Scandalous

Chapter 29

Monday arrived with the particular, neutral quality of a day that had decided nothing about itself yet.

Nathan drove to Crestwood in the early grey of a November morning and parked and walked through the main building with the composed, unhurried quality he had spent two months perfecting — the bearing of a teacher who knows where he is going and why and has no particular interior weather worth noting. He had performed this walk approximately forty times since September. He was, by now, very good at it.

He unlocked Room 214. He set up his desk. He arranged the day's materials with the focused, methodical attention of a man who is thinking about what he is doing and not about anything else, which was the intention if not entirely the reality.

Second period filed in with the Monday energy of students who have had a weekend and are operating at partial capacity — the particular, slightly glazed quality of people re-entering routine. He let them settle. He called the register. He stood at the front of the room and began the session with the question he'd chosen over the weekend, which was about Heathcliff's final state of mind and whether Brontë intended the reader to understand it as peace or as exhaustion.

The discussion moved the way Monday discussions moved — more slowly than Tuesday or Wednesday, the gears finding their speed. Several students contributed. The room found its rhythm incrementally.

He did not let his eyes rest in the back left corner for longer than the back left corner warranted.

When she spoke — answering a question he'd directed at the room generally — her voice had the same quality it always had. Clear, unhurried, the thought fully formed before it was offered. He acknowledged it the way he acknowledged contributions from the room, with the professional, even response of a teacher receiving a student's answer, and moved on.

He was aware, with the specific, inconvenient precision of a man who is monitoring himself, that the quality of his attention when she spoke was different from the quality when anyone else did. He was aware of this. He did not have an available solution for it and so he simply continued.

The chime rang. The room cleared with the efficiency of people who have somewhere to be next.

He was at his desk by the time the last student reached the door.

"Miss Madison," he said, without looking up. "Could you stay back a moment."

The classroom had the particular quality of an after-class room — the specific quiet of a space that has just held twenty-four people and is now adjusting to two. She stood at the front with her bag over one shoulder, composed and waiting, the expression of someone prepared for whatever this was going to be.

He set down his pen.

"I wanted to apologise," he said, "for Saturday."

A pause. She looked at him. "You don't need to—"

"Maryanne's comment," he said. "About your parents." He held her gaze. "It was thoughtless and I should have — I hadn't told her. That's not an excuse, it's simply what happened, and I'm sorry she said it."

Shae was quiet for a moment. The expression moved through something he couldn't fully name and settled. "It's alright," she said. The same words she'd said in the bookshop, with the same even quality. "She didn't know."

"Nevertheless," he said.

She looked at him. Then she gave the small nod of someone accepting a thing that has been offered properly. "Thank you," she said.

He picked up his pen. He was going to say something professional — enjoy the rest of your morning or some equivalent — and she was going to leave and they were going to be back in the appropriate arrangement of things.

"She doesn't handle criticism well," he said instead.

He heard himself say it.

Shae looked at him with the expression she wore when something had arrived that she was going to be careful about. The slight stillness of it. "She's a writer," she said, after a moment. "It's a particular kind of exposure. It makes sense that she'd be—"

"Protective," he said. "Yes." He looked at his desk. He had said more than he should have, which was becoming a pattern in this room at the end of classes when it was just the two of them and the particular quality of the quiet that came with it. "That's enough of that. Enjoy the rest of your morning, Miss Madison."

She went.

He sat for a moment after she'd gone and looked at the door and thought about the word nevertheless and what it had done in that sentence, and the editorial comment about his wife that had followed it unbidden, and felt the specific quality of a man who has once again said slightly more than the situation warranted.

He picked up his pen and went back to work.

Three weeks passed in the way of weeks that contain the ordinary material of a life — classes, marking, the faculty meeting on the second Tuesday of the month that ran twenty minutes over as they always did, dinner on a Wednesday that he and Maryanne ate without incident, a Saturday spent separately in the way of two people who have arrived at a temporary, functional peace.

The thing between them from the kitchen doorway — who are you trying to convince — had not been revisited. It sat in the house with them the way unresolved things sat in houses, present without being addressed, neither growing nor dissolving. He went about the work of being a husband — the coffee in the mornings, the small domesticities — and she went about the work of her manuscript, and the equilibrium was maintained and he did not examine it closely.

In Room 214, the class moved from the final discussion of Wuthering Heights — which produced, in its last session, a conversation that he would have called the best he'd facilitated all term — into the announcement of the next text, which he'd chosen with more deliberateness than he usually brought to syllabus decisions. Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The question of what it meant to wake up as something your family could no longer recognize and the various directions in which that premise could be taken.

Two weeks into November, on a Thursday, he stood at the front of Room 214 and made the announcement.

"I asked you to start your original work in October," he said. "We're six weeks in. I want a rough draft by the end of next week — not finished, not polished. Whatever you have. Pages, outlines, fragments. I want to see where you are and what you're working with." He looked at the class. "This is not a judgment exercise. It's a progress check. What you give me stays between you and me."

The room received this with varying degrees of the anxiety that mid-process check-ins produced in students who had started and students who had not. He noted both categories without comment.

The papers arrived the following Friday. He collected them at the end of second period — a stack of varying thickness, the spread of student engagement rendered in page count. He put them in his bag, taught the rest of the day, drove home, ate dinner, and by half past nine was in his study with the stack on the desk and a red pen and the glass of whisky that accompanied late marking.

He started at the top.

He worked through them with the professional thoroughness he brought to all student work — reading properly, marking properly, noting the things that were working and the things that weren't with the specificity of a man who believed that feedback was only useful when it was specific. Some were genuinely promising. A few were competent but cautious — the work of students playing it safe, staying in known territory, producing something that would not fail without having any ambition to succeed. Several had not started in any meaningful sense and had submitted outlines or premises that were ideas rather than work.

He marked each one. He placed them in the done pile.

It was past midnight when he reached hers.

He hadn't organised the stack in any particular order — he'd simply worked from top to bottom and she happened to be near the bottom, which was chance rather than anything else, and he noted this with the awareness of a man who has started noticing when he is noting things.

He picked up her pages.

She had submitted eleven. He had asked for a rough draft — whatever they had — and she had given him eleven pages of something that was not rough in any sense he could apply to the other submissions. He could see the edit marks in the margins in blue pen, the characteristic annotation of a writer who doesn't stop working on a thing simply because it's due — revisions noted next to original lines, questions to herself in pencil at the edges, the record of a mind that had been arguing with the text from the inside.

He settled back in his chair. He read.

The story was about a girl in a library.

She came every week, this girl — the character had no name yet, a deliberate choice he noted — and she came with the specific, private purpose of a person who has always known how to be alone in a room and has never particularly required it to be otherwise. The library was her space in the way certain places become a person's space — not through ownership but through frequency and intention, the accumulated weight of hours spent there.

The man came on Tuesdays.

He arrived with a stack of books he worked through at the far table with the focused, unhurried attention of someone for whom reading was thinking made external. The girl noticed him first the way you notice things you aren't trying to notice — peripherally, incrementally, without the single moment of recognition that stories tended to impose on the experience. It was over weeks. Small observations that accumulated.

The way he moved through the stacks — the unhurried ease of someone entirely comfortable in their own body and in this particular room.

The way he read — with a pen, in the margins, the running conversation of a person who considered the book a two-way exchange rather than a monologue.

The quality of his attention when something in the text landed — the almost imperceptible pause, the stillness, before he continued.

She wrote: She had, before this, believed that she was the kind of person who did not require company. She had tested this proposition across enough years and enough rooms to consider it established. What she had not understood — what the Tuesday man complicated — was that the proposition had been established against a baseline of available company that had never included anyone who read the way he did, or thought the way he appeared to think, or was the specific kind of quiet that his quiet was. She had not known, until now, that there was a kind of quiet that was different from her own and that she found, against her expectations, that she wanted to be in proximity to it.

Nathan stopped.

He looked at the page.

He read the paragraph again.

He was aware of something happening in his chest — not the flutter, not the inconvenient physical response he had been managing and suppressing and refusing to name. Something quieter than that. The specific, settled feeling of a person who has read something true, which was the feeling great writing produced and which he had been experiencing throughout these eleven pages with increasing frequency and increasing—

He set the pages down.

He looked at the window. The garden dark. Past midnight. The house quiet, Maryanne asleep down the hall.

He picked the pages back up.

He read the scene where the girl and the man spoke for the first time — the book they'd both reached for, the mild comedy of it, the conversation that had moved without effort for longer than either of them had planned. She'd written the girl's experience of the conversation with a precision that was almost uncomfortable to read — the specific quality of being met, the relief of it, the way it arrived as a surprise because she had not known she'd been waiting for it.

She wrote: It was not that she had been unhappy, before. She had been complete. She had the books and the quiet and the space that was hers and she had not experienced the completeness as lacking anything. But now she sat across from someone who could follow her wherever the thought went and who pushed back when pushing back was warranted and who was interested in whether she was right rather than simply in whether she was interesting, and she understood — with the particular, inconvenient clarity of something understood too late to be useful — that complete and sufficient were not the same thing.

Nathan sat with that sentence for a long time.

He looked at the stack of papers on his desk — the other twenty-three, marked and done, in their pile. He looked at the eleven pages in his hands.

She was, he thought, with the quiet certainty of a man who had been reading and teaching literature for long enough to know, genuinely extraordinary. Not in the way that teachers described students when they were being encouraging. In the way that the word meant — the specific, rare quality of a writer who was already working from instinct rather than training, who was finding the true thing and trusting it, who had not yet learned the habits that would make them safer and consequently blander.

He thought about the scene in the cafeteria, the first week of term. He thought about Where The Winds Take Us in her hands in the back left corner of Room 214, and the way she had stood up and dismantled it in four minutes. He thought about six weeks of watching her think.

He thought: she is seventeen years old and she is writing something true.

He picked up the red pen.

He began to mark. He did it properly — with the same specificity he'd given every other paper, the same professional engagement. He noted what was working and why. He pushed back on two word choices in the third scene that were almost right but not quite, and wrote the question that would help her find the better ones herself rather than simply telling her what they were. He noted the structural decision she'd made in scene five — the withholding of the man's name, the deliberate choice to leave him as he throughout — and wrote this is working, don't change it in the margin.

He got to the last page.

At the bottom she had written, in the annotation style of her margin notes rather than the story's voice: This is still early. I'm not sure yet where it goes.

He looked at this for a moment.

He wrote, beneath it, in his own hand: Follow it. Don't decide in advance.

He put the pen down. He set her pages on top of the marked pile and sat in the quiet of the study and looked at nothing in particular for a while.

He thought about the specific quality of what he'd just read. The completeness and the sufficient and the insufficiency of the gap between them. He thought about the story's girl, unnamed and careful, noticing things in a library on Tuesdays.

He did not write anything else.

He turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark for a moment before getting up.