Be Mine (23 page)

They'd fuck the mud. They'd fuck other males. Presumably, they'd fuck sick frogs, old frogs, dead frogs. Theirs was just a blind instinct, directed at nothing in particular. Nothing personal. Nothing that mattered. I pictured all of this in the Henslins' pond—all the fuming and anxious groping—and, at the edge of it in the darkness, Sue, with that look on her face:

I wanted to spice up your life a bit.

Oh,
I'd said, my voice sounding as if it were coming from somewhere far away from me. And then, weakly, walking away from her, audible only to myself,
That did cross my mind.

But it had
never
crossed my mind.

As I walked back to my office, Robert Z passed me in the hallway again, only looking over for a moment, raising his hand in a soft hello. He'd seen something there on my face, I could tell, which kept him from stopping, kept him from teasing—"
Playin' hooky yesterday, Sherry?
" And it occurred to me suddenly then, sickeningly, that
everyone
knew—knew that I was having an affair with Bram, that the notes had been from Sue, that I'd fallen for it, the whole thing, that I was vain and stupid enough to continue to fall indefinitely as they watched.

Had that been what Sue had wanted all along?

Had I betrayed her somehow so deeply—not listened to her attentively enough, not called her often enough—that finally she'd devised a plan to humble me forever?

Had she, over the years, grown to have so much contempt for me—my worries about my weight, my taste in clothes, the way I talked, the books and movies I liked or didn't like—that she wanted to end our friendship this way?

All these years, had I simply overlooked it, as I talked on and on about Chad's accomplishments, about Jon's good humor, about the hollyhocks in the garden, about what I was making for dinner, or what I'd just bought at the mall, the signals she was sending?

I remembered noticing, once, the look on her face, one afternoon, showing her photographs from our week in Costa Rica. It had honestly puzzled me, that expression. I'd said, when I noticed it, "I'm sorry, Sue. Am I going on and on?"

"No," she'd said, but her expression had stayed the same, and I'd gone on, then, about the ocean, about the tropical flowers. I had totally failed to see it for what it was—boredom, disdain. Deepening, widening.

Maybe.

Or, maybe it had occurred to her suddenly, one morning. Maybe she'd simply woken up one morning and realized that she hated me.

Or, perhaps, was she only telling the truth, there in the hallway that afternoon? That she'd only felt sorry for me? That I'd looked
washed up.
That she only wanted to spice up my life?

And, which of these possibilities would be the least painful to believe?

W
EDNESDAY
afternoon, when I'd called Bram from my office and told him I had to go home that night, not to the efficiency, he said, "You're kidding, right?"

Why would I be kidding?

"No," I said. "Bram, I have things I have to do, and I'm tired—"

"What do you have to do?"

I said, "Chad's coming home on Sunday. I have to do laundry. I have to—" I could think of nothing else to say, so I told him the truth. "I'm exhausted," I said. "I couldn't sleep all night."

There was a silence on the other end of the line that, it occurred to me, could quite possibly contain a third person, listening. Suddenly, then, I felt sure of it. Who were the phone operators at the college? I'd never even seen them, as far as I knew. I'd had the impression that they'd all been replaced years ago by a tape recording, but that couldn't be true, could it? Someone had to be there to talk to the people with more questions than a machine could answer.

So, where were they?
Who
were they? And did they, perhaps, get bored wherever they were and listen in on the conversations zigzagging back and forth across the campus?

"Oh," Bram said.

"But I'll see you tomorrow," I offered.

"Whatever," Bram said.

Behind him I could hear an engine start up, and something metal—flimsy and heavy at the same time—crashing onto cement.

Now, he was lying on his back on Jon's side of the bed. Looking up at the ceiling, he said, "So, what are we going to do about this, Sherry?"

I was relieved, I realized—a weight rising from my chest, as if a large bird had been perched there—hearing him say something that had to do with what was happening between us, the little door it opened into the possibility that this was wrong, that it had to end. In that crack of light I thought I could still see myself in my old life—maybe carrying a basket of laundry up the stairs. Going for a slow walk with Jon through a park, holding hands, growing older, placing a plate of sliced beef and onions on a table between my husband and my son. I said, "Oh, Bram, you're right. This
can't go
on."

He said, "I want you to leave this motherfucker, baby. I want you to be mine."

I couldn't move.

I couldn't breathe.

The word
mine
seemed to echo around the bedroom, peeling itself down to the essentials of hard consonants and the single bright vowel (
eye eye eye
) bouncing from one white wall to the other—while, outside, what had sounded like thousands and thousands of spring birds making noises about their territory, about their fears, about their plans for the future in the trees, went completely silent.

I sat up.

What was I doing here, with this stranger, in my marital bed? Whether Jon had wanted it or not, it
was
a completé betrayal, and I'd done it simply out of vanity, hadn't I? It hadn't been for
Jon.
I couldn't even pretend to myself that it had been. It had been for
me:

See, Bram. I am a woman with a lovely home. I am a woman with things, and people, and—

No.

It had been for
Sue.

See? No one needed to spice up my life.

It had been for all of them. It had been for Beth at her computer, playing solitaire, watching me out of the corner of her eye. Amanda Stefanski in her orange dress, telling me what a wonderful mentor I was. Robert Z, who wasn't gay at all, but who still had no interest in me. My student Merienne with her misspelled name and plunging neckline. Derek Heng.
What's the point of reading
Hamlet
if we don't understand it?
My mother, who'd died when she was my age. My brother, who'd gone to a Holiday Inn in Houston to shoot himself in the head and never even left a note. I'd done it for
them.

But, in doing it, I realized now, listening to Bram breathe on Jon's side of the bed, staring at the ceiling, I had plucked out my own eye. I had taken a knife to my own hand.

"We have to go," I said to Bram, and got out of the bed.

He got out of bed more slowly than I, but he did get out, and as he pulled his clothes back on behind me I brushed the pillowcases and the sheets with the palms of my hands. There was nothing there, but I brushed anyway. Skin cells. Molecules. The dust and detritus of us. My hands were shaking. I made the bed, pulled the sheets up, tucked them in—and the white comforter, heartbreakingly familiar and plain, a blank page upon which I'd written all of this, I pulled that up, too, smoothed out the creases, sweeping the surface, patting it down until it looked exactly as it had—although, I knew, stepping back, that it was no longer the same bed in which Jon and I had slept the night before, and the night before that, and all the nights remembered and forgotten stretching behind me, through time. It had been changed, forever—the subtle alteration having taken place, it seemed, at the level of its atomic structure, a few rearranged particles that had turned it into another bed entirely, the bed of a couple I'd never met, a couple I would not have recognized, passing them on the street. A couple I would have failed to recognize mainly because the woman, passing by me with her husband, would have borne such an uncanny resemblance to me.

"Are we going, babe," Bram asked, "or are we going to stand here staring at the bed?"

I didn't turn to look at him.

I couldn't tear myself away.

I was stunned, frozen in time, over my own bed. There was something, I thought, that I needed to remember about this bed—but then Bram, behind me, cleared his throat impatiently, and I turned away from the bed, while, under it, the tape recorder continued its digital whispering, which either I didn't hear, or I chose not to hear.

B
RAM
drove my car back into the city. We'd left his red Thunderbird in the parking lot of the college, ostensibly so that my husband, who was supposed to be out of town, wouldn't hear from the neighbors about another man's car parked in our driveway.

Being beside him in a car was a lot like being with him in bed. He knew what he was doing. He was absorbed completely in the task of doing it, the mechanics of it.

But I felt strangely shier beside him here in my car than I had been even the first time with him in bed—self-consciously pulling my seat belt across my chest, awkwardly adjusting the visor so that the sun, which had begun to slide out of the sky already into the west, wasn't in my eyes.

I crossed my ankles on the floorboard, and, when that seemed matronly, I crossed my legs.

Bram looked down at them, put his hand briefly on one of my knees—the one that still bore a deep blue bruise and a patch of raw skin from my fall in the cafeteria—and then put both hands back on the steering wheel as we merged onto the freeway.

As he drove, I watched the side of his face. In profile, driving, he looked, I thought, like a man who loved nothing, no one, more than a complicated engine, and the stab of terror I'd felt beside him in bed—
no.
He was passionate, yes, but he was, surely, a reasonable man. When I told him that the affair had to end, he would be understanding, and discreet. He would be polite when he saw me in the hallway at the college. He would slip politely out of my life, as quietly as he'd slipped into it. What Bram Smith really loved was just this—a car, driving it, completely absorbed, utterly lost in the world on the other side of it, while, at the same time, completely attentive to the network of belts and cogs and oiled steel that was the motor of the thing he drove, which was, at this moment, my car.

I could see that in his eyes, and felt relieved that he was looking into the windshield, not at me, with that intensity.

Then, listening to something, Bram said, "This car's sprung too tight. These Jap cars—"

He shook his head. He suggested that I get something (the timing belt?) checked. He said there was a clicking sound when the gears shifted, a bit of grinding, and the car pulled a little to the left. How long since I'd had my tires rotated?

I told him I had no idea. Was I supposed to have my tires rotated?

He snorted, nodded. He said, "Doesn't your fucking husband know anything about cars?"

No, I told him. My husband knew about computers, he designed software, important—

"
Software
" Bram said. "Pussy."

I inhaled at the word, and my mouth stayed open, waiting for the breath to return from inside of me to the world—shocked at how sharp it had felt, hearing that word, meaning Jon. It was as if I'd been slapped on the top of my hand with something thin, but solid. Defensively, I said, "He shoots, too. He hunts..." but I let it trail off, picturing Jon outside the house in his orange coat, taking aim at a squirrel on the roof.

"Well," Bram said, "he ought to be taking better care of his wife's vehicle." He touched my knee again and looked over. "Not to mention some of his wife's other needs."

***

M
ILES
passed before we spoke again.

It was a parody of a late spring afternoon. Stone-blue sky. All the flowering trees in bloom. The grass was emerald green. I unrolled my window a few inches and could smell damp clay, new leaves. Even along the freeway, daffodils and narcissi were holding up their sugary torches in the ditches—their proof of the triumph of beauty over decay, their perfumed suggestion that, under the earth all winter, something had remade them, turned their deaths into something frivolous, lighthearted, and sent them back into the world wearing it.

We passed the place where I'd hit the doe, but when I looked into the median, I saw nothing there.

Had the grass simply, finally, consumed her—nature washing her out of this world, reabsorbing her, the fur and the blood and the bones, bringing her back into the earth? Or had someone come along with a truck, a pitchfork, and, in an orange suit and plastic gloves, disposed of the evidence?

Did it matter?

She was gone.

We were close to the exit we needed to take to get to the college, and I wasn't sure if Bram had ever approached it from this direction, and I was about to point it out when he cleared his throat and said, "I had a word with our friend Garrett."

I turned to look at him.

His mouth was open. His nostrils were flared. Both of his hands were on the steering wheel, holding it more tightly than he needed to hold it. I said, "What?"

"I told Garrett that if he continues to bother you in any way, there will be serious consequences."

"Oh my god," I said. "Bram," I said. I put a hand over my mouth. In only the span of a few heartbeats, I'd broken into a sweat. I could feel a cool droplet of it run from the back of my neck straight down my spine. I said from behind my hand, "You shouldn't have said anything to Garrett. I—"

"That's between me and Garrett," Bram said, passing our exit. "I don't want to talk about it. I just thought you ought to know."

I took my hand from my mouth and looked down at my lap. My hands felt loose, distant—like parts of me that could easily slip off, be lost. I could feel my heart beating behind my ears, a low voice coming from my blood, insisting
(was was was),
and opened my mouth to try to say something, but before I could, Bram looked around :ind said, "Where the hell are we? Fuck. Did we miss our exit?"