The Easy Way Out by Stephen McCauley Page B

tables. It was Arthur who gave some direction to my reading and made me realize it was all right for me to admit that, despite my upbringing, I’d read and enjoyed (even if I hadn’t entirely understood) a certain three-thousand-page French novel about cookies. In his married life, Arthur had earned a doctorate in English literature. His field was Restoration comedy, just the thing—along with a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan—for his repressed-homosexual incarnation.
    I’d inherited my love of reading from my father. He was constantly moving his eyes from left to right across a page of print, although he made little distinction between, say, The Naked and the Dead and the label on a soup can; both served the purpose of blocking out my mother and the rest of his surroundings.
    My mother viewed reading with suspicion and often tried to discourage it, possibly because my father did so much of it. During adolescence, the only way I was able to read in peace was to lock myself in the bathroom and pretend I was masturbating.
    As soon as I graduated from an overrated college isolated in the woods of New York State, I moved to Cambridge to look for a teaching job. Jeffrey and I, who were just pals at the time, had talked about moving to Manhattan together, but I decided I’d rather live in a city where my accent was easily understood. Half my time at college had been spent dodging words with the letter r in them so I wouldn’t have to repeat or translate, as if I were speaking a foreign language. I figured I’d have enough trouble in the classroom without the added problem of a language barrier.
    It took me a long time to find a teaching position. For one thing, I was underqualified (I had no teaching certificate and little experience), and for another, I have red hair. People tend to regard redheadswith a fair degree of suspicion, especially when it comes to working with children.
    What I had going for me was principally a handsome, if slightly outdated, suit I’d snatched from the racks of my parents’ store. I think it was the suit that finally secured me a part-time teaching position at a snazzy private day school near the city. I taught two classes of ninth-grade English for several months, and then, thanks to the unexpected suicide of a staff member, I was offered a full-time position.
    At the time I thought I was Socrates, but when I analyze the situation, I realize I was a mediocre teacher. I often lost patience with my students, and there were days when I was so fantastically bored, I’d blank out or fly into a rage just to keep myself awake. I wasn’t very good with discipline, either. I was probably too close to my students’ age to command their respect and not tall enough to inspire fear. And despite my vague idealism about teaching, I didn’t much care for the profession as a whole. Every time I walked into the teachers’ room, I’d choke on the clouds of cigarette smoke and the overwhelming stench of unacknowledged countertransference.
    In looking back, however, I think it was probably none of these factors that made me leave teaching so much as it was a feeling of grave social inferiority to most of my students. Late in my third year of teaching, I finally realized what my students had obviously known all along: no matter how much I thought I had to teach them, no matter how much they did or didn’t learn under my tutelage, no matter how many homework assignments they missed or how many books they didn’t read, they would very probably, thanks to nothing more than family connections and social standing, end up doing something with their lives a lot more satisfying and financially rewarding than teaching the likes of them. The curiously sympathetic condescension with which the students had been treating me since the day I arrived began to make sense to me.
    Once I’d accepted this reality, I lost almost all my interest in teaching and gave my