The Final Lesson
She was the last student in class, that day, the last day of my 18 year string of years teaching photography and art classes at Island Community College. When she bent over to pick up her belongings, I noticed her not unattractive figure. Mary Smith was the usual type of older student, yet another artist probably with an unspoken agenda to somehow use photography in their work. Mary showed me photographs of her work, dark, “European-like,” were my unspoken observations.
A familiar jealous stab when she told of her marketing success made her a little more interesting. What did she know that I had missed? Why had commercial success eluded me so long? I was teaching others for a living rather than doing my art for my living as Mary apparently had managed to pull off. And with a small smile she offered me a room to stay in her villa in Rome.
The system wide cutbacks affected the 55% of the teaching staff that were unentitled part timers. It saved the State a lot of money but put a lot of precariously perched instructors and lecturers in an even a more precarious state. I was one of those poor folks. To make matters even worse, my wife of 26 years chose this time to ask for a divorce and demand cancellation of our marriage contract and a division of our assets. I was trying to save my house, trying without success to assume a big mortgage on my own without a job. I felt on this last day of class pretty sorry for myself. Earlier at the beginning of class, Mary asked me if I would give her a ride to her car after class. I eagerly agreed, secretly hoping it would lead to something more intimate.
My desk was cleaned out, my personal belongings gone. I left my keys on the counter and 18 years of memories flooded my mind. I remembered my little family spent the terrifying hours of a recent hurricane safely protected and huddled behind the darkroom’s concrete walls. The heavy steel clad door slammed shut. Locked. I checked. I felt sorry for myself. My life was changing and I didn’t know how it was going to be, “downstream” as they say.
Mary sat beside me, an attractive but aging hippy chick alone with me in my small Nissan pickup. I could smell her strong body odor and also a faint smell of her period. Strangely I thought the overall smell reminded me of tomato paste, somewhat ripe, but not entirely repulsive, with a compelling element to it. Mary looked at me curiously and spoke with a note of caution as I tried to guess her intentions. We drove carefully in the pounding rain. “Do you remember Ivan” she said?
Ivan was a big, thick, smiling, Russian looking youth who had taken my evening photography class a few years earlier. The first impression he gave one was of his ethnicity. I thought how he was aptly named since he just looked so much like a Russian. His features although not unpleasant, were rough hewn and overly large. His smile and attitude were attractive. He was at once loud and quiet. This quality in particular seemed to give clue to his Russian schizophrenia. After I met him I discovered Ivan was the son of an old acquaintance, Paul Chekov. Ever since he had been my English instructor in college, his father and I had never really hit it off. I remembered that there had been rumors of an affair with a student before he left teaching.
Ivan’s father Paul was a trust fund baby from New York. His family, already well known in Russian Émigré circles became wealthy as Paul’s father’s success in the New York world of Architecture translated into money. Paul brought a good measure of that wealth to Honolulu and bought a business and made good real estate investments.
I remembered that Ivan had hit on every female in the class, even the older ladies. After a month or so, he settled in a mutually exclusive and steamy relationship with a voluptuous young Japanese girl who had a public weakness for colorful lacy and flashy peek a boo underwear. Truly, I’ve forgotten her name now. Let’s call her Helen. I lost contact with both Ivan and Helen after the semester was over. Now here was someone who knew Ivan. “I was his mother” Mary said. “Was?” I replied, suddenly caught up in her drama.
We sat by the side of the road in a little cul de sac while the rain kept up a steady drone. Mary started to tell me a story. She explained that Ivan was dead. He had taken his own life. She began by asking me what Ivan had told me about his brother. Did I remember that Ivan and his brother Peter were twins? Had Ivan told me about his brother’s trial and incarceration? I remembered vaguely that he had said something about a trial. Murder. His brother had received a life sentence on the mainland for a murder that he had committed in a rage of self defense he insisted.
Mary told me that the arrogant and vigorous Paul, the father of these once fortunate and healthy, smiling, good looking twin boys, collapsed in court with a massive heart attack when Ivan’s brother was convicted of first degree murder and put in prison for life. Paul retired in his new wheel chair to a sad seclusion at his ranch in Oregon. Without a tear Mary continued her story as my unease grew she explained she took my class to be spiritually near her now dead son. The nexus of his death she thought began in my class where he met Helen. Together before and after class they explored the deep sexual bonding of youth that expanded to more mundane concerns when Helen became pregnant. Anticipating a child and perhaps the intimacies of marriage, they moved to the big city of Honolulu from our outer island. Ivan left the reclusive artists mountain safety of his mother’s Kokee retreat and fled eagerly to a new urban adventure.
How things turned sour between Ivan and Helen was unclear. Mary felt Helen never was truly with child, but instead a manipulative pretender. Ivan took a final leap off a 22 story building after neighbors reported a loud and cantankerous argument with Helen.
Mary told me that at first she wanted to understand and see if anything in the class had contributed to his demise. I shivered inside as she told me these things. I knew now how she had been looking at me. I wondered if my obvious lust for Helen and her frilly under things had silently urged on Ivan’s youthfully competitive energies. No doubt I thought.
I hoped she couldn’t see my heart. By her perhaps unconscious design Mary had made certain I too shared his death. How should I act? What should I say? I remember that my personal problems seemed immediately much less pressing in the face her despair. Her only children of her youthful love marriage, one dead in a stupid suicide, his DNA cast to the pavement in a useless gesture, the other in prison for life. Slowly time passed. We talked and talked. It kept raining.
Eventually Mary got out of my truck and into her own. I had her phone number from the class list, but when I called her Kokee studio she never answered my messages. I guess I reminded her too much of bad memories.
The preceding story is fictional. Any resemblance to circumstances, persons living or dead is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Images and Words: Copyright: John Michael Shklov. Kapaa, 2007
