I had a student in my composition class some years ago. Deeshawn Williams. A nice boy. Friendly. Quite funny, actually. And smart. A junior. I get them when they’re juniors. One more year and they’re off. Vanish into thin air. I could see a future for him, unlike many of them. What are they doing in college. They can’t write – many of them – a grammatically correct sentence. Deeshawn could. The boy could express himself.

 

He disappeared. Some friends of his in class told me he’d been killed. There was going to be a memorial service.

 

His older stepbrother had shot him in his sleep – having first shot their mother before Deeshawn got home and put her in a closet. He cut them up, bagged the parts in plastic garbage bags and transported them in a shopping cart – making several trips – across the Major Deegan Expressway – to the Harlem River where he dumped them in. Weighted the bags with stones from the riverbank.

 

I never met Mrs. Williams, a nurse, and, apparently, a talented gospel singer. She had a wicked sense of humor Deeshawn’s friends told me. 

 

We went to the service – in a black section of the Bronx – Bob and I the only white people. When they introduced me as Deeshawn’s professor I felt compelled to stand up and say a few good words about him. My student, Deeshawn Williams. Parts of him floating down the Harlem River. Bumping along the bottom. They never found the head. His handsome face. Made us all crack up. Bumped fists with me. Was running a B+, A- in in the course.

 

Leaving the church and walking up the avenue to where Bob had parked the car, we both felt out of place, this neighborhood, the cold winter night. And sure enough someone emptied a pot of water (I hoped it wasn’t worse) down on us from an apartment window. We both breathed easier after we’d found our way out and were back on the Deegan South to Manhattan.

 

I wondered about him. As years passed. Semesters marched one after the other, summers. Imagining him continuing in his life – graduating – on to graduate school. Government job in Washington (he’d interned with Schumer between junior and senior year High School).

 

Deeshawn Williams . . . The name hardly conjures an image now. But a presence.

 

He would flirt with me, an old lady by his measure. But 49 wasn’t old by mine. He made me feel alive – waked up. Teaching English Comp for 24 years to mostly uninterested kids required to take it . . . “Prof Lovely” he called me. “How is Professor Lovely today?” (my last name is not “Lovely). “If I wasn’t going with someone (who?),” he’d say, “I’d sure ax you out.” To say I looked forward to class when Dee was my student is exaggerating. The banter was friendly, generous, flirtatious. He noticed I was a woman: complimented me on the cut of my hair, my scarves (Hermes). I didn’t encourage it, though I may not have discouraged it. Nice bling there, Deeshawn. Oh, yeah, I get you a special price you move me up a grade point ‘r two.

 

Did I dress for him? Of course not. When I showered, for class, I may have been aware of his appraising eyes, mild, bemused. Imagine, Professor Lovely naked.

 

I never talked with Bob about him. My little secret. Bob wouldn’t have cared. Bob was somewhere else.

 

Bob divorced me the end of that semester. In fact he moved out shortly after we survived the memorial service. Left me for the moon-faced, sad-eyed graduate assistant. Ah, so much for the dream of the married life. The something you can count on.

 

He would have come and gone with his A-, a blip of brightness on the Comp grid, and that would have been it. However, he got “Incomplete” on his transcript – itself forever incomplete. (Is there a “Dead Transcript Office” in a sub-basement hereabouts?)

 

How can it be? He was just 20 when he entered the class. And with three weeks to go, he would have turned 21. He invited me to his party. 21. He could legally drink. My majority, he said. He would be a man. I even pretended I might come. Oh, and where is this affair? Your ‘hood? A white woman alone? At night? He grew quite serious – it was charming! I’ll escort you – in and back out! Serious, man -- come on, do it! (He almost called me Louise – he caught himself)  I’d be your date? I could see him spin the wheels of bringing a white woman more than twice his age – his “Professor” -- to this night of his rite of passage. His 21st year.

 

Ah, Deeshawn . . . you couldn’t know, but I was just three months from turning 50.

 

Your brother, your hideous, insane brother saw to it you never crossed the divide alive. Forever a boy in parts.

 

Now I’m thinking about him these years later, this intersession break. Comp over once again. Another Christmas looming. Then on to a new decade. Continue, as always? My little juniors evolving into seniors, drifting insubstantial across campus. Hi Professor, how’s things? Mmmm. Then utterly vanishing. Sometimes I think what I’m really waiting for is it to be finished. To be able to stop pretending, cease maintaining the inertia – a body in motion continuing in motion. Ah, to quit the ceaseless rounds of beauty and sorrow, Spring and Fall, another garden, another visit to the dentist, another “Nutcracker”, another trip to Paris crossing Pont Neuf glancing up at the stone face of the guy on the horse . . . To see so clearly to the end is to negate what remains? If one can see nothingness, a space without one, one is, it would seem already there. These Christmas carols playing again and again – Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney – and they’re both dead -- on and on preserved and repeating, the dead go on repeating.

 

I sit in the kitchen paralyzed by what I see and what I know. Then George walks in and asks what’s for breakfast. What shall we do today, a Saturday – the Vermeer at the Met, a movie, dinner at the new Italian on 1st Ave? I lurch forward into this day. The thing is it’s not without enthusiasm, or optimism. Faced with a piece of buttered toast and jam, my heart fills. The animal, the beast -- Eat! Breathe! George my lover makes my flesh pleasure and sing. As never Bob did. But George won’t marry me. He is 23 years my junior. About what Deeshawn had been. But time has moved along. George is a chemist. His fingers reek of chemicals. I’m teaching him things. He believes he loves me. I am a grand experiment that will serve him well. He thinks about me when I’m not around. No doubt! You’re a phony, I tell him. I teach him about love. Or about lust. The deeper and deeper we go, the further we grow apart. Soon it will be over. And isn’t it ok to leave things unfinished. It all ceases like a film run off the reel before the end.