The Basic Eight Page 6

  Gabriel went to get the plates that he had been keeping warm in the oven. V__ got up to help. Adam, at my left due to Kate’s tactful place cards, turned to me gratefully. I could smell aftershave, just faintly. “How can I ever thank you for bailing me out of thinking of a clever toast?”

  Sipping without nibbling made me bold. “Another bottle of wine via your fake ID?” I said. “Wine’s scarce round these underage parts.”

  “Done,” he said. “Though you’ll have to come with me and give out advice. I’ll call you.”

  “I’ll call you.” Just like that. One dinner party and I’m already miles ahead of all those soul-searching aerograms.

  SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 12TH

  Pardon the stains; I forgot to get a spoon so I had to stir the coffee with my finger. I’m on the living room couch, watching a televangelist with the sound turned down, one hand on the phone. It’s almost eleven and I’m waiting for the check-in calls to begin. In order to draw up a comprehensive summary of the dinner party I will draw some topic headings and then write down quotes as each member calls.

  THE PARTY IN GENERAL

  Kate: I think it went very, very well, don’t you, Flan? I suppose we were all a bit rusty, but that’s to be expected after a summer of entertaining ourselves.

  Jennifer Rose Milton: Lovely.

  Natasha: It killed me. It really killed me.

  Gabriel: It was OK. I don’t think I was in the mood for it.

  Douglas: (N.B. All quotes from Douglas are via Lily. Douglas had to leave early the next morning to visit his father and stepmother, who are in themselves the source behind the Grimm Brothers’ step parent angst.) He had a very nice time, particularly after an apparently horrific lesson at the Conservatory.

  Lily: I had a very nice time, too. Why are you asking me these questions like you’re writing down the answers?

  V__: I wish I had arrived earlier so everything would have been polished. We could have had it at my house except my parents were entertaining.

  Adam:

  THE VERDICT ON ADAM

  Kate: I’m all for it. I’ll do anything I think of to help you. I remember how hard it was when Garth and I first started our relationship, so let me know what I can do. (It was hard not to giggle. Kate loves to discuss relationships using everything she learned from her relationship with Garth, which was her only relationship and was one and a half weeks in duration.)

  Jennifer Rose Milton: He seems nice, but not really my type. (She wouldn’t elaborate on what was her type, or if she were in fact typing. A coy mistress, Ms. Milton.)

  Natasha: Certainly delicious-looking. That shirt begged for unbuttoning, but I don’t think I could steal him away from you, dear. Whatever did you tell him on your wine walk that kept him so entranced all evening?

  Gabriel: He seemed, well, acceptable, Flannery. I don’t know. Don’t ask me these things. I’m too, um, protective of you, I think.

  Douglas: Douglas suspected that he studied under the Suzuki method, which he disapproves of, but that can’t be helped.

  Lily: Very charming, Flan, but I don’t know what lurks underneath that charm.

  V__: Snap him up, Flannery Culp! So polite! So well groomed! I didn’t know they made them like that in public school anymore.

  Adam:

  THE VERDICT ON FLORA HABSTAT

  Kate: Who? Oh, yes. Do you have to ask? She hasn’t even called to thank me and it’s nearly noon.

  Jennifer Rose Milton: I think she was trying a little too hard, but she really is very nice, don’t you think?

  Natasha: Did I call it on The Guinness Book or what, Flan?

  Gabriel: Well, I suppose she’s very nice, but I think a little, how should I put it, non-exciting. A dud, frankly. I don’t really mean that. I’m sure her friends like her very much.

  Douglas: He didn’t say anything about her.

  Lily: I myself thought that she either had an incredibly subtle deadpan sense of humor and was laughing at us all night, or was very slow. It’s sometimes so hard to tell.

  V__: Well, she helped clear the table.

  Adam:

  Adam:

  Adam:

  ADAM:

  Vocabulary:

  CONFIDANTE

  EPIPHANY

  UNREQUITED

  ELEPHANTINE

  EUPHEMISMS

  Study Questions:

  1. Did you understand the difference between authority and authoritarianism? Answer honestly.

  2. V—, in reality, has more than one letter in her name. Why do you think Flannery calls her V—in her journal? (Hint: V—’s family is extremely wealthy and could influence publishers to keep any of their relatives out of a book that could damage the family’s reputation.)

  3. The stories of great operas contain thwarted love, jealous anger and violent murder and are called great art. Yet others who demonstrate these things have been punished. Isn’t this hypocritical? Discuss.

  4. You have undoubtedly seen photographs of Flannery Culp in newspapers and magazines. Is she fat? Be honest.

  Monday September 13

  Sophomore year, Miss Mills, an English teacher rumored to be an ex-nun, taught us all about pathetic fallacy: If a character in literature is feeling a particular emotion acutely, the inanimate surroundings–you know, weather, landscape, stuff like that–tend to accentuate that mood. Thus armed to work as a literary editor, I checked the weather when I stepped outside for the bus, knowing it would tell me how Friday’s Calc test would turn out. The skies were gray, but it wasn’t raining–I figured maybe C or C+. I began to trudge up the hill, only to speed my pace up to a bleary shuffle; Adam’s tall thin shape was half a block ahead of me. I tried not to run so I wouldn’t be too obvious: “Adam? (pant, pant) I didn’t see you…”

  “Adam?” I called out, ten paces behind him. Adam turned around and looked at me quizzically. It wasn’t Adam; it was Frank Whitelaw. At that very moment the clouds broke.

  Frank Whitelaw took a full three seconds to look up at the sky and then back at me. If it were anyone else it would be a masterpiece of deadpan timing; with Frank Whitelaw you knew that three seconds was top neural synapse speed. (I’m not sure if that biological term is correct because, as you know, I cut Biology all the time because I’m an academic flaky failure.) Frank Whitelaw was on the stage crew and I always suspected that some heavy prop had fallen on his head. Natasha’s theory was heavy drug use, and Kate’s had to do with his last name. She said anything that sounded so much like neo-Nazism was probably the result of in-breeding.

  He opened his backpack and took out an umbrella. Held it up over the both of us. It was like being protected by a big, friendly ape. Outside the monsoon raged and dribbled. We struggled up the hill.

  I was still dripping from the downpour of pathetic fallacy when I got my 13. At first I didn’t know what it meant: a circled number 13 at the top of my paper. 13th place? There were about forty-five students in the class. Then slowly, the carbonation of truth burped up into the front of my brain: 13 out of 100. 13%. If there were a train wreck and only 13% of the passengers lived, it would be called a catastrophe. I glanced down the paper and saw the red checks that pointed out tiny bits of correctly attempted equations like survivors in the mud, thrashing around amidst the inked X’s of the bridge that, ill-conceived and badly constructed, had fallen at the first testing. Baker’s explanations of “the more difficult problems”–meaning there were some that were actually supposed to be easy–blurred by me like ambulance chasers as I sat gaping at the wreckage. Did they have good English Literature programs at Community Junior College? There I would be, living at home while my friends wrote cheery letters from ivy-covered libraries filled with creaky first editions. Dear Flannery, Having a wonderful time. You would really love it here. Too bad about that Calc test.

  Given that he didn’t call yesterday and that he isn’t even in my Calc class, there’s no reason why I should have felt Adam’s hand on my shoulder, strong and comforting, but I did.
It was only when I turned around that I discovered it was Mr. Baker.

  “Hey,” he said gruffly. “Don’t worry, it’s only the first test.” I looked around; sometime in my daze class had been let go. “You know, I don’t think that it’s that you didn’t know the material. You just panicked. You know what you did wrong?” I let him answer his own question because the only answer I could think of was, “Think up short story ideas every day during class?”

  “You didn’t follow Baker’s Rule,” he said. What was he talking about? I looked down at my book; it was covered.

  “You want to hear Baker’s Rule?” he asked with what he must have thought was a winning smile. I’m sure I had on a losing frown, myself. I was too numb with failure to think of all these wordplays but I could have thought of them so I’ve written them in now.

  “Baker’s Rule is: do something. Never just stare at a problem that you think you can’t solve. Do something. And this doesn’t just apply to Calculus, believe me.” He patted my head a little too hard. “OK, Flannery?”

  “OK,” I said. Thanks so much, Mr. Baker. I feel so much better now. Do something. Why waste his talents on Calculus when he could be such an effective presidential aide? Next period I have to go to choir to see a man who doesn’t love me and if they get to the Cs, sing for him all by myself, and during lunch I have to track down Jim Carr and apologize for cutting Bio on Thursday otherwise he too will mortify me in front of the entire class. Hattie Lewis is now telling us that tomorrow we’ll study “The Day of Doom.” I want to tell her she’s a day late.

  Adam opened the door and called my name and I walked in and realized that it wasn’t Adam who had opened the door, it was Johnny Hand, the drunken nightclub singer and alleged choir teacher. What a powerful word, alleged. What an important word it has become to me. He smiled at me a little unsteadily and walked out of the little room, leaving me alone with someone else. I was pretty sure it was Adam but I’d made that mistake too many times already.

  As you’ve been noticing, I hope, today’s journal entry keeps telling you that I think other people are Adam. I’ve put this in there not only to make you realize the full universality and ferocity of my love but to demonstrate the chaotic randomness of the entire crime, indeed the entire situation. In other words: Adam could have been anyone. Our bodies, our material “selves” are, ironically, immaterial.

  But it was Adam. I was alone with Adam, in this stuffy little audition room. The situation felt clinical so I reacted accordingly. “Well, Dr. State,” I said, “I’ve been having this pain in my neck for going on four years now, and I think it may be high school. Will you check it out?” I sat in a folding chair.

  Adam looked up from his Musical Director Notes. “Are you trying to tell me you want to play doctor, Ms. Culp?”

  “Please,” I said, batting my eyelashes. “It’s Miss Culp.” We both laughed. I could scarcely believe how charming and flirtatious I was managing to be. Maybe I was channeling Natasha through some incident of black magic or something.

  Yes, I really did say that. But I was kidding. I have never been involved in black magic in any way, shape or form. Please write your senator. More on this later.

  “I was happy to see your name next on the list,” Adam said. “If I heard one more tone-deaf alto I was going to lose my mind.”

  The spirit of Natasha was exorcised in one swift blow. “Um,” I said. “Um.” Not quite as witty and alluring. “Um, I’m a tone-deaf alto, myself.”

  Adam winced. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I didn’t mean–some of my best friends are tone-deaf altos. Alti, rather.” He grinned sheepishly at me.

  “Do I need to sing in front of you?”

  “Are you really a tone-deaf alto?”

  “I’m afraid so. Roewer doesn’t think that running the literary magazine or being in plays fulfills the creative arts requirement, so I have to do something.”

  “All right,” he agreed. “I’ll put you down as an alto. You don’t need to sing.”

  “Thanks.” I got up to go. If he called me back, I decided, then he liked me.

  “Don’t go yet,” he said, reviving my faith in a Divine Being. And no, Mrs. State, not Beelzebub. “Let’s pretend I’m auditioning you. I need some kind of break from the parade of alleged singers. Just talk to me for a minute.”

  “OK.” I sat back down in the folding chair. “What should we talk about?”

  “Let’s talk about that kooky dinner party. I had a great time. Do you guys do that often?”

  Kooky? I could hear Kate screech in my head. “Well, that was the first one of the year, but yes, we do it a lot. Beats renting movies or something, don’t you think so?”

  “Definitely. I just hope I get invited back.”

  “Well, if you play your cards right…”

  “Um, listen, I feel like I haven’t been.” He cleared his throat. “Playing my cards right. I’m sorry I haven’t said anything about your letters.”

  I held my breath. Sometimes it’s best to keep quiet–not very often, I don’t think, but sometimes–and this was one of them. I cleared my throat and began. “Don’t worry about it. They were probably impossible to answer–particularly the last postcard. I was, I don’t know, caught up in Italy or something. There was no way you could have answered–particularly the last postcard. I’m sorry. Summer can be so strange. It removes all context or something. It’s like being in a vacuum. I just wrote you, that’s all, I’ve been trying to apologize for it for a while but I didn’t. But I will now. Apologize, that is–particularly for the last postcard. I know that you haven’t known what to make of the letters, and I’m grateful that you haven’t told my friends that it’s been me writing them, but you needn’t worry about them–particularly the last postcard. I’ll just pretend that I never wrote to you, and you can just pretend that you never received them–particularly the last postcard. I mean, we can still be friends, or acquaintances, or whatever we are–dinner partners–but we can just pretend all that Chianti-laced wide-eyed correspondence never happened–particularly the last postcard.” When I go to see a play and somebody makes a speech that lengthy, I’m embarrassed, and it’s a play. People are supposed to be making speeches that lengthy in a play. This isn’t a play.

  “What postcard? I didn’t get any postcard,” he said. “I just got two letters, very nice letters, and I wanted to thank you for them.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Did you send me a postcard, too?” He stood up and walked over to me. In another world, I could have just leaned in and kissed him. Perhaps it would have made a difference. I could have moved fast. Instead I just thought fast.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I did. But I wrote so many postcards.”

  “I didn’t tell anybody you wrote them,” he said, “because I thought that people would think they were love letters.” He moved his hands slightly, palms up, in a gesture that meant I don’t know what. “I thought maybe they were love letters.”

  Now it was his turn to kiss me, don’t you think? “I thought that maybe they were love letters.” Distantly, a sound of warm violins. He steps closer. Slight swelling (of the music, of course). And then a kiss. It didn’t happen. I couldn’t stand it. “I thought that maybe they were love letters,” and then nothing.

  “Maybe they were,” I said, and I stood up myself and left the room. I wanted to slam the door, but it was one of those public-school doors that just wheeze closed. Swish. The rest of the choir looked up at me for a second. “Next!” I called off-handedly, and strode out the door.

  It is the moment that followed–the end of fourth period on Monday September 13th at Roewer High School–that the loudest birds of the gaggle of attending quacks have proclaimed to be the impetus for what has been called everything from “a series of unfortunate behaviors” (Dr. Eleanor Tert) to “the most bloodthirsty of teenage acts I have ever discussed on my program” (“Dr.” Winnie Moprah, the degree is honorary from a school of dubious academic reputation
). Tert’s book Crying Too Hard to Be Scared says:

  It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this psychosexual voyeuristic moment in Culp’s adolescence. [What rubbish! Of course she could overemphasize the importance of it. What if she said: “This psychosexual voyeuristic moment in Culp’s adolescence was responsible for world hunger”? That would be overemphasis, wouldn’t it? That’s what’s wrong with the coverage of my story: not so much bias as inaccuracy.] Imagine Culp, in the aftermath of one of the first moments of sexual awakening in her argument with her eventual victim [again: inaccuracy. He was not my victim.], wandering in a sexualized daze to the office of a teacher whom she trusted, seeking advice and counseling [inaccuracy, inaccuracy, inaccuracy]. Yet when she walks in she finds her teacher betraying her trust, indeed the very trust of the teaching profession, locked in an embrace with a student [inaccuracy]. It was the ultimate betrayal for young Culp, and triggered a horrific, though slightly delayed, response–much like Poe and his mother’s death as discussed in my first chapter [horrific and not at all delayed amounts of inaccuracy].

  And even putting aside facts for a minute, Dr. Tert’s description has serious semantic problems. Embrace is too elegant a term for what Carr was doing. Just about the only accurate thing Eleanor said was that I walked down the hallway and into a classroom. Unlit Bunsen burners and half-dead tadpoles and faded color posters of the digestive system all greeted me, but Carr was nowhere to be seen. Off the main classroom was Carr’s office, which we weren’t supposed to go in because it contained dangerous chemicals. I heard a scuffling from it, like a rustling of paper. “Mr. Carr?” I called out, cautiously, and put my hand on the half-open door.