Plan B for the Middle Class Read online

  PLAN B FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS

  FOR ELAINE

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I

  HARTWELL

  DeRAY

  BLAZO

  II

  ON THE U.S.S. FORTITUDE

  FORT BRAGG

  SUNNY BILLY DAY

  THE TABLECLOTH OF TURIN

  A KIND OF FLYING

  III

  THE GOLF CENTER AT TEN-ACRES

  THE SUMMER OF VINTAGE CLOTHING

  PLAN B FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS

  ALSO BY RON CARLSON

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The stories in this collection first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications:

  Gentlemen’s Quarterly, “DeRay,” “Sunny Billy Day”

  Harper’s, “The Summer of Vintage Clothing”

  McCall’s, “A Kind of Flying”

  The New Virginia Review, “Plan B for the Middle Class” (as “Plan B”)

  The New Yorker, “On the U.S.S. Fortitude”

  Playboy, “Hartwell”

  Ploughshares, “Blazo”

  The Santa Monica Review, “Fort Bragg”

  Story, “The Tablecloth of Turin”

  Weber Studies, “The Golf Center at Ten-Acres”

  “A Kind of Flying” also appeared in The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road, edited by Susan Stamberg and George Garrett.

  “On the U.S.S. Fortitude” was anthologized in Voices Louder than Words, A Second Collection, edited by William Share; and in The Practical English Handbook, Ninth Edition, edited by Watkins and Dillingham.

  Thanks also to the Sundance Institute for a week with “Blazo.”

  I

  HARTWELL

  This is about Hartwell, who is nothing like me. I have sometimes told stories about people, men and sometimes a woman, who were like me, weak or strong in some way that I am or they shared my taste for classical music or fine coffee, but Hartwell was not like me in any way. I’m just going to tell his story, a story about a man I knew, a man not like me, just some other man.

  Hartwell just didn’t get it. For years he existed, as the saying goes, out of it. Let’s say he wasn’t alert to nuance, and then let’s go ahead and say he wasn’t alert to blatancy either. He was alert to the Victorian poets and all of their nuances, but he couldn’t tell you if it was raining. This went way back to when he was in college at the University of Michigan and everybody was preparing for law school taking just enough history, political science, things like that, but Hartwell majored in English, narrowing that to the Victorians, which could lead only to one thing: graduate school. As a graduate student, he was a sweet guy with a spiral tuft of light hair that rose off his head like fire, who lived alone in a room he took off campus and who read his books, diligently and with pleasure, and ate a steady diet of the kind of food eaten with ease while reading, primarily candy.

  When I met him, he had become a sweet, round man, an associate professor of English, who taught Browning and Tennyson, etc., etc., and who brought to our campus that fall years ago his wife, Melissa, a handsome woman with broad shoulders and shiny dark hair cut in a pixie shell.

  I say “our campus” because I too teach, but Hartwell and I couldn’t be more different in that regard. I know what’s going on around me. I teach rhetoric and I parse my students as well as any paragraph. My antennae are out. I can smell an ironic smirk in the back row, detect an unprepared student in the first five minutes of class, feel from the way the students file out of class what they think of me. Hartwell drifts into his classroom, nose in a book, shirt misbuttoned, and reads and lectures until well after the bell has rung and half the students have departed. He doesn’t know their names or how many there are. He can’t hear them making fun of him when they do it to his face while handing in a late paper, whining his name into five sarcastic syllables, Pro-fess-or Hart-well, and smiling a smile so fake and sugary as to make any of us avert our eyes. He is oblivious.

  This was apparent to me the first time I met him with Melissa at the faculty party that fall. The effect of seeing them standing together in the dean’s backyard was shocking. Anyone could see it: they wouldn’t last the year. As I said, she was attractive, but as she scanned her husband’s colleagues that evening it was her eyes, her predatory eyes, that made it clear. Poor old Hartwell stood beside her, his hair afloat, his smile benign and vacant, an expression he’d learned from years alone with books.

  Melissa shopped around for a while, and by midterm she was seeing our Twentieth-Century Drama professor, a young guy who had a red mustache and played handball. It took Hartwell the entire year to find out about the affair and then all of summer session to decide what it meant. Even then, even after he’d talked to Melissa and she to him and he’d moved out of the little house they were buying near the college, even then he didn’t really wake up. The students were more sarcastic to him now that he was a cuckold, a word they learn as sophomores and then overuse for a year. Watching that was hard on me, those sunny young faces filing into his office with their million excuses for not being present or prepared, saying things that if I heard them in my office would win them an audience with the dean. Things I wouldn’t take.

  I, however, am not like Hartwell. There isn’t a callow hair on my head. I am alert. I am perspicacious. I can see what is going on. I’ve become, as you sense, a cynical and thoroughly jaded professor of rhetoric. My defenses are up and like it or not, they are not coming down.

  It was in the period just after Melissa that I became friends with Professor Hartwell. Our schedules were similar and many afternoons at four-thirty we fell into step as we left the ancient Normal Building where we both taught. Old Normal was over a hundred years old, the kind of school building you don’t see anymore: a red block structure with crumbling turrets, high ceilings, and a warped wooden floor that rippled underfoot. I’d walk out with Hartwell and ask him if he’d like to get a coffee. The first time I asked him, he said what and when I had repeated the question, he looked at me full of wonder, as if I’d invented French roast, and said, “Why, yes, that sounds like a good idea.” But, of course, with Hartwell that was the way he responded every time I asked him. He was like a child, a man without a history. His experience with Melissa certainly hadn’t hurt him. He thought it was odd, but as he said one day, over two wonderful cups of Celebes Kolossi at the Pantry, about the drama teacher, “He had vigor.” But we primarily talked shop: semantics. Hartwell was doing a study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I offered my advice.

  I wasn’t surprised during this time to see him occasionally lunching with Melissa. He was the kind of man you could betray, divorce, and then still maneuver into buying you lunch.

  But our afternoons together began to show me his loneliness. He was as seemingly indifferent to that feeling as any man I’d ever met, even myself in the life I have chosen, but more and more frequently during our conversations I would see his eyes narrow and fall upon a table across the room where a boy and a girl chatted over their notebooks. And when his eyes returned to me, they would be different, and he would stand and gather his books and go off, a fat fair-haired professor tasting grief. He never remembered to pay for his coffee.

  Then the next thing happened, and I knew from the very beginning what to make of it. When you fall in love with a student, three things happen. One: you become an inspired teacher, spending hours and hours going over every tragic shred of your students’ sour deadwood compositions as if holding in your hands magic parchment, suddenly tapping into hidden reservoirs of energy and vocabulary and lyric combinations for your lectures, refusing to sit down in class. Two: the lucky victim of yo
ur infatuation receives a mark twice as high as he or she deserves. Three: you have a moment of catharsis during the denouement in which you see yourself too clearly the fool, a realization that is probably good for any teacher, because it will temper you, seal your cynicism and jade your eye, and make you sit down once hard and frequently thereafter.

  The object of Hartwell’s affections was a girl I kind of knew. She had been in my class the year before, and she was a girl you noticed. Ours is a small midwestern college and there are a dozen such beauties, coeds with the perfect unblemished faces of pretty girls and the long legs and round hips of women. These young creatures wear plaid skirts and sweaters and keep their streaming hair in silver clips. They sit in the second row and have bright teeth. They look at you unseeing, the way they’ve looked at teachers all their lives, and when one of these girls changes that glance and seems to be appraising, you wear a clean shirt and comb your hair the next day.

  That was what gave Hartwell away: his hair. I met him on the steps of Normal and he looked funny, different. It was the way people look who have shaved beards or taken glasses, that is, I couldn’t tell what was different for a moment. He simply looked shorter. Then I saw the comb tracks in the hair plastered to his head and I knew. He had been precise about it, I’ll give him that. After a lifetime of letting his hair jet like flame, wildfire really, he had cut a part an engineer would have been proud of and then formed the perfect furrows across the top of his head and down, curling once to disappear behind the ear. If you’d just met him, I suppose, it didn’t look too bad. But to me, god, he looked like the concierge for a sad hotel. He had combed his hair and I knew.

  There were other signs too, his pressed shirt, the new tie, his loafers so shiny—after years of grime—that they hurt the eye. He was animated at coffee, tapping the cover of the old maroon anthology of Victorian poetry with new vigor, and then the coup de grâce—one afternoon at the Pantry, he picked up the check.

  Hartwell was teaching a Hopkins-Swinburne seminar at night that term and the girl who was the object of his affections, a girl named Laurie, was in that evening seminar. When Hartwell began to change his ways, I simply noticed it. It was none of my business. One’s colleagues do many things that one doesn’t fully appreciate or understand. But Hartwell was different. I felt I should help him. He had not been around this particular block, and I decided to stay alert.

  I could see, read, and decipher the writing on the wall. This shrewd pretty schoolgirl was merely manipulating her professor to her advantage. I knew she was an ordinary student from her days in rhetoric, an officer in Tri-Delta sorority who wore a red kilt and a white sweater and who spent more time choosing her blouses than studying verb phrases, and now she was out for poor Hartwell.

  I changed my office hours so I could be around when his class broke up, which was about nine P.M. Tuesday and Thursdays, and I saw her hang around my old friend, chatting him up, always the last to leave and then stroll with him, and that is the correct word, stroll, down the rickety corridor of Normal, the floor creaking like the fools’ chorus. She would laugh at the things he said and toss her hair just so and squeeze her books to her chest. And Hartwell, well, he would beam. From the door of my office I could see the light beam off his forehead, he was that far gone.

  In most cases these things are not really very important, some passing infatuation, some shrewd undergraduate angles to raise his or her grade point average, some professor’s flagging ego takes a little ride, but I watched that term as it went further and further for Hartwell. The shined shoes were a bit much, but then at midterm that spring, he showed up one day in gray flannel slacks, his old khakis and their constellations of vague grease stains gone forever. And I could tell he was losing weight, the way men do when they spend the energy necessary to become fools.

  Melissa, his ex-wife, now uneasily married to our drama professor (who had since developed his own air of frumpiness), came to my office one day and asked me what was going on with Hartwell. I hadn’t like her from the beginning, and now as she sat smartly on the edge of the chair, her short carapace of hair as shiny as plastic, I liked her even less, and I did what I am certainly capable of doing when required: I lied. I told her that I noticed no difference in her former husband, no change at all.

  I knew with certainty that there was danger when one afternoon in April he leaned forward over his coffee and withdrew a sheet of type paper from the pages of his textbook. It was a horrid thing to see, the perfect stanzas typed in the galloping pica of his office Underwood, five rhyming quatrains underneath the title “To Laurie.” It was fire, it was flower, it was—despite the rigid iambic pentameter—unrestrained. It was confession, apology, and seduction in one. I clenched my mouth to keep from trembling while I read it, and after an appropriate minute I passed it back to him. He was eager there at the table in the Pantry, beaming again. He had begun to beam everywhere. He wanted to know what I thought.

  “It is very, very good,” I told him quietly. “The metaphors are apt and original, and the whole has a genuine energy.” Here I leaned toward his bright face. “But Hartwell. Don’t you ever, under any circumstances, give this to a student.”

  “I knew it was good,” he said to me. “I knew it. Do you see? I’m writing again.”

  “Do not,” I repeated, “give this to Laurie. You will create a misunderstanding.”

  “There is no misunderstanding,” he told me, folding the poem back into the old maroon book. “It is a verity,” he said. “I am in love.”

  As everyone knows, there is nothing to say to that. I stirred my coffee and saw from how high an altitude my friend was going to fall.

  April is a terrible month on a campus. This too is a verity. Every pathway reeks of love newly found and soon to be lost. It is one of the few times and places you can actually see people pine. The weather changes and the ridiculous lilacs bloom at every turning, their odor spiraling up the cornices of every old brick building in sight, including, of course, Old Normal. Couples lean against things and talk so earnestly it makes you tired. Everywhere you look there is some lost lad in shirtsleeves gesturing like William Jennings Bryan before a coed, her dreamy stare a caricature of importance. This goes on round the clock in April, the penultimate month in the ancient agrarian model of the school year, and as I walked across campus that spring, I kept my eyes straight ahead. I didn’t want to see it, any of it.

  Of course, Hartwell and I couldn’t be more different. That’s clear. But I had a sensation after he’d left that afternoon that reminded me too strongly of when I had my troubles, such as they were. Years ago, a lifetime if you want, a student of mine became important to me. She wasn’t like Hartwell’s Laurie—at all—her name isn’t important, but it wasn’t a pretty name and—in fact—she wasn’t really a pretty girl, just a girl. She came to my notice because of an affliction she carried in her eyes, a weight, a sorrow.

  This is not about her anyway, but about me in a sordid way. I saw what I wanted to see. What I needed to see. She was frail and damaged somehow and I was her teacher. Well, who needs details? It was the same story as all these other shallow memories, some professor off balance and a young person either willingly or unwillingly the victim or beneficiary of it all. My student, this strange girl, received an A for B work, and I waited for her to pick up her term paper a week after the semester ended. Let me explain this to you: there was no reason for me to be on campus, sitting in my office in Normal Hall, no reason whatsoever. I had my door cracked one inch and I waited. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Friday afternoon I was still on the edge of my chair. Just having her paper (which I read and reread, held in my lap as I waited) was enough, and undoubtedly, it would have powered me through the weekend. I am the kind of professor who is in his office more Saturdays and Sundays than he will ever admit. On Friday evening, when I was preparing in my routine way to leave and go home, she came. I heard a step on the stair, the first step which was not the janitor’s step, and I knew she was
coming. How long could it have taken between the sound of those beautiful footsteps and their pausing at my opened office door? Twenty seconds? Ten? Whatever the time, it was the eon between my young and my old selves. I had a chance, as the old scholars put it, to know my tragic flaw. Not that I’m any more than pathetic, and certainly not tragic, but I came to know in that short moment that I was a fool and that I was about to join a legion and august company of the history of all fools. The girl came to my door and paused and then knocked on the open door. She acted surprised to find me there. She acted as if she expected to retrieve her paper in a box outside my door. I told her no, that I had it. I handed it to her, still warm from my lap. She nodded and averted her eyes and said something I’ll never forget. “This was a good class for me,” she said. “You made it interesting.” And then she turned and touched the rippled floor of Normal Hall for the last time. Without her paper and with no reason to be on earth on Friday night, I became a fool, and in a sense the guardian of fools.

  Like Hartwell.

  But what could I do? This Laurie was as shrewd as any I’d seen come along. She not only accepted his poem—she’d commented on it. I’d quizzed him on what she had said, but he’d just smiled until his eyes closed, and shook his head. He was so far gone that I had to smile.

  But Laurie hadn’t stopped there. With no reason whatsoever, she had invited him to the Spring Carnival. There was no reason to do this. She’d already won her victory. Hartwell was absolutely incandescent about it. He was carnival this and carnival that. I should come, he said. Oh go with us, he said. It was as if they were engaged. I told him no. It was a sunny spring afternoon in the Pantry, too hot really to be drinking coffee, and I told him no to go ahead, but for god sakes be careful. If you want to know the meaning of effete, just say be careful to a fool in love. My advice didn’t get across the table.