Headed back to school after one of these donations, it occurred to me that if whoring is selling yourself for money, then I was a whore. Writing English essays and sociology term papers was also whoring. I had been raised mainstream Methodist, I had a clear fix on right and wrong, but there it was: I had become a whore, only peddling my blood and writing skills instead of my ass.
That realization raised questions of morality that still engage me to this day. It’s a rubbery concept, isn’t it? Uniquely stretchable. But if you stretch anything too far, it will tear. Nowadays I give my blood instead of selling it, but it occurred to me then and still seems true to me now: under the right circumstances, anyone might sell anything.
And live to regret it.
Morality
I
Chad knew something was up as soon as he walked in. Nora was home already. Her hours were from eleven to five, six days a week. The way it usually worked, he got home from school at four and had dinner on when she came in around six.
She was sitting on the fire escape, where he went to smoke, and she had some paperwork in her hands. He looked at the refrigerator and saw that the email printout was gone from beneath the magnet that had been holding it in place for almost four months.
‘Hey, you,’ she said. ‘Come on out here.’ She paused. ‘Bring your butts, if you want.’
Chad was down to just a pack a week, but that didn’t make her like his habit any better. The health issue was part of it, but the expense was an even bigger part. Every cigarette meant forty cents up in smoke.
He didn’t like smoking around her, even outside, but he got the current pack out of the drawer under the dish drainer and put it in his pocket. There was something about her solemn face that suggested he might want them.
He climbed out the window and sat down beside her. She had changed into jeans and one of her old blouses, so she had been home for awhile. Stranger and stranger.
They looked out over their little bit of the city for awhile without speaking. He kissed her and she smiled in an absent way. She had the agent’s email; she also had the file folder with THE RED AND THE BLACK written on it in big capitals. His little joke, but not so funny. The file contained their financial stuff – bank and credit card statements, utility bills, insurance premiums – and the bottom line was red, not black. It was an American story these days, he supposed. There just wasn’t enough. Two years ago they’d talked about having a kid. They didn’t now. What they talked about now was getting out from under and maybe enough ahead to leave the city without a bunch of creditors snapping at their heels. Move north to New England. But not yet. At least here they were working.
‘How was school?’ she asked.
‘Fine.’
Actually, the job was a plum. But after Anita Biderman got back from maternity leave, who knew? Probably not another job at PS 321. He was high on the list of subs, but that didn’t mean anything if the regular teaching roster was all present and accounted for.
‘You’re home early,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me Winnie died.’
She looked startled, then smiled again. But they had been together for ten years, married for the last six, and Chad had seen that smile before. It meant trouble.
‘Nora?’
‘He sent me home early. To think. I’ve got a lot to think about. I’m …’ She shook her head.
He took her by the shoulder and turned her to him. ‘You’re what? Is everything okay with Winnie?’
‘That’s a good question. Go on, light up. Smoking lamp’s lit.’
‘Tell me what’s going on.’
She had been cut from the staff of Congress Memorial Hospital two years ago during a ‘reorganization.’ Luckily for the Chad-and-Nora Corporation, she had landed on her feet. Getting the home nursing job had been something of a coup: one patient, a retired minister recovering from a stroke, thirty-six hours a week, very decent wages. She made more than he did, and by a good bit. The two incomes were almost enough to live on. At least until Anita Biderman came back.
‘First, let’s talk about this.’ She held up the agent’s email. ‘How sure are you?’
‘What, that I can do the work? Pretty sure. Almost positive. I mean, if I had the time. About the rest …’ He shrugged. ‘It’s right there in black and white. No guarantees.’
With the hiring freeze currently in effect in the city’s schools, subbing was the best Chad could do. He was on every list in the system, but there was no full-time position teaching fourth or fifth grade in his immediate future. Nor would the money be much better even if such a position opened up – just more reliable. As a sub, he sometimes spent weeks on the bench.
For awhile two years ago, the lay-off had been three months, and they almost lost the apartment. That was when the trouble with the credit cards had started.
Out of desperation and a need to fill up the empty hours when Nora was tending to the Reverend Winston, Chad had started a book he called Living with the Animals: The Life of a Substitute Teacher in Four City Schools. Words did not come easily to him, and on some days they did not come at all, but by the time he was called in to St Saviour to teach second grade (Mr Cardelli had broken a leg in a car accident), he had finished three chapters. Nora received the pages with a troubled smile. No woman wants the job of telling the man in her life that he’s been wasting his time.
He hadn’t been. The stories he told of the substitute teaching life were sweet, funny, and often moving – much more interesting than anything she’d heard over dinner or while they were lying in bed together.
Most of his query letters to agents weren’t answered. A few were courteous enough to drop him a ‘sorry, but my plate’s full’ note. He finally found one who would at least look at the eighty pages he had managed to wring out of his old and limping Dell laptop.
The agent’s name had a circus-y feeclass="underline" Edward Ringling. His response to Chad’s pages was long on praise and short on promise. ‘I might be able to get you a book contract based on this and an outline of the rest,’ Ringling had written, ‘but it would be a very small contract, likely a good deal less than you currently make as a teacher, and you might find yourself financially worse off than you are now – insane, I know, but today’s market is pretty sick.
‘What I suggest is that you finish another seven or eight chapters, possibly even the whole book. Then I might be able to take it to auction and get you a much better deal.’
It made sense, Chad supposed, if you were overseeing the literary world from a comfy office in Manhattan. Not so much if you were hopscotching all over the boroughs, teaching a week here and three days there, trying to keep ahead of the bills. Ringling’s letter had come in May. Now it was September, and although Chad had had a relatively good summer teaching (God bless the dummies, he sometimes thought), he hadn’t added a single page to the manuscript. It wasn’t laziness; teaching, even when it was just subbing, was like having a pair of jumper cables attached to some critical part of your brain. It was good that the kids could draw power from that part, but there was precious little left over. Many nights the most creative thing of which he found himself capable was reading a few chapters of the latest Linwood Barclay.
That might change if he spent another two or three months without work … except a few months of living on just his wife’s salary would tip them over. Nor was anxiety helpful when it came to literary endeavors.
‘How long would it take to finish it?’ Nora asked. ‘If you were writing full-time?’
He drew out his cigarettes and lit one. He felt a strong urge to give an over-optimistic answer, but overcame it. He had no idea what was going on with her, but she deserved the truth.