Chapter 6
Un-like his father, Gil Horton was on time.
I was sitting at my desk in my classroom, going over the notes I had prepared for the class scheduled for the following period. I was alone, sitting at the head of the room, with my blond lacquered oaken desk settled solid and square on the wooden floor, like a monumental tombstone facing the empty rows of desks and chairs. It was overcast outside, and the sky was filled with dark, swirling clouds, ragged fingers of lightning, and a distant rumbling of thunder. A storm was approaching, so the overhead lights were turned on, spilling down a cold, unflickering fluorescent brightness.
I looked at the notes randomly, familiar enough already with their content not to need this additional free time to prepare. Actually, I was waiting; waiting to see whether Gilbert would respond to my request for this meeting. Depending upon whether he appeared or not, and, if he did appear, how he conducted himself during the course of the meeting, a decision would be reached by me as to whether he would pass or fail my course.
I could, of course, do nothing about his Regents examination, nor did I care to. After the climatic meeting I had with his father last week, I really didn't care whether Gil passed my class or failed it; I was past the point of caring I wanted something much more personal from Gilbert Horton: I wanted revenge.
One might believe that I would show compassion for the innocent boy, concluding that he has suffered in life enough just having been exposed to the crushing, ego grinding influences of his father. Innocent, also, he might be considered, of any responsibility for his father, and what had transpired in my office with him, just as his father had been innocent of any liability for my uncle's attack upon me while I was only a very young girl. To all of this I say-no. No person, really, is ever innocent. We are all victims, each and every one of us, doomed through no act of our own, forced to relive, again and again, the immutable tragedy of the past. No exceptions were ever made, not even for poor young Gilbert Horton.
I heard his knock at the door the first time, but I chose to ignore it. It was a feeble little thing, barely audible, like the gentle tapping of a bird, pecking at a tree, searching for something to eat. I continued to stare at my page, reading the same sentence in my notes, over and over again. The knock came a second time, a little louder, but not much. I refused to look up. Finally, he rapped with his knuckles, and I turned toward the door. There, framed in the window glass in the upper portion of the door, I saw Gilbert Horton.
"Come in," I said impatiently, making him aware, in that one command, that I had heard the first two knocks, had ignored them, and that he was now disturbing me. "You're not going to stand out there all day, are you?"
His face flushed crimson, and he turned the doorknob. Gilbert Horton entered the empty classroom, walking softly, lightly upon the floor, holding his books under his arm, hanging at his side. I allowed him to walk all the way over to my desk, wait a few minutes as I pretended to be reading a long paragraph from my notes, then looked up, past him, and said: "The door."
"What?"
"The door," I repeated, as pointedly as possible, indicating the classroom door. "You've left it open. Go back and close it, please. This is not a barn, you know, it's a classroom. I'm sure you wouldn't have left the front door of your house open like that, would you? No, of course you would not. So go back and close it, please."
I went back to my notes, listened for the sound of his retreating footsteps, heard the silent click of the closing door against the metal frame, then concentrated upon the sound of his softly falling steps as he returned to my desk. I let him wait there until I looked up and acknowledged his presence.
"Yes?" I said.
He seemed confused. "Ah, you wanted to speak to me about something, Miss Harper?"
Gilbert Horton was the complete antithesis of his father. The most accurate description of him physically, although not the most complimentary, was that he was a twerp. He was a painfully thin, anemic-looking boy, perhaps fifteen years old, but certainly looking younger, with sandy colored hair that lay flat upon his narrow skull the way moss grows upon a damp rock. His eyes were small and weak, their color pinkish, with no lashes or eyebrows I could discern, and they were carefully hidden behind a pair of thick, out of style horn-rimmed glasses. His complexion was pale, almost sickly white, with large, misshapen patches of redness, scattered randomly across his face and neck, making it seem as if he were suffering from hives. The dome of his head was high, almost grotesquely so, leaving one with the impression that his head was much too large for his narrow bony shoulders. At the center of his face, giving him a slightly pragmatic sharpness, was an extraordinary nose. Long and thin, it hooked downward, overhanging so low that it was almost parallel to his top lip. Completing this imbalance was the total absence of any chin. His face seemed to fall away from under his bottom lip, folding back in loose, hanging flesh, until it merged incredibly with his scrawny, gaunt neck.
No wonder his father hated him, I thought coming as close as I could even come to feeling sympathy for another person. He was the living embodiment of everything his father feared.
"Yes, I do wish to speak with you, Gilbert," I said, looking up at him from my position behind my desk. He shifted uncomfortably, from foot to foot, continually rearranging the pile of books held awkwardly in his hands, hoping I was going to give him permission to be seated. I didn't of course, and instead, probed his face openly with my somewhat hostile gaze. "You know why, of course, I spoke with your father last week, don't you?"
He shrugged and looked ashamed. "I guess it's because of this class...." He avoided the direct answer, probably because it was painful to admit.
I wasn't about to let him off that lightly. "Specifically, Gilbert, why was he here?"
"Because I'm doing poorly, I guess...."
"Because you're failing, Gilbert," I said sharply. "Because you're going to fail this course, without any doubt, and you're going to fail your Regents, and, even more specific than that-because you won't graduate in June."
His face dropped. "I really won't graduate?" he asked, uttering the words as if speaking them had now somehow made that possibility unalterable. "Really?"
I laughed tiredly, shaking my head in ostensible exasperation. "What do you think, Gilbert?"
He chewed his bottom lip. "I thought maybe I could still pass. You know, study and things, and work real hard, then-I could pass."
"Have you been studying all along?"
"Yeah. I mean, every night. I read everything, I do my homework carefully, but-"
"But you don't seem to understand it," I offered. "Do you, Gil?'
His eyes dropped and he sighed. "No...I don't. I guess I'm just too dumb." He said it with the obvious self-serving humility that begs the compassionate listener to refute the statement.
I didn't.
I wanted him exactly where he was. I wanted him to begin questioning those things about himself of which there would always be a certain degree of doubt in his mind. I wanted him down upon himself, so that when I really got down upon him, I could crush him, and he would be grateful to me for having put him out of his misery.
"Did your father tell you what...happened in our meeting?" I asked.
He thought for a moment using the expression on his face to indicate that he was seriously attempting to remember. "No-o," he said drawling slightly. "No he didn't say anything, really."
"Are you certain? He said-nothing? Nothing at all?"
"Well-" he hesitated.
"Come on!" I said gruffly. "Let's have it."
"Well, Miss Harper, he didn't say anything, but I sensed something had happened. I got a feeling from him about it."
"Go on."
"My father doesn't like you, Miss Harper," he said, smiling inwardly at himself, as if some strange personal psychology of his thinking had in someway found that fact comforting. "I could tell. He didn't say anything about you, or tell me that he didn't like you, but I know it's true." He laughed then, abstractedly.
"What's so funny?" I asked.
"You know something, Miss Harper? I think my father is afraid of you. Isn't that crazy?"
My eyes narrowed. "Are you afraid of me, Gil?"
He returned my look, almost boldly. "I think I am, sometimes," he said. "But then, other times, I'm just not sure. I don't know, Miss Harper. Maybe I'm afraid of you, but then, maybe it's just that I understand you."
That surprised me, and I found myself arming my defenses, as if I somehow sensed that this young, probably somewhat retarded adolescent, posed a real threat to me. As if he and I, under different circumstances, could have either been intimate friends or mortal enemies.
I laughed once, to ridicule him, but the sound came out thin and unconvincing. "Whatever can you mean by that, Gilbert?" I said, trying to dismiss the idea.
He shook his head, as if he really didn't know. "I'm not sure what I mean, Miss Harper. I have trouble sometimes with words. I don't find myself thinking in words. It sounds crazy, but I find myself thinking-I've always found myself thinkingfeelings and...colors."
"Colors?"
"Yeah, like right now, the color I get from you, in talking to me, is blue. But not sad blue. A kind of cold, pale blue, like a thin crust of ice. And then, behind it, I sense a...redness. like a fire burning brightly, and the only thing that keeps it from burning you out is that thin blue layer of ice." He shrugged. "I told you it was crazy. But that's the way I think. That's what goes on in my brain. I have feelings about things and people; and colors."
I was impressed, although I didn't permit myself to show it. I've often heard and read that handicapped people have an uncanny ability to compensate for whatever deficiency they possess, often in strange, inexplicable ways. History was full of men and women who have gone into violent epileptic fits and come out of them with a clear, if somewhat fragmentary picture of the future. And stories of idiot savants-mongoloid idiots so mentally incapacitated they barely could feed themselves, but possessing a strangely precise ability to multiply two lengthy strings of numbers in their head, and come out with the correct number in an instant, or possessing the ability to tell you what day of the week Washington's birthday will fall on in the year 3451, and to be right always-have been so well documented that no one doubts their existence. Could it be that Gilbert Horton had his own way of compensating? The possibility was a chilling one.
"You never explained why you think you understand me at times," I said, cautiously almost. "Tell me about that, Gilbert. I'd be interested to know."
He shrugged and smiled. "It has to do with my father," he said. "I get a feeling-and I know this is crazy-that he was your father too, when you were a little girl. Maybe not him, but someone like him. Someone like my father."
"That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life," I said, dismissing him with a flip of my hand. I thought of Uncle Jeff. "It's all in your imagination, Gilbert. All in your imagination."
He shrugged and smiled. "Is it? If you say so."
I changed the subject abruptly. I didn't like the feeling I got back from him. I had the decided impression that he was staring into my thoughts, laughing at me.
"Getting back to the reason I asked you to come here before class," I said, "I'd like to know how you'd feel if you failed my course, and, consequentially, failed to graduate."
That eerie awareness he seemed to possess, that chilling, intuitive insight into my character, dropped away as suddenly as it had manifested itself, and the old Gilbert Horton returned. He was again a young, innocent, somewhat backward boy facing what must have seemed to him, the supreme crisis in his life.
He said: "I'd feel really bad. I want to pass and I want to graduate. I want to prove to myself that I can do it, but mostly I-" He stopped.
"Mostly you-what?" I prompted.
"Mostly I want to prove to my father that I can do it."
"That's important, isn't it?" I asked.
His face became very serious. "It's the most important thing I'm ever going to do in my life." He made a humorless laughing sound in his throat. "He never graduated even from grammar school, and he resents me. He's been after me for a year, trying to force me to drop out, just so I wouldn't graduate." His eyes turned inward, and his voice became quiet. "Well, looks like he's won."
"Not necessarily," I said.
He looked up. "I-I don't-"
"How would you like a chance to pass?" I asked.
He looked at me suspiciously. "Don't make fun at me, Miss Harper. This is much too important a thing. I don't like to be teased."
"I'm not playing any games," I answered. "I'm offering you a real chance to pass my course. In a sense, I'm offering you a deal."
"What kind of deal?"
"I'll pass you in my course. Your mark will only be a D, but it will be a passing grade."
He sighed in disappointment, shaking his head. "That isn't going to help me pass the Regents. I'd need a miracle for that. And you know, and I know, that if I fail the Regents, I won't graduate."
"No, you're wrong. You can graduate."
He rubbed his nose with the knuckle of his left hand, weighing my sincerity with his steady gaze. "How?"
I explained: "If I give you a passing grade in your class work, and you go on and fail the Regents examination, which seems probable, all that will happen will be that you have failed to qualify on a statewide level. But as far as Jefferson high school is concerned, you will have fulfilled all of your requirements here."
The idea was beginning to sink in, and a glimmer of budding awareness flickered dimly in his eyes. "Go on," he said.
"The only way you can be prevented from graduating is if you fail both the Regents examination, and my senior English class." I smiled at him. "But if I pass you-"
"I can still graduate!"
I held up my hand. "It will mean, of course, that you will have to accept a General diploma instead of an Academic diploma, because of the Regents failure, but it will not prevent you from graduating."
"That's right!" he cried, the idea blossoming in his consciousness. "My God-that's right!"
He dropped his books on the edge of my desk in his enthusiasm, and he clapped his hands together, jumping up from the floor. Then, just in the middle of his ecstasy, he paused, his face grew serious, and he stared at me with questioning doubt.
"That's only half of the deal," he said. "What's the other half?"
I looked at my watch to see how much time we had before the next class began. We had enough time for what I had in mind.
"Are you willing to do what I tell you to do?" I asked.
He considered the question. "Is it illegal?"
I laughed. "I guess it probably is, in a strictly legal sense, but it's nothing like what you're contemplating. You won't go to jail, if that's what is concerning you."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure," I said.
He nodded. "All right, then I'll do it, Miss Harper. I'll do what you want...just as long as you pass me."
"And you'll do anything I ask? Regardless of what it is? Regardless of how strange it may sound to you?"
"Tell me what it is-I'U do it."
"Even if it involves a certain amount of risk? You'll do anything I ask of you? Anything? You'll obey me, as if I were your master and you were my slave?"
"Miss Harper, if you pass me in this class, I'll do anything you ask me to do, without question."
I smiled at him, then lowered the boom. "Gilbert," I said, "take out your cock."
His eyes widened and his mouth fell open. "What did you say?" His voice was breathless and shrill.
"I said-take out your cock. Right now."
He looked at me with wide, pleading eyes, his face suffused with blood, as though the blotchy patches of color which mottled his complexion had suddenly congealed into a single burning blush of embarrassment. He opened his mouth to say something, could think of nothing appropriate to say, then turned slightly, and looked over his shoulder at the doorway leading out of the class to the hallway.
"Don't worry about anyone seeing you," I said, allaying one part of his concern. "Just turn your back to the door, face me, open your zipper and pull out your cock."
"But if somebody comes in!"
"Without question," I reminded.
He closed his eyes until his face tightened, the color of his shame deepening a shade. "Yes, Miss Harper," he said, his voice a subdued whisper.
I watched him with a certain sense of detachment, spreading my thighs in the well of my desk as the wetness deep inside of me began to ooze out against the crotch of my panties. His hand was trembling as it went to his zipper, pulling it down until the baggy material of his pants spread open. He was wearing a pair of briefs, and the protruding lump of his genitals seemed small and lost within the folds of the pale material. He hesitated.
"Have you ever made love to a woman?" I asked.
He looked up at me, his face scarlet. "No...I've never had a girl friend."
Knowing how important it is to a young man to be considered an experienced lover, Gil's admission of virginity must have been particularly painful for him.
I continued to hammer away at him. "Have you ever been naked in front of a woman before?" I asked.
Tears began to well up in his eyes. "No...never. Not even my...mother."
I smiled at him, exercising my half of the bargain. "Don't stop now, Gilbert," I said. "You're just getting to the best part. Take it out, please."
Sucking in his breath, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, he released his penis from the briefs. The shaft was very small, and very flaccid, hanging limply down the front of his pants, looking infinitely more obscene than it would have had it been erect. His testicles remained within the pocket of the shorts, and from what I could judge of the flesh I could see, Gilbert Horton seemed not to have very much pubic hair, either.
I made a tsking sound with my tongue. "Oh, well," I said resignedly. "Can you make it hard?"
Gil refused to look at me. "I don't know. I'm kind of...you know."
"Make it hard, Gilbert," I said, ordering him.
"All right.. . . "
He began to pull upon it ineffectually, using his thumb and index fingers to stroke with. The shaft remained flaccid, and it looked as if he were pulling upon a dangling piece of soft rubber.
"Come on, Gil!" I said sharply. He jumped, opening his eyes and looking at me for the first time since he had exposed himself. "You can do better than that, certainly. Do it yourself the way you do it when no one is watching you. Make believe you're enjoying it."
He sniffled and nodded, shaking his head up and down in a rapid succession of jerky arcs. He closed his eyes tightly and began to concentrate. Taking his limp penis into the palm of his hand, wrapping his fingers around the finger-like shaft, he began to stroke himself up and down. The head of his penis was barely visible inside the curled circle of his fingers. He began to breathe heavily, and a single drop of perspiration trickled down the hooked avenue of his nose, catching at the tip, hanging precipitously, threatening to drop off.
I watched him working, wondering what was going on in his thoughts. It was interesting, I thought, permitting myself the luxury of philosophizing, the humiliation and degradation a person would endure in order to get that which he considered important.
"Do you play with yourself very much?" I asked.
He shuddered. "No...I hardly ever."
"I want the truth!" I snapped.
"Yes...."
I laughed softly. "How often do you do it?"
He shrugged, pulling himself up and down, grunting with the effort. "It depends. Sometimes not so much...sometimes a lot."
"How many times is a lot?"
"Two...three times."
"A week?"
His face turned beet red. "A...day." He said the word so softly I had to lean forward to catch the sound.
"My my, you're a very passionate boy, aren't you."
His hand stopped moving, and he unwrapped his fingers. His penis was erect. Even in its aroused state, it was hardly more than four inches long, and no wider than a good thick index finger.
"Christ," I said cruelly, "you're not very big at all, are you?"
Gil said nothing. He stood rigidly in front of me, with his eyes closed, his hands hanging tensely at his sides. The flush of embarrassment reached from the base of his neck right up to the roots of his hair.
"Well, are you?" I asked. "Say something!"
"No...I'm not. I...I'm not very big at all. I'm small in fact." His body was wracked with dry fitful sobs.
"How would you like to fuck me?" I asked. His eyes opened wide. "Are you...serious."
"You're goddam right I'm serious," I said. I reached out and touched the pencil-thin shaft, stroking it affectionately, as if it were my own personal pet. "I don't think I've ever had anything quite so small inside me. It should be an interesting experience."
He trembled spasmodically. "You mean right now? Right here-in the classroom?"
"Later, little man." I released him from my grip, folding my hands together, interlacing the fingers on the edge of my desk. "Right now I have something a little more...varied in mind for you. Are you interested?"
He nodded, not trusting his voice.
"I want you to eat me."
"Ohmygod!" He slumped forward, and for a moment I thought he'd fainted. At the last minute he caught himself on the side of my desk, and straightened himself. He swayed from side to side as though he were drunk. "This is the wildest thing that ever happened to me...Jesus!"
"You'll do it?" I asked.
"Yes, of course! Did you think I'd say no?"
I stood up, pushing my chair back. It scraped along the floor, and the sound sent a shiver up my spine. Lightning cracked loudly, and, as if on cue, a torrent of rain beat against the window pane.
"Get under my desk," I said.
He stared numbly at me.
"I said get under my desk. Into the well of the desk. Then I'm going to sit in my chair, slide forward, and place my legs in there also. And while
I'm teaching the next class, you're going to be licking my pussy."
"Holy shit!" he gasped, the color fading from his face. "This must be a dream. It can't be real!"
He began to move toward my desk, walking stiffly, like a robot.
"Wait," I said. I walked across the breadth of the classroom to a point against the wall, halfway down from the door. Without thinking to hide his exposed state, Gil turned and watched me. I lifted my skirt, held it up with one hand, and with the other, pulled down my panties. I stepped out of them and dropped my skirt. I said: "I almost forgot about these." I swung them around the tip of my index finger.
Gil began to collapse. Then I realized all he was doing was hurrying to get under the desk.
I positioned my chair, seated myself in it, then, checking the door to make sure that there was no one peering in, I pulled up my dress until it bunched tightly at my waist, and I slid the chair forward. My legs went under the desk. I parted my thighs.
Feverishly, as if he were starving, as if he were waiting for this moment all his life, Gilbert Horton began to eat my cunt. I'd come three times by time the class had taken their seats.
"Today, ladies and gentlemen," I said, forming the words almost painfully as Gil's invisible tongue did its work well, "we are going to begin a great American classic, The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne."
There was a general cry of displeasure, and, for the first time since I'd been teaching, I found myself not resenting it. The noise helped to cover over the soft sound of my moan of pleasure as I came again.
As I worked into the lecture, I found myself curiously thinking of Uncle Jeffrey, and then, logically, Travis Horton, Gil's father. I said:
"One of the central themes of this novel is that the past creates the present and the future, and that, regardless of how one may attempt to escape the past, he is always its prisoner." I opened my copy of the text to the Author's Preface page. Before I read, I said: "Hawthorne himself, in The House of the Seven Gables, tells us at one point: 'no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever set right.' " I pushed my cunt into Gil's mouth. "We shall see how this novel demonstrates that idea."
I began to read, in a carefully modulated voice, that betrayed no trace of the hidden pleasure licking into my body under the cover of the desk. I read the Preface and the first chapter, pausing at those passages I felt conveyed the meaning of the novel.
" 'The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition,' " I read, " 'lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.
Many writers lay great stress upon some definite moral purpose...not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral,-the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives in the successive ones.
I gasped as Gil rammed his tongue all the way up inside of me. Perspiration began to run down my cheeks as I felt myself building toward another orgasm. I continued to read:
" 'Still, there will be a connection with the long past-a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete-which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life...."' Thinking of Uncle Jeff, happy that he was dead, I began to come. My voice only cracked once as I continued with the lesson: " 'Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity...."'
The orgasm peaked and died, but the enthusiastic stroking of Gil's tongue didn't, and he continued to stuff himself upon the wet sexual feast between my parted thighs.
As I began to build, almost immediately toward another orgasm, I found myself remembering the pathetic brutality of Travis Horton in his desperate attempt to prove to himself that he was a man.
" 'If so,' " I read, speaking loudly to cover over the wet, squishy sound of Gil's darting tongue, " 'we are left to dispose of the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property-conscious of wrong, and failing to rectify it-did not commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. .
" The triple image of Uncle Jeff, Travis Horton, and his son, Gil Horton fused suddenly in my mind. I read: " 'To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor-perhaps as a portion of his own punishment-is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family."
I read on, and on, and on, coming, and coming, and coming, until my body was raw, almost licked clean, and my mind was blank of all personal responsibility, as I came to the final paragraph: " 'From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance...."'
I closed the book and tried to sum up the salient points covered in the reading for the past hour, before I passed out from coming.
"Most of Hawthorne's books deal with the past, as does this book. What does he tell us of the past? First, he tells us we must pay for what we do. We pay for our past again and again, down through the ages." I lifted myself from the chair a fraction of an inch, and I drove my wet, sopping middle hard against Gil's open, sucking mouth. "In a very real sense, we are constantly in the process of creating the past."
My class looked at me blankly, as if I were speaking to them in Serbo-Croatian. The only thing which prevented me from screaming in frustration was the fact that I was building rapidly again toward another orgasm.
"Can anyone paraphrase the theme of the first chapter of The House of the Seven Gables?" I asked, without too much hope of eliciting a response.
To my surprise, someone raised a hand.
"Yes?" I grunted optimistically, the orgasm swelling in my belly.
"The sins of the father are visited upon his sons," came the perfect reply.
"Very good," I said, and I came again.