The Lesson (3 page)

—Dreams, she said, are easily explained by stupid people. They are easily dismissed. They are meaningless. Nothing can be based on them—no predictions, no hopes. No one has any dreams that have anything to do particularly with him or her. A dream is simply images, as though one were traveling aimlessly by car not on a street but through a series of rooms, and one sees things, looking there out the window. But they are useless and one shouldn't pay attention.

When Stan looked like he wanted to object, she continued.

—At least, this is one view. Another view is that dreams may be explained easily (again, easily) with the use of certain books. This group of people would say that a dictionary of some sort (made by some truly brilliant person) will give you exact definitions for anything you might encounter in the dream world. Through the use of a book of this sort, you can tell what your dream means, and what its significance is in your life. There are other books that will tell you that dreams are the way that higher beings communicate with lower beings, and in so doing, give instructions about how life is to be led.

She paused.

—Of course, I don't agree with any of that. Do you?

Stan explained a dream to her that he had had. It took a while. When he had done, she told it back to him.

—So, she said, you were drawing for your father. He gave you paper and a pencil and told you to draw a wire. You drew a line and he said, that is a line. I want you to draw me a wire. So, you drew a line between two buildings, and drew the buildings, and then you drew someone with an umbrella about to step onto it. He took the paper and crushed it, and you felt terrified that this would make the person fall. Then, in the dream, the person fell, and you were falling, and your father was speaking to your mother, you could hear his voice. He was saying,
before he was born…
, but you couldn't make out anything after that.

—That's right, said Stan.

—Was it frightening?

—Only that the person with the umbrella, a young woman. That she would fall. And, my father. He was accusing me of something.

—One thing about dreams, said Loring. Is that we know many things, and some of them we learn from life. But others, it seems that we could not have learned them from life. Some of them we see in dreams. Do you know anything that you never learned or saw?

A bus came then and there were many red flags along the top. They were flying in the wind. People were hanging out the windows of the bus. The driver was waving. They were tourists of some kind, and seemed very happy. Stan waved to them.

Loring took his hand and led him up the hill. This time they had to pause several times, for he had grown tired. It was a long way for a boy to walk without stopping, and, of course, she was far too old to carry him.

—He played that opening with black, she said. The opening you played that first day. My husband played it. It is a very sharp opening. That means, sharp, means that it is easy for either side to lose. I will show you a game now that he played once, against another man, a great player himself. He used this opening against that man, Hulder, because it was that man's favorite opening, and Hulder has used it repeatedly to crush his opponents. The match was to be until ten victories. No one had found a really good way to stop Hulder with this opening. And so, my husband played this opening against Hulder, and played the very same moves that Hulder had played. Thus, Hulder had to play against his own opening, in a way, had to play black against his own moves as white, and in doing so, he showed Ezra how to neutralize the opening. Of course, Hulder didn't really want to do it, to show him—so he actually made a bad move on purpose, thereby losing the first game. In the second game, Hulder played white and got into complications where he beat my husband. Then in the third game, my husband played white again, and played the opening. Hulder faltered this time in his resolve and played the best defense he could, which was sufficient for a draw. In the third game, then, Hulder had to play something else, because his own preparation in those lines had all been given to my husband! The game would have just ended up a draw. He actually lost that game. And of course, Ezra had used all his time to come up with other variations in other openings, which he sprang in the following games. He won the series 10–4, with 6 draws. Hulder was shattered and never played at that level again.

—Did your husband like playing chess?

—He did.

She showed him the moves of the game, advising him not to play that opening for some years yet, as the ways in which the opponent could go wrong, although ever present, were very difficult to punish unless one knew how.

—But I must know how! You have to teach me.

—I will, she said, I will. But it takes time.

When they had played through all the games of that match on the board by the window, Stan was very tired indeed. He had been tired from the walk, as I told you, and now he was tired from concentrating. He went and lay on the mat.

Loring moved her hands as if to say, you mustn't do that, we aren't done here, but this gesture had no effect on him, and so she went and sat in the chair again.

She made quite a picture, I must say, sitting in that chair. She was a rather severe old woman, with the intelligent desirous eyes of a horse, always flickering, signaling. Yet few could say what they signaled. She sat in the chair with her hands folded and looked like the name of a region on an antiquated map. By this I mean, correct in a way that fits with something one doesn't understand.

At four the mother came and took the child, and carried him out over her shoulder, still sleeping.

—Quite a day, said Mrs. Wiling. His first day of lessons.

—That's so, said Loring.

—Did he do well? Did he learn much?

—It is generally the first talent that really gifted people have.

—What do you mean?

—Learning much from little—that's the talent we must hope your son has. Goodbye.

But she had certain exceptions, or I should say, she had made certain exceptions over the years. The trouble is, as you get older, the people you like die and are not replaced with others, so that it is easily possible to end up with no one at all to talk to, or at least, no one you would want to hear responding to whatever it is you might have ended up saying.

This was the trouble that Loring was in. Aside from the times when a visitor came to town—some old acquaintance from their tournament days—aside from that, it was simply a matter of reading books and sitting in chairs. Of course, walking as well, visiting the cemetery, and looking at things, plants and such, animals here and there—but she tired easily, and so mostly it was about sitting and reading.

The book that she was reading at that time was called
The Miraculous Indifference of the Eleventh Century
. It was about how, for whatever reason, during the eleventh century A.D., there had been several severe bouts of indifference, documented in cultures geographically remote from one another. The meaning of this was unclear, and the historian did himself few favors. Nonetheless, the book was terribly funny, although not meaning to be, and this caused Loring much grief, for when she would begin to laugh, she would be placed back in the room where she was sitting, and the hollow sound of her laugh coming off the wooden ceiling, floor walls, the glass of the windows, it made her feel that she had no one to whom to tell anything, that no matter how much comedy might be found in a passage, it was useless beyond what it might avail her directly. Even should she come upon the most tremendously wonderful thing that had ever been written, she could not say it and have someone useful hear.

Of course, this situation had not come about for lack of trying other options. Do you believe that she did not write letters to him after he was dead? Oh, certainly she did, reams and reams of letters, buried in a box. She wrote him a hundred letters, two hundred letters, a letter a day, and buried them in the ground by his grave. She sat on the grass there and spoke to him. She lay awake in their room and whispered, feeling that somehow whispers travel farther than things said outright.

No proof came that he had heard any of this, that he had read any of the letters. But, of course, neither did there come any proof to the contrary.

She sat at her desk in the evening time, and began to write a letter. It was not the first letter she had written concerning the boy.

e.

He came again, this time for the lesson. I watched him very carefully, and put your sweater in the way, on the chair where he was to sit. When he moved it, he put it on the table on the far side of the room—which is what you always did. I don't know what that means. Is that just the place where sweaters should go? Or something more?

I asked him to say your name and he said it the way it used to be said—not the way it is pronounced now. But did I perhaps say it that way unwittingly? I can't remember.

Why am I even writing to you? If it is true, and something of you is in him, then is any part of you elsewhere, receiving such missives as these?

There is no chance of it, I suppose. Then what is this writing? What is it? Is it less purposeless than some other fragile thing?

I feel there can be no good out of it—out of any of it. But then I feel something else, a certainty that through his eyes you will look at me, and see me, and that I will see you the same. Such a moment—for that I would give the rest, all the rest, all these useless rags, buildings, people.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn't what is or what was.

For me that what-is-to-come, well, you know, you know what it is, my love. I am reaching out towards you in your narrow space.

yours,

l.

When she had finished writing the letter, she looked at it carefully. She held it in her hands, looking at it carefully, and then she tore it up. The torn-up pieces she left there on the table, as if they might do something for one another in such a state.

Just at the strike of nine, the boy arrived. Loring had left a note on the door. It said,

LET YOURSELF IN. I AM UPSTAIRS.

The boy came into the house. Two shoes faced him in the narrow passage, two shoes in the very middle. As many things seem hostile when arrayed in strangeness, so one might imagine the dark hall of this house with its shuttered windows to frighten him, but he was not frightened. He stepped over the shoes, went straight through and found the stair and climbed. These were steep steps, of the sort in old colonial houses. He was by no means assured of an easy time, and stopped halfway up at a little window carved in a half-moon. The glass was warped and the street below was bent into an impossible shape. He sat looking through for quite a while until the voice came from above.

—Stan?

—Here on the stairs.

He went up the rest of the way.

Loring was sitting in a room off to the left. At the top of the stairs were three rooms. One was the bedroom, one a workroom, and the third, well, she was in it. That room was for nothing at all, and never had been. Loring and Ezra had never liked the room. There was something wrong with it, but they couldn't say what. They would occasionally put things in there because they felt something would happen. The things that happened were never anything that one could really know about.

The room was at this time empty save for one chair, and a little table by the window. On that table, sat a box. It was shut, closed with a tiny clasp over which wax had been dripped. The wax was unbroken.

—Hello, said the boy.

Loring looked at him and thought, If you are listening, when I ask you this question, you will respond to something else I have said.

—Did you finish the problems I left you with?

—Is this the room you were talking about?

—What did I say about it? asked Loring.

—You said that it was almost like the room was in this house and in another house, and that was why it didn't really work to put anything in it, unless you felt like the things in it would also be elsewhere.

It took him a little while to say this and he got it wrong the first time, but the second time said it straight through with a very serious expression.

—That's right, she said. That's what I said.

—But why would you sit in a room like that?

She didn't reply.

—Anyway, I can't feel it. It just feels like a room.

—The…

—What is in that box?

It was an ordinary question, and of course, one that troubled Loring to no end. In all the time since her husband's death, she had puzzled over nothing so much as this. Of course, the permission to open the box had long been received. That it could have been opened at three months is clear. Three months had been the agreement for quite a while before he had suddenly changed it, and in some ways it would make perfect sense to honor the previous agreement. The year's permission was also long gone, for had not one year, then two, three, four, five, all come and gone? Why then was the box still there, still unopened?

The truth was this: as long as Loring did not open the box, some mystery still remained, some hint of life, a secret kept—an act still continuing in its efficacy, on the part of Ezra. And so in preserving the shut box, she preserved his living nature, and whenever she pondered opening it, she played with his living will that it be opened, and with what his expectations had been for what she would feel upon opening it. Now necessarily, in order for this to work at all, she had to actually permit herself the possibility of breaking, and opening the box. And so it was, that once a month, she would sit with the box and decide whether or not the time had come to open it, and each time she did so, she did not know whether or not it would be opened.

Such days were special, and she would dress especially for them. She would close all the shutters of all the windows, and turn all the photographs and portraits to face the wall, even Ezra's photograph in the parlor.

She would take off her shoes and put them by the door, pointing out. And then she would walk backwards up the stairs, and into the little room, and there sit in the chair and observe the box. She would do this all at the hour of dawn, leaving the whole day to sit and think.

Of course, in this case, it happened that the boy arrived, and she had seen that he would come and left the note that he might enter on his own. And now there he was, standing in the doorway, and his mind too was on the box.

—You may pick it up, she said. But be careful.

He went to the table, to the top of which he could barely reach. She reached out and got hold of him under his armpits, and with great effort tried to lift him up. She got him partway up but then dropped him back down and sank herself to a knee and then sat flat on the floor.

—Are you all right?

—I'm, I'll be fine. Just, give me a second.

She managed to find her feet and went out of the room. In a few minutes she returned with a stool. He clambered up onto the stool, and from there to the table, where he sat on the edge. Then he took ahold of the box and moved it towards himself.

This in itself was a rather tumultuous event for Loring, as the box had not been moved since Ezra placed it there. She never permitted herself to touch it, not wanting to know what it weighed, or whether the contents shook.

Stan leaned over the box and examined it closely. It was made of dark ebon wood, and hardly any grain was perceptible. It was about the size of a hat box—large, in fact. Almost anything could be in there.

He looked at Loring. She was making a gesture that she often made, pressing the tips of her fingers in turn with the thumb and forefinger of the opposite hand.

—Can we open it?

Loring shook her head. The boy sitting there, holding the box, hovering over it; with his corduroy pants and clean white shirt, his small scrunched face and unkempt hair, he bent and swelled in her mind's eye. It was very hard to look at him, and she imagined so much what he might be, or had been. His voice was not entirely the voice of a child. But was this just because he was a prodigy? But why was he a prodigy, and why had he come to her?

—What do you know about my husband? she asked.

Tilting his face like the moon-shaped window on the stair, the boy earnestly answered,

—He lived in this house. He was better at chess than you or I. He would stand for long periods of time; he preferred not to sit. I don't believe that would be very comfortable. Do you?

—It is not comfortable, said Loring. What else do you know?

—He gave you this box?

—I didn't tell you that.

—What is this? Did you put it here?

—Wax. No, I didn't.

—Hmmmm. Did someone else then, not him, give you the box? Do you think he would have been a good teacher to have, if he was the one here, and you had died?

—No, said Loring. He wasn't really a good teacher at all. He never had any idea why he did things. Let's go downstairs.