Besides, I’m akin to a curiosity—he makes a healthy living from letting loathsome types peek around the corner at me. “That’s Janice Shriek. She used to be famous.” Some slack-jawed gimp is peering from behind a glossy wooden beam right now. I am ignoring him—he will not receive even a sliver of my attention.
I do like the smell of beer and whiskey and smoke, however. I do like the busy times when they are all chattering away in there, happy as a bunch of click-clacking gray caps holding a half-dozen severed heads, as in “days of yore.”
Duncan only started coming here again in earnest after he fell out with Bonmot. When it all came crashing down, he called the Spore of the Gray Cap his home once more; again became the Green God of the Spore. Many a beer was consumed here. I wonder sometimes if Duncan ever came back during those happy-unhappy hours and sat looking at the corner, where all that can now be seen is a hole.
Now why would Duncan fall out with Bonmot? Could it have been over love? Possibly. If we turn to Duncan’s journal, to the entry where he recounts to Mary Bonmot’s fateful discovery along the Path of Remembering You, we shall soon find out. The ink was not yet dry on his grief when he wrote:
Glimpsed. Detected. Surprised. Held. Ensnared. Ensnarled. Entrapped. Captured. Stricken. No hope of understanding. He’d caught on, grasped, and comprehended, with no hope of acceptance. If I could make a fence of these words to keep him from us, I would, but it’s no use. It’s over. I am no longer a teacher. You are no longer my student. In a sense, we are released from all of it—the hiding, the sneaking around, the lying, the delicious forbidden feel of your lips against mine.
(There I go, romanticizing it—putting words between myself and the hurt. I disgust myself sometimes.)
I took the Path of Remembering You well after dark. I don’t remember anything about my trip, except the absentminded scratches from a rosebush in the gardens and the frozen position of the stars. It was cold, and I was glad to pull myself up into your open window and into your smooth white arms. Your skin, as always, awakened my senses, and I trembled from the power of your eyes, the soft place at the base of your neck, the soap smell of you, the miraculous hollows on the inside of your thighs.
And, afterward, intoxicated by the feel and scent of you, the taste of you on my hands, my lips, I swung happily back into the cold, certain I would see you the next night; even the sudden tight prickle on my left arm, my right foot, that presaged spore-pain only added a spark to my mood. The stars swam and spun, and the solid, cold buildings seemed to sway with this happiness in me that was you.
But, my love, no happiness ever went untested. No happiness ever lasted unchanged, untransformed. It doesn’t mean happiness has to end, just that it takes on new patterns, new shapes.
It happened by the willow trees where I first saw you, that flickering shiver of a glimpse, and yet that red hair like a fire burning through the trees. It was by those trees, along the path where I walked a happy man, that the stone table where I spent my lunch hours came into view. It lay at the very heart of the willows like a black cave, not a stone at all, and the dark green leaves of the surrounding bushes glistened with reflected light. And, my love, someone sat at that table, and even in that uncertainty, I knew who it was and all of the life left my gait. I could tell my happiness was about to change.
Bonmot sat at the table, dressed in his most formal clothes, as a Truffidian priest would on sacrament day at the Cathedral. Glittering robes, with gold thread woven through them. Even in the dark, they glittered.
I looked into that dark and I could not see his eyes. “Bonmot,” I said, “is that you, Bonmot?” Even though I knew already that it was him.
He said nothing, but motioned for me to sit beside him at the table. I didn’t hesitate, Mary—I sat next to him willingly. Any excuses about the cold, the lateness of the hour, would have been crushed by the weight of the stone and that gaze. So I sat and made a joke and remarked on the cold and said, “Should we have a midnight snack, then, instead of lunch?” and trailed off because throughout my nervous monologue Bonmot had said nothing. He stared at me with no expression on his face, the staff leaning against the stone bench, the medallion hanging around his neck on a silver chain. I clutched the table so hard that the stone abraded my fingers.
Now, finally, he spoke, each syllable unbearably clear against the cold night air. This is what he said, my love. I can’t forget it. I can’t sleep tonight because of it. He said, “It’s no use, Duncan. I know. Once I too had a secret that made every breath I drew a lie, and so it’s no use for you to talk of other things. Because I know. You have compromised your student, Mary Sabon.”
There was silence for a full ten seconds and then I began to talk. I could not stop talking. Every word was a denial of what he had said. Every word placed such a distance between you and me that it made me physically ill—and yet I did it because I thought it was the only way to save us. And so I babbled on—what was Bonmot talking about? How dare he? Didn’t he know me better than that? I had just been out taking a late walk. Didn’t he know I helped to keep boys away from female students? Didn’t he realize I was a colleague, a professional, a person who would never do what he accused me of? After so many talks in the gardens at lunch—so many wonderful conversations—how could he possibly consider— why, it was an outrage—why, I had been a model teacher—why, I was a published historian—I was—I was … and, finally, at some point, I realized that he had heard none of what I had said, and that his look of sorrow had transformed his face from granite to skin and flesh and bone. And I stopped talking. I looked away from him. My body shook. I could already anticipate everything he was about to take away from me, and I thought it meant the end. Really, The End.
He said: “There are no more lunches under the willow trees for us. You are no longer a teacher at this academy. I expect you to gather your things now and be gone before dawn. As for Mary, she will finish out the next two semesters and earn her degree, but if you ever set foot in this place again, she will be expelled in a very public way. I have had my fair share of scandal, Duncan. I will not let friendship or anything resembling it destroy my good works at this school. Good night, Duncan.”
I did not even notice when he left because I thought I had lost you. I thought those words meant not just the end of my career as a teacher, but the end of us. But now, as I tell you all of this, I realize it is not the end—it just signals a change. A change for the good. We’ve been desperate and in love, which can be a great thing. It lends an urgency to all we do and say. It means that we do not take lightly each other’s bodies or our hearts. It means we love each other fiercely and with no artifice between us.
But this is not the only kind of love we can have—it’s not the only kind of passion. What we have is a flame like your hair, but there’s another kind of excitement in the freedom to admire each other in public, without fear. There is a charge that comes from sharing our lives through more than just midnight trysts and frantic letters like this one. And this is why, finally, having lost everything tonight, I am still oddly hopeful, Mary. Mary. Your name is still such a revelation to me, your body always reminding me of the first time so that your touch makes me weak with the miracle of this thought: I am with Mary Sabon. I am loving Mary Sabon.