My Education (14 page)

“You sick thing,” she gasped when I was done.

“I love you,” I told her gravely, but she brushed this off, nimble and devilish again.

•   •   •

Nothing could have better excused my failure to accompany Dutra on his trip to New York than my confession, upon his return, that I'd fallen in love with not only a woman but the same sanguine blonde he'd accosted that day at the market. Dutra verily hooted with glee. Of course, being Dutra, his response wasn't mere titillation. He was honestly thrilled I'd found love—though it was true he was thrilled all the more that my love was so racy. There was no man on earth for whom my ardor could have prompted an ardent desire on Dutra's part that they meet, but for the privilege of meeting Martha, Dutra launched an onslaught of persuasion not unlike an onslaught of threats. “Bring her over to have a beer with me! I'm like the
father
in this situation, I have to approve. Don't make me start following you. I got Injun skills,
sabe
? Me track you. Me not make a sound.”

I was desperate to keep them apart, for every obvious reason. It wasn't only, or even mostly, that Dutra, with his elaborate bongs and his heaps of ska records and his juvenile know-it-all-ness, had been my most recent lover; had fucked me on his orange Dacron couch and on his capsized king mattress amid a squalor of coffee-damp Styrofoam cups; had been fellated by me while a rerun of
Star Trek
illumined our nude, writhing limbs; or had pleasured me in our shared shower amid pads of hair and fallen gobbets of toothpaste overseen by a giant ashtray in the shape of a crab keeping laden precarious balance on the tank of the toilet. Far worse was that my alliance with Dutra, whether carnal or not, hopelessly marked me as someone far younger than Martha. In the course of our first torrid week Martha and I had made love in the back of her Saab; in the armchair she kept in her office in the English department; in a stand of lilacs in the riverfront park, on the frigid and dew-sodden grass; each of these trysts taking place at some hour between bedtime and dawn, when she slipped from her house to meet me—but never once in my house, though the whole of that week it stood empty, as if tailor-made for our needs. The idea of bringing her there was unbearable to me, and to her must have been at least sufficiently strange that she never once asked me about it. Perhaps she could sense that the sight of my home would present a disjunction she'd rather not ponder. Yet in my desire to match her adulthood, I somehow failed to notice the logical lapse by which our madness of lust often drove us straight back through
her
doors—“No noise!” Martha would urge in a whisper as she opened my jeans with one hand and we sank to the checkerboard floor of the kitchen, where I would cringe from the recurring apparition of Lucia bursting in with a shriek of “DIOS!”—“Regina,” Martha exclaimed, looking up smeary-faced, “what's the matter? I
need
you to
come
,” much the way she might say to Lucia, “I
need
you to
clean up this mess
.”

In truth, the distance between our ages and stations of life, about which I at least had the sense to be worried when it came to the difference between our two homes, was much effaced in our first weeks together, but by Martha, not me. Nine or ten in the evening—whenever it was, I assumed, that the baby was sleeping and the nanny ensconced in her room with her late-night TV—she would call in low tones from the kitchen to say she was free. I'd rush into the night to meet her—in the same demimonde of our town I had learned beside Dutra. The High Life, the Pink Elephant, the Silver Dollar Saloon. They all crouched beneath guttering neon or behind penitentiary bars, along the farthest-flung, least well-lit, working-class streets most remote from the hem of the Hill. Here erstwhile comrades of Dutra's from the county community college might join ranks with an unchanging cast of geriatric alcoholics who held down their stools sixteen hours a day, but never university students, let alone the professors. Even I, who had never before had a female lover; much less one who was married; much less married to my own former mentor; much less a professor herself at the school at which I was a student—even I who, due to all this compounded inexperience, truly believed none of this posed a real obstacle—even I understood why she kept our affair to this realm. She might have left the country, so unlikely was she to cross paths with somebody she knew. But of course this was where she met Dutra, whether because he'd tracked me, Injun-style, or because such a meeting was inevitable.

The Pines was a relatively higher-quality establishment, because a car was required to get there; an old-fashioned roadhouse, it featured music on weekends and even served food. I'd ordered fries on a pretense of hunger, putting off the moment at which I'd join Martha on the little dance floor where the tables had been shoved aside. The band had taken a break, and Martha stood dancing with the jukebox while perusing its list, one hand flat on its top as if preventing it getting away. She wore black jeans, black motorcycle boots with silver buckles, a white Hanes undershirt the right size for a twelve-year-old boy beneath which her milk-heavy breasts were squashed flat. She'd begun pumping her milk for the baby with a frightful contraption she'd bought through the mail, and sometimes, halfway through our clandestine evening, we'd repair to the Saab to take care of this chore while I lay across the seat with my head on her lap staring up at the suction cup crushing her nipple. “Sexy, isn't it,” she'd say wearily, her body briefly the captive of the pump's tubes and coils. I knew mine weren't the only eyes in the dimly lit bar watching her. I'd felt the room watching us—watching her, and me as her adjunct—ever since we'd arrived. And then a weight dropping into a nearby chair made me glance over, and there Dutra was, with a victorious grin on his face.

“So,” he said. “Introduce me.”

The trio accompanied him that since long before he and I met had established themselves as the owners of the other three seats in his car. Alyssa was a self-described Jewish-American Princess Gone Bad from Shaker Heights, Ohio, who had graduated the previous year with Dutra but stayed on, not enrolled, to continue her prodigal spending of her family's money on marijuana for herself and her friends. Zaftig and freckled and borne along on an elaborate rat's nest of gingery hair, Alyssa bore a remarkable physical and temperamental resemblance to Janis Joplin. She was always so high she was almost asleep, and radiated benign out-of-it-ness from beneath half-closed lids. She shared the backseat with Lucinda, one of the more wayward faculty townies, the bony, viper-tongued daughter of a well-known economics professor. Lucinda had been discharged from Dartmouth on a medical leave after overdosing and had never gone back. The front seat was reserved for Ross, Dutra's comrade from his days at community college, unless I was along, in which case the trio, with resentment, all squeezed into the back. I had never been comfortable with them, because whenever my relations with Dutra went back on the rise, his with them went back on the decline, but I was most horrified to see them for the reasons I've mentioned above. Now they all came to roost at my table, merrily studying me from behind their pint glasses, because Dutra of course had told them.

Martha came to stand beside my chair and passed her hand over my cheek to rest splayed on my collarbone, so that her fingertips just brushed the tops of my breasts. “What's all this?” she smiled. “Someone's taken my chair.”

Dutra said, with a broad lying grin, “We thought Ginny was here all alone.”

“Only a fool would leave this girl alone,” Martha said, and from the grin she showed him in return, I could see she recalled precisely who he was.

The band had come back onstage and throwing her grin around to include all of them Martha seized my hand and led me onto the dance floor. In the privacy of our affair, in the secretive nests where we fed on each other, I was heedless and greedy, and had earned Martha's scolding for ripping a seam of her shirt in my hurry to separate her from her clothes—but now in the dim, seedy bar I discovered she could be brashly extroverted, while I was hamstrung by inhibition, despite the pride that I felt by her side. It was thrilled pride, but it was still shy, and it didn't stop me from being afraid—of the man who muttered “dykes” as we passed by his stool, but perhaps more of Martha herself, whose provocative smile seemed to challenge not the drunk, wary men staring at us, but me. “Can you?” her eyes asked, their penetration concealed from others by her lopsided smile. Can you follow me out in public, and not be afraid of what others will say? But this wasn't her public, I half-reflected, even as I emboldened myself to join her. She was insinuating trails through the smoke-heavy air, astraddle the beat of the music, and I pretended to share in her trancelike indifference and juked loosely beside her until Dutra and trio joined us, Dutra dancing alone in the pent-up, skilled way that marked him as a child of Manhattan, Alyssa and Lucinda tossing arms overhead and whipping hair side to side so they looked like two trees in a storm, and Ross sardonically doing the pogo to conceal his discomfort at having to dance, so that Martha and I were absorbed by the group, and I became grateful that Dutra was there.

“Smoke break,” everyone agreed several songs later, and we shouldered our way back outside.

The backseat of Martha's gleaming black Saab was half taken up by a baby seat, a sort of wide plastic bucket lined with calico cloth and a strappy web harness that would apparently safeguard the baby from a violent impact. I had never paid the seat much attention, but I couldn't imagine it was hard to remove, and my first desire now was that Martha not see Dutra's car, ankle deep like our living room with Dutra's typical sediment of takeout boxes, fruit peels, sodden tea bags, stray rolling papers, unraveling cassette tapes, empty beer bottles, and cigarette butts. I rode in his car all the time with no thought of its filth but envisioning it now through Martha's eyes I was disgusted—it was possibly worse than the house. “We brought a car,” I offered as we crossed the gravel lot, and was surprised when Martha sharply dissented.

“There's no room in the back,” she reminded me.

“I could help take it out—”

“Where's your car?” she asked Dutra, decisively following him.

As always Dutra had parked in the lot's remotest, least-lit corner, the better to smoke pot or snort cocaine off the car key, and the better, at least, for me to conceal my mortification as Martha made herself comfortable in the front passenger seat amid heaps of refuse and pulled me down onto her lap. Of course Dutra sat at the wheel, and the trio in back. Alyssa's thick joint made the rounds. Martha sucked long and held even longer before slowly exhaling.

“Nice,” Dutra said.

“Very,” Martha said as she gave it to me. “Thanks, Alyssa.”

“That's cool.” Alyssa had stretched her legs over Lucinda and Ross, and lay against the car window enthroned on her nimbus of hair. “So you live in town, Martha?”

“Yeah.”

“Where at?”

“Taughanock Heights.”

“Oooh. Lucinda's old nabe. Very swanky.”

“My parents' old nabe,” Lucinda clarified testily.

“I might have cleaned out a pool up there once,” reminisced Ross. “Or mulched someone's hedges with dog shit.”

“You live with your folks up there, Martha?” Alyssa went on. Martha was leaning against the headrest with eyes closed and lips forming a very slight smile of bemusement, or contentment, or both.

“Nah,” Martha said, eyes still closed. “I've got my own place up there.”

This wonderment made Alyssa the most alert I'd ever seen her. “Wow!” she said. “That must be awesome!”

“It is,” Martha said. I could see Dutra silently laughing, gazing out the windshield.

“Do you go to school here?” Alyssa asked almost shyly, aglow in the warmth of new friendship.

“Nah, I went to school on the West Coast,” Martha drawled.

I'd been on the point of correcting Alyssa that Martha was no student, but a professor—but Martha's swift embrace of the imposture had left me speechless.

“Oh, that's
cool
. I've always thought that I shoulda gone west.”

“It's not too late.”

“Oh, man. I just feel like I've got roots here now.”

“Alyssa's been here even longer than me,” said the wise man Dutra. “You've been here like, what?”

“Fuckin' five years, man,” Alyssa revealed.

Their banter was endless. “Wow,” Martha said. “Holy shit,” Dutra said. “I road-tripped out to Portland once,” Ross announced, making his own bid for Martha's attention. “Shelton Circle—the brick and limestone one,” Lucinda admitted under Martha's encouraging queries. My silence had evolved now into something that Martha, at least, couldn't ignore. She said to me, “Tired, huh, baby?” though it was she who more needed to leave. It was past two o'clock in the morning. I knew her breasts must be painfully swollen and I was even, in my growing hostility, purposely sagging my weight against her.

Driving away in the Saab she said, “That was just what the doctor ordered.”

“Being mistaken for a college student by a dim-witted pothead who can barely see past her own hair?”

She rotated her head very slowly, to study me, even as the car raced down the dark lakeside road. She was letting me know that I hadn't hurt her, though I might have embarrassed myself. “Don't worry,” she said. “I know I can't pass for nineteen anymore.”

But the truth was she could. She was a changeling. In the bar, in the front seat of Dutra's Volvo, in her fading black jeans with her uncombed hair carelessly draping her face, that other putatively actual backdrop of professorship and husband and mansion and child made no sense—you understood her impatience with it. You might even see some of the habitual gestures of hers I had started to learn—the way she had of quickly straightening her shoulders; of roughly hooking her curtain of hair on her ears; of sweeping objects out of her way when she was ready to make love and they had made the mistake of falling into her path—as her repeated attempt to shrug all this stuff off and be rid of it once and for all.