The Centaurus

“Wait.”

“What?” He listens to learn if she has heard someone coming. “Do you know what you’re saying? What do you love about me?”

Into the hush the roar of the crowd penetrates like an en circling ocean. Here on this landing he feels dry and cool. He shivers, afraid, now, of what he has begun to do. “I love you,” he tells her, “because in the dream I told you about when you turned into a tree I wanted to cry and pray.”

“Maybe you just love me in dreams.”

“When is that?” He touches her face. Silver. Her mouth and eyes are black and still and terrible like the holes of a mask.

She says gently, “You think I’m stupid.”

“I’ve thought so. But you don’t seem so now.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“You are now.”

“Don’t kiss me. The lipstick will smear.”

“I’ll kiss your hand.” He does, and then slips her hand inside his open sleeve. “Does my arm feel fu

“It feels warm.”

“No. Rough in spots. Concentrate.”

“Yes…a little. What is it?”

“It’s this.” Peter pulls back the sleeve and shows her the underside of his arm; the spots look lavender in the cold diffused light. There are less of them than he had expected.

Pe

“It’s a thing called psoriasis I’ve had all my life. It’s horrible, I hate it.”

“Peter!” Her hands lift up his head from the gesture of sobbing. His eyes are dry and yet the gesture did release something real. “It’s on my arms and legs and it’s worst on my chest. Do you want to see it there?”

“I don’t care.”

“You hate me now, don’t you? You’re disgusted. I’m worse than Zimmerman grabbing you.”

“Peter, don’t just say things to hear me contradict them. Show me your chest.”

“Must I?”

“Yes. Come on. I’m curious.”

He lifts his shirt and T-shirt underneath and stands in the half-light half-ski

“In the summer it pretty well goes away,” he tells her, pulling down his shirts. “When I grow up I’m going to spend the winters in Florida and then I won’t have it.”

“Is this what your secret was?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“I expected something much worse.”

“What could be worse? In a full light it’s really ugly, and I can’t do a thing about it except apologize.”

She laughs, a glimpse of silver in his ears. “Aren’t you silly? I knew you had a skin thing. It shows on your face.”

“My God, does it? Badly?”

“No. It’s not noticeable at all.”

He knows she is lying, yet does not attempt to make her tell the truth. Instead he asks, “Then you don’t mind it?”

“Of course not. You can’t help it. It’s part of you.”

“Is that really how you feel?”

“If you knew what love was, you wouldn’t even ask.”

“Aren’t you good?” In accepting her forgiveness he sinks to his knees, there in the corner of the halfway landing, and presses his face against her cloth belly. His knees ache in a minute; in relieving them of pressure his face slides lower. And his hands of themselves slide up silver and confirm what his face has found through the cloth of her skirt, a fact monstrous and lovely: where her legs meet there is nothing. Nothing but silk and a faint dampness and a curve. This then is the secret the world holds at its center, this i

In the lavatory Caldwell is puzzled by the word book gouged in square capitals in the wall above the urinal. Close examination reveals that this word has been laid over another; the F had been extended and closed to make a B, the U and C closed into O’s, the K left as was. Willing to learn, even by the last flash of light before a

Zimmerman apparently has been waiting for him. The hall is all but empty; Zimmerman sidles from the stage entrance to the auditorium. “George.”

He knows.

“George, have you been worried about some tickets?”

“I’m not worried, it’s been explained to me. I marked them Charity in the books.”

“I thought I had spoken to you about it. Apparently I was wrong.”

“I shouldn’t have gotten the wind up. Mental confusion, is what they call it.”

“I’ve had an interesting talk with your son Peter.”

“Huh? What did the kid tell you?”

“He told me many things.”

Mim Herzog, he knows I know, the goose is cooked, it’s out in the open and can never be put back. Never ever, it’s a one-way street we’re on, ignorance is bliss. The tall teacher feels whiteness fill his body from his toes to his scalp. A weariness, a hollowness and conviction of futility beyond anything he has known before seizes him. A film too thick to be sweat makes pasty his palms and brow as his skin struggles to reject this seizure. “He didn’t mean to cause me any trouble, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue,” Caldwell tells the principal. The pain, the tireless pain, itself seems weary.

Zimmerman sees as if through a rift in clouds that Caldwell’s glimpse of Mrs. Herzog is at the bottom of his fear and his mind exults, fairly dances in the security of being on top and able to maneuver. Expertly he skims, like a butterfly teasing a field, above the surface of the dread in the knobbed drained face opposite him. “I was struck,” he says glidingly, “by Peter’s concern for you. I think he believes that teaching is too great a strain on your health.”

Here comes the ax, praise be to God for little blessings, the suspense is over. Caldwell wonders if the dismissal slip will be yellow, as it was with the telephone company. “Is that what the kid thinks, huh?”

“He may be right. He’s a perceptive boy.”

“He gets that from his mother. I wish to hell he had inherited my weak head and her beautiful body.”

“George, I’d like to speak to you frankly.”

“Shoot. That’s your job.” A wave of dizziness simultaneous with an immense restlessness overtakes the teacher; he yearns to swing his arms, twirl around, collapse on the floor and have a nap, anything but stand here and take it, take it from this smug bastard who knows it all.

Zimmerman has risen to his most masterly professional self. His sympathy, his cadences of tact, his comprehensive consideration are exquisite. His body almost aromatically exudes his right and competence to supervise. “If at any time,” he says in gentle measured syllables, “you feel unable to go on, please come to me and tell me. It would be a disservice to yourself and to your students to continue. A sabbatical could be arranged easily. You think of it as a disgrace; you shouldn’t. A year of thought and study is a very common thing for a teacher in the middle of his career. Remember, you are only fifty. The school would survive; with so many of these veterans returning, the teacher shortage is not what it was during the war.”