T
he walk from her house to Starbucks seemed to take hours, but when Shelly looked at her watch, she saw that only fifteen minutes had gone by since leaving home and, now, passing the building that housed the Chamber Music Society. She willed herself not to look up at the window to her office, but she could feel the window looking down at her. She could feel her former self watching this present self walking by.
What might she have thought, say, six months before, if she’d been told of a woman who had a secure well-paying job at the university and had thrown it all away to have a sleazy affair with an undergraduate work-study student?
What would she have thought if she’d been told the way the woman had been caught red-handed in this affair—that she’d allowed a series of cell phone photographs to be taken of herself in bed with a nineteen-year-old sorority girl?
What would she have thought if she’d looked down now and seen this woman walking by, moving inexorably, but also as if there were heavy weights tied around her ankles and wrists, toward the place she thought she might be able to find this girl—this girl that university officials had warned her not to harass?
She’d have thought, perhaps, no fool like an old fool?
Or would it have been something harsher? Much harsher.
Now, she thought, imagining looking down at herself from the lofty heights she’d once occupied, she was one of them. The fallen.
S
he was so lost to these thoughts that, as she approached Starbucks and glimpsed herself in the plate glass window, she was surprised to see her own reflection. She’d expected, she realized, to see herself as a warted hag, a specter, a
creature
—lecherous and leering, and that much more repulsive because, although she looked sexless, she wasn’t.
But that’s not how she looked.
In the window, she looked frantic, even to herself. And pitiable. Harmless. Maybe sad. Her hair was messed but shining in the dim November sunlight. A man in a black suit and red tie looked her over appreciatively as he held the door for her. She did not, it seemed, appear to be a monster to him. To him, she looked like the reflection in the plate glass window.
But there was no mistaking the horror on Josie Reilly’s face as she turned at the counter, holding her white cup, and saw Shelly walking through the door.
M
ira had never shared anything about her personal problems with a colleague before. Even in graduate school when her fellow students regularly wept late into the night in one another’s arms over their breakups and their breakdowns, Mira had kept a close check on what she told others about herself.
One of her best friends, Tessa, another doctoral candidate in anthropology, had told Mira about the years of incest abuse she’d endured as a child by a much older half-brother, and then had reacted with bitterness that seemed to border on rage when Mira told her, many years into their friendship, about her mother’s death.
“You never told me your mother was dead.”
“She died years ago,” Mira tried to explain. “I was an undergraduate. You and I hadn’t met.”
“But we’ve discussed your mother on about five hundred occasions,” Tessa had said as Mira recognized in her friend’s eyes a dawning apprehension, a withdrawal, a dismissal that heralded the end of their friendship, “and you never once indicated that your parents weren’t both still happy and healthy and living in Ohio. I told you all about
my
father’s death. It seems like that might have been a good time to mention that you, too, had a parent who’d died.”
Mira hadn’t intended to shrug. She knew that a shrug indicated that either it didn’t matter or she couldn’t comprehend the big fuss. But she’d felt herself doing it anyway—and, as she shrugged, she felt as if something shawl-like (her friendship with Tessa?) was slipping off her shoulders, discarded behind her.
S
o it was that much more surprising to find herself now weeping into her hands as Jeff Blackhawk sat across from her, watching, rubbing his knees with his palms. She could not suppress the sobs.
Truly, Mira had meant to tell him only that she was in a hurry because she had to rent a car, that her husband had theirs, that she was going to drive up north to get her children from their grandmother. But the second she uttered their names (
Andy, Matty
) her lungs had seemed to fill instantly with tears, and she’d found herself choking, gasping, spluttering. Finally, after what must have seemed to him to be an alarming amount of time, Jeff said, “Mira,” the way you might call a dog that was running toward the road, and she looked up, and the expression of doomed embarrassment on his face snapped her back.
Mira turned around quickly in her chair and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her desk, and hurriedly began to wipe her eyes and nose, her cheeks, her lips. God only knew what she must look like, she thought, or what the condition of her eye makeup might be, but she finally managed to take a deep, trembling breath, and speak.
“Jeff,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry. I haven’t slept and—”
He waved his hand as if to clear the air of smoke or tear gas. “No,” he said. “You don’t have to apologize, but I’d like to know what I can do to help. Certainly you’re not in any shape to drive up north, are you? Let me call someone for you. Or, I don’t really have anything to do until I teach on Thursday, except read bad student poetry. I could take you in my car. I like kids. I’d like to meet yours.”
“Oh, that’s so—” Mira felt the shame of her relief in that moment like an implosion. “But I—”
“Just
let
me, okay, Mira. They’re predicting the first snowfall of the year today. Or tonight. It might even be a big one. The roads’ll be slippery, and in your condition?” He held up his hands at the obviousness. “You owe it to your kids not to get killed on the road. Let me—”
“Okay,” she said.
“W
ho is this?” Craig asked. His hand was shaking, but he was managing to hold the phone to his ear. The clock on his dresser said 12:00. Was it midnight? No: The sun was shining weakly outside. It had to be noon. He’d set his alarm for 9:00 a.m., and he remembered it bleating for him to wake up, remembered hearing Perry close the front door behind him as he left for his early class, but then he must have turned it off, gone back to sleep.
There was no answer on the other end of the line.
“Who is this?” Craig asked again. He could hear breathing. He listened. He sat up. He put his free hand to his temple and rubbed it. He was trying not to say anything else, just listen, but then, despite himself, under his breath, he asked, “Nicole? Is it you?”
There was a high crazy scream of laughter then:
“No, you idiot! This is
Alice.
Did you forget about
Alice
?”
And then the phone went dead in his hand, and Craig, heart pounding, was out of bed, bolting through the apartment, into the hallway, and the door was slamming, locked, behind him.
T
he look on Josie’s face, standing in front of the Starbucks counter (slender fingers wrapped around a white paper cup, just turning around) froze Shelly in the threshold, holding the door open with one hand, clutching her shoulder bag to her hip with the other. There was a rush of cold air around her ankles, and it seemed that, in addition to Josie, everyone in the café had turned at that moment to look at her, to see where the draft had come from, to scowl at her for holding the door open. (When had it gotten so cold? Shelly had walked all the way here from her house in a thin dress. Was the dampness she felt on her neck that of melting snow?)
A woman with a stroller pushed past, and after she’d managed to squeeze by Shelly with her baby and her contraption and her diaper bag, she turned back around and nodded at the door. “Better shut that,” she said. There was such gentleness in her tone that Shelly looked at the woman, trying to comprehend not what she’d said but the way she’d said it. “The door,” the woman said, nodding at it again. “It’s gotten cold out.”
Shelly stepped all the way into the coffee shop and let the door swing shut behind her. By then, Josie was on the other side of the room, putting a lid on her cup, glancing furtively around her, and Shelly, despite the warnings of the university bureaucrat, was approaching her, moving her mouth, saying the girl’s name loudly enough that other people were turning at their tables to look.
Josie started to back away, but Shelly was ready for it, and reached out, took hold of the slender arm (bare, despite the cold: Josie was wearing a pair of faded jeans with holes in the knees and a little silky black top, a cashmere sweater wrapped casually around her waist, like an afterthought)—and held on.
“Please,” Shelly said.
Josie yanked her arm away, looked around, exasperated, and, under her breath, said, “What do you want?”
“I have to talk to you.”
“You’re not supposed to harass me.”
“I’m not harassing you. Josie. Please. I’ll leave you alone, I swear, I won’t”—Josie took a step back as if in anticipation of the word
touch
—“but I have to talk to you. Please.”
“No.” Josie was shaking her head emphatically, but then she stopped, seemed to think briefly, but seriously, about something, and then, to Shelly’s great relief and surprise, she was nodding her head. “Okay,” she said, sounding more annoyed than reluctant or frightened. “Okay,
okay
,” she repeated, as if in defeat, and then she lifted her chin and pointed it toward an empty table in the back corner, and Shelly followed her to it.
Josie slid behind the table and leaned back, tossing one leg over the other and crossing her arms over her chest. Shelly sat down hard in the stiff wooden chair across from her, doing everything she could not to slump. (That was something her ex-husband had accused her of: “You don’t
sit
in a chair, Shelly. You
slump
in it.”) Josie didn’t hesitate to look her straight in the eyes when she was seated, or to lean forward with her hands folded on the table between them. Shelly had expected an awkward silence, but right away, Josie was talking:
“Look, I know you’re probably pissed as hell at me, but I have to tell you this is really not my fault. I can’t help it if we had this . . .
involvement
, and maybe I should have, yeah, kept my pictures where no one else could see them, but you’re the older one here, you’re the
authority figure
. You were supposed to—” Here, Josie seemed to search for some word she’d memorized and couldn’t find. Instead, she went on with some thoughts about the nature of the student/employer relationship, which seemed both scripted and poorly delivered, and for the first time Shelly began to wonder if it had
all
been an act.
She reached across the table, put a hand on Josie’s wrist to quiet her, and said, “Why?”
“Why
what
?” Josie said, looking startled to have her monologue interrupted.
“Why any of it?”
“I was just explaining that,” Josie said. “There are certain perimeters in student/employer relations at the university—”
“Parameters?” Shelly asked.
“Whatever,” Josie said. “But, being your work-study—”
“Why me?” Shelly interrupted. “Is this some kind of hazing thing?”
Josie didn’t laugh.
She didn’t even blink.
She held Shelly’s gaze long and hard enough that Shelly didn’t need an answer to the question, and then she finally said, “I told you, Omega Theta Tau doesn’t participate in hazing.”
“What about the underwear?” Shelly asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“You told me. You said you had to wear the same panties for a month, and—”
“Oh,
that
.” Josie swatted her hand through the air as if to clear it of an annoying insect. “That’s not hazing.”
“Well if that’s not hazing, maybe this isn’t either.”
“What’s ‘this,’ ” Josie said, making quotation marks in the air around her own face.
“You know,” Shelly said, her voice sounding automated even to her, “an affair. With a woman. Photographs. To prove it. Maybe getting someone in trouble, getting someone fired.”
“No way. We’d get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council if—”
“No,” Shelly said. She realized that she was shaking, but her words came out of her passionlessly, as if she were reading them, and what she was reading was already familiar to her, had been read and reread a hundred times. “I was in a sorority, too, Josie. We did all the same stuff, knowing full well we’d never get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council. We knew, just like you do, that if the National Pan-Hellenic Council ever heard about it, they’d just help cover it up. People who’ve never pledged might be fooled by that, but not me.”
“You can’t prove anything,” Josie said, and the way she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair made it clear to Shelly that Josie was right.
J
eff chewed on hard cinnamon candies as he drove, and the sound coming from his closed mouth was so loud and chaotic it occurred to Mira that he was splintering his teeth, but when she looked over at him, and he looked back at her and smiled, she was relieved to see that his teeth were intact. “Would you like some?” he asked, pointing to the bag of candies between them. “Help yourself.”
“No, thanks,” Mira said.
After they’d left Godwin Hall, and before they’d gone to get Jeff’s car from the university parking garage, they’d gone back to Mira’s apartment so she could get her credit card. (Despite Clark’s protests that she was treating him like a two-year-old, Mira had insisted on keeping their joint card at home, in a box at the bottom of their bureau, since they were already so deeply in debt that it could only, in her opinion, be used in emergencies.) But when she’d gotten to the bureau, to the bottom of the drawer, and then to the bottom of the box, it wasn’t there.
Clark had taken that, too?
She’d called to Jeff in the other room, “I’ll be right out!” as she pawed through a few other drawers, and even looked under the bed, and went to the closet to check the pockets of Clark’s jackets.
Not there.
She could hear Jeff in the living room humming to himself as he paged through some of the books on her shelf.
Now what?
It was two hundred miles, at least a couple of tanks of gas there and back. She’d had the ATM withdrawal maximum lowered to fifty dollars a day (again, so there would be no temptations), and she certainly didn’t want to make Jeff stand around in line at the credit union as she tried to get money out of hers and Clark’s savings account.
“I’m sorry this is taking so long!” she called, mostly to buy herself some time to think about what to do.
“It’s not a problem, Mira,” Jeff called back. “I’ve got forty hours before anyone will notice I’m missing, and that’ll just be a dozen relieved undergrads. That’s the great thing about being a bachelor. Nobody files a Missing Person’s report for at least a week. Hey, I see you’ve got a whole shelf of Camille Paglia. Are you a fan?”
Later, Mira thought, she would tell him about her interest in Paglia’s popularization of literary criticism, and how she hoped, herself, to emulate something of it in her own anthropological studies—but at the moment she was back on her hands and knees feeling the carpet under the bureau for the credit card. She sat for a few minutes on the floor before she stood, went into the living room, and said to Jeff, because she had to, “I don’t have any money. Except what I can get out of the bank. My husband took the credit card.”
Jeff was holding
Sexual Personae
in his hands as if it he’d never held an actual book before, as if he had no idea how to open it, both hands wrapped around the edges like a plateful of potluck food. He looked over at Mira, shrugged, and said, “I’ve got cash and a full tank of gas. And now I know where you live. I have people who can help me get the loan repaid if I have to.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows ridiculously, without bothering to smile, and Mira understood instantly, physically (although she couldn’t muster the energy to
feel
it) why, if the rumors were true, so many girls and women allowed themselves to be used by him.
“Thank you,” she said to him for the tenth or fifteenth time that morning, and he acknowledged it with another shrug, turning back to the book. She offered him a cup of tea, or a sandwich, but he said he’d rather hit the Wendy’s on the freeway if she didn’t mind.
“I have a man-size hunger,” he said. “I’d like to wait for a Bacon-ator if you don’t mind.”
T
hey’d headed together to the parking garage closest to Godwin Hall then. It was a short walk, but the sky was spitting a damp snow, and they had to keep their heads down. It would have been impossible to carry on an easy conversation, even if Mira had been in a state of mind that allowed for small talk.
Jeff was parked on the first floor, under a sign that read,
NO PARKING
. He pulled the ticket off his windshield and tossed it into the backseat without saying a word about it.
His car was a mess.
Mira had, she supposed, expected a Porsche. Although she knew Jeff couldn’t make much more money than she did, she also found herself so continually surprised by the opulent houses and the exotic vacations of her colleagues (who had the same salaries that, for Mira and Clark, barely covered the rent) that she’d grown used to assuming that most academics had secret sources of income—trust funds, inheritances, law suit settlements. If Jeff were one of those, with that kind of money, Mira had imagined he would spend it on something flashy, something women would be impressed by, like a sports car.
But not only wasn’t this a sports car, it was even rustier and more exhausted-looking than Mira and Clark’s car:
The door of the glove compartment had been torn off somehow, and Jeff had stuffed it with candy wrappers, many of which had fallen on the floor. The backseat was a pond of memos and flyers and Wendy’s bags. (Where, Mira wondered, looking back there, would she put the twins? Clark had their car seats, too, she realized. But she’d have to worry about that later.) It took Jeff several tries to start the car—and once he did, the motor made a sound like a spaceship taking off, only to grow disconcertingly silent as he started to drive. It crossed Mira’s mind that they were actually coasting out of the parking ramp, with no engine at all, but Jeff seemed in control of things, and the confidence he exuded—popping candies into his mouth, fiddling with the ancient-looking radio dial—was reassuring. He said, “I know she doesn’t look like much, but she’s as reliable as they get. We’ll be the fastest thing on the freeway, sweetheart.”
The little endearment did not seem to Mira to be a come-on, or even overly familiar. It seemed, instead, to be an attempt to comfort her—and, again, for the hundredth time that day, tears sprang to her eyes, and she vowed to herself that she would buy that slim collection of his poems she’d seen at the bookstore on the shelf of Local Authors as soon as they got back:
The Blind Horizon.
She would read them carefully, and ask him about his influences, his inspirations and aspirations. She would treat him with more respect. She was sorry,
so
sorry, that she hadn’t done so before now.
Jeff flashed his U-Parking pass at the attendant in the booth. Then they were winding their way through campus.
The day was getting colder. The sky, darker. It would be a matter of minutes, Mira felt certain, before the first blizzard of the year began in earnest—and, still, there were boys crossing the street in short sleeves, girls in mini-dresses and tank tops. Was this vanity, ill-preparedness, or did their youth give them some sort of metabolic advantage in the cold?
Mira herself was shivering as Jeff’s car’s heating system blew cool air smelling of dust through the vents and into her face.
Jeff slowed down at an intersection full of pedestrians and bicyclists, and at the corner of State and Seymour, Mira saw Dean Fleming standing under the crosswalk sign, waiting for the signal to change. His red tie had blown over his shoulder, and he had his tweed cap pulled down low on his head of bushy gray hair. He looked, it seemed, right at Mira as they passed—but if he registered who she was and that she was a passenger in Jeff Blackhawk’s junker, it didn’t show on his face. An enormous snowflake landed on the windshield right in front of Mira, and made no sign of melting.
“Freeway? Wendy’s?” Jeff asked.
“Sure, yes,” Mira said. “And, Jeff, I’m so,
so
grateful for this.”
“I know,” he said, and ground his molars down on the piece of candy in his mouth, turned to her, and winked without smiling.