Scandalous

Chapter 6

By the time the last bell rang, Nathan had heard seventeen different interpretations of the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, and precisely one of them had been correct.

He stayed in his classroom after the students cleared out, as had become his habit — not for any productive reason, not marking papers or preparing lessons, just sitting in the particular quiet of the room after it had been full, letting the noise of the day settle before he was required to carry himself anywhere else. The afternoon light came through the south-facing windows at a low, amber angle, warming the tops of the desks, catching the dust that moved through the room in slow, untroubled spirals.

He poured the last of his thermos and drank it cold and thought about the day.

The morning classes had been what they were — capable, mostly, in the way that students at a school like Crestwood were capable: prepared to perform competence, trained to produce answers that sounded correct, less practiced at sitting with the parts of a text that resisted summary. He had asked them what Fitzgerald meant by the green light and gotten back, across six class periods, a reasonably consistent chorus of the American Dream, hope, the unattainable, possibility — answers that were not wrong, exactly, but that lived on the surface of the thing without going under it. Without asking what the light actually cost the man who stood at the water's edge looking at it.

He had pushed. He had pushed the way he'd been pushing all week, the slow, methodical pressure of a teacher who believed that the difference between a surface reading and a real one was worth the discomfort of getting there. Some of them had moved. Most had moved just enough to seem to be moving and then stopped.

He did not find this discouraging. He had been doing this long enough to understand that most people arrived at a thing sideways, in their own time, through a door they found themselves and not the one you pointed them toward. He was planting something. He would not necessarily see it grow.

But there was a difference, still, between students who would eventually get there on their own time and students who were already there — who had been there, who had perhaps arrived before he had, who didn't need pointing in a direction so much as a space wide enough to move in.

He thought about second period. The way the room had gone quiet after she spoke — that quality of quiet that is different from the quiet of people who haven't understood something. The quiet of people who have just understood something they weren't expecting to.

He's not celebrating. He's waiting.

He set the thermos down. Six words that had done in six seconds what he'd been trying to get the rest of the room to do in twenty minutes. Not because she was showing off — that was the thing he kept returning to, the thing that distinguished it from the kind of bright-student performance he'd seen plenty of and was largely unmoved by. She hadn't been performing. She had been saying a thing she had thought about and arrived at and was now simply reporting, the way you report a fact, without particular investment in whether the room found it impressive.

She had read the book twice. Once in eighth grade. Once last summer to see if she'd read it wrong.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at the ceiling.

She was seventeen and she read books twice to find out if she'd misunderstood them the first time, and she annotated her copy of Gatsby before he'd assigned the chapters, and she answered questions without raising her hand because the hand-raising felt, he suspected, like a performance she wasn't interested in giving. She sat in the back left corner and said precise things and looked at him with those green, unhurried eyes and then went back to her book.

She was a student, he told himself. An exceptional one. That was the entirety of it.

He picked up his bag, put on his jacket, and turned off the banker's lamp.

The drive home took twenty-three minutes in light traffic.

Nathan took the longer route — the one that wound up through the residential streets above Altadena Drive and gave him an extra eight minutes in the car, which had begun to function as a sort of decompression chamber between the version of himself that existed at Crestwood and the version that walked through the front door of the house on Altadena Drive. He wasn't sure either version was the true one, but the drive was useful for remembering that they were different.

He thought about Gatsby through the residential streets. He thought about what he'd do with chapter five — the shirts scene, the rain, the reunion that goes immediately sideways because Gatsby has idealized the moment so thoroughly that the reality of it can only disappoint. He thought about whether to have them write something short in class or push the analytical reading harder before introducing the writing component.

He thought, briefly and without intending to, about the back left corner again.

He changed the subject of his own thoughts with the deliberate efficiency of a man who has had practice doing this. He thought about Daniel's dinner invitation, which he had been putting off addressing. He thought about the paper he'd started two years ago on unreliable narration in mid-century American fiction that was sitting in a folder on his laptop, untouched for fourteen months. He thought about whether there was anything in the refrigerator that constituted a meal.

He turned onto Altadena Drive and parked in the driveway.

He heard her before he opened the door.

Not the music this time — Maryanne's voice, clipped and professional, carrying through the front window in fragments that were not quite loud enough to be words but had the unmistakable cadence of someone conducting business. He let himself in quietly, set his bag by the door, and found her in the study — the second bedroom furnished with a desk she'd bought online the day after they arrived because the one that had come with the house wobbled — pacing with her phone against her ear and the expression she wore when she was talking to someone whose opinion she was required to manage.

She looked at him when he appeared in the doorway. The look lasted approximately half a second — acknowledgment, no warmth — and then she turned back toward the window.

"The timeline is the timeline, David," she said, to her phone. "I understand the concerns about the last quarter. I've told you what the last quarter is going to look like and I'm asking you to trust the structure." A pause. Her free hand moved — fingers against the side of her thigh, the rhythm of suppressed impatience. "Yes. Yes, I'll send it by Friday." Another pause. Her jaw set slightly. "David."

Nathan left the doorway.

He went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and surveyed it with the mild, practiced detachment of someone who has stopped being surprised. Half a block of cheese. Two eggs. The remains of a bottle of Maryanne's wine. A container of leftover rice from two nights ago.

He tried to remember the last time Maryanne had cooked an actual meal. Not here — they'd barely been in the house a week, takeout every night since they landed, that was simply the reality of unpacking and adjusting and neither of them particularly caring enough to do otherwise. But before. In Hartford. He went back through the months and found nothing that qualified, not for a long time — a year at least, maybe longer. She had stopped somewhere along the way and he had stopped noticing that she'd stopped, which was perhaps the more telling detail. The kitchen in Connecticut had been used for coffee and wine, in that order, and the occasional morning where one of them made toast and didn't offer the other any.

He took out his phone and opened DoorDash. He had the interface memorized by now — the Thai place two miles away, the one with the green curry, always the same thing, always with the rice, always with a side that represented some vestigial optimism about the meal being more than it needed to be. He placed the order without looking at the total.

Thirty-two minutes, the app told him.

He poured himself a glass of water and leaned against the counter.

From the study, Maryanne's voice continued in its measured, professional register. David again. The structure. The timeline. She was good at this — at managing the people who held parts of her career in their hands, at giving them exactly enough of what they needed to stay cooperative. She had always been good at that particular calibration. The gap was a different calibration entirely — the one that applied to people who weren't useful to her in a professional sense, the one that would have required giving something without getting anything back.

He finished the water. Refilled it.

He sat at the kitchen table with the papers he'd been meaning to mark all week and worked through six of them in the thirty-two minutes before the DoorDash driver rang the bell.

He ate alone at the kitchen table. The green curry was good. The rice was fine. The spring rolls he finished about half of. The study door stayed closed.

When he was done he washed the container — something in him resisted simply throwing them away, some lingering belief that a household in which food containers were washed was still a functioning household in at least the technical sense.

He dried his hands on the kitchen towel.

Through the study door, Maryanne's voice had dropped lower — not the business tone now, something more relaxed, the particular quality of a conversation that had shifted into territory that had nothing to do with the deadline. He didn't listen. He had learned not to listen.

He went upstairs.

He sat on the edge of the bed in the quiet room and looked at his phone and looked at the window and looked at nothing in particular for a while. He thought about the unreliable narration paper, the one sitting untouched in a laptop folder, and whether he still had anything to say about it or whether the thing he'd had to say had simply gone somewhere he couldn't reach anymore.

He thought, without meaning to, about a book that had been read twice. The margin notes he'd glimpsed on her desk — small and precise, the handwriting of someone who had things to say to the page and had been saying them for a long time.

He put his phone down.

He told himself to sleep.

The house was quiet in the way that empty houses are quiet, even when they have people in them — the particular silence of rooms that have stopped waiting for anything.

He lay down.

He looked at the ceiling.

He slept, eventually, the way you sleep when you've been exhausted for long enough that the body simply takes over and overrules everything else. Without comfort. Without rest, exactly. Just the cessation of the day.