Page 42 of Cheater and the Saint
Once I was alone, my smile faltered and I sighed. I didn’t know what it’d take to reach him, but I wasn’t giving up until I did. When I set my sights on something, I didn’t back down. A part of me felt guilty for it.
He was nothing but a goal in my mind, the touchdown to win the biggest game of the season. I knew once I had him, my interest would fade.
Maybe he realized that, too.
That Monday was like all the others. It might’ve been the first day of a new month, but it was the same old crap as always. In British lit, I sort of paid attention to Mrs. Stevens’ lecture, but mostly zoned. Poems and stories, no matter how highly acclaimed they were, just didn’t hold my attention for shit.
I still didn’t know what I wanted to study as a major, but I knew damn well it wouldn’t be anything literature related.
Jacob jotted down notes before doodling in his notebook. He drew those weird masks, the one laughing, one miserable one, that were like the symbol for theater geeks everywhere.
Yeah… I wouldn’t be majoring in theater, either.
I didn’t know what I was even good at. I mean, other than fucking, and although a career could be made of that, it wasn’t ideal. Being a porn star would be fun, though. Being paid to fuck hot guys or chicks on camera. Sign me up.
“What about you, Mr. Cartwright?”
I blinked before focusing on Mrs. Stevens. “Huh? Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”
The class laughed. Mrs. Stevens looked like she wanted to laugh, too, but she pursed her lips instead.
“At least you’re honest,” she said with a sigh. “I asked what you thought Keats meant here.”
I looked at the poem we were reading aloud,Ode on a Grecian Urnby John Keats. The narrator was looking at an old urn and commenting about each scene he saw. The scene we were discussing was when the speaker of the poem looked at a depiction of a man playing a pipe. A beautiful woman lay beside the piper.
“What do you think Keats meant by this part?” Mrs. Stevens asked before quoting:
“Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss.
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
“Um,” I said before clearing my throat. I re-read the lines she’d read aloud. “Honestly, I have no idea.”
“Try.” Her expression was patient, and she watched me with kind, green eyes. “There are no wrong answers. When we read poetry, there can be so many interpretations, for everyone’s life experiences are different. We see the same world, but infer it in different ways.”
“Okay.” Normally, I loved being the center of attention, but being called out in front of the whole class to answer some bullshit question about boring poetry wasnotin my comfort zone. “It sounds like the narrator dude is saying that the piper guy can’t kiss his sexy lady friend. But it’s okay because she’ll be young and hot forever.”
Jacob snorted a laugh before bringing his fist up to his mouth to cover it with a cough. I cut my eyes at him.
Mrs. Stevens, however, seemed impressed. “Although the terminology isn’t what I would’ve used, your meaning is spot-on, Mr. Cartwright. The speaker is saying that the young couple is frozen in time, never to grow old. Never to die. But he also addresses that they can never have human experiences, such as the piper kissing the maiden.”
“What’s the point of it?” I asked. “Some guy is looking at some drawings on an ancient pot and asking questions. Seems kinda pointless.”
“Poetry doesn’t have to have an obvious meaning,” she responded. “And you’re not the first student to ever ask me such a thing. It’s also funny you should ask what the point of it is, because that’s part of the message Keats was trying to get across with the poem. In it, the speaker asks the urn questions, such as what purpose does art serve? All of the depicted scenes are frozen, never moving forward. But with the imagination of the viewer, they can make the scenes whatever they wish them to be. Just like art.”
Thankfully, Mrs. Stevens moved on after that and asked a different student questions.
I kept thinking about the poem for the rest of class, though. Not so much the poem itself, but what the teacher had said about interpreting things differently than someone else.
Like, if there was a red balloon floating in the air, someone might smile and think of a happy memory of being at one of their favorite birthday parties as a kid. While someone else might remember the scene in the movieITwhen Georgie got his arm bitten off and dragged in the sewer. They saw the same thing, but their thoughts and reactions varied.
I wondered if people were that way, too.
To some people, I looked like the carefree playboy who partied a lot and didn’t care about his future. They only saw the good time I could give to them. But Saint seemed to see something else when looking at me, as if he could somehow see the real me beneath it all—themeI sometimes refused to even see myself.
