2
Some months before the assistant asked me to the dance, the associate chair called me into his office. This was a man whose face held the assurance of the living: he’d hold up a good long while yet.
“Do you have room in any of your classes?” he said.
“No,” I said, “I don’t have any room. I certainly don’t have room two weeks into the semester.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mary, because we’ve got this kid here.” He pointed to a kid in the corner whom I hadn’t noticed yet. A thin boy who clutched several plastic grocery bags to his chest.
“My name’s not Mary,” I said.
“It’s not?”
“He missed two weeks,” I said. “Forget it.”
“He’s here on a visa.”
“Does he speak any English?” I said.
We looked at him. He looked back at us as if he might startle himself off his chair.
“Take the kid,” the associate chair said.
—
Once a visa student in 99 wrote me a poem about how much I was helping him improve his grammar. One of the lines of the poem went:
Thou laid really strong excellent basement.
—
The kid was a worse-than-average 99 student. He couldn’t write a sentence. He turned in his first jumbled essay and I thought: There is no way this kid is going to pass. And I thought: What a bother for him to fly all the way across the world to sit in my class and then to fly back home. And by the time I finished those two thoughts he was already shifting to the back of my mind, he was already taking a seat amid the blur of other students, whose names I would never know, whose faces I’d forget, and whose passing or failing grades were like changes in the air temperature, were nothing to do with me.
Every semester I went through this. I’d had the job two years. I had local city kids and a few foreign students, all of them ready for certain destruction. Some brought me fruit baskets. Some tried to bribe me into passing them. One threatened me, told me his “alliances” would look me up one day.
By the third week of the semester what this kid was to me was nothing to do with me.
—
By accident I heard him play. I was walking down the hallway toward another tedious day and a strange sound stopped me. Strands of violin and piano were coming from behind a door. I looked in.
Did I mention that this run-down school, this flat barrel-bottom place was run between the walls of a building designed by a very famous architect? Yes it was. It had been the high point of the architect’s career. It was while making this building that the architect had come up with his very best ideas about designing buildings and had summed these ideas up in a short catchy sentence that he said aloud and that was later written into books that were read all over the world and was now familiar even to the layperson. After saying this catchy sentence, the architect succumbed to his drinking problem and never straightened himself out and eventually died bankrupt and alone, but this building still stood, and now somehow these people had gotten their hands on the place and were ruining it as fast as they could. Water damage, broken tiles, missing doorknobs, and worst of all, modern rehab: linoleum floors, drop ceilings, paint over wood. Catastrophe was setting in, but this one room had been preserved — perhaps because the public still encountered it on festive holiday occasions. The architect’s one mistake had been to put this room on the seventh floor. The public had to be ushered in past the wreckage to reach it, up the new fake-wood-paneled elevators, over the colorless hallway carpet that had been nailed down there. But once inside, an auditorium opened up overhead and it was perfect. It marked that thin line of one artistic movement shifting into another, one great artist at his best.
—
On the stage the kid from my class was on the piano. Another student was playing the violin. The kid kept lifting one hand, keeping the left hand going and conducting the violin with his melody hand. Then the violin stopped and the kid continued to play and the sound I was hearing was formal and sad and peculiar. I myself had studied piano for years. I’d wanted to be a concert pianist in high school, which is its own separate bad joke now, but I knew this guy was super good. The piece had a density and a mathematical oddness, an originality. He stopped playing and looked up. I ducked out the door.
—
I stood in the hallway, thinking. How had such a talented kid wound up at our school? The school was no great music school. There were better music schools up the street, not to mention all over the country and the world.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe for a moment, like my lungs were being pressed. I saw the emotional deadness in me and I saw it lift. It was temporarily gone.
—
Another paper of his landed in the pile. I couldn’t understand any of it. Something about cars. The color of cars. Maybe about the color of cars. Something about the advent of America, of bank machines and microwave sandwiches. That afternoon he sat in the back of the class, wrote down whatever was going up on the board. I told him to talk to me at the end of the hour. He came and stood in front of me, his plastic bags in his hands at his sides. He was the same height as me, and he had sharp, dark good looks, though his nervousness shaded them. “Yes, miss?” he said.
“Why don’t you explain to me what you’re trying to say here,” I said. I had his paper in my hand, and he lifted his eyebrows over it.
“Is it not right?” he said.
I dropped the paper on the desk. “This writing is horrendous,” I said. “What are you doing at this school? Didn’t you apply anywhere else? Proper music schools?”
He said nothing.
Suddenly I was overwhelmed. “Well?” I said. “Well?”
The room was washed out that day. Even the fluorescents were dim.
“You’re never going to pass this class,” I said.
He turned and walked toward the door.
“I heard you in the auditorium,” I said, shaking. “I saw you.”
He stopped at the door and looked back at me.
—
You think it’s so easy doing what’s right?
—
Once I had a student from Mexico who’d crossed the Rio Grande over and over and always been caught. At one point he’d been lost for three days and nights, alone in the Texas desert. He’d thought it was the end of him for sure. At last he found a road and thought, My God, I am saved. The first car that came down the road was border patrol. He was back in Mexico in an hour. Another time he had tried to cross and had been sent back and had been so frustrated that he decided to use all his money and fly to Canada that same day, which he did. I don’t know why he didn’t just stay in Canada. I never asked him that. What’s so bad about Canada? But he had that American addiction, I guess. He tried to cross at Niagara Falls, had been caught again, and was sent back again — so two times from two sides of the country in thirty-nine hours. Well, he’d made it to the U.S. at last and the only reason he wanted to be here, he said, was to get an education (what, they don’t have schools in Mexico? I’d said, and he’d been annoyed). Here in the U.S. he’d gotten fake papers, he told me. He’d gotten a job with those papers, was working under a fake name. The job paid for him to go to college, so he was getting a degree under a fake name and would have to give up his identity forever, but he didn’t care. If he didn’t pass the class, the college would make him leave and the job wouldn’t pay for school anymore.
He didn’t pass.
Frankly I knew it didn’t matter if he passed or not, because I knew he wouldn’t live for long. I had no idea how he would die but I knew.