You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [47]
And then the bell rang. Which is what often happened. He’d leave us with a question. The class would end and we’d file out wondering. We’d exchange knowing looks with one another. Even if we weren’t friends, we were bound together somehow. And those of us who’d fallen for him always returned ready and nervous, wanting so much for him to notice us. And afraid that he would.
* * *
The days got shorter as October came to an end. Sometimes I ate lunch with Lily when she was around. Otherwise, I ate alone and read whatever he told us to read. I ran cross-country and usually stayed after school to train. I made some friends. Or I met some people to talk to anyway. Mostly though I kept to myself. I rarely saw my father. In the evenings I ate dinner with my mom at the small table in the kitchen.
All I wanted was to live the life Silver wanted us to live.
By then we’d read Sartre, The Book of Job, and Hamlet. The days were cold and beautiful and I tried to pay attention to them. I tried to pay attention to everything. Above all else it’s what he seemed to want from us.
Waiting for the métro those mornings, I always hoped he’d see me. I dressed for him and stood with a book open, waiting. When I heard someone descending the steps onto the platform I’d furrow my brow as if immersed in my reading.
I saw him from time to time. He’d slip into a different car, or sit with his back to me. Those days I never had the courage to speak to him. Sometimes we’d walk from the métro to school together. I waited for him to ask me questions but he asked very little. He was warm. He smiled. Always said good morning.
“Good weekend?” he’d ask. “Doing O.K.?” He meant after what we’d seen together. But when I thought about that man dying in front of me I thought mostly of how it brought us to Au Petit Suisse. Put me there at a table with Silver. How he’d taken care of me. How I thought maybe I even took care of him. The event itself didn’t haunt me the way the school counselor thought it should. I’d been obligated to meet with her once a week.
During those walks with him from the métro, he’d sometimes ask about the reading: did I like it? Was it interesting to me? I gave generic answers while I searched for something intelligent and original—witty, spontaneous observations that would reveal my maturity, the wisdom beyond my years. They never came.
And then, as we entered the gates of the school, I’d lose him to the morning crush.
* * *
On November eighth he handed out copies of The Stranger.
From my notebook:
November 8, 2002
Stranger—read for the weekend.
Saturday—Place de la République—manif.
And then one of his handouts clipped and pasted onto the page:
From the NY Times—1968—John Weightman:
As a white African, he evolved a kind of solar paganism fraught with melancholy. “Nuptials” celebrates the union of the young man with the natural beauty of sun, landscape, and sea. “The Wrong Side and the Right Side” signifies that life, even when lived to the full in the ideal circumstances of the Mediterranean, has its undercurrent of sadness. “There is no love of life without despair about life” is one of the aphorisms coined by Camus to express this view. He means that even in moments of intense lyrical appreciation—for instance, when bathing in the summer sea with his girlfriend, like Meursault, the hero of The Stranger—he is conscious of some inherent tragedy in the universe.
That was a Friday. He read sections of the essays aloud to us. Ariel wrote across her stapled packet, “Are we still in elementary school?” She turned it and showed Aldo who grinned his moron grin, lank hair hiding his face.
But the rest of us listened. Even Colin had stopped smirking. Over the last month he had taken on an air of near-violent intensity. He spoke less and less, scratching away, paying careful attention. He hadn’t returned to class for a week after he’d walked out. And then one day he was back, ten minutes late. Silver said nothing, only nodded at him as he walked tentatively into the room. As the days passed he began to concentrate.