Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath by Steven Goldman

are turned in. He seems to think that he has some sort of moral responsibility to be consistent and timely.
    As I sit in class mentally calculating how many more hours of Curtis’s lecturing I still have to endure—less than fifty, if I’m doing the math correctly—I begin to sense that something is wrong. Curtis is talking, nothing unusual there, but his voice seems flatter, less animated, as if he no longer cares about whether or not we are listening. He is almost mumbling, reading aloud occasionally from his well-worn copy of
O Pioneers!
sitting on his stool at thefront of the room, which is unusual in itself, as he usually paces while he reads. The board is nearly blank. Last Friday’s date still sits in the far left corner. There are a few halfhearted attempts to write a word or two, none of the usual illegible scrawl he haphazardly fills the board with as he writes furiously with one hand, holding the book in the other and never stopping the rush of words for so much as a breath. Today there are pauses. He has not asked one rhetorical question. In fact, he has asked no questions at all.
    I look around furtively to see if anyone else has noticed the change. If anyone has, it is hard to tell. Several people are still taking notes, on Lord knows what, because Curtis has barely said anything about the reading. The same one or two students who always sleep through the class have their heads down in their customary hunched positions. The rest of the class sit in their usual semidazed state.
    The pauses grow longer. Curtis reads, then pauses, says a few words, then pauses again, as if he is testing whether there is a difference between the pauses and the talking. And then, unostentatiously, he closes the book and walks out of the room.
    At first, no one speaks. The heads that are down on the desktops remain there; the more alert students look around nervously. Mariel stops taking notes.
    â€œMaybe he needs to take a leak,” suggests Louis. No one laughs.
    We sit in silence for over a minute. I time it on my watch. Then Bonnie and Anna, who sit in the far side back corner, start to whisper, pulling their desks closer together. Slowly small clumps of conversation sprout across the room, and eventually people find their normal speaking voices. David doesn’t move from his spot, third row, third seat in, and he becomes an island as the neat lines of desks form loose constellations of social organization. He fidgets with his pencils. I pretend to be part of the conversation taking place directly to my left, about a movie I hadn’t seen. My one contribution is that I had heard it was good. At 9:05, when class officially ends, everyone gets up and leaves.
    â€œWhat was the last thing he said?” I ask David as we shuffle down the hallway to calculus.
    â€œI wasn’t really listening,” David admits with what sounds like regret.
    â€œI don’t think anyone was.”
    â€œShould we tell someone?”
    â€œReport Curtis AWOL? I don’t want to get him in trouble. Maybe he had a breakdown, like Ms.—what was the name of the woman who we had in seventh-grade Latin?”
    â€œMs. Hertig.”
    â€œLike Ms. Hertig.”
    David shakes his head. “She started out weirder than Curtis. Curtis is strange, but not psycho. And she didn’twalk out of class, she broke into hysterics and threw a chair at Louis.”
    Theory 1: A man walks into a bar …
    Mariel, of course, has the full story by break.
    â€œHe just walked out of school, got in his car, and drove away. They found his copy of
O Pioneers!
in the parking lot.”
    â€œDoes anybody know why?”
    Mariel grins. “It’s a mystery, but the prevailing theory is that some trustee spotted Curtis coming out of Riley’s.”
    Riley’s is the best-known, and possibly only, gay bar in town.
    â€œThey can’t fire a guy for going into a bar, not even Riley’s.”
    â€œEven if it