It was impossible to imagine Mack, the manager of a vegetarian restaurant specializing in raw-food vegan entrées ("What would that be?" Jon always joked. "Water? Leaves?"), weathering a divorce. Sue had told me that he'd been discharged from the Peace Corps after only a month in Africa because he had chronic problems with blisters on the bottoms of his feet. After only two weeks, he couldn't walk at all, and then they got infected, and briefly there was some scare that he would have to have his feet amputated, and he'd never walk again. To this day, even in the dead of winter, Mack wears only Birkenstock sandals, often with thick black socks.
Today, there wasn't much to say about Mack. The boys had been getting in trouble in school, but just for boy stuff and mostly because they refused to sit still during free-reading time. We ended up talking for a long time about whether it was a good or bad thing for Sue and Mack to insist that the boys keep taking tae kwon do, although they seemed to hate it. "Don't they need to learn discipline?" she asked me. "They're not going to learn it from me or Mack."
I smiled. I shrugged. I had no opinion. When Chad was that age, if they were teaching tae kwon do in the area yet, I hadn't heard of it.
While we talked, the boys came and went from the house, and they ate cookies, too. Crumbs on the table and on the floor. Occasionally we'd hear a piercing scream coming from the backyard while they were out there, but Sue didn't even bother to get up to look out the window. We both yawned a lot. At one point I felt the need to stand up and stretch, and Sue said, "Have I become a burdensome bore to you, Sherry?"
I sat back down right away, and said, "No!"
"Admit it. I'm boring you to death, Sherry. Why do you always have to be so nice?"
"I'm not being nice," I said. I laughed. I said, "I'm sorry."
Sue laughed, too. "See," she said, "you're so nice you're apologizing for my being boring." She picked up a cookie. She said, more seriously, "It's okay. Someday you'll crack, Sherry Seymour, and we'll all get to see your true self."
I rolled my eyes. I said, "If anyone has seen my true self, Sue, it's you."
"Sure," Sue said, finishing the cookie, changing the subject to her mother, and then to my father, and then for a long time we talked about the difficulties of having elderly parents, while the boys screamed outside, and, occasionally, Kujo barked loudly, once, then stopped. From far away—some fenced-in yard, or from a chain tied to a tree?—a dog barked back. After a half hour or so Sue looked at her watch and said, "Oh my god! I have to go to the store and get some dinner!"—and I was, frankly, happy to think of getting on with the day.
A shower. A magazine.
I was surprised to find myself thinking, too, of heading to bed, to sex, with Jon when he got back from the hardware store. How long had it been since I'd anticipated that on a Saturday afternoon? I started sweeping the cookie crumbs off the table before she'd even stood up, but I thought she gave me a cold look when I did, and I shook my hand out over the sink and turned to her with the warmest smile I could manage. "Please," I said. "Don't hurry. It's so great to have you here."
"No," she said, standing up, brushing crumbs off her legs onto the floor as she did. "We've got to get home."
"You're sure?" I asked, twice.
"Yes," she said, each time. She went to the hallway to get her purse, and I couldn't help noticing as she walked away that her shirt wasn't tucked in behind her, and a loose roll of flesh was exposed around her waist.
"Don't let me forget my LEGOs," she called from the hallway.
"Right," I said.
I swept the pieces, like the crumbs, into my hand. She'd never gotten the tank put together, so I put it all in a Ziploc bag. When I handed it to her, she handed it back. "Here," she said. "If you could get this put together and drop it off later..."
"Sorry," I said. "I never could do those. But I could send it to Chad in California if you want me to. He could FedEx it back."
"Oh, forget it," Sue said. "This isn't your problem." She stuffed the bag into her coat pocket, and we stood facing one another in the hallway for a moment.
"It was so nice of you to come over," I said, and immediately regretted it. It sounded fake, and formal—the kind of thing you'd say to a new neighbor, not the woman whose hand you'd been squeezing in a death grip when you pushed your baby into this world. (Jon had passed out, so Sue, who'd been in the hallway as our "second string," had to be called in.) And Sue seemed to bristle at my tone, too. She said nothing in reply, but told the boys—who were watching something loud on the television in the living room by then—that it was time to go. They reflexively whined, but they were past us and outside slamming the car doors before we'd even made it to the porch.
Outside, it was truly a new season. The leaves hadn't quite come out on the trees, and the grass wasn't yet green, but everything was damp and brilliant and getting ready. Down the road, I heard the Henslins' cows lowing—a sound of contentment, I thought. The sound of warmth, of mud, of sun, of a life being lived, at the moment, anyway, without enough information for worry.
We moved from the porch to the porch steps. I could hear one of the twins shouting angrily from the backseat of Sue's car. But there was also birdsong, and the wind chimes I'd tied to the garage eaves ringing sweetly.
"Gosh, we talked all afternoon," Sue said, "and I never even asked you howjo‹ are."
It wasn't true, and she knew it. She'd asked me, and I'd said I was fine. It was her way of asking again, and it crossed my mind that there was something suspicious about the way she was looking into my eyes, as if she'd been waiting all afternoon for the information she might be able to extract from me now in these last seconds of it.
But I just shrugged. "Nothing new here," I said.
"Well, what about your secret admirer?"
"Nothing to report on that subject," I lied.
BRAM had said, "It's your neck I can't get over."
He put his lips on the little pulse point at the base of it, and then moved his tongue in circles there for a few long minutes, before moving up, under my ear, pushing the hair away, sinking in his teeth. "I told you," he whispered, "didn't I, that I'm a vampire?"
I tried to laugh, but what came out was a breathy sigh. He was undoing the top buttons on my blouse with one hand, smoothing the hair away from my neck with the other, pushing me backward onto the futon, tongue and teeth just under my ear until my whole body—the entire length of the skin that held me together from my forehead to my feet—rippled with it.
Goose bumps.
A rabbit stepped on your grave, my grandmother used to say.
Chills, but so warm that a trickle of sweat ran cold at my rib cage down to my stomach.
He put his face between my breasts, and I could feel his breath, hot on the damp flesh there. He reached behind me, unfastened my bra, then slid his hand around to my chest, and cupped one breast in his hand, looked at it, put his mouth to it.
He had said he was a vampire.
Over coffee in the cafeteria a few days before, I'd asked him how he'd come to be named Bram, and he'd said, "I'm a vampire." I smiled. I could barely look at him—those deep dark eyes in the cafeteria glare. The sound of trays clattering, college girls squealing. Someone, back in the kitchen maybe, was pounding, it seemed, with a spoon, on a pan. The cash register was ringing up coffee and hamburgers, tinnily, hysterically. The whole place seemed so chaotic and alive, it was like a kind of hellish festival—a carnival just beginning to get out of hand. Soon, it seemed, the food fights would start, and then the screaming, and then the orgy, and then the bullets would start ricocheting around the room.
"Really," I said. "It's unusual. Did they name you after Bram Stoker?"
"Yeah," he said. "Believe it or not. My mother was an odd bird, as you can imagine, naming her son after the Dracula guy."
"Why did she?"
He was drumming the fingers of one hand on the tabletop. There was a silver band on his right hand. With his other hand, he squeezed the Styrofoam coffee cup he w
as holding just hard enough to make it buckle, but not to crush it.
"She was an English teacher," he said, nodding in my direction. "Like you. But high school. She liked Dracula. In her spare time she wrote vampire novels."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Did she publish them?"
"One. It was a kind of trashy paperback. Out of print now."
"Did you read it?"
"No," he said. "By the time I was old enough to be interested, she died. And after that, I couldn't stand it. I'd pick it up, but it was too weird. My dead mother, the vampire lover. You know, it's the kind of thing that could make a teenager crazy. And now I don't even have the damned thing."
"What was it called?"
"Bloodlover. One word."
"Wow."
"Wow is right. I'm sure it's full of sex. That's another thing you don't really want to read about, written by your mother, when you're seventeen."
"No," I said. "You don't."
He leaned back in his chair.
I could see that, although he wasn't tall, his body was long. His stomach muscles beneath the T-shirt he was wearing looked solid. He was built like a runner, I thought. There was a line of sweat in the gray cotton, which split his torso exactly in half.
It was warm in the building. Only the first week of March, but the rise in the temperature outside had not yet inspired the college custodians to turn the furnace down—and here, in the cafeteria, the steam had built up so thickly on the windows that rivulets of it were running in jagged lines down the glass. Those of us who had to spend the whole day in our hot offices and classrooms had stripped off whatever we could. Sweaters, of course. Panty hose. Overshirts. I'd even taken off my strand of pearls because it was growing slippery and oppressive around my neck.
"So, tell me about you," he said.
I could think of nothing to say. My mind was suddenly a photograph of nothing. I'd bought him the cup of coffee, ostensibly in return for the work he'd done on my car, but I could tell by the way he looked at me, and he could tell by the way I couldn't look at him, I supposed, why I'd called and asked him to meet me.
"It's okay," he said when it became obvious that I wouldn't be able to speak. "You can tell me another time."
SUNDAY, late morning, I took to the garden with a rake.
I always did this in March, when there was a break in the weather long enough to clear away some of the winter debris. There would be more winter, I knew—icy rain, another snowstorm—but today it was sixty degrees, and all the brittle branches of the honeysuckle, the dried-up mums, the dead vines, even a few husks of hollyhock blooms I'd failed to pinch off the summer before, and which had clung brown and withered to the stalks through winter, yielded easily to the rake, as if they'd given in to death so long ago there wasn't even the vaguest connection to this earth any longer. The roots were so withered that they came out of the dirt in a quick dusty cough when I yanked only lightly with my garden gloves, and they emerged covered with dust. In only a few hours, I'd managed to cart seven wheelbarrows full of last year's garden to the scrubbrush at the edge of the yard. Tomorrow, Jon will burn it, and it'll go up fast and smolder down to a very light gray ash, nothing left over at all from last summer's wild blooming—no evidence that it was ever there. Gone without a trace, like a thought.
Once the garden was clear of the detritus, I could see the little green shoots of tulips stabbing up into the spring warmth, and the few snowdrops, already blooming, nodding demurely in the sun. Every few minutes, I thought of Bram, his hands on my breasts, his body on top of mine, and I had to lean on my rake to steady myself. Jon came around the side of the house from the backyard, where he'd been putting golf balls into mole holes, and I smiled at him, distantly. "What are you thinking about?" he asked.
I told him nothing.
"IS THIS skirt too short?" I asked.
Monday morning. We'd replaced the storm windows with the screens over the weekend, and propped one of the bedroom windows open about an inch that night. A breeze that was cool but that carried, too, an implication of spring—a scent of foliage, or freshly washed hair—was whispering through that inch of openness.
It was a silvery skirt I'd bought a few years ago but had worn only once, and then only to a tea party thrown for women faculty at the house of a ceramics instructor. Even there, even then, I'd been self-conscious—although, in truth, the skirt is only an inch or so above my knees, which would have been a long skirt to me fifteen years ago, when I regularly wore skirts so short that sitting down in them was dangerous.
"Are you kidding?" Jon said.
He looked away from the mirror, in which he was watching a reflection of himself secure the knot of his tie, to me in my skirt. "There's no such thing as a skirt too short if you've got gams like that."
I smoothed it down over my thighs. "Thank you," I said.
"Your boyfriend's going to like that one," he said, turning back to the mirror. "Is that why you're wearing such a short skirt to work today?" His tone was playful, but I could feel my pulse quicken a bit at my wrists.
Friday, when I'd come home after the night before, in my efficiency, on my futon, with Bram, I'd felt numb, like someone who'd been left in a hot bath too long—a bath full of rose petals, steeping and silky and reeking with sweetness. I remembered that when we first moved into our house, Mrs. Henslin had brought us a bag of homegrown strawberries as a welcome present. After taking them from her, thanking her for them, I forgot about them. I left them on the back porch. It was August, and by the time I realized what I'd done and opened that paper bag again, they'd turned into something that made me recoil in horror, and that bag of fruit smelled the way I thought I smelled that night, walking into my own house, seeing Jon there, waiting for me on the love seat with his newspaper. I wasn't sure if it was shame I felt, exactly, or if it was fear. I felt like a woman who'd been sent out of the village in which she'd lived her whole life and was returning to it after a long absence, seeing it again. What would she find?
"Hi," Jon had said. "Long time no see."
"Hi," I said, and tossed my purse on the table by the back door.
He stood up.
"You look tired," he said. He kissed my cheek. When I felt the familiar lips there, and smelled him, I had to take a step back. "Have a wild night last night?" he asked.
"No," I said—too quickly?
He put his arms around my waist and whispered, "You can tell me. You've been fucking some other man, haven't you? You can tell me."
He was joking, I was sure—this fantasy, half teasing and half serious, which had taken on a life of its own. But, when I looked closely at his face I thought no. He knows. And he doesn't care. Still, I said, "I haven't, Jon."
BRAM met me in the cafeteria. He was pouring coffee into his Styrofoam cup when I got there. "Hey," he said, looking up.
He was wearing a lavender-colored shirt, and the sight of him in it—that delicate spring color, and the masculine body in it, even the sight of his hands, one of them holding a coffee cup, the other reaching into his jeans for change to pay for it with—it crossed my mind that I might faint, that if I didn't steady myself by holding tightly to the strap of my purse I might leave this world, suddenly, something hot and all-embracing swooping down on me in a dark funnel of feathers and sweat, taking my consciousness with it.
"Hi," I said.
He looked at my legs, then at my face.
Those eyes.
He said nothing, needed to say nothing. After a second or two I said, "Let me buy that for you," nodding at his cup.
Bram looked at the cup himself, as if he hadn't realized he still had it, and shrugged, and said, "Okay." He leaned toward me as I reached over to take the coffeepot from him. I could feel his breath on my neck when he said, "So. Tonight?"
"Yes," I said, in a whisper, before I even knew I'd opened my mouth to speak.
He took a step back. I poured the coffee into my cup, but only halfway because my hand was s
haking and I was afraid I would spill it.
Bram waited at the end of the line as I paid for the coffee, and when I joined him there he said, "I can't sit down this morning, I'm afraid. I'm meeting a student in my office. See you later?"
"Okay," I said.
This time, my tone was businesslike, although I'd felt disappointed. The word jilted flew quickly through my mind—a dragonfly on fire—before he smiled at me. That dimple. And he looked, again, at my legs, and my blood seemed to surge at my wrists, behind my ears. When he looked back into my eyes, I had to look away, over his shoulder, where I glimpsed Garrett standing in a crowd of students, talking to a boy who looked like Chad, but wasn't Chad—just the jawline, the hair, had reminded me of Chad, who would never have worn that boy's nylon Red Sox jacket.
Bram turned. As he walked away, I stood still with my coffee shivering blackly in the Styrofoam cup in my hand—a bit of light sparking in ribbons across it, like the sun over a very deep but narrow lake.
Saunter, I thought, looking up from the coffee to Bram's back.
The man sauntered
His walk was so casually sexy (such a long gait—even slowly, it could get him quickly to wherever he needed to go) that it made him look like a man who'd never once in his life been in a hurry. As he passed Garrett, he must have said something to him, because Garrett turned, and they high-fived, and the boy who looked like Chad gave Bram a thumbs-up, and for a horrible moment I imagined that thumbs-up had something to do with me, and the bad moment caused the coffee in my cup—even half hall—to spill over, and one burning drop landed on my ankle.
Was it possible?
Could Bram have told anyone?
Could this all somehow be some kind of—plot? Joke? Game?