It was almost seven when I dropped her at her apartment. I don't know what Susan did when she got upstairs, but when I got home I masturbated, severely bothered by her.
CHAPTER 3
Usually I bought lunch at the school cafeteria and brought it up to the band-uniform room along with several of the other favored musicians with whom Ken Johnson, our music teacher, played jobs. It wasn't that we loved this small, hot room so much, but because we could smoke there in safety and soothe our nicotine fits. Of all the student pros, I was the only one Ken ever invited to the teachers' lunch room. I never asked him why, but I assumed it was because I locked older than the others.
When he had started taking me to lunch the year before. I began from the first to call the men teachers by their first names, and none seemed even to notice it. I enjoyed the lunch room because I could smoke as much as I wanted, drink coffee, which wasn't available for students, and the conversation with faculty was a good deal more interesting than that of fellow musicians, who spent all their time talking about fucking.
The day after Susan and I were at the tea garden I casually asked Ken what he was doing for lunch. "What else? Coin' to the TLR," he said, then added. "Want to come along?"
We sat with Hugh Barnes, a science teacher, and Dave Arcy, U.S. history. I looked around the room. "I don't see Miss Lawrence," I said.
Barnes grinned. "You mean Queen Victoria?"
They all laughed at me. I was puzzled. "Why do you call her that, Hugh?"
He leaned over confidently. "Christ! Have you seen her? If she doesn't look like the Grand Old Dame I don't know who does."
"You think she'll get tenure if Gilchrist doesn't come back?"
Dave Arcy started to chuckle. "Are you kidding? Any woman who's that virginal and old-fashioned is a cinch for tenure. Besides, I already got the word from Oaks. Even if Birdie Gilchrist does come bade, he's going to keep Lawrence on."
Hugh shook his head. "I hear she's one hell of a teacher."
"Good or bad?" asked Ken.
"Well," Hugh said, "she's had her class for a month now and Oaks says she's six weeks ahead of her lesson plan and the kids are so hot on the course they're writing two-thousand-word papers when she only asks for five hundred."
It was true, she inspired the class beyond anything I had ever seen a teacher do, but the jokes behind her back angered me. I felt compelled to go to her defense."
“I don't know about the Queen Victoria bit," I said. "If the old queen had run the empire the way Lawrence runs that class, not only could she have thrown out Disraeli, but she'd probably still be alive and kicking today."
"Hah!" said Barnes, blowing a thick cloud of smoke into my face.
I wouldn't quit. "Okay, she looks stuffy as hell, but she's really not. She's not at all stuffy in class, and I've driven her home a few times when I've had to go downtown, and she's really got a good head."
"Appearance to the contrary?" Ken asked.
"Yep," I said.
"Well, I dunno. She's sure quiet as hell around here," Hugh added.
"Speak of the devil… " Dave pointed to the door.
Susan had just come in, wearing the gray-striped tent and carrying her tray. She looked at us, her face registering surprise and a little concern when she-spotted me. She poured a cup of coffee, put it on her tray, and came over.
"Grab a seat, Miss Lawrence," Ken said, pulling out a chair for her. I noticed that he addressed her formally, rather than by her first name.
"Her name's Susan," I whispered to Ken.
"Would you call that Susan?" he whispered back.
She said hi to us all and sat down, sliding her tray onto the table. There was some awkward conversation. It was obvious that her presence had stilted talk among the men teachers. Why didn't she show them what a great conversationalist she was? How bright and witty and intelligent? But Hugh Barnes was right: she hardly said a word.
Susan ate her lunch, smoked a cigarette, and lifted her eyes to glance across the table at me from time to time. She never acknowledged that she knew me, except casually as one of her students.
"Say, Dick, what's this I hear about you and Mrs. Wiggins?" Hugh asked. "One of my students that's in the family-living class with you came in and told me this wild story. I laughed for an hour."
Family living was a course required for senior students. It was part of the "new" education, and concentrated on the birds and bees in general and simplistic terms for those dummies who* by some mischance had not yet learned. The emphasis was on successful marriage, money management, and interpersonal relationships between men and women, or "boys and girls" as they were called. Mrs. Wiggins was another venerable paragon of the faculty. She was almost at retirement age and carried about her the stiff demeanor of an old-school authoritarian, her back straight as a flagpole, her hair white and frizzy, and her complexion pale, with fine, blue veins prominent all over her face. I always had the feeling that if I even mentioned the word sex to her she would melt into a puddle on the floor out of embarrassment.
"Well," I said, "you all know Mrs. Wiggins, I mean, what a fine lady she is, and all that."
Everybody grinned but Susan.
"Well, this morning we were talking about premarital intercourse, or 'the evils of experience prior to marriage,' as Mrs. Wiggins put it, and she and I were having a running argument. I said that virginity wasn't the issue anymore, that when a relationship started between two people it was new, from scratch, and that what either of them had done in the past wasn't important, it was only their present, their 'now' that mattered. She said that a girl had to be a virgin or she simply couldn't live with herself, and that her husband would never respect her if she had 'prior experience' or 'gave in' before the wedding ceremony. She asked me how I would feel on my wedding night if I found out my wife wasn't 'pure' as she called it.
"And then it happened. It wasn't what I meant to say; it just came out wrong, because I never would hurt the old girl's feelings, but what I said was, 'I don't think I'd feel bad if my wife told me she wasn't a virgin. How did your husband feel when you told him?' "
The teachers broke into a roar of laughter, except Susan, who choked on her coffee but managed to keep a straight face.
"I didn't even realize what I'd said till I saw her turn bright purple. She began to cry and stomped out of the room when the class started to laugh, and I had to run out into the hall after her and apologize. I told her I hadn't meant to say that, that what I'd really meant was, would her husband have loved her any less if she hadn't been a virgin? Anyway, I finally got her calmed down, but she wouldn't return to the room for the rest of the period. There I was, standing out in the hall, patting her back and telling her what a nice lady she was, and of course I knew she was pure when she got married, and all the rest of it, and I kept thinking, what the hell am I doing here? This is absurd."
Ken put his arm around my shoulder. "Well, I hope she forgave you good, because once you get on her list you'll have a hell of a time getting off."
They all were still laughing but Susan, who kept dabbing at her lips with a napkin, though she had finished her lunch some time before and was only drinking coffee.
Driving home that afternoon, Susan said, "I didn't expect to see you in the TLR."
"I told you I'm a privileged character."
She laughed. "I believe you. That was some story about Mrs. Wiggins."
I glanced over at her. "It was all you could do to keep from breaking up. You even choked on your coffee when I got to the punch line, but you didn't laugh."
She remained silent.
"Why are you so different around the other teachers?" I asked. "If I told you that story now, you'd laugh your ass, I mean you'd laugh yourself silly."