LITMIR.BIZ

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      MR. M.

      THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a happy time in my life. I had a good job, an apparently solid marriage, and an easy, unthinking faith in my own good judgment and moral integrity. Right now, that seems like more than enough to ask for.

      I was restless, though. I thought about going back to school, earning a master's and maybe even a doctorate in Education, retooling myself for the administrative track. With all the ferment going on in the field, all the talk about the decline of America's schools and the need for a bold new generation of leadership, I sensed a golden opportunity for the transformation of my life.

      After nearly a decade of classroom teaching, interacting with maybe a hundred kids a day, I was itching for a chance to apply my skills on a larger scale—writing curriculum, formulating policy, developing innovative programs that would help reshape secondary education. I had visions of myself as a Principal, a respected authority on school reform, perhaps even a politician one day.

      Measured against my dreams—which, admittedly, I'd done nothing to implement—my day-to-day life seemed a bit lacking. There were times when I nearly hypnotized myself with the drone of my own voice, the all-too-predictable trajectory of my classroom thoughts. I'd walk out at the end of the day feeling underutilized, like the best parts of me hadn't been engaged, and were turning rusty from disuse.

      It's probably not surprising that this vague discontent spilled over into my marriage. There was nothing particularly wrong with it. For the most part, Diane and I got along well enough and enjoyed each other's company. We just felt stagnant, like a TV series that had run a couple of seasons too long. Part of it was that we were stuck in a holding pattern, trying to conceive our first child, but the problem ran deeper than that.

      Diane has an enormous number of good qualities. She's attractive, well-read, politically aware, and good at her work (she does PR for St. Elizabeth's Hospital). People who know her consider her a loyal and caring friend, the kind of person you can count on in hard times and emergencies. After five years of marriage, her virtues were so familiar to me that I hardly even noticed them.

      What I noticed more and more in the months leading up to the election were her shortcomings. There weren't many, but I guess I kept my eye out. Her underwear bored me. She ate an awful lot of ice cream that went straight to her thighs. She couldn't have told a joke if her life depended on it. She interrupted my reading. Sometimes I'd look at her and find myself thinking about Jack Dexter, wondering if I was finally beginning to understand.

      TRACY FLICK

      PEOPLE KEPT USING the term “sexual harassment” to describe what happened, but I don't think it applies. Jack never said anything disgusting and he never threatened me with bad grades. Most of our time together was really sweet and nice. I even cried a few times, it felt so good to have him hold me.

      MR. M.

      JACK WAS JUST like me. We started the same year at Winwood, and were friends within a matter of weeks.

      We ushered at each other's weddings, played Friday night poker with a couple of his buddies, and made it a habit to get absolutely plastered once a year, on the last day of school. Both of us had electric guitars and vibrant fantasy lives, which we indulged every now and then in his basement, turning the amps up to ten and scratching out every three-chord anthem we could remember, plus a few that the world hadn't heard before.

      The poker games ended in 1990, when Sherry Dexter got pregnant. I guess I wasn't too broken up about it. The games had gone from weekly to monthly by that point and had begun to emit the stale odor of rituals that have outlived their usefulness. But Jack acted as though something important and sustaining had been subtracted from his life. He started talking about poker all the time, wistfully, as if we'd been big-time professional gamblers instead of young married guys puffing on pretzel rods, biting our nails over a pile of nickels. If you asked about Sherry, he always said the same thing, with the same disheartened expression.

      “She's enormous, Jim. Big as a frigging house.”

      Sherry was six months along when Jack started up with Tracy Flick. I know because he told me about it at lunch the next day, half bragging, half confessing his sins.

      They were working late on the Valentine's Day edition of The Watchdog, just the two of them, when the conversation somehow turned to the subject of dating.

      “The boys in this school are so immature,” she complained. “They don't even know how to conduct a conversation.”

      “Oh?” said Jack. “So you'd prefer an older man?”

      “As a matter of fact, I probably would.”

      “How old?” he asked, not quite teasing.

      She pondered him and the question together.

      “How old are you?”

      “Me? Thirty-two.”

      “Thirty-two?” Her tongue made a thoughtful circuit of her chapped lips. “That sounds about right.”

      TRACY FLICK

      IT SEEMED EXCITING tome, a new frontier. Jack had been flirting with me all year anyway, commenting on my clothes, telling me I reminded him of this girl he'd been in love with in college. He watched me all the time.

      Yes, I knew his wife was pregnant. Everybody knew. Somehow that made it even more exciting.

      It was the stupidest thing I ever did, but I wouldn't trade that first kiss for anything. And for all the trouble I caused him, I'd like to imagine Jack feels the same way, though I wouldn't blame him if he didn't.

      MR. M.

      I WAS APPALLED and jealous at the same time. I didn't want to lecture him, didn't want to offer even implicit approval, and couldn't quite conceal my curiosity.

      I also had to accept a certain amount of responsibility. I'd been egging him on for years about the girls at Win wood, asking if he'd seen this one in her tight little skirt or that one in her black velvet top. Tracy had been a staple of our gossip for well over a year at that point. It was easier than you might imagine to forget she was fifteen. Spend enough time in a high school, and you forget what fifteen means.

      TRACY FLICK

      WE TOOK RISKS. Jack had lots of keys and more free time than I'd realized. He wrote me passes out of gym and study hall and we unbuttoned each other in musty storage rooms, surrounded by musical instruments, audiovisual equipment, shelves of mysterious chemicals. We did crazy things right in his classroom, in a corner you couldn't see from the door. I gave him a hickey one day under the stairwell, then painted it over with some cover stick. We fooled around in the darkroom, the handicapped elevator (this was after school, when the wheelchair kids had gone home), and backstage, behind the curtain. We kissed and licked and rubbed, driving each other crazy with our tongues and fingers. Twenty minutes of that and I'd walk around the rest of the day in a zombie daze, smiling at everyone I passed. It was the same for Jack. He forgot how to teach. He'd be standing there at the board and his face would just go blank. He'd tap the chalk against his forehead, leaving a cluster of faint white dots.

      “I'm sorry,” he'd say. “Where the heck was I?”

      I was a sophomore. He was my first real boyfriend.

      MR. M.

      JACK WAS SIMPLY not functioning on a rational level. You saw him in the hallway with Tracy all the time, and he looked as love-drunk as any sixteen-year-old in the whole school. I expected to turn the corner one day and find them making out in front of her locker.

      “Jack,” I said. “This has got to stop. It's getting out of hand.”

      “I

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