Teacher by Mark Edmundson Page B

porn classic but an English translation of Virgil—a trot, as they were called. As she snatched the offending volume, our Latin teacher, tall and white-haired and straight as a chessboard bishop, called out that all of us should now surrender our cheat sheets.
    Around the room she trolled, looking for erring souls. And she made quite a haul. From between the knees and behind the propped-up books and under the notebooks of nearly every student in the class she pulled a translation of the famous poem. Some were books; others, on the desks of the more industrious, were translations copied out in careful longhand. Almost everyone in that small class was apprehended as a scapegrace. Among the few righteous ones were the Blind Girl and me—me not because I was so silver-sheened honest but because I simply didn’t give a sufficient damn to figure out that this was the way to thrive and that, sitting in a middle row, in a very back seat, two seats deeper than my nearest neighbor on either side, I had never noticed the malfeasance. As to the Blind Girl, she was clearly innocent. Anyway, I felt a certain kinship with the Blind Girl. So what Dubby told me rang a somber bell; eventually it evoked the feeling of mortal kinship, the still sad music of humanity, as I’d later hear it called.
    Anyway, here is the Doober’s tale. On one end of the New Corridor, the pine-paneled and brightly lit passageway where I’d ducked into the guidance counselor’s office, there is Dubby. He is late, per usual, for a dose of geometry (or
geometwy,
depending on your meanness quotient) from the teacher he’s taken to calling the Waskally Wabbit—that is, Mr. Repucci.
    Enter from the other side of the corridor the Blind Girl. According to Dubby—a footnote here—the Blind Girl was not born blind. One day she simply popped on the bathroom light and took a full look in the mirror and was struck by what appeared and, lo, could see nothing. Is this too mean to write? Too cruel? It is simply the common coin of high school, the last place where Darwinian laws apply without amendment. Think back to the worst thing you ever did or said in those precincts before moralizing too fervently.
    The Blind Girl looked like the figure in Edvard Munch’s much-reproduced painting
The Scream.
Her eyes were hollowed caves; her cheeks were indented. It was as though she’d fed on the winds. Her mouth stood open in a look of sorry expectancy: The worst might arrive at any minute. She had a ravaging case of acne. As she walked, she moaned quietly to herself, sometimes in ghostly melodies. She was a haunted being passing you by, a pained soul come back, Ancient Mariner–like, to tell you how it was with her and could readily be with you. But high school being what it was, no one much noticed or cared.
    The Doober sees the Blind Girl, with her red-bottomed cane tapping her way down the New Corridor, where it is so bright that one almost feels it is stage-lit. But Dubby himself is in medieval darkness, waiting in the wings, for the areas that adjoin the corridor on either end are windowless. They’re full of classrooms with thick, dungeonlike doors, which are now—Dubby is late for class—slapped shut.
    Suddenly, behind the Blind Girl’s subdued tap-tap, there rises up another pattern of sound, something aggressive and strong, summoning up the image of a well-engineered train, maybe, smacking its way down the track, very metallic, very sure. And soon there is a shape coming up fast behind the Blind Girl, who moves at an unvaryingly deliberate pace, making mystical-seeming half-circles over the floor with her cane.
    He’s gorgeous: Sicilian hair, blacker than Presley’s dyed do ever was, slicked back in a phenomenally beautiful duck’s ass, which he strokes compulsively. He wears skintight pants that ride about two inches above his black knifepoint shoes. He’s decked in a jack shirt, a button-up that doesn’t tuck in, with two buttons low down over the belt to