Read Tied to the Tracks Online
Authors: Rosina Lippi
Tied to the Tracks (49 page)
“I guess I deserve that,” John said. “But it is insulting.”
“Exactly,” Angie said. And then: “So go ahead, tell me your conclusions.”
He thought for a moment, considered retreating, and understood it would be the worst course of action, the one thing certain to alienate her, possibly past the point of recovery.
“I can see that Caroline has changed, I guess is the word. She stood up to her mother and her sisters. I didn’t think I’d ever see that happen, but she did.” He focused on a spot on the wall, because to look at Angie was to lose his resolve. “I’m willing to accept the idea that Caroline decided to back out of the wedding because she realized she can’t make that kind of commitment to any man.”
“But?”
“Maybe she is in love with Rivera and she’s already announced it to the world while we sit here eating stale doughnuts.”
“That’s doubtful,” Angie conceded.
“But maybe—and this is another maybe, Angie, but I’ve got to say it—maybe she’s not.”
“Not in love with Rivera?”
“Maybe she’s not gay, or if she is, maybe she’s decided Rivera isn’t the person she needs in her life. Or maybe—and I’ll admit to you that this seems the most likely situation to me—maybe Caroline has decided that she likes women but wants to be celibate. There’s a reason her sisters were worried when she ran off to the retreat house, you know. They’ve always half expected she’d end up a nun. So she might decide to live as a celibate, and whether or not that’s right or good or healthy, whether it’s fair to Rivera or herself or not, it’s her decision.”
His voice grew rough as he spoke and was almost hoarse at the end, just as Angie’s expression had gone from very still to stone. She wasn’t looking at him, but at her own hands, locked around her glass. John took short, shallow breaths and waited for her to scream at him or laugh at him or tell him exactly what an idiot he was being.
Vodka,
Angie was thinking,
is not my drink
. Her head hurt, and she was noticing a very odd side effect: all her good anger, carefully fed and flamed and tended over the course of a long and sleepless night, was seeping out of her like gas from an old balloon. John went on and on saying things that sounded sensible and fair, but when added up together meant that Rivera was going to be miserable, and that maybe even Caroline was doomed to be miserable, and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it except Caroline herself.
Angie tried to throw the anger switch, and found she couldn’t. Because he was right, and that irked her but she couldn’t be angry about it.
She said, “So you don’t care if Caroline dumped you because she likes women. If she just stood up and told all of Ogilvie, you don’t give a damn.”
He blinked at that but before she could work up any indignation he found a way to steal that, too.
“Well, shit, Angie,” he said wearily. “Of course it’s going to hurt like hell. You think it’s easy admitting that I didn’t notice there was something missing? I’ll take heat for this for a long time.”
She leaned forward. “So why didn’t you notice?” It was as close as she could come, as she would ever come, to asking him about sex with Caroline. If he didn’t answer her, she wouldn’t be surprised.
He blew out a breath and closed his eyes. “I’ve been asking myself that pretty much nonstop since last night, as soon as I saw her there in the doorway talking to Rivera. Right before I made an ass of myself to you and walked away.”
“Sweet talk won’t get you anywhere just now,” Angie said. “So did you come to any conclusions?”
He put his chin on his chest. “One possibility. You won’t like it.”
“Try me.”
“Caroline,” he said evenly, “isn’t you.”
“Oh, please.” Angie wanted to lean over and slap him, but she also wanted to lean over and run her hands over his body; she was a weak human being, unable even to keep herself from smiling.
John was looking at her in a calculating way. “You know what I’m trying to say. I spent five years dating women who weren’t enough like you to keep my interest, and it got to the point that I just gave up. I came to the conclusion that something was always going to feel slightly off.”
“That’ll do for a start,” Angie said. “But you’re not off the hook yet, Harvey.”
He gave her a half smile. “Does this mean you’re not mad at me anymore?”
“Don’t rush it,” Angie said, taking the last swallow of vodka in her glass. “Let me think.”
He reached across the litter of their meal, took her wrists in his hands, and pulled her face to his. “Can you think while I do this?”
“I do my best thinking when I’m lying down,” Angie said, when the kiss broke. “Or sitting in a chair. Your call. What?” she said, alarmed by the look on his face.
“I don’t think I have any condoms.” He got up and patted his pockets, found his wallet, pulled it out. He looked as frantic as Angie felt as he tried to open it. The wallet flipped out of his hands, spitting out a shower of credit cards and bits of paper and business cards that flew over the floor. Angie caught a flash of foil and went diving after it, came up with a half piece of gum still in its wrapper.
“Shit,” John was saying. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Angie flung herself down on the couch and the cushions crackled suspiciously. John heard it, too.
“Didn’t you tell me Tony brings women here sometimes?” John asked. And then they were both taking the couch apart. Among candy bar wrappers and store receipts and note cards covered with Tony’s scrawling handwriting there was a long streamer, bright blue foil squares each containing a ribbed circle. Six of them.
John reached for her, grinning. “I’ll die trying, I promise you that.”
Somewhere among the wreckage on the floor, Angie remembered, there was a carton of juice. She was thirsty enough to go look for it, so she began to disentangle herself from John. Her sweaty skin peeled away from the leather cushions with a vaguely obscene sound, and he cracked one eye at her.
“Who,” Angie said, “puts a leather couch in an editing suite reception room?”
John’s hand moved up her back, his thumb questing. “Hey. I may have my faults, but when it comes to negotiating with university autocrats, I am without peer. First class all the way for the new film program.”
“You’re responsible for this couch?” Angie grinned. “Did they hire you for your skills as an interior decorator?”
“No, they hired me as chair of the English department,” John said, yawning, but his hands seemed completely awake and interested in exploring. She knocked them away.
“Explain.”
He cocked his head at her. “They made me an offer, I made them a counteroffer, you know how it goes.”
“You asked for a leather couch in the editing suite.”
“God, you’re dense sometimes.” He pulled her closer and kissed her. “I told them the department needed to add a film studies curriculum. I made it a condition of my hire. I was right, they didn’t fight it.”
“Explain the couch.”
He laughed at that. “What’s to explain? I negotiated a budget for production facilities. I made some calls and had it designed. They started what, last January, finished in June. Money does make some things easier.”
Angie thought about that for a minute. “But you don’t have any film faculty.”
“We’re going to be searching this year,” John said. “Two faculty positions, one administrative to run this place.”
They would be looking for a new medievalist, too, Angie knew, but now was not the time to be thinking about Caroline Rose.
He said, “You interested?” His tone was perfectly easy, as if he had an endless supply of good things in his pocket, things that were hers for the asking; things he wanted her to have.
Angie sat up and scooted away before he could stop her. “I might teach one course in the fall for you, but that’s it.” She looked at him over her shoulder as she began to shift through the stuff on the floor. “You’ll have five hundred applications, you won’t miss mine. Here”—she tossed him a take-out carton—“the last of the dim sum.
Mangia,
Harvey, you’ve got to keep up your strength.”
Mangia,
Harvey, you’ve got to keep up your strength.”
He was starting to say something, trying to draw her back into this discussion: the wheres and whys and hows; whether they could live together; if they’d survive living apart; what the costs would be, the dangers, the sacrifices; what she was willing to risk. He had already risked everything, but he would never remind her of that, and she was thankful.
John said, “Come here.”
She saw the juice carton and grabbed it, and caught sight of what it had been covering up: a small photograph, no more than three inches square, molded to the shape of John’s wallet, slightly frayed at the edges, as if it had been often taken out and studied. A photograph of her. Five years younger, just out of graduate school, frightened, miserable, in love. She was sitting on a Long Island beach in a drizzle, on a Sunday afternoon in August. Rain or tears or both on her face, her hair a mass of blue spikes. She had been thinking about leaving John, about walking away from things she couldn’t cope with, didn’t understand; walking away before he had a chance to see her for what she was. As she had, that very night.
Now John was watching her look at the photograph. His expression was thoughtful, too, a little wary, hopeful.
Angie got up and went around the coffee table to sit on the edge of the leather couch. He took the photo from her and put it aside, cupped her face with his hand, and smiled at her.
She said, “John. What were we thinking?”
He shook his head. “We weren’t thinking.”
“I have some questions for Miss Zula.”
“Later,” John said, drawing her down to him. “Tomorrow, or maybe the day after.”
TWENTY-ONE
You want my opinion, you should be making a documentary about how y’all talk a different language than we do down here. And I don’t mean English, neither. I never have run into a Yankee who don’t come down here with all kinds of crazy ideas about who we are and what we think and how we spend all our time figuring out how to make life hard for black people, but then never really listen when we try to say plain how things really are. You had best start large, if you really want to tell the story of Miss Zula’s life, because all of Ogilvie had a hand in bringing her up, as she has had a hand in each of our lives.
Your name:
Walker Winfield. If you’re willing to listen to what I have got to say, stop by and see me anytime.
Sunday morning Angie was trying to make some order out of the mess in the reception area while John slept. She was folding his trousers when his cell phone fell out of the pocket and gave a soft beep.
She picked it up and looked at the display screen. It was the battery that was beeping, down to its last half bar of life. The reception bars, on the other hand, were all there: five of them. The ringer was off, but the tiny envelope that indicated waiting voice mail was glowing. The number next to it had a certain symmetry that Angie had to appreciate: eighty-eight. He had eighty-eight messages, from the woman he had left at the altar, her family, his own, curious neighbors, relatives, colleagues, most probably one or all of the people who wrote for the
Bugle
. Messages that would be distraught and angry and colorful in a variety of ways. If this were her phone, if these messages had been left for her, she would have deleted them all, without ever listening to a single one. But John would listen; that was one difference between them, and nothing she could be proud of.
Bugle
. Messages that would be distraught and angry and colorful in a variety of ways. If this were her phone, if these messages had been left for her, she would have deleted them all, without ever listening to a single one. But John would listen; that was one difference between them, and nothing she could be proud of.
John woke up when she kissed his cheek. He turned his head toward her, mumbling, “Where did you go?” His arm came up and pulled her in.
“Just tidying up,” Angie said. She held up his phone for him to see, and watched him wake up, fast. “This is a satellite phone. We could have got out of here yesterday, and you knew it.”
He didn’t avoid her gaze, made no apologies. “I suspected, but I didn’t look.”
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