The English Teacher Read Online Free PDF Page B

coats, football pads, coin wrappers, a stapler, a fishing rod, balled clothing, a rubber Richard Nixon mask, a bike pump, a rumpled suit—that spread from the doorway to the far wall. As Peterleaned closer, he could see, beneath the only window, jutting out through all the crap, the flowered corner of a mattress.
“So that’s my bed?”
“No. That’s Stuart’s bed. You’re here.” Caleb pointed to the near wall, which was stacked with boxes—his own boxes, Peter realized. “It folds out of the wall. It’s pretty cool. Look.” Caleb pushed into the cluttered center of the room all of Peter’s boxes, then lifted a metal lever and caught the bed as it exploded out of the wall. “Ta da!” he exclaimed, gazing at the whole room—at the exploding bed, the warty cactus, the burnt thumbs of incense in a dish—with un-disguised reverence.
“So why didn’t you move in here?”
“He didn’t want me to.”
At this Peter felt a small bit of pleasure mingle with his horror, but it was short-lived. No one had told him he’d be sharing a room with Stuart. Stuart frightened him. Stuart didn’t even speak to him.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“Right next door,” Caleb said, still eager to please.
Peter stepped into the little bathroom and locked the door. He stood at the sink, a hand on either side of the basin, as if he were bracing himself to throw up. Maybe he’d feel better if he threw up. He tried to coax something out. Then he noticed a tiny little screen fastened to the drain and a clot of moist hair caught in it. With his fingernail, he pried up the screen, tapped it empty on the side of the plastic bucket below, and snapped it back in place. All this he did without thought. He was in a state beyond thought. In the mirror he saw, for an instant, the real Peter, the Peter he was when he was not conscious of looking. But after that all he saw was his mirror face, flattened out by self-awareness. Usually, when he looked in mirrors, he tried to figure out what it was about his face that no longer attracted Kristina. He’d read somewhere that handsomeness was not the result of a certain combination offeatures but of symmetry. The human eye gauged the degree of symmetry of the two halves of a face because, research had shown, people with symmetrical faces tended to be less prone to disease—thus a better biological choice. But tonight Peter did not try to find the asymmetry in his face. He knew that wasn’t it. He wasn’t unattractive. Girls who didn’t go to Fayer often thought he was cute at first, before they spoke to him. It was something else. He was undeveloped in some way that was not physical and seemed beyond his control. He suspected it had to do with being an only child, or having only a mother, and there was a part of him that had hoped the Belous would help him change. Now he feared they would only make it worse.
“Are you all right?” Caleb said through the door.
“Yeah.” His voice came out funny, more a breath than noise. He wasn’t sure Caleb had heard him, but after a while his feet scuffled away back down the hall.
At the toilet he unzipped his fly. He had already begun to pee when he saw her photograph. She was looking right up at him, grinning. Love, she seemed to be saying. Yes, he replied. All this happened in the interval between conscious thoughts, between recognizing that this, this woman tying the shoelace of her sneaker on an overgrown path, was Mrs. Belou, the real Mrs. Belou, and remembering that she was dead. When that last thought came, his stream of urine stopped abruptly, painfully. She had died in this house. She had stood right here, and there by the sink, and in his room. She had touched everything he would soon touch. There was no place he could ever be in this house where she had not breathed. He put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat, the black and white tiles on the floor flashing in time with his slamming heart. He didn’t want to live here, in the house of a