Dreaming.
TWO
Curtis Parks the Previous Fall
IF HE HAD REALLY believed the things he said he believed, he might have taken it for a sign. The past fall, in despair at the dull competence of his students, thinking of giving up teaching altogether, Curtis Parks had received an extraordinary paper from a dark, sullen-looking boy who when he came to class, which was rare, sat like a shadow in the last row. The paper, poorly typed, full of misspellings and crossings out, seemed to Parks astonishingly responsive to its subject: “Two Presidential Assassinations, Lincoln and Kennedy — The Murderer in the Mirror,” also in part the subject of his own unwritten study. At first he thought plagiarism, no student can be this good — the occasionally clumsy writing a means of disguise. But if stolen, where from? In preparing his own book on Booth and Lincoln, he had read, intrigued by the parallels, everything he could find dealing with the assassination of important men. (His four years of research down on 1,600 note cards.) And the student’s essay was amateurish in technique, too personal and insightful to have been written by a professional. It was more than likely the real thing. A discovery. A discovery of discoveries. He had shown it to his wife, who said — the kind of remark she was always making — “Why don’t you kill him so you can use it in your own book?”
It was as if all his years of teaching had converged to this moment. A rare gesture in his career, Parks invited the student to his office, holding the paper instead of returning it with the others in class. For the first time since the beginning of his days as a graduate student — nine years back, though in feeling a distant past — he felt that he might be after all some kind of teacher.
Steiner’s generation was, on reputation at least, more straightforward than his own, so he started out as straight-forwardly as he knew how. “This is a remarkably fine paper,” he told the stooped, dark-haired boy who sat stiffly in the wooden chair, head down, as if he were a prisoner of war. “I can’t tell you how much I admire it.”
The boy looked amused, his head turned away. “I didn’t plagiarize, if that’s what you think.”
Parks admitted that he had thought plagiarism initially, but that he was convinced, working on similar concerns himself, that the essay was an original. It was perhaps the most gifted student work he had seen in all his years of teaching.
Steiner said thank you, though his face, distrustful, as if he knew from prior experience that praise meant deceit, was saying something else. His look — Parks reading it — said, What do you want from me; what are you after, mister? and, You can’t know how smart I am. No one can.
Parks brought to bear all his charm, which women — some, his wife not among them — had told him was considerable. Uncharmed, charmless, Steiner gave nothing in return, answered in monosyllables, sometimes just nodded or shook his head. The idea just came to him, he said, out of the air, but now that he had written on it, it didn’t interest him anymore. He didn’t think the paper was too good. He was sorry about the messiness but that he had more important things to do than write papers.
“What, for example?”
“Nothing.” He jutted impassively from his chair like a pop art assemblage — the chair more real than the boy.
Parks took a deep breath, his impatience like a clock next to his ear, began again. The thing was to do with your life the kind of thing you did best. To fulfill in some sense your role, your calling. The titans of history, tyrants and saints, presidents and assassins, were, in fulfilling their destinies, enacting the deepest needs of self. (Steiner nodded.) The sin was not to do what you were meant to do.
“How can you not?”
“By not recognizing what it is.”
He smirked, looked frightened, as if some secret nerve had been touched by Parks’ remark.
With a sense of being off the ground, in unrecognizable danger, Parks told his student that he thought he had the makings of a gifted historian. Steiner was impassive. He’d rather make history than write it, he said. Besides, he was a math major.
“Are you a first-rate mathematician?”
He shrugged. “Good enough.”
“Why do something you’re second-rate at?” Parks rose and fell to eloquence. Steiner had the possibility, even if small, of being among the handful of first-rate historians who were poets (no less at least than poets), the conscience of a time, seismographs of their race — the Bible, in fact, a work of history.
The student smiled darkly. When relaxed he was not without charm — a handsome boy in his dark way. “The Bible’s already been written,” he said.
He felt like an officer, leading a charge, who discovers inside enemy lines that his troops are no longer behind him. With faint heart, he went on: “I don’t want to pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do, Steiner. I’m not going to put any pressure on you. You can continue in the class you’re now in, which may be what you want to do. My idea is to give you a private class instead. A tutorial. Does that interest you? We could try it for a few weeks and see how it works. It should be useful whether you go on in history or not.”
Steiner looked around the office as if it had been offered for sale. “Do you have more to teach me?”
“If you have more to learn,” Parks said.
They agreed on a time for their next meeting — the coming Friday at three — and Steiner, leaving the paper behind, made his escape.
Before leaving that night, Parks reread the essay and, though there was no doubt of its accomplishment, it seemed less remarkable than before. It struck him that it was something he himself might have written if he were less well-trained, less knowing. It was the complexity of things — a vision that met itself in paradox at every turn — that stood in his way.