Once Izzy and her teacher became a couple, in perhaps the loosest form of that word, her understanding of him both expanded and deflated in the most thrilling of ways. He was as kind and as funny and as knowledgeable as he seemed in class; the things she found to be interesting about him in that hour of class each day compounded and became solid. His considerable monetary wealth, a never-ending trust fund from his parents, gave him access to a world that Izzy found bizarre, even if she didn’t get to actively participate in it. She could not accompany him to Nashville for gala benefits for the Tennessee Arts Commission. She could not travel to Belgium for the week of spring break for the singular purpose of attending the opening of a famous artist’s exhibition. She could, however, hear about these things, the casual way that he mentioned these amazing occurrences, the casual way he accepted the fact of them. He was a high school art teacher and yet he was a millionaire bon vivant. It made him as close to a superhero with a secret identity that she could ever hope to know.
Being his lover, god, the awfulness of that word, the refusal on Izzy’s part to think of herself as anything other than his pal, as if she was in a 1930s comic strip, she also gained access to the secret diminishments of his life. He was a high school art teacher because his art career had dissolved almost immediately. He was not talented, he readily admitted, his famed European exhibition having been only a single painting displayed alongside a dozen others in a government building in London, and he was teaching only because his parents had forced him, after his aborted attempt to become a serious artist, to attend college and actually do something with his adult life. He was, he believed, a failure, albeit an insanely wealthy failure thanks to his family’s fortune. More troubling to Izzy, although she also found it soothing in some strange ways, was his obvious mental health issues, bouts of extreme depression offset by incredibly manic periods. All of this was supposedly controlled by medicine and therapy, but he sometimes ignored both and seemed to dare himself to fall into craziness. It was not immediately noticeable at school, his classes strange and offbeat even when he was in the best state of mind, but as she spent more and more time with him, especially in his private moments, she noticed the signs of instability and found herself shocked by the force of them. Some nights, after she had slipped away from her house or from the restaurant, she would drive to his farmhouse, acres of privacy yet she still had to park her barely running truck in the garage just in case, and find him slightly drunk and already bemoaning the awful fact that this illicit affair was ruining her and further ruining him.
“I’m doing my best here,” he once told her, “but I feel like, no matter how this plays out, I’ll make you hate the world.”
She kissed him, flipped through the complete series of Criterion Collection movies that he owned, films stranger than porn to her, and she said, “I already hated the world. You make me hate it less.”
Sometimes she could snap him out of it, but other times, when the depression turned into something more combustible, he would reach for whatever was close and smash it against the stone floors of his house. He would break things until the world was tiny and jagged and understandable again to him. Then he would grow sheepish and try to clean it up. The next time she was at his house, it never failed, he would stroll barefoot through the house and then wince when he stepped on a tiny shard of pottery or glass or plastic that his broom or vacuum had not found. These moments gave her pleasure, to watch the reminders of his behavior bite into him. She always, always, wore her shoes in that house.
Her own mother, who had died of heart failure when Izzy was thirteen, had been undiagnosed and unmedicated but so terrified of the world by the end of her life that she would not, except on the rarest of occasions, leave the house. Izzy was so used to mental instability she began to assume that everyone except herself suffered from it. Hal’s psychological problems were not a surprise but rather the eventual revelation of what she already knew. He was artistic; he was a failure in developing his artistic abilities; he taught at a public high school; he was in love with her, an eighteen-year-old girl; of course he was crazy. Sometimes she believed she was immune to psychosis, that she had spent so much time in its presence that she had built up defenses against it. And then she saw the multiple positive pregnancy tests, and she felt the strange, sweeping panic of unchecked emotion, and she knew that she had been foolish to believe that she, tiny and ridiculous, was anything close to invincible.