Tampa

chapter eight

The screams echoing through Janet’s class were hard to bear. She was attempting a lecture on the Treaty of Paris while Mrs. Pachenko walked between the rows of desks insisting upon calm, raising a finger to her lips and whispering to individual students to please sit all the way down in their desks. In the back of the room, several kids were cheering as one of them, a young man whose shirt bore a flaming skull, stood hunched atop his desk like a motocross biker, sliding it forward in small hops. Students appear enthusiastic and are communicating well together, I wrote on the evaluation form.

“Kevin!” Janet yelled, her thick fingers surrounding her mouth in an amplifying oval. “You can either park it on your butt right now, or you can practice sitting still after school in detention.” Kevin momentarily stopped jumping, but as soon as Janet turned around to write on the board, he stood and lifted his desk up with him, tiptoeing toward the front of the room until she turned back around, at which point he’d drop it and sit down as though frozen. Mrs. Pachenko, busy waiting on a student riffling through his backpack in a farce of looking to see if he had his homework, was none the wiser. Janet finally noticed when Kevin’s desk had surpassed the front row of students and he sat islanded just inches from the chalkboard. She looked down at him through the bifocals of her thick lenses. “What is with you?” she asked. “Do you have ants in your pants?” The students immediately began to roar as Kevin, nodding, stood up and began spinning around the room pretending to reach into his pants and itch. It was about this time that I noticed the intricacy of Mrs. Pachenko’s embroidered blue vest, which read VOLUNTEER across the back. Usually volunteers just donned the ID card around their necks that she also wore. The vest was a production from her own imagination. I pictured the sad scene of her making it at home one evening, dutifully feeding its fabric into a sewing machine by lamplight as Frank recited an alphabetical list of SAT word definitions in the background with audible zest.

Nonetheless, my write-up of Janet had to be positive yet credible. Though occasional classroom management issues did arise, I continued, Mrs. Feinlog was able to use humor and authority to restore student attention. Mrs. Pachenko, the classroom aide, serves as a clear source of calm assistance and organization. By the time the bell rang, Janet had given up entirely and was sitting at her desk with a look of constipated apathy as Mrs. Pachenko, reading aloud from a revised syllabus that they’d decided to institute once she began helping out, stressed how important it was that the students complete their substantial assigned readings each night at home. “If we don’t get to a discussion of the War of 1812 by Friday,” she threatened, a quaver of panic tingling her voice, “we will not be on schedule for our November unit on the Texas Revolution.”

“Thank you for letting me sit in,” I said to them afterward, beaming. “I think there’s been improvement from a few weeks ago?” During my first observation session, one of the students had successfully used an oversized safety pin to pierce his own septum but hadn’t counted on the prolific blood loss. He’d held the area and waited quietly until most of his hand and lower arm were covered, at which point he’d raised his other hand and asked, in a muffled voice, if he could please use the bathroom; the classroom had turned into an assault of screams and cell phone pictures when he walked from the room dripping a long trail of micro-splatter. As a result, Janet and Mrs. Pachenko had to fill out bloodborne pathogen exposure paperwork and hold classes in the auditorium for the rest of the day as a janitor scoured the boy’s desk and the classroom floor with bleach. Although I had to make brief mention of the incident, I tried to minimize references to leaked bodily fluids and spun the event as follows: Mrs. Feinlog fosters an environment of openness where students feel free to express themselves artistically.

While things at school continued running smoothly, in the first few weeks after my affair with Jack began, Ford seemed to sense my further mental departure. Desiring shared bonding, he insisted upon a weekend double date with Bill and Shelley, Ford’s partner and his wife, at the bowling alley. “You need to get out once in a while and have some fun,” Ford insisted. “Otherwise you’ll go stir-crazy.”

The evening was not a success. I found it hard to focus; the place was awash with teenagers. In the alley next to us, several young boys and girls wearing glow-stick necklaces began tossing lightweight balls granny-style through their legs. I couldn’t help but find watching them preferential to the stolid conversation my own party was having. Several times during the evening, I’d snap out of a fantasy—a pantsless Jack standing spread-eagle atop the lane’s gleaming wooden floors, repeatedly bending over and swinging the bowling ball between his knees, his testicles coming alive with motion when he finally stood and released the ball toward the pins—only to find that Ford and the others were waiting on me to comment. I hadn’t even heard the question.

Displeased, Ford drained pitcher after pitcher of beer. When the festivities reached their natural conclusion, he was drunk and clingy; he stank of stale adult sweat and kept trying to kiss me on the mouth, becoming increasingly irate each time I pushed him off. By the time we called it a night and got into the car he was ready to explode.

“What’s with you? You hardly even spoke to Shelley. You think you’re too good to hang out with normal-looking people or something?” By this I could only imagine that Ford was referring to Shelley’s unfortunate bulb-tipped nose.

“I have nothing in common with her. I wasn’t impolite.” Looking over at him, I kept having the disquieting thought that Jack had somehow been sitting in the passenger seat of my car waiting for me and Ford had just climbed in and sat right on top of him. I feared that Jack was now writhing unseen beneath Ford’s large back and limbs, being suffocated as we drove.

“You seemed like a stuck-up bitch,” he said. He spoke very slowly, as though the words were being sent to him through an earpiece and he was repeating what he’d heard on time delay. “You have to realize that’s what people will think of you if you don’t act friendlier.” His head rolled down and to the side and then raised again, recharged by its own kinetic movements. “And what do you mean you have nothing in common? She teaches high school for fuck’s sake.”

I then had the optimistic thought that perhaps Jack wasn’t trapped under Ford at all—maybe he was crouched down in the backseat with a generous length of taut piano wire in his hands, about to pop up and strangle the stocky trunk of Ford’s neck while I blew him a kiss and turned up the radio—what a delightful show of initiative that would demonstrate on Jack’s behalf. “Do you have something in common with every cop?” I asked him. “Every single one? The deadbeats? The thieves? The traitors?”

“Enough in common to talk to them over a beer,” he said. “I wasn’t asking you two to go on a road trip together.” I could feel his eyes train upon me at the stoplight, his demeanor softening as he admired my face in profile. “Hey,” he said, reaching his hand out toward my shoulder. But I wanted none of it.

“Come on,” I said, pushing his hand away. “I’m driving.”

“Yeah you’re driving,” he said, seething. “The fucking car I bought you. What, you can spend my money but I can’t touch you? You’re better than me, too?”

“You’re just drunk, Ford.”

“No,” he said, adamant. “This doesn’t just happen when I drink. This is why I drink.” With that his hand clamped down upon my upper arm. I tried to push it off but he was holding on with all his strength.

“Ford, you’re hurting me,” I warned him, my voice inflected with actual fear. It wasn’t so much the pain as the act of restraint itself that felt so awful, the knowledge that I wasn’t physically in control.

“Do you know how you make me feel all the time?” He was yelling, nearly weeping. I slowed down the car and began driving far below the speed limit. I didn’t want to arrive home with him like this. He’d never actually hit me, but he wasn’t opposed to using applied force—a gripping of the wrist when I wanted to leave the room and he wasn’t done talking, a too-firm squeezing of the thigh when I’d said no too many nights in a row. “You’re ice-cold for days, sometimes weeks, then suddenly I come home and you’re so hot for it that you’re greeting me with your ass in the air. Then the next morning it’s like I disgust you again. Do you know what a mind-fuck that is?” His eyes were trained on me, staring; he wanted me to turn and look at him, to see the expression accompanying his painful confession, but I refused. The rest of the drive continued in slow silence; eventually his grip loosened and he retracted his arm. “Fuck my life,” he mumbled.

When we got into the house, he opened a beer and sat in front of the television; I went directly to the bedroom. I was hardly into my pajamas when I heard his deep openmouthed snores begin. The next afternoon he showered and went to work with no discussion of the previous evening’s conversation; he asked about dinner and I told him I’d make pork chops and leave a plate for him in the refrigerator. He nodded, gave me a quick kiss that smelled too strongly of aftershave, and left. One thing I could always count on with Ford, despite his occasional outbursts, was his ability to suppress the uncomfortable—his breaking point was deep and not often reached, but whenever he got there I knew that as soon as the air cleared I’d have another long stretch of time where all his angst would stay buried.

Jack’s concerns were a bit more out in the open, and they included Ford. I hadn’t told Jack that my husband was a cop, though I wouldn’t have lied if Jack had asked. What worried Jack most was my physical relationship with Ford. The Wednesday after Ford’s outburst, Jack and I were having an extended hangout at his house, which had proven a wonderful arrangement. In fact, since our first completed tryst in the car, Jack’s house was the only place we’d met. His single bed was deliciously narrow, forcing us to either be fucking or otherwise pressed together simply to both fit on top of it. On Wednesdays Jack ordered pizza—we always laughed as I’d hide in the hallway when the deliveryman came to the door—then for the second course we’d eat chocolate pudding cups without spoons, dipping our tongues down into their cool centers and watching one another’s pink flesh skate around the cups’ plastic rims.

Today we were naked in the pool, careful to stay submerged to our necks lest any passersby feel the need to peek over his fence in the twilight of fall’s dinner hour. Facing each other with twined legs, Jack and I bobbed in the warm water with a circular foam tube pressed between us to help us float.

“It sucks how we won’t get to go do stuff together for like four more years,” he said. Jack had already adopted the illusion that we’d date through his entire high school career and beyond, a fantasy I didn’t attempt to ruin. In truth, our relationship’s shelf life was closer to that of an elderly Labrador. One more year seemed to be the most realistic to hope for; two was very unlikely. He’d grow, his voice would further deepen, defining muscle would thicken and broaden him. I couldn’t imagine remaining attracted to him beyond fifteen at the latest. “I mean even stupid stuff, you know? Like getting dinner or going to a basketball game.”

I tilted my pelvis up and wrapped my legs around his waist, rubbing myself against the smoothness of his stomach. “But you can do that stuff with friends. We get to have the very best part of a relationship be our whole relationship. With us it’s dessert for every meal.” I could feel his erection beginning to form beneath my ass cheeks, so his next question surprised me—I figured his mind was drifting somewhere more pleasant.

“What’s your husband like?” he asked.

I didn’t have to feign indifference. “He’s just a husband.” I shrugged. Worried his interview might go in a direction that could derail the evening’s merriment, I decided to play upon Jack’s sympathy. “The other night he was drunk and swearing at me. It’s more of a living arrangement. He pays the bills, takes care of all the boring adult stuff.” I laced my fingers between Jack’s, looking at their pruneish tips. Despite the warmth of the evening, our time in the water had given Jack’s lips a blue hue and covered his body with goose bumps. I loved how timid it made him look, as though he had just been rescued from the bottom of a well.

“Do you guys still… you know?” Jack asked. I wanted him to say it—I loved to hear Jack use the vocabulary of lust in any context.

“Still what?”

He rolled his eyes. “Have sex and stuff.”

“Not often. But when we do, it’s nothing like you and me. There’s no passion like there is with us. When I have to have sex with him, I just think of you.” With that I swam to the pool wall, then motioned Jack toward me, grabbing his arm the moment he got close and pulling him in, pinning myself between him and a cold jet of water. “So give me some more to think about.” Obligingly, Jack began to kiss my neck, an activity that, guided by my moans, he’d quickly become rather good at. Reaching down I used my fingers to guide his penis into me, helping him through the initial, awkward rubbery stage of underwater entry. The sky was just dark enough that I could make out the beginnings of a few stars, but the whole world soon reduced to the simple sound of Jack’s thrusts and the water, responsive, lapping.

Jack and I were always cautious, even on Wednesdays, when our schedule was extended: his father’s training night went until 8:00 and it then took him an hour to drive home, but I was always out of the house by 7:50, save for the night that Jack had begun his cunnilingus studies in earnest—it was nearly impossible to look down at him, the flesh around his lips marinated in my enthusiasm, and not grant his smiling request to do it just a little longer. That night I left at 8:15 and it was worth every second of the risk.

I’d hoped some of the safeguard restraints I’d implemented would have a secondary side effect of helping to keep Jack’s emotions compartmentalized. But less than a month into our affair his shyness when we were alone together had fully retracted, and he didn’t hold back when talking about his feelings for me or his plans for our life as a couple. I’d stressed early on that there could be no written notes, no text messages, no wordy ruminations of ardor. He ended up bypassing this rule though, writing terrible poems in a notebook (When you leave / My heart falls asleep in my chest / and has nightmares of death until you return), which he’d give to me to read after sex. They were harmless enough—if they were found, it would be obvious only that he was smitten with someone; none of them mentioned my name. He frequently told me he loved me, a behavior I didn’t like to encourage with a response—I claimed I didn’t want to use the word “love” because it should be felt and understood rather than said. This, too, became a point of contention with Jack.

One night I asked if I could watch him jerk off and he agreed, but explained he was used to looking out his window at the sky while he did it. “I stand to the side of the window now instead of in front of it though.” He smiled. “I guess it worked out that you saw me but I sure don’t want anyone else to.”

“Go ahead,” I urged. “Do it exactly like you’d do it if I wasn’t here.” Taking a seat on the bed behind him, I watched his buttocks clench and his head lift up as though he was having a conversation with God. When he was finished I told him to come rub his semen on my breasts and asked him why he liked to look out the window.

“Are you sure you’re looking at the sky?” It did seem to be the only thing visible save for a few distant hedges. “Not peeping in someone’s window?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I dunno. At clouds or stars.”

“Why?” I cradled his balls in my hand; even their wrinkled exterior still held the incipient softness of youth. His balls, I realized, were softer than the skin on Ford’s stomach.

“It just makes me feel overwhelmed or something. A good overwhelmed. Like I’m such a small part of the world that I don’t ever have to worry about anything.”

I gave him a wide grin. “You’re really young.” He play-pushed me in a teasing way; he hated when I brought up his age.

“You don’t look as old as you are,” he countered. “In a few years no one will even know there’s an age difference when we’re together. When I’m in college everyone will think you’re my college girlfriend.”

“Don’t fast-forward,” I said. “We need to enjoy every second of this.” The phrase “when I’m in college” made me feel kicked in the skull. It was like seeing a plate of my favorite meal that had been left out for a week and now was rotting and festering with maggots—I wouldn’t be able to enjoy a second helping of Jack tonight with that image in my head. I began to kiss his chest, closing my eyes and tucking my nose beneath his arm, hoping the odor would act like a smelling salt and wake me up from the horrible vision of Jack matured.

But he’d just orgasmed, which meant my power over him was at its lowest—he didn’t want to stop gazing in his crystal ball just yet. “I say we get married the day I turn eighteen,” he suggested. “We’ll already have been waiting forever by then.”

With this second mention of advanced age, I slumped back onto his bed, taking comfort in the faded basketball graphic of his sheets that he was already too old for. A yawn slipped past my lips.

“You do want to get married, don’t you?” he asked.

“I’m already married, Jack.”

A confused look came over his face. It was not an attractive kind of naïveté, just a perplexed one, like a customer who orders chicken salad at the deli but gets home and opens the container to find a pound of macaroni instead. “Well yeah,” he said defensively. “But you’ll leave him when I’m old enough for us to be together for real, right? I mean, you don’t love him. You love me.”

“This is tedious, Jack.” I started to reach for my bra but he placed his hands on my shoulders, imploring.

“You love me, right?”

“What do you think?” He nodded and stepped back but wasn’t sated.

“If you feel it, then why can’t you say it?” he demanded. “It’s not like saying it will make it untrue.”

“But saying it doesn’t make it true either,” I reasoned. “People throw that word around all the time. It’s meaningless.”

He began to pace at the end of his bed in a way that made his genitals lightly bounce; their hypnotic sway made me feel slightly more favorable toward him. “It’s not meaningless to me,” he stressed. “This is… it’s hard what we do, how I have to see you in class without touching you or saying anything real to you. How we can’t talk on the phone more than a second to make plans, and it has to be on a secret phone I keep in a box under my bed. How we can’t tell anybody or go anywhere together. And you can’t even say three words to me?”

“Let me show you instead,” I offered, reaching for his arm.

“I know,” he said, pulling back. “I know that. I just want to hear it out loud.”

I didn’t want him to hear it—the more he heard it, the more he’d believe it, and the more he believed it the harder it would be to break things off when the time inevitably came. But, I figured, it would be more than slightly hypocritical for me to belabor the conversation further by taking some odd stance on an insistence of honesty. There was no need to prematurely ruin things.

“Just this once,” I said. “You know I don’t like it. It makes us seem just like everyone else, and we’re not like everyone else.”

He buried his fingers in the back of my hair and brought his lips and eyes in close and level with my own. “I love you,” he said, his voice stupid with hormones.

“I love you too, Jack.” As soon as I said it he was kissing me. He didn’t give one second of pause for analysis, had no desire to read the veracity of my expression. Before I knew it he was fully inside me, my legs balancing wearily on his shoulders like an oversized harness on a young ox.

Pictures were another sore spot for Jack—I insisted that I could have none of him nor he of me, not even a fully clothed shot of me snapped surreptitiously on his regular phone in the classroom. “I can’t have a photo of you standing in the front of our class in a turtleneck?” he asked. “One picture to look at between our visits?”

I was firm. “It’s just not smart, Jack. Say your father sees it, or a friend. One question leads to another. Suddenly they’re watching you watch me in class, or they catch me staring at your crotch as you walk past my desk. We don’t want to invite scrutiny.”

But his father soon saw more of me than a photo. This also happened on a Wednesday, a bit after 6:40. Jack and I were in his bathroom, the shower still running—he’d soaped up my breasts with shampoo, rinsed them using the detachable wand, then liked the visual so much he’d repeated the lather. Jack was standing up on the edge of the tub, his hands lifted to hold the curtain bar for balance, so that he could see my squatting ass in the mirror and my blond hair trailing down my back while I gave him a blow job and theatrically touched my foamy breasts. Given the running water and fervor of Jack’s escalating moans, we only barely managed to hear the sound of the garage door opening.