Unfortunately for me, I found her.
While I’ve got a pretty good memory, I’m the first to admit that some of my recollections should be called in for questioning. The fact is, I’m not above deluding myself and getting away with it, which is why, as I visualize the girls from my high school, I can only guess that I’m romanticizing. In my mind’s eye they look like sexy-celebrity-hooker-fantasy-music-video schoolgirls. That can’t be right. I see them wearing white unbuttoned shirts with exposed black lacy bras and dark green miniskirts and long cream socks and black buckled shoes. I see them floating on pale legs through narrow halls, their hair billowing behind them like flames in a strong wind. That can’t be right either.
This I am sure of: the girl Brett loved was tall and pale-skinned, with flaming red hair falling down her back, shoulders as smooth as eggs, and legs as long as an underground pipeline. But her dark brown eyes, often hidden behind an unevenly cropped fringe, were her secret weapon: she had a look that could have toppled a government. She also had a habit of running her tongue around the tip of her pen. It was very erotic. One day I stole her pencil case and kissed every last biro. I know how that sounds, but it was a very intimate afternoon, just me and the pens. When Dad came home he wanted to know why my lips were stained with blue ink. Because she writes in blue, I wanted to tell him. Always blue.
She was half a foot taller than me, and with that flaming red hair she looked like a skyscraper on fire. Thus I called her the Towering Inferno, but not to her face. How could I? That beautiful face and I hadn’t been introduced. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen her before- maybe because I took every third day off school. Perhaps she did the same, only on alternate days. I followed her around the school grounds at a distance, trying to see her from every conceivable angle to get the three-dimensional mental image my fantasies deserved. Sometimes, as she moved lightly through the grounds, seeming to weigh only slightly more than her own shadow, she sensed I was there, but I was too quick for her. Whenever she turned I’d pretend to be looking at the sky, counting clouds.
But shit! I could suddenly hear my father’s grating voice telling me I was looking to deify the human because I hadn’t the stomach for God. Yeah, maybe. Maybe I was in a bid for self-transcendence, projecting onto this tall succulent woman in order to release myself from my solitary carnival of despair. Fine. That was my right. I just wish I could’ve been oblivious of my unconscious motivations. I wanted just to enjoy my lies like everyone else.
I couldn’t think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It’s just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn’t got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn’t that abnormal. That’s what a first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don’t notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.
For a while the roles in our relationship were easily definable. I was the lover, the stalker, the sun-worshipper. She was loved, stalked, worshipped.
A couple of months passed in that way.
After Brett’s suicide, Mr. White went right back to teaching. It was a bad decision on his part. He didn’t do what everyone should do after a monumental personal tragedy- run away, grow a beard, sleep with a girl exactly half your age (unless you are twenty). Mr. White didn’t do anything like that. He just came into class, same as before. He didn’t even have the sense to order the removal of Brett’s desk- it just sat there, empty, tipping his scales of grief all the way over.
On his better days, he looked like he’d been woken from a deep sleep. Mostly like he’d been exhumed from his own grave. He didn’t yell anymore. We suddenly found ourselves straining to hear him, as if trying to pick up the beat of a weak pulse. Even though he was obviously suffering to the point of becoming a caricature of suffering, he got (not surprisingly) little empathy from his pupils. They only noticed that before he had been industrially furious and now he was utterly remote. Once he lost the essays the class had written. He pointed listlessly to me. “They’re somewhere in my car, Jasper, go look for them,” he said, throwing me the keys. I went to his car. A Volkswagen covered in dust. Inside I found empty food containers, wet clothes, and a prawn, but no essays. When I went back empty-handed, he gave the class an exaggerated shrug. That’s how he was. And at the sound of the bell, when the students rapidly stuffed their books into their bags, wasn’t Mr. White packing up his things faster than anyone? It was almost like a competition, and now he always won. Yet for some reason he stayed on in his job, day after miserable day.
On day after class he asked me to wait behind. All the other students winked at me to signify they thought I was in trouble and it pleased them to know it. But it was only that Mr. White wanted the recipe of the chocolate cake Brett and I had made that day. I told him I didn’t know it. Mr. White nodded for an unnaturally long time.
“Do you believe in the Bible, Jasper?” he asked suddenly.
“In the same way I believe in ‘Hound of the Baskervilles.’ ”
“I think I understand.”
“The problem is most of the time when God’s supposed to be the hero, he comes across as the villain. I mean, look at what he did to Lot ’s wife. What kind of divine being turns a man’s wife into a pillar of salt? What was her crime? Turning her head? You have to admit this is a God hopelessly locked in time, not free of it; otherwise he might have confounded the ancients by turning her into a flat-screen television or at least a pillar of Velcro.”
From the look on Mr. White’s face, I could tell he wasn’t following the lucid argument I was, not proudly, plagiarizing from one of Dad’s midnight sermons. Anyway, what was I talking about? Why was I haranguing a man who looked like the rotting stump of an old tree? It seemed I was able to do anything for a suffering man except be nice to his Deity.
What I should’ve said was this: “Why don’t you quit? Get out of here! Change schools! Change jobs! Change lives!”
But I didn’t.
I let him go on thrashing about in his cage.
“Well, anyway, I guess you’d better get to your next class,” he said, and the way he fiddled with his tie made me want to burst into tears. That’s the problem with people who suffer right in your face. They can’t so much as scratch their noses without its being poignant.
Not long after that, Dad came to pick me up from school. That wasn’t as rare as you might think. After exhausting his daily activities- waking up (an hour), breakfast (half hour), reading (four hours), walking (two hours), staring (two hours), blinking (forty-five minutes), he’d come and get me as “something to do.”