“Oh, no, not really,” I said. “I enjoyed teaching. Kids that age, like you say—there’s so much potential. There was one student in particular, I took an interest. We got to be quite close.”
The man took a sip of tea. “Ah,” he said, and he looked at me closely. “A young lady?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, certainly, these things can happen. And between a teacher and a student, quite common I’m sure.”
“No, no,” I said. “It was nothing like that.”
“No, of course,” the man said.
He took another sip of tea. I took one too and burned my mouth. More than anything I wanted to stand up and walk out of his shop, hurry back to my hotel room and close the blinds, put my mind on my files and documents and a cold glass of milk, maybe a ham sandwich too. But the gallery owner was refilling my cup, edging a bowl of sugar cubes politely in my direction. His interest was familiar—I got plenty of that sort of thing during the school board hearing: the curiosity of people who’ve already made up their minds. I set my tea cup down hard on its saucer, then remembered that I was his guest, that he’d been awfully nice to invite me in. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran my finger around the underside of the cup, afraid I’d chipped it.
The man waved his hand. “Very high quality ceramic, made to endure the storms at sea.”
“It’s just that everyone thought the same thing. About the girl.”
The man set his own cup down. “I apologize. These things, it isn’t necessary to discuss.”
“No, it’s all right,” I said. “To be honest, no one even asks about it anymore.”
The man and I sat without saying anything. He looked down at his cup, and I remembered the ugliest stretch of that conversation with Pearl and Eddie out behind the post office. “You’re an embarrassment to us,” Pearl had said. “Eddie’s lost business because of you, did you know that?”
“Jesus, Pearl,” Eddie said.
“Jerry Deitch got someone else to do his deck, you told me that,” Pearl said. When Eddie didn’t say anything she turned to me. “His daughters were in your class. He said if he’d known he would have pulled them out of school.”
It’s not what you think, I might have said. There’s been a mistake. But it was all still so fresh—it wasn’t even clear, at the time of that conversation, that I wouldn’t be teaching again the next fall, and I had my reasons for keeping quiet. The gallery owner put more water on to boil, and I thought about how many times in the years since then I’ve told the whole thing through to a sympathetic audience all in my own head—the flesh-and-blood people who might have been interested having long ago stopped asking.
“It was five or six years ago now,” I told the man. “At the end of the semester I used to have my classes do a bit of fiction writing. And that year I had a very bright student. She’d shown some interest in my mother’s work. My mother, like I said, was a writer. And so I assigned one of her short stories to the class—it wasn’t what I usually did. What my mother wrote was always based on real people and actual events, and I told my students that I wanted them to do the same, write about something they knew, something they really understood, but give it the guise of fiction. Let those lines blur, I said, for the sake of a good story. In any case, when this particular student turned in her assignment, well, there were problems at home and she turned in a story about a girl who was being mistreated. You know. By a very close relative.”
“I see,” the man said.
“It was clear she wasn’t making it up. It had to be taken seriously. I told her to come see me after class. It was the father, a very bad situation. I should have sensed it before. Maybe I did, but not to the extent.”
“Mm, yes,” the man said. “What does one do?”
“Well, I was in a difficult position,” I said. “I handled it poorly.”
I would have liked to have left it at that, but the man poured the rest of the tea into my cup and asked me to go on. So I did my best to explain. I told him I should have known that what this student needed most just then was someone she could trust to keep a secret. But after all those years of working with young people, I was still naive. “There are rules,” I said to her. “I can’t let this go.”
I thought she was just upset when she threatened to bring me into it. “How come you like me so much, anyway?” she said. “You could get in trouble for that.” I should have taken her seriously when she reminded me of how I’d patted her hand, given her a ride home once or twice, written something friendly in an old copy of Mrs. Dalloway I’d given her. “You’re not supposed to do things like that,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. But that is not what we’re talking about. I need you to see someone about what’s been happening to you.”
In the end she agreed to go to the school nurse. There were bruises on her arms. “And other places too,” she said, and she showed me one on the inside of her leg. I knew the nurse would recognize right off what was happening. In return I promised that her family would never see what she’d written—a promise I have kept, despite it all.
A little bell sounded at the front of the gallery and the door chimed open and closed. “One moment,” the gallery owner said. He went into the front room, saying something in French. “Tourists,” he said when he sat down again. “They will not buy. Go on. The nurse.”