Pug Hill - Alison Pace [67]
“Lindsay,” he says, and I relax ever so slightly. Beth Anne ushers Lawrence and Lindsay out into the hall, and the rest of us stare at the floor, and you can almost feel the way everyone is focusing on it now, so intently, much more so than before.
Beth Anne comes back and a few minutes later, Lindsay walks serenely in. After a moment, Lawrence enters the room, and he takes it, too. He perches on the edge of the desk and attempts to maneuver himself so his elbow is bent and his chin is resting in his hand. The angles don’t quite work because of the way he’s perched on the desk, and after a few moments he sits up straight. He tosses his head as if he were shaking a long mane about him, and once again, Takes the Room.
“I’m going to read a little poem I wrote myself,” he tells us as he hooks on the microphone, then spreads his hands out wide to the side again, less jazz hands this time, and more open and welcoming gesture.
“I once saw a little birdie,” he begins.
“A flirty birdie that flew right into a puddle and got all dirty.”
Lawrence pauses, staring blankly into the video camera, for what seems to me like a very long time, and then looks over at Beth Anne, blinking several times very quickly, and asks, “Can I start again?”
“Certainly,” says Beth Anne, and then to all of us, “Class, never be afraid to ask if you’d like to start again.”
“I once saw a little birdie,” Lawrence begins again, and continues speaking confidently all the way through to the end. Except for the actual poem, of course, I think he does excellently.
Afterwards, when Beth Anne asks him, he tells us all that his anxiety level was a five.
Lindsay chooses Lawrence as her partner, and that makes sense to me, and I think how I will not know him any longer as Most-Likely-Gay-Even-Though-He-Wears-A-Wedding-Band-and-Talks-About-His-Wife-Lawrence but from now on only as Very-Good-At-Public-Speaking-Lawrence. Strangely, I feel like I need to take a moment to say goodbye to Most-Likely-Gay-Even-Though-He-Wears-A-Wedding-Band-and-Talks-About-His-Wife-Lawrence, and so, silently, I do.
After another round of exiting, and waiting, and staring at the floor, and looking back up, and watching everyone file back into the room; Lindsay walks slowly in, and up to the front of the room. She seems slightly less meek, actually rather calm, cool, and collected. Her hands don’t even shake as she attaches the lavaliere to the collar of her jacket. She takes a few steps forward from the desk, and clasps her hand behind her back. Her feet are planted firmly as she looks around and Takes the Room in a way that makes me almost understand why rooms should be taken. And then she runs right out of it.
“Okay,” Beth Anne says, walking to the front of the class, to where Lindsay, so calm, so cool, so collected, and so apparently none of those things at all, had just been standing. “We’ll just give Lindsay a moment, see if she comes back.
“Sometimes, class,” she adds on, “people just need a moment.”
I need a moment, I think. The chain-smoking, moody-black-vintage-overcoat-wearing part of my inner self—the one I try my best not to listen to—is back. She tells me I need a lot more than that.
I stare at Lindsay’s beautiful Marc Jacobs purse and her notebook, over there on her chair-desk, and I wonder if she’s somewhere in the building—in the bathroom throwing up, or in the stairwell desperately practicing The Lion over and over again in the hope that somehow, some way, it might help. Or is she out on the street, having decided that her purse and her notebook are not nearly as high on her priority list as is never having to come back into this room again?
When it’s clear that Lindsay isn’t coming back, Beth Anne turns to Amy. Amy picks Alec as her coach and trudges out the door. It begins to dawn on me that while going last seemed so appealing in the beginning, in the end, it’s more than a little anxiety-provoking. In the end, it seems actually so much worse than having gone already; because then at least the whole thing would be over with.