The Dream of the Broken Horses by William Bayer

interested too."
    "Yeah!"
    Now standing where Tom and Barbara stood that day, by the fountain in the paved school courtyard bounded by the Common Room and classroom wings, I imagine the play of their eyes, their searching looks, the unspoken yearning each sensed and felt.
    Perhaps Barbara, being a vibrant, sensual woman, felt a sudden, unaccountable animal hunger for this attractive young man standing so straight and attentive before her—fresh, lean, clean-cut, the very opposite of the stout, lined, jaded quasi-gangster with whom she'd had slimy sex earlier that afternoon.
    Tom, I think, would have been shattered by her beauty and entranced by her sultry gaze. No other mother that day had looked at him like this. No other mother exuded such pure and forceful sexual energy. Since starting at Hayes, his life had been consumed by boys. He'd had no time to date, no opportunity to meet young women. Now, suddenly, here was a person in whose eyes he could read desire.
    Whatever they said to one another—and it was probably fairly close to what Jerry and I imagined once we got over our first crude fantasies—it was the silent dance of their eyes that pierced those secret places in human hearts where attraction and love are suddenly born. This eye-ballet would have been further enhanced by their surroundings—spring air scented by flowers and freshly mowed grass, a special slant of golden afternoon light, most of all the warm air bath that raised an attractive gloss from their sun-washed skin while releasing those aromatic attractors Mr. Butterfield, our science teacher, told us were called pheromones.
    I'd like to draw them as they stood together that day, two gorgeous, silent, poised about-to-become lovers facing one another just outside the jabbering crowd. But it's getting late, the light is failing, I may not have the skill . . . and, also, I have an appointment I must keep.
    Â 
    H ilda Tucker taught art at Hayes for thirty years. She was already in her forties when I entered the school in the first grade, a patient, nurturing buxom woman, who, from the first day, recognizing a slim talent, took me under her gentle wing.
    "Work hard on your drawing, David," she would tell me. "Drawing is the basis of art."
    I believed her, worked hard on my drawing, ending up not the painter she'd hoped, but a glib draftsman specializing in eyewitness portraits and, my latest incarnation, rapidly drawn courtroom caricatures.
    She still lives in the small tract house just two miles down the road from Hayes, from which she would bicycle to and from school every day, except during snowstorms when she walked. Driving up to the house, I distill an image of her from my schooldays, not crouched over the handlebars of her bike the way people ride today, but sitting upright in the traditional manner, pedaling proudly, cheerfully oblivious to passing cars.
    "David . . . !" She embraces me at her door with the same warm, welcoming expression she always displayed when greeting me at school. "I've been looking forward to this all week!"
    She ushers me into a small living room dominated by a baby grand piano covered with framed photographs of former students. The paintings clustered on the walls are not at all conventional—brilliant color-filled landscapes reminiscent of the French Fauves. I gaze at them and then at Miss Tucker and then at her canvasses again, executed on her annual summer trips to France where she'd set up her easel in a field or by the side of a road, then proceed, as she used to put it, to "paint the light."
    "Your paintings still move me."
    "So kind of you to say that, David."
    "The large one over the mantle—didn't it used to hang in your classroom beside the door?" She nods. "Now seeing so many together, I understand what you were doing. Why, I wonder, didn't I see it before?"
    "Simple, David. You were a child. Now you're an adult, an artist, too."
    She leaves me with her pictures while she retreats to her