Scandalous

Chapter 35

Friday arrived with the particular quality of a Friday in December — the end of a week that had carried more interior weather than it had shown on the surface, moving into the cold, clear light of a California winter morning that looked the same as every other morning and was not.

Nathan had spent the second half of the week doing what he had decided to do, which was the thing the argument had always required and which he had been doing with varying degrees of success since September. Distance. The professional register locked back into place with the deliberate, practiced quality of a man who knows where the switch is and has made a decision to use it. He called on her no more than he called on anyone. He returned her marked comprehension response with the same face-down, impersonal distribution he used for all of them. He did not let his eyes rest in the back left corner for the quarter-second longer that constituted — he had decided — an indulgence he was no longer extending to himself.

He had not looked at his phone.

He had looked at it on Wednesday morning and seen no new messages and had felt something he carefully declined to name and had turned the screen face-down on his desk and taught three periods in a row with the focused, single-minded competency of a man who has somewhere to put his attention and is using it.

He had thought about phone records.

He had thought about you can watch the whole thing progress in Daniel's voice, the casual delivery of it, the complete absence of self-consciousness in the man who was unknowingly describing him. He had thought about this on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday morning in the car and he had arrived at Room 214 on Friday with the specific, resolved quality of a man who has made a decision and intends to hold it.

Second period filed in.

She came in third from last. Sat down. Put Giovanni's Room on the desk — the same copy she'd had when he'd first noticed her reading at the back of his class in September, the spine creased, the pages wearing the soft, rounded edges of a book that had been opened many times. Not just four chapters. He noted this without noting it.

He called the register. He began.

"David knows," he said, standing at the front of the room. "From the first line. The novel opens with him already at the end of the story — he's narrating from after everything has happened. Which means Baldwin is making a specific choice: the reader knows from page one that David knows." He looked at the class. "So the question I want you to sit with is this — what does it mean to watch a man who already knows the ending behave as though he doesn't?"

The room considered this.

A student in the third row — Marcus, reliable, thoughtful — offered the first response: "He's lying to himself. It's denial."

"Is it?" Nathan said. "Is a man who knows the ending and continues anyway in denial?"

"He's in denial about being able to stop it," another student offered.

"Better," Nathan said. He looked at the room. "What else?"

A beat. The class doing the particular work of a Friday morning discussion — working a little harder than the end of the week wanted them to.

Then, from the back left corner, without being called on, in the even and unhurried voice that always had the quality of a thought fully formed before it was offered:

"He's not in denial. He knows exactly what he's doing."

Nathan looked at her.

She was looking at the book — the open page, as though the answer were there and she was reading it aloud rather than producing it herself. "David doesn't not-know. He knows. Baldwin makes that clear from the first paragraph — the narration is retrospective, he has the whole picture. The self-deception isn't about facts." She paused. "It's about permission. He's withholding permission from himself. And he keeps doing it while the thing happens anyway, and he calls that not-knowing, but it isn't."

The room was quiet in the attentive way.

Nathan said, from the front of the classroom, in the professional voice: "Go on."

She looked up from the page.

"He performs not-knowing," she said. "For everyone around him. For Hella. For Giovanni, in a different way. He produces the version of himself that doesn't know, that is confused, that is simply — in over his head." A pause. "But the reader has the narration. And the narration is from the man who knows. So you're watching him perform not-knowing in real time while he tells you the truth from the other side of it." She looked at the book again. "I think that's the tragedy. Not what happens to Giovanni. The tragedy is that David knew the whole time and spent all of it pretending otherwise."

The room sat with this for a moment.

Nathan stood at the front of Room 214 and felt her words do what they did — not loudly, not with the dramatic, obvious quality of something aimed — just with the quiet, precise specificity of a true thing landing in a space where it fit exactly. He was aware of his own face with the heightened, monitoring attention of a man who has learned to manage it and was managing it now.

He said: "Does that make him sympathetic or not?"

The room moved. Marcus came back in — sympathy required understanding, and understanding David required accepting that knowing and continuing were not the same failure as not-knowing. Someone else pushed back: knowing and continuing was worse, not better. The debate moved with the natural energy of a room that has found something real to disagree about.

Nathan directed it. He asked the right questions. He waited the right amounts of time. He was, by any observable measure, exactly where he was supposed to be and doing exactly what he was supposed to do.

He did not look at the back left corner more than the back left corner warranted.

He was aware, with the specific, quiet accuracy of a man who has stopped arguing with himself about certain things, that she had not been talking about David.

Or rather — she had been talking about David. Everything she'd said was true and precise and the reading of the novel was correct. Baldwin's retrospective narration was exactly that. And she was also, in the way that great readers talked about books, talking about the thing the book was about rather than the book itself. And the thing the book was about, in this room, in this configuration, was something she understood from the inside.

He knew the whole time and spent all of it pretending otherwise.

Nathan looked at the board.

He wrote a question on it — about Giovanni's interiority versus David's, the asymmetry of knowledge between them — and directed the room toward it and let the discussion carry the rest of the period without requiring much from him.

He thought about permission.

The specific word she'd used. Not denial, not self-deception in the ordinary sense. Permission. The withholding of it from yourself while the thing proceeds regardless. He thought about this with the focused, honest attention of a man who has spent the week looking at phone records in his imagination and has also, in the same week, been aware of every moment she was in the room and the quality of his attention when she was.

He thought: I have been withholding permission.

He thought: That is not the same as not-knowing.

The chime rang.

The room cleared with the Friday efficiency of students who have places to be and a weekend beginning. Nathan was at the board, erasing the last question he'd written, giving himself something to do while the room found its way out.

He heard Claire's voice before he saw her — the particular, slightly amplified quality of Claire speaking about something she was pleased about, which was a distinct register.

"Okay so — birthday brunch first," she was saying, the tone of a woman who has planned this and is presenting it as settled fact. "Then we hit the beach."

"The beach in December."

"The beach in December," Claire confirmed, unbothered. "Because the beefcakes don't take winters off and neither do we."

"I'm not going to the beach to look at men doing pull-ups."

"You don't have to look. You can stare." A pause. "Then we smoke, obviously—"

"That part I'm in favor of."

"—then lunch at that place in Silver Lake you've been pretending you don't want to go to, then more smoke, then horror movie at yours with snacks. Terry's picking us up at seven."

A beat of silence. Nathan kept the eraser moving. He could feel the conversation without looking at it — the specific, comfortable frequency of two people who had been friends long enough to disagree without effort.

"I like the weed parts," Shae said. "I can do without most of the rest."

Claire made a sound that was not quite a word. "You are such a prude."

"I'm not a prude, I just don't want to—"

"You're eighteen," Claire said, with the flat, declarative quality of someone presenting evidence. "You are eighteen years old and you are still a virgin and I say this with love — it's a little sad."

The sound of a hand connecting with an arm — not hard, the specific impact of an exasperated friend registering protest.

"It's a choice," Shae said.

"It's a choice," Claire repeated, in the tone of someone unconvinced by the framing.

"It is. And besides—" a pause in which Nathan could hear, even from the board with his back to them, the precise quality of Shae deciding whether to say the next thing "—all the boys our age are stupid. And immature. So."

"So nothing," Claire said. "That's what I'm saying. That's the whole problem."

They moved through the door — the sound of them fading into the corridor, Claire still talking, Shae's response lost to distance — and then the room was empty and Nathan was at the board with the eraser in his hand and the clean slate in front of him.

He stood there for a moment.

Eighteen. Sunday.

He set the eraser down.

He thought about all the boys our age are stupid and immature — the way she had said it, the slight pause before it, the specific quality of a girl who has a reason for that sentence that she has no intention of offering to anyone in the hallway.

He went to his desk. He sat down.

He thought about phone records. He thought about time stamps. He thought about you can watch the whole thing progress.

He looked at the phone, face-down on the corner of the desk where it had been since Wednesday.

He looked at the window.

He picked up his pen and went back to the comprehension responses and held everything else in the careful, quiet stillness of a man who has heard more than he was meant to and is doing absolutely nothing with it.