The Stand-up Guy, Chapter 2

Chapter 2

     Robert sat with his hands on his lap in the small room that joined several administrative offices for Joshua Chamberlain High School.  The school was large enough, 1,100 students, that it had a principal, two vice principals, and a police department liaison, Officer Frank Greenwood.  Robert briefly wondered, not for the first time, at the fact that each of them had at least one secretary though Robert, a teacher with ninety-seven students to manage, had not even an intern to make photocopies or to collate handouts.

     Greenwood’s secretary, Vicki, stepped out of his office and said to Robert, “Officer Greenwood needs to talk to you.  He’ll need to go over everything that happened for the report.  But he’s tied up with phone calls right now.  Can you wait for a few more minutes?”

     Robert nodded and caught a breath of her flowery perfume.

     “Guess.”

     Vicki tilted her head quizzically.

     “Guess perfume.  You’re wearing Guess perfume.”

     “Yes.”  She smiled shyly and then slipped back into the office and closed the door.  

     How lousy was it, thought Robert, that Vicki was wearing the same perfume Helen had been wearing when she left?  It was a scent she wore often and it quickened his pulse whenever he hugged her.  He would brush his nose on the back of her soft ear where she dabbed it, breathe it deeply. 

     But she was gone and in Robert’s mind, her leaving had set this awful turn of events in motion.  Had she gone to work like she had every other day, had she not turned off the alarm clock while she figured out what to say, he wouldn’t be sitting here now.  He would have arrived early and then evacuated with the students, avoided the whole thing.  He and Anthony Townsend would probably never have crossed paths, even accidentally.  The proverbial first domino that got him involved had fallen the moment Helen shook him gently awake.

 

“Robert, I’m leaving.”

She hadn’t left for the early shift at Starbucks yet, and this had meant it was still early enough to be asleep because she always left for work before he was up.  His alarm would awake him at 5:45 as it had nearly every day of his life.

So why was she trying to wake him?  Robert moaned and rolled away.  But she pulled him by the shoulders toward her.  He blinked and her face blurred into focus above him.

“Robert, did you hear me?”

“Wha’?”  He rubbed his eyes, but without his glasses, her face remained out of focus.  Standing next to the bed, she was wearing her wool coat and a wool hat—this much he could make out in spite of being nearly blind without his glasses.  Coat on, hat on, so she was leaving for work, but why didn’t he smell the toast she burned every morning for breakfast or the strong coffee she always brewed? 

Helen stood back, looked down at him with her lips pressed thin.  “Robert, I’m leaving.”

He rolled onto his left side and pulled the alarm clock to within an inch of his face:

6:42 a.m. 

At this he dropped the clock on the floor where the backup batteries sprang free and rolled under the bed.  He sat up so fast that Helen hopped back a step.  Snatching his glasses and then his inhaler from the nightstand by the clock, he managed to gasp, “It’s late!” before sucking a lung-full from the inhaler. 

He swung his legs to the floor, stood, and then nearly fell before abruptly sitting back on the edge of the bed.  His breath was still caught in his tightening throat and it took a moment for his head to stop spinning.  “You’re late...I’m late,” he said, finally managing a full breath.

Robert had never been late for a day of teaching in the eight years he’d taught at Joshua Chamberlain High School.  In fact, he was more punctual than a city bus, arriving exactly one hour before classes every morning to prepare.  He was quite sure he had never been late for anything in his life.

Helen wiped her eyes with the back of a gloved hand, turned, and walked slowly toward the bedroom door.  Robert stood again, put his hand on his blue robe with the yellow ducks which was hanging from the bedpost.

“You’re crying.  Why are you crying?”  His lungs deflated again when he realized not only was she wearing her coat, but she was pulling a little red suitcase on wheels too.  It was the expandable she bought for short trips because it will fit in the overhead compartment on any airline.

“Why do you have a suitcase?  Aren’t you running late for work?”  He managed to pull on the robe, but then he had to tie it, untie it, tie it again, and then tuck the excess sash neatly into the loops before he was ready to follow her into the living room.  And his slippers were not where they should be, so he had to fish them from under the bed first.  Helen had inadvertently kicked them under when shaking him awake. 

This is all wrong.

A cold sweat was quickly dampening his undershirt.  As if someone had set an anvil on it, his chest tightened again, forcing him to wheeze. 

When he finally could slip his feet into his slippers, he quickly followed her into the living room where she stood, her hand on the front door.

“I love you Robert, but I can’t do this anymore.”

“This?”  He clutched the inhaler, noticing the four issues of English Teacher Monthly had been knocked to the floor.  He made a note to pick them up later, stack them neatly on the corner where they belonged.

Helen pulled a folded sheet of yellow paper from her coat pocket and shook it open.  “I knew I wouldn’t be able to say it right, so I wrote some things down, sort of a list I guess.”

She stayed near the door like she was going to run out as soon as she finished reading. 

“The furniture,” she said.

He looked around.

“Your planner, your boring classical music, your bathrobe.”  She paused, crying again.

“What’s wrong with my bathrobe?”

“Ducks?  Robert,” she sniffed, “how many grown men do you know have ducks on their robes?”

“Clip on ties, socks color-coded and a row in the top drawer like the pencils in your desk.”

“You don’t like the way I dress?”  He resituated his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“No Robert, don’t you get it?”

His shoulders sank.

“It’s, it’s that you dry your hands on the back of the towel because you know people usually use the front of it.”  She sighed, looking around for the words to say so he would understand.  She motioned to the bookshelves on every wall in the second bedroom, his study, packed with books.  “It’s the books, Robert.  Stacks and stacks of alphabetized books.  Alphabetized!”

“But I teach English—you, you’re studying nights to be a librarian.”

“No Robert, it’s not—it’s that you are your books.  I mean, you never come out of that world, the one you’ve organized like a card catalogue.”

“But I thought we were happy, six years, almost seven.”

“I still love you Robert, but I need something more.”

She held up a tarnished gold pocket watch she had been clutching in the same hand that held the suitcase handle.  “You’re so damn predictable.  I need you to be spontaneous.  For God’s sake, be late, call in sick, show up unexpectedly.”

His brow furrowed deeper.  “That’s the watch my father left me.”

“Do you have any idea how many times you check this old watch every day Robert?  We make love every Tuesday night at 7:30 and every other Saturday, same time.”

He frowned, looking at his feet and mumbled, “It doesn’t keep accurate time.”

She shook her head.  “You don’t think I notice that everything in your life is on a schedule, even me?”  She had finally managed to stop crying at least for the moment.  “I wish you’d be, oh, I don’t know, reckless just once.  Be irresponsible, be negligent, heck, be dangerous.”  She waved the yellow slip of paper.

“Dangerous?” 

How, he wanted to ask her, do you propose I be dangerous around so delicate a woman?  Isn’t the world already dangerous enough?  “But you,” he hesitated, as if it was inappropriate to talk about Helen’s condition even though they’d been together for so many years.

She put her fist on her hip.  “Go ahead, say it, but I’m not made of china.  You act just like my father, trying to pad everything, protect me from myself.

“That’s not what I want, Robert.  I don’t need a man to schedule my life in the safest way possible.  You’re not my father.”

“But your condition?”

 Suddenly, Robert felt quite like fainting.  When he had begun dating Helen, senior year in high school, her father had explained she had CIPA, Congenital Insensitivity to Pain.  It was the night he came to take her to the senior prom.  She was upstairs, styling her hair while he waited nervously on the couch across from her father who was planted comfortably in a recliner and staring at him.

“People with CIPA literally can’t feel physical pain,” he had explained.  “Nothing; not a bump on the head, not a four-inch cut.

“Growing up, I told her countless times about the other children we’d read about with it and how many of them had lost adult teeth, blinded themselves, or even died of exposure or infection.”

It seemed to Robert at this moment that Mr. Summers was taking him into his confidence, disclosing such personal family information, and it made him feel honored to be trusted with such.

“So you, young man,” he had looked over the rim of his glasses, “will take the greatest care with my daughter, yes?” 

“Yes sir.” 

It was as though he, Robert, had been given a very important mission, and since that day he had been proud to carry out this duty loyally.

“Folks with CIPA, sometimes they hurt themselves, break a bone, maybe even cut themselves without realizing it,” said Mr. Summers.  “Damned if this one toddler we read about didn’t gnaw her own finger off before her parents realized it.  Serious stuff, yes?”

Robert had nodded, feeling his heart swell at the thought of being this beautiful young woman’s protector.  There he was, eighteen-years-old, tall and scrawny, clutching an inhaler with a sweaty palm in his pocket, next to a wad of damp tissues.  Sitting nervously on the edge of that couch he had never felt more courageous.  He had been commissioned with the safety of the delicate Helen Summers; a responsibility he felt was perhaps even greater than protecting the Holy Grail.

"When she was a girl of nine,” her father had said, “Helen asked me to build her a tree fort.”  He chuckled at the memory, shook his head.  “She had been sitting in the window, watching the neighbor’s children play in a ramshackle tree fort assembled high in an oak tree.

“Absolutely not, I told her.  It isn’t safe, especially for you, and you ought to know that.  She pleaded for the tree house, but instead I built her a doll’s house with paper cups, cardboard, and hot glue—a much safer venture, yes?  The way I saw it, Helen’s tree house adventures were to be kept between the covers of books like The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe.

“Later, she climbed the tree in spite of me and, of course, she fell six feet onto her left arm, breaking it at the elbow and in four other places.

“She didn’t tell me for a week and then only because she was having trouble writing in school.  She couldn’t get her arm to rest on the desk properly.  I was furious but her mother insisted I go easy on her.  The fact that the doctor was going to have to re-break the arm before setting it properly in a cast was punishment enough, she said.

“So you see, she can be stubborn about these things, but I expect you’ll look out for her the same, yes?”

And so Robert had, through five years of dating and six years of marriage, done his utmost to avoid danger and carefully calculate risk on her behalf.  But now she was asking him to embrace it, even to be negligent. 

He simply wondered how?  Why?  And it sent his head spinning.

“Robert, all these books you read are filled with heroes, brave men, courageous men, you can’t see what I’m trying to say?”  She shook her head, mascara running, dark hair falling out of the lavender headband.  He loved how she did that, putting her hair in colorful headbands.  And her small, black-frame glasses, her light freckles on smooth tan cheeks.”

     She opened the door, stepping into the hallway.

     “Robert, do you remember when we met?”

     “Of course I do.  The Nickelodeon, at the movies on Classics Night.  You were in front of me, I said you smelled nice, like limes, and you laughed, but you smiled and said kiwi.  I couldn’t believe you were there when most kids our age were watching The Terminator at the Maine Mall Cinema.”

     “Gregory Peck.”

     “Yes!” he stepped toward her as if remembering this might bring her back from the hall, have her unpacking the suitcase.  “To Kill a Mockingbird.  And every night on our anniversary we watch that.”  She looked at her feet, the doorframe, avoiding his pitiful smile, standing there in his blue robe with the yellow ducks, glasses on the end of his nose.

“You’re always reading your mythology—your Homer, Poseidon and Zeus, Odysseus and Achilles.  But it was Mockingbird we fell in love watching Robert.  That’s the book you ought to re-read.”

She walked to the coffee table in the middle of the living room, placed his father’s old watch it, turned back around, and walked through the door.  When she closed it gently, walked away, little suitcase rolling behind her, Robert just stared at the watch.  The stupid, useless watch that he set and then reset sometimes every four hours.  Really, it was only accurate for about an hour or two before it was off completely, and who carried a pocket watch anymore?  But Robert found comfort in this outdated timepiece—in the fact that it required constant readjustment, constant checking.  Why couldn’t she understand that he needed this?

When he heard a car trunk slam, a taxi?—looked up and saw by the living room clock that it was 6:51 a.m.; He was fifty-one minutes late getting up and the wheezing had started again.  Straps of tension were tightening around his chest.

A car door?  They didn’t own a car.  Was she taking a taxi?  Was she leaving with someone?

“Oh, God.”

     He had seen through the gap in the curtains a yellow Portland Taxi idling on the street below, and it seemed his heart seized pumping mid-beat.  He’d already needed three shots from his inhaler and it wasn’t even 7:00 a.m.  Helen was about to be driven away in a cab.  He was to begin teaching in less than an hour, and he wasn’t even dressed yet.