36
It was impossible not to stare at Professor Polson as she cooked. Like Perry’s mother, she cracked the eggs with one hand, and then tossed the shells into the sink. She didn’t measure anything. Two burners were glowing blue on the stove at the same time. She grated cheese straight into the pan of scrambled eggs.
Professor Polson reminded him of his mother, but she was also like a girl Perry’s own age—hair uncombed, falling around her face in a mass of curls and tangles. Her hands were full, so she used her shoulder to push the hair out of the way as she leaned over the stove. In her jeans and Indian-print shirt, she could easily have passed for a college girl. She was thin. Even a little bony. You would not have known she’d given birth to twins. He imagined that she didn’t eat a lot, because she also didn’t look athletic. In Bad Axe the only women he knew who were mothers and weren’t overweight were the athletes: the hikers and bikers and swimmers. Or the smokers. The alcoholics. Professor Polson looked healthy, but she did not look like someone who worked out at a gym or who spent much time outdoors. She looked, Perry supposed, exactly like what she was: a reader, a writer, a teacher. Someone who’d spent her life studying something very particular and obscure, and who’d become an expert on it because she was more interested in it than anyone else had ever been or might ever be again.
And at the same time that Professor Polson reminded him of women like his mother, his aunts, the mothers of his friends—and also girls like Mary, Nicole, Josie Reilly, even Karess Flanagan—she was also nothing like them.
She was neither young nor old, fashionable nor out of touch. Professor Polson existed somewhere in between the worlds of the mothers he knew and the girls he knew, and he could not take his eyes off of her as she peeled slices of ham out of a plastic package and dropped them onto a skillet, where they shriveled up quickly and filled the kitchen with the smell of meat and maple. He was, he realized, ravenous.
They’d talked for hours since he’d come back to the apartment, he guessed. He’d lost track of time. But it was pitch-black night when he’d returned, and now the sun was shining through her apartment windows. Hours had to have passed.
After the interview, when they’d left Professor Polson’s apartment, Perry had walked Lucas back to his place, and then he’d turned around, intending to go back to his own apartment. But he’d found himself instead walking directly toward the Omega Theta Tau house.
The rain had stopped at some point during Lucas’s interview, and now the streets were shining with dampness in the moonlight. The sky was completely clear, looking as if some kind of blue-black satin had been rolled in enormous bolts all through the town. The moon was somewhere close to full, but not quite, and it turned the branches of the trees to a kind of parody of October—spooky, damp. Leaves had blown out of the trees during the storm and lay in tatters in the streets, and on the sidewalk, on the lawns. They caught at the toes of Perry’s shoes.
He couldn’t help himself.
He had to go there.
He had to stand outside the house.
He had a feeling, and when he’d had that feeling before, she had appeared, or seemed to appear.
Perry had already known, more or less, the story Lucas was going to tell Professor Polson, but it had terrified him anyway. The matter-of-factness of the account. The mundane details. Lucas’s plainspoken, shamed recounting of events. It had required self-restraint for Perry to keep himself seated, listening. More than once, he’d had the urge to flee. He’d seen himself in his dark suit again, pictured himself in Bad Axe at the funeral, walking with the coffin on his shoulder, the terrible, solid, indisputable shifting of weight inside the coffin when Nicole’s cousin stumbled as they carried her out of the church and into the hearse.
And there were other things he remembered.
Back in his dorm room, in Godwin Hall, just those few weeks before the accident.
Told you, didn’t I?
Nicole had kissed him afterward, and stood up, and, as she was buttoning her shirt, had said, “Told you, didn’t I? I knew you wanted to fuck me, and that you would.” Then, she put on her clothes, closed the door behind her—somehow managing to leave her panties at the foot of the bed for Craig to find (although Craig didn’t recognize them, and instead teased Perry mercilessly, pitifully, about his “mystery slut”). Why had she done that? It could not have been a mistake. He’d known Nicole most of his life. She wasn’t ever sloppy. Even in kindergarten she’d been the first one to throw her empty milk carton away, or fold up her nap mat.
At first, Perry had thought she might have been sending a message for Craig—but, later, he wondered if it had been something else, a way to discredit Perry, cast suspicion on him. Surely she could tell that he and Craig were starting to become friends.
He could see the light on the porch of the Omega Theta Tau house, but Perry couldn’t tell, from where he stood on the sidewalk looking up at it, whether anyone was on the porch.
It was a flat town, a flat state, so it was that much stranger, eerier, that the sorority house was perched on a hill above the rest of the block.
Behind it, the memorial orchard sloped down to the wall between the sorority property and the smaller yard of the frat house next door. There were no leaves at all left on those cherry trees as far as Perry could tell—two skeletal rows of shiny, wet black branches and moonlight. From inside the house, there seemed to be only one light: a dim flickering in one of the upstairs windows. Perry couldn’t tell if it was a candle doing the flickering or some shadowy figure pacing around by the window. There seemed to be lacy curtains, and they seemed to be closed. He supposed it wasn’t so odd that all the lights were out at this time of night—or morning—in the middle of the week before exams. Omega Theta Tau was supposed to be one of the studious sororities.
Perry stood staring up at the house until he was sure there was no one on the porch, and then he stepped off the sidewalk and onto the grass. He wanted to get closer, but he thought it was a bad idea to go straight up the front walk, which was bathed in porch light. He didn’t know why. He had no idea yet what he thought. Did he think Nicole was in there? And, if so, how? And if she wasn’t, what was he afraid of? And if she was, what then?
He stayed in the shadows, and made his way up the side of the lawn. The ground was soggy, slippery, carpeted with fallen leaves. He walked slowly, with no idea what he planned to do when he reached the porch. (Knock on the back door and ask to see Nicole? Peer in the windows to try to catch a glimpse of her?)
He stopped. Looked behind him. Looked in front of him. He looked toward the porch, and just before he saw what he thought was a man in some kind of dark suit or uniform, the light switched off and Perry was left standing on the lawn in the dark, and then he heard what sounded to him (so out of place here that it took him more than a few seconds to recall it from duck hunting with his dad at Lake Durand, or deer hunting in the national forest with his grandfather, from the hundred or so Boy Scout rifle competitions he’d attended at the Bad Axe Rod and Gun Club) like the slide of a shotgun being racked, and he crouched down and, holding his breath, made his way back across the lawn, away from the house, as quickly and as quietly as humanly possible.
It was blocks later that he realized that he’d run all the way back to Professor Polson’s apartment, the outside entrance of which had been propped open so that he didn’t have to buzz her, and that he’d run up to the stairs to her door, and he was knocking on it.
She opened the door as if she’d been expecting him.
Clearly, he hadn’t woken her. She was still in the same top and jeans she’d been wearing during Lucas’s interview. Her eyes looked watery, as if she had been either crying or coughing. Her hair was a little more mussed. (Perhaps she’d been lying down?) But when she saw that Perry was nearly doubled over, out of breath, standing in her doorway, Professor Polson pulled him into the apartment without asking any questions, and led him to the couch.
“I’ll get you some water,”
she said. “Try square breathing. You know what square breathing is?”
He knew what square breathing was only because she’d told them about it in class, in preparation for their trip to the morgue—had told them that if they began to feel faint during the visit, or to feel as if they might be sick, or hyperventilate, they should close their eyes and do square breathing.
(“Breathe in through your nose to the count of four. Hold the breath to the count of four. Exhale to the count of four.” She’d had the whole class practice. “I used to lose at least three students to the linoleum every field trip until I taught square breathing.”)
As Perry sat panting on her couch, and Professor Polson went into the kitchen, he tried it:
One. Two.
The apartment looked different in the dark.
Three. Four.
She came back to the living room with a sweater draped over her shoulders and a glass of water for him, three ice cubes bobbing in it. She turned on the light beside the couch and handed him the glass, and then sat down on the chair across from him, perching on the edge of it, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, and asked in a soft, concerned voice, “What is it, Perry? Can you tell me?”
The square breathing, or something, had worked. He was calm now. He didn’t even feel winded. He told her what had happened. The darkness. The candle. The man he thought he saw in the shadows, and the sound of a shotgun being racked up, and how he’d run, not realizing he was here again until he was.
Professor Polson had seemed to think for a long time about what she was going to say before she spoke, and then said, “Perry, I think maybe we’ve already taken this too far. I think I’ve encouraged you in some—” she pulled the sweater off her shoulders and onto her lap, and then gathered it in her hands, brought it to her face, seemed to breathe it in for a minute before she continued, “unproductive thinking. When the imagination—and I’m not talking here about your imagination per se. I’m talking the collective imagination, the occult imagination—when it’s stimulated, many things that aren’t real can come to seem to be real. Perfectly sane people, people who—”
“No,” Perry said.
Professor Polson nodded as if she’d expected him to object, but she went on:
“Let me tell you something,” she said, and she told him, then, a story about her childhood. Her mother. A kind of transformation in a pantry. A white coffin, and her own realization, staring into it, of what the unconscious was capable of. The imagery that informed this life, this culture.
“You can pretend you aren’t superstitious,” Professor Polson said. “You can imagine that you are not religious. You can be certain that you don’t believe in life after death, if that’s what you want. But, Perry, it doesn’t stop the fact that we are in a very strange position here. We humans. With such a clear knowledge of how it will end, and no idea what will happen afterward—just some symbols, some music, some stories to show us the way.
“Of course you believe your friend is alive. That she lurks around every corner. That her death could be something as alive as her sexuality was, as your own. You’re nineteen years old. Who dies, Perry? Who believes in death at your age? People with a lot more life experience than you have believed stranger things. Have seen stranger things. Folklore is full of—”
“I’m sorry, Professor Polson, I know what you’re saying. But it isn’t folklore. This. It—it isn’t.”
There was a kind of sad understanding in her eyes, but she was shaking her head at the same time.
“Perry, folklore doesn’t mean something doesn’t make sense. Or doesn’t seem real. Truly, it’s the opposite. Beliefs—traditional and superstitious beliefs—arise and are passed down for coherent, substantial reasons. They’re based on psychological and physical data, real or not. Shared experiences. In the field we call this elegant rationale. There’s often an elegant rationality to even the strangest beliefs. But it doesn’t make them real. Being based on fear, inspired by hope, they can be dangerous, Perry, and I think we’re headed in that direction, and that we need to stop what we’re doing now, before it leads to something—”
“Please,” Perry said. “No. Please. I’ll talk about it any way you want me to. We can call it elegant rationale and campus folklore if you want to. But, please. Don’t stop . . . listening to me. Professor Polson—”
She reached across the coffee table and took his hand. She held it in her own for a few seconds, and he could feel for himself how cold his own hand was. She squeezed it before she let go, and said, “I know. I know. Okay.”
“Thank you. I—”
But she held up a hand to stop him from saying anything more. She stood up then and gestured for him to follow her into the kitchen, where he leaned against the wall as she made him a cup of tea, and they talked about class, about the article on apotropaic magic they had been assigned for the next week and which Perry had already read. She told him about her travels during her Fulbright year, the village in which she’d stayed a few nights, where every house and every inn, every restaurant and church, kept nailed to its door a piece of a broken mirror that had once hung in the ladies’ room of the local cathedral, until the cathedral had been bombed.
There had been only one woman in the cathedral at the time—an old deaf lady who hadn’t heard the air raid sirens. She’d been blown into too many pieces to gather and properly bury. The mirrors were nailed to the doors to keep her from stopping by.
They discussed the section of the essay on the motif of harmful sensations. The Sirens. The Lorelei. The Harp of Dagda. The Hungarian Suicide Song—a song, it was believed, that to hear would cause the person who heard it to commit suicide.
He told her that when he was in high school, a rumor had gone around that there was a YouTube video posted on the Internet—a body swinging from a rope tied to a tree—that, if you watched it, would cause you to hang yourself within three days. Girls had gone around Bad Axe High School frantically whispering about who had been reckless enough to watch it at the last slumber party. He’d even witnessed some tears in the hallways, and the principal eventually wrote a note home to parents letting them know about the rumor, urging them to talk to their children about it.
“Yes,” Professor Polson said, smiling, excited. “This is exactly the kind of thing we want for our study, Perry. Exactly.”
Perry was still hearing her words our study in his head, and the little thrill of that, when she said, “I think it’s time for breakfast. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to get to the class your parents are paying me to teach, and teach it.” They both looked at their watches at the same time, and then they sat down to eat the eggs that had grown cold on the table as they’d talked, but which were still delicious.
Part Three
37
Josie was wearing flip-flops even though the temperature outside could not have been over forty-five degrees. It was one of those deep-pewter late October days during which morning lasted until it finally bled without a whimper into twilight. Shelly had, herself, pulled her suede boots out of the back of her closet for the first time that year. Not only was it too cold for flip-flops, but flip-flops had been the one item of clothing Shelly had asked Josie, when she’d first hired her, not to wear to the office.
And she was over an hour late.
“Hey,” Josie said breathlessly, pushing open the door to Shelly’s office with her hip. “Sorry I’m late!”
Shelly tried to look away as nonchalantly as possible, returning to her computer on which she’d managed to call up a blank Word document as soon as she heard what she’d assumed was Josie coming up the stairs.
“You’re not mad, are you?” Josie asked, but she was out of the door’s threshold before Shelly could turn around and say anything, her flip-flops making a husky whisper as they slapped against the heels of her small white feet as she sauntered down the hallway toward the restroom.
It had been two weeks since they’d first slept together, and there’d been
two dinners (both at Shelly’s house, cooked by Shelly) since then. Three other times, they’d left the office together, gone back to Shelly’s for drinks, and ended up in bed. These assignations had been initiated casually enough by Josie (“Hey, Shelly, are you up for a glass of wine after work?”) and, after each time, Shelly swore to herself that she wouldn’t let it happen again.
Too risky. Too risqué. Too unseemly.
But simply saying no seemed impossible. At least once or twice a day now, Shelly found herself nearly doubled over with longing for the girl:
The small hard nipples under her hands. The soft palpitating at the base of her throat. The way Josie (who required sometimes a steady, blissful hour of tongue and fingers to reach an orgasm) would throw her head back in the final seconds, and Shelly could glimpse just the bottom of her bright white front teeth between her parted lips, and a hissing sound would escape from Josie that sent what felt like a shockwave ripping through Shelly’s body, bringing her to her own climax without even needing to be touched.
It was only when they were in bed that they discussed the fact that they had ever slept together before or that they ever would again, so each “date” was like some kind of extreme sport—the rush of not knowing what would happen next.
In the meantime, Josie’s work ethic had dwindled down to nothing. She’d stopped bothering even to apologize for leaving early. She simply announced that she was leaving. Twice, she called in sick, depositing scratchy-voiced messages on the voice mail, having clearly timed her calls so that Shelly wouldn’t be in the office to actually answer the phone.