Scandalous

Chapter 23

By Wednesday, they had reached the final movement of Wuthering Heights.

Nathan had structured the last three sessions around discussion rather than lecture — partly because it was the right pedagogical approach for a novel that rewarded argument, and partly because he had learned enough about the specific composition of this class to know that the most interesting things that would be said about the book were not going to come from him. He had thirty years of thinking about Brontë. He wanted to hear what they had, uncurated.

He sat on the edge of the desk in the way he'd taken to sitting on it — the position of a teacher who is present but not presiding — and let the discussion find its shape.

"He's going to die alone," said a student in the second row, with the comfortable finality of someone stating the obvious. "That's the whole point. He spent his entire life obsessed with a dead woman and it destroyed everything around him. That's the ending."

"That's a reading," Nathan said. "Is it the only one?"

"He's a villain," someone else offered. "Brontë doesn't redeem him. He's cruel to Hareton, he's cruel to young Cathy, he manipulates everyone around him for years. You don't get a redemption arc when you've done what he's done."

"Does the novel claim to redeem him?" Nathan asked.

A pause. "Well — no."

"So if the novel doesn't claim to redeem him, and you're arguing he doesn't deserve redemption, what exactly are you disagreeing with?"

The student worked through this, which was the intended effect. Around the room, a few other people shifted — the particular physical adjustment of people who are finding an angle on something.

A girl in the third row: "I think it's sad, though. Not sympathetic, but sad. He loved someone who chose someone else, and he never recovered. That's just — that's a human thing, even if everything he did with it was monstrous."

"Can you be a monster because of something human?" Nathan asked. "Or does the monstrousness cancel the humanity?"

This opened into four separate directions simultaneously — the overlapping, slightly chaotic energy of a class that has found genuine traction on a question. He let it run for a moment. This was his favorite thing about literature, the thing he had tried to explain to colleagues who preferred structured annotation exercises and had never quite convinced them of — the moment when a book stopped being a thing to be studied and became a thing to be argued about, when the students stopped performing comprehension and started actually thinking.

He was watching the room. Managing the traffic of the discussion. Occasionally redirecting, occasionally introducing the piece of context that shifted the frame.

He had almost stopped noticing that he always ended up looking at the back left corner.

Shae had been quiet through most of this one — the specific quality of quiet that meant she was listening at full capacity, processing, not yet at the thing she wanted to say. He knew the distinction. He had learned it.

She raised her hand when the room was in the middle of debating whether Hareton's trajectory — his redemption, his growth, his eventual relationship with young Cathy — constituted an answer to Heathcliff.

"Go ahead," Nathan said.

"Hareton is the answer," she said, "but not in the way we're framing it." She looked at the book, open on her desk. "We keep reading young Cathy and Hareton as the hopeful ending — the corrected version of Heathcliff and old Cathy, what that relationship could have been without the class divide and the cruelty. And that reading is there. Brontë puts it there." A pause. "But I think the more interesting thing Hareton does in the novel is function as Heathcliff's mirror. He grew up without love, without education, without anyone investing in him — the same conditions that shaped Heathcliff. And he could have become Heathcliff. The conditions were identical." She looked up. "He didn't. Which means Brontë is arguing that the external circumstances alone don't produce a Heathcliff. There's a choice somewhere in there. A point where something could have gone differently."

The room had gone into its particular quality of quiet.

"And what does that do to how we read Heathcliff's death?" Nathan asked.

"It makes it a release," she said. "Not a punishment. He doesn't die because the universe is correcting an imbalance. He dies because he's been running on a single engine for thirty years and the engine finally gives out." She paused. "He starts seeing her. Near the end. Her ghost, or his perception of it. And he stops eating. He's not choosing to die — he's just stopping choosing to live, which isn't quite the same thing. The novel doesn't punish him. It exhausts him." She closed the book gently. "And the fact that Hareton and young Cathy are building something on the same ground — Wuthering Heights, literally the same house — isn't commentary on Heathcliff's failure. It's just proof that the ground itself was never the problem."

The silence held for a moment.

Nathan became aware of the weight of his own expression and checked it. He was already too late.

The smile was there — not the professional one, not the one he deployed in the course of ordinary teaching moments. The other one. The one that arrived without authorization and had, by this point, developed a specific association with a specific direction in the room. He felt it on his face and he looked at his notes and he managed, after a moment, to produce the composed, assessful expression of a teacher who has heard something he is now incorporating.

"That's one of the more precise formulations of that argument I've encountered," he said. He said it to the room. He looked at the room. "The distinction between punishment and exhaustion — that's worth sitting with."

A few students made notes. Someone in the front row typed something into their laptop. The discussion resumed in the general direction Shae had pointed it, other voices picking up the thread.

Nathan sat on the edge of his desk and looked at his notes and did not look at the back left corner again.

He thought about the smile and what it meant that it had arrived and decided, not for the first time and not with great conviction, that he was going to think about it later.

The chime rang.

The faculty dining area at Crestwood was a room off the main staff corridor that held eight tables, a good coffee machine, and the unspoken seating conventions of a room that had developed them organically over time. Nathan had established his arrangement early — the corner table by the window, the one that got the best light and was slightly removed from the natural centre of gravity of the room, which suited a man who was still, three months in, operating as a recent arrival rather than a fixture.

He was halfway through a chapter of the novel he'd been carrying for two weeks and halfway through a somewhat disappointing sandwich when Daniel appeared from across the room with his own tray and the expression of a man who has decided this is where he's sitting.

Nathan looked up.

"Before you say anything," Daniel said, setting his tray down and folding himself into the opposite chair, "I need an answer from you and I'm going to need it in the form of yes."

"That's an unusual framing for a request."

"It's a request that benefits from optimistic framing." Daniel opened his water and leaned back. "Halloween dance. Friday night. Seven to eleven, gymnasium, half the student body in increasingly questionable interpretations of Halloween costumes." He looked at Nathan. "They pay extra. All you have to do is stand near the drinks table for four hours and make sure nobody adds anything to the punch that wasn't there when they left the kitchen."

Nathan looked at him.

He spent a moment contemplating the specific proposition — four hours on a Friday evening in a school gymnasium, surrounded by several hundred teenagers in the particular configuration of costumes that teenagers chose for school dances, which skewed, in his experience, significantly toward the interpretive end of the Halloween concept. The music. The specific audio landscape of a school dance. The vigilance required to monitor a drinks table. The general atmosphere of raging, barely-managed hormonal energy in an enclosed space.

He thought about the book he was currently in the middle of. He thought about the bottle of wine at home and the general concept of a Friday evening that did not involve any of the above.

He raised both eyebrows.

"I'll think about it," he said.

"That's a yes with extra steps," Daniel said, with the satisfaction of a man who has done this before. "Good. I'll put your name down."

"I said I'll think about it."

"And I said I'll put your name down." Daniel took a sip of water. "I need someone reasonable at the drinks table. Last year Henderson had it and he was distracted by the Year Eleven Medusa and someone got vodka into the lemonade. It was a situation." He looked at Nathan with the frank expression of a man asking a reasonable favor. "You won't be distracted by a Year Eleven Medusa."

Nathan said nothing.

He thought, briefly and entirely against his will, that this was not a guarantee he was in any position to make with great confidence, and then looked at his book and did not say this.

"I'll let you know by Thursday," he said.

Daniel accepted this and moved the conversation to the history department's ongoing scheduling conflict with the administration, which was a more comfortable topic and required nothing from Nathan except occasional nods of general solidarity.

The rest of the day had the smooth, ordinary quality of days that contain nothing exceptional — classes moving through their material, the corridor between periods, the stack of marking that had accumulated on his desk over the past three days that he addressed in the last two hours with the focused efficiency of a man catching up on a thing he'd been putting off.

He drove home in the early dark of October evenings, when the clocks haven't yet changed and the day has already gone before it feels like it should have.

The house had lights on.

He noticed this — specific lights, in specific rooms, meaning Maryanne was home and at her desk, which was the arrangement he'd come home to on the better evenings. He hung his keys. Loose his bag. Stood in the kitchen for a moment, looked in the fridge, and made the decision without much deliberation: he was going to cook.

He put on the radio — the classical station he kept on low when he was in the kitchen because it required nothing of him and gave something back — and got out the ingredients. Pasta, the good olive oil, garlic, the capers and tinned tomatoes and the remnants of the puttanesca components he'd been assembling across the last two shops. He worked with the easy, practiced competence of a man who cooked because he actually enjoyed it rather than because it was required of him, which was its own quiet pleasure — the engagement of the hands, the progression of stages, the specific satisfaction of a thing that started as raw components and became something good.

He thought about the Halloween dance. He thought about Henderson and the vodka situation. He thought about Daniel's expression when he said you won't be distracted by a Year Eleven Medusa with the specific confidence of a man who didn't know what Nathan knew.

He concentrated on the garlic.

It had not been spoken of again. Not the dinner at Daniel's, not the drive home, not the liquor cabinet and the hallway and the study door closing with force. Neither of them had apologized — this was not unusual, this had never been their method. The apology-as-speech-act was a form that belonged to people who needed the words in order for the thing to be real, and they had always operated differently. The acknowledgment was in the doing, the small renegotiations of daily life that said: we are resuming. We are choosing to continue. The rupture happened and is now in the past where it belongs.

Nathan had made Maryanne's coffee every morning since Sunday. Not the basic version — the specific version, the way she had told him in the second year of their marriage and which he had memorized and maintained: the ratio, the temperature, the dash of cardamom she'd picked up the habit of from a trip to Istanbul that she'd taken before he knew her and never fully explained. He slid it to her in the morning without comment and she took it without comment and something in the set of her shoulders changed slightly when she did, which was the transaction in its entirety.

He had found her editor meeting notes on the kitchen table Tuesday morning — the handwritten ones, her system, the shorthand she'd developed that was largely illegible to anyone who hadn't spent years learning it — and he'd spent thirty minutes that evening reorganizing them into the order she used for actual meetings: concerns first, then proposed changes, then the non-negotiables at the back where she could flip to them quickly when the conversation tried to push past them. He had put them back on the table with the specific alignment she preferred, corners square, nothing moved from where she'd put it except what was reorganized, and said nothing about it.

She hadn't mentioned it. But the notes had gone into her bag in the morning and she had not come home from the meeting in the state she usually came home from meetings where she'd been underprepared.

Wednesday night she had fallen asleep in her office chair with the lamp on and three chapters of something spread across the desk — not her own work, someone else's manuscript, the kind she was asked to read for the press occasionally. He had checked at midnight when the light was still on, found her asleep in the chair with her reading glasses still on, and he had stood in the doorway for a moment looking at her.

He had taken the reading glasses off — gently, the careful removal of something from a person who is asleep — and set them on the desk. He had reached past her and turned the lamp off. He had pulled the throw blanket from the sofa, the same one from Sunday morning, and draped it over her with the quiet of a man doing a thing that doesn't require acknowledgment to count.

She stirred slightly but didn't wake.

He went to bed.

These were the gestures. The vocabulary of a long marriage that had developed its own grammar — not the grammar either of them would have chosen if they'd been designing it, not the grammar of romance novels or the first year, but the one that existed. The functional language of two people who had been each other's primary person for long enough that the mechanisms of care had outlasted some of the feeling and simply continued operating.

He plated the pasta. He put Maryanne's portion on the warmer. He carried his own to the table and ate in the comfortable quiet of the kitchen with the radio still on low.

She would emerge when she emerged. She would eat when she was ready. She would come to bed eventually or she wouldn't, and he would either find her there or not, and the day would become the next day.

He ate his dinner. He thought, briefly, about a class discussion and a formulation that had been precise and unexpected, and the distinction between punishment and exhaustion as endings.

He did not think about the grocery store. He had decided he was not thinking about the grocery store.

He cleared the plates. He put the warmer on low.

He went upstairs and lay in the dark for considerably less time than Sunday before sleep arrived and took him, which he counted, all things considered, as a kind of progress.