"Since January," she said. "It's been"—here, she looked at the ceiling, and inhaled—"so nice."
"I had no idea," I repeated.
Amanda looked at me. She must have seen something there, because she stopped smiling. She said, "Oh, you're not upset, are you?"
I exhaled through my nose. A kind of snicker, maybe, because she looked surprised. I shook my head in quick little snaps and said, "Of course not. Why would I be upset?"
"Well, maybe, because we're in your department. Maybe—political reasons?"
"Political reasons?" I sounded incredulous, I thought, but also bitter. What was wrong with me? Was I upset? I remembered Sue implying that I would be jealous if Robert Z and Amanda got involved, that I would be jealous if Robert Z had any girlfriend at all. ("You seem," Sue had said, "really invested in him being gay. We have no reason, you know, to think he's gay")
But I had honestly thought he was.
And, if he wasn't, I would never have thought, anyway, that Amanda Stefanski would be the type of woman, of girl, he'd have had any interest in.
I looked at hex.
Those eyes—they were so large, they were like a bug's, a calf's, eyes. Her hair was thin, but glossy. Her jawline had a rough stripe of pimples along it, which she'd tried to cover up with foundation. She looked so young, so pliant, so overly accommodating. Could Robert Z be in love with her?
Then, I thought of Bram, looking at her, from her waist to her neck. In this ridiculous dress! I could see the tag on her bra through the sheer fabric. I could see the little roll of fat on her belly pushing out beneath the sash at the center of it.
But Amanda had small, delicate hands, I noticed for the first time. The skin on them was utterly white and smooth. Her nails were trimmed plainly short. She brought one hand to her mouth and began to chew on those nails. I looked up at her face. Was she, after all, attractive?
I stood up. I took the hand she did not have in her mouth and said, "Amanda, I'm truly happy for you. And for Robert." I forced myself to smile. I said, the smile aching a little on my face, "I'm even happy for Pretty."
"Oh," Amanda said. "Thank you so much, Sherry. That means so much to me. I couldn't bear it if you disapproved."
I continued to smile until I'd closed the door behind her.
CHAD returned my e-mail within the hour:
Sorry to hear about Grandpa, Mom. Yeah. Heard that about Garrett. He's gonna get his butt blown to bits. Gotta go to physics. Will call tonight. Luvya2.
BRAM was at the efficiency already when I got there. I'd had a key made for him, left it in an envelope in his campus mailbox, and he'd used it to let himself in.
Before I even opened the door, I knew he was there. I could feel him—a powerful shadow, an impression of energy—on the other side of it. He was standing by the kitchen sink, drinking a beer. When I walked in and looked at him, he said, "Hey," in a way that made the back of my knees feel as if a feather, or a breeze, or a breath, had passed over them quickly.
"Hey," I said back.
I dropped my purse on the floor and went to him.
On the futon, we were quicker than we had been before. I came easily under him, his mouth on my neck, my hand reaching between us, cupping his testicles. "You're so wet," he said. "I like how wet you get."
We fell asleep on the futon in one another's arms before eight o'clock, then woke up just past midnight. The alarm clock I'd brought from home glowed on the floor, a murky blue, the second hand seeming to whirl too quickly, too smoothly, around the dial to be keeping actual time.
This time, he rolled me over on my side and pushed into me from behind. It took longer than it had the first time, and when we were done, the sheets were tangled and sweaty, and we were both panting—Bram on his back, and me still on my side. After a few minutes of just breathing together there in the dark, in the moonlight from the window and the glow of the alarm clock, he reached over and put a hand on my hip. "Are you okay, babe? Are you happy?"
I rolled onto my back.
The length of him was pressed against me, cool and blue in the darkness. I said, "I am, Bram. I'm happy."
"So am I," he said.
Without having to look at his face, his deep eyes, it was easier to talk to him, to ask him, "Bram, how did this happen?"
"You hit a deer," he said. "And then I saw you. And then I had to have you."
"Is that it?" I asked. "I mean, you'd seen me before, hadn't you?"
"Maybe," he said. "But not like that. In that skirt. Smelling like roses. I really noticed you then, babe. You were impossible not to notice."
But Garrett had said he'd spoken of me. The hot teacher in the English department. They should all take classes from her. Garrett had been so sure he'd been talking about me.
If not me, then, who? The other women in the department, except for Amanda, were older than I was. None of them could have been described, without being sarcastic, as "hot." Could it have been—
"Had you ever seen Amanda Stefanski before today?" I asked.
"Who's Amanda Stefanski?" he said. He was stroking my hip. He'd rolled onto his side.
"The woman who came up to us in the cafeteria. The English teacher."
He rolled onto his back again. "Sure," he said. "I've seen her."
"How would you describe her?" I asked.
"She's pretty easy on the eyes," Bram said. "She's pretty hot," he said. "But not like you," he said, pulling me into his arms again, pressing his erection against me.
Afterward, I got up to get a drink of water from the bathroom sink.
I turned on the light, looked at myself in the mirror.
There were bite marks on my right shoulder.
BETWEEN classes in the morning, I went to the women's room to look at those bite marks. Every time I did, I felt breathless—a deep electric surge between my hip bones. Because it was Tuesday, and tonight I would be sleeping at home, I wasn't sure if that deep magnetic longing was for Bram, or Jon. Did I want to be bitten by my lover, or to show my husband that my lover had bitten me?
"He bit you?" Jon asked, his eyes widening, slipping my blouse off my shoulders to look. I nodded.
He saw the mark there, which had gone from pink to purple during the day.
When he saw it, I could feel his whole body go rigid against mine. He put his mouth over it, then yanked my blouse—my good white blouse, the one that went with all the skirts and pants I wore to teach in—straight off of me, the pearl buttons scattering between us on the floor.
GARRETT.
I woke up beside Jon in the middle of the night:—achy, stiff, as if I'd been sleeping for many hours on a train—and I had to pee, a sharp pain at the center of my pelvis that spread into a wider, duller pain.
I peed in the bathroom, in the dark, and then stood up from the toilet, and turned on the light, and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I was again a stranger, of course (I'm never, any longer, the woman I expect to find in the mirror), but not unpleasant-looking, I thought:
A woman with a husband who fucks her on the living room floor.
A woman with a lover who was jealous that another man had written her love letters.
My hair was dark and messy, and the eye makeup I was wearing had smeared smokily across my lids. If I blurred my eyes, peering into that mirror, I looked, I thought, young enough to be myself, years before, when, crossing the street, men would whistle at me from either side, from passing cars.
I would, then, hearing their whistles, look down at my feet, somehow ashamed to have called such attention to myself, but deeply in love, also, with that attention.
When I focused my eyes, I was myself again.
Jon's wife.
Chad's mother.
Bram's lover—
And then I realized, suddenly and completely, who it was if it wasn't Bram who'd written those notes.
It was, of course, Garrett.
Garrett.
Poor lost Garrett, whose bony little body I'd held in my
arms when he fell down hard in the driveway, chasing after Chad, and who'd stood up then with both knees streaming blood.
Garrett's little-boy blood all over my Asian-print skirt, and his tears on my blouse.
He was small, then, even for his age. His hair was always sticking up in back. He smelled like Corn Flakes, and sun. He'd pressed his face into my stomach as he wept. I put an Elmo Band-Aid on each knee and gave him an ice-cream sandwich.
Garrett, of course.
His own mother, possibly a drunk, then dead. His father, dead.
Garrett had seen me in the hallways, I supposed, and some dim memory of that comfort from years before, that physical closeness, had come back to him, and he'd thought, wrongly, that he was in love with me—because I'd been kind, once, because he was alone. It was why, of course, he'd told me the notes were from Bram. He was embarrassed to have written them. He was trying to throw me off the track.
Oh, Garrett, I thought, sitting down on the lid of the toilet, and thought of him sitting across from me under Dali's rose, telling me he'd joined the Marines. Had he been trying to impress me? (The first to fight.)
Oh, god, no.
Poor little Garrett with a truck bumping against the legs of my coffee table, his small butt in the air, making vroom-vroom noises.
Please, dear God, don't let poor little Garrett go to that war and die.
I WOKE in the morning to Jon breathing into my neck, "I want you to bring him here. I want him to fuck you in our bed." He rolled on top of me, his penis rigid between my legs.
"How?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Tell him I'm out of town. I'll out of town. I'll just come back early."
He pushed my legs farther apart with his own.
The look on his face was serious, I thought. Dangerous, again. And stupid, too, I thought. He didn't know Bram. He didn't understand what he was asking.
Or, he simply didn't care—about me, about our marriage, about anything but himself and his sexual fantasy.
"No," I said.
He looked surprised. He said, "Why?"
"Why? Why? Why would you ask me to do that?" I asked.
"Because, I—I—" He seemed not to understand the question. He seemed hurt that I would ask it. He was whining, I thought.
"No," I said, pushing gently against his chest with my palms. "I'm not bringing him here, Jon. I'm never bringing him here."
Jon rolled off of me then, onto his side—although he was still looking at my face. He was pouting. Sulking. But there was a stubbornness to it, too. I thought of Chad, with his arms crossed at his chest at Toys "R" Us, refusing to leave the Hot Wheels display without another miniature car.
"This is our bed," I said to Jon, enunciating each word carefully. (No—I'll buy you three cars, young man, no more. Let's go) "I will not bring a stranger into our home."
"You won't bring a stranger into our home." Jon snorted. "You think you haven't already brought a stranger into our home?" At that, he laughed. He said, "You think this hasn't already come into our home?" His eyes were wide, as if it were mostly amusing, as if my stubbornness were the issue, not his.
I said nothing.
We were at the threshold of a room I didn't want to enter. I didn't want to talk about what this meant—about our marriage, about our lives. I didn't want Jon to say anything that would mean that this had happened, really, ever, or that it had made any difference between us, that it had brought something new into our marriage, something that might now always be there.
But then, as if my saying nothing were an agreement to his plan, Jon rolled back on top of me and said, "Come on, Sherry. I want you to fuck him in our bed. I want his come stains on our sheets when I get back." He pressed the tip of his penis to the entrance of my vagina. "Okay?" he said. "Okay? Say yes. Please?"
I saw, then, in my husband's face over mine, that there would be no talking him out of it. (Okay. One more. But that's it, young man, and then we're leaving) And it came to me, looking into his stubborn, boyish expression, lit up with sexual energy, that there would be nothing left for us after this.
All those nights of ordinary pleasure, twenty years of them, after a long day, after Chad was in bed, after the dishes had been unloaded from the dishwasher and the lights had been turned out, and our teeth were brushed—those nights when we had quietly and companionably taken off our clothes, touched each other, kissed each other, then had uncomplicated, undangerous sex—those nights were over.
And what, if anything, would replace this edgy game when, as it had to, the affair with Bram had ended?
Another affair? The memory of the affair?
Or nothing?
"Okay?" he asked again. "Okay?"—louder this time, as if I hadn't heard him already, and a little more like a threat. He said, "Look, Sherry, I let you fuck this guy. You owe me, don't you?" He pushed himself into me so hard and fast that I cried out from the pain of it, and then he fucked me for a long time, as if he hadn't heard that cry of pain, as if he couldn't tell, or didn't care, that, beneath him, I was exhausted and uncomfortable and a little afraid.
When he was done, I said, "Fine. Okay. Okay."
"Great," Jon said, standing up, headed toward the bathroom. "Good girl. Friday?"—so casually he might have simply suggested having another couple over. Sue and Mack. Or going to a movie.
And then he was in the bathroom, and I was surprised to find my hands clenched in fists at my sides. I was surprised to find myself thinking, Fine. I lay in bed listening to the sound of the mourning doves outside as Jon showered and got ready for work, and to the sound of something making what must have been a nest under one of our bedroom windows (a fussy ticking, a flustering, something intricate and exhausting being prepared) just as they did every year—wrens, finches, building their nests in the eaves troughs, under the windows, in the hanging plants on the front porch, any sheltered nook they could find, as if the house were no longer ours, but theirs.
He was right, of course. Who was I to think I hadn't already brought a stranger into our home?
When Jon came back into the bedroom wearing his suit, smiling, smelling of soap, I thought, Yes, okay, all right.
ON THE drive into work, I saw her, at first, from a distance, and mistook her for an old coat in the median—a camel's hair coat—empty, tossed out of a passing car, a nice coat, the kind my mother used to wear, and I thought, Now why would someone toss out a coat like that? before I recognized her for what she was, and what I'd done.
"HOW HAVE you been?"
Sue, on the other end of the line, sounded much farther than a few offices away.
"Why are we talking on the phone?" I asked her. "I'll be right down."
When I got there, she looked papery, and shiny, sitting at her desk. There was something strangely poreless about her skin—the way Chad's skin had looked a couple of years ago when he'd been prescribed Accutane for his acne.
Yes, the acne had gone away, but what was left was a mask-like perfection that scared me. It was unnatural. When I read about a boy in Illinois who'd killed himself, and the parents had blamed the Accutane, I made Chad go off of it. "Fine," he'd said. "You were the one who didn't like my zits, not me."
And he'd been right. It had been me who'd worried over those red eruptions on his flesh, and it had been, hadn't it, because they meant he was not a baby any longer—his flesh hairless, poreless, blemish- and perspiration-free?
But after he went off the Accutane, Chad never got a single pimple again.
Sue, now, was the one who looked as if she were wearing some kind of mask. She looked as if she would be dry to the touch. "Are you okay?" I asked.
Her side of the office was a mess, which was unusual. Usually Sue was the one who complained about the bad habits of her office mate, an eccentric old woman from Alabama who taught English as a Second Language and whose students—Syrians, Koreans, Nicaraguans—came out of her class speaking their second language in a long aristocratic southern drawl. "Look," Sue would say, poin
ting to a cup of coffee that had been left un-drunk on MayBell's desk and molded over, "someone needs to teach her to clean up after herself. She's still waiting for her slaves to come back from the fields."
A stack of old newspapers had slid off Sue's desk onto the floor, and no one had bothered to pick them up. I bent over to do it for her.
"I'm great," she said. "I guess you must be, too. But, I'm only guessing." Her tone was frankly angry. It surprised me. I took a step backward.
"What?" I asked. "What do you mean?"
"Well, you asked me how I've been. I wonder where you've been."
"I've just been—here," I said, pointing to the air around me. "I haven't been anywhere."
Sue laughed under her breath. It sounded brittle. "Oh," she said. "Well, I guess in the last twenty years I was getting kind of used to hearing from you every few days, so when two weeks go by..."
"Oh, no," I said. I put my hands to my heart. "Oh, Sue. Has it been that long? I'm so—"
"Don't be sorry, Sherry. I'm not trying to make you feel guilty. I'm just surprised."
"Oh, dear," I said. "Sue, I've been—"
"You've been what?" Her eyes were narrowed. She was, I thought, studying me closely.
"I've been—I don't know. Sue." I stood for a moment, feeling the closed-up air of her office embrace me too warmly. I inhaled. I sat down across from her. I exhaled. I said, in a different voice, a deeper voice, "How can I tell you, Sue?"
"What is it, Sherry? What's been going on with you?"
I opened my mouth.
She was waiting.
I had to tell her.
I inhaled again, and this time I could feel the dust particles in the air enter me, settle in me. I said, "Oh. Oh, Sue. How can I tell you this?"
"Try me," she said. "What is it?"
"I don't know," I said. "Midlife crisis? Sue, I've—"
I realized I was using my hands as I said these few, vague words, churning them in the air—something I usually did only when I was teaching, when I was actually trying to show the enormity or complexity of something, or to point to something I'd written on the blackboard. I saw my hands in the air in front of me and realized that Sue was looking at them, too, seeming annoyed.