7

Diana could not believe that she had allowed this to happen. She sat in the car wondering how to stop it. Lida was driving too fast and it frightened her. She held onto the bar on the dashboard.

“What will you do with the kids when you’re in Vermont?” Lida asked it angrily.

“It’s not Vermont. It’s New Hampshire.”

“I thought you said Bennington.”

“I said near Bennington.”

“Oh.” Lida turned into the shopping center. “I need cigarettes,” she explained.

All the while Lida was in the drugstore, Diana sat frozen. She wished for the courage to walk away from the car. But she knew she would not. She surveyed the women who walked along the mall, noting their legs, mostly.

In the late-summer sun, most of them wore shorts. Not too short, of course, but short enough to demonstrate that the exercise of bearing children was not sufficient. There were knotted blue-veined thighs, fat-drappled thighs, thighs with silvery stretch marks.

Lida returned, tearing the cellophane from the package.

“Do you know, Lida,” she said, “that I’m eight years older than you are?”

“You told me. So?”

“What I mean is, my kids think of me as old. I don’t think they think of you as old.”

“They should see my tits sag.”

“I’m hoping”—Diana laughed—“that moment can be postponed indefinitely.”

“You haven’t told me where your kids will be while you’re off giving your paper. New Hampshire.” Lida started the engine and threw the car into reverse.

“Bill’s agreed to take them.” Bill was her ex-husband. He lived in Virginia.

“Why can’t Bill agree to take them so you can spend time at home with what’s-his-face?” It was a fair question. “Don’t answer that,” Lida said, “I already know.”

They turned into the housing development and Lida squinted at the street sign. “Relax,” she said, “we may never find it.”

It was a more depressing tract than most, with wan little homes that the real-estate ads described as “ramblers.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lida said, “he’s not even lower-middle-class.”

“I knew you’d make fun of him.”

It was the sort of neighborhood where women hung their wash and sullenly compared it to that of their neighbors. Backyards enclosed in Cyclone fences. An occasional motorboat perched on a trailer.

“God,” Diana said, “I hope no one’s home.”

“He’s probably paneling the basement,” Lida comforted.

“I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”

“Hey! I couldn’t have found this place without you!”

It was true. Bit by bit, Diana had grown curious about what she called the “other half” of his life. In reality, it was more the other nine-tenths. Perhaps even more than that.

One night, when she ought to have been grading essays, she found herself paging through the telephone directory. There it was.

She sat, absurdly, staring at it. She ran her index finger across the line of type, feeling her pulse quicken and her breath come short. Ridiculous. She slammed the book shut and hurriedly replaced it on the counter, relieved that none of her children had come bounding into the room to force her to explain what she was doing.

Now she and Lida were driving past his house.

“It’s that one,” Lida said, gesturing with her chin.

“For God’s sake, keep moving.” Diana resisted a histrionic urge to throw herself to the floor of the car.

Lida eased into Diana’s driveway and sat with the engine running. “Well,” she said, “let me know when you want to go on another reconnaissance mission.”

Diana flushed.

“It wasn’t so stupid,” Lida said, “I’ve done lots worse.”

Diana’s smile was thin.

“Look at the bright side,” Lida continued. “He didn’t have a flamingo in his front yard. Or a little nigger boy with a lantern. Isn’t it comforting to know that?”

Diana closed the door to her bedroom behind her. She took her shoes off and placed them, side by side, on the closet floor.

Downstairs, two of her sons were arguing. She hoped she would not be called upon to referee. She heard a scuffle, then glass breaking, then the slam of the screen door. Another slam. They were gone.

She pulled the pillows out from under the spread and propped them up against the headboard. Then she took the Duvivier book from the nightstand where it had accused her lo these weeks. She got into bed and tried to concentrate.

Lida’s assessment of the man had been correct. He was, Diana decided, too clever to be read so carelessly. She let the book fall.

She looked across to her desk. The Oxford English Dictionary stood to one side of it. One of the volumes had been removed and lay open, as it had since May. She imagined Lou—the obscure object of her desire—flipping through its pages. “What kind of book is this?” he would say. “You need a goddamned microscope to read it.”

“It comes with its own magnifying glass,” she would tell him.

And he would leave it there, just that way, open to page 701.

By the end of the semester, her desk would be littered with papers. There would be blue books, a stack of them, fastened with a rubber band. And lined sheets torn from spiral-bound pads, the sort with edges that fell like confetti to the carpet. Occasionally there would be crisp white bond, typed and stapled in the corner. And maybe there would be Lou, his belly spilling out over the tops of his trousers, his socks tossed at the foot of her bed.

She thought of that house, imagining the bric-a-brac that filled each room. Did he ever sit, there in that house, and think of her?

That house. And in it, the room he shared with his wife.

She closed her eyes.

She saw herself slipping into their bedroom, thinking it empty. Then she would see him, asleep, naked, a sheet thrown across his body from his waist to his ankles. She would lean against the edge of the bed opposite his and listen to his breathing. She would come to his bed, sit cautiously, afraid, listening for footsteps. She would run her hand over the sheet, over his stomach and his thighs and his penis. Then, under the sheet, along the inside of his leg.

She would hold his testicles soft against the palm of her hand.

She saw him, waking up, smiling, taking the sheet away. She would not be afraid anymore, but would lean down and run the tip of her tongue over his testicles. He would laugh a little. She would lick his penis, her tongue flat and big, hold his penis in her mouth and run her lips stickily up and down and around.

He would touch her hair and the back of her neck and her face. She would look and find him smiling still and she would lick the palm of his hand and he would pull at her to come up toward him.

She would wear a skirt and a blouse. No shoes, no stockings. He would unbutton her blouse and suck at her nipples and lick her breasts and her lips and her neck. She would be dripping wet with wanting him. She would go crazy if he didn’t put his penis inside her. But he would, he would, and while he was fucking her, she would feel her nipples brushing his chest and touch his back and his ass and his legs and then his nipples and his shoulders and his hair.

He would come. She would smell it and feel the heat of it inside her. She would have her arms around him, her fingers in his hair. And they would lie there, smiling, damp, soft.

“Mother!” A teenage voice carried up the staircase. “Are you home?”

Lida advanced on the girl in the second row and stood beside her chair, her hands on her hips, her voice shrill. “What do you mean, LaChelle, you haven’t read it?”

“Well, uh, I, uh …”

“Has anyone in here read it?” she demanded of the class, her eyes leaping from one black face to the next. “Leroy?”

Leroy looked away.

“Falsetine?”

Falsetine added to the graffiti on the arm of her chair.

She didn’t bother to call on anyone else. So this was presession. In the college catalog, how had it been described? “An intense learning experience designed to introduce the student to the joy of higher learning before he/she must meet its rigor.”

Rigor, Lida thought, as in rigor mortis. But what could be expected of a college which required only that its students be prehensile?

It was then that Falsetine dropped her pen. “That does it!” Lida walked to the lectern, gathered up her notes, and jammed them into her purse. “Come back tomorrow when you’ve read it, or don’t come back at all.”

Lida had long ago stopped awaiting the day when tongues of flame would descend and hover over each fluffy Afro. The wonder was that she’d ever envisioned it at all. What had she been like in those days? Before she’d put her soul on ice?

“Girl, come back here,” one of the students called after her. “I don’t want no F.” She knew his voice. Jame Jackson. Despite the fact that he’d enlisted in this “intense learning experience,” he’d not yet begun to affix the final S to his first name. Nor to anything else. Lida remembered his admissions essay, a treatise on Uncle Tom Cabin. Nonetheless, Lida’s recommendation that he be placed in the remedial group had been cast aside. Jame Jackson was probably an English major.

She bounded down the stairs and into her basement office. She sat at her desk musing. How would she get them to read Milton? Was there a comic-book edition? In blackface? That might work.

Though the door was open, someone knocked on it.

“Go away,” Lida said without turning.

The knock came again.

“I mean it.” Lida walked to the door. Four of her students stood there dumbly in the corridor. “Go away.” She pushed the door shut.

The phone rang. It was Diana. “Why aren’t you in class?” she asked.

“Aw, the fuckers! They didn’t even read the material. Can you imagine? They can’t even read a simple detective story. I walked out.”

Diana thought of the Duvivier and her failure to start it. She said nothing.

“What’s up?” Lida asked. “Why did you call if you thought I’d be in class?”

“I was practicing.”

“Practicing what?”

“Getting up my nerve,” Diana said. She took a deep breath. “Does that offer still hold?” she asked, the words tumbling out, banging into each other, it seemed.

“What offer?” Lida asked.

“You know, your house?”

“Oh, sure. When?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Fine,” Lida said. She hung up, even more in a fume. How could Diana think of men at a time like this? Or at all? They were all the same. Hadn’t she told Diana just the other day all about her latest lover, the psychiatrist? The only argument in his favor had been the flexibility of his schedule. She thought, now, of their last time. Very last time, she hoped.

“Is there anything I can do to make it better?” After sex he always spoke in the voice that disc jockeys use on FM stations. The voice, she guessed, he assumed with his patients.

“No.” She looked over, to find him smiling at the ceiling. Christ, she congratulated herself, would anyone ever guess how kind you can be?

Lida glanced at the clock. Presession classes were three hours long. She had much time to kill. She started across the campus lawn.

Lawn, that was a laugh. It looked more like a sandlot with an occasional tuft of grass. Lida kicked at the tufts whenever she could.

She pushed at the door to the Student Union and it opened with a bang—the whoosher to keep that from happening had long since been stolen.

Several students were inside. Some sat at tables, some leaned against the wall. One sat on the radiator near the window, snapping her fingers and rolling her shoulders to an unheard melody. Word of her classroom outburst, Lida saw, had already spread. There had been loud conversation when she had opened the door. Now there was a cramped silence.

Lida put a dime in the coffee machine and watched the liquid fall into the cup. There were little pockets of laughter behind her. From the corner of her eye she saw someone approach. LaChelle.

She brushed past the girl and placed the cup on the nearest table. “Go away, LaChelle.” She took a paperback from her bag. “I’m trying to read.”

The others giggled. “Shit,” one of them said, drawing the word into two distinct syllables.

Lida flipped the book to the place she had marked, the point at which Duvivier’s hero was about to couple with the first of a score of women. She read pointedly until LaChelle backed away.

Gradually, the activity returned to normal. Someone played the jukebox. Someone else broke one of the sugar shakers that graced each table. Curses and loud laughter followed.

Lida read two pages, stopped suddenly, then read the scene again. God damn! She had not been wrong. The lady had just apologized for menstruating and the gentleman had condescended to fuck her anyway! God damn! She had thought of Duvivier as providing respite from the humdrum of her lovers and her life. But now! Even he seemed a traitor.

She remembered Charles, lying naked in that tacky little apartment of his. Earlier, when he’d discovered she was menstruating, he had made his displeasure plain. “When will this be over?” he’d asked.

“Not for a while,” she’d said, “since it just started this morning.”

“Lida, I am horny as hell,” he had said. “Go take that thing out and come to bed.”

God damn men. Would a rapist, she wondered, let you take your Tampax out if you asked him?

But Lida had taken it out and gone to Charles.

Somewhere a bell rang to signal a change of classes. Still seething, Lida put her book away and went to get her mail. Well. At least the Seare and Jolly temporary hadn’t let her down. Well, well. She took the envelope, unopened, back to her desk.

Should she? Hell. She reeled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. But where would she send her protest?

Care of Seare and Jolly, of course. She had their address, right there on the desk.

“My dear Duvivier,” she wrote, her fingers like hammers on the keys.