Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Events described herein are products of the Narrator’s—Speaker’s—Whatever’s—imagination. Any resemblance to factual incidents, places, or persons (real or deceased) is purely coincidental. Besides this, any relationships between consecutively narrated events is also purely coincidental. Causality, whether by natural or supernatural means, is neither expressed nor implied.
“Every time a student says something to me like, Ms. Rilke you’re the best friend I have here—I simply want to run screaming from the room. Let me make this perfectly clear to all of you: I am not your friend,” Ms. Rilke had stated more than once over the years to her many cohorts, although scrutiny of her actions over time invited the conclusion that this simple fact never occurred to the pitiable aging woman she had become.
“Do you have any idea how weird it would be for somebody my age to be fraternizing with the likes of you?? Oh my God. I have a life.”
Rachel Rilke did have a private life. As with any other teacher, he had to respect its dissociation from her professional life.
One afternoon, after school, he probably found his mind floating up to the padlocked iron gates of that alien realm, as he viewed the photos on the wall of her classroom, as she sat at her desk grading papers.
An avid amateur photographer, Ms. Rilke had taken all them herself. They were the only things with which she adorned her austerely furnished classroom. Most of the frames showed portraits of students whose faces he recognized from around school— there was Shelli Riccardi’s boyfriend smiling the smile that made other girls swoon, despite, or because of, his propensity for violent aggression—along with a few landscapes and severely lit interior studies.
His meandering glance settled finally on a portrait different from the others: it showed an older looking man, silver-haired, distinguished and somewhat noble of mien.
Could this be Ms. Rilke’s boyfriend that he had heard about, from Lauren Napolitano and Chad Ermengarde? He wondered silently, considering the black and white profile of the man’s face. Miss Lotti, the religion teacher who taught Christian Lifestyles, had asked Ms. Rilke to come into her class as a guest speaker. Ms. Rilke spoke at length about the official vocation of singlehood as a lifestyle approved by the Catholic Church. In the course of her interview with the class, Ms. Rilke’s serious long-term non-marital relationship had come up. The rumor was that she went with the father of a girl who had graduated the previous year from the school, with the class that included Chad, Christy, and the abusive football players.
“What are you thinking?” Ms. Rilke’s voice returned the N/S/W’s thoughts to reality with a start. From her desk, she regarded him with good-humored interest, momentarily distracted from the schoolwork laid out in front of her. That she had asked for his thoughts just at the moment when they had roved, sneakily, to speculate on her private life so surprised him that he brought it up recklessly, right then and there. Not mentioning the man’s portrait, he asked if it was true what he had heard, that she never wanted a committed relationship. But she must have known what prompted the question; she had seen him pausing at the picture she had taken and put up herself, longer than at any of the others.
“I guess I heard you had a sort of fiancé, betrothed sort of partner, but that that was all you wanted, you didn’t think you’d actually marry him,” he mumbled, trying awkwardly to justify his not totally justifiable curiosity. The question was forward, perhaps even untoward. But he presumed it could not be forbidden territory, if Ms. Rilke had alluded to her relationship freely to roomful of seniors, and put up a picture of the man who was the other half of it, in her classroom for everybody to see. Could it?
Ms. Rilke didn’t look taken aback. She merely chuckled slightly, smiled the sphinx-like half-smile, and said, “I never intend to get married.”
That was all she’d say on the matter, and he did not press for more. She often hammered in her tangents and digressions about the importance of personal boundaries and privacy. This concerned her especially in the context of the new world they were entering, one in which invasive information technology and social media gone haywire now aided the timeless human propensity of gossip.
The passing glimpses he had of Ms. Rilke’s life beyond school appealed to his imagination. They seemed relevant in how they informed her life as a teacher, a learner, a person who lived the life of the mind. But maybe he was rationalizing to think that. Maybe they were “relevant” only because, for whatever weird reason, Ms. Rilke’s personality fascinated him endlessly.
The reasonable words his English teacher had directed at him about Christianity—and also, honestly, the magnetism and force of her personality, her stated progressive views, seemingly incompatible with the Catholicism he had up till then associated with Midwestern German-Americans, the very fact that such an individual could also remain an established pillar of a Roman Catholic institution for fifteen years—made him begin to reconsider his possible exit from the Church.
Ms. Rilke didn’t care to bash the Church without purpose. As a teacher, she concerned herself more with pushing each student to examine their own preconceived notions critically, especially those that underlay deeply held beliefs. If the student’s belief could reasonably withstand the rhetorical exercise of Ms. Rilke playing the sensible-sounding devil’s advocate, then that belief was worth upholding.
But maybe, rather than staying Catholic despite personal doubts, he really just felt like he wanted to become Ms. Rilke’s personal acolyte, and her to be his priestess, his Buddha, or perhaps yet his own Messiah, armed with revolutionary knowledge imparted to rock his world to its very core.
On an unrelated note:
The spring semester was when Ms. Rilke taught about Existentialism.
Perhaps it was more apposite a topic than it should have been, for her.
That year, there were four sections of Advanced Junior English, and these got split down the middle between Ms. Rilke, the veteran instructor of the course, and Miss Jorgensen a younger teacher who had just been hired that year.
Miss Jorgensen had nerves with her students. Her teaching skills were relatively pristine, compared with Ms. Rilke’s fifteen years. The difference between the juniors who took her Advanced English, and those who took Ms. Rilke’s would only become fully apparent the following year, when most of the kids who took Advanced English as juniors would advance to College Credit English with Fr. Gregory Gottlieb. Existentialism was a centerpiece of the CC English curriculum, which got administered through St. Frideswide’s College across town. Those students who had had Ms. Rilke the previous year understood it perfectly, when Fr. Gottlieb covered it, but those who had had Miss Jorgensen, to put it kindly, floundered.
Ms. Rilke had stories to spare to drive home the Six Points of Existentialism, as elucidated by the scholar Gordon E. Bigelow. That was why her set of students understood it so well the next year. They were different, for having gone through her hands, not the untried ones of Jorgensen.
Existence comes before essence—the only thing humans can know is their unique experience of themselves and the world, through their senses. Underlying meaning takes a backseat. Reason is inadequate to plumb the true depths and absurdities of human life. This leads to alienation. Consequently the human subject experiences growing anxiety. The anxiety culminates in the imaginative Encounter with Nothingness, the realization that no meaning can be proven to exist independently of the mind that contemplates it, and that death may be the ultimate end of meaning, because it is the end of consciousness.
And finally, all this brings the human subject to the anxiety, the Ultimate Anxiety, of True Freedom.
If nothing means anything, then you—individual you—choose your own meaning, which choice becomes an essentially creative act.
In a nutshell, as Ms. Rilke put it, life is what you make it. Reality truly is your own creation, if the most important thing created is the meaning you choose to believe, to convince yourself that life is still worth living.
Nearly all the days were still.
He saw the boyfriend in the flesh for the first time in early April 2005, when he ran into Ms. Rilke with him at Barnes and Noble.
Ms. Rilke greeted the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—and introduced the man standing at her side. “This is Jack Fredricksen.”
She didn’t bother to identify their relationship with each other.
It went without saying.
He shook Jack Fredricksen’s hand; the older man’s hair was almost completely white, and whatever good looks might have graced his visage in earlier years had faded with age, though he looked no less distinguished than the photo on Ms. Rilke’s wall. He had to be a good ten years older than her at least, and all the worse for the wear by comparison: her only signs of age lay in the slightly grayed temples above her spectacle frames, the few lonesome silver streaks that ran through her dark brown hair, and in the crinkles adorning the corners of her drooping green eyes that shone through her glasses.
“Pleased to meet you,” Jack Fredricksen said.
“He’s the student I told you about,” said Ms. Rilke, slithering her arm around the N/S/W’s shoulder familiarly, briefly brushing his buttocks.
“He wrote on his registration sheet for next year, that if he couldn’t get into the elective religion classes he wanted, that they should just schedule him into whatever religion class I happen to be teaching, if the religion department give me any sections.”
“That’s sucking up,” said Jack soberly.
“Ohhh but it’s so much fun,” the N/S/W replied archly, playing along. He hadn’t known the counselor in Student Services would go tell Ms. Rilke what he had written on his sheet, on a whim. He didn’t do it to suck up or get “capital”—he actually really did want to have her as a religion teacher the next year.
But if it did flatter her when the counselor blabbed, that was also fine by him.
More capital, like what Andrew LaBoone, the cool popular senior, had gotten. It was something to aspire to.
Standing there in that second, with Ms. Rilke’s flabby slithering arm around his shoulder, he found himself sizing up the considerable difference between her and that of the aging boyfriend. He chuckled inwardly; he knew he batted for the other team; he knew that his admiration for Ms. Rilke was purely intellectual; he knew that she and Jack Fredricksen were probably perfectly happy together, and that that was fine. It was fine.
But it was sort of funny that he had to remind himself of all these facts, as though the reminder was necessary to keep them contained within the boundaries of existence.
A few weeks later, futzing around on his mother’s desktop PC one evening, he discovered the State Circuit Court Access website. It listed the public records of every court trial and hearing that had taken place in the state during the last fifty years, from small claims, to violent crimes and felonies. It included the names of all people involved. You could run the name of any person you knew through the search engine. If that person was a Wisconsin resident, the website would spit back every official court proceeding that had that person’s name attached to it.
Fascinated, the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—started typing in the names of everybody he could think of off the top. Mostly the court records he found were boring: speeding tickets and (for a few classmates who had already graduated, like Chad Ermengarde) underage drinking violations.
Then he put in Ms. Rilke’s name. The court record that came up for her differed considerably from the rest of those he had found. A couple years earlier, she had taken out a “Harassment Restraining Order” against another woman in civil court. “Connie Fredricksen” read the name under the Respondent heading. The initial hearing at the courthouse had occurred on a Friday—September 12th, 2003.
The name rang a bell, as did the date of the hearing, listed on the page he looked over. It evoked three images from his memory, that had previously been separate from each other: his mother talking to his elementary school Harold Schuler in a chocolate shop; the rumor from Lauren and Chad, that Ms. Rilke was dating the father of a recent graduate; and the day, two years previously, that he himself had first attended Writers’ Union moderated by Mr. Hiller, but in Ms. Rilke’s room, because she was out for the day, and Mr. Hiller’s usual room was undergoing custodial maintenance, on the other side of that large dull box-like wing of the building.
His mother had seen the chattering woman Connie Fredricksen in the chocolate shop, served by Harold Schuler, his old friend from elementary school, who was attending Central High, the neighborhood public school. Connie was the mother of Lily, who had been in his senior-level Spanish class the previous year, and since graduated. Jack Fredricksen, who Ms. Rilke was still dating, was Lily’s father, Connie’s presumptive now-ex-husband. The day that he had first gone to Writers’ Union, it had been in Ms. Rilke’s room, because she was out that day, attending the hearing where she had petitioned against Connie—just the autumn after Lily herself had passed through Advanced Junior English, in the same grade as Chad, Christy, and the abusive football team that so many were glad to have seen the back of.
Given his mother’s description of Mrs. Fredricksen’s intense demeanor buttonholing Harold in the shop, it seemed plausible that by beginning to date the husband of a dying woman, while their daughter was in her own English class, Ms. Rilke had— intentionally or not—become the unique target of Mrs. Fredricksen’s brain-cancerrelated behavioral symptoms. But whatever had started the issue, whatever Ms. Rilke had said in court had been sufficiently compelling that the highest ranking officials of that county’s circuit court had granted her a two-year-long civil restraining order, that would have led to Mrs. Fredricksen’s arrest and felonious indictment if she had disobeyed it—cancer, or no cancer; daughter Lily, or no daughter.
Small, small world, he thought at that moment—still at that point inclined to view Ms. Rilke’s side of the dispute with greater sympathy. She wasn’t Jack Fredricksen’s new wife, but it seemed clear that, apart from living separately, they were by now as good as married: when he saw them at Barnes and Noble, they were just about to sit down and do taxes together. He wondered how Lily Fredricksen must have felt, to have her high school English teacher sleeping with her father and taking a restraining order on her sick mother.
Unlike the first time he’d heard of Connie Fredricksen, laughed and then forgotten her, the sheer weirdness of all these other people and situations coincidentally linking back to her gave him pause sufficient to file the discovery away more prominently in his memory bank.
It would make for a wild story to entertain people someday, if only he could do it whilst maintaining crystalline clarity.
“The general consensus among the other teachers,” Ms. Rilke remarked at least once, that he would reflect on long afterward, with a transfigured perspective, “is that I get away with murder.”
She did:
That same school year, his junior, he volunteered to be the student assistant to Mrs. Cook in the Main Office, next to the Cafeteria. During his study hall periods, he would sit at a side desk in the corner, and alternate between his own homework, and running odd jobs to support Cook’s administrative undertakings. Her job seemed boring overall, but she did it well, and with a wonderful ease and sense of humor.
Once, near the end of his study hall period, he was sorting school mail, when Ms. Rilke happened to float into the office and strike up a conversation with Mrs. Cook and the other secretaries.
It was just small-talk and pleasantries, but at one point, he distinctly overheard Rilke make mention of the fact that she was given to forging the signature of her boyfriend, Jack Fredricksen, whenever she used any of his numerous credit cards to make purchases. Apparently she carried them in her purse at all times. Fredricksen was well-known, to Mrs. Cook and the rest of the staff, to have been married to Lily’s mother Connie, who was dying of brain cancer, when Rachel Rilke had taken up with him a year or two earlier.
The way Ms. Rilke spoke at that moment: it was like she was commenting on the weather, something utterly trivial and predictable. She did not care who knew. Her tone was utterly careless and elegant.
You almost had to marvel in astonishment that she could be not only so cruel—but so shameless:
She Did Not Care.
And the eeriest thing about it all, he would later on reflect, was how ordinary moments like that seemed, during his years at that curious institution. Rachel Rafaële Rilke could do whatever she wanted, to anybody: steal the husband of a woman dying of cancer, humiliate that woman doubly by dragging her through a public legal spectacle that lasted literally over a year, keep her own job despite that devilment, and finally brag about using that husband’s credit cards to the school secretary, also dying of cancer—because Rachel was Rachel.
And as with the varsity football senior a year earlier, who had reduced Mrs. Cook to tears by screaming at her to “GO DIE!!”, Mrs. Cook—kind, sweet, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly-ifher-life-depended-on-it Benita Milagros Humérez Cook—was expected to forgive and forget that Rachel Rilke could do these things with impunity. It was her duty, at that curious institution, to be a good sport about everything, because Mrs. Cook was Mrs. Cook.
The percipient reader is delicately reminded of the inadvisability of raising objections to the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever’s license to spin wild stories, on the grounds that it may incriminate the reader.
Because let’s be honest here: real life is weirder than the most contrived of fictional plots.
Reason is inadequate to plumb its depths and absurdities.
Words simply fail.