“That’s subtle,” she says. Does he know what subtle means? (It’s not that she’s unaware that she’s an elitist asshole. She’s aware! She’s just powerless not to be one. Also, seriously, does he know what subtle means?) She says, “Is hitting on passengers a thing with you, or should I feel special?”
“What makes you think I’m hitting on you?” But he’s still grinning, and it’s the first thing he’s said that a man she’d want to go out with would say. (How will she ever, in real life, meet a man she wants to go out with who wants to go out with her? Should she join Match? Tinder? Will her students find her there?) Then Luke says, “Just kidding, I’m totally hitting on you,” and it’s double the exact right thing to say—he has a sense of humor and he’s complimenting her.
She says, “If you give me my license, you can walk me to my room.”
“Let me walk you to your room, and I’ll give you your license.”
Is this how the heroines of romance novels feel? They have, in air quotes, no choice but to submit; they are absolved of responsibility by extenuating circumstances. (Semi-relatedly, Nell was once the first author on a paper titled “Booty Call: Norms of Restricted and Unrestricted Sociosexuality in Hookup Culture,” a paper that, when she last checked Google Scholar, which was yesterday, had been cited thirty-one times.)
Nell charges the drinks to her room, and in the elevator up to the seventh floor he is standing behind her, and presses his face between her neck and shoulder and it feels really good; when they are configured like this, it’s difficult to remember that she’s not attracted to him. Inside her room—the pretense that he is merely walking her to the door has apparently dissolved—they make out for a while by the bathroom. (It’s weird, but not bad-weird, to be kissing a man other than Henry. She has not done so for eleven years.) Then they’re horizontal on the king-sized bed, on top of the white down comforter. They roll over a few times, but mostly she’s under him. Eventually, he unbuttons and removes her blouse, then her bra, then pulls off his ridiculous hooded shirt. (Probably, if she were less drunk, she’d turn out the light on the nightstand.) He’s taller and thinner than Henry, and he uses his hands in a less habitually proficient but perhaps more natively adept way. He smells like some very fake, very male kind of body wash or deodorant. Intermittently, she thinks of how amused her friend Lisa, who’s an economics professor, will be when she texts her to say that she had a one-night stand with the shuttle driver. Though, for it to count as a one-night stand, is penetration required? Will penetration occur? Maybe, if he has a condom.
He’s assiduously licking her left nipple, then her right one, then kissing down her sternum, though he stops above her navel and starts to come back up. She says, “Keep going,” and when he raises his head to look at her, she says, “You’re allowed to go down on me.” This is not a thing she ever said to Henry. Although he did it—not often but occasionally, in years past—neither of them treated it like a privilege she was bestowing.
Luke pulls down her pants and her underwear at the same time. He has to stand to get them over her ankles. From above her, he says, “Wow, you haven’t shaved lately, huh? Not a fan of the Brazilian?”
Which might stop her cold if he were a person whose opinion she cared about, a person she’d ever see again. She knows from her students that being mostly or completely hairless is the norm now, unremarkable even among those who consider themselves ardent feminists, and it occurs to her that she may well be the oldest woman Luke has ever hooked up with.
The funny, awful part is that she did shave recently—she shaved her so-called bikini line this morning in the shower, because she had seen online that the hotel has a pool and had packed her bathing suit, which in fact is not a bikini. Lightly, she says to Luke, “You’re very chivalrous.”
Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps 3 percent less hammered than she was in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, “You’re pretty.”
With her cooperation, he tugs her body toward the foot of the bed, so that her legs are dangling off it, then he kneels on the floor and begins his ministrations. (Being eaten out by the shuttle driver! While naked! With the lights on! In Kansas City! Lisa is going to find this hilarious.) Pretty soon, Nell stops thinking of Lisa. Eventually, wondrously, there is the surge, then the cascade. Though she doesn’t do it, it crosses her mind to say “I love you” to Luke. That is, in such a situation she can understand why a person would.
He is next to her on the bed again—he’s naked, too, though she doesn’t recall when he removed the rest of his clothes—and she closes her eyes as she reaches for his erection and starts moving her hand. In spite of the impulse to declare her love, she’s still not crazy about the sight of him. She says, “I’ll give you a blow job, but I want my license first. For real.”
He doesn’t respond, and she stops moving her hand. She says, “Just get it and put it on the bedside table. Then we can quit discussing this.”
In a small voice, he says, “I don’t have it.”
Her eyes flap open. “Seriously?”
“I checked the van, but it wasn’t there.”
“Are you kidding me?” She sits up. “Then what the fuck are you doing here?”
He says nothing, and she says, “You lied to me.”
He shrugs. “I wish I had it.”
“Are you planning to, like, sell it?” Who do people sell licenses to? she wonders. Underage kids? Identity thieves?
“I told you, I don’t have it.”
“Well, it’s not like you have any credibility at this point.”
After a beat, he says, “Or maybe you didn’t really lose it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She will reflect on this moment later, will reflect on it extensively, and one of the conclusions she’ll come to is that, with more self-possession, he could have recalibrated the mood. He could have done a variation on the thing he did in the bar, when he teased her for assuming he was hitting on her and then admitted he was hitting on her. If he had been more confident, that is, or presumptuous, even—if he’d jokingly pointed out her glaring and abundant complicity. But her life has probably given her far more practice at presumption than his has given him. And, in reality, he looks scared of her. His looking scared makes her feel like a scary woman, and the feeling is both repugnant and pleasurable.
Quietly, he says, “I swear I don’t have it.”
“You should leave,” she says, then adds, “Now.”
Again when they look at each other, she is close to puncturing the theatrics of her own anger—certainly she is not oblivious of the nonequitability of their encounter ending at this moment—but she hasn’t yet selected the words she’ll use to cause the puncture. As drunk as she is, the words are hard to find.
“I thought we were having fun.” His tone is a little pathetic and also a little accusing. “You had fun.” It’s his stating what she has already acknowledged to herself, what she was considering acknowledging to him, that definitively tips the scales the wrong way.
“Get out,” she says.
In her peripheral vision, as she looks at her bare legs, she can see him stand and dress. Her heart is beating rapidly. Clothed, he folds his arms. If he’d reached for her shoulder…If he’d sat back down next to her…
“Eleanor,” he says, and this is the first and only time he uses her name, which of course is her real name, though not one that anybody who knows her calls her by. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just wanted to hang out.”
She says nothing, and after a minute he walks to the door and leaves.
* * *
—
Her headache lasts until midafternoon on Saturday, through the budget meeting, the meeting
about the newly proposed journal, the discussion of where to hold future conferences after the ones that are scheduled for 2016 and 2017. She suspects that some of her colleagues are hungover, too, and she’d likely be hungover, anyway, without the additional drinks she had with Luke, so it’s almost as if the Luke interlude didn’t occur—as if it were a brief and intensely enjoyable dream that took a dreadful turn. And yet, after she wakes from a pre-dinner nap, the meetings are a blur and the time with Luke is painfully vivid.
Nell rises from bed and splashes cold water on her face. She wants days and weeks to have passed, so that she can revert to being her boring self, her wronged-by-her-partner, high-road self; she wants to build up the capital, if only in her own mind, of not being cruel. She no longer thinks she’ll tell Lisa anything.
Which means that when, while dressing to meet her colleagues for dinner, she finds her driver’s license in the left pocket of her jacket, the discovery only amplifies her distress. The lining of the jacket’s left pocket is ripped, which she knew about, because a dime has been slipping around inside it since last spring. But she hadn’t realized that the hole was large enough for a license to pass through.
When she was a sophomore in high school, the father of a kind and popular classmate died of cancer. Nell didn’t know the boy well, and she wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to write him a condolence note. He came back to school after a week, at which point she hadn’t written one. It seemed like perhaps it was too late. But a few days later, she wondered, Had it been too late? Weeks later, was it too late? Months? She occasionally still recalls this boy, now a man who is, like her, nearly forty, and she wishes she had expressed compassion.
This is how she will feel about Luke. She could have summoned him back on Friday night. She could have called him on Saturday, after finding the license. She could have texted him on Sunday, or when she returned to Madison. However, though she thinks of him regularly—she thinks of him especially during the Republican debates, then during the primaries, the caucuses, the convention, and the election (the election!)—she never initiates contact. She does join Match, she goes to a salon and gets fully waxed, she starts dating an architect she didn’t meet on Match, who is eight years older than her, pro women’s pubic hair, and appalled by how readily a gender-studies professor will capitulate to arbitrary standards of female beauty. Nell finds his view to be a relief personally, but intellectually a facile and unendearing failure of imagination.
Sometimes, when she’s half asleep, she remembers Luke saying, “You’re pretty,” how serious and sincere his voice was. She remembers when his face was between her legs, and she feels shame and desire. But by daylight it’s hard not to mock her own overblown emotions. He didn’t have anything to do with her losing the license, no, but it’s his fault that she thought he did. Besides, he was a Trump supporter.
The World Has Many Butterflies
Julie and Graham had known each other for eight years before they ever played I’ll Think It, You Say It, then they played I’ll Think It, You Say It for a year before Julie decided—decided, realized, idiotically fabricated the belief that—she was in love with Graham. Graham worked at the same investment banking firm in Houston as Julie’s husband. Also, their respective kids all attended the same private school, which meant Julie and Keith saw Graham and his wife, Gayle, regularly, in a way that (for almost a decade!) had barely registered with Julie. They showed up at the same soccer games and school fundraisers and Christmas parties and dinner parties. They greeted one another in a friendly fashion, and—in retrospect, Julie went over it repeatedly, that innocent earlier era before she became obsessed—she thought of Graham as slightly more appealing than most men, but neither fascinating nor smolderingly handsome. Even later, Julie considered Graham and Keith comparably attractive, if your thing was preppy middle-aged men, which hers apparently was. But neither of them was, like, hot. Nevertheless, for a stretch of several months, whenever Julie had sex with her husband, she pretended he was Graham.
It was at Bret and Tracy Hutchinson’s twentieth anniversary party, at River Oaks Country Club, that Graham appeared beside Julie and said, for the first time, “I’ll think it, you say it.” Julie was standing alone, momentarily, because the babysitter had texted to ask if her youngest child was allowed to go to sleep with the light on in his room. Graham nodded his head once, toward an unofficial receiving line that had formed around the party’s hosts.
“Well, for starters,” Julie said, “I’m surprised they decided to throw this party because I was always under the impression Bret and Tracy kind of hate each other.” She glanced at Graham before adding, “I assume they’re celebrating, what, a total of three happy years together?”
Graham raised his eyebrows. “I’d have estimated one, but, sure, let’s round up.”
“And even though they’re both tedious, they’re tedious in such distinctive ways,” Julie said. “With him, it’s like, all roads eventually lead to a disquisition on the pleasures of hunting white-tailed deer. But apart from being bloodthirsty, he’s really gentle and has such good manners. Whereas with her, all roads lead to her gifted children, and she’s so aggressive and braggy. Literally, she’s probably told me twelve times that Mr. Vaughn said Fritz is the most talented math student he’s ever had.” Julie took a sip of her champagne before adding, “To be fair, Tracy does look great tonight. Her Spanx must be killing her, but she looks great.”
“What are Spanx?” Graham asked.
“Seriously? They’re ‘shapewear.’ ” Julie made air quotes. “They smooth out your womanly lumps and bumps.”
“And here I thought womanly lumps and bumps were one of life’s great gifts,” Graham said.
“Depending on the location.” When Julie and Graham’s eyes met, she said, “Who else?”
Graham nodded toward another guest and said, “Anne Pyland.”
“Anne is an interesting case, because every other time I interact with her, I either get a kick out of her or I can’t stand her. So in the end, even though she’s better and worse than most people, she’s average. When she’s in a bad mood, she doesn’t hide it, and I’m not sure if I’m jealous or appalled.”
Again, Graham nodded once. “Rob Greffkamp.”
“He’s wondering how many drinks he needs to consume before he can forget his moral ambivalence about working for Halliburton.” From across the room, Rob Greffkamp let loose with boisterous laughter, and Julie added, “And he’s optimistic that he’s at least halfway there.”
“Sherry Chessel.”
“Bad news,” Julie said. “I really like Sherry. I have nothing critical to say.”
Graham gave her a dubious look. “Surely if you put your mind to it?”
“Graham, she’s the director of an organization that finds families for foster kids. Plus, she has a sense of humor.”
“Fair enough. Doug Green.”
“For Doug, we go to the multiple choice format: (A) super-snobby and aloof, (B) intensely awkward, or (C) on the spectrum.” Julie looked at Graham. “Don’t tell me you haven’t considered all those possibilities.”
“A combination of A and B,” Graham said. “Is that permitted?”
“It is,” Julie said, “although it’s a cop-out.”
“Jennifer Reilly.”
“Well, she can’t stand Anne, so it’s funny they’re talking to each other right now,” Julie said. “Were you guys at the school auction last spring?”
Graham nodded.
“I think Jennifer had just had a lot of the punch, but Anne spread rumors that she’d snorted coke.”
“Man,” Graham said. “You’re good.”
“By which I assume you mean I’m a huge bitch who usually manages to keep her bitchiness concealed?”
Was Julie a huge bitch who usually managed to keep her bitchiness concealed? She truly didn’t know. In the eight years
she and Keith had lived in Houston, she had never talked like this to anyone. She was simultaneously shocked by the conversation, shocked to be having it with a man, shocked by its effortlessness, and not surprised at all; it was as if she’d been waiting to be recognized, as if she’d never sung in public, then someone had handed her a microphone and she’d opened her mouth and released a full-throated vibrato. Except that her only audience was Graham, a familiar semi-stranger, which made the game a secret, which was the most fun part of all. Neither on that day nor in the future did they ever discuss the game’s rules, yet clearly they both agreed what they were. Julie considered this complicity amazing, though she wondered if her bar for amazing was low.
She did have friends, and they did gossip about people, but the way they gossiped felt superficial, imprecise, and gratuitously mean; talking to Graham felt sincere and only incidentally mean. Also, there was a physical sensation Julie often had near the end of parties or kids’ soccer games, what she thought of as tired face—she’d exerted herself, received little in return, and now wished to be alone, or at least to be in her car, with only children, and preferably only ones to whom she was related—and this sensation seemed, after she and Graham started playing I’ll Think It, You Say It, like nothing but boredom. Was it possible she had been bored for the entire time she and Keith had lived in Houston? For her entire adulthood? Because, alarmingly, I’ll Think It, You Say It left her as cheerful and energized as a Zumba class.
Julie and Keith had met in graduate school—he was getting an MBA, she a degree in speech and language pathology—and they’d married while living in Chicago, which was where their two daughters were born. Their son was born after they moved to Houston for Keith’s job, and at first it amused Julie and Keith that they’d spawned a Texan. There were things about the white, moneyed version of Houston that Julie didn’t love and, even more, that she didn’t love herself for not resisting.