“Umble?” the man asked. “Umble bumble um mumblebum.”
And so on. Exciting listening. It went on and on.
I thought of just walking in. It was an appealing idea—as an idea.
I thought of coming back later, but that wasn’t even an appealing idea. Who knew what I might miss?
I hung in. The minutes dragged by like rainy afternoons. (I put that in a writing assignment once. The minutes dragged by like rainy afternoons. The teacher wrote Good!! in the margin. What a creep.)
Suddenly the man’s voice was right by the door.
“I don’t know,” he was saying. “I really don’t. But I’ll give it a try.”
I scurried across the hall and put my back against the freight-elevator door.
Another minute passed. Then the man said, “Okay,” and opened the door.
He stepped out into the hall, saw me, and froze for a second as if I was a cobra poised to strike. Then he decided to pretend I wasn’t there. He closed the door behind him and started to walk away.
I said, “Are you the teacher?”
From the way he frowned at me, you would’ve thought this was a real hard question. Finally he got his wits together and figured out what he wanted to say. He drew himself up and said … no.
Obviously he wanted to say a lot more—maybe thousands of words more. But that was all he could manage at the moment: no.
I said, very politely, “Thank you.”
He frowned some more, turned away, and stomped off.
At school any guy you don’t like is a dork, but dork isn’t a word I use all that much. I guess I like to save it up for special people, like this guy. This guy was a dork. I took an instant dislike to him, I don’t know why. About my mother’s age, dressed cheap and ugly. One of those dark, intense types, if you know what I mean. I swear I never knew what a bad haircut looked like till I saw his. He had “intellectual—keep your distance” written all over him.
I gave my attention to the door in front of me. I couldn’t think of anything that needed thinking about, so I just went through it.
Nothing had changed, but it was all different now, because I understood what the deal was. What I’d heard through the door was a conversation between the dork and the ape. Naturally I only heard the dork’s side, because the ape wasn’t talking out loud.
The dork wasn’t the teacher. Therefore the ape was the teacher.
There was one thing more. The dork wasn’t afraid. This was important. It meant the ape wasn’t dangerous. If a dork didn’t have to be afraid, I didn’t have to be afraid.
Now that I knew he was there, it was easy to spot the “gurilla behind the glass. He was right where I’d left him.
I said to him, “I came because of the ad.”
Silence.
I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. I moved up to the chair and said it again.
The ape stared at me in silence.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “You talked to me before.”
He closed his eyes, very, very slowly. It’s not easy to close your eyes that slowly. I thought maybe he was falling asleep or something.
“What’s the matter?” I said again.
The ape sighed. I don’t know how to describe a sigh like that. I expected to see the walls bending under the weight of that sigh. I waited. I figured he was getting ready to speak. But after a full minute he was still just sitting there.
I said, “Didn’t you put the ad in the paper?”