Scandalous

Chapter 18

He had, over the years, developed a reasonably refined tolerance for disappointment in academic contexts. You assigned work, you calibrated your expectations to something below your hopes and above your fears, and you received what you received with the professional equanimity of a man who understood that the gap between what students were capable of and what they chose to produce was a constant and largely immovable feature of the landscape.

He had thought, perhaps naively, that the presentation assignment would be different.

He had thought this because he had given them complete freedom — any book, any format, genuinely any creative approach they wanted to take — and his experience was that freedom, when given to students who were capable of using it, produced work that the constraint of a conventional assignment could not. He had thought that a school like Crestwood, with its resources and its parental involvement and its insistence on academic excellence as a brand value, would produce students who were at least functionally distinguishable from the ones he'd encountered elsewhere.

By the fourth presentation, he had updated this assessment.

The first three students had each produced a poster board. The poster boards were large and colorful and covered in printed images from film adaptations, which Nathan had initially taken as a supplementary choice — the visual component of an otherwise book-based analysis. It had become evident, by the third one, that the poster board was not supplementary to the analysis of the book but was, in several cases, the entirety of it. The student presenting had given him a thorough and detailed account of the Lord of the Rings films — the casting choices, the production design, the deviation from Tolkien's narrative structure in the extended editions — without once referencing the source text in any way that suggested they had opened it.

By the time the fifth presentation had concluded — a poster board featuring concept art from the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series alongside a plot summary that Nathan recognized as having come verbatim from a Wikipedia page — he had placed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose and was pressing with some force.

"Before we continue," he said, in a tone that was very level and communicated, through its levelness, that he was choosing levelness deliberately. "Does anyone in this room want to tell me they chose a book that has a film adaptation — and that their presentation is, in fact, about the book?"

He looked at the class.

Twenty-four students looked back. Nobody raised their hand.

Several people looked at the desk.

He exhaled.

He was formulating the sentence that began What I asked you to do was — the sentence every teacher eventually says, the one that bridges the assignment as given and the assignment as interpreted — when, from the back left corner, a hand went up.

He looked at it. He looked at her.

She had her hand raised with the specific quality of someone who has committed to a thing and is not going to be tentative about it, but there was something else in her expression — something he hadn't seen before, a slight hesitation, a held quality at the edge of what was otherwise entirely composed.

"Miss Madison," he said.

She lowered her hand. Looked at him for a moment. Then looked at the surface of her desk and back up again.

"Where The Winds Take Us," she said. A pause that lasted precisely long enough to be meaningful. "By Nathan Kingston."

The room did a very specific thing. It went the particular quality of quiet that a room goes when it has just processed information that realigns everything slightly and is waiting to find out what happens next. He heard two whispers — not the words, just the quality of them, the urgent, low sound of people exchanging a reaction.

Nathan lifted his head from where it had dropped slightly forward. His eyes found hers across the room.

He raised an eyebrow.

She held his gaze. The corner of her mouth moved — the barely-there curve, the one he was cataloguing against his better judgment — and she gave him a small nod.

She had done his book.

His first novel. The one he'd written at twenty-eight, before graduating Harvard, before the marriage had calcified into what it had calcified into, before any of the things that had produced the version of himself that was currently standing at the front of Room 214 pressing the bridge of his nose. The one he'd written at the kitchen table of a dorm flat in fourteen months of early mornings, the one he'd sent to three agents on the same Tuesday and heard back from one of them two weeks later, the one that had been published by a small press to the reception that small press literary novels received — modest attention, appreciative reviews in places that appreciated that kind of thing, a readership that was real and loyal and not particularly large.

He had never discussed it with a student. He had never expected to discuss it with a student, here or anywhere.

He chuckled — and it was not the professional sound, it was the slightly unsteady sound of a man who has been caught off guard and is aware of it — and he folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the desk and looked at her and said, very quietly: "You actually read it."

"I did," she said.

He looked at her for one more moment. Then he inclined his head, with the gesture that said the floor is yours, and he held his arms in their crossed position because they were the most natural available arrangement for a man who needed to do something with his hands and was not going to let what was currently happening in his chest show in his posture.

"Go ahead," he said.

She stood up with the ease of someone who has done this before in her head and is now simply executing. She didn't have a poster board. She had a copy of the book — the same edition, the original paperback — and a single typed paper that she held without looking at.

"Where The Winds Take Us," she said, to the class, in the carrying, unhurried tone of someone who has something to say and is going to say it. "Published 2017. A first novel."

She held the book briefly toward the class — the cover, the author's name — and set it on the desk beside her.

"The novel follows a man called Marcus over approximately three years. On the surface it's the story of a man pursuing the American Dream — Marcus wants success, stability, the version of a life that means you made it. But Brontë's mirror principle applies here: what the character says he wants and what the character is actually chasing are two entirely different things." She paused. "The American Dream in this book is essentially a decoy. It gives Marcus a respectable reason to be in motion. But the engine of the novel is something else."

Nathan was very still.

"He meets a woman called Sera early in the first act. She's chaotic, self-destructive, addicted in a way that makes her both magnetic and fundamentally unreachable. And Marcus falls in love with her — or tells himself he does — and what follows is three years of him trying to save her. Trying to be the thing that changes her." She looked at her paper briefly, then put it face-down on the desk. She wasn't reading from it. It was a prop. "The critical thing the author does, and it's not announced anywhere in the text, it's structural — is that Marcus doesn't want to save Sera because he loves her. He wants to save Sera because being the man who saves her would make him the kind of man he believes himself to be. The love is real, but it's also instrumental. She is the project through which he constructs his own identity."

From somewhere in the third row, Nathan heard the particular sound of a student sitting up slightly. He did not look.

"The secondary character — Anna, who has known Marcus his entire life and has loved him for most of it — exists in the novel at a very specific remove. She's present throughout. She's kind, clear-eyed, and entirely legible. She asks nothing of Marcus that he couldn't give. The tragedy of the novel is not that Marcus loves Sera and loses her. The tragedy is that Marcus cannot see Anna because Anna doesn't need saving." She paused. "The hero's compulsion is to the impossible. The possible is invisible to him. And the novel is very precise about this — it doesn't sentimentalize Anna's departure. She doesn't wait. She builds her life, she finds love, she's happy. The book doesn't punish her for leaving. It just shows you what it cost Marcus to never understand what she was."

The room was very quiet.

"Thematically, the novel is doing several things simultaneously. It's an interrogation of the American Dream as a masculine identity structure — the argument being that the Dream isn't about accumulation, it's about the story a man tells himself about what he deserves and whether he's earned it. But at a deeper level it's about the nature of the love that requires its object to be broken. Marcus can love Sera because she needs him. The relationship gives him a narrative. And the book's central argument — which is never stated, because the best arguments in good fiction are never stated — is that this kind of love is a form of narcissism with a convincing disguise." She looked at the book on the desk. "The title isn't about Sera. It's not about the Dream. It's about Marcus himself. He goes where the wind takes him because he has never once chosen a direction. He's always just responded to the thing in front of him that needed something from him. And by the time he's capable of a real choice, there's nothing left to choose between."

She stopped.

The room stayed quiet.

Nathan stood with his arms folded and said nothing.

He was looking at her and she was looking back at him and he was — for the first time in his adult life, standing in front of a room or anywhere else — entirely without a sentence. Not searching for one. Not processing toward one. Simply not in possession of one.

She had understood everything.

Not the plot, not the themes as he would have summarized them in an author's note or a classroom context. The actual thing. The thing he had been trying to write when he was twenty-eight and had sat at the dorm room kitchen table at five in the morning trying to say something true about what happens when a person mistakes the act of loving someone for the act of understanding themselves. She had taken the book apart at its joints — found the load-bearing walls, the real argument, the thing under the thing — and she had laid it out in four minutes with the clean, precise confidence of someone who had sat with it and trusted what she'd found.

He heard himself, very quietly and entirely without intention, say something.

He didn't realize he'd said it until he saw the eyes in the room turn toward him — the slight, collective head-turn of students registering that the teacher had spoken.

"Brilliant," he had said. Just the word. Under his breath, not quite under his breath.

The silence had a different quality now. Seventeen-year-olds, even the ones who hadn't read the book and had no particular investment in the proceedings, could identify the sound of something that had gone past the professional register. The exchanged looks had the careful, calibrated quality of people who are deciding how much they understood of what they just witnessed.

Nathan cleared his throat.

He unfolded his arms. He pushed off the desk. He looked at the class with the expression of a man who has reassembled himself and is going to proceed accordingly.

"Miss Madison," he said, in a tone that was even and professional and only slightly different from entirely natural. "Excellent work. Please sit down."

He turned to the board.

"Given what I have seen today," he said, to the room, and the tone communicated clearly that what I have seen today was not a compliment to most of those present, "I've decided the next assignment is going to be different."

He wrote on the board. Large. No ambiguity about what he was writing.

ORIGINAL WORK. 85% OF YOUR FINAL GRADE.

The sound the class made was genuine — a collective intake of breath followed by the particular groan of twenty-four people receiving information they would have preferred not to receive.

"I know," he said, without sympathy. "Here are the parameters." He turned. "You will write something original. It can be fiction, non-fiction, a memoir, a graphic novel script, a collection of connected short pieces, fanfiction if you want to take that road — I don't care about the form. I care about whether it's real work. Whether it comes from you, whether it shows genuine engagement with the craft of putting words together in an order that means something." He looked at the class. "You have until the end of the school year."

Another wave of sound — this one lower, the recalibrated groan of people doing the math on the available time and deciding it was either generous or insufficient depending on how much they intended to do.

"One rule," he said. "It's yours. Completely yours. Not assisted, not generated, not assembled from someone else's sentences. If I can tell the difference — and I can tell the difference — you receive a zero and you explain yourself to Mr. Caldwell." He set the marker down. "Questions."

There were questions. He answered them with the direct efficiency of a man who has work to do and has given the class everything it needs.

In the back left corner, Shae Madison was not asking questions. She was sitting with Where The Winds Take Us in front of her — the paperback, his name on the cover — and she was looking at it with an expression he did not let himself look at for more than a second before he turned back to the student asking about word count.

He did not have a word count requirement, he told them. He had a quality requirement. They would know when they'd met it.

He was not, he told himself firmly, thinking about the word brilliant and the fact that he had said it out loud in a classroom of twenty-four students.

He thought about it for the rest of the period.