Читать книгу The Inventors - Peter Selgin - Страница 23

V.

What You Knew

Bethel, Connecticut, 1970

AS SOON AS YOU ENTERED THE NEW TEACHER’S CLASSROOM you knew things would be different. Instead of their usual regimental rows, the desks were arranged in a large oval, with the teacher’s metal and Formica desk shoved into a corner like a miscreant. The room’s cinderblock walls were covered with canvas or corkboard and festooned with images of authors, scientists, poets, world reformers, and leaders: Lincoln, Einstein, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, Socrates. There were reproduced paintings by Picasso, Klee, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Vermeer, poems by Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, “Desiderata” (“Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence”) Kipling’s “If” (“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”), and other poems and posters:

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

“War is unhealthy for children and other living things.”

“Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?”

From a phonograph soft strains of classical music emanated.

The one standard item in the room, the chalkboard, had been transformed into an object of curiosity by the words scrawled in large letters across it:

EVERYTHING YOU’VE LEARNED IS WRONG

Under this in smaller letters the new teacher had written:

The statement on the handout is true.

As you took your seat the teacher made his way around the circle of desks, handing out mimeographed sheets still warm and reeking of chemicals from the spirit duplicator. The sheets were folded in half. Unfolding yours you read:

The statement on the blackboard is false.

From the bottom of the sheet the teacher had you tear off a thin strip of paper, then asked how many sides the strip of paper had.

Several students volunteered: Two!

If I told you I can make one side of that strip of paper you’re holding disappear, the teacher asked, what would you say to that?

Manifestations of dissent. Impossible! No way! It can’t be done!

Having borrowed a strip of paper from Mary Beth Lumpkin, the teacher twisted it and curved it into a loop. With a piece of Scotch tape from the dispenser on his desk he taped the two ends of the loop together.

He handed the result back to Mary Beth.

Please draw a line down the middle of both sides, he instructed her.

Mary Beth Lumpkin drew one line. There was no other side.

Question your assumptions, said the teacher.

THE NEW TEACHER was energetic and intense. He moved around the classroom like a tennis player covering his end of the court. He liked to challenge and provoke, encouraged discussion, honored dissent and debate. He taught you to question authority, abhor clichés, spurn stereotypes, shun received wisdom, resist jargon and sentimentality.

No teacher worked harder. He arrived at the school at dawn and would stay often until dark. When the school administration refused to pay for a textbook he wanted he spent hours at a portable typewriter in his cottage replicating the book’s pages one by one onto ditto masters, complete with illustrations that he reproduced freehand.

He did his best to downplay the distinction between teacher and student, to blur if not erase altogether what he saw as an artificial and unhealthy boundary, to treat his pupils as equals, or anyway not as inferiors, to align himself with them, to make them feel that he was on their side. He insisted that his students call him by his first name and not Mr. ———— (“That’s my father’s name”).

In the middle school cafeteria one day, having forsaken the sanctuary of the teacher’s lunchroom, the new teacher took his food tray and headed toward the table where you and some other students in his special class sat. Seeing him coming your way you decided to play a practical joke on him. As soon as he sat down (having said, “May I join you?”) you all simultaneously picked up your lunch trays and left the table, or pretended to, then you turned around and came back. As you did, without meeting any of your eyes and with a grim look on his face, the teacher stood up and left.

Only then did it dawn on you that you’d hurt the teacher’s feelings. It had never occurred to you before then that you could do that to a teacher.

The joke was your idea. Later that same afternoon, you apologized.

The teacher was gathering papers at his desk, putting them into his briefcase.

It was meant to be funny, you said. I guess it wasn’t.

The teacher said nothing. He kept putting away papers, not looking at you.

Anyway, I’m sorry, you said.

Friends don’t apologize, said the teacher.

You were officially his friend.

BEFORE YOU MET the new teacher you’d been an average thirteen-year-old boy, with an average thirteen-year-old’s interests and ignorances, a child’s innocently circumscribed view of the world.

You had absolutely no interest in worldly affairs or events. You watched the news on television, anyway you saw and heard it while your parents watched, the avuncular anchorman’s voice reducing wars, assassinations, droughts, earthquakes, and other calamities to a murmur as monotonously assuring as that of the ceiling fan thrumming away through hot nights at the top of the stairs.

You loved ships, especially ocean liners with many funnels, old cars with running boards, and warplanes, Spitfires and Spads, sea anemones, and starfish. You were lousy at sports. You preferred to draw – especially ocean liners, especially the Titanic, which sank the year your father was born. You would spend hours alone at the dining or kitchen table with your box of colored pencils rendering the doomed ship’s porthole-pocked counter stern rearing up against the starry sky, with tiny stick-figure passengers leaping like fleas from its decks.

You assumed that you were smart. Your papa was a genius, after all. Yet at times you had to wonder. Your school grades were good, but then they were skewed by your habit of adorning book reports and other papers with free-hand maps and drawings of paramecium that charmed your teachers into awarding you A’s. On Standardized Aptitude Tests where your draftsmanship was confined to filling in ovals with a sharpened Number 2 pencil, you fared less well. Your verbal and your math scores were abysmal. No wonder, since you guessed at every answer, filling in those little ovals like they were portholes on the Titanic.

One day – when you were old enough – you’d wear Old Spice (for the clipper ship on the bottle), smoke Viceroy Cigarettes (you liked the package design), and drink Cutty Sark whisky (yellow label, clipper ship).

AT THIRTEEN YOU were already vain. You couldn’t get enough of mirrors. You never quite saw what you were looking for. Yet there were hints, intimations. What you were looking for was me, your future self, a self you tried to will into premature existence by staring with grim determination at your reflection.

You’d be famous someday, the mirrors told you. A famous artist, or movie star, or a designer of ocean liners with five, six, a dozen funnels. The mirrors supported your conviction that you were special, one that, until the teacher invited you into his cottage, the rest of the world for some reason stubbornly refused to honor.

Your looks were a work in progress, the mouth and jawline still soft, the eyebrows insubstantial, your lips a tender bow of flesh. Someday (you promised your reflection in the mirror) you would have a chiseled jaw and steely, squinty eyes like James West of The Wild, Wild West, a popular James Bond/Western TV show in which Secret Service Agent West and his trusty sidekick Artemus Gordon toured the country in their private railroad car, averting the dastardly deeds of a colorful array of diabolical villains exemplified by Dr. Miguelito Loveless, a dwarf bent on avenging his smallness by conquering the world. Jim West wore skintight brocade vests and bolero jackets with retractable derringers, exploding buttons, and hidden daggers, and would dispatch a half-dozen bad guys at once with a medley of fists, kicks, and karate chops.

You were less mature than others your age. Your friend Christopher was much more mature than you. He was always helping people, Christopher, especially old ladies like Clara, his neighbor across the street, shoveling her sidewalk and bringing her string bean casseroles that his mother baked. Unlike you and your brother, Christopher was a Cub Scout. You’d see him in his blue uniform edged with yellow piping and festooned with badges and medals. He went to church every Sunday, made his bed, and picked up after litterbugs.

On the table in his waiting room Dr. Randolph, your pediatrician, kept old issues of a magazine for children called Highlights that featured a cartoon strip entitled Goofus & Gallant. It contrasted the behaviors of its eponymous duo, showing each responding to similar situations, with Gallant exemplifying kindness and generosity and Goofus being selfish and irresponsible. Goofus takes the last apple. Gallant shares his orange … Gallant was a pussy; Goofus was a dick. You were Goofus.

THOUGH FOR YEARS you’d been hearing whispers and rumors about it, you’d only recently discovered sex for yourself. You kept a so-called “girlie” magazine, the kind dignified by the phrase artist’s models and packed with black-and-white photographs of naked, large-breasted women gazing into the camera lens, rolled up in a tube and hidden in the crags of a stone wall in the woods behind your home. When the mood struck, you’d go up there and – with some difficulty, since you wouldn’t always recall where you last hid it – find the magazine, a little worse for wear than last time, its pages stuck together with dampness and mold so you had to peel them gingerly apart to get at your favorite photograph, the full-page one of the dark-haired lady making a “come-hither” gesture with her right hand while running her tongue over her lips. You’d convey the magazine to the nearest shady patch of moss (made for the purpose, so it seemed) and stand there, all alone in the woods with your dungarees down around your ankles and dappled sunlight filtered through the overhead branches. As you held the magazine with one hand and your dick in the other with the thrust of rushing rivers all the dark splendid forces of nature converged, the primitive mysterious forces of life: they were at your command, merging, mounting, flaring, drawing everything around you – trees and rocks, moss and lichen, ferns, insects, birds, air – into a vortex that spread outward, absorbing the woods and hills, the neighborhood, the town, streets, buildings, houses, hat factories, churches … spreading its whirlpool arms wide to embrace the Milky Way and all of the other galaxies, the whole universe, everything sucked into a churning maelstrom as you stood with your head thrown back and your breath catching in your throat holding back the urge to scream. Then, before you knew it, it was over, the wave crested, its energy expended, its remnant force backing off, until nothing remained but you standing alone there in the woods on the side of the hill with your pants down around your ankles, the universe a wad of limp flesh in your tired, wet hand.

Afterward you’d hike to the top of the hill and, as fast as you could, run down it through the woods, leaping gazelle-like over rocks and tree trunks, all the way back to the house, your feet barely touching the ground. Except for in your dreams this was as close as you’d come to flying. By some miracle you didn’t break your neck.

YOU WERE AS seductive as you were easily seduced, especially by the surfaces of things. Certain colors and textures you found irresistible. Anything vermilion, golden-yellow, or striped. Your superficial fascinations made it hard for you to grasp things on a deeper, more intellectual level. You cultivated these superficial captivations, turning them into drawings, charming others with them as you had been charmed. The moment you presented Mrs. Decker, your kindergarten teacher, with a drawing of the Queen Elizabeth or the Empire State Building, and she gave you a kiss, you learned the value not only of art, but of seduction.

You were vain, selfish, cunning, impudent, brash, sullen, sneaky, earnest, charming, naïve, lazy, impatient, sweet, sarcastic, and shy. You were not yet intense, obsessive, depressive, nostalgic, melancholy, regretful, arrogant, or an insomniac.

You were an invention in progress.

* * *

MOST OF WHAT YOU LEARNED FROM THE NEW TEACHER he taught you outside of the classroom, during your visits and your walks together. There were the things that you talked about, big things: books, music, science, politics, education, art. Never anything petty or humdrum. Even when you spoke of ordinary things, discussing them with the teacher made them seem extraordinary. Though the teacher’s subject was English, like your father, he knew a little about everything. For sure he knew much more than you did.

Again, you would not remember the details of your discussions. The details didn’t matter. What mattered were the quality of the exchanges themselves, the atmosphere of reverent silence imbued with the smoky smell of Chinese tea and the sounds of burning wood snapping in the stove, these along with the gestures and facial expressions of the teacher, which must have persuaded you as much or more than his ideas.

For weren’t you so engrossed by the teacher that you’d have been held spellbound by anything he said? Had he not become for you a sort of an oracle, a fount of wisdom, one so ornately beautiful you’d have drunk from its waters even knowing that they were bitter or polluted or poisoned? In the end, what he said mattered much less than his having said it. And what mattered even more was how, when not speaking, the teacher listened to you. It was his listening after all that held you in such thrall. To every word of his listening you clung for dear life.

And though your genius papa knew even more than the teacher did, the teacher was easier to talk to and with. He was much more tolerant of your ignorance.

Then there were the things that you didn’t talk about, the knowledge, wisdom, and insights that you absorbed from the teacher as if through osmosis while sitting or walking together in silence. Looking back, it would seem to you that you’d learned as much from those silences as from your talks. That two people could exist in a state of mutual contented silence was a revelation to you.

THANKS TO THE new teacher you developed the habit of reading. Before you hadn’t been that well read. In fact you hardly read at all. With their hundreds of pages tightly packed with words, books intimidated you. It seemed impossible if not absurd to you that anyone could read – let alone write – a whole book.

For being so intimidated by books you blamed your parents, who never read to you. Your mother couldn’t; her English wasn’t good enough. As for your father, he couldn’t be bothered. Anyway he disliked books in English, preferring those in other languages, especially German. They lined the shelves of the bookcase your father kept in the back room of the Building, the one with the trundle bed.

Thanks mainly to the foreign books on those shelves, you had come to think of all books as repositories of cunningly encrypted code, and concluded that they all, without exception, were incomprehensible.

This may explain why, seeing all those books jammed into the jerry-rigged shelves of the teacher’s cottage, you experienced something like what a small renegade republic must feel when confronted by the collective armies of an axis of powerful nations, their batteries loaded and trained upon your woeful ignorance. You couldn’t decide whether to surrender or run. Instead, you asked the teacher if you could borrow one of his books.

Help yourself, the teacher said. Only remember: when somebody lends you a book they’re letting you borrow a piece of their soul. Please be sure to return it.

You chose a slim paperback. With its yellow text on a lush green background – a splash of sunlight on moss – the cover appealed to you. The book’s opening paragraph struck a decidedly non-threatening note:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was this moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…

THE WALLS OF the bedroom where you slept with your brother (twin brothers in twin twin beds) were painted chalky blue. On one wall was a painting your mother had done of a rabbit, on another a similar painting by her of a donkey. The curtains were a deeper blue than the walls, printed with steamship luggage tags and other tokens of travel to foreign destinations: Reno, Cannes, Lido, Waikiki, Amsterdam, St. Moritz, Paris.… Until you were ten years old, when your mother took you and your brother to Italy, those curtains did all of your traveling for you, stirred by the winds of the ceiling fan at the top of the stairs over the linen closet.

To the sound of the fan thrumming away through hot summer nights you conjured a mythical creature – part eagle, part lion, part dragon – living behind its folding louvers. The fan was controlled by a timer switch your father rigged up with a pulley for a dial, tucked under towels in the linen closet. That the switch was strictly off-limits didn’t stop you from tiptoeing to the linen closet in the middle of the night in your pajamas and giving the pulley a solid twist so the blue curtains would billow and the fan would thrum all night long, obscuring the rasps of crickets there to tell you how very hot and muggy it was.

That muggy September night, curled up in your bed with the lamp glowing and the blue curtains billowing and the ceiling fan thrumming, you read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or tried to. Within three pages your eyes went bleary. The paragraphs turned into rectangular swarms of gnats. Before long a raft like the Kon-Tiki arrived to float you and your illiterate dreams downstream to the Land of Nod.

Subsequent books met with similar results, with you asleep within three pages.

Over time, though, the word swarms flew in orderly fashion into your brain, which made sense out of them. Words formed sentences, sentences melded into meaning, and ideas, images, characters and events sprouted from the pages like vegetables in a garden. Thus the reader in you was born.

ONE OF THE books you borrowed from the teacher’s shelf was a novel by Hermann Hesse called Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game. Set in the twenty-fifth century, the story centers on an austere order of secular scholars who, while running a boarding school for boys, engage in a draconian intellectual game whose rules are deliberately obscure and whose devotees live in a segregated community in the province of Castalia known as Waldzell.

Joseph Knecht, the main character, is the order’s most distinguished member, the most accomplished player of the game. Convinced that Castalia has become an ivory tower cut off from the problems of those who live beyond its hermetic borders, Knecht resigns his post as Magister Ludi and renounces his cloistered existence to tutor a boy named Tito, the son of a friend. Days into his new vocation, while swimming with Tito, Knecht drowns in a mountain lake.

The name Castalia, you learned, comes from Greek mythology. It’s the name of the nymph Apollo transformed into the fountain at the base of Mount Parnassos at Delphi. According to the myth, anyone who drank from the fountain or listened to the music of its flowing waters would be transformed into a poet.

The teacher’s carriage house was your Castalia. The chessboard and its pieces were your Glass Bead Game. The teacher was Magister Ludi, Master of the Game. And you were Tito, his tutee, the dynamic and strong-willed boy.