Scandalous

Chapter 34

They finished Metamorphosis on a Tuesday.

This was not, strictly speaking, supposed to happen until Thursday — he had scheduled two more sessions for the close reading of the final section and the broader thematic discussion that usually closed out a text, the accumulated conversation that tied the individual threads into something a student could carry forward. He had done this with every novel for eleven years and it generally held.

Second period on Tuesday ran ahead of schedule in the specific way that only happened when a class was genuinely inside a text — when the discussion didn't require management or prompting but simply moved, one contribution pulling the next with the internal logic of people who were actually thinking rather than performing the activity of thought. It had happened maybe four times this semester. Today was one of them.

The question that had opened it was Gregor's silence — not the physical inability to produce human language, but the question of whether he had, by the end, stopped wanting to. A student in the second row had put it plainly: he stops trying to make them understand him. Is that giving up or is that finally understanding something himself? And the room had taken it from there and not stopped for forty minutes.

Nathan had asked two questions in forty minutes. Both times he'd done it only to redirect the momentum slightly, the way you touched a spinning top — not to stop it, just to keep it true.

When the chime rang and the class registered the end with the slightly surprised quality of people surfacing from something, he stood at the front for a moment and felt the specific, quiet satisfaction of a session that had done the thing it was supposed to do.

"We're ahead," he said. "Two sessions ahead, in fact." He looked at the room. "Which means we're moving on."

He went to the board.

He wrote two words.

Giovanni's Room.

"James Baldwin," he said, turning back to face them. "Published 1956. Baldwin was American — born in Harlem, spent much of his adult life in France, which is where this novel is set." He looked at the room with the particular attention of a man choosing how to introduce a book he knows will do something to the people who read it. "It's a short novel. You'll move through it quickly. I want you to resist that."

He set down the chalk.

"The story is narrated by a man named David — an American in Paris in the 1950s. He's engaged to a woman named Hella. He meets a young Italian bartender named Giovanni, and they begin a relationship." He paused. "The novel is about what David does with that. The choices he makes, and what those choices cost — not just him."

The room was quiet in the attentive way.

"Baldwin is doing several things at once in this book," Nathan continued, "which is the mark of a writer who trusts the reader. On the surface it's a love story. Underneath it's a book about the distance between who we are and who we allow ourselves to be in front of other people — and what happens to the people we love when we can't close that distance." He looked at the class. "It's also, because it's Baldwin, a book about guilt. The specific, corrosive kind that doesn't come from doing something wrong. The kind that comes from knowing what you want and being unable to stop wanting it."

He looked at the board for a moment.

"First four chapters for Thursday. Read carefully. He's not wasting a word."

The room moved to put away Metamorphosis and take out notebooks. He moved to his desk. He was aware, without looking at the back left corner, that she had gone still in the specific way she went still when something had landed — the particular quality of her attention sharpening into a focused, inward thing. He had learned to recognize it from across the room.

He looked at his desk.

He picked up his pen.

The staff room at lunch was its own particular ecosystem — the twelve minutes in which the teachers who ate at school rather than leaving for it occupied the same space with the compressed, slightly over-caffeinated energy of people who have three more periods to get through and are refueling. Nathan took his usual spot at the end of the table nearest the window, which was the least social position available and which he had been occupying since his first September at Crestwood.

He had a sandwich. He had coffee. He had the marked set of comprehension responses from third period that he was going to get through today if it was the last thing he did.

Daniel arrived at twelve-seventeen with a plate of whatever the canteen had offered and the particular expression of a man who has information and has identified his audience.

He sat down across from Nathan.

Nathan did not look up from the comprehension responses.

"You heard about Hargrove," Daniel said.

"I heard what Caldwell told us at the meeting," Nathan said. He turned a page.

"There's been a development." Daniel cut into whatever was on his plate. "One of the admin assistants has a contact over there — I'm not going to pretend this is official information, because it isn't. But apparently—" he lowered his voice to the register he used when he was enjoying the delivery of something "—they pulled the phone records."

Nathan turned another page.

"The teacher and the student," Daniel said. "Apparently it started with texts. Completely harmless to begin with — academic stuff, the way these things apparently go. A few calls. Then over a few weeks the calls got longer and then at some point—" he paused for the specific beat of a man who has timed this "—they were sexting."

Nathan set down his pen.

Not with force. Not with drama. He set it down with the careful, deliberate quality of a man making sure the object was placed correctly and then he looked at his coffee cup and felt his jaw tighten in the specific way of someone receiving information through a second layer of meaning.

"Found it all on the records," Daniel continued, fork moving. "Time stamps, everything. You can't delete a phone record. I think people forget that." He shook his head with the mild, untroubled expression of someone for whom this story was interesting rather than proximate. "Laid it all out in sequence. You can watch the whole thing progress, apparently. Harmless to — not harmless."

Nathan looked at his coffee.

He thought about his phone.

He thought about the specific, sequential record that lived on a phone — the messages that arrived with time stamps, the calls that logged their duration. Happy Thanksgiving Mr. Kingston. The response he'd sent with her first name and a question attached. The exchange that had followed. The call that had lasted four hours and twenty-three minutes, logged in both directions, timestamped at twelve-fifty-two in the afternoon on Thanksgiving Day.

He thought about the weeks before that. The texts that had started with paper and ink — I liked your marginalia — and had moved through Goodnight Shae and the phone number offered in a car park at dusk and the pattern of contact that had developed since.

He thought about time stamps.

"The teacher's done," Daniel said, not unkindly. The tone of a man delivering a verdict that was, in his estimation, straightforward. "They'll have him on the records alone before anyone needs to say anything else. Once you've got the progression documented like that—" he picked up his coffee "—it tells the story for you."

Nathan said nothing.

"Most definitely looking at jail time," Daniel said. He said it the way you said something obvious. A conclusion that followed from the evidence without requiring argument. He picked up his fork again. "Which, honestly — you make those choices, you know what you're doing. You can't claim you didn't know what you were building toward."

The staff room moved around them in its ordinary Tuesday lunch configuration. Mrs. Chung was discussing something with Henderson at the far end of the table. Someone's phone rang and was silenced. The particular ambient sound of a room full of people in the middle of their working day.

Nathan looked at the comprehension responses in front of him.

The words did not resolve into meaning in the way they usually did. He was aware of them as marks on paper without being able to make them do anything further.

He thought about you can't claim you didn't know what you were building toward.

He thought about the sequence. Not the way Daniel was describing it — not as a prosecution exhibit, not with the cold light of a phone record — but the actual sequence as he had lived it. September, the first week. The quality of her attention in the back left corner of Room 214. The way she had stood up with his book in her hands. The evening in the classroom when he had not thought about the door until afterward. The paper with his number. Goodnight Shae. October. The grocery store. The dance. November. The bookshop. The staff meeting where he had sat in an auditorium and heard the rules read aloud and conducted his own private audit and arrived at not yet. Thanksgiving. Four hours and twenty-three minutes. Time stamped.

He thought about I have not done anything wrong.

He thought about what a phone record looked like from the outside.

He thought about you can watch the whole thing progress.

"Nathan."

He looked up.

Daniel was looking at him with the mild curiosity of a man who has noticed his lunch companion has been somewhere else for thirty seconds. "You alright?"

"Fine," Nathan said.

He picked up his pen. He looked at the comprehension response in front of him and made himself read the first line and process it and write a mark in the margin. Then the next line. Then the line after that.

Daniel went back to his lunch and the conversation drifted to the department meeting on Thursday and whether Caldwell was going to extend the marking deadline for the winter assessments, and Nathan sat at the end of the table nearest the window and participated with the correct percentage of himself while the rest of him sat with the specific, quiet gravity of a man who has just heard his own situation described from the outside.

It tells the story for you.

He turned the page.

He did not look at his phone.

He finished his coffee and gathered his papers and returned to Room 214 with twelve minutes before third period, and he sat at his desk and looked at the window and thought about the difference between what was true and what a time-stamped phone record made legible to a person reading it without context.

He thought about you can't claim you didn't know what you were building toward.

He thought about this for a long time.

Then third period arrived, and he stood up, and he taught.