Twenty-six years ago, he called from Paris, from a phone booth he’d hot-wired
for long distance at no charge. Last summer, it was an email bearing the
heading, “Out of the Blue.” It had been almost as long as that stolen phone
call since I’d last heard from him.
I never saw him again once he left for Paris. But he did call—twice—until the
French phone company cut him off. And he did write, a letter or two, one
about wanting to make love to me on his windowsill with the amazing rooftop
view.
The email comes to my campus address, the one that anyone even remotely
curious could Google with ease. The tone is friendly, even polite, like that of a
distant friend with whom one has lost touch, not by design but by default. He
offers some details about himself, says he heard from a former teacher of ours
that I am teaching creative writing. He’s married to a kindergarten teacher
(which I knew), has a teenaged daughter (which I didn’t know but am not
surprised to learn), lives in Evanston in an old red brick house with a white
dog.
I check out his website. It’s the same face, only without the wild expression of
the one in my high school yearbook, that crazed-looking face that, a few years
later took Indiana reservoir curves at high speeds and dove into its dark
waters during a full moon. It’s a mellower, more peaceful face, the kind of face
that won’t scare off business for his freelance writing work. Age has been kind
to him. I notice, though, that in a separate photo his white dog still mugs a
salacious grin.
I’d heard he’d published a novel, though I never saw it on the shelves. But at
the bottom of his email is a website for downloading an e-version of his book.
He’d written in my yearbook the year I graduated and he left for graduate
school, “You’ll probably end up a better writer than I. At least I can say I knew
you when.”
I am just curious enough to write him back. I respond in kind about the big,
brown-shingled house from 1929 that I share with my poet husband and my
beagle with the soulful eyes.
*
High school graduation is a month away when I tag along with some of the stage
crew guys to visit him in Lombard, where he lives in his grandfather’s house. He
shows our entourage inside the house, dark and gloomy, solidly wooden in the
Germanic style of my cabinet maker forebears.
“Whipping Post” is blasting on a stereo with seriously large speakers. The stage
crew guys are duly impressed by the sound equipment while I am stirred by Gregg
Allman’s larger-than-life vocals. The guys pass the album cover back and forth,
noting the tribute to the band’s roadies on the album’s flip side. They are like his
roadies, having traveled an hour west just to return sound equipment they had
previously hauled for one of his theater productions.
Walking back down the gravel drive to the car, he and I chit chat about our next
moves as the stage crew guys pile inside an old Falcon. He is going to graduate
school in southern Indiana to study creative writing. The gravel under my feet, the
grape leaves trellised against the wide hips of his grandfather’s house, the
flowering bushes and generous front porch transport me to a familiar place, a deja-
vu that is also prescient of what is to come. I reach out for one of the grape
leaves, twirl its sturdy stem, and risk a small smile back over my shoulder. Maybe
I’ll see you there, I say. Knowing, with that gesture, in that place we’ve both
known before, that we will, of course, meet again, and again, and again. The leaf,
the twirl, the knowing smile. On the way home, one of the stage crew guys sitting
in the back seat kisses me, but I am still twirling that leaf, smiling that smile, as if
I have already lived the life that is yet to come.
*
I met him in high school, creative writing class. It wasn’t my first class in that
subject, but it was the first one where I could imagine writing as my life’s work.
In that class, we wrote journals. We watched surrealist movies such as Un
Chien andalou, replete with a razor-slashed eyeball and ants like sinister armies
stalking from an open palm. We did writing exercises; we read out loud. He
turned me on to Anais Nin and Henry Miller. He said he taped words that he
liked to his wall, unusual words like fritillary. He was also an actor and director,
in charge of stage crew for school productions but also director of his own
shows.
Word had it that he was dating the leading lady in his fall show, a cheerleader
who aspired to be the next Melissa Manchester. “Dating” wasn’t the word for
it, though. Two students was dating. A teacher and a student was something
else.
He read my journals for class and made brief notes in the margins, encouraging
me to keep writing. After he’d read a few weeks’ entries, he asked me to stay
after class one day, then offered to tutor me privately. Together, we would
read Nin and Miller, Durrell, Artaud, and all the other writers mingling in that pre-
Hilter Parisian café scene.
When I stopped by his classroom one afternoon, the cheerleader was there,
and they were laughing, leaning into each other, like they shared some secret.
Later, when he asked me why I had left, I said I felt like I was inside a
boudoir. He laughed, that crazy howl that was his trademark. I always
wondered if that was his real laugh or if he was acting; it seemed too big to be
real. After I turned him down, claiming I was too busy with speech team and
the school newspaper and my AP English class to take the time for tutoring,
and after he tried to persuade me to rethink my priorities, I started to fantasize
about him, about him and the cheerleader, about him and me and an
opportunity that I could not put into words.
The rumors about him and the cheerleader continued into the spring. She
played Lola in the annual musical, “Damn Yankees.” I shared the role of
reporter Gloria Thorpe with another girl until the cheerleader came down with
inflamed vocal chords two weeks before the show, and I was asked to take
over her role. I’d never sung in front of anyone before, and although I had
done bit parts in other shows, I’d never played a lead. She wrote me a
handwritten note, encouraging me to act like a cat onstage, to help me get into
Lola. I hated her for writing me. It was the kind of advice he’d have given, had
I let him. I never answered her. I was furious with him but instead turned my
scorn on her.
He, on the other hand, was all the more attractive for being so outrageously,
intensely, and inappropriately involved with a high school student (if the rumors
were, in fact, correct—I never did ask him). I wanted what she wanted. I
wanted to be noticed, admired, talented, a star. Other girls in school were
rumored to have done the same as her, slept with male teachers for reasons I
was only just beginning to understand.
I never acted again. I never sang again. But I kept writing--in my journal,
stories and poems. I read the writers he wanted me to read, and the writing
of their friends and lovers, reading my way into other worlds more passionate
and stormy than anything I alone had ever imagined.
next page
for long distance at no charge. Last summer, it was an email bearing the
heading, “Out of the Blue.” It had been almost as long as that stolen phone
call since I’d last heard from him.
I never saw him again once he left for Paris. But he did call—twice—until the
French phone company cut him off. And he did write, a letter or two, one
about wanting to make love to me on his windowsill with the amazing rooftop
view.
The email comes to my campus address, the one that anyone even remotely
curious could Google with ease. The tone is friendly, even polite, like that of a
distant friend with whom one has lost touch, not by design but by default. He
offers some details about himself, says he heard from a former teacher of ours
that I am teaching creative writing. He’s married to a kindergarten teacher
(which I knew), has a teenaged daughter (which I didn’t know but am not
surprised to learn), lives in Evanston in an old red brick house with a white
dog.
I check out his website. It’s the same face, only without the wild expression of
the one in my high school yearbook, that crazed-looking face that, a few years
later took Indiana reservoir curves at high speeds and dove into its dark
waters during a full moon. It’s a mellower, more peaceful face, the kind of face
that won’t scare off business for his freelance writing work. Age has been kind
to him. I notice, though, that in a separate photo his white dog still mugs a
salacious grin.
I’d heard he’d published a novel, though I never saw it on the shelves. But at
the bottom of his email is a website for downloading an e-version of his book.
He’d written in my yearbook the year I graduated and he left for graduate
school, “You’ll probably end up a better writer than I. At least I can say I knew
you when.”
I am just curious enough to write him back. I respond in kind about the big,
brown-shingled house from 1929 that I share with my poet husband and my
beagle with the soulful eyes.
*
High school graduation is a month away when I tag along with some of the stage
crew guys to visit him in Lombard, where he lives in his grandfather’s house. He
shows our entourage inside the house, dark and gloomy, solidly wooden in the
Germanic style of my cabinet maker forebears.
“Whipping Post” is blasting on a stereo with seriously large speakers. The stage
crew guys are duly impressed by the sound equipment while I am stirred by Gregg
Allman’s larger-than-life vocals. The guys pass the album cover back and forth,
noting the tribute to the band’s roadies on the album’s flip side. They are like his
roadies, having traveled an hour west just to return sound equipment they had
previously hauled for one of his theater productions.
Walking back down the gravel drive to the car, he and I chit chat about our next
moves as the stage crew guys pile inside an old Falcon. He is going to graduate
school in southern Indiana to study creative writing. The gravel under my feet, the
grape leaves trellised against the wide hips of his grandfather’s house, the
flowering bushes and generous front porch transport me to a familiar place, a deja-
vu that is also prescient of what is to come. I reach out for one of the grape
leaves, twirl its sturdy stem, and risk a small smile back over my shoulder. Maybe
I’ll see you there, I say. Knowing, with that gesture, in that place we’ve both
known before, that we will, of course, meet again, and again, and again. The leaf,
the twirl, the knowing smile. On the way home, one of the stage crew guys sitting
in the back seat kisses me, but I am still twirling that leaf, smiling that smile, as if
I have already lived the life that is yet to come.
*
I met him in high school, creative writing class. It wasn’t my first class in that
subject, but it was the first one where I could imagine writing as my life’s work.
In that class, we wrote journals. We watched surrealist movies such as Un
Chien andalou, replete with a razor-slashed eyeball and ants like sinister armies
stalking from an open palm. We did writing exercises; we read out loud. He
turned me on to Anais Nin and Henry Miller. He said he taped words that he
liked to his wall, unusual words like fritillary. He was also an actor and director,
in charge of stage crew for school productions but also director of his own
shows.
Word had it that he was dating the leading lady in his fall show, a cheerleader
who aspired to be the next Melissa Manchester. “Dating” wasn’t the word for
it, though. Two students was dating. A teacher and a student was something
else.
He read my journals for class and made brief notes in the margins, encouraging
me to keep writing. After he’d read a few weeks’ entries, he asked me to stay
after class one day, then offered to tutor me privately. Together, we would
read Nin and Miller, Durrell, Artaud, and all the other writers mingling in that pre-
Hilter Parisian café scene.
When I stopped by his classroom one afternoon, the cheerleader was there,
and they were laughing, leaning into each other, like they shared some secret.
Later, when he asked me why I had left, I said I felt like I was inside a
boudoir. He laughed, that crazy howl that was his trademark. I always
wondered if that was his real laugh or if he was acting; it seemed too big to be
real. After I turned him down, claiming I was too busy with speech team and
the school newspaper and my AP English class to take the time for tutoring,
and after he tried to persuade me to rethink my priorities, I started to fantasize
about him, about him and the cheerleader, about him and me and an
opportunity that I could not put into words.
The rumors about him and the cheerleader continued into the spring. She
played Lola in the annual musical, “Damn Yankees.” I shared the role of
reporter Gloria Thorpe with another girl until the cheerleader came down with
inflamed vocal chords two weeks before the show, and I was asked to take
over her role. I’d never sung in front of anyone before, and although I had
done bit parts in other shows, I’d never played a lead. She wrote me a
handwritten note, encouraging me to act like a cat onstage, to help me get into
Lola. I hated her for writing me. It was the kind of advice he’d have given, had
I let him. I never answered her. I was furious with him but instead turned my
scorn on her.
He, on the other hand, was all the more attractive for being so outrageously,
intensely, and inappropriately involved with a high school student (if the rumors
were, in fact, correct—I never did ask him). I wanted what she wanted. I
wanted to be noticed, admired, talented, a star. Other girls in school were
rumored to have done the same as her, slept with male teachers for reasons I
was only just beginning to understand.
I never acted again. I never sang again. But I kept writing--in my journal,
stories and poems. I read the writers he wanted me to read, and the writing
of their friends and lovers, reading my way into other worlds more passionate
and stormy than anything I alone had ever imagined.
next page
r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal
winter 2008 literary non-fiction
out of the blue by mary ann cain
winter 2008 literary non-fiction
out of the blue by mary ann cain
