He was about to go out again to the cafeteria and to dinner. He knew that Peter Makepeace would think it was important, in a desperately crucial time, for all the faculty to show their commitment to the best interests of “the Windsor community.” He also knew that Peter Makepeace was unlikely to be defining those best interests any more than a week from now, but there would be somebody new, and that somebody would be watching for the smaller signs. He started to get a book from the shelf to read while he ate, and then stopped, thinking of something. He didn’t usually bring his work home from his office. He liked to keep things in their places, and correcting papers should be done at his desk in the Student Center, not at home, where his private life was. He had brought these papers home because, with all the mess caused by Michael Feyre’s death, he hadn’t been able to concentrate in his office. Besides, people kept going in and out. Everybody wanted to talk. Everybody wanted to say something meaningless but profound.
He had brought this set of papers home in a plain folder and left the folder on top of the bookcase to the right of his fireplace in his living room. He got the folder now and put it down on his coffee table. He unbuttoned his coat and sat down. This was the only piece of creative writing he had assigned in his sophomore English class. He didn’t like doing it because, as far as he was concerned, the vast majority of high school students knew no more about writing fiction than they knew about the government of Burkina Faso. The school insisted, though. It had its reputation as a haven for the arts and for the artistic students to consider. He had assigned the story and then had had a hard time making himself read what his students handed in.
He went through the papers now and pulled out first the one written by Mark DeAvecca and then the one written by Michael Feyre. The story was supposed to be four to five pages long. Mark’s was over seventeen pages, and James had been able to tell, from the first paragraph, that it was an assignment he had done while deliberately ignoring every instruction he had been given for doing it. James suspected that that was the way Mark did most of his homework, except that in every assignment before this one he had done far less than he had been asked to do. James had put it down to laziness and bad attitude. This story was an example of neither. It was, instead, an assertion of integrity so forceful and uncompromising that there was no mistaking it. Mark DeAvecca might or might not be a scholastic slacker. James was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt now that it was known for certain that the boy hadn’t been on drugs and had been seriously ill at least some of the time. What Mark DeAvecca was, without question, was a writer, with as strong a narrative voice as James had ever seen anywhere. It was astonishing in a boy of his age, and what was more astonishing was the fact that it was obvious that, at least on some level, Mark knew exactly what he had. Knew it, James thought, and had no intention of violating it for the sake of jumping through hoops to get an A on an English paper. Quite right, James thought. He’d even give the boy his A, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t the kind of fiction he liked or even found possible to appreciate. James had an ear, and that ear knew when it was hearing the real thing.
Michael Feyre’s paper was only three and a half pages long, and it, too, was astonishing. It was not the work of a writer but of a savage, and of a savage with a streak of brutality so wide and deep that he should have been locked away for his own safety long before he’d decided to hang himself. James had made the obligatory forays into the red-light districts of half a dozen cities, in the United States and abroad. He had read his share of filthy pulp novels that existed only to prove that it was possible to extend a sex scene written in excremental slang for 181 pages. He had never seen anything like this: raw, nasty, lethal, feral. After the first time he’d read it, he hadn’t wanted to touch it with his bare hands. Once he’d made himself get over that, he’d found himself not so much reading it a second time, as counting off the number of times Michael had used the word “cunt.” It was second only to the number of times he used the word “fuck,” and that was due to the fact that the second word could be used in more ways than the first and in more ambiguous circumstances.
But it wasn’t only the words. James had had students attempt to shock him with words before. It was the revelation of a mind for whom all human relations had been reduced to rape. You raped or were raped. There were no other choices. There were no other explanations for why two people might spend any time together doing anything. There were no other explanations for why one person might be emotionally committed to another, even a mother to a child.