At the end of the Tuesday night seminar, white-bearded Barry raised his hand and invited the whole class to reconvene for a nightcap at his sports bar.
“I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but all this talk about gender makes me thirsty!”
The initial response to Barry’s overture was lukewarm—it was late, people had work in the morning—but public opinion shifted when he added that drinks would be on the house.
“Now that you mention it,” said Russ, the fanatical hockey fan, “I could definitely go for a free beer.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Barry. “What’s the point of being in college if we don’t socialize outside the classroom? That’s like half your education right there.”
“Does that include hard liquor?” Dumell ruefully patted his midsection. “I’m watching my carbs.”
“Within reason,” Barry told him. “I’m not breaking out the Pappy Van Winkle.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Dumell assured him. “I’m a cheap date. Just ask my ex-wife.”
Eve had no intention of joining the party. She’d been dodging Barry’s invitations to get a drink after class for the past two months and didn’t want to offer him the slightest encouragement, not that he needed any. Barry was one of those guys who didn’t know the meaning of rejection; he just kept trying and trying and trying. His persistence might have been flattering if it hadn’t felt so smug and entitled—so steeped in male privilege—as if there was no possible way she could outlast him in a battle of romantic wills.
Hoping to avoid any unpleasantness in the parking lot—Barry sometimes lurked outside the exit and then attached himself to Eve as she walked to her car—she ducked into the ladies’ room and killed a few minutes in the stall, playing several turns on Words with Friends (random opponent, not very good) and then peeing, not because she needed to, but because she was already sitting on a toilet and it seemed foolish not to. She washed her hands with excessive diligence and checked her face in the mirror—an unbreakable, though less and less rewarding, habit—before leaving the rest room and almost colliding with Dr. Fairchild, who was standing outside the door, her lanky basketball player’s frame augmented by businesslike heels.
“Eve.” She sounded concerned but vaguely reproachful. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Why?”
“You were in there for quite a while.” The professor heard herself and grimaced, mortified by her own rudeness. “Not that it’s any of my business.”
“Great class tonight,” Eve said, trying to cut through the awkwardness.
Dr. Fairchild gave a distracted nod and then asked, with some urgency, “Are you going? To the bar?”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Oh.” Dr. Fairchild couldn’t hide her disappointment. “I was hoping you were.”
“Are you?”
“I was thinking about it. Might be fun, right?”
Huh. Eve hadn’t given a lot of thought to the professor’s idea of fun, but it hardly seemed like drinking at a sports bar with guys like Barry and Russ would be high on her list.
“It’s been a long day,” Eve explained. “I’m kinda wiped out.”
“I just—” Dr. Fairchild flipped her hair over her shoulder, first one side, then the other, her favorite nervous gesture. “I really don’t want to go there by myself.”
“You won’t be by yourself. Sounds like a bunch of them are going.”
“I know.” A pleading note had entered the professor’s voice. “It’s just a lot easier to walk in with a girlfriend. Especially at a place like that.”
Eve was puzzled, but also touched, by the professor’s use of the word girlfriend. Until this moment, they’d never even had a conversation outside of class.
“I guess I could get a drink,” she said. “Just one, though. Tomorrow’s a workday.”
“Thank you.” Dr. Fairchild leaned down and gave Eve a hug. “I really appreciate this.”
“No problem. So I guess I’ll see you over there?”
Dr. Fairchild’s smile was also an apology. She knew she was pushing her luck.
“Could you maybe give me a ride?” she asked. “That way I can’t chicken out.”
*
Ten minutes later, they were parked outside of Barry’s bar, a squat brick building that had the unappealing name of PLAY BALL! emblazoned on the front awning, with a baseball bat standing in for the exclamation point. Dr. Fairchild didn’t seem in any hurry to leave the car.
“I have very big feet,” she said. “It’s not easy to find cute shoes in my size.”
“Those are nice,” Eve observed. “You can’t go wrong with black pumps.”
“You should see my red stilettos. I can barely walk in them, but they look really hot. I just don’t have many opportunities to wear them at the moment.”
“I’ve pretty much given up on heels,” Eve told her. “At my age, I’d rather be comfortable.”
“Forty-six. Not young, that’s for sure.”
“I’m not that much younger than you,” Dr. Fairchild pointed out. “I guess I’m trying to make up for lost time. I missed out on my best years.”
In the bright public sphere of the classroom, Eve never had a problem accepting Dr. Fairchild as a woman. In that context—a teacher interacting with students, deconstructing outmoded concepts of masculinity and femininity—she seemed like an embodiment of the curriculum, her theory and practice a continuous whole. In a minivan outside a sports bar, however, the professor’s gender identity seemed a little more precarious, as much wish as reality. It was partly the timbre of her voice in the darkness, and partly just the size of her body in the passenger seat, the way she filled the available space.
I can see who you were, Eve thought. One self on top of the other.
As soon as this uncharitable image occurred to her, she did her best to erase it from her mind. She wasn’t the gender police. Her job—her responsibility—was to be kind and supportive, and not to judge the success or failure of somebody else’s transformation.
“You look really pretty,” she said.
“I’m trying.” Dr. Fairchild’s chuckle was tinged with anxiety. “Every day’s an adventure, right?”
“I wish.”
“At least that’s what my therapist tells me. I think she’s just trying to cheer me up.”
“Is everything okay?”
Dr. Fairchild stared out the windshield while she considered the question. The only thing in front of them was a brick wall.
“It was my daughter’s birthday last weekend,” she said. “Her name is Millicent. She just turned eight.”
“That’s a sweet age.”
“We threw her a party, my ex-wife and I. And some of the other parents came by at the end, and it wasn’t like they were mean to me or anything. But I could see I made them uncomfortable, and my daughter saw it, too. They stood as far away from me as possible. Like whatever I had might be contagious.”
“I’m sure they didn’t mean anything by it,” Eve said. “It just takes people time, you know?”
Dr. Fairchild examined her manicure. “If it wasn’t for Millie, I’d probably just move to New York or L.A. Just get far away from all this suburban bullshit.”
“If that’s what you want to do, you should do it. New York’s not that far.”
“It’s too expensive,” Dr. Fairchild said. “And it’s not like it’s gonna make any difference. Doesn’t matter where you live. You’re always just kind of alone with your shit, you know?”
“It’s the human condition,” Eve told her.
Dr. Fairchild turned away from the wall.
“You’re as bad as my therapist,” she said, but it sounded like a compliment.
* * *
Julian Spitzer wasn’t old enough to drink legally—not even close—but none of the adults objected when he poured himself a glass of beer from the communal pitcher, and then another one after that. That was the upside of going out to a bar on a Tuesday night with a bunch of middle-aged people. You just sort of slipped in under the radar. Nobody bothered to check your fake ID or otherwise give you a second glance, especially if you happened to be sitting with the owner of the bar, which, he had to admit, was pretty fucking cool.
The downside of this situation was that he was stuck at a dump called PLAY BALL!, surrounded by people twice his age who were talking among themselves about the kind of unbelievably boring crap people that age liked to talk about—dental benefits, kale, lower back pain. He might as well have been hanging out with his parents, except that his parents never would have seated him directly in front of a pitcher of Bud Light or whatever weak-ass beer this was and then pretended not to notice while he imbibed to his heart’s content.
This wasn’t the kind of news you could ethically keep to yourself, so he snapped a pic of the half-empty pitcher and shot it off to his friend Ethan, who was having a blast at UVM.
Dude I’m getting WASTED with a bunch of old farts from my Gender and Society class! How fucked up is that?
Until he typed this message, Julian was unaware of the fact that he was in the process of getting WASTED. But once he saw the word WASTED throbbing like a prophecy inside the green text balloon, it struck him with the force of undeniable truth. Because, really, why shouldn’t he get WASTED? He’d been in college for almost two months and this was the first time he’d partied with his fellow students, or with anyone else, for that matter. It had not been a very exciting fall.
His phone pinged right away: That’s what you get for going to community college, asshole!
Dumell, one of two black guys in the class—he was the African-American, not the Nigerian—heard the chime and elbowed him in the arm.
“Message from your girlfriend?”
“One of ’em,” Julian replied.
Dumell chuckled. “How many you got?”
“Hard to keep count.”
“Listen to you, player. I bet they love it when you roll up on your skateboard.”
“What can I say?” Julian told him. “I’m a fuel-efficient lover.”
Dumell considered the metaphor.
“Guess that makes me a gas-guzzler,” he said. “Old-school Detroit. Ten miles to the gallon highway. But it’s a smooth ride, if you know what I’m saying.”
Barry, their host, pounded on the table, sparing Julian the need for further banter.
“Welcome, fellow scholars,” Barry said. “I’m glad you all could make it. And I’m especially delighted that our esteemed professor has decided to grace us with her presence. Dr. Fairchild, it’s a privilege to have you in my humble neighborhood tavern. You really class up the joint.”
Dr. Fairchild blushed and waved off the compliment as the students drank a toast in her honor. Julian made a point of clinking glasses with everyone at the table—Barry, Dumell, Russ, the professor, Eve (Brendan Fletcher’s mom, weirdly enough), the hilariously named Mr. Ho (who spoke very little English), and Gina (the chatty motorcycle dyke). Aside from Barry, who was one of those I’m-an-asshole-and-proud-of-it guys, Julian liked them all just fine, and he was even feeling okay about Barry, considering that he was picking up the tab.
Fuck you, he texted Ethan. These are my people.
*
Julian knew he was too smart for Eastern Community College. Everybody said so—his parents, his teachers, his friends, his former guidance counselor, who was a bit of a dick, but still. He had the GPA and the SATs to get into a good four-year school, and his parents had the money to pay for it, or so they said. It was just that senior year of high school had been a total bust—he’d been seriously depressed for most of it—and he hadn’t been able to complete his applications in a timely fashion.
He didn’t start feeling better until the beginning of summer—they’d adjusted his meds for the fourth or fifth time, and finally stumbled on the magic formula—and by then it was way too late to get in anywhere decent. His parents and shrink agreed that it would be wise for him to take a few classes at ECC, to get his feet wet, as they insisted on putting it. If he liked it and got good grades, he could transfer somewhere better for sophomore year, somewhere more commensurate with his abilities.
Julian hadn’t expected much from community college, and for the most part ECC had lived up to his low expectations. His Math class was a joke, way easier than high school. He regularly dozed off in Bio and still got A-pluses on the first two tests. Gender and Society was the only exception to this general rule of mediocrity. It was a wild card, a night class full of rando adults, taught by a female professor who’d been born a male and had transitioned, as she liked to say, in her late thirties, which definitely enhanced Julian’s academic experience. It was one thing to have a professor tell you that gender was socially constructed, and another to hear it from a person who had actually done construction work.
There was a lot of funky jargon in the reading assignments—cisgender and heteronormative and dysphoria and performativity and on and on—but he didn’t mind. It was one of those classes that actually made you think, in this case about stuff that was so basic it never even occurred to you to question it, all the little rules that got shoveled into your head when you were a kid and couldn’t defend yourself. Girls wear pink, boys wear blue. Boys are tough. Girls are sweet. Women are caregivers with soft bodies. Men are leaders with hard muscles. Girls get looked at. Guys do the looking. Hairy armpits. Pretty fingernails. This one can but that one can’t. The Gender Commandments were endless, once you started thinking about them, and they were enforced 24/7 by a highly motivated volunteer army of parents, neighbors, teachers, coaches, other kids, and total strangers—basically, the whole human race.
Any hot chicks? Ethan texted.
Ha ha, Julian replied.
Sad to say, it was slim pickings in Gender and Society. The only halfway hot female close to his own age was Salima, the Muslim babe, and she wore a fucking headscarf. The rest of her clothes were normal enough, and she had a cute round face, but that headscarf was black and forbidding. When they’d interviewed each other, she told him she didn’t drink, date, or dance—which explained her unfortunate but totally predictable absence at the bar—and was saving herself for marriage to a good Muslim guy. She said she was happy being a woman, except that just once she’d like to know what it felt like to punch someone in the face.
Only three ladies at the table. A dyke, Brendan Fletcher’s mom, and my professor
The tranny? Ethan texted back. Holy shit!
Julian snuck a guilty glance at Professor Fairchild, who was deep in conversation with Mrs. Fletcher. Early in the semester, he had unthinkingly used the word tranny to describe his teacher, before she’d had a chance to explain how offensive it was, and now his friends wouldn’t stop using it, no matter how many times Julian asked them not to. They insisted that tranny was just a harmless abbreviation, and called Julian a pussy for scolding them about it.
She’s a nice person, he wrote.
Hot?
They’d been over this ground before.
Not especially
Professor Fairchild wasn’t a freak or anything, far from it. She was what his mother would have called an attractive older woman. She wore tasteful conservative suits like a lady lawyer on TV, always with a colorful scarf tied around her neck. Lots of makeup and nice perfume. A little manly around the jaw, but otherwise pretty convincing.
What about Fletcher’s mom?
This was a harder question. Mrs. Fletcher actually was kind of pretty, as much as he hated to admit it. Not in a young woman way, but pretty-for-her-age, which he didn’t know exactly, beyond the obvious fact that she was old enough to be his mother. She had a nice face, maybe a little sad around the eyes, or maybe just tired. There was some gray in her hair, and she had a little belly, but she had a decent body overall. Excellent boobs, and she still looked pretty good in jeans, which was a lot more than he could say for his own mom, despite her Paleo diet and yoga addiction.
She’s okay, he texted back. Except that she gave birth to a raging asshole
* * *
The bar wasn’t all that crowded on a Tuesday night, but it was pretty noisy, with classic rock blasting in the background, songs that Eve remembered from high school—Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and “Little Pink Houses”—more than a few of which inspired Barry and Russ to trade high fives or break out their air guitars. Eve hated most of those songs—cock rock, her college friends used to call it—but the lyrics were permanently engraved in her memory, courtesy of every boyfriend she’d ever had.
Snot running down his nose! Greasy fingers smearing shabby clo-hoes!
That awful Jethro Tull song came on while Professor Fairchild told Eve about her mother’s death, which happened just a few months after Margo—they were on a first-name basis now—had completed her transition. It was one of those freak things, a stubborn cold that somehow turned into drug-resistant pneumonia. Her mother went to the emergency room, complaining of a nagging cough and shortness of breath, and twelve hours later she was on a ventilator, unable to speak, drifting in and out of consciousness. She rallied a little right before she died, just long enough to scribble a final message to the daughter who had once been a son.
You are confused, she wrote, in a weak and trembling hand. You need to wake up and smell the coffee!
“Those were her dying words.” Margo tried to smile, but couldn’t complete the mission. “Right after I told her how much I loved her. You need to wake up and smell the coffee! I’ll never forgive her for that.”
“You should try,” Eve told her. “It’s unhealthy to resent the dead.”
Margo knew this was true. “I wish I could talk to her one more time. Just to make her understand that this is me. Not that sad little boy living inside the wrong body. But she’d probably just hurt my feelings all over again. She used to say such horrible things.”
“I know how that goes,” Eve said. “I work with older people. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that comes out of their mouths.”
“Oh, I believe it,” Margo said. “But my mother was a schoolteacher. She was not an ignorant woman. She just refused to accept my experience and acknowledge my pain.”
“She loved her little boy.” It was strange how clear this was to Eve, though she’d never even met the woman. “She didn’t know how to think about you any other way.”
Margo drank the last sip of wine in her glass.
“She never really knew me. My own mother. Isn’t that terrible?”
Margo buried her face in her hands. After a moment of hesitation, Eve reached out and began rubbing the professor’s shoulder, aware as she did so that everyone else at the table was watching them with a mixture of concern and discomfort.
“Something wrong?” asked Dumell.
Eve shrugged—of course something was wrong—but Margo raised her head and told him that she was fine.
“Don’t mind me,” she said, wiping her eyes and mustering an embarrassed smile. “I just get emotional when I drink.”
“There’s only one cure for that.” Barry waved his hand, signaling to the bartender. “Yo, Ralphie! Another round for my friends.”
* * *
Russ had switched to Diet Coke, and everyone else at the table was drinking wine or hard liquor—trying to get the most bang from Barry’s buck—so Julian had the second pitcher all to himself. It was a lot of beer for one person, but he was approaching a level of intoxication where finishing it on his own seemed like a matter of personal honor. To make it official, he texted a pic to Ethan before he poured the first glass: the sweaty plastic vessel filled to the brim, his own liquid Mount Everest.
60 oz bro wish me luck!!!
“You texting or listening?” Dumell asked.
“Both,” said Julian, but he put down his phone and turned his full attention back to his real-life companion, who was telling him about Iraq, which was not a subject Julian got to hear about every day, at least not from someone who’d actually been there.
Not that it was all that exciting, apparently. Dumell said it was mostly boring as shit, due to the fact that he was an auto mechanic, not a combat soldier. He spent most of his tour sweating in a repair shop, changing oil and brake pads, replacing spark plugs and rotating tires, the same routine tasks he now performed every day at Warren Reddy Subaru in Elmville. Every once in a while, though, he got sent out in a tow truck to pick up a disabled vehicle that had been hit by an IED or an RPG.
“That’s when shit got real,” he said. “You’re driving through that desert, totally fucking exposed, just waiting for something to explode. Every pothole feels like the end of the world, know what I’m saying?”
Weirdly, Julian thought he did, though he’d never been near a war zone, and had never seen anything blow up that was bigger than a firecracker, except on a screen.
“Anything bad happen?”
“Not to me. Just did my job and came home.”
“Must’ve been a relief.”
“You would think so. But I didn’t . . . readjust too good. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hold a job. Marriage fell apart. Scared all the time. Like I was still out in the desert, driving through a minefield.”
“That sucks.”
“PTSD,” Dumell explained. “That’s what the doctors say. But it doesn’t make any sense. I was lucky. Came home in one piece. Ain’t got shit to complain about.”
Julian was intimately familiar with this line of thinking. It had played on a loop during the black hole of his senior year. My life is good. People love me. I have a promising future. So why can’t I get out of bed?
“Doesn’t matter,” he told Dumell, surprising himself with the conviction in his voice. “You feel what you fucking feel. You don’t have to apologize to anyone.”
Dumell squinted for a few seconds, as if he was trying to get Julian into focus. But after a moment, his expression softened.
“Guess you know what I’m talking about, huh?”
“Kind of,” Julian told him. “I got PTSD from high school.”
* * *
Eve stopped drinking after her second glass of the house white—a watery pinot grigio—but Margo happily accepted Barry’s offer of a third.
“What the heck,” she said. “I’m not teaching tomorrow.”
It was close to eleven, and Eve started thinking about the logistics of a graceful exit. It would have been simple, except that she felt responsible for getting Margo back to campus, where she’d left her car. She was about to broach the subject when Margo turned to her with a wistful smile.
“This is nice,” she said. “It’s just what I hoped it would be.”
“What do you mean?”
Margo gestured vaguely, sculpting a roundish object with her hands.
“Just this. Going out with a girlfriend and talking about . . . stuff.” She laughed sadly. “I always thought I’d have more women friends after I transitioned. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have friends. But not too many of them are cis women.”
“It’s hard,” Eve said. “Everybody’s so busy.”
Margo tapped a manicured fingernail on a damp cocktail napkin. “I think I watched too much Sex and the City, and read too many novels about amazing female friendships. These women who talk about everything, and help each other through the hard times. I never had friends like that when I was living as a guy.”
“My ex-husband didn’t have any friends like that, either. Men just don’t need that much from each other.”
“But you do, right? You have friends you can confide in. Talk about your love life or whatever. Share your secrets.”
“A few,” Eve said, though she hadn’t done a great job of maintaining those friendships in recent months. She hadn’t told Jane or Peggy or Liza about her porn problem, and she certainly hadn’t mentioned her crush on Amanda. The only person she could imagine confiding in about her feelings for Amanda was Amanda herself, and that wasn’t possible at the moment. They hadn’t really talked since their fateful dinner at Enzo, even though they saw each other every day at work. When they did communicate, they were both a little guarded, very proper and professional, as if neither one wanted to venture into any gray areas, or get anywhere near the other’s personal boundaries.
“You know what the problem is?” Margo said. “I missed out on the bonding periods. I didn’t grow up with a tight group of girls, didn’t have any women roommates in college, didn’t get to swap sex stories with co-workers at lunch. No Mommy and Me classes, no hanging out with a neighbor while our kids had a playdate. The only woman I could ever talk to like that was my ex-wife, and she refuses to be my girlfriend. She wants me to be happy, but she doesn’t want to go clothes shopping or hear about the cute guy I have a crush on. Can’t really blame her, I guess.”
“That’s gotta be complicated,” Eve said.
Margo nodded, but her mind was elsewhere.
“When I was a guy, I used to get so jealous when women went to the bathroom together. One of them would get up, and then her friend would get up, too. Sometimes two friends. It was like a conspiracy. And I’d be like, What’s going on in there? What kind of secrets are they telling each other?”
“Nothing too exciting,” Eve said, though she’d actually had some interesting bathroom experiences over the years. Sophomore year of high school, Heather Falchuk pulled up her shirt and showed Eve her third nipple, a little pink island at the bottom of her rib cage. Her college friend Martina, a recovering bulimic, used to have Eve accompany her to the bathroom so she wouldn’t be tempted to purge after a big meal.
“I know it’s stupid,” Margo said, running her finger over the lip of her wineglass. “It’s just one of those things I always wanted to do.”
* * *
Julian had made it through two-thirds of the pitcher when the extent of his inebriation made itself clear to him.
“Oh, shit,” he told Dumell.
“What?”
Julian’s laughter sounded hollow and faraway in his own ears. “I’m pretty fucking wasted, man.”
“I can see that. You been sucking it down pretty good.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Julian leaned toward Dumell. It felt to him like something important was happening. “I never had a black friend before. You think that makes me a racist?”
Dumell thought this over, scratching the corner of his mouth with the tip of a thumb.
“I hope you’re not driving home,” he said.
Julian shook his head and pointed to the floor.
“Got my trusty skateboard.”
“Where you live?”
“Haddington.”
“That’s five miles away.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You really commute on that thing?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
Dumell didn’t dispute this. “Is it fun?”
“Fuck yeah. You know that hill on Davis Road? Over by Wendy’s? Sometimes I’m going faster than the cars. Feel like a superhero.”
“Ever have an accident?”
“Nothing bad. If I see trouble coming, I just hop off.”
“I get that,” said Dumell. “But you can’t always see it coming, right?”
Julian picked up his glass—it was half-full—and then put it down without drinking.
“Only bad thing that ever happened, some jock assholes from my high school kidnapped me.”
“Kidnapped?”
“They threw me in their car, drove me to a park, and duct-taped me inside a Port-A-Potty.”
Dumell’s eyes got big. “You shitting me?”
“Nope.”
Julian shot a venomous glance across the table at Mrs. Fletcher, but she didn’t notice. She was too busy sucking up to the professor, who was apparently her new best friend. Mrs. Fletcher’s dickwad son had been one of the kidnappers.
“Why would they go and do that?” Dumell asked.
“Why? Because one of these jocks was being an asshole at a party, so I threw a drink in his face.”
“Crazy motherfucker,” chuckled Dumell. “How long were you stuck in there?”
Julian shrugged. It had only been a couple minutes—his house key cut right through the tape—but it felt like forever. The stench of that open toilet had been seared into his nostrils for months afterward. He could still smell it now if he tried hard enough.
“Too fucking long,” he said.
Julian shot another hateful look at Mrs. Fletcher. He wanted to say something mean, to let her know what a horrible bully she’d brought into the world, but she was standing up now, not even looking in his direction as she headed off to the rest room with Dr. Fairchild in tow.
“Damn,” said Dumell, who was watching the women walk. His voice was low and appreciative. “She looks good.”
“Which one?” asked Julian.
“Damn,” Dumell repeated in that same soft voice, which wasn’t really an answer.
* * *
With only one stall and limited standing room, the women’s rest room at PLAY BALL! wasn’t ideal for girl talk. Eve made a magnanimous after you gesture, inviting Margo to avail herself of the facilities. She checked her phone while she waited—there were no texts or emails of note—and reminded herself that it was rude to speculate about the particulars of the professor’s anatomy.
It’s not important, she thought. Gender’s a state of mind.
Margo flushed and emerged with a slightly tipsy smile on her face.
“Mission accomplished,” she announced in a singsong voice, turning sideways so Eve could slip past. “Your turn.”
Eve really did have to pee, but she was overcome with a sudden attack of shyness the moment she sat on the toilet. She had no problem going with strangers nearby, but it was harder when people she knew were within hearing range. It was all because Ted, in the early days of their relationship, had once teased her about the force of her stream.
Jesus, he said. Who turned on the faucet?
Years later, when their marriage was falling apart, Eve had mentioned this incident in a couple’s therapy session, to which they’d each brought a list of unspoken grievances. Ted had no recollection of making this comment, and was mystified that it could have bothered her for so many years. It was a dumb joke, he told her. Just let it go already. But here she was, seven years divorced, and still brooding about it.
“Eve,” said Margo. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What do you think of Dumell?”
“Dumell?” Eve repeated, trying to buy some time. The truth was, she hadn’t given a lot of thought to Dumell. They hadn’t interviewed each other yet, and he didn’t talk much in class. She didn’t even know if Dumell was his first name or his last. She mostly just thought of him as Worried Black Guy, though she’d been impressed tonight by how attentive he was being to Julian Spitzer, who looked like he was getting pretty drunk.
“Yeah,” said Margo. “Do you like him?”
“He seems nice.” Eve discovered to her relief that it was easy to pee while holding a conversation. “Kinda low-key.”
“I think he’s handsome,” Margo said. “He’s got really nice eyes.”
Eve wiped and flushed and exited the stall. She understood her role now.
“So,” she asked, washing her hands in that slightly theatrical way she adopted when other people were watching. “Do you have a crush on him?”
“Maybe.” Margo was gazing into the cloudy mirror, applying her lipstick with the concentration of a surgeon. “And by maybe I mean definitely.”
“I can’t stop thinking about him.”
“Is that allowed?” Eve inquired. “The teacher-and-student thing?”
“Who cares?” Margo scoffed. “Do you have any idea what they pay me? Anyway, we’re all adults, right?”
If they were going to swap secrets, this would have been the time for Eve to mention Amanda, to bond with Margo over their illicit crushes, but she wasn’t drunk enough to say it out loud.
“I’m just glad he’s tall,” Margo said. “I don’t think it would work with me and a short guy. I mean, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, but a lot of men get freaked out by tall women.”
“They’re such babies,” Eve said. “What doesn’t freak them out?”
Margo nodded, but without much conviction.
“I’ve never actually been with a man before,” she confessed.
“Oh,” said Eve. “Wow.”
“I liked women when I was a man. At least I tried to. But now . . . that’s not really working for me anymore. I think I’m ready to branch out.”
“Good for you.” Eve gave her an encouraging squeeze on the arm. She wanted to say, I know exactly how you feel, but once again the words stayed put.
“So what should I do?” Margo asked. “How do I seduce him?”
“Maybe you should just talk to him first. Get to know him a little.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Or you could sit on his lap and stick your tongue in his ear. That works, too.”
* * *
Something happened to Julian in the men’s room. He wasn’t exactly sober going in—nowhere near it—but he could still walk and think straight. But when he came out, he was totally fucking WASTED. It was like that whole second pitcher caught up with him in the course of a single piss.
Getting back to the table was an adventure worthy of a video game, and Dr. Fairchild seemed to have taken his seat.
“ ’Scuse me,” he told her. “No offense, but that’s my spot.”
Dumell pointed across the table. There was an empty chair next to Mrs. Fletcher.
“Why don’t you sit over there?” Dumell told him. “Spread the love.”
Dumell was giving him a badass military stare, like, Just do it, motherfucker. Julian wasn’t so hammered that he couldn’t take a hint.
“Chillax, bro.” He winked at Dumell and then gave him a thumbs-up, which he realized, even as he was doing it, was a little too much of a good thing. “I got your back.”
There was something else he wanted to say, but he couldn’t remember what it was, and the next thing he knew Mrs. Fletcher was standing next to him with her arm around his shoulders, offering to drive him home. Julian didn’t want to leave just yet, but Barry said he didn’t have a choice.
“You overdid it, kiddo. It’s time to go.”
“I’m not drunk,” Julian protested, but even he didn’t believe it.
They escorted him out to the parking lot like a criminal, Barry on one side, Mrs. Fletcher on the other. It was actually a relief to get out of the bar, to breathe some fresh air.
“I drank that whole pitcher,” he told them. “All by myself.”
“You’re a champ.” Barry helped him into the passenger seat of Mrs. Fletcher’s minivan. “You’re not gonna get sick, are you?”
“No way, Jose.”
“All right.” Barry nodded solemnly before he shut the door. “Don’t let me down.”
Mrs. Fletcher smiled at him as she slid the key into the ignition. Not a happy smile, but one of those What are we gonna do with you? smiles. It was weird being in the van with her. Like she was his mom. Or maybe even his girlfriend. Why the fuck not?
Brendan would not like that, he thought.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” she told him.
He felt okay at first, except that the world kept lurching at him through the windshield. Too many trees and headlights and storefronts. It was better to focus on Mrs. Fletcher’s face. She had a nice profile.
“You think they’re gonna hook up?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Dumell and Dr. Fairchild. I think he likes her.”
Mrs. Fletcher turned and looked at him, as if he’d said something interesting.
“Did he tell you that?”
“Kind of.”
“Well,” she said, after a brief hesitation. “It’s none of our business if they do. They’re both adults.”
Julian nodded. He liked the sound of Mrs. Fletcher’s voice. And he liked the tight shirt she was wearing, the way her boobs swelled against the buttons.
“What about us?” he said. “We gonna hook up?”
“You’re drunk,” she told him.
“You’re really pretty. Do you even know that?”
“Julian,” she said. “Let’s not do this, okay?”
“Why not?”
“I’m forty-six years old,” she told him. “You’re not even old enough to drink.”
He wanted to tell her that age didn’t matter, but something went badly wrong in his stomach, and he had to ask her to pull over.
“Right now! Please.”
She heard the urgency in his voice and swerved to the side of the road. He jumped out of the van, hand clamped over his mouth, and puked into a nearby storm drain, which was better than leaving a disgusting puddle on the sidewalk for dogs to sample in the morning.
“Oh, fuck.”
He was down on all fours, gazing through the metal grate into the dark abyss below, when he realized that Mrs. Fletcher was crouching next to him, rubbing his back in a slow circle, telling him to relax, that he’d feel better when he’d gotten the poison out of his system.
“Poor baby,” she said.
“You have great boobs,” he told her, right before he puked again.