Love and Glory

Chapter Two

The cinder block classroom reeked with heat. The windows were closed. The radiator hissed. Mr. Crosbie, the instructor, was outlining a successful expository essay on the board.

“We begin,” he said, “with the topic sentence.” He wrote I. TOPIC SENTENCE on the blackboard.

“Now, in Cardinal Newman’s essay that you read for today, what is the topic sentence?”

I was reading Mr. Crosbie’s comments on my first paper. “A certain weak humor,” he’d scribbled, “and the suggestion of imaginative reach. But riddled with punctuation errors, run-ons, and sentence frags. It is inappropriate to a formal expository essay.” A large red F was circled at the bottom.

Two seats away from me to my right, Jennifer Grayle was sitting. I had passed her in the corridor on the way to class and she had ignored me. I had bitten off my anxious hello just in time when I realized she wasn’t going to speak. Maybe she didn’t mean the stuff about getting to know me better. Now she was sitting with her textbook open to Newman’s essay and her pencil poised to underline the topic sentence as soon as someone identified it.

“Well, what is the essay about,” Crosbie was saying.

Jennifer was wearing a black woolen shirt and faded blue jeans with the cuffs turned up. The jeans were smooth over her buttocks and thighs. I looked at them and felt my abdominal muscles clench like a fist. Christ she looked right through me when I went to say hello. Right fucking through me.

The steam pipes that fed the big iron radiator gave a chunk. I looked at the F on my first college theme. My stomach had the going-down-in-an-elevator feeling it always got when I’d been caught.

Mr. Crosbie wasn’t making much progress. He shook his head. “I don’t think one can say that the topic of the essay is religion. You need to be more specific.”

Jennifer’s hair was dark brown with now and then a glint in it, sort of a copperish glint. It came to her shoulders and then turned up slightly. Her lower lip was full and her mouth was wide. Where the black woolen shirt opened at the throat I could see, from my angle, the hint of her white breast.

My face felt hot. I was wearing a gray Orlon pullover shirt and it itched against my back. I shifted a little in the yellow-maple chair. On the writing arm there were initials engraved with hard-tipped pencils, some of them quite ornate. Some of them childish. A lot of the initials were designs where the letters were incorporated into each other, a B on the second leg of a capital R, things like that. A number of the initials were of couples. RP & JH. Occasionally they were in hearts.

I looked at the watch on the wrist of a guy next to me. 8:20. Jesus, class lasted till 9:00. I couldn’t last. My eyes kept closing and when they closed my head would begin to sag forward and then jerk back as I caught myself. I shifted in my chair again. My underwear was damp with sweat and felt too tight. I looked at Jennifer. She didn’t look hot. I wouldn’t think about her underwear, or sweat. I knew that the laws of nature required her to have many of the same bodily functions I did, but that was only technically true. My imagination never accepted it as real.

Mr. Crosbie was getting mad, or desperate. “What do you think an expository essay is?” he said. The class, wretched in its hot boredom, coalesced into mute submission. I gave up. With my feet propped on the empty chair next to me, I tipped my own chair back against the wall, folded my arms across my chest, and let my head relax forward.

Mr. Crosbie was leaning forward over his lecture table looking at his seating plan. “Mr. Franklin,” he said, “define exposition.”

Franklin was hunched over his notebook and text, staring at them blankly. The more he looked the more they didn’t tell him what exposition meant.

“Mr. Franklin?”

Franklin was very ivy with his oxford button-down and chinos. He wore his blond hair in a crew cut, and his white bucks looked pre-scuffed. He was in college on some kind of church-related scholarship. He looked up finally from the unobliging textbook and said, I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I don’t know.”

Crosbie said, without looking up from his seating chart, “I’m afraid you don’t Miss Grayle, do you know?”

I felt a little thrill in the delta of my breastbone when he said her name. She sat up straight and looked right at him, but I could see the faint flush of embarrassment darken her face.

“It’s a kind of story that’s true,” she said.

Crosbie smiled without humor, “Oh,” he said, “really? What kind of a story exactly?”

Jennifer said, “Not a story that’s been made up.” She gestured slightly with one hand.

Crosbie placed both hands on his little lectern and leaned over it, looked straight at Jennifer.

“Miss Grayle,” he said, and let the name hang there in the stifling room. He shook his head. “Miss Grayle, an essay is not a story. It may or may not be about something that, as you so cleverly put it, ‘is made up.’ Mr. Franklin’s answer revealed that he didn’t know, but yours reveals how much you didn’t know.” His eyes swept the room. Jennifer looked down at her book. Crosbie’s eyes settled on me, slouched in the back. He checked his seating plan.

“Mr. Adams,” he said. “If I’m not disturbing your rest, can you define expository for us.”

“If an old man shows himself to a little girl in the playground,” I said, “that’s an expository act. If he writes it up after, it’s probably an expository essay.”

Billy Murphy, sitting in the other back corner of the room, burst out a loud “Haw.” Everyone else was silent. Crosbie’s face got red. He looked at me. I looked back. I could feel anxiety and anger mingling in my gut. I was still tilted back with my feet up.

Crosbie said, “I think we’ve had enough of you in this class for today, Mr. Adams. You may leave.”

I shrugged, let my chair tip slowly forward, closed my book and notebook with exaggerated care, took the unlighted Camel cigarette from behind my ear, stuck it in my mouth, and walked slowly toward the front of the room. I looked down at Jennifer as I went by, and her eyes glinted with sharp, repressed humor. She understood what I’d done. It made my back tingle.

“Promptly” — Crosbie glanced down at the seating chart — “Mr. Adams.”

At the door I stopped, looked at Crosbie, and said, “The thing is, my answer was right.”

Then I looked at the class, made a short wave to Billy Murphy, whose face was bunched with amusement, and walked out. I left the door open behind me.