“I hope to disprove that your mother is, at this moment, the most important person in your life.”
“The hell you wanna hope somethin’ like that?”
“That is our purpose, Mr. Saunders: questioning the validity of what we believe is true.”
“That may be,” the thick-handed bricklayer intoned, “but you should leave my mother out of it.”
“I did not bring her into the conversation, sir; you did.”
Now both Christian and Bright Saunders were giving John the evil eye.
“Awareness of the school of suspicion tells us that while we think one thing something completely different might be the truth. Who lied to us? We did. Why? Because we want to believe something else; because our passions tell us one thing while our unexamined experiences have a different story to tell.”
“So you think that there’s one person who’s the most important to all of us?” Tina Pardon, a junior in the psychology department, asked.
“Yes,” John replied.
“Like God or somethin’?” the aging sex worker, Lena Oncely, chimed in.
“I submit,” John said, “that the most important person in anyone’s life, in this modern world, is the man or woman who signs our paychecks.”
The entire class — even Christian, Bright Saunders and Dawn Langthorpe — seemed taken aback by the assertion.
“More important than my mother?” Maya Thoms wondered out loud.
“As I have said,” the impudent professor lectured, “the word important in this circumstance tells us what is significant, vital or crucial in our lives. Your mother can disown you, your dog will die, your children can go off and join a cult somewhere. In any of these circumstances you don’t have to replace them. If you loved them you might well think that they are irreplaceable: not vital, not crucial to your continued existence. Importance is here and now — immediate. It is the reason we turn left rather than right, reach into our pockets or run away; why we say yes when we think no, do what is asked of us when we’d rather be with one of those loved ones. There are many important people and systems in your life but the one you cannot live without is the man or woman that signs your paycheck. That may be a parent but your need of them is that signature, not blood or familial connection. If you lose that source of revenue it will have to be replaced in short order.
“If this is true, if the most important person in your life is someone you have never met, then the world we live in is vastly different from the world we thought we knew: a fantasy that we have always believed was bedrock.”
Silence lay over the class like the layer of snow covering the streets and cars, trees and sidewalks outside the second-floor window of the lecture hall.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Christian Van Dyne said after the long silence. “I found out recently that the man who raised me, the man I called father, was not that at all. He loves me and he raised me and he believes that he’s my blood but none of that is true. My mother had a lover and I am that man’s son.”
35
“I’m gay,” Dawn Langthorpe stated simply a few hours after the first School of Suspicion seminar. She and John were seated on the couch, looking out at Mott Street from Lucia’s old apartment.
He had put a hand on her exposed thigh expecting her passion for his lecture to morph into the release he had come to rely upon.
“Oh,” he said, stumbling over the word.
Later they were sitting at the round two-person table set in the corner of Lucia’s kitchen. John had made meatballs from spicy Italian sausages with a sauce of basil, plum tomatoes, garlic and red cooking wine. This sauce he ladled over vermicelli.
“At first I was angry at you,” Dawn said by way of explaining why she’d agreed to come home with him.
“Angry about what?” John poured thick red Chianti into her artfully misshapen green glass goblet.
“I wanted to argue about the thinkers you chose and the arrogance that you believe you know what’s most important to me. I wanted you to answer that kid who said that his father wasn’t his blood when instead you ended the lecture. But I knew I was mad because that classroom was the most real thing I ever experienced in school. It wasn’t synthetic, you know? Not some kind of preparation for another plastic-wrapped experience that we think one day might make us real. You were telling us that the man signing our check was most important because you wanted to free us from that chain or at least to get us to see we were enslaved.”
“Some of you work for a living,” John said at the top of the class on the following Monday. “Some of you were beaten by loved ones. Some have run from what you were while others go to church every Sunday with mothers and grandmothers who have been going to that same house of worship for the last fifty years. When this class is over you will probably return to those lives. But, hopefully, when we are through here, some of you will feel a little release from the cage of certainty.
“After decades of study the only truth I know is this: we stand on a mound of human corpses that is at least ten thousand years deep. Our language, our genes, our beliefs, our joys and sorrows rise from that soil. We will never fully understand it but that mound of soil is the best and worst of us. We can never see the whole picture but if we close our eyes we might be able to know it.
“Those dead ancestors live in our words, our blood, in the stories we tell over and over again, never tiring of the repetition of love and war and tragedy. We are, more than anything else, the process of spiritual evolution — each of us the embodiment of truth without any conscious knowledge of that truth.”
“What’s all that supposed to mean?” Craven Marsters, the only white member of the class, asked. Craven was a veteran of the most recent Afghan war and married to a black woman, Osa Chalmers, who also attended Medgar Evers and planned to become a registered nurse.
“It means that any veracity, any truth in your life, is in your actions, not your convictions.”
“Are you saying that truth exists but cannot be known?” Mister Price, a student of the mathematical sciences, asked.
“Exactly, Mister,” John acceded appreciating the trick Mister’s parents had engineered in his name. “What do you think when you ask someone a question and they tell you something that might be the truth?”
“Like what?”
“You ask your girlfriend if she had ever been intimate with a friend of yours and she says no... or she says yes.”
“I think I’d question the first and believe the second,” Mister said.
A few students laughed.
“But if you found a letter in her bureau drawer where this friend had confided that the greatest sorrow in his life was that they had never been lovers, then you would know a truth beyond whatever answer she gave. Because she saved that letter, the penned emotion of your friend and the fact that their intimacy was beyond any mere physical act would be something that could not be questioned.”
“Yeah,” Mister said nodding in tiny arcs, “that’s true.”
“That’s how I found out about my father,” Christian Van Dyne said aloud. “I found a journal in a suitcase at the back of my mother’s closet. My real father was a teenager when he impregnated her. She said that he was just a boy but that he was also the first man she’d ever loved.”
“Do you want to come have dinner?” John asked Dawn on the phone that evening.
“No,” she said.
“Why not? I won’t put my hand on you again.”
“I know, but...”
“What?”
“I never thought my life was fake until your class,” she said. “I mean I suspected it but no one had ever put it into words. It’s wonderful, like reaching into your pocket and coming out with twenty dollars you forgot you had. But it hurts me to think the way you do. It feels like something tearing inside. That’s what it feels like in class and when we’re together too.”