🎧 398: The classes ...

THE CLASSES were a success from the start, though Herb and Lorna tried to keep them from growing too quickly by swearing the students to secrecy. The secret was a hard one to keep, as hard as the original secret discovery of one’s own sexuality, that secret we’re immediately eager to spill, the biggest and best secret that we ever have held in common, the secret that joins us. How rare it was and how delightful it must have been for the wrinkled citizens of Punta Cachazuda to get, late in life, a chance to wear again the self-satisfied smirks they had last worn when, as adolescents, they each had first discovered whatever bit of the great mystery of human sexual pleasure each had first discovered. Rarer still, and quite possibly more delightful still, was the unexpected return of the opportunity to reveal the discovery to a friend, or, if one’s friends already knew (and how disappointingly often they did or pretended to), to an acquaintance, anyone who would admit ignorance and listen. Many a student of Herb and Lorna’s rediscovered giggling. Every one of them was bursting to tell someone else, and most of them had a specific someone in mind. I wish I could say that they wanted to tell out of a spirit of generosity, an elevated desire to enlighten other Punta Cachazudans, but in most cases, it was a desire to show, even though it would be only for the brief moment of the telling of the secret, that they knew more than their fellows. It’s a baser desire, but it may underlie more didactic efforts than the nobler one.
     Since every student wanted to enlist someone else, and neither Herb nor Lorna could resist for long the pleading of one student to bring in another, the classes grew and grew. Not every student arrived in a state of ignorance. A few brought with them treasured, and long-hidden, examples of coarse goods. Two of these were products of Herb and Lorna’s unwitting collaboration. One, they discovered to their great surprise, was an item they had sold to a lanky, dark-haired, gum-chewing gas-station attendant in Sundown, Texas, not very long before their arrival in Punta Cachazuda.
     The first classes, hardly classes at all, were held in Herb and Lorna’s garage. When the enrollment exceeded the capacity of the garage, they expanded into the living room, and when the combined garage and living room became too crowded, they began meeting twice a week, then three times a week, and eventually they were meeting six days a week and still were unable to accommodate everyone. Clearly, the thing to do was to crawl out from underground and move the classes to the recreation hall. By this time, the secret was hardly secret within the town: nearly every Punta Cachazudan with any mechanical or modeling ability at all was enrolled in one of the classes and had set up a little clandestine workshop at home, usually in the garage, most of the workshops built according to plans Herb furnished, so that the whole operation could be folded against a wall and concealed behind what appeared to be a handy swing-away ironing-and-mending center. Those who couldn’t make erotic jewelry or sculpture sold it, and those who couldn’t sculpt or sell modeled.
     To get the use of the recreation hall, the Punta Cachazudans were going to have to speak to the only people in town who weren’t yet in the know: the Bagnells. It dawned on Herb and Lorna and their students, when they found themselves giggling and blushing while discussing the need to approach the Bagnells, that the timidity, the fear, and the embarrassment they felt were nearly identical to the feelings they would have felt, or had felt, in admitting — confessing — to their parents, however indirectly, that they had experienced some of the secret pleasures that separate adults from children.
     A delegation was chosen. They marched, giggling in spite of themselves, to the home of Bobo Bagnell, and, biting their tongues to keep their faces straight, demanded that they be given permission to use the recreation hall for classes in the design and manufacture of erotic jewelry and objets d’art. Bobo, baffled, consented, in the belief that the bizarre request was just part of a scheme to get him to come to the recreation hall the following evening, where, he supposed, the Punta Cachazudans intended to throw a surprise party to celebrate his eightieth birthday. The next evening, he dressed in his white linen suit and walked to the recreation hall, which, he could see, was filled nearly to capacity. When he entered, a moment passed before anyone noticed him, but when people did, they began to applaud him, and their applause made more notice him, and they began to applaud him. When they began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” Bobo’s eyes misted over. The cupcakes and coffee they served him were not, he admitted to himself, a lavish spread for an eightieth birthday celebration, but it was the thought that counted, and he thought that the decorations on the cupcakes, little amorous couples intimately entwined, were clever, amusing, and flattering.

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