Near the blackboard was Mike Dorni in his wheelchair, and there in his usual first-row first-seat was Lester Braun, who, Alice said, was the smartest in the group. Lester had learned easily what I had struggled over, but he came when he felt like it, or he stayed away to earn money waxing floors. I guess if he had cared at all—if it had been important to him as it was to me—they would have used him for this experiment. There were new faces, too, people I didn't know.
Finally, I got up the nerve to go in.
"It's Charlie!" said Mike, whirling his wheelchair around.
I waved to him.
Bernice, the pretty blonde with empty eyes, looked up and smiled dully. "Where ya been, Charlie? That's a nice suit."
The others who remembered me waved to me and I waved back. Suddenly, I could see by Alice's expression that she was annoyed.
"It's almost eight o'clock," she announced. "Time to put things away."
Each person had an assigned task, the putting away of chalk, erasers, papers, books, pencils, note paper, paints, and demonstration material. Each one knew his job and took pride in doing it well. They all started on their tasks except Bernice. She was staring at me.
"Why ain't Charlie been coming to school?" asked Bernice. "What's the matter, Charlie? Are you coming back?"
The others looked up at me. I looked to Alice, waiting for her to answer for me, and there was a long silence. What could I tell them that would not hurt them?
"This is just a visit," I said.
One of the girls started to giggle—Francine, whom Alice was always worried about. She had given birth to three children by the time she was eighteen, before her parents arranged for a hysterectomy. She wasn't pretty—not nearly as attractive as Bernice—but she had been an easy mark for dozens of men who bought her something pretty, or paid her way to the movies. She lived at a boarding house approved for outside work trainees by the Warren
State Home, and was permitted out in the evenings to come to the Center. Twice she hadn't shown up—picked up by men on the way to school—and now she was allowed out only with an escort.
"He talks like a big shot now," she giggled.
"All right," said Alice, breaking in sharply. "Class dismissed. I'll see you all tomorrow night at six."
"When they were gone, I could see by the way she was slamming her own things into her closet, that she was angry.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I was going to wait for you downstairs, and then I got curious about the old classroom. My alma mater. I just wanted to look through the window. And before I knew what I was doing I came in. What's bothering you?"
"Nothing—nothing's bothering me."
"Come on. Your anger is all out of proportion to what's happened. Something's on your mind."
She slammed down a book she was holding. "All right. You want to know? You're different. You've changed. And Im not talking about your I.Q. It's your attitude toward people—you're not the same kind of human being—"
"Oh, come on now! Don't—"
"Don't interrupt me!" The real anger in her voice pushed me back. "I mean it. There was something in you before. I don't know… a warmth, an openness, a kindness that made everyone like you and like to have you around. Now, with all your intelligence and knowledge, there are differences that—"
I couldn't let myself listen. "What did you expect? Did you think I'd remain a docile pup, wagging my tail and licking the foot that kicks me? Sure, all this has changed me and the way I think about myself. I no longer have to take the kind of crap that people have been handing me all my life."
"People have not been bad to you."
"What do you know about it? Listen, the best of them have been smug and patronizing—using me to make themselves superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron."
After I said it, I knew she was going to take it the wrong way.
"You put me in that category too, I suppose."
"Don't be absurd. You know damned well I—"
"Of course, in a sense, I guess you're right. Next to you I am rather dull-witted. Nowadays every time we see each other, after I leave you I go home with the miserable feeling that I'm slow and dense about everything. I review things I've said, and come up with all the bright and witty things I should have said, and I feel like kicking myself because I didn't mention them when we were together."
"That's a common experience."
"I find myself wanting to impress you in a way I never thought about doing before, but being with you has undermined my self-confidence. I question my motives now, about everything I do."
I tried to get her off the subject, but she kept coming back to it. "Look, I didn't come here to argue with you," I finally said. "Will you let me take you home? I need someone to talk to."
"So do I. But these days I can't talk to you. All I can do is listen and nod my head and pretend I understand all about cultural variants, and neo-Boulean mathematics, and post-symbolic logic, and I feel more and more stupid, and when you leave the apartment, I have to stare in the mirror and scream at myself: 'No, you're not growing duller every day! You're not losing your intelligence! You're not getting senile and dull-witted. It's Charlie exploding forward so quickly that it makes it appear as if you're slipping backwards.' I say that to myself, Charlie, but whenever we meet and you tell me something and look at me in that impatient way, I know you're laughing.
"And when you explain things to me, and I can't remember them, you think it's because I'm not interested and don't want to take the trouble. But you don't know how I torture myself when you're gone. You don't know the books I've struggled over, the lectures I've sat in on at Beekman, and yet whenever I talk about something, I see how impatient you are, as if it were all childish. I wanted you to be intelligent. I wanted to help you and share with you—and now you've shut me out of your life."
As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.
She was crying silently as we left the school, and I found myself without words. All during the ride on the bus I thought to myself how upside-down the situation had become. She was terrified of me. The ice had broken between us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea.
She was right in refusing to torture herself by being with me. We no longer had anything in common. Simple conversation had become strained. And all there was between us now was the embarrassed silence and unsatisfied longing in a darkened room.
"You're very serious," she said, breaking out of her own mood and looking up at me.
"About us."
"It shouldn't make you so serious. I don't want to upset you. You're going through a great trial." She was trying to smile.
"But you did. Only I don't know what to do about it."
On the way from the bus stop to her apartment, she said, "I'm not going to the convention with you. I called Professor Nemur this morning and told him. There will be a lot for you to do there. Interesting people—the excitement of the spotlight for a while. I don't want to be in the way—"
"Alice—"
"—and no matter what you say about it now, I know that's how I'm going to feel, so if you don't mind, I'll hang on to my splintering ego—thank you."
"But you're making more of this than it is. I'm sure if you'll just—"
"You know? You're sure?" She turned and glared at me on the front steps of her apartment building. "Oh, how insufferable you've become. How do you know what I feel? You take liberties with other people's minds. You can't tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel."