You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [44]
I imagined he’d call or invite me over. Sometimes I’d write when I was drunk. I’d offer to come over but he’d say no. He’d tell me it wasn’t a good time. I don’t know. Maybe he had a girlfriend or something.
Please, I wrote. Please.
He said, Marie it’s too dangerous. So I started sending sexual messages: I want you to fuck me. Then just as vulgar as I could come up with. I’d write and he’d respond. He’d always respond. Tell me what you want exactly. And that’s when I started to lie. I’d tell Ariel that I was seeing him all the time. I started showing her the messages. I’d write them in front of her and we’d wait for his answers. Sometimes she’d write pretending to be me: Tell me what you want to do. He’d tell me and there was none of his tenderness in those messages. None at all. And he still wouldn’t let me come over.
GILAD
I’d never read Shakespeare before his seminar. Before him I got by the way you do—CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, ClassicNotes. You read the chapter summaries, the analysis, you pretend. You don’t ever have to read the thing. Shakespeare always felt like too much work to me. But the way he talked, the way he moved around the room, the guy was either a fantastic actor or he believed what he was saying. You just don’t see that very often. Teachers in movies are always leaping onto tables and sacrificing their lives for their students and their love of literature but the truth is that you rarely, rarely take a class from a teacher who cares. It’s just unrealistic. How many people could walk into a classroom year after year and weep for “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? That’s why the ones who stay are so often some of the most depressing people you’ve ever met in your life. It has nothing to do with their age. They’ve stayed because of their disposition—bitter, bored, lacking in ambition, lonely, and mildly insane. With few exceptions, these are the people who are capable of staying in a school. This is what it takes to teach for half a life-time. The ones who care, who love the subjects, who love their students, who love, above all, teaching—they rarely hang around. Which is more or less what my mom told me in Senegal when Ms. Mariama lost her job.
“People think teachers are easily replaced,” she said. “But that’s only true of the bad ones.”
Mr. Silver was the first person I’d fallen in love with. Not that there was sexual desire. Or maybe there was. It’s hard to say. Any time you love someone that intensely, anytime you want to be loved that badly, sexual desire is always part of it. And when you’re seventeen, eighteen years old, what doesn’t have to do with sex? Not since Ms. Mariama had I felt anything for a teacher. I wanted everything for myself that he seemed to want for us—to live an involved life, to care deeply about something, anything, to feel the immediacy of time passing, to crave, to long. It didn’t feel like rhetoric then. I still don’t think it was. He believed it all, the whole thing.
When we began to study Hamlet that October I was excited about it. He’d asked us to read the entire play over the weekend. I liked that. It made me feel adult. It made me feel as if I could read Hamlet over a weekend. Sunday I sat in the sun in the Luxembourg Gardens in one of those green metal chairs with a thick scarf wrapped around my neck and the collar of my coat turned up. I read the entire thing through in one sitting. I took a break to eat a sandwich and then kept on going.
“Just go sit in a café and read the play,” he told us. “Have a coffee. Take a pen.”
He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal