∞

It’s August and it’s time for you to go but the light is all wrong for leaving. 

The school year starts in August pretty much everywhere now.  Back when you were in elementary school, it started on the Wednesday after Labor Day.  You remember now how it magically seemed to turn cooler that day or at least by week’s end, even if it had been blistering hot or Indian summer just the week before.  If you try you can remember the wet comb plastering your hair to your head and ducking away from your mother’s thumb, wet with the saliva that could tame cowlicks and erase a milk mustache. It’s just as easy to recall that nervous anticipation, that excitement, to start a new year with a clean slate and unknown opportunities.  Who knew what kind of honors might be won or what winning runs might be scored?  Who knew where you might find yourself when your singular distinguishing moment arrived?  It could be in the classroom or on the playground or in the echoing alley between the school and the rectory.  And what form would it take?  It could be the correctly spelled word, the stolen kiss, the ounce of energy you didn’t know you had.  It’s been years since you were young and now school starts too early.

August is still summer and still hot and while the other teachers complain in faculty meetings about how wild the kids are when they come back and how they have no attention span and damn the Internet and video games and satellite television, you’ve never bothered to voice your opinion that the light is just wrong and it’s too soon.  You’re sure that a few pairs of eyes[1] would roll at any suggestion from the moony English teacher and you’ve sworn to yourself that if Masters gives you that look one more time, you might just say or do something that makes everyone uncomfortable, not just you.  Still, it seems pretty obvious that school simply starts too soon, cutting summer too short.  Students return distracted by unfinished games and by swimming pools still full of warm water, sporting suntans and bruises and other signs of hard play that can’t be hidden with short sleeves and open collars.  The light coming into the classroom windows is all wrong for grammar and writing and short stories and sonnets and you think if any of them just thought about it for one minute they would see that. 

You remember her face in your hands after that first bold kiss in her classroom.  You remember bits of her chalk notes on complementary angles superimposed on her sweater after you’d pressed her back to the board.  You remember thinking that it had been so long coming, that kiss, that you’d circled each other in a holding pattern forever, so awkward for grown-ups.  The kiss held too much of your pent-up passion and it embarrassed you when both pairs of horn rimmed glasses went askew but she laughed, her whole body shaking, and in answer to your ‘what?’ she told you a joke.  She asked you how two porcupines make love and was laughing so hard she could barely respond to your ‘I don’t know, how?’ with ‘very carefully!’  She said the two of you were like nerdy porcupines and you kissed her again, more carefully, thinking that you’d finally found the secret door and it was open. 

For all your love of words, they stayed stuck in your mouth no matter how badly you wanted to spit them out and share them with her.  Over that first Christmas break in the no man’s land between Christmas and New Year, in lieu of declarations you worked on pressing your lips to every square inch of her body.  It seemed to stretch afternoons into whole years, lying with her and kissing her and talking silliness but when your thoughts turned serious and you desperately wanted to say something meaningful, you came up dumb.  All of these thoughts and emotions she’d given you for the first time in your whole stupid life and all your love of words and you couldn’t string even a few together to tell her about gratefulness and reverence.   And so she liberated you with a small tissue-wrapped leather bound journal next to your coffee cup one morning, a sticky note attached that said:

Jim,

We make such a good couplet, but a math teacher needs proof.  Give me a sine!

Write to me,

Sarah       

So in between physical consecrations and devotions, you poured out sonnets – your own and ones you loved[2] - and you wrote brief thoughts and observations on her eyes and skin and hair and you made plans in that journal that you passed back and forth.  You scolded her for using it to say mundane things like ‘We’re almost out of dog food!’  and she responded with a poorly drawn Labrador retriever with mouth open, tongue hanging out, saying I LOVE YOU JIM SARAH SAYS IF YOU LOVE ME YOU’LL BUY ME FOOD THX JEEVES

And but so now it’s late which you can tell by the light and you’re surrounded by boxes of books in your haunted living room.  Everything else has been packed and loaded and moved.  This is the last of it.  You wanted to load the books yourself.  You can’t resist it, this scab-picking, this wound-opening.  You can’t just tape them up and cart them to the car, shuttle them off to their new home and their new place in new bookcases.  You have to reach your hand in and take out the last journal to read the last entry (yours)  to twist the knife to keep it fresh to remind you to forget the new life you want or you think you want because here is your life, your grief, your soul’s companion.

Sarah –

Let’s go to the lake tomorrow if it doesn’t rain.  I’ll pack sandwiches and wine and books and it’ll be just like it was in the beginning.  Me reading you my favorite poems and you telling me how wrong I am about everything.  I’ll kiss you a million times and that still won’t be enough.

Until tomorrow, here’s your beloved Neruda.  He can speak for me. 

Forever yours,

J

Sonnet XLV

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because-
because-I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

All the other pages are blank, mocking echoes.  You stare out the window at the waning August sun and you know this light is all wrong.  It’s August light and it’s still summer and it’s too soon to go, even though you had stayed on another year, clinging to mind-whispers and nothing.  You stayed for a year having fallen in love with your heartbreak.  You stayed, irrationally rooted to where she could find you if she came back looking.  Some part of you, of course, knew she wasn’t coming back but what if, what if, even if it were just in dreams, she would look here and find you, soul dead and paralyzed.

It’s not that you didn’t know how to live.  You knew how to live, what to eat, what to say, how to know when something’s funny or sad, what clothes to wear, when to close your eyes and sleep, how to start a day with an alarm clock and coffee and shuffle through each step like you’re under water or under glass. So it’s not that you didn’t know how, it’s that you didn’t want to know.  At the end of each day, you made a desperate turn for the house, not thinking to stop for food or clean shirts at the laundry, just rushing back after holding your breath for the entire day. 

Here in the house you could stand in her closet and bury your face in her dresses and sweaters.  You didn’t have to pretend that you weren’t dead yourself and you could miss her and long for her as much as you almost couldn’t stand and not be ashamed when grief bowed your back.  You could touch pieces of jewelry like worry beads and spray her perfume onto her pillow so you could lay your own head there and sleep. You could loosen a strand of hair from her hairbrush and wind it around your finger until it cut off the circulation.  And but for as much as you withdrew and became silent and exerted only the most minimal energy to live – to your utter disgust and despair – you simply went on living.  You’d managed to go on living and you lived long enough to stop wishing that you just wouldn’t. 

So, now it’s August again and even though the light is all wrong for it, you will open your books and start teaching grammar and writing and short stories and sonnets at a new school in a new town. The other teachers won’t regard you until you do your time and learn how things are done at St. Mark’s and the students will be wary until they have the book on you, Mr. Halpert, the new English teacher.  They won’t know anything about you and they won’t know anything about the math teacher you were engaged to, such a shame, that pretty teacher named Sarah.

The living room is sifted soft and dark.  Last box, last light out.  Door closed, key in the mailbox for Mrs. Thompson.  Five counted stairs to the walk, to the car.  You start the engine, cursing your irrational fear and your magical thinking.  You lingered too long and now your drive will be in darkness. 

[1] Mr. Pollard, the industrial arts (when did that stop being ‘shop’?) teacher who you secretly call Popeye because of his disproportionately large forearms, Mr. Fitzgerald, the gargantuan Social Studies teacher who literally has to crouch to enter his classroom and who enjoys intimidating students and teachers with his freakish size and booming voice just a little too much, and Tom Masters, the quintessential gum-chewing, whistle-toting, spandex short-wearing in January PE instructor slash coach who always manages to look at you with a shake of his head and a silent benediction you interpret as ‘you poor dickless bastard.' 

[2] She had favorites but she was open to listening to or reading just about anything.  You loved her for that and you loved that she hated Wordsworth and Tennyson and merely tolerated Keats and Yeats.  Neruda, on the other hand, made her swoon.

∞

Our unconscious brains use dreams to express unconscious desires.  You can’t be held responsible for these.  In waking life, you take a stock broker and an athlete and a heroin addict and an English teacher and there is a decent chance on any random night all of them or any two of them might put their heads down and have the same dream.  For example:  dreams about teeth.  Lots of people dream about their teeth crumbling or falling out.  This dream is supposed to signify that the dreamer has a fear of losing control or of public embarrassment.  Broker or barber, it’s a common dream.  Whatever grace humans manage to project in their waking life, at night the reptilian, childlike part of the brain takes over and we have the same fears.

A few months after Sarah died, you woke up with a broken tooth in your mouth, amazed you hadn’t swallowed it and mystified by how it might have happened.  Your dentist said there was evidence in your mouth that you were grinding your teeth; it’s a common response to stress and anxiety, he said.  So, in addition to dreaming when you were asleep, you’d been grinding your teeth and breaking them.  You wonder what sound that makes and you know this must have just started because you know Sarah would have mentioned it because she was a light sleeper and because she slept pressed up against you and she would have heard you or felt you doing it.  Without anyone other than Jeeves[3] beside you to notice, hear you, poke you with an elbow to stop, you never knew you were doing it.  You were unconscious.

The dream is a literary cliché you hope to God you are not resorting to, but you can’t help it, you are dreaming and slightly aware of it.  Tomorrow, you have an all-day new teacher orientation at St. Mark’s that you are dreading.  You think you used to be better at those kinds of things, more relaxed and charming, quick with a handshake and a smile but now it seems to require so much energy and you feel so awkward as a conversation agent – you lose your train of thought in the middle of speaking, your mind wanders rudely while listening and you nearly always have that moment of surreality where your brain screams out ‘my God she’s dead why are you standing here just talking to this person it’s pointless!’  So you had a little Scotch and fell asleep so your unconscious brain could work through your social phobias and unconscious desires.

First, this next part really happened before you fell asleep.  You finished unpacking the last of your clothes and found an old Pearl Jam tee shirt and you thought some music, semi-loud, and a little Scotch might be a good idea.  You admit it, some foolishness ensued.  You’re a 29-year old man wearing a Pearl Jam tee shirt for starters and trying on a bandana in front of your bedroom mirror, rotating your torso right to left to get the effect from all angles is just a wee bit foolish.   Full metal foolish is leaving the room for the sole purpose of casually walking back in and pretending to catch your image in the mirror by surprise to get some objective view of yourself.  And you do that.  You also catch what is obviously a disapproving look from Jeeves and you say ‘don’t judge me!’ to his reflection in the mirror but he rolls over on the bed to avoid witnessing any more of your antics.

“Come on!  It’s not like I sang a John Mayer song into my hairbrush, for Chrissake!”

Okay, you weren’t seriously considering the bandana, but the problem here and the source of your social anxiety is that you don’t know who you are anymore.  You say your name out loud and try to make the sound into a mental picture.  Ask yourself who you will be in this new life because it is a fundamental question.  For a split second being a cheap imitation of David Foster Wallace seemed like a viable option in Phase I of The Reinvention of Jim Halpert.  But while the bandana managed to give Wallace a certain unstudied and hip cachet, you looked like you’d just had brain surgery or suffered some sort of head trauma.  The ideas of how you might evolve carom wildly through your head; the bandana was only the beginning.

What if you were to, say, take up skiing?  Just become crazy for it, and people would know you as a skiing enthusiast.  Or maybe you develop a passion for photography and you’re the guy who always has a camera case slung over his shoulder, with enough knowledge to collect and switch lenses and filters, conveniently placing the camera between your face and the world.  Or maybe you start this whole Granola Halpert evolution where everything you eat and wear and think about is organic.  You start gardening and you start small with maybe a few tomato plants and maybe lettuce and you can see yourself out there in the yard making straight rows of vegetables, neatly labeled.  Of course, you learn a lot about seeds.  You’re practically an expert on soil acidity and you develop a snobbery about hybrids.   A whole new wardrobe probably goes along with this metamorphosis, full of organic cottons and muted colors and some version of a jaunty but functional gardening hat.  Or you could forget the gardening (you get nauseated thinking about the compost pile you’d be honor-bound to have) and just change your wardrobe.  What if you tossed out your chinos and v-necks and started going to school in jeans and cargo pants and Pearl Jam tee shirts and maybe you let your hair grow long like DFW but you eschew the bandana.  That could work if you hadn’t just accepted a position at a Catholic high school that surely has a dress code and might even require a tie.  Try hard to remember how to tie a half-Windsor.

What if you became interested and involved in small-town politics and ran for councilman as the last honest man devoted to public service?   What if.  You might become a Big Brother or finally learn the guitar or run a marathon.  Ask yourself who you will become in this new life.  Say your name out loud and try to turn the sound into a mental picture.

For some time right after she died, you played the role of the quintessential shattered poet.  You didn’t do it intentionally and you lacked the energy and devotion it takes to be a true icon of the banal, but now that you’re in the market for an identity, you’re going to hang onto that one.  You tuck it in your pocket like a horded candy and in case none of this other crap works out you can be the drunken, shattered, tortured poet.  It could be the perfect life for you:  shoulders stooped, lank and unkempt hair falling over the forehead, Scotch-filled and brooding, bitter and broken.  How perfectly ironic you would be. 

When the bandana and compost dream ends, there’s an abrupt shift of scene to a classroom and then to your old bedroom in the summer heat.  Sarah, sweat, a tick-tick-ticking ceiling fan and the smell of sex.  It’s like a Mickey Rourke movie, but when the poetry starts in your head you wonder how fucked up you have to be to start dreaming in couplets.  Neruda couplets.   The dream is so vivid you can taste her skin on your tongue.

You’re  standing in front of a classroom of juniors lecturing on the sonnet.  The Italian, the Spenserian, the quatrains, the proposition, the couplet, the resolution.  As you turn back from the board you realize you are  totally naked except for a bandana around your head and you  immediately reach down to cover yourself with your hands.   Nobody’s laughing, your students don’t appear to think anything is amiss.  For a minute, you think this is okay. Either nobody notices or it’s perfectly okay that you’re  naked in front of a classroom discussing iambic pentameter, just like that.  You even try to get hold of your dreaming self to ponder whether it’s normal for you to teach nude, and  no.  You decide that it is just plain weird, not to mention humiliating, that you’re naked, as you  wear chinos and v-necks with a t-shirt underneath every day, like a uniform. You  don’t teach naked.  You crouch down behind your desk to hide and then you hear Sarah’s voice.

She’s sitting in the front row, though you swear she wasn’t there a second ago and she’s telling you something that you can’t quite hear.  Her lips are moving and she’s got her head cocked to the side like she does when she’s considering you. You  can’t hear her – it’s like your hands are over your ears, it’s all muted and muffled.  But then she’s inside your head talking nonsense and  saying something about the dog or your hair and you say, ‘I’m naked.  Is that okay?’ and she laughs and that is also inside your head.

‘Talk to me,’ you beg.  ‘Please talk to me.’

And suddenly the classroom is gone and you’re both lying naked together in bed, the air heavy and humid. You put an open mouth to her shoulder, tasting salt and you scrape your teeth against her skin, wanting to bite down, with the strangest wish on your tongue and familiar words filling your mouth like cotton.  You  wrap your arms and legs around her, surrounding her like a shell and hiding her.  It’s part memory and part dream when she swats at you and says ‘it’s too hot!’ but then she’s kissing you, her mouth like water.  You’re momentarily aware that you’re  dreaming but with the urgency of her tongue in your mouth you refuse to believe it’s not real.  From your memory you recite the words, pulling them one by one, like threaded cotton from your mouth, timing their rhythm to the Greek chorus of her sighs, punctuating the lines with kisses on her smooth skin.

How terrible and brief was my desire of you!

How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,

still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,

oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force

in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.

And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,

and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Suddenly, the bed has rails and your arms are cradling her with your cheek pressed against her hair.  Wanting only the sound of her voice, you say, ‘talk to me’ but no answer comes and the only sound in your head is a mechanical, metered chirping.  It morphs from monitor to alarm and you awaken startled, shaken, and sweaty, the last lines of the poem ringing in your ears.

Oh, farther than everything.  Oh, farther than everything. 

And but so the dream lingered in your woken mind, fogging your vision, and you thought this is no way to be starting a new life, no way to reinvent yourself.  You try to shake it off and wander to the front porch with your coffee and your Pearl Jam tee shirt and your messy hair, squinting at the sun just starting.  You jump, yowl and curse at the paper that comes flying at your bare feet along with the hot coffee jilted from your cup.  The paper boy hangs, the long hair, the goddamn baggy shorts, so adolescently sure and entitled to give you shit and the bull’s horns and a snarled lip like Billy Idol. 

“Rock on, dude!  Pearl Jam rules!”

“Shut up.”

“Whaa..?”

“Don’t throw the paper at me like that and don’t make fun of me.”

Pathetic.

“Okay, man, sorry.  Just having a little fun with you.”

You huff and he walks away and you think that this is no way to start your ultimate extreme life makeover.  

A year from now you won’t remember this particular exchange with the paper boy[4] because the day is a full one.  You spend a full day at St. Mark’s for orientation.  You swallow that ‘first day, new teacher’ feeling and smile a bit and remind yourself you are installing Halpert 2.0 and that all seems to be going well.  St. Mark’s uses a mentor system and it strongly believes in this system for assimilating new teachers.  It’s hard enough to attract teachers to a small, middle class Catholic high school in a small town in Vermont; St. Mark’s is not about to lose any lobster it snares by being sloppy with care, feeding and indoctrination.  The assignments are announced and your name is paired with a teacher named Paul Heiser[5] and when your pairing is announced there is a loud female snort that comes from directly behind you[6].  Suddenly there is female breath and female laughter and female whispers in your ear saying ‘good luck with that!’ and you turn to see a girl with curious hair. 

[3] Jeeves was a semi-famous pound dog before you adopted him, having been featured in the local paper as the Adopt-a-Pet of the Week. Abandoned by his owners at age 7, Jeeves suffered from separation anxiety which meant he could not even pee alone, and he insisted on having his own couch and half of whatever you were eating.  Unwilling to call him the Dog with No Name, you settled on Jeeves because of some dark coloring on his upper lip that suggested a very proper British moustache and an air of sophistication that his Labrador brain did not possess. You remember an early journal entry from Sarah called “Ode on Jeeves – A Labrador Haiku”

You gonna eat that?

Smells good.  You gonna eat that?

Hey!  Hey!  I’ll eat that!

You have only recently resumed conversing with him as though he were human. 

[4] You learn later his name is Justin just like every other boy his age, but what Justin has going for him is a pretty keen sense of observation and he walks the neighborhood every day delivering papers, so he notices a lot of stuff.  Later than that, your conversations turn friendlier and you fall into this routine on Saturday mornings where he delivers you last and the two of you sit on the porch and gossip like two old women.  You give him a little extra each week and he brings you a bagel to have with your coffee and you make him a hot chocolate and you gossip.  This is something you never could have imagined doing, ever.  But you like it.

[5] Even without his slight head nod and two-finger wave, you would have known which one was Heiser, because he is the one you most fear being paired with.  During a perfunctory coffee and donut session, you size Heiser up as a colossal tool.  He’s about 45, you’d guess, short and naturally muscled with big black-framed glasses crowned by a crop of rusty grey hair.  He teaches Latin and English, he’s a ball-buster with excellent aim and you can’t help feeling like your sack is in his sights.  The old you would be rubbing your hands together at an opportunity to deflate this guy’s ego just a bit.  The new you just wants to hang onto your testicles in case you are ever lucky enough to need them again.

[6] You were vaguely aware of someone coming in late, but it was during Sister Mary Donata’s presentation on the importance of a spiritual inner life for lay teachers, so you kept your attention, respectfully.  This late person sat behind you, intermittently distracting you with toe-tapping and heavy sighing.

∞

B.I. #1 - September 23rd

St. Mark's High School - Principal's office

Middlefield, Vermont

Father Joseph Chimento[7]

Q

I'm thrilled we were selected!  A documentary about high school students that doesn't revolve around sex and drug use or cheating or some kind of eating disorder is an excellent idea. 

Q

The staff and students have all been informed.  I'm sure it'll be strange to have cameras around at first, but we'll get used to it.

Q

Not at all!  I'm involved in summer stock here in Middlefield, so...

Q

Certainly.  Mr. Halpert is new.  He came to us from Scranton, Pennsylvania. 

Q

True, we don't often get applicants from out of state.  We don't get a lot of applicants from in-state, either, to tell the truth.  He said he was looking to relocate to Vermont and he'd done his research.  He thought the area was exactly what he wanted. 

Q

I suppose the thought crossed my mind, but - we do very thorough background checks here and everything checked out.  I just - I sensed a profound sadness.  A loss.  He wanted to start over - have a fresh start and he had excellent credentials.

Q

I have a little joke about that.  You've heard the saying "you don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps?"  I say that about being Catholic, so no, it's not a requirement, but it does -

Q

He'd been raised Catholic, so he knew...and I thought that maybe God called him to us.  I thought he was running to us rather than running from something.  No matter what you believe, we all benefitted. 

Q

I think he's doing very well.  He's certainly popular with the students.  We'd had a creative writing outlet for our students called...I can't even...anyway, it was published annually.  Mr. Heiser did a wonderful job with it, certainly, this is in no way...but Jim...Mr. Halpert...he really got the students fired up about doing it monthly.  He took them to the Dog River Bridge to throw stuff off of it - he said it was an exercise in letting go and then he got them to write about it.  He got them to write some very creative, very experimental things.

Q

Oh, yes, I heard something and there was that one faculty meeting...but I suppose they settled it without bringing it to me, thank God.  Seems like a lot of my time is spent as peacemaker so...that's another feather in his cap because I'm pretty sure he was the one.  Mr. Heiser can be tough.  He's a great teacher, but Paul can be rather...firm in his opinions. 

Q

I very nearly didn't - I was going to pair him with Ms. Beesly but as much as this is 2008 and all and they're both single people and there wouldn't be anything wrong...I just wanted to remove any possibility of impropriety or conflict.  I thought Jim and Paul might be good for each other.  Paul lost his wife about ten years ago - never been the same, really.  He's developed that hard outer shell people do sometimes.  Jim wasn't like that when I met him.  I could tell, you know, he had that sadness but it wasn't through and through.  He was still willing to be happy.  And from a teaching perspective - you can get stale over time, you know?  Set in your ways and teachers sometimes lock into a routine.  Jim had lots of ideas - some I wasn't so sure about to be honest, but I knew he'd ruffle some feathers...in a good way! 

Q

He was hired for the vacancy left by Mrs. Ketter - she taught poetry and American literature.  Neither course had been updated in years and he was really excited about that.  He wanted to expand the selections - keep some classics but add in some contemporary writers.   He talked a lot about David Foster Wallace and he wanted to  teach Infinite Jest in the Lit class.  I had no idea if the book was appropriate for our students.  It's over 1,000 pages...

Q

Yes, 1,069 pages.  It's too long.

BI #2 - September 29th

St. Mark's High School - Teachers Lounge

Middlefield, Vermont

Paul Heiser

Q

I teach Latin and English composition. 

Q

Six.  I have three kids in Latin III and three in Latin II.  Nobody signed up for Latin I this year.

Q

I hope we always offer it and the students who take it, they're good kids.  Smart.  They want a challenge they don't get in other classes.

Q

Halpert?  Yeah, I'm his mentor.

Q

Look, I know you're looking for some drama here.  Classic conflict, right?  The crusty old teacher, all stuck in his ways coming up against the brash young lion, full of enthusiasm and fresh ideas so we must hate each other, right?  I'm supposed to be full of professional jealousy and maybe personal, too, because he's a young, good-lookin' guy.  [snorts and shakes his head] You know what?  There's no drama here.  Halpert's a good kid.  We have different opinions about things in the classroom, absolutely.  I don't like some of the things he does and he doesn't like my approach.  [shrugs] What're you gonna do? 

Q

Sure the kids like him!  He's only been at this for six years!  He hasn't been worn down yet.

Q

Look, I'm not here to win a popularity contest.  It is my fervent wish, each school year, that by the end of the term, I will have taken 20 functionally illiterate students and educated them to the point where they can write one, simple, perfect declarative sentence.  That is my goal.

Q

Ten years ago, yeah.  Joe tell ya that?

Q

No, no, it's fine.  I'm sure that's why he paired me up with Halpert.  He lost his fiancée a year and a half ago.  Ovarian cancer.  Just awful, so young. 

Q

Not really.  We got it all out the first day over beers.  I ended up driving him home, he got pretty  drunk.[8]  He said the whole year has been kind of a blur to him, he doesn't remember much.  I remember feeling like that - so lost.  It brings you to your knees.  No way you can stand back up again without having someone to lean on.  [clears throat]

Q

Nah, it's okay.  He's a good kid.  Screwed up ideas about teaching, but he'll be okay.  I think he might have something cooking with that kooky art teacher, Beesly.  You know anything about that?

B.I. #3 - October 21st

St. Mark's High School - North Wing - Mr. Halpert's room

Middlefield, Vermont

Overheard  from the hallway

Mr. Halpert - So, tell me about the two people in this poem.[9] 

[silence]

Mr. Halpert - No ideas? 

Student - The author's horny.

[laughter]

Mr. Halpert - Thank you, Jason!  There it is!  Okay, yes!  He's, uh, he's longing for someone and that longing is turned into a physical craving that he can't...uh...well, maybe we don't need to go into that right now

[Laughter]

Mr. Halpert - Okay, it's almost last bell, so for Monday...

 [class groans]

Mr.  Halpert - I know!  For Monday, I want a poem.  It doesn't have to be in sonnet form!  It can be any form you'd like. 

Student - On what topic?

Mr. Halpert [groans] - I have to give you the topic, too?  Okay, here we go. 

[class settles]

Mr. Halpert -[sits back against the desk, arms folded, then he reaches to tap fingers against mouth]  I want you to think of someone in your life.  The most important person in your life.  Someone who has had a huge impact on your life - positive or negative or maybe both.  I want you to write about how you feel when you think about that person.  I don't want a biography!  I want to know what you feel when you think of that person.  And then I want you to edit and edit and edit the thing.  Take out the words that aren't about feelings and leave me just the raw emotion.  Make me feel something.  

Student - [unintelligible]

Mr. Halpert - No, Matt, you don't have to do all that.  Guys, don't make this harder than it has to be!  It can be as little as four lines of very simple words, but they have to be powerful words.  Choose wisely, make each one count.

[class groans]

Mr. Halpert -  Dazzle me with your creativity and your courage!   See you Monday.

B.I. #4 - November 7th

St. Mark's High School - North Wing - Mr. Halpert's room

Middlefield, Vermont

Pam Beesly, Jim Halpert - overheard  from the hallway

J - You just don't think, y'know that it'll happen.  [sniffs loudly] You don't go into it with those thoughts and it was just, um, it was a sucker punch and...[growls] man, so pissed, so mad for a long time but you can't be mad.  You can't let yourself...if you get caught up in your own head like that...you don't want to waste whatever time you have left together being mad

P- Yeah, I can imagine...

J - Can you?  Can you imagine it?

P - Well, I didn't mean...I mean, I guess I what I mean is I can...

J - Y'know, you can't.  You just can't.

P - I'm sorry, I didn't...

J - People say they know or they can imagine and you know you just don't have any fucking clue about it until you're there...

P - No, of course, I

J - and even in the middle of it you're not even aware, I mean, you're so aware, really just and you're trying to soak up every last bit of this person, their eyes, and just every last bit but you're afraid to focus on one thing because you might miss something else...

P - Please don't feel like...you don't have to tell me anything

J -[sighs] Look, Pam, I'm sorry.  You're a good friend and I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner and I don't mean to be a prick...

P - It's okay and I'm sorry, too.  This isn't the right time or place and now you're upset...

J - I'm not upset, I'm not. 

P - Okay.  Are you angry?

J - No, no.  I'm not angry and I'm not upset, I just...fuck, I don't know what I am.  I just...don't know...

P - Are you hungry?  [both laugh}  Because I make great...instant pudding  [laughter]  and I can call out for pizza better than anyone.

J - [laughs] Really?

P - Yeah...and listen, I can make the real cooked kind of pudding, I mean I know how, but I actually prefer the instant, so why don't you come over after work?

J - To your house?

P - Yeah...yeah.  It'll be fun.  You can yell at me some more and I'll make pudding.  You can haul out my high school yearbooks and make fun of me.  I have lots of wine.

J - Well, since you have wine...okay.  It's a date.

B.I. #5 - November 17th

St. Mark's High School - Letters publishing office

Middlefield, Vermont

Jason, Emily, Meg, Matt

Q

Emily - The name was Mr. Halpert's idea.  He said that a lot of The Bible is made up of letters -

Meg - Epistles

Matt - Whatever - it goes "a reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Klingons"

Emily - Pretty sure there aren't any Klingons in the Bible, Dork Boy.

Matt - Paul wrote to like a lot of people.  We can't be sure.

Emily - [loud sigh] Whatever!  The point Mr. H was making is that back then, letters were the only means of communication across long distances and not everyone knew how to write.  It was a very big deal.

Jason - So "letters" has two meanings - the letters of the alphabet and like love letters

Meg - Not just love letters, but written messages. 

Emily - I would love to read his stuff.  He promised us before the end of the year he would.

Jason - Yeah, I don't know.  He's so...weird.

Emily - He's not weird!

Meg - You love him.  You're in love with him and you want to have his babies.

Emily - [rolls eyes] Who doesn't?

Jason - I don't but I think Matt does.

Matt - I do and I'm straight.  He makes being a dork seem cool.  I don't think he's weird.

Meg - He's private - almost secretive, y'know?

Emily - Well, he's new.  We just don't know him very well yet.

Q

Matt - Yeah, we had a literary thing with Mr. Heiser, but it just didn't...

Emily - It was an annual thing and like a contest so

Jason - It turned into a popularity contest over whose stuff got in there and it was all lame.

Matt - Yeah, Heiser wanted us to stick to like traditional forms for poetry and most kids, I mean, nobody I know reads that stuff, let alone writes it

Meg - So last year like only two kids even submitted anything and Heiser said there wasn't enough to even justify the cost of publishing

Jason - the paper and ink

Meg - yeah, so there was nothing

Emily - But right away, Mr. Halpert started asking us about it and we weren't very excited.

Matt - And he asked us why and we told him about Heiser and he was like ‘forget that, okay? Let's just have a fresh start.  We'll reinvent it and it'll be something new.'

Meg - So we were like, cool, whatever, we'll see.

Emily - The next day, he read us this Neruda poem.

[Jason groans]

Jason - You mean the sex one?

Meg - No, not the sex one!  The topaz one.

Jason - The girls went batshit crazy over it

Matt - Dude, even I got a little choked up

Meg - Mr. H...he got kind of...

Emily - his voice totally broke!  You could hear it, like he was going to start crying

Meg - And nobody, God, you could hear a pin drop we all just like held our breath like what do we do if our teacher starts crying?

Jason - yeah the room was dead silent while he read it

Matt - Man, he didn't even really read it, y'know?  He knew it by heart, he just recited it from his head even though he had the book in his hands.

Q

Matt - Love Sonnet Seventeen.   I wish I could remember stuff like he does.  It's amazing.

Emily - I have it!  I asked him if I could borrow the book and I copied it into my notebook [flips pages]...here!

Meg - Matt, you read it.

Matt -[nervous laugh] You really want to hear this?

Q

Matt - Okay.  Don't laugh. [laughs] Okay, here goes.

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Jason - [kissing sounds] It's a bromance!

Matt - [shoves Jason with his shoulder] Shut your face, asshole.  It's not a bromance - it's just, okay, I never had a teacher like him before, y'know?  He's cool.  Some of his jokes are lame, okay, but he like knows they're lame so that makes them kind of cool.

Meg - I liked what he said about writing letters, when we started.  He said it can be more intimate than whispering in someone's ear and that just, wow.  I mean, I like to write but I never thought about it that way. 

Jason - He said that sometimes, for whatever reason, it's hard for you to just like say things or maybe you want to say something without being interrupted and you can write it down and give it to someone.

Matt - And they can read it over and over and it's like you always have that moment, y'know?  You can always feel that again or hear them. 

Q

Emily - No, he's not married.  I don't...

Jason - He doesn't talk about himself a lot.

Meg - He seems lonely to me.  Like hurt.

Matt - But he's really funny, too, y'know?  He's always cracking jokes and he's funny. 

Emily - He needs a girlfriend.

Meg - Like you?

Emily - Exactly!  Yeah, no, he needs a girlfriend like Ms. Beesly.

Q

Jason - Yeah, the art teacher.  Super hot. 

Meg - I love her.  I've taken classes with her every year.  She's so awesome.

Matt - She's crazy.  She's gotten in trouble with the principal a bunch of times - we were scared they were going to try and fire her last year.

Q

Meg - It all started with Freda Kahlo.  She's a huge fan of Freda's and she was telling us about her life and how she used painting to express herself when she was recovering from her accident and surgery and how she married Diego Rivera but was bisexual and how they were both communists or something.

Jason - Oh man

Emily - There's stuff you don't want to talk about in a Catholic school

Matt - And no matter what - stuff that gets said in class always has a way of making it to the person it's going to piss off the most.

Meg - And that's exactly what happened.  The discussion went off topic like crazy and it was all over the place, but mostly it was about women and how women are portrayed in art and TV and movies and stuff and she was trying to get some of the kids to look at things objectively, y'know?  Critically?  From a feminist...

Jason - The F-word

Meg - Yeah, these are discussions that just don't happen here.  So, some parents heard about it and complained.  We heard Father Joe defended her to the parents but he was so pissed at her.

Meg - Yeah, he was really mad and she ended up on administrative leave for a week.

Emily - She went to New York City and stayed with her sister, right?

Meg - Yeah, and she came back with like a million amazing photographs. 

Jason - So awesome

Q

Meg - I think they're friends.  I've seen them just like talking.

Jason - They eat lunch together sometimes.

Emily - He needs her!  He deserves to be happy.

Matt - I think she might need him, too.  She needs a boyfriend.

B.I. #6 -  December 1st

St. Mark's High School - North Wing

Middlefield, Vermont

Pam Beesly - Burchfeld Art Building, Second Floor

Q

It is cool, isn't it?  This was the groundskeeper's house when the school had boarding students back in the forties.  Mrs. Bryant and I are the whole art department and we share the building.  She has the front and I have the back and that...suits both of us just fine.

Q

Oh, it's fine, you know?  I mean, she has her ways and I have mine and they are just...wow.  Totally different!  But it's fine, she's a fine teacher.

Q

Well, I know the likelihood of any of my students becoming gallery material is pretty slim and that's no slam on their talent.  I've had some super-talented kids.  But it's nearly impossible to get to that level, to be noticed.  I want to give them something else, I guess.  I want them to know art is created in a larger context, you know?  Not in a vacuum.  And the picture or the painting or the poem, whatever it is,  becomes more meaningful when you understand it in context. [looks away, fidgets with her necklace] This stuff is really important to me.

Q

[laughs] Oh, Freda!  Freda's gonna get me fired one day!  But...I can't not talk about her.  I can't not say there is a feminist perspective.  Especially for the girls...they have to get that.  I don't know what the hell I'm doing at a Catholic school.  [laughs] Who told you?

Q

They're good kids - Meg's one of mine, she's really great, and the rest are Mr. Halpert's writers, right?  Yeah. 

Q

Jim?  We're friends, yeah. 

Q

Well, he was hard to get to know right away, I mean, he's quiet at first before you get to know him and he was new here so that didn't help.  He was shy.

Q

Yes, I, um...I found out in a strange kind of way.  We'd been kind of hanging out and eating lunch together and stuff and I knew he was from Pennsylvania...Scranton...but he didn't tell me much about why he moved and I just didn't push it.  Anyway, I went over to his classroom at the end of the day several weeks ago to see if he wanted to go have a drink or something and his classroom door was open and it was so quiet that I almost walked in, I thought he'd dismissed his class early.  I mean, usually, close to last bell on Fridays this place is crazy, but anyway, I stopped outside the door because I heard him talking to his class and I ended up standing there and listening to him...um, while he read this poem. 

Q

Yeah, Neruda.  It just...it was so beautiful and I couldn't see him from where I was, I only heard his voice and I could tell how moved he was reading it...

Q

Really?  The kids tell you that?  Wow, of course they did.  So anyway, he dismissed his class and he was obviously...emotional and I asked him about it and he told me about Sarah.

Q

I felt...well, when I was standing out in the hallway, I was just blown away by the words but really by the passion in his voice and it just all made sense to me.

Q

Okay.  I was attracted to him right away.  Instantly and very.[10]  And I'll admit that I was pretty forward in the beginning because I was interested, you know?  And I was excited to have a new teacher here around my age and he was so dorky with the horn rims and the chinos but just gorgeous, you know, with that hair and in that really casual way and he seemed smart and like he just needed to loosen up a little because it was almost painful to look at him sometimes and I kind of...threw myself at him.  At the Homecoming dance.  We were chaperoning and I'd had a couple glasses of wine before I left the house and I sort of backed him into the corner by the girls' locker room and...well, let's just say, it didn't go so well.  I pretty much scared the crap out of him.  So, I apologized and it was all very awkward and embarrassing and I was afraid he was always going to be weird around me after that, but it was okay.  He cracked a joke and after that we started eating lunch together.

Q

We're all fragile in some way, I think.  I just tried to be a friend, you know?  I tried to make him laugh, I made him eat a lot of pudding.  [laughs] I took him to a bar to listen to some live music and after he got that scared shitless look off his face, I think he had a good time.  Course, he had a few drinks and that never hurts.  He just...he needed a friend. 

B.I. #7 - January 3rd

St. Mark's High School -

Middlefield, Vermont

Jim Halpert - Burchfeld Art Building, first floor

Q

Happy new year to you, too!  You guys must be wrapping up, huh?

Q

It is good to get home.  Did a little road trip back to Scranton, which was fun, spent some time with the family.  Yeah, holidays were good.  Now it's on to the spring semester.

Q                                      

It does feel like home, isn't that nuts?  [laughs] I've only been here since August, but it feels good.  I'm settling in.

Q

We've been, uh, spending some time together and it's...nice.  It's good.  She makes me laugh.  We're...um, we're going skiing today, it's the last day of vacation, so we're going skiing.  Cross country.  [holds up wineskin] With wine. [smiles and shrugs] She's forcing me.

Q

Well, I've been writing a lot.  Poetry mostly. 

Q

I'm thinking about it.  I know how tough it is, but Mr. Heiser has some contacts in publishing.  I guess it's worth a shot.  You never know, right?

[7] You already know Father Joe.  Joe's the guy who is still hanging onto some affectation from back when he felt the first surge of power through his young and manly loins.  Unfortunately for Joe (and you). that first brush with manhood came around 1964.  He's like the lost member of the Rat Pack, a smoother, pinker, rounder version of Dean Martin.  He was first in line for the hand-me-down pinkie rings from Uncle Carlo.  He does the two-handed handshake:  grip with the right and grip and do an odd patting thing with the left.  He claps you on the shoulder and squeezes just a little too hard.  You know Joe and you like him despite all his weirdness or maybe because of it  because if there's anyone who looks as out of place in rural Vermont as you feel, it's Father Joe Chimento.

[8] If you were involved in this conversation, you would not hesitate to give Heiser a good hard kick under the table.  What the fuck, Paul?  You wouldn't have gotten so drunk if it weren't for him ordering and talking and ordering and refilling when you were in the john and then the shots.  Unfair.

[9] The poem you just read to the class is Sonnet XI by Pablo Neruda. It's blatantly sexual and could probably get you fired, but this is your senior poetry seminar and your kids are pretty cool.  It's a big love affair in that class every time you meet - you've never had a class so responsive and there are some pretty decent writers, too.  You're taking a risk by reading this poem and there are giggles and snorts, but you feel strongly about treating them like adults.  In their own adolescent way, they know about love and longing and lust and desire, or they think they do.  You figure they can get it in a music video or they can have Pablo tell them what it's all about.  Besides, you're convinced that the two boys in class are getting laid on a regular basis.  Fuckers.

[10] What?  That is insane.  But, she did corner you against the water fountain when no one was looking, grabbed a handful of your sweater and pulled your face down to kiss her, didn't she?  And didn't that get your mind going places it hadn't been in awhile?

∞ 

The stages of grief are these:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  How interesting that the human desire to quantify extends to grief as if you could write a primer for it or a “Grieving for Dummies” or design a course in successful grieving so that soon after someone died you climbed aboard the Grief Express and at each depot along the way you dropped off your worked-through emotions and picked up the next group of issues to be wrestled with and then the whistle would blow and the engine would chug and your journey continued smoothly until you ultimately ground down to a halt, your grieving complete, popping out the other end a completely whole, healed, new person.   As though it never happened, as if you could forget. 

I like to think that on the outside I appeared to be passing this course with flying colors and honestly, most days, I think I did pretty well.  But the transitions were not smooth and the stages were not linear.  In fact, you hazily remember certain days, brittle and careening in high gear, when you were stubbornly silent or sulked and sneered from one stage to another.  Sarah jumped out of the past without warning at weird times and she rarely whispered.  I couldn’t predict or prepare for these moments that spiraled up and down my memory like vertigo.  Next thing, you’d be clutching the handle of the shopping cart or touching your forehead to the shower tile trying to get your bearings.  As if you could shake your head and forget.

Pam Beesly helped.  Mostly she helped but sometimes when I was alone I felt guilty for feeling good.  I felt guilty for having feelings for someone again and the feelings weren’t sorrow and the feelings were for Pam.  Then I felt shallow and manipulative, like I was using her, that she was simply the missing female piece I was snapping into the empty space.  Like she was your replacement girl, your power pack of cosmic energy, your soul recharger.  Could new life be as simple as plugging in and letting her bring you back to life?  As if any girl would do, as if you could forget.

But the truth of it was, I was beginning to forget.  Certain details were moving out of focus, certain conversations were blurred in a haze.  Sometimes I couldn’t remember if I’d told Pam a story or if I was remembering telling it to Sarah.  I was terrified of calling Pam Sarah but sometimes the feelings she aroused were the same and they became mixed up in your head.  Sometimes I expected that she knew things she’d have no way of knowing because it had been Sarah at my cousin Michael’s wedding and you’d never been to Philadelphia with Pam.  It all became muddled and blurry and I tried hard to separate them.  That seemed very important to me. 

Forgive me.  I am the unreliable narrator, flipping between you and I.   Understand, there were things I could not accept and that’s where you came in.  Forget talking.  I thought it would help if I could write this story, but not saying ‘I’, not saying ‘me’ because then it’s too close, right?  You know sometimes when you’re telling a story to someone and you’re very keen to have that person tap into your story, very eager to make some connection and suddenly you’re saying ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ - you know how you do that?  That’s what I was doing there in the beginning, just saying you but meaning me, because we’ve all had that loss haven’t we?  I needed you with me on this, I just couldn’t do it alone.  We’ve all had that pain so crushing.  I didn’t think you’d mind and it was so much easier for me.  I stayed on the sidelines, licking my wounds and watching and I would finally like to say ‘thank you’ and ‘well done’ because if it had been left up to me, well, I think we both know this story would have had a lot more Scotch and much less plot.  You were the one who kind of forced me to go to Pam’s for pudding and pizza and look how brilliantly that turned out.   Talk about your soothing tonic, talk about your whole new world.  I don’t mean to leave you behind, but it’s time, isn’t it?  Masks off then, no crutch and no bullshit.

I kept the dry cleaning receipt as a reminder, tacked up on the cork board over my desk at home.  It’s a reminder to stay open, keep the boundaries porous.  She’d done me a favor, picked up a few sweaters at the dry cleaner for me but when she came in through the front door with my dry cleaning over her shoulder and a new tennis ball for Jeeves, I pulled up hard and let her have it.  I didn’t yell, I don’t do that.  I gave her the good old passive-aggressive “I’m fine, nothing’s wrong, I’m just tired” bullshit.  And let me tell you, she did not love that.  And unlike Sarah, she didn’t let me go and stew in silence until I got over it.  She got right up in my face and wanted to have it out right there and then and man, did that make me feel like an ass and very uncomfortable.  I had to hurt her and say that for a moment it felt too familiar.  I had to admit that I was afraid.  She said it was okay, that was fair, but I wasn’t allowed to shut down and lock her out.  She made me agree to talk to her.  Fair enough, I said. 

But I continued to hold back; it seems I did that for a long time.  Maybe consciously because of the guilt, maybe subconsciously because of the fear.  It was so hard to let go of myself and all my precious grief!  Leaving myself open like that felt so dangerous and it felt like betrayal.  I know it’s irrational but it’s not weird; it’s completely normal.  I hadn’t yet reached the point where I realized that my healing didn’t have to hurt anyone, so I was still holding back and she gave no sign she noticed. 

Over breakfast at the Blue Benn diner in Bennington on a steamy Sunday July morning she slid a piece of color-washed paper across the table at me.  She’d written the words in her bold, even script and it seemed to almost sigh in a way I’d never  experienced before and though I knew the words by heart, they’d never come from her and so I read them slowly and carefully, the heat rising to my ears as her fingers pressed firmly on my wrist.

Sonnet XI[11]

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

And I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue. 

“Okay,” I said.  “Okay.”

Saturday morning on 30 minutes of sleep.  I am not joking thirty minutes.  Justin comes to the door with the paper, the bagel, and the coffee and I’m grabbing the robe around my waist, squinting at him without my glasses and shoving a ten dollar bill at him and saying, “can you get another coffee and another bagel and come back?”  And he laughs at me and says “Holy crap, you finally got laid!”  I tell him to shut up and go to the store and we’ll catch up another time and please can he leave the coffee and bagel and just ring the bell?  And keep the change and shut up!

Pam Beesly’s naked body in my bed causes me to commit at least five of the seven deadly sins and my worst offense is gluttony.  She takes my glasses off of me and I get an erection.  She’s delicious and delightfully filthy in every good way but she refuses to have sex if Jeeves is in the room.  I ask why.  Because, she says, his big old bewildered dog face staring at her will prevent her from having an orgasm and she is definitely there for the orgasm.  Minutes go by and we determine that ‘prevent’ is too strong a word, so on her fingers she ticks off reasons why Jeeves might diminish her enjoyment of her orgasm while she’s sitting on top of me.  These range from ‘he reminds of my father’ to ‘it’s dog abuse – he knows what we’re doing!”  Beyond lust and her deliciously filthy mouth she’s just so funny.  She makes me laugh.  I fix the lock on the bedroom door and I let my dog judge me. 

We drive to Bennington all fluffed up and fancy for a play.  She never makes it to the second act.  She is sound asleep with her head on my shoulder.

She is pretty much useless in the kitchen outside of pudding and scrambled eggs and showing up in only an apron and high heels.  I start shopping and cooking and I develop this weird passion for feeding her.  She keeps the wine glasses filled, plays music, sits on the counter and kisses me every time I’m within range, traps me with her legs and puts her hands down my pants, chops things if I need her to, but mostly she just admires me in her kitchen.  She carries on and on like if she doesn’t I might stop cooking for her and God, she loves to eat and everything I make her is the best she’s ever had.  How did she live so long on pudding and pizza and eggs?  In exchange she does the dishes and I admire her at the sink, with my hands, my lips, my whole body pressed to her back and I want nothing more than to lean into her and close my eyes.

We have plans for next school year.   We want to teach a cross-discipline course that melds writing and art.  We’ve done the instructional design, we’ve done the curriculum, we’ve pitched it to Father Joe.  We’re just waiting to hear if he approves. 

Moments still come, in the morning when she’s still asleep curled under my chin or when we’re sitting quietly on the porch.  I train myself to let them flow across the artificial borders I’ve made.  I take Pam to Scranton and she meets my family, sees the house and after that visit, the moments slow down.  Life merges, the water commingles and I breathe out.

She owns, I rent, and come August, my lease will be up.  We’ve put in a garden at her place, I’m leaving clothes and a toothbrush and there’s room for me there.  She’s hinted and I smile past it, but I’m thinking.  It will be August again so soon and already I’m thinking I love her.  I can feel blood in my veins and steel in my back and I wonder if two years is enough time.

She knows the old tradition and while so many things are new, I’m still as clumsy as ever with words when I try to say them.  I think I’m improving, but I’ll never be as good as I am on paper and on paper, I’m no David Foster Wallace, but then, who is?  There will only ever be one and now he is gone.  I’m no Neruda, either,  but in the fading August light, I find her with her camera in our garden, her autumn-colored curls lit up and glowing, a cotton dress loose around her bare legs.  She looks so beautiful in this light with a smile for me as I hand her the journal.

“I think it’s good timing,” I tell her.  “August.”

SONETO LXXVIII 

I don't have a "never,’ I don't have an "always." 

In the sand 

Victory left its forgotten footprints. 

I'm a poor man ready to love others who are like me. 

I don't know who you are. I love you. I don't give or sell thorns. 

Someone perhaps may know that I didn't weave bloody

Crowns, that I fought against mockery 

And that truly I filled the high tide of my soul. 

I gave doves as repayment for vileness. 

I don't have a "never" because  I was, am, will be unique.

And in the name 

Of my changing love, I proclaim purity. 

Death is only a stone of forgetting. 

I love you, I kiss your mouth of happiness. 

Let's bring the wood and make fire on the mountain.     

Before you can say ‘how predictable’ let me be the first to acknowledge that the love-of-a-good-woman-saving-a-broken-man theme is somewhat overdone, especially in poetry and country songs.  But it is a capital-T Truth that there is no greater earthly reason to allow yourself to be redeemed than to love and be loved.  This is our story.  What more can I tell you?

[11] This is ‘the sex poem’ that I read to my senior writers.  Coming from Pam, it meant more than that and I knew it.  I can’t believe I was foolish enough to think she wouldn’t notice or know, that she would not be hurt and insulted.  How could I think she could be satisfied with being handed an empty glass, with being given only some?

∞

Jim,

'Fire on the mountain,' huh?  Is that code for ‘I wanna move in with you?’  If so, bring your dog and your pajamas and never leave.

I love you,

Pam

Pam -

I may fall over in front of my class this afternoon but you are so worth it, you dirty girl. 

Lustfully yours,

Jim

Jim –

I wish I had the words to tell you how happy you make me.  I love you and Jeeves and our garden and our life.  This is getting good. 

So grateful,

Pam

p.s.  enough with the Neruda already!  I want your words.  Make me swoon, Halpert.

Pam,

You’re merciless.  You keep me up all night, you chain me to the stove and make me cook for you and now you want to be wooed with words.  Will it never end?

Jim

Jim,

Suck it up, Big Daddy.  You’re the writer, so…write.  I’m more than happy to provide inspiration if you need it. 

I really like you in those pants.

And no, it will never end.  Ever.

Pam

XX

Please click here for the rest of the story, but don't forget to come back!

 http://sweetpea46.livejournal.com/

Lots of endnotes for a change, okay?

First, here’s the blurb from the interview that planted the seed:

Class Act
John Krasinski imagines his alternate-universe life as a teacher

I go by Mr. K. I'm teaching English at a prep school in rural Connecticut. In my class, homework is not homework, it's preparation for the next day. I love teaching books that have been pigeonholed as ''epics,'' and my big thing is discovering for yourself why you like them. I'd have a lot of stuff written in some cryptic way on the whiteboard where you can't understand it until we start talking about the book. I'd throw desk supplies off bridges... I've gone out on several dates with the bio teacher. Her name is Sarah, and she's just a really great girl. I'm more gregarious than she is; she brings me into the underground indie-world stuff and I bring her sonnets. It's weird because the kids are talking about this new show called The Office and they're like, ''You guys are so much like Pam and Jim!'' and I'm like, ''I don't have a TV. Sorry, I'm not into pop culture stuff.''  

Lisahoo is the only reason this epilogue is even here - all the graphic work is all her.  When I had the idea for doing the book, I asked her if she’d be willing and if she’d said no, I would have had to write something completely different.  So many thanks to you for letting me write what I wanted and for letting your children starve for the sake of art.  You’re the best.

I knew I was eventually going to have Jim write an original poem, which meant I had to write an original poem.  Dread doesn’t begin to cover that.  Thank you to Colette for applying her word precision mojo and helping to make it better than it was.  Hey, if you know the chick who is trained on the sniper rifle, you call her!

Lovefool, I think we got lucky like Angela and Jenna.  Thank you for everything you did to make this happen. 

The handsome pooch playing Jeeves appears courtesy of his mom, Colette.

DFW