My English teacher kissed me in January. This followed weeks of strain as we walked gingerly around Susanna’s crush. Naming it had made us feel we ruled its power and separating for the vacation had made us feel we deserved more of each other.
In our first private conversation after I returned I told Wyatt my Lincoln history, the saga of my infatuation, what a girl I’d been. Studying his minutest reaction, I inched up on the details, giving him more poetry than I had my mother.
“What I Did on My Christmas Vacation,” I said. Wyatt always laughed when I was arch, enjoyed my show. “I wanted to tell you,” I said and emphasized “you,” aching to have him know how often I thought about him. The tension was getting tighter, I knew I wasn’t crazy. He liked to make me blush, alluding to Lincoln in code during class. I scattered the names of other boys in front of him. I sat on the damp bench at the pool, watching him coach. I spent more and more time with him, rather than less, daring the crush to intensify. I followed after him, talking constantly in case silence broke our spell. Should I read more Swift? Would he let me see his dissertation? Tell me again the first lines of Don Juan. What does Shakespeare mean by “counterfeit” in act I, scene iv, of As You Like It? Here’s the extra-credit paper I wrote, just for fun, on Rosalind and the uses of “counterfeit.”
One late gray afternoon, shortly before dinner, I brushed my hair and went to his office. I tapped on the door, pushing it open. I liked what luscious appeal he must see in the doorway.
I said, “You going to dinner?” I stepped into the room, and he sprang up, yanked me against the wall and shoved the door shut.
“You’re the sexiest girl I’ve ever…,” he said. I felt sorry for his wife. He gripped my shoulders and kissed me. “Susy, Susy,” he said in a disappearing whisper.
At first I thought, “Oh my God, he shouldn’t do this, he’s the teacher. This will change everything. We’re going to get in trouble.” And then he pressed his hand against my hip, and we kissed another time and another. I let the kissing take over. How quickly that happened. By the time he opened his office door a minute later things were set. This would never not have happened, and since it had already happened it might as well keep happening, and it was going to. I matched his quick stride on the way to the dining hall, our silence an abrupt contrast to our usual way, and sexier for it. I kept an eye out, hoping we’d run into my sister, who would divine my triumph and joy.
We didn’t get much time alone, and sometimes he forced me to stay away from him, deflect attention. “Better cool it for a bit,” he’d say. But the attraction blazed between us. I felt strong and happy, had so much to write in my diary. Wyatt loved me.
A few weeks later we were driving on an invented errand. (“Just tell your dorm mother I said you have to come with me,” he’d said. “Make up a reason.” I’d told her he was taking me to the city library for independent study.)
Wyatt asked, “What sort of things turn you on?”
I laughed, but it was nerves, not delight. “I don’t know.”
“Of course you know—you think about sex. What do you think about?”
“You!” I said, loud and exaggerated. Please don’t keep talking, I wished, but he was watching the road.
“What do you think of me doing to you?” I didn’t answer, and he started to sound impatient. “I want to make you happy. I want to know what you like.”
“Yes, well…”
“Susy, how long have you been having sex?”
“Since December—one month.”
Wyatt was surprised. “So recently? Was that your first time? I thought—you act so confident, so aggressive. I was sure—I’m amazed. You appear very experienced.”
“I’ve seen a lot.”
“How did your mother react when you told her about Lincoln?”
“She was pleased for me.” I mean, that was true, but she’d been pleased by a lie. I said, “Wyatt, I’m lying.” He looked over at me. “I did spend the night with that guy in Taos…but, and—I’m still a virgin. I let my mother believe otherwise because I was sick of her asking.”
“I see,” he said. He let a long silence go by. “Why did you deceive me like that? I thought you trusted me.” Oh, God, I tumbled, grabbed.
“I was afraid you would, would—”
“Would be scared off by your virginity?” I nodded. “I’m glad you told me.” He sounded organized. “It’s important that I know before we make love. I want to make love to you, and I would like to be the one.” When he emphasized his words, he squeezed my hand. He found the turnoff he was looking for and pulled up beside a trailhead. We didn’t get out of the car. He tugged down the zipper of my jumpsuit, and the cold air hit my skin, and then he covered my breasts with his hands. One warm hand on each breast. We sat like that, my exposed skin getting colder, and I looked down at his scalp resting on my chest. It hit me: I was in it. I’d really done it, made this come true—we were together. A wretched feeling came over me, a silent gong beating. I thought it was anticipation.
In another week he took me to his house. His wife was out. As we drove in the clear, white February sun, he kept glancing at me. He reached across the seat and touched my leg. “You do have your birth control, right?” The diaphragm was already in. I’d practiced until I could insert it with a quick gesture, like buttoning a coat. How different the words birth control sounded when he said them instead of my mother. “When he says them,” I wrote, “they smolder.” I had turned in the fraudulent permission slip in order to leave school grounds.
He parked in front of his house, and we got out. I was trying to concentrate on the normal things: you get out of a car, you shut the door. The door thumped in the hollow winter air. Had anyone heard? He hurried me along the flagstones, directing me with a hand on my neck to his front door, which opened onto the huge smell of him, yet mixed with her, too, the rest of his life. He pulled the drapes shut across the picture window in the living room. My body started to shiver with eerie nerves, and I couldn’t stop. This was going to be it. In a small minute this gap of time would close, and I’d be having sex.
From a closet Wyatt pulled out a towel, which he spread on the carpet, then a sheet on top of that. “Take off your clothes.” His voice was warm, firm. He was natural with instruction. Naked, I watched him undress, this big man whose sports jacket I studied in class, stripped to skin and shoulders, pelvis, hair.
As we made love, I looked around at his living room, wondering which things he’d chosen and which had been purchased and arranged by his wife. He’d prepared me for blood, for pain. There was none. I hardly felt him, and the intercourse was brief, a bland interruption of my fantasies.
I pushed that off. Nothing mattered but the finally getting, the finally having, the me wanted by him, the me here on his floor. He came, and then he tugged at the sheet and covered us. The scent of real sex rose up with the sheet, the smell of semen mixed with spermicide, the childhood smell of coming to my mother’s bedside after a bad dream. My mother’s smell was so pronounced it was if she had climbed in between us.
“Let’s do it again,” he said. He was panting, and sweat showed beneath the hair on his chest.
“I can’t,” I said. “You can only do it one time with a diaphragm. Then I have to wait six hours and take it out, refill it and put it in again.” I’d read the pamphlet a hundred times. He gave me a look, which for years I thought was of disappointment, but one day I realized how foolish I must have sounded, and young, and how he made a decision, looking at me, to keep me that way.
I’d seen his body once already, sort of, as I walked into the echoing indoor pool after faculty swim. He was in a bathing suit, holding his towel by his side. I had made small talk. “God, I wanted to look at you,” I said months later, as we wandered over every memory. This was the inventory of our affair, all we had. “Didn’t I know it!” he said. “I felt raped.” He was smiling, teasing, and we drifted on from the word rape. I didn’t note his way of making it my engine that revved us.
In a few minutes Wyatt jumped up, again at the closet, and he produced the vacuum cleaner. As he unlaced its cord, he gestured at me to get my clothes back on. Still naked, he bundled the sheet with the towel and vacuumed thoroughly. “In case any of your hair is in the carpet,” he yelled over the motor. It finally stopped. “Go and wash up.”
After I was through in the bathroom he came in and peered at the floor, at the white porcelain of the sink’s edge. He tore off some toilet paper and wiped at the rim of the drain in the bathtub. “It wouldn’t be wet at this time of day,” he said.
When his wife came home he made dinner for the three of us. I wanted her to adore me, a reflex, the way hungry me wanted that out of everybody. I asked questions about the pottery class she taught. I wondered if it showed, the flush from sex on my skin. Would she recognize his mood as postcoital, as something that belonged to her? She asked the most regular questions about school, and I answered, feeling the ache inside my thighs, the sore back from efforts on the floor. We all joked at the headmaster’s expense.
Driving me home afterward, Wyatt said, “You can’t write about this in your diary, you know. I can’t risk any of the girls in the dorm finding it. You are in complete control of this secret. You can’t tell your sister, or your mother. If you tell, I lose my job.”
No, I wouldn’t tell. Just promise me more, I thought. More.
“Okay,” I said, pulling back from the words I had already started to gather for description. “Okay.” My words would stay unwritten. The blank page would be our cover.
Playful then, he said, “What do you write about me in your diary?”
“About what you say in class, stuff like that.” I was flirting. I wrote everything. I taped in scraps he left in my mailbox with the bits of Byron on them, but I didn’t want him to know. It seemed girlish. I’d already betrayed him. I’d written down the first kiss, the time he said, “What we need is a weekend, so we can fuck each other raw,” and when he’d said a few days later, “If we’re still together when you’re twenty-five, I’ll give you a baby.” I didn’t want to lose any of it.
“Can I read it?” he said. He knew I’d tell him yes in spite of myself. “Only two people in the whole world know about this, Susy. Anyone else is just guessing, and they can’t accuse us based on a guess.”
“Good night,” he said when I got out. “My lover.”
I walked into the common room right behind the Domino’s deliveryman, and girls were gathering around the coffee table.
“You want to chip in?” someone asked. “Hurry.”
“No, thanks. I’ve eaten.” I wanted to be alone with the full-length mirror in the bathroom. I wanted to wipe up the warm spermicidal jelly that was oozing out of me. The kids were excited about Hawaiian pizza while I had watched Wyatt sauté mushrooms in a cast-iron skillet with sliced onions and pour them over grilled steak. He had shaved the meat into thin slices, revealing its red center, and laid some on my plate, some on his wife’s, then some on his own.
In the bathroom I took off everything and stared in the mirror. Wyatt had made love to me, and his touch had changed what I looked at. My breasts were fuller, my hips relaxed. This is the mouth that he covered. These are the breasts he stroked. I had no one to tell but myself.
Lying aroused us. We pretended to run into each other in downtown bookstores, where he bought me used copies of William Blake and Elizabeth Bishop, Helen Vendler, Robert Coover, Bettelheim on dreams, lots of Byron from somebody else’s academic life. I gave him The Good Soldier, one of my mother’s favorites, and he bought another copy, so we could read aloud to each other in his office on Fridays, alternating chapters. “This is the saddest story,” he would whisper to me in the dining hall, smirking with our mutual deception. He bought me Lolita, a fat, white paperback. He thought this showed off his sense of irony, his private lecture on postmodernism. It was postmodern for him, modern Humbert, to buy Lolita for me, to watch me read it. Postmodern to call me “Su, Susy, Su. Zah. Nuh.”
“The fire of your loins,” I toasted, one naked elbow rubbing dry on his old living room rug.
“I’m going to give you the best education anyone has ever had,” he said. I believed that’s what I was getting. I knew A. N. Wilson and The Faerie Queene. We parked at campsites emptied by winter. I knew Turgenev and Swinburne. We went to motels he picked or spent snowy Saturdays on his rug while his wife attended her book club. She returned once just as I finished lacing my second boot. We hadn’t heard her car. We talked for days about the close call. He taught me the terms strophe, terza rima and anadiplosis. I knew twenty of the Shakespeare sonnets by heart. We discussed mimesis.
I started to let my mother do all the talking when she phoned. I was afraid she would catch the change in me, hear something in my voice that broadcast my adventure. I had to be careful now, even though Wyatt and I had only managed sex three times in six weeks. She was calling about spring break. Penelope had been invited to a classmate’s house, and my mother wanted to take me to Mexico.
“Just us, darling. I’m going to take us to an absolutely magical little town. You’ll love it.”
I didn’t like the idea of leaving Wyatt, felt it like a wound, but I couldn’t give that as a reason, couldn’t object to anything about the trip.
In Oaxaca we shared the hotel room, our dropped clothes and drying bathing suits in the bathroom, our single bottle of conditioner. She pulled lip gloss from her bag when she saw I needed it. I worried I’d talk in my sleep. In a way, I wanted to so that I could have some theatrical means of revealing the affair without violating Wyatt’s rules. No, she mustn’t find out. He’d get fired, I’d lose him. But what if she asked the right questions? I imagined her at night over my bed, drawing out with fairy fingers the untold and the held back, until she got the word, the name, the private sin.
“Don’t you want any?” she’d ask, the tiny spoon quivering in her fingers outside the restaurant. Coke made her shake a little. You had to stare to see it. Her palms were coated in chilly sweat.
“We’re in a foreign country,” I said. “Please, Mum.”
“Oh, pooh,” she said. “I don’t need your disapproval right now.” Why did she get to have everything out in the open? It made me furious, longing for consequences.
We traveled down the coast by plane and bus. The unpaved roads were hell on her back, and now and then she yelped with pain, but no one paid her attention. On the bus we noticed the same things—those sandals, the sad little boy, the our-lady-of-something behind the steering wheel—in the hotels we noticed the same things. We sang “The Way We Were” and “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” breaking down with laughter before the second verse. In our usual holiday habit, we never parted, and I couldn’t think about my affair.
At night she fell asleep fast, a Lethean stupor in which her face relaxed. Sitting up next to her, I read Kurt Vonnegut and Fitzgerald stories. Her lips were clenched together, and the hole in her nose gurgled when she inhaled, whistled when she exhaled. She needed to have a wall built to replace the ruined cartilage. “Like a bathtub plug,” she’d said. I could picture her worn septum, the ragged tissue. The sound nauseated me, and I hated her sleep, the way it left me so alone.
In the last town, Puerto Escondido, we ate red snapper for dinner. “Have you ever tasted anything this fresh?” she said. For breakfast we had eggs with chorizo and corn tortillas. “Café con leche,” she ordered, her Spanish overdone first thing in the morning. But she began the day, opened it for us. She apologized to me for doing so much coke and said she’d stop. She whispered about the tiny sum the waiter earned, underlining our privilege. Our money gave us celebrity—we were the rock stars, the ones the Mexicans wanted to be, she said. “That maid earns six dollars a week.” She left ten-dollar tips.
There were no museums here or shops. We planted Coke bottles in the sand to keep them cool. We propped ourselves up on our elbows and watched the surfers. We lay on our stomachs, one of us dozing, the other reading “naughty bits” aloud from some paperback. We passed the book between us. Have you ever done that? Have you ever done this? I told her about making out with Pete Spooner, how it freaked me out when he came in my hand. I tried to think of things sixteen-year-olds might say about boys. Intimate now and obsessed with Wyatt’s moves and muscles, I tried to know less than I did. I body-surfed in the shallows as she asked the teenage boys about their boards, about the best wave. Every hour or so, she pushed up from her towel with an elaborate sigh.
“I’m going inside to cool off a bit,” she said, and headed toward the exterior staircase that led up to our floor. Her heels sank in the sand, exaggerating the swing of her hips. As soon as she reached the path she straightened up and almost skipped. I lay on my back and listened to her feet. I heard the door of our room open with the key, then the screen slap shut. I could predict how long she’d be gone because I knew what she was doing exactly. I tested my accuracy, running the scene in my head to coincide with her return. She unzipped her wash bag, pulled out the sno-seal and unfolded it. She tapped the edge of the paper with a finger, herding the coke into a pile. Then she dipped in a Bic pen cap (her wash bag was filled with them but no pens). She never measured, and a hit had no specific size. She was probably up to a gram a day.
I lay on my towel, wanting to call Wyatt. I’d tell him I hated watching her think she was sly and cute. I missed him so badly. When she returned to the beach, innocence pasted on her face, I said I was going to find a phone.
“I want to call my father,” I lied. “I’ll be back for lunch.”
“You’ll be gone all that time?”
“I want to walk around.”
“It’s just fishermen and schoolchildren. Absolutely no one else.”
“I’m not looking to meet anybody.”
“Don’t get snotty with me, miss.”
“Sorry.”
I went through the town to the one store with the tin Pepsi sign over the door. Its colors were gone. I placed a collect call from the pay phone, Wyatt’s extremely memorized phone number a happiness in itself. The phone in his house rang, my presence manifested in a bell, a vibration. No one answered. I followed the street back to the hotel, feeding my craving for Wyatt with an imaginary conversation. I returned to our spot on the beach, where my mother had left our book and my towel.
That night we remained at our table after dinner. No matter how angry I could get, how fed up, how smug with knowing better, she was still mine, as intimate and regular to me as my own fingernails or throat clearing, and my irritation washed away. We pushed our chairs back and walked past little fires on the beach until the few lights of the hotel were behind the bend of the coast.
“The men will get up early and fish,” she said. “And their snapper will be our dinner tomorrow.” We held hands. We never walked together without touching, arms linked, shoulders bumping or fingers entwined. Her mouth was always close enough to my head to whisper. I inhaled the warm and the dark from the ocean.
“Good night, sea, good night, sky,” she said. “Go on, Sue.” My grandmother Patsy had started this with me when I was three.
“Good night, sand. Good night, shells,” I said. “Good night, snapper we’re going to eat tomorrow.”
We ambled back and climbed the stairs to our room. I flopped onto our double bed, my mother’s voice endless—about money, men, her sister, her mother. She was worried about Penelope’s marks, what did I think, was boarding school the right place for her, would I help her study? The fan picked up speed when she flipped the switch, a chill over my acute sunburn. She asked about my call to my father as she took off her choker of amber beads.
“I never got him.”
“Isn’t that odd?” she said. “I thought he didn’t go out. That it made him too tired. Shouldn’t someone have been there to answer?” She was right. Confined to his wheelchair with the MS, my father needed Isabel’s constant care and a live-in nurse. I’d forgotten to follow through on the lie, to build up its walls.
“He goes out,” I said. “Sometimes I take him to the park.”
“Often? You need moisturizer.”
“Maybe once a week. If the weather is good. The last time, I pushed his chair up to a bench in the shade, and we watched all the dogs.” This made me smile, thinking of the tentative start of intimacy with my father, new terms, a relationship between adults, and the creases around my smile stung with sunburn. “He’s going to get a new chair he can control with his breath.”
“Fascinating.”
She lay down, and we faced each other, lying on our sides.
“Actually, it’s nice, you know,” I said. After long periods of no contact with him, I’d worked hard to get to know him again. His MS had eased up, even after he’d been predicted to die. I loved my stepmother. “Isabel’s made it a lot easier to be with him these days. He’s been telling me about his youth.”
My mother snorted. “I was his youth.”
“No, before that. Before he met you.”
“What, when he was with Irene? And does he say horrible things about me?”
“No. The subject hardly comes up.”
“The subject?” Something spiked in her voice, and I felt careful. “You make me sound like homework.”
“I just meant not lately. Lately, we talk about when he lived in Europe. I didn’t know he lived in Germany.”
“He was so happy when you were born. He came to the hospital to take me home, and he arrived with a Victorian pram filled, completely filled, with lilies of the valley. He wanted you to remember their scent forever. He was so happy.”
“I do remember the smell.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve heard the story, you’ve learned to associate it with the flower. You couldn’t actually remember.”
“I remember every birthday present he gave me.” I started to list them—the antique rocker, the collected Dickens—and my mother rolled onto her back and looked at her arms.
“I’m already peeling.”
“When you were in Payne Whitney he gave me a book about—”
“What does that mean? What the fuck does that mean?” She sat up and stared at me. “Payne Whitney, Payne Whitney, how long till I live that down?” She grabbed my ankle and twisted the sun-burnt skin, yanking as she talked. “And who do you think got him to show up? I had to call him. He wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. He didn’t give a shit about you two. I had to organize everything. And you’re so bloody grateful for his fucking present?”
I pulled my leg away. I picked up a hairbrush, turned it over and over, and said softly, “At least the drugs he takes are medicine.”
“Bitch. Look at me when you speak to me, you little. Melodramatic. Bitch. Are we going to talk again about poor Susy’s childhood because her mother did drugs? Jesus, get over it. I suppose you’re about to tell me he’s the better fucking parent?” She grabbed the brush from my hand and smashed it against the bedside table. The noise was tremendous, everything suddenly crashing and screaming. “You think he’s such hot shit? Where was he at your eighth-grade graduation? Where was he when I moved to Taos? He didn’t even protest. Some parent! Some parent who makes fun of what you read and makes you feel stupid for the boarding school you pick. Let me tell you something: Who do you think gave me my first coke, my mother?”
It was too tempting, almost a gift. I said, “That seems to be the family tradition.” I wanted to be icy, instead of scared. Even as I tried to think what it would take to calm her down, I let a little dangerous rage seep out. She wrenched my arm, which burned under her grip. She jerked up my chin. Her breath was metallic and rank with the synthetic in the coke.
She screamed, “Get the fuck out of here and go to your daddy, you little bitch,” and I jammed myself against the wicker head-board, sizing up the distance to the bathroom, the closet, the front door. She looked like she’d hit me, and I could feel my body getting ready for it, ready to curl around her fist. Hit me, I dare you! I thought. I was angry—that I didn’t have Wyatt to protect me, that I couldn’t talk about him or call him; I was mad I’d come on the trip, fallen for it, and mad at all the things I’d done wrong. I was afraid that she’d use this—Susy loves Nat!—that she’d assign me some label and everyone in the family would think I was this way. The way Susy is. She bunched up my T-shirt in a fistful and dragged me off the bed and over to the door.
“GET OUT, GET OUT, YOU LOUSY LITTLE BITCH, YOU UNGRATEFUL CUNT!”
I didn’t believe in the proportions of the fight, so frenzied, so fast. I wanted to smile. I wanted to skip to the part where we’d be together on the bed, taking apart the scene as if we’d watched it in a TV movie. She hurled open the door, pushed me onto the narrow landing, and I grabbed for the banister. She wouldn’t actually shut the door, no. But she did, and I descended the stairs, looking back a couple of times. I looked up when I’d reached the bottom, the closed door and her raging voice. I went toward the water, and the sand made me stagger and slow down. I could hear her screaming until I got close to the waves.
I wanted something to happen to her. Something to happen to me. Make her sorry. Make her scared. I walked up the beach a ways, then turned up a pitted alley and emerged on the town’s one street. In the mornings chickens and bicycles and dogs picked their way around the ruts in the road, but now every window was shuttered, chairs abandoned, laundry pulled in. There wasn’t even a bar for the solace of gathered voices.
“What, no sister?” said a man, an English accent coming out of the dark. We had met him the day before. He’d veered off his course on the beach to talk to us, and we pretended to be sisters. In the sun he was charming and older and carefree, his white shirt open. He told us he lived here, and it was a sexy eccentricity. At night, though, when he came up to me in his unbuttoned shirt and landed his hands on my shoulders, he seemed broken and much too old. His hands moved to my collarbones, and I thought he was hiding out in an empty town. He pointed across the road at a balcony. “Mine,” he said. “Want to see?” I went, curious what I could make happen.
His apartment was almost bare and smelled of faint mildew. He turned on the lamp near his pillow, which showed books and newspapers piled beside the bed, a single glass on his table. He opened the skinny balcony doors for me, and I stepped out for the better air, but I couldn’t see the ocean or anything else. He moved up behind me and circled his hands around my waist, pressing my pelvis into the iron rail. I didn’t want to be there, but I was there, still intrigued in spite of myself about my power over him. I faced him, looked past at the old table fan. He tried to kiss me.
“I should go, I think.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He kept his hands on my waist, as if he were about to lift me. I thought I was probably stronger than he was. “Do you like tequila?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Wait just a minute.” He let go of me and went over to the sink, where he ran a dishcloth under the tap. He came back and sponged off the back of my neck.
“Does that feel good?” Grains of sand dragged against my sunburn.
“No.”
He led me over to the bed, where I lay down, my shoulder blades aware of the single sheet and the thin pallet. He put his knee between my legs, hovering over me. His kiss was weary and stank of beer.
“I’ve got to get back,” I said, getting up. I could have sex with him, I saw that. He’d be Number Two. I’d lost my virginity to Wyatt two months earlier, and already I could have number two. I thought about the trappings of this story, how it could be told once I got back to my mother. I liked the edge in it, the dangerous window of risk and bad idea.
But this was a mistake, his small, tatty room, his dirty glass and the T-shirt hanging over the back of his chair. I wanted to get out.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I should walk you down,” he said. “Otherwise people will think I’ve paid for you.”
“But I don’t look like a hooker.”
“It doesn’t matter what you look like,” he said. “But whom you are with.”
I was glad to be out in the open. We went down the stairs, me first, and he sang in Spanish, which I didn’t understand. I felt he’d probably been drunk all day and was stupid because of it, and that I didn’t matter to him anyway, the way stoned people ignored everything.
When I came back to the hotel room, my mother was asleep, making her noises. I pulled my T-shirt over my tender shoulders, rubbed on some lotion and got into my side of the bed. The sheet was almost too much to stand on the sunburn.
In the morning she wouldn’t look at me. I waited my turn while she was in the shower, and I came out of the bathroom to find she’d already gone down to breakfast. When she left the open-air dining room, I went in and ate. We spent the next three days like that. She didn’t ask me where I went, and maybe that’s why I can’t remember what I did with my time except go off to another beach, away from her, my halfhearted daily pursuit of adventure. But I remember her three days, the hour she woke each day and the muslin shirt she wore over the bikini top she tied in a bow at the nape of her neck.
Whenever Mexico came up, my mother remembered “that divine older man who was very interested in you.” Our broken time didn’t exist, our fight erased. My suggestion of it made her nod as she would at the radio, heedless, indifferent. The three days in which she didn’t see her sixteen-year-old daughter in a southern Mexico town cobbled of barbed wire and dog shit and public showers—“That’s absurd.” Our trip to Mexico: We walked around the plazas in Oaxaca, she fed me my first forkful of mole. She remembered the bright taste of lime in our beer. She reminded me about her pain, that constant, the bus ride that hurt her back for the last hours into that southern town, close enough to Guatemala that soldiers were a possibility, and wouldn’t that have been thrilling, to see soldiers?
If she knew, I thought, his wife would hate me. But she didn’t know, and I came often to her house, settled into their couch against her afghan, leaving my stray hairs on the corduroy upholstery. She cut up cheddar and set the butcher-block board in front of us all on the small chest they used for a coffee table. They drank wine, and she made ginger tea for me, or black currant, sweet and vaporous. I let it get cold, watching that wineglass in her hand. I didn’t want tea. I wanted her to go, to be called off to answer the phone, to decide to go downstairs and fold laundry, and she always did eventually because our united wish was so forceful in compelling her from the room. Before she reached the bottom landing, Wyatt crossed with a quick, silent tread and got near enough for our knees to touch. He stood over me, cupping his hand beneath the chunky glass goblet. He gave me the deep gaze, the beseeching hungry need. “You’ve changed me,” he whispered. “You own me.” My body was bristling for any sound from the stairs, any drag of carpet to say she was coming back to us. When we’d been too quiet too many minutes, he would talk in a bright, gamey voice about my dorm’s old plumbing or the fate of the swim team or the rehearsals for As You Like It. I was starring in it, and I was really good, getting private tutorials from Wyatt on Renaissance history, the Elizabethan court, the tradition of trouser roles, the complex meaning of archaic English. Knowledge was power.
“My Rosalind,” he whispered, so inaudible only the initial parting of his lips for “My” made sound, his tongue lingering on the l. It turned me on, and I spread my knees a bit. I had two desires—to draw him closer, and to give him what he wanted to see. I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. Wyatt stepped away, a stern look to forbid the behavior, and I felt wounded. I waited until he took me home and we were in the car, belted and driving down the grade of his little mountain. Then I put his hand between my legs.
What did grown-ups say to each other? How did they make things work? I was dying to ask him what his wife said about me. Didn’t she wonder why he drove me forty-five minutes there, taking an hour and a half away from home on a Friday night? I felt superior to her because of what I knew.
Wyatt said they had a good marriage. The years they had amassed, four times anything my parents had yet managed, spoke to me of real marriage. The duration must mean an effort on both their parts, real love. It didn’t occur to me his dedicated interest in his sixteen-year-old student meant something else about marriage, something he wasn’t letting me in on that was also important. I came as the welcome daughter, the friendly pet.
As a couple they would sometimes take me to the movies, Wyatt between us. He held his wife’s hand in his lap, and his other, unseen fingers applied warm pressure to the thigh of my jeans. During class, I sat in the first row and mouthed dirty things to him the other kids couldn’t see while he tried to map out Blake’s debt to Dante on the blackboard. “God, we shouldn’t do this,” he always said after class. “What have you done to me?”
His wife told him she was concerned about our relationship. He said yes, I do have strong feelings for Susy, but nothing inappropriate has happened. I think you should back off, she said. He said, Actually, I’m in love with her, and though I’ve done nothing about it, I cannot guarantee that at some date further on I won’t want to act on those feelings.
I was so scared as Wyatt reported this to me, and astonished and baffled. I was so scared when he told me she wanted to talk to me. Adulthood was rushing at me.
The next time I came over, she and I sat at the kitchen table. Wyatt went out to the garage, another of his studies, overrun by more books.
“We both care about him a lot, don’t we?” she said. She took a comforting tone with me, a therapist’s tone. She put her hand on my sleeve. “I’ve talked everything over with Wyatt,” she said. “And it’s all fine. I don’t want to get in the way of your relationship with Wyatt. Whatever I feel or other people feel—it’s our problem.”
“Thank you,” I said, recognizing Wyatt’s logic. I felt solemn. She was kind to me. They both were. “Other people I don’t care about. You I care about.”
“I know, and that’s what makes you so special.”
Special.
Wyatt planned to play opera for me that evening. He called me upstairs, and his wife stayed in the kitchen. He stood by the stereo, inspecting one side of an LP.
“Beethoven’s only opera,” he said. “Sit down and let me teach you about Fidelio.” He explained Florestan’s woe, imprisoned, longing for his lover, the way the music built its ecstasy, the heat it gathered. “Here, now listen, here’s the climax.” With Florestan’s feverish “Mein engel, Leonoren,” Wyatt mumbled, “Oh, God,” and burst across the room to me (how many times we treaded the same lines, scenes replayed because we couldn’t move forward). The kiss was rough, a performance to the Beethoven, and I was embarrassed for him. I didn’t like him this way and was frightened his wife would come upstairs. In the final “freiheits” Wyatt worked his pelvis against me and put his mouth to my ear. “Mein engel,” he whispered. “I’m going to lend this to you. I want you to listen to it in your room and think of my cock when you hear ‘freiheit.’ Mein engel.”
My mother could say “cock” with aplomb, even grace. She could make it funny or poetic. But Wyatt sounded like he’d only read it. I had given him the nerve to speak it, I knew. But he didn’t know how to handle such a word, and I wished I could tell my mother of his rare awkward moment.
My mother phoned him at home one evening. I happened to be there. He adopted his manicured voice of classroom experience, smoothly, swiftly getting through the call. We laced our fingers in scheming knots as I pressed my head to his, ear to the receiver. I could hear her vocal darting, her efforts to get him closer, friendlier. “Surely you’ve noticed her crush has gotten out of hand, haven’t you?” She was too late. My mother—able to see through restaurant walls into the bathrooms, able to divine a police officer’s family history—didn’t know about us! She would never, never know what I knew about Wyatt. “What are his hands like?” she’d say to me, hearing of a Scott, Brian, Kevin. I made stuff up, and she couldn’t tell!
I wanted to tell her I’d lost my virginity, a desire as keen as longing for her hug. I wanted to talk it to pieces, benefit from her approval and experience, or let Penelope in on it, with the promise not to breathe a word to Mummy; or even just tell one other girl, Jane, upstairs. But Wyatt had made me promise that I understood what a professional secret was, its fuel, its land mine, its radiating force. “If you’re as mature as I think you are,” he said, “you won’t disappoint me.” I swore to him I was equipped for it.
When he told me he couldn’t help it, that he would not help it, I believed him. “You have more power over me than anyone in the world,” he told me. It made me smug, and I believed him. “You are the smartest student ever to understand me,” he said, and I believed him. “You,” he said, and I believed him. After the others had cleared out of the classroom with their binders and soccer shoes and clatter of zippers and snaps, I’d come around to his side of the desk and let him brush his arm against my breast as I leaned over to inspect some open page of the Norton anthology. I wrote in the diary how the spot he brushed burned hot under my shirt for hours. Behind the dangerously ajar office door, we pressed into each other up against the filing cabinets. We stood behind his car, our heads visible and nodding, practicing a false animation, while our hands touched with naughty selfishness. We laughed at the word boyfriend, and I used it for the boys in clumps around the campus, the slouched lazy profiles, skateboards and Walkmen, jackets carelessly open in the coldest weather. Stupid. We grew pompous and sloppy. We walked everywhere together, and still no one stopped us.
Wyatt concocted a “Mind of the South” trip to New Orleans for the mini-term, Twain, Tennessee Williams, etc. Some of my friends were going scuba diving in Baja. Some kids were learning printmaking, that sort of thing. We sat together on the airplane, observing each other at the everyday beyond the campus edge, the boundaries of our circumstance. The other teacher supervised the rest of the kids.
The first morning Wyatt announced, “Those who wish to visit the French Quarter, sign up with Mr. Ulrich. Those of you interested in Walker Percy will go with me.” We went to his hotel room and made love, then lay awhile on the bed, no hurry. He ran his hand over my hip and said, “‘This was not counterfeit! There is too great testimony in your complexion that it was a passion of earnest.’” He could quote Shakespeare in any situation. We went out and found curious things to eat, grinned at what we knew was a stunning deceit. No one knew us here, except that one group sent miles away, and he grabbed me in the street in a way he never could, kissing the breath out of me.
I was asleep in my dorm room on a Saturday morning, a bright morning, which I knew through my eyelids because I hated to close the curtains on my small single. The window looked out across the campus and monitored the driveway that fed from the town so that I could know the instant Wyatt’s yellow car got to school. I typed my papers for his class, sitting by this window, waiting for yellow. When he was late, I couldn’t stop checking. This morning he’d be in the dining hall at breakfast, a time of day I never got to see him, when he was usually at home eating his married breakfast, however that went. He had campus duty this weekend, and he’d be here all day, where I lived, signing permission slips, unlocking the gym, organizing bleacher cleanup. After dinner hours he was going to drive a vanful of kids to the movies. He’d already asked me what I wanted to see.
Someone was knocking, I was turning over, and there was Wyatt opening my door. I looked at the tower of his body as he grinned with one foot over the threshold. I wasn’t supposed to have boys in my room ever. He knew that.
“Good morning,” he said in the tone that sounded like “I want to fuck you.”
I sat up under my covers. He was seeing me in my bed, as close to domestic congress as we’d come.
“Give me your diary,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ll keep it safe for you, at my house, while she’s here.”
My mother was coming later in the week for a parent day.
“She won’t read my diary,” I said. He gave me an are-you-crazy look. “I’ll hide it,” I said.
“She’ll find it.” Then he said, “You’ll show her.”
No. No, no. He had been schooling me in secrets, how to treat them right, where to keep them, why to hide them. “You can’t be careless, Susy.” For three months I had told nobody about the affair, an intolerable hardship. I was in love, we were lovers! He wanted to know everything about me! Wyatt had told me to join the Disciplinary Committee, become ethically unimpeachable, an arbiter of behavior. He suggested I apply for a senior proctor position. “You’ll be able to come and go as you please. Proctors can have cars. We can meet whenever we want.” Responsibility, he taught me, granted immunity.
I got out of my twin bed and pulled the diary out from beneath a pile on my desk while he watched. He took it from my hand, letting his knuckles slide against a nipple, the sort of gesture we’d perfected. He pushed my book inside his briefcase. “I’ll keep it in the garage,” he said. “After she’s gone, I’ll give it back to you.”
“I have the problem of my wife. I’m married, Susy. You don’t have that problem,” he said, but I was entitled to that problem, too. She was in my way when she answered the phone, in the way, maddening, when she canceled the visit to her sister because her sister was sick.
He had a study at home, a boxy office with a plywood door, teetering columns of books, unkempt stacks. The room seemed squashed by the weight of the rest of the upside-down house, the upstairs with its aging stereo, glass vases, small oil landscapes, front door, pressing down upon the office, upon the narrow, windowed bedroom, where I spent that whole weekend (finally, her trip to the sister), using my friend at Colorado College to write me a false letter of invitation. “All right, you can tell her, only her,” he said. “We need her.” Later he wanted us to have lunch with her so he could thank her. We’d act out some version of the couple we might have been.
“Why don’t you stay naked the whole weekend?” he said. I didn’t mind, and that felt precocious, the not minding. I went from room to room, opened their cabinets, carried things up and down the stairs. We had sex over and over again, racking up a record, until I was desperately sore, unfuckable. I didn’t come, didn’t bother to miss it, and Wyatt never asked. I brought glasses of wine up to the living room so we could lie on the floor and listen to Lucia di Lammermoor and La Cenerentola. In his bedroom, more books reached up to the ceiling. There was room for almost nothing else. Her pale yellow plastic bottle of moisturizer sat on the dresser, its scent an intimacy beyond my comprehension, and I didn’t want it in my nose. I followed after him, taking breathfuls of the breeze he trailed, his aging sports jackets, sunburned arms, chalk dust on his collar and between the grooves of skin on the pads of his thumbs. The rooms had the yellow smell of old books, damp books, books crammed into dark, small spaces. The smell of paper was everywhere, what could go up in smoke at any time. Something was not right in that house. At the time I assumed it was me.
It had been almost a year. I was a senior. In some ways Wyatt and I were a real couple—we had our habits, in jokes, little fights. We had routines, a habit of innuendo and of postponing what we wanted, greedy consumption of it in the rare motel room. He had started to bring roast beef sandwiches, grapes in a bag, bottles of apple juice. The meat and bread were thick in our teeth after we made love. We ate naked on top of the bleachy motel sheets. We had poems and quotations that were ours. Exempt from the truth, we had started to think of ourselves as exempt from every obligation or requirement, and I often returned to campus past curfew. And he was right about proctors—I was left alone.
One evening Wyatt pulled me aside at the salad bar and asked me to come to his classroom. “I’ll be grading,” he said. “Come see me.” I defended myself to suspicious friends, those constant evenings. “It’s extra help,” I said if they noticed. I’d pretend to be anxious about my college applications, which, Wyatt assured me, would stand out because of his letter about me. He let me read it. “Never in the history of my professional life as an educator…”
I was supposed to look nonchalant as I walked over to his office. I always wanted to run. So what if I did?
“Sit down, Susy,” he said. I pulled a chair across the linoleum, closer to his desk.
He stood before me, leaning back and clutching the desk’s wooden edge, his large pale hands whitened at the knuckles. “My wife knows about you.”
“I know. You told her we were in love.”
“Not that. She knows we’re lovers.” My guilty, nasty success and my body and the taste of his saliva.
“How?”
“I just had to tell her. I’ve had a hell of a weekend, the longest weekend of my life. We hardly slept at all.”
I should have been thinking about him, but I was thinking of her. Now she and I were a pair, a team, sharing the same lifting of the hips beneath him, and his heavy sleep, and the moment when we slid our palms over his shoulders and felt the raised freckles. Now we both knew we shared.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to put my arms around him, but the classroom window faced the darkened campus, our scene spotlit.
“So now she knows.”
“What are you going to do?” I was scared this meant the end, the closely held secret over, the smoke dissipated.
“I told her if she made me give you up I’d leave.”
“Oh. Okay.” Did this mean I was safe? I had no idea what it meant. He liked being married.
“We’ll have to see what she says.”
“When?”
“She’s taking some time to think about it.”
“Is she coming in tomorrow?”
“I think so. She has students.”
I had pottery with her. There were just a few of us, and I liked her as a teacher. I could split her into two people. She was patient, described things well. It wouldn’t be hard to see her, our Tuesday routine, in our smocks, the pegs where we all hung them.
What about the roast beef and the grapes, would we still have that? Now we could go to a restaurant.
“Don’t worry,” he said, sending me off to my dorm. “I won’t let anything take you from me.”
I thought, Now I know how animals feel. Threatened, fierce, terrified. I didn’t know where to put these emotions. Wyatt seemed concerned with something else, and the idea of Mrs. Crawford kept asserting itself, the awful humiliation. I was not equipped for exposure.
I was roused at midnight by the girl whose room faced the phone booth. She came to my door and knocked, repeating “Phone,” until I got out of bed. I tucked into the wooden cubby and lifted the receiver.
“Darling?” my mother said, her coo and whisper. She muffled something. I was brought awake with an uncomfortable knock in my heart.
“What happened?” I said.
“Darling? Don’t worry. But I just got raped.” Quickly, she said, “I’m okay, I’m okay. I don’t want Penelope to know.”
“You were raped?” She was visiting New York for a week.
“Oh, I don’t want to tell you how, it would really scare you.” She sounded like she might be giggling, or hiccupping. I couldn’t tell, something slipping away, kept back from the call. I felt the panic of great geographical distance. Why wasn’t she worse? Did she need help, police? Did she want me?
“I’m in shock,” she said lightly. It was her cabdriver. She wouldn’t tell me more, and she asked me questions about rehearsals and my grades, which I couldn’t answer, except for “Fine.” When she said her sweet, drifty good-night, I dialed Wyatt’s house. Well, if his wife knows, she knows. At least I can call if I need him now. Wyatt answered as if he was thinking about me, expecting me, and I told him about my mother. It was a relief for the drama to be about something besides our situation. I wasn’t calling as his lover, but as his advisee.
“Get some sleep, Susy,” Wyatt said. “Call her in the morning. Then let me know how she is.”
Before breakfast I called her, a sour hole in my stomach, and my mother was hearty and had to be reminded why I was concerned.
“Oh, that,” she said, as if the rape had happened months earlier.
“Did you get the medallion number?”
“Why would I?”
“Wasn’t it the cabdriver?”
“The cabdriver? It was some creep waiting in the foyer. He waited until the cab drove off.”
As I returned to my dorm to pick up my books after breakfast Wyatt’s wife was parking in the lot near the path. I was too near to change direction. She lifted a block of plastic-wrapped clay out of the passenger seat.
“Hi,” I said. I had to talk to her. I had to see what had changed.
“Please, Susanna.” She looked straight ahead, over my shoulder. “You’ve been fucking my husband.”
I was surprised to hear her say “fucking.” It wasn’t welcome on our little campus, not from a teacher. It shut me up.
“Let’s just not. Let’s not do this.” She hoisted the clay higher in her arms and stepped past me. She didn’t slow or indicate I should follow, but she called back, “Sorry about your mother.” This gave me a small satisfaction: they did talk about my problems. I watched her moving off toward the art building, her square-toed suede shoes and the leather handbag strap and her high-necked blouse. She wore the camel-colored spring coat that I had pushed past so many times in the winter, when I hung my parka in her front closet.
I had to tell someone. I ran into my dorm-mate Jane as she left the bathroom.
“Come in, Jane, come into my room. Close the door. I need to tell you something, but you have to promise, you have to swear, do you swear? I’ve been having an affair with Dr. Crawford.” Words in air, words aloud. Words.
“You’re having an affair? When did it start?”
“Ages ago. You know how I had that crush on him my first semester? We couldn’t help it. He’s in love with me. I was a virgin, I mean, I lost my virginity to him, and we’re in love. His wife knows. It’s like a Shakespearean comedy! But I can handle it. I can.”
Jane shook her head. “Be careful.” She had no appetite for my secret. I wanted her to beg for details. God, how I wanted to recount our every move and trick. “This can go really wrong,” she said with unexpected weight. “You have to watch out.”
But what should I watch out for? How could it be worse? Wasn’t this the worst of it, the wife finding out, the flaming, tantrumming center of recklessness and rule breaking, the violation of rules and contracts? And I was fine.
“Do you think I’d get kicked out?” I said.
“You won’t be kicked out,” Jane said. “He’s the one who should go.”
I had a physical urge to throw my body in front of him, and I knew I mustn’t tell anyone else. “Wyatt said they would never fire him. He’s the only PhD on the faculty. Don’t tell, okay?” I said as she left.
At the end of the week Wyatt told me, “She’s decided I may continue our affair.” Maybe she did tell him that, I have no idea, and I had every reason then to go along with his report. I brought my college applications over to their house on Saturdays and spread them over the living room floor, a stapler next to me, checklists. She made tea and read the newspaper at the kitchen table. He wore rag wool socks, which I avoided seeing, this one detail, finally, too much of who they were when I wasn’t around.
Wyatt almost convinced me to go to college in Colorado Springs, to stay. Almost. He gave me the brochures, producing them from his briefcase after American Lit. “I drove in and picked these up for you.” In the course guides, he’d circled the classes he thought I should take. “You can live in an apartment downtown,” he said. “And I can visit you Thursday afternoons.”
It was that “Thursday” that made me choose Boston. I loved him, but I meant to grow up. I wouldn’t even stay the summer and went to France with Katy from my old school, shrugging off his grip. “Do you know what you’re doing to us?” he said.
During my first college semester, Wyatt called all the time, quizzing me on my course syllabi. He asked where my professors had gone to university and ridiculed them and scolded me for not writing him more often. I started going out with Jason, and we had sex between classes and in the basement of the library, in my car. Good, fun sex, talking-dirty sex, the opposite of on purpose. His body startled me, not wide and deliberate but tight, lean, quick, hard all the time, wanting me to come and making me come. Gleeful and obscene, we wanted to be loud in his dorm room, and afterward I would dart out in his towel to use the bathroom, flirt with the other boys I ran into in the hall before shutting Jason’s door again, more sex. I was supposed to meet Wyatt in Colorado Springs for a secret weekend, but I canceled it, lying, and he knew I was lying, and I didn’t care. He could hear me slipping off to a new life, nothing to do with him, and it infuriated him. He kept me on the phone at night—how I’d undone him, sacrificed him and jeopardized his very marriage for my selfish wishes, my craven need to feel special—until I stopped answering.
When the affair ended for good, after Wyatt’s last harsh words and nasty blame, I decided to tell my mother. I regretted the barrier I had put between us to protect Wyatt. My mother liked that I was having so much sex with Jason, which gave us a lot to talk about—techniques, preferences, cocks, UTIs. But this! The affair! I would really impress her. The broken rules and flaunted drama. The day I told her, we stayed on the phone for two hours as she asked me insistent questions. How did it start? Did the wife ever know? Where did you do it? Was he a good lover? But I thought you told me all about the night you lost your virginity? Oh, you sneaky girl! Did Penelope know? Who ended it? What did you say?
I answered, letting relief spill out, letting her see my history’s many angles. Her questions had warmth in them. We laughed at the ruses and close calls. She cried for me. “Oh, poor darling,” she said. “If I’d known, I would have killed him.” She said she thought she’d sue the school, and I felt alarm. “Do you want him to do this to someone else, Sue? Because he will. He probably already is.” Vanity flamed up in me.
“Well…,” I said.
Then she changed her mind. “I could never put you through that. You’d have to testify, you know.” We said good-bye and hung up.
Five minutes later, not more than ten, she called back. Her mood was unhinged, a mask dropped.
“You’re making it up,” she said. “I don’t believe you.”
I tried to object, and she cut me off, her voice a seething crack. “You learned how to lie from me, and now you think you can lie to me, and I won’t know?” She spoke with incredulous contempt. “This never happened. You just wanted it so badly, you wanted some drama. How pathetic.”
She hung up, the air gone still with the abrupt absence of her voice. You’re making it up. You’re making it up. I sat rattled and blinking on the edge of my bed, which felt like the world’s edge. Had I made it up? I got down on the linoleum, reached under the bed and pulled out the box. I had every piece of paper, every letter of his, copied-down poems, directions, scraps torn out of notebooks, napkins from New Orleans, the Leontyne Price, the photo my mother arranged of the two of us at my graduation, snapped just a few months ago. She’d been standing right there, documenting the affair. I’d been so worried that it showed, as if she’d see his handprints obvious beneath my dress. On my shelf I had the books he’d presented to me, poetry and theory mostly, inscribed with his tight, controlled hand, quoting Shakespeare and Ford Madox Ford. He had used codes, the inscriptions private yet also innocuous.
I sat on the floor and sifted through the entirety of our affair. Other than my diaries, it was just poems, sonnets, comments in the margins of English papers. Wyatt had covered his tracks, although he hadn’t resisted one explicitly pornographic letter. He had sent it to American Express in Paris. I’d read it once, sitting on a hotel bed, feeling sick and not ready. What if I showed her that? Would she believe that? Even with my meticulous diary pages open before me, I felt crazy, unnerved, as if my life had vanished. My eyes moved over words, but my mother could rewrite anything.