. I wondered if you still have Jessica’s?”

This had never dawned on me; it was true, though, that senior journals were often never retrieved because the students didn’t care enough to come and get them.

“I’m not really sure, Rosalyn. Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering if I could have it. You know, if it’s still there. I know what it looks like. It’s a pink notebook with little pink kittens on it.”

This seemed odd to me. “I’m not sure. I suppose if it is I would have to offer it to her parents.”

Rosalyn said nothing, but I could see that she didn’t like this idea. “Well, maybe just let me know,” she said. Her eyes were looking at the file cabinet where I kept a lot of student assignments.

“I’ll talk to you about this another day,” I said.

“Okay.”

Reluctantly she went back to her seat and we listened to the morning announcements. I felt somehow vulnerable, not only because of the unspoken secrets of every person in the room, but because of my awareness of twenty pairs of eyes that looked at me with what somehow seemed like suspicion.

When the announcements ended and we did our pledge of allegiance (with varying levels of patriotism), Ann Walters appeared in the door with Danny. I glanced at the class and sensed that they were glad to see him. He wasn’t going to be an outcast, as Ann had feared. “Come on in, Danny,” I said. He stepped forward and I hugged him, a gesture which he accepted stiffly. Still, it was my instinct that he needed one — I didn’t dole them out that often.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, and many of the young people said the same as Danny moved down the first aisle to his desk.

“Thanks,” he murmured. He set down his books carefully and then seemed to be aligning them on his desk, his blond hair falling almost over his eyes, which were cast down. Message: I don’t want attention.

“Okay, class, let’s get going. First: vocabulary.”

Despite their groans I took them through twenty new words, offering up examples in a spritely and, I hoped, interesting way. I fielded a few questions about the words, then told the class to take out
Crime and Punishment
. I glanced over my lecture notes and realized, with horror, that everything I would have to say had a potential double meaning for the boy seated in the second row — the boy who had not only suffered the death of his love, but who was considered a suspect in her strangulation.

I took a deep breath. Where was Ann Walters now? She had moved silently back into the hall when Danny had made his entrance. “Okay, readers. We need to talk about the murder.”

Some heads shot up; I saw them from the corner of my eye, but then they realized, it seemed, that I was confronted with a distinct problem. “Danny,” I said, “if any of this makes you, uh— uncomfortable — you can go down to Ms. Walters. I can catch you up later.”

“No, it’s all right,” he said. “It’s a cool book.”

“Okay. Well, class, I’m interested in hearing how the plan went awry. Here is a man who has plotted out the murder of a woman in what he thinks is meticulous detail — and yet things go wrong almost from the start. What are some of those things?”

A hand went up. “He overslept.”

“Good. What else?”

“He spent, like, a million years sewing that little loop for the axe into his coat, but he never thought about what would happen if someone else was in the room where he wanted to
get
the axe.”

“Good, Chris. A great point.”

Rosalyn said, “I think he’s obsessive-compulsive.”

“Interesting! Why?”

“Because he counts the number of paces from his house to hers. And later he’s counting something else — the wallpaper or something.”

“Excellent! You read this carefully,” I said, shooting a significant glance at a couple of people who had studiously been avoiding my eye and had obviously NOT read sixty pages of a Russian novel the night before. “What about when he reaches the scene of the crime?”

“She almost doesn’t let him in!” yelled Carla Gianni, who was usually quiet. “She tries to shut the door on him!”

“And what, Carla, is her downfall?”

“Huh?”

“What makes her let him in when her instinct is not to do so?”

Carla smiled. “It’s her greed. She wants the pledge he brought, which is just wood wrapped up in something. He told her it was a silver cigarette case.”

“Exactly!” I looked around at the class of twenty-six — they all seemed intent on our conversation, even Danny. “Now let’s talk about Raskolnikov. He thinks he’s extraordinary, superior to the common man, and therefore to the common criminal. What assumption does he make about his own crime?”

Danny raised his hand. “He thinks that he won’t freak out afterward. He thinks because he tells himself he won’t, that means he won’t. And of course he does freak out afterward, so it proves he’s not superior, and it also shows a person can’t kill without breaking down psychologically.”

“Great point, Danny. All of you. I’m so impressed with your thinking today. And the point Danny raises is one to think about: Dostoevsky is suggesting that a person cannot commit murder and then be
authentically
innocent. Their guilt would be evident in their
inauthentic
behavior.”

Carla raised her hand again. “Like that guy on the news who obviously killed his wife, and everyone else is searching for her and he refuses to help, saying she ran off with someone. But that’s not authentic — it’s not what a loving husband would do. Because even if she ran off and hurt his feelings, he would still think of her as his wife and the mother of his children and he would be fearful, and he would want her found. So because he acts that way, laughing in front of the police cameras and stuff — it means he did it. He killed her.” She looked shocked by this even as she said it.

“That’s an interesting application of the theory, and certainly a profound psychological question, isn’t it?” I asked.

I noticed that many of the students found this concept extremely interesting. Danny said, “So any killer that the cops look at — they’re looking for inauthentic behavior too, right? Or some sign that the person is lying.”

I realized uncomfortably that he himself had just been through an interrogation. “I suppose so. I’ll have to look into getting a speaker from the police force to talk to us about this — and maybe we can get Mr. Jonas to discuss it — he has degrees in psychology.”

The class buzzed for a moment with this idea; some of them had Derek as a teacher in their psych elective, and he was already popular. Rosalyn and Chris Angelini had been talking across the aisle, and then she said, “Could you ask him, Ms. Thurber? We’d like to talk about it.”

I nodded, although my schedule for
Crime and Punishment
was pretty tight; it was a 500 page book with endless complexities, and the class was never long enough for our discussions.

“Okay. Let’s get back to the story. As Danny pointed out, Raskolnikov loses his concentration after the crime. What other mistakes were made?”

“He realizes that he left the door open!” someone called.

“He didn’t anticipate being hunted,” said Danny in an odd voice.

“You’re right. He sees himself as the hunter — the cat to Alena’s mouse. But the moment he wields his axe, he becomes the mouse.”

“And the cops are the cat,” said Danny. “And sooner or later, they’ll get him. Right? Does he get caught in the end?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. Danny’s eyes looked moist to me, and some of the students were shifting nervously in their desks. “We’ll keep reading. We have to figure out the point of it all. Give it time, and we’ll see the author’s intention.”

We moved on to more clarifications of plot, but I tried to steer away from things that would have direct Jessica parallels. When the bell rang I realized I was perspiring.

I sat in my desk chair, spent, and Danny walked up to me, waiting for everyone else to leave. Javier hovered with his thesis, but I asked him to wait in the hall for a moment.

“I’ll write you a pass if you’re late, Javier,” I promised.

“Yes?” I said to Danny after Javier dragged out. I know my voice sounded fearful.

“I just wanted to tell you I didn’t kill Jessica,” he said.

I almost started crying. His face looked worn and tired. “It’s okay, Danny.”

“But I really want to know who did, you know? I really want to know. I’m kind of obsessing over it. But this gives me something to think about — the whole authenticity thing. I look for someone who’s not acting right. Someone close to her who is acting weird. And that might give me an idea, right?”

“You need to get some sleep and take some time. Time gives you perspective.” I touched his hand and waited until he looked at me. “Danny? This isn’t your job. Your job is graduating and making your family proud, and making Jessica proud in heaven.”

“So you believe in heaven?” asked Danny with tears in his eyes.

* * *

I helped poor Javier, but I feared that my explanation had, as ever, left him more confused than before. “Do you see what I mean?” I asked with a smile. He smiled back and assured me he did, but his eyes told me he would be back tomorrow with no thesis statement.

Before I left the room I looked for Jessica’s journal — pink with little pink kitties on it. I found it in a cluster of old senior notebooks in the third file cabinet drawer. I pulled it out and flipped it open to see Jessica’s first entry: a response to the first twenty pages of
Waiting for Godot
. “My take on this play is that the author was trying to create an existential atmosphere by having the set, the characters, and the dialogue make very little sense. Well, he succeeded. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s boring.”

Ah yes, that was the Jessica I remembered.

“I have done nothing but in care of thee, of thee my dear one, thee my daughter …”

—Prospero,
The Tempest
, Act I

“I can’t do this anymore,” I said to my lunch table, which today consisted of Josh and Stella Carson, two of my English colleagues, and Ann Walters and Derek Jonas, who had wandered into the little lounge and joined us. There was a “big lounge,” too, but Josh and I, who always had some big idea to discuss — or, admittedly, some little piece of gossip to digest — preferred the intimacy of the little one. No one else was there, aside from Marnie Taylor, who rested in a corner, using the lounge phone to debate nursery wallpaper with her husband. Her free hand rested on her stomach as though it were a table.

“I can’t teach a book about axe murder to kids who are still reeling from Jessica’s.”

“Maybe move on to the next book?” Ann Walters tried.

“
The Stranger?
A book about a murder.”

“What comes after that?”

I laughed. “
The Tempest
. About the man who wants revenge against the brother who tried to kill him.”

“Who picks these?” asked Derek.

“Hey, man — that’s what literature is about. Love and Death. The human condition,” Josh said, pasting on a profound expression for a moment before eating a strawberry. “Want one, anybody? Teddy?” He held a strawberry close to my mouth and my eyes darted toward Derek, who was staring at his napkin.

“No thanks. I don’t like fruit,” I said.

“Suit yourself. I have to go anyway. A certain sophomore miscreant failed to make up his quiz this morning, so now I have to give up half of MY lunch period to give the bugger one last chance. He’d better be there,” Josh said ominously. He waved and left.

Stella Carson leaned toward me. “Is it true Josh isn’t coming back next year?”

I stared at her, shocked. “I’ve heard nothing about that. I would think he would tell me!”

Stella shrugged. She was petite and perfect in her pink linen suit. “I heard it through the grapevine. That he got a job at some public school.”

“Well, I will certainly ask him!” I said, a bit indignantly.

Derek selected another piece of pizza from the plate he and I were sharing. Leftovers from our “date.”

“You and Josh seem to be understood as a pair around here.”

“A pair of jokers,” Ann said lightly.

Stella’s mouth twitched. “If you mean romance, Josh already has a significant other. I think his name is Tim.”

I blushed. Stella wasn’t entirely comfortable with the fact that Josh was gay, which made me uncomfortable. She was normally a liberal person. We all had our quirks, I reflected as I looked at Derek, watched the realization dawn on his face.

“My World Lit class would like you to come and speak to them about the notion of psychology and authenticity,” I said. “Don’t eat that last one. I’m starving.”

He gave me a slow smile. “Okay. And okay.”