Making her disciples giggle and blush, at lunchtime flashing a paring knife in a swooping circular motion to indicate cas-tra-tion: know what that is? as certain eighth grade boys passed noisily by carrying cafeteria trays.
Boys rarely saw her. She’d learned to go invisible like a playing card turned sideways.
He lived — smugly, it seemed to some observers — inside an armor of irony. (Except when alone. Staring at images of famine, war, devastation he felt himself blinking hot tears from his eyes. He’d shocked himself and others crying uncontrollably at his father’s funeral in an Upper East Side synagogue the previous year.)
She had not cried in approximately four years. Since she’d fallen from a bicycle and cut a gash in her right knee requiring nine stitches.
He lived alone, in three sparely furnished rooms, in Riverview Heights, a condominium village on the Hudson River in North Tarrytown. She lived alone, except for the peripheral presence of her aging grandmother, in a few comfortably furnished rooms in the main wing of the Trahern estate at 83 Highgate Avenue; the rest of the thirty-room mansion had long been closed off for economy’s sake.
He had no idea where she lived, as he had but the vaguest idea of who she was. She knew where he lived, it was three miles from 83 Highgate Avenue. She’d bicycled past Riverview Heights more than once.
He drove a not-new metallic blue Honda CR-V, New York license TZ 6063. She knew he drove a not-new metallic blue Honda CR-V, New York license TZ 6063.
Actually he didn’t always think so well of himself. Actually she didn’t always think so well of herself.
He wished to think well of himself. He wished to think well of all of humanity. He did not want to think Homo sapiens is hopeless, let’s pull the plug. He wanted to think I can make a difference in others’ lives.
He’d been an idealist who had burnt out, crashed in his late twenties. These were worthy clichés. These were clichés he had earned. He had taught in Manhattan, Bronx, and Yonkers public schools through his mid-and late twenties and after an interim of recovery he had returned to Columbia University to upgrade his credentials with a master’s degree in computer science and he had returned to teaching for his old idealism yet clung to him like lint on one of his worn-at-the-elbow sweaters, one thing he knew he would never emulate his father in the pursuit of money, here in Skatskill-on-Hudson where he knew no one he could work part-time mostly helping kids with computers and he would be respected here or in any case his privacy would be respected, he wasn’t an ambitious private school teacher, wasn’t angling for a permanent job, in a few years he’d move on but for the present time he was contentedly employed, he had freedom to feed my rat as he called it.
Much of the time she did not think so well of herself. Secretly. Suicide fantasies are common to adolescents. Not a sign of mental illness so long as they remain fantasies.
He’d had such fantasies, too. Well into his twenties, in fact. He’d outgrown them now. That was what feeding my rat had done for Mikal Zallman.
Her suicide fantasies were cartoons, you could say. A plunge from the Tappan Zee Bridge/George Washington Bridge, footage on the 6 P.M. news. A blazing fireball on a rooftop. (Skatskill Day? It was the only roof she had access to.) If you swallowed like five, six Ecstasy pills your heart would explode (maybe). If you swallowed a dozen barbiturates you would fall asleep and then into a coma and never wake up (maybe). With drugs there was always the possibility of vomiting, waking up in an ER your stomach being pumped or waking up brain damaged. There were knives, razor blades. Bleeding into a bathtub, the warm water gushing.
Eve of her thirteenth birthday and she’d been feeling shitty and her new friend/mentor the Master of Eyes (in Alaska, unless it was Antarctica) advised her why hate yourself Jude it’s bor-ing. Better to hate those others who surround.
She never cried, though. Really really never cried.
Like Jude O’s tear ducts are dried out. Cool!
Ducts reminded her of pubes she had first encountered as a word in a chat room, she’d looked up in the dictionary seeing pubes was a nasty word for those nasty crinkly/kinky hairs that had started to sprout in a certain place, between her legs. And in her armpits where she refused to apply deodorant until Grandmother nagnagged.
Grandmother Trahern was half blind but her sense of smell was acute. Grandmother Trahern was skilled at nagnagnagging, you might say it was the old woman’s predominant skill in the eighth decade of her life.
Mr. Z! Maybe he’d smelled her underarms. She hoped he had not smelled her crotch.
Mr. Z. in computer lab making his way along the aisle answering kids’ questions most of them pretty elementary/dumb ass she’d have liked to catch his eye and exchange a knowing smirk but Mr. Z. never seemed to be looking toward her and then she was stricken with shyness, blood rushing into her face as he paused above her to examine the confusion on her screen and she heard herself mutter with childish bravado Guess I fucked up, Mr. Zallman, huh? wiping her nose on the edge of her hand beginning to giggle and there was sexy/cool Mr. Z. six inches from her not breaking into a smile even of playful reproach giving not the slightest hint he’d heard the forbidden F-word from an eighth grade girl’s innocent mouth.
In fact Mr. Z. had heard. Sure.
Never laugh, never encourage them. If they swear or use obscene or suggestive language.
And never touch them.
Or allow them to touch you.
The (subterranean) connection between them.
He had leaned over her, typed on her keyboard. Repaired the damage. Told her she was doing very well. Not to be discouraged! He didn’t seem to know her name but maybe that was just pretense, his sense of humor. Moving on to the next raised hand.
Still, she’d known there was the (subterranean) connection.
As she’d known, first glimpsing the Corn Maiden in the seventh grade corridor. Silky blond corn-tassel hair. Shy, frightened.
A new girl. Perfect.
One morning she came early to observe the Corn Maiden’s mother dropping her off at the curb. Good-looking woman with the same pale blond hair, smiling at the girl and hastily leaning over to kiskiss.
Some connections go through you like a laser ray.
Some connections, you just know.
Mr. Z. she’d sent an e-message you are a master mister z. Which was not like Jude O. to do because any message in cyberspace can never be erased. But Mr. Z. had not replied.
So easy to reply to a fucking e-message! But Mr. Z. had not.
Mr. Z. did not exchange a knowing smile/wink with her as you’d expect.
Ignored her!
Like he didn’t know which one of them she was.
Like he could confuse her with those others her inferiors.
And so something turned in her heart like a rusty key and she thought calmly, You will pay for this mister asshole Z and all your progeny.
Thought of calling the FBI reporting a suspected terrorist, Mr. Z. was dark like an Arab, and shifty-eyed. Though probably he was a Jew.
Afterward vaguely he would recall you are a master mister z but of course he’d deleted it. So easy to delete an e-message.
Afterward vaguely he would recall the squirmy girl at the computer with the frizz hair and glassy staring eyes, a startling smell as of unwashed flesh wafting from her (unusual at Skatskill Day as it was unusual in the affluent suburban village of Skatskill) he had not known at the time, this was January/February, was Jude Trahern. He had no homeroom students, he met with more than one hundred students sometimes within days, couldn’t keep track of them and had no interest in keeping track. Though a few days later he would come upon the girl in the company of a fattish friend, the two of them rummaging in a waste basket in the computer lab but he’d taken no special note of them as they’d hurried away embarrassed and giggling together as if he’d opened a door and seen them naked.