I read his book the following week. I took it to the campus library and sat in one of the armchairs in a glass alcove on the silent floor. The librarians had printed out signs of the Brontës and Jane Austen with fingers to their mouths and pasted them at the ends of the stacks. Shhh! From my perch in the alcove, I could look down and see a grassy part of the campus, four floors below me. It was 8 a.m., and I watched sleepy students in sweats or pajamas stumbling past on their way to early morning classes. A few male athletes ran in a superior manner; a few female athletes ran as if to punish themselves. A few young women wore elaborate outfits and full faces of makeup, their eyes darting to and fro to see who noticed them. A few misguided young business students wore badly cut suits, having internalized some inaccurate message about dressing for success.
I didn’t want to sit in my office where I could be disturbed at any moment by coworkers or students. I typically had a good relationship with my students—our college is a student-oriented college, not an R1 school, and, until everything happened with John, I liked talking to them and getting to know about their passions and dreams. I liked giving life advice just as much as I liked giving advice about essays or books, and I liked that a few, who possessed a boldness I had never felt with any authority figure in my life, would flop onto the sofa across from my desk and allow me to witness them amid their tortured confusion.
I tended to read manuscripts, however, in the library. Even at fifty-eight, even at this college where I have taught for nearly thirty years, I still feel the thrill of excitement in a university library. I still feel the potentiality—the students working toward becoming something, the stretching, searching minds, the curiosities of what will become of oneself buzzing at the study tables and between the rows of books. I find being among all that to be far more energizing than an enclosed and solitary space. Here I feel as though I’m engaged in the knowledge project. In my office I’m engaged in the knowing project. In my office I am of college life but not in it. In the library I am in but not of it. I like feeling the thrum of the students’ brains and hearts, uncensored by the classroom setting. In the library their lives swirl around me—I’m aware of their romantic entanglements, their grudges, hatreds, obsessions, all vibrating at a frequency I won’t ever feel again. Never will I love as they love, or hate as they hate, or want what they want with such strong and solidified identification.
Our last meeting had such an effect on me that I decided to wait a few days to read Vladimir’s book. Not that he would care, but it was unlike me. Usually I was so sensitive to the anxieties that possessed someone who sent a manuscript that I read it right away. I remember, with my early fiction, how nervous I was to hear what someone thought, and how much umbrage I would take if I felt as though someone had not responded promptly to a piece of writing I sent them. I dealt with young writers frequently (along with my academic courses I taught a creative-writing course every spring), and normally, if I did not read something right away due to workloads or faculty responsibilities, I would let them know that as soon as I started reading I would contact them, so that they could manage when to expect a response. But I found that I couldn’t treat Vladimir with the same courtesy.
Of course it was different. His book was already published by a major publishing house. It existed in the world and did not require my reflections or feedback—it was impervious to it. We had read the reviews and the accolades, we had seen it in the “Best of” lists when it came out. It wasn’t reviewed in the Times, but it got a review in the Washington Post, a mention in the New Yorker’s “Briefly Noted” book column, and a starred review in Booklist and Kirkus. When the first wave of allegations came against John and he was asked to leave the hiring committee, I was told I could stay on but I requested I be released. I knew the words that would be volleyed back and forth when I left the room, I knew that they would feel constrained by my presence because they couldn’t talk freely about hiring the kind of person who would never tarnish the department in the same way again. I was sure they wouldn’t hire a straight white man, but Vladimir had a better reputation than the writers that the college was accustomed to receiving applications from. With the splash that his first novel made in the literary world, if not the commercial one, he might have gone to many colleges closer to an urban area and still been competitive. And his interview, in which he apparently (again, I was not there) revealed some disturbing domestic details (of which I had heard), had been deemed extraordinarily compelling.
Which is all to say that until he brought his book by, I hadn’t read it out of spite and willful ignorance. And if he hadn’t brought it that night, and if I hadn’t caught his gaze in the reflection of the darkened window, and if he hadn’t dropped his eyes in tender and exposed self-consciousness, I don’t know if I ever would have.
I read all morning, until I had to hurry to my eleven thirty class. I had thought I would get a cup of coffee midway through but I didn’t, and I was so absorbed that I arrived to the classroom slightly late, disoriented, and had to spend some time asking the students about how they were faring before I could organize my thoughts enough to remember what we were covering that day. Luckily, all my students love nothing more than to speak about their psychological wellness, so my buying of time was met with some eager stories about medication, campus counseling, time management, and ADHD, told with wry self-awareness while I settled myself.
After class I drifted up to my office and was met there by Edwina, a devotee of mine asking about recommendation letters. Edwina wanted to complete two programs this summer—an internship with a Black, female-run film-production company whose last feature won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and a summer course in art semiotics at Brown. She wanted to be a producer, she told me, but a respected one, one who could bring about cultural change. She told me that when she had worked as an intern at another film company last summer there was this woman, one of the more powerful executive producers, who had her PhD in classics from Harvard. Every time she left a room her degree was mentioned in hushed and reverential tones. Edwina’s goal was to be like her: a cloud sweeper, weather controller, “bone-bringer,” as well as a revered mind with an impressive degree.
After agreeing to write them (I do believe that anyone who does not write recommendation letters if asked is monstrous, and even though I am the most selfish human being I know, I write them, and write them from scratch without asking the requestor to write a draft of them first) and dispensing with some quick advice, I urged her out. I could tell she was disappointed at not speaking more—I did quite like her and liked to see what she was reading and give her recommendations and hear her gossip about her other classes and classmates and professors, but I could not give her my full attention. All I could think about was Vladimir’s book. I didn’t pick it up to read it again—to do so in my office would be humiliating—but I wanted to see if I could think about it and re-create the passages in my mind.
When I was reading in the library, I was overwhelmed with a mixture of genuine admiration and seething jealousy. The book was funny, clear, awake, vivid. The prose was spare but the voice was not sacrificed in his exact word choice. It felt both like life and beyond life. He was a truly great writer, and though this book, an epigrammatic roman à clef, might not have catapulted him into fame, I had no doubt, reading it, that he would have it all—the bestseller; the interviews; the columns; the articles not only about his writing but about the decoration of his home, his fitness routines, his office, his food consumption, his work habits and sleep habits and opinions on politics.
For context, I have published two novels—my last one at forty-three years old. I have since then published mostly nonfiction work about literature for academic journals and occasionally, at more desperate times, written book reviews for our local newspaper. My first novel was deemed to hold promise; my second novel was deemed a disaster. The first I felt was a complete and utter lie, the second meant something to me but was roundly dismissed for being solipsistic. Since that time, for the past fifteen years, I have been trying to balance the important with the truthful. This has meant endless false starts, long projects of research that have been abandoned, mornings when I have woken up at five and prayed for an urgency of voice to come to me only to be disappointed. I have watched writing the female experience—particularly the motherhood experience (the subject of my second book) rise and reach praise and prominence in the past decade. I do not think I was ahead of my time; I think I wasn’t as unapologetic as this new crop of writers are. These new young mothers write with force and wit and humor. They embrace the I I I with fervor. They don’t shy away from talking about the banality of existence that comes with being a mother—the lunches in rest stops, the weariness of the body, the bad and mortifying toys and food and games and lackluster vacations and compromises that fall like an avalanche over the false totem of one’s own self-regard. I suppose I had always been too shy to address that banality head-on. My second book was a discussion of three women—a career woman, a mother, an artist. They begin in their own worlds, full chapters apiece. Then the narratives begin to intercut. Over the course of the book, it is revealed they are, in fact, one person. The response of critics at the time—some male, mostly female, boiled down to “who gives a fuck.” I won’t say I was undervalued, because I don’t believe that. Alice Munro was winning every award at the time, with her gentle, insightful stories of women’s lives. Generosity. Margaret Atwood wrote exciting books that practically lived inside of a uterus. Be a Fan. There were the others—Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver—the list is long—who wrote my kind of female experience. No, my work was simply not enough—not loud enough, not forceful enough, not realistic enough, not poetic enough, not funny enough, not speculative enough, not good enough.
When I was in my PhD program, I had lunch with one of the university’s writers in residence. I was a messy and distended twenty-seven-year-old with yellow teeth and bad clothing who smoked incessantly, but I remember believing that there was a flirtation to the lunch. And perhaps there was: when I look at my female students now, even the messiest, the sloppiest, the ones who drink Pepsi Max at 9 a.m., I see in them the beauty of youth—the beauty of their plumpness, their half-formed-ness, that skin that’s lit from underneath. At this lunch I was supposed to be asking questions about melding creative work with an academic life. I was in the English lit department and the lunch came about because I had attended one of his classes and mentioned that I wished to write fiction, and he, who had taken the same path of academia and literature, extended an offer of advice. We had lunch in a spot he suggested, which felt like the pinnacle of elegance—not fussily fancy, not achingly hip, a place that was refined, classic, the kind of place I could never imagine picking. John and I were engaged to be married at the end of the year. There was a moment at this lunch when the writer in residence (whose career I thought at the time was enviable, but now I realize was probably an ongoing series of disappointments and slights) reached for my hand and I pulled mine away as if from a hot stove.
I still, to this day, do not know if he was truly reaching for my hand or if I misconstrued the gesture—he could have been reaching for the salt. The moment sticks in my mind mostly because it reminds me of how timid I have always been (God, you are a pussy, Sidney used to scream at me during her teenage rampages). I had lusted after this writer in residence, constructed elaborate fantasies about us meeting in darkened hallways or him sitting alone in a classroom and me straddling him on the chair from where he taught. But when he moved his hand toward mine it was as if I was as limited and repressed as an Edith Wharton heroine. A swirl of fear and morality welled as I jerked my hand from the table back into my lap. We continued speaking as if nothing had happened (and again, perhaps nothing had). I remember one thing he said about writing at the time, which enraged me with its cliché. I had asked him, in a pretentious way, I’m sure, if he had any credo about writing—anything he truly lived by. He said, “I only write if I have something to say.”
I remember feeling so angry about this bland statement—about how hokey the advice was, how banal and corny. But there was a deeper rage as well—the rage of embarrassment. I was a working-class girl who, despite a parental divorce and some suffering in my adolescence, had gone to a decent university. I had become energized in the academic setting and got myself into a well-regarded graduate program. There I had met my future husband. I would never have anything to say. I knew theoretically that everything was happening all the time and that I only needed to sit and look closely and I would find a story worth telling. I didn’t yet know that many writers find what they want to say in the writing. After I left the lunch I avoided the writer in residence. He called several times to discuss a short story I sent him and I never called him back. I saw him at a conference many years later—we were waiting for the same elevator. I said hello and he deliberately ignored me, almost comically so, for the entire week.
Reflecting on Vladimir’s book I was struck that I was in the literary presence of someone who, for whatever reason, had something to say, and a way to say it. I researched his backstory. He was the son of Russian émigrés, obviously, and grew up in Florida. He attended an Ivy League, then volunteered for the Peace Corps and spent time in Africa like his hero, Norman Rush, had done. When he returned, he was accepted to and enrolled in what is widely considered the best writing MFA program in the country. Then he stalled. I assume he was unable to sell his thesis book after graduation. He and Cynthia, a fellow MFAer, were married. He took several adjunct positions at scattered colleges in and around New York City. Eventually his work began to appear in literary journals, and then the sale of his first book was announced. He was thirty-eight when it was sold and is now forty years old. Cynthia has a book deal with HarperCollins for a memoir that has not yet been completed. She is thirty-two.
From the window of my office I could see a young girl leaning against a tree with her hands behind her back. A freshman—I met her at an orientation event this year. Her body is the kind that could only belong to eighteen- or nineteen-year-old women—pencil legs, rounded hips, a lean flat stomach, an impossibly small waist supporting immense breasts. Even in one year, that body, despite all her stubborn urgings and attempts, would thicken in the waist and haunches to support the load of her curves. Her hair had been bleached blond and grown out at some point; it extended to her waist, half-yellow, half–walnut brown. She wore circular sunglasses, tiny cutoff shorts, and a sweatshirt that was cut to reveal her shrunken midriff. If I remembered, she had poor skin, though I couldn’t see from out my window. A skinny, ugly senior boy held his hand at the right side of her hip, tentatively. He was clearly out of his mind with desire and trying to hide his inexperience. He held a SoBe Green Tea bottle between two fingers in the hand that was not touching her. The girl’s pose was both eager and deflective—the desire for admiration trumping the lurking suspicion that this homely boy was able to be so forward with her only because of the disparities in their ages. He leaned in to kiss her with an odd, wide mouth. Even from fifty feet away I could see the laboriousness of this activity between the two of them—a smashing motion that brought neither pleasure.
Vladimir was eight years older than his wife.
Well.
The age difference shouldn’t have bothered me: I was five years younger than my husband. Eight years is not such a great difference. And yet all women recoil a bit when a male chooses a younger woman as a life partner, even if everyone is a consenting adult and a power dynamic does not seem to be present. We know that the younger woman perhaps feels chosen, and the older man perhaps feels lucky. We know there’s a sense of promise in the younger woman from the perspective of the man, and a sense of reverence for experience from the perspective of the woman.
Plus, even though I was not yet ready to admit to myself the depth of my attraction for Vladimir, or how competitive I was with Cynthia Tong, his first-generation Chinese-American wife with her credentials, her style, her ability to wear flat shoes and look graceful rather than stubby-legged, her what I assumed was effortless thinness, her buckets of potential, and her book deal based on her traumatic history that I knew a bit about from departmental rumors, I still felt the sting of their youth in the face of my age. At fifty-eight, I felt past the point of establishing myself as a literary writer. I was just as old as Penelope Fitzgerald had been when she had published her first novel, and I didn’t know another serious female author who’d begun a career this late. It seemed whenever I looked up the ages of writers who were reputed to have started older, they turned out to be decades younger than me. Yes, I had published two novels, but that was nearly twenty years ago, and it wasn’t as though they were highly lauded and enshrined and the public was waiting for my next offering. No, they had done so poorly that a new offering from me would be the same as a debut. At best, if I kept trying, if I “broke through,” I might have one or two meaningful books. My name, though, if I cared about it, was sure to be lost to time.
Lest you think I haven’t evolved at all over the course of my fifty-eight years, and that I have been simply sitting here hoping to be famous like some imbecilic ingenue, I want to say that the urge to make a mark has only recently renewed in me. In fits and starts my ambition has ebbed and swelled. After my second book, for many years, I was content to write for myself. Content to tinker. I kept a truth journal, collecting little observations and metaphors in a notebook. I practiced writing like practicing the piano—I wanted to be absorbed and taken away by it—I didn’t mind if it ever met an audience. I had many years of peace. I loved to read and be engaged and surprised by new voices. I wanted to be an admirer. When Sidney was an older child I wanted to model being an admirer for her. I thought she would suffer unless she learned a certain level of contentment with one’s life, a certain holding of oneself in deference to the world.
And unfortunately, and unflatteringly, when I examine the suppression of my ambition most thoroughly, I also wanted to be content and without ambition for John, who had given up writing before we met, but nearly had a nervous breakdown when I published my first novel, and hit me (the only time, and very drunk) while we were discussing the logistics of a minor book tour for my second.
Now that Sidney was not only out of the house but out in the workforce doing good, meaningful, and often righteous work as a lawyer for a nonprofit and living with a woman and becoming more and more a separate person from me, with eyes that watched and judged me, and now that John had been publicly shamed as a lecherous pervert, my perspective on my ambition had shifted.
The boy and girl outside were still kissing, he was now scooping his pelvis in and up toward her, his skinny rear visibly clenching and releasing in his tight jeans. One of her hands was outstretched awkwardly—like she was trying to get someone’s attention to come rescue her, or she didn’t know exactly where to put it.
“Where are you?” I heard, and turned to see my husband at my office doorway, holding his gym bag, wearing salmon-colored shorts that revealed his lanky calves (his long, slim legs and hips are his best feature) and a button-down, snug at his belly. He came over to my desk, sat on the edge, and leaned down close so he could see from my perspective. He smelled like John, nice, he always smelled nice, aftershave and detergent and tea tree oil and coffee. I was lucky in that other than the time I was pregnant, when John’s smell was distressingly repulsive to me, his scent was always comforting and attracting. “Ugh,” he said, looking at the couple beneath the tree.
I smiled and shrugged, and checked my computer screen quickly to make sure that I had minimized anything relating to Vladimir or his book.
Since the accusations had come out, John had been suspended from teaching and interacting with students until an as-yet-undisclosed date in October, when he would have his dismissal hearing in front of the Title IX committee. He had been allowed to keep his office and other campus privileges like going to the library (which he never used) and the gym (which he went to every day), and he was still on the budget committee. They needed him: he had been chair for six years, nobody else knew the intricacies of where the department’s money went, or how to craft a budget that would get approval from the dean’s office.
Separate from the scandal, for several years now John and I maintained a distant relationship when we were at home—more of a sharing space than a true living together, more roommates than spouses. It was something we had fallen into—like we each kept choosing different turns inside a labyrinth until, without intending to, we ended up on opposite sides of the kingdom. I slept in the guest room in our house because of John’s snoring. We were away from each other most nights of the week—I went to exercise classes and out to drinks with friends and down to Albany to see art house films and to a weekly music night at a pub that functioned as a kind of salon for local artists. On the occasions that we were home together, I either disappeared to my office to work or gardened outside or read by the pool if it was warm. Sometimes we watched a movie together, but I tended to sit in a chair rather than on the couch with him, citing my back.
I stopped making dinner when Sidney left the house for college ten years ago, unless we were having people over or I was struck with some urge. The end to cooking had been a relief to both of us—I had certainly resented the endless tick in the back of my mind, what will we have for dinner, that would start up at noon each day, and John had resented my resentment. After John and I had dropped her off at Wellesley and driven back, and I spent a tear-drenched twenty-four hours in bed, I announced the end of my culinary career. Instead, I tried to keep a well-stocked pantry and fridge—roast chickens and eggs and vegetables and sausages and salami and lentils and olives and smoked salmon and whitefish and fruits and yogurts and cheeses and grains and breads and nuts. Salads from delis—all the things one likes to eat that can be easily assembled. Which is to say we didn’t eat together. We used to gather breakfast and meet on the porch, but when I was trying to reestablish my morning writing practice I started taking my food upstairs with me. We used to have a cocktail hour around 6 p.m. to check in with each other, but a few years ago I found it hard to maintain my ideal weight unless I curtailed my daily drinking.
We traveled (still very well) as a couple, and, of course, we saw each other at work. Our offices were on the same floor in our small department at our small college—the walk from his to mine was less than ten loping paces. And it was at work, when we could pretend that the personal didn’t exist between us, where I would feel my resistance to him, so stubborn at home, slide off. Here, we dealt with the common enemy. Here, I could be his ally. It was like the early days between us. If we were ever feeling at emotional odds with each other, distant or angry, we knew that the only thing we would need to do was go visit his parents. After less than eight hours of his father’s Marine-style barking and his mother’s glazed disassociation we would fall into each other’s arms with relief and unity, so glad to be who we were, together.
He rubbed his forehead back and forth in my hair. I pushed him away. Clearly, he was restless today, eager for someone’s companionship. “What do you want?” I asked him. He looked at me chastened. All this drama at the college had brought out his neediness—more and more these days he played the part of the old dog that has done something wrong coming to look for the approval of its master, all contrite sweetness. More and more I played the part of the angry owner, pushing the dog away, knowing it would always return. It was bad behavior on both our parts, the patterns were dangerous. John was not a happy fool, and he was not content to sidle up to me day after day only to be rejected over and over again. At some point he would decide he had been mishandled too many times, and he would bite back hard.
What I had said to Vladimir the other night, when he visited, had been true. I had known about the affairs, the existence of them. I had known they were with students. But I hadn’t known the details about the behavior, which, as such details have been revealed, are more unsettling than I cared to admit. For example, there are records of 1,183 text messages exchanged between John, fifty-five at the time, and Frannie Thompson, twenty-two. I find the mental image of my husband with his fat thumbs on his phone, texting back and forth with this young woman—who, as far as I knew, had a certain transplant-from-the-city élan and nice and shiny hair, but no real humor—very undignified. When I think of his little excitements at his own quips, the amount of time he spent caressing that device with quivery anticipation when he could have been doing something worthwhile, it all feels grotesque.
I also had not expected that I would be caught in the fray. The tide had been shifting away from his behavior being acceptable since even before we received our PhDs, I knew that. There were always whispers about him, and occasionally a new and drunk colleague would, with righteousness, confess to me that they knew about one of his indiscretions, and I would have to explain to them our arrangement. But because he was a general advocate of women in academia and women writers, and was committed to all sorts of social justice and diversity initiatives in the college—because, in effect, his politics were not only impeccable but admirable—I, not as his wife, but as a professional, along with the rest of the college, had collectively decided to look the other way. These women were of age. The whispers remained whispers and nothing more. That’s the way it is in these schools. I was a beloved teacher, my classes were waitlisted. I was fit and stylish and until around forty-five I was occasionally mistaken for a student. My last name was different from John’s. Outside of the department, not many people knew we were married.
However, when the wave of accusations and the petition came, I found that suddenly everyone knew that I was the wife of the disgraced chair. Toward the end of the spring semester, I was sitting in my office when a group of five young women from my Adaptations class entered, giggling with what was clearly their own sense of self-importance and buoyed-up enthusiasm they had roused in whatever cabal they’d had before. I invited them in, and they exchanged daring glances until Kacee, clad in a flowered baby doll and lace stockings with a Japanime hairstyle—two buns, one on each side of her head—a girl who would attach a pen cap to the fat bottom part of her lip during class and “accidentally” pull her shirt down so that one nipple was exposed, a girl who always laughed too loudly at anything the one very handsome boy said in class, stepped forward.
“We wanted to talk to you, um,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. They were already annoying me. They were an annoying bunch. Individually I’m able to drum up, most of the time, a sense of patience and tolerance for each student. Even the extremely grating ones. I don’t know what happens in one’s youth to make one student so tolerable, so pleasant, so secure in themselves, so eager to learn, and what makes other students so irritating. But I pride myself on not discriminating against them because of it. With most of my students, I’m able to understand their need to be seen, and I’m able to focus on that need and let their ticks and blips, their entitlements, their insecurities or overconfidences, simply wash past. I’m able to see them in progress, and to know them in progress. To know that they don’t yet fully grasp what they are presenting to the world as they present it.
But if even irritating students can be withstood individually, and pleasant students can be excellent company, students in groups are always awful. They get too much bravery from each other, they forget to behave well. The interaction with this group led by Manic Pixie Kacee was bound to be painful.
“Well, um, we just wanted to say, um.”
Becca, a tall girl who took her emotions as seriously as cancer, wearing a baggy turtleneck over a baggy dress over baggy pants (Joke: How do you get into a hippie’s pants? Take off her skirt, first), stepped up.
“Well, we just wanted to say, like, you don’t, you don’t have to, like, do the whole supportive silent wife thing.”
I breathed in, white-hot anger rushing up my forearms into my elbows.
Then Tabitha, in her mechanic’s jumpsuit, worn unbuttoned to the waist so that her bra was visible, stepped forward.
“Like, you’re this hot, brilliant lady. We think you’re really hot.” I could tell they prized their own opinion of my hotness, their ability to appreciate hotness in an older woman. “And like, it is totally unfair what he’s done to us.”
“You?” I asked
“Us women,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. “Not you personally.”
Kacee stepped forward again.
“We just want to know when you’re gonna dump his ass.”
“Cause you should,” someone in the chorus piped up.
Careful, Careful, Careful, I thought to myself. Careful. We professors talked about it all the time. Nowadays you must be so careful. It’s good, it’s good, we would say to each other. It’s good, that there’s safety. Though we all wondered what we were preparing these students for with all our carefulness, as if the world was going to continue being as careful. But then again maybe it was, we would say. Maybe if these were the people who were in the world, who were comprising the professional culture, then the world would have no choice except to be more careful. And that would be a good thing. People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong—so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings—the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that when we hadn’t been able to, and our only defense was to call them soft. They had God and their friends and the internet on their side. And perhaps they would make a better world for themselves. Their aim was not to break taboos, the way people born ten to twenty years before me, and, in a small way, my generation, had done. No, they worked in a subtler and stricter way. And perhaps it had to be so. And so Careful, I told myself. No anger, no personal attacks, just Grace, Grace, Grace.
The girls stood nervously in front of me, waiting for my response. I cultivated warmth in my chest and brought it up to my face. I pushed the warmth through my smile, letting it settle around my eyes.
“I want to thank you for coming to see me. I’m flattered on two accounts: for calling me a ‘hot lady’ and for the care that you’re extending toward me. It makes me feel hopeful for the future to be surrounded by young women who are as passionate and empathetic as you are.
“Sit down”—I urged them, and they crammed onto the couch and its arms, facing me.
“We all live and work within structures and institutions,” I told them. “We can’t help it. I work, I live, inside of institutional sexism, racism, and homo- and transphobia, for example. And the difficult thing to understand about these institutions is that we all, however aware of it we are or not, practice sexism, racism, and homo- or transphobia, even if we are female, a person of color, or homosexual or a trans person. And so I’m fully willing to admit that my remaining with my husband—not standing by his actions, necessarily, but simply remaining in relationship to him—may be a product of my own internalized sexism. Certainly how could it not be.”
“Right,” said Kacee, a band of saliva visible in her open mouth.
“That said, and I say this again, with such deep gratitude for the care you’ve extended toward me, that my husband and I have had a life together longer than any of you have been alive. And we’ve had agreements, and arrangements, and compromises throughout that time. And challenges. We’re now faced with another challenge. Both a public challenge and a private challenge. I know that you will understand if I beg for your understanding, and respect of my privacy, as I decide for myself, as a hot, brilliant lady, how I will handle my marriage of thirty years. Extending me that courtesy is an act of feminism in and of itself.”
Ten minutes later I closed the door to my office waving and blowing kisses as they beamed at me.
Assholes, I thought.
But their intrusion shook me. I am clandestine in general, most especially when it comes to my students, and they made me feel exposed. And so while I believed the case against John was both maddening and absurd, I regret to admit that my self-consciousness trumped my conviction. I didn’t like to be seen too frequently on campus in his company. And I had never liked him being physically affectionate in the office.
“Please get off my desk,” I told him, and he backed away, straightened up and addressed me as though I had been the unprofessional one.
“Did you see Florence’s email about the language of the department goals?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you see Tamilla’s response?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you see Andre’s response?”
“No,” I said.
“Have you checked your email today?”
“No,” I said. “I was prepping, and then I was teaching, and then I was researching.” He and I had long arguments about how available academics should be. He loved to answer all inquiries immediately, I couldn’t stand it.
“Well can you straighten it out? They need some diplomacy.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Unless you want to come to the gym with me?” He dangled his gym bag in front of me.
In years past, we had gone to the campus gym together from one to two thirty most lunchtimes—cardio on the elliptical, then a weight program given to us by a physical trainer we went to for a few sessions because we had won them in an auction. In Japan, there is the word nakama, which is most often translated as “friend” but, as a Japanese colleague once explained to me, is more accurately defined as “close people who do things together.” We used to value that idea and talk about it—companionship in marriage: doing things together—not necessarily having to connect, but giving our company. Our regular stints at the campus gym were that, as were our disciplined traveling and our attempts at cultural responsibility.
“No thank you,” I said. I now belonged to the YMCA in town. John knew I no longer felt comfortable parading in front of my students in stretch pants, hefting and sweating and bending in full view of their appraising eyes.
He nodded, determined to be amused by my firmness. Just before leaving he paused at the door.
“Listen, I know we aren’t really doing the entertaining thing these days.”
“We’re not, no.”
“Right, but I wanted to ask Vladimir and his wife and their daughter over to swim in the pool before the weather gets too cold. They don’t know anybody—they’re living over on Route 29 in some shitty condo, and I was curious if you wanted to be a part of it, or if I should ask them when you’re planning on being out of the house.”
I couldn’t tell what game he was playing at, if he was playing at a game. I had mentioned that Vladimir had come by in passing because of the book, but I didn’t know if John perceived the jolt that he had given me those nights before. Still, imagining the afternoon filled me with elation. The thought of seeing Vladimir Vladinski in my backyard, even with his wife and daughter, of seeing him shy and embarrassed taking his shirt off to reveal his slightly flabby stomach, to see him clad in some hastily bought swim trunks, to pass him a sweating beer or, even better, to serve him a beer as he lay in a cabana chair, to see him bouncing on the diving board, not yet ready to jump in the pool, to see him lifting his daughter into the sky, to observe him in moments of banality—rubbing zinc sunscreen in on his face or hesitating at the door because of wet feet—filled me with yearning. A succession of images, each more tender and intimate, flashed through my mind.
“It would be nice of us to entertain them,” I said, hoping that John wouldn’t notice anything off about the way I spoke. “Better do it soon though. This weekend, or else it will be too cold. Saturday is supposed to be warm.”
“Fine with me,” he said, maybe with suspicion, or maybe simply pleased that I had given in so easily.
“There are a few things I’d want you to do in the yard first,” I said.
“Jesus,” he said. “Fine. Make a list.”
“That compost bin has got to go.”
“Make a list,” he repeated. “I’ll do them if I can—”
“Then I’ll just hire someone to do them.”
“I’ll do them. I should have known this would result in my doing labor for you.” But he was pleased with me, I could tell.
“When you ask them, give Cynthia my number and we’ll coordinate on food.”
He nodded. He said my name and I looked up at him. “I miss you,” he said, and then turned to leave.
In the doorway he passed Aaron—our lanky, earnest, English Department assistant—bringing me some copies I had requested. At the sight of my husband, Aaron bowed his head and placed the stack of manuscripts on my desk with an unintelligible murmur. I thanked him and asked him how he was. I liked Aaron, he was a sweet senior boy who wrote lengthy, baroque poems about the cosmologies of invented fantasy realms. He didn’t answer, and exited wordlessly, his chin pressed to his chest, breathing heavily through his nose, as though he had caught John and me half-dressed, amid some illicit act of concupiscent commingling.