434: Effie. Ah, Effie.
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 2 continues
Effie. Ah, Effie. Effie may have been a terrible teacher by every objective measure, too full of pep for her own good, so eager to give what she knew that it spilled out of her as if through a burst dike, making her seem disorganized, confused, and ill prepared in front of a class, but Matthew and Jack decided that she was the best natural teacher of all of them, and since she was also pretty in a flyaway sort of way, they took to her at once. She lived alone in a small apartment not far from Matthew’s. She had a car — a battered Volkswagen — and gave Matthew rides to the school where they did their practice teaching. She knew rock musicians and folk singers, and that made her life seem thrilling and bold to Matthew, risky. Sometimes, when he arrived in the morning, he smelled marijuana in the apartment. The idea that he knew someone who smoked marijuana with her morning coffee was thrilling. Usually he would get to her place early, and she would be running late. From the first, she was only partly dressed when he arrived. He would pour himself coffee while she bustled around, and he would ignore her limber little body, on principle, because he believed, or managed to make himself believe, that not making any sort of advance was cool, that the chummy, sexless domesticity they shared for half an hour showed how sophisticated and modern they were, the vanguard of a new social order, in which the brightest and best would teach the poor and sad, in which men and women could work together without fucking, without even thinking about fucking. He never touched her, never tried.
Actually, Matthew was too intimidated by her to make advances. He believed that she was an extremist, politically, socially, culturally, that she spent nights in smoky rooms debating politics, planning strikes, printing leaflets — that is, when she wasn’t up till the small hours in clubs, after the clubs had closed, when the real music happened, when everyone got stoned and snipped away at the fabric of conventional society. He supposed she must be an extremist sexually as well, and that, if he ever did make an advance, what she would want or expect from him might be something he didn’t know how to deliver. He told himself that there was no sense risking a friendship by trying to turn it into something else, and he admitted to himself that there was no use risking an embarrassing failure, either.
But what a crush he had on her, and what fantasies he entertained! One morning she was still in bed when he arrived. She called out from the bedroom to say that she couldn’t get up. “I don’t think I’m sick,” she said. “I just can’t get out of bed, you know? I do this to myself. I wear myself out. I just can’t do it today.” Matthew made coffee and toast. She sat up in bed when he brought it to her. She wasn’t wearing anything. When she sat up, she pulled the bed sheet over her breasts, but it kept sliding down and she didn’t pay much attention to keeping it up. He tried not to look at her little breasts, because he couldn’t decide how to look at them, what attitude to take toward them. She didn’t seem to care whether he looked or not. He sat on the bed, they talked for a while, and he began to grow annoyed at how completely at ease she was. Some crumbs of toast fell onto her breasts, tiny bits like grains of sand, and for a moment he thought that he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from brushing them off. Then he thought that he might ask her if he could brush them off. Or maybe he might mutter, “Crumbs,” as a prefatory justification and then brush them off. Or perhaps it would be best not to touch her, just to say something about the crumbs. Maybe that would be enough, since it would make her aware that he had noticed the crumbs and she would figure out that he must therefore have noticed her breasts, too, and there would be a suggestion that he was concerned about her welfare, at least to the extent of not wanting her made uncomfortable by crumbs on her breasts, and that might be the start of something. He could say something like “You have some crumbs on those lovely breasts,” or even just “You have crumbs on your breasts.”
What he did say was, “You’re getting crumbs on you.” Effie looked at her breasts, flicked the crumbs away with her hand, and went back to eating. Nothing else happened, nothing at all. Later, Matthew drove to school in Effie’s car, wondering whether she had wanted him to try anything. No, he decided. They were friends, that was that, and a friendship like theirs was certainly something wonderful, something worth preserving, worth making sacrifices for, even the sacrifice of sex. Still, the thought kept returning that surely she must have some feelings like his. If so, why hadn’t she given him some sign? She wouldn’t have had to invite him into bed with her, but she could have said something just a little provocative. “Are you sure you feel like going to school today?” Something.
He was depressed as hell by the time he reached school. Everything annoyed him — the children, the other teachers, everything. He began to think that teaching wasn’t for him.
Effie recently finished law school and has been doing volunteer work, defending indigents and championing hopeless causes. She has never lost her sense of outrage. Matthew hasn’t seen Effie in nearly a year, but every month or so he gets the urge to call her, always during the day, when, he assumes, her husband is not around. It is, partly, an urge to talk about important things — issues, ideas — but Matthew recognizes that there’s another motive behind these calls that are never made, and that recognition is the reason they’re never made.
[to be continued on Tuesday, February 21, 2023]
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