Without any formal discussion or request, Sid stayed on with us the following week, mostly shut up in the guest room, emerging every once in a while to jog or to make food. She was considerate, overly so, her consideration a way to keep us at an arm’s length. She didn’t have a car but ordered groceries and beer to be delivered to the house and washed her dishes immediately after each use and did small chores like taking out the garbage and rotating the laundry. I say “us,” but I only knew for a fact that she kept her distance from me. She and John might have been having heart-to-heart discussions whenever they were alone, I didn’t know. Whether it was being back in her childhood bedroom, or because I had somehow failed to be the confidante she’d wished for, after that day at the diner she became as aloof as a teenager. In the unlikely occurrence that we were all home together, we moved around the house hushed and with care, like silent monks on balance beams. I had a futon in my office that I made up as a bed for myself. When Sid learned I wasn’t sleeping in the Big Bedroom she offered to switch with me, but I insisted that I preferred having unlimited access to the office, and as long as I had enough pillows the futon caused only minimal damage to my back.
I wasn’t being sacrificial. In fact, I was aflame with ardor and inspiration, and the only place that felt like real life was the seat at my desk, looking through the slats of the wooden blinds to the street outside, writing my story. I still refused to call it a book, because to call it a book might snuff its flame. It was like when I first met John. If I had met him a year or two earlier, it would have been impossible for me to believe that this tall and handsome lothario could seriously return my affections, and I would have somehow ruined it. If it had been a year or two earlier, our coupling would have been doomed. But as it happened, when we came together I was at the height of an upswing of good fortune. I was the most well-regarded student of my year, beloved by my teachers; I was passionate and interested in my subject matter. A beautiful future stretched out before me. My confidence calibration was such that the night after John and I first kissed, I acted with utmost restraint. Unlike every other romance I’d had, which I had either entered begrudgingly or ruined with anxiety and clinging, I could sense exactly the correct level of communication, the perfect blend of distance and attention needed to manage him. For the first and only time in my life, it was possible to act like those women who prided themselves on their success with men, the ones who preached ideas of manipulation, about letting a man think he was right while secretly getting what you wanted. Which is not to say I didn’t fall in love. I did. But somehow I intuitively understood exactly how to manage it—how to neither clamp down nor let go, but keep gently pulling the thread until I found myself unpacking boxes in his apartment.
It was like that now, whenever I sat down to write this story. The writing felt like what I imagined skiing the slalom felt like to an accomplished skier, just the right amount of exertion and planning and foresight, the rest of it easy grace. I instinctively knew to never speak of it, or even think on it too much when I was away from the desk, except for the walk here or there when I allowed my mind to rest on it. The act in front of my computer was an act of evocation, of conjuring. It gave me shivers of pleasure, like the vibrations I used to feel the third or fourth time a new, infectious pop song played on the radio. The familiar and the new. The sensation would surge as long as my fingers moved over the keys.
I took pains to distance the story from Vladimir. It was written in the third person, it took place in the 1960s, it concerned a certain subculture. I based one character physically on him, a minor figure. But I infused it with the energy of my desire. And even as I held off the idea of a finished work from my mind, I kept thinking about him and me on some panelists stage, at some book festival in some smaller city like Calgary or Austin or San Diego. Award winners, both of us, we would be put up at the same hotel and would meet for a martini in the dark of the bar. However ridiculous it was for an older woman like me to lust after him, the force of my talent, the brilliance of my work, would blur my lines and firm my skin. It would be one night, maybe two, and then over, but there would be a crystal of connection formed between us. We would be linked for the rest of our lives. This fantasy floated alongside my expatriate fantasy, fantasies of meetings in bathrooms, and the reoccurring image of him reflected in my window. They gave me a floating feeling as I moved through my circumscribed world, teaching my classes, answering my emails, exercising, driving my car, grading papers, meeting students, attending faculty meetings.
Like every year, the cold came more quickly than expected. The day after the pool guy came there was a sudden frost, and the dirt froze into a spongelike formation that crunched when stepped on. That morning I pulled out my white woolen cardigan sweater that I bought from the Salvation Army in my twenties and layered it over a long flannel nightgown with bulky fisherman’s socks and my indoor sandals. Even I could admit I was getting bonier, the cold seeping more easily into my marrow. Sid, in a neck gaiter and a hat, was out for a run when John approached me in the kitchen. He was wearing an old sweatshirt that clung to him in unfortunate places and shorts he knew I hated.
“Are you coming to the first day of my hearing?”
“Good morning to you.”
“You haven’t said anything to me in the last three days. I just want to know if you’re coming.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Got it. Fuck you.” He moved violently through the kitchen, banging doors and slamming the carafe of the coffee maker down with such force I was afraid it would shatter. I could tell that he wanted to stalk off but couldn’t bring himself to do it. I felt a pang of pity for him. Where was he going at night? He seemed so lonely, so alone.
“John.” I moved forward and put my hand on his forearm. He pulled his arm away and looked at me with thick red rings surrounding his nearly lashless eyes.
“Do you even love me anymore?” Something soft rose up in his voice.
And what was I to say? Most days, these days, I didn’t feel as though I loved him. Most days I thought of him as a problem I would have to solve eventually, when I felt like making the effort. Despite what Sid said about perception, I felt as though it would be more humiliating to divorce at the height of the scandal. It would make it seem like I hadn’t known about the affairs, that I was another victim, that I stepped into the light of knowledge on the day the petition was delivered to the dean. If we were to divorce, then I preferred to do it after everyone had forgotten. Five years from now, perhaps, when the freshman class was gone, and some old faculty had retired, and nobody remembered John on campus. But as he stood in front of me, vulnerable and wanting, I couldn’t tell him no, I didn’t love him. I felt wildly protective of that soft part of him that reached out for me like a child. John was usually pulled back and cynical. Dignified. In a departmental gathering or a faculty meeting I would sit back and admire how he could dominate all the whining, sputtering academics with his removed dignity.
A loud succession of thumps sounded from the back room that led to the porch. “It’s Sid,” I said, and ran to let her in, but when I got there I saw that the noise was coming from a cardinal charging the glass doors, intent on murdering its own reflection. Last year a developer had cleared the forest down the road to build condos, and since then I’d found two dead birds lying outside these doors. I kept meaning to research what I needed to do to stop them. I grimaced, feeling sick, and pleaded with the bird to stop. I put my hands on my knees, my stomach churning.
“Take the other end of this.” John picked up a throw blanket from an armchair. “We’ll hold it against the glass.”
We stood there, each raising a corner against either side of the door frame. Too late. The bird rammed harder and harder, shaking the panes, until there was a soft thump on the ground, and the corpse lay still on the concrete.
“The symbolism is a bit heavy-handed, don’t you think?” said John.
It was a joke we’d said to each other for thirty years. Whenever we passed a deer slain by the side of the road, or a violent storm crashed down on us. Disarmed, I addressed him with a note of affectionate anger in my voice.
“Why do you wear those shorts and then ask me for something you want? You know I can’t stand those shorts.”
But I hadn’t read the moment correctly. I had thought he’d melt and sweep me up jokingly, and I’d tell him that of course I loved him, that I’d consider coming to the hearing. Instead he looked at me sadly, shook his head as though I were responsible for all the tiredness in the world, and left.
I sank into an armchair like a felled tree. I was angry at myself for creating my own trap. Now I felt as though I had done something wrong. Now I felt as though I had to run after him. “I love you, baby, I love you.” What did I truly want from him? Did I want a day, a month, a year of domination? In which I could scream at him and mock him all I wanted with impunity? Did I want him to grovel at my feet? It wasn’t that, exactly. I wanted him to accept the role of the penitent. But you can’t ask someone who feels like a victim, as John most certainly did, to live apologetically. And there it was, that twisted logic. Even as we railed against victim mentality, against trauma as a weapon, we took the strength of our arguments from the internal sense of our own victimhood. John was acting just like the women who accused him. He had been wronged, goddamnit. While there was a part of him, I knew, that understood I was suffering too, he still cherished the sense that he was the most drastically injured party. He grasped his being wronged like a precious gem in a velvet pouch. Yes, he was like all the rest of them, desperately holding on to his own pain.
By the time I arrived on campus, I was shaking with anger. I was late, having stood stock-still in my bedroom staring out the window, a cavalcade of thoughts crashing down on me. I remember reading that Edna St. Vincent Millay gave instructions to her housekeeper not to interrupt her if they saw her standing still—that was the way she would compose poems, on two feet, staring into the middle distance, writing and rewriting lines in her head. I never had that organization of thought: my rapt pauses were all about conflicting feelings, images and memories running and bumping into each other—more like a chaotic battle scene than the unfurling of insight.
At any rate, I was hurrying to my Women in American Literature survey class when I saw Edwina, my treasured star pupil, walking with Cynthia Tong along the green. I waved, and they waved back with overdone fangirl adoration. But it was the gesture of two people who were clearly together in thought, while I stood on the outside. When I began teaching, when I was young and fresh and within a decade of my students, there were certain women with whom I related deeply, women who became my friends. Even briefly watching Edwina and Cynthia crossing the quad, I saw this was happening with them. So quickly, only three weeks into the semester. Jealousy burned at me, anger fired from my womb. Edwina hadn’t put her off, she hadn’t said she would make a date with her and hadn’t followed through. I had written an email to her with x’s and o’s and they were giggling with each other like new roommates.
In class we were comparing selections from Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the diaries of Alice James. “Why are all these white women so obsessed with being female?” asked a blond, female student who never did the reading. “Don’t they recognize their privilege?” When I ventured to say that Chopin, for instance, began writing after being left widowed with six children as a means of support, she shrugged. “But she still walked through the world as a white woman.” When I asked her if that meant she shouldn’t write, she said, “No, she shouldn’t complain.” When I asked what writing that was not-complaining looked like, she said, “I don’t know, like James Joyce.” Another student, thankfully, interrupted and said the women were of different times and different literary movements than James Joyce. “And different countries,” said another. “Also he was very privileged,” another burst in. “I just don’t know why we have to read these whining women,” the student countered, and another, defending my honor, said, “The course is Women in American Literature.” “Women couldn’t vote or get legally divorced at the time Chopin was writing these works,” I said. “They may seem outdated to you now, but—” Then I stopped myself. I hated this class more and more every year. The wide scope of the subject matter made it impossible to take the time to fully examine any work we studied, and the brief timeline of a semester made every choice of every class objectionable, as though every week I was saying, “This is the American Woman.” I wanted to take it off the course catalog, but it was a cross-listed requirement-fulfilling class in both the Gender Studies and English departments, and therefore hard to shift. “I want us to talk about what they are doing in their work. What is the symbolism they are using, what is the metaphor? They are writing at the time of Freud, Darwin, and the tail end of transcendentalism. How do we feel those movements affected…”
I felt so tired when class ended. The student who had challenged me hurried out of the room, all her bravery gone when she was not performing for her classmates. Starving, I stumbled to the school café and bought soup that came in a waxy paper tub, a seasonal apple pastry that they stocked from a local farm, and some ashy, lukewarm coffee. I found a booth in which I could sit in a patch of sun, and collapsed into it. It would be poor form for me to fall asleep, surrounded as I was by students, but that was all I wanted to do—to close my eyes and let the heaviness overtake me. I must have closed them momentarily, because it was behind the dark of my lids that I heard a strident “Yoo-hoo!”
When I opened my eyes, there was a halo of light surrounding a mass of hair that could be compared to a lion’s mane were it not so shiny and well-coiffed. Florence. Florence once said at a faculty retreat that the only thing she would bring on a desert island was a round brush. “And that’s all you need to know,” I said to anyone who would listen. She taught postmodernism, apparently quite well, but it was nearly impossible to imagine her reading a book. She was around forty, and her uniform was aggressively “hot”: short dresses, high-heeled boots, big earrings, ripped tights. She had enviable long legs, which she would furl and unfurl excessively, like an anthropomorphized spider. Her use of uptalk was deliberate and defensive, and she spoke primarily about recipes and restaurants and her children’s extracurricular activities. In most faculty meetings she complained about labor and how she didn’t want to do it. She purposefully misunderstood the pact that tenured faculty had: the exchange of volunteered service for the security and freedom of her position. After she got tenure she never published, and she was late to everything. She was contradictory as a way of life—challenging any statement or assumption made in our meetings. She could be fun—there was one night about six or so years back that she and I embarked on a caper after a dean’s cocktail hour that ended up with her getting a summons for public urination—but as a colleague she was a dud.
She had been especially irritating about John. Like many beautiful-ish women, she was obsessed with the idea of men sexually trespassing. To hear her speak, she had never had an encounter with any man that had not resulted in some form of the man expressing his longing for her or taking advantage of her. I secretly thought she was offended that John hadn’t invited her to join him in a tryst, although she was the kind of woman John would stay away from out of instinct. She had led the charge to say that he could not teach this year, even before his hearing, and she resigned from the budgetary committee, saying she could not sit in the room with “that man,” though we all knew she had joined the budgetary committee only after a performance review that threatened penalization if she didn’t sign up for at least one working group (I, for example, was on four).
I straightened myself up to greet her and saw she was with David. David, my old lover, currently the interim chair while John was suspended. In the past, God, almost twenty years, David had declined. When we came together he was a lean, compact man with a shaved bald head that I loved to rub my hands over, to feel between my breasts. He had a strong forehead and a prominent nose, which could physically arouse me by sight. At the height of our coupling, I would catch a glimpse of his nose during a meeting and could manipulate myself, using the ridge of the chair and my muscles, into a small, secret orgasm.
David was now fifty pounds overweight and dissipated. He no longer shaved his head, but wore a little tonsure of short hair surrounding his shiny pate, a style that made him look like the character-actor version of a tax accountant. His nose had lengthened into a beak, with an extra bit of hanging cartilage at the tip. He dressed as an afterthought—I am sure his wife bought shirts and slacks for him in bulk and he accepted them like a prisoner accepts their uniform. Ah, but I shouldn’t be so mean to David. For years I had focused on his flaws. It was the only way I could survive his great betrayal. Was I pleased when I compared him with my husband, whose light hair and eyes allowed him to fade so gracefully into age? Who was still vain, who used the gym more than the library, who dog-eared pages in fashionable men’s catalogues? Certainly I was. But I would wager that David, with his meaty, masculine fingers, could still be a thrilling lover: focused, playful, receptive. He had marked the end of my experimentation, the commencement of my unimpeachable existence. Our affair lived in my thoughts like a once-loved but mostly forgotten piece of music, popping into my head occasionally, bringing all sorts of feelings.
He lost a son, many years after we ended things, in a freak accident at a lake. At the funeral he had embraced me tightly and whispered in my ear, “See?” I didn’t see. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t see. During our affair, he had not had any understanding, unspoken or otherwise, with his wife. Guilt about leaving his family had prevented what I had believed at the time was my greatest chance at happiness. His son was born a year after we ended things. I assumed he was putting all his sexual energy back into his marriage, doubling down on the life he chose. His “See” seemed to suggest that he believed the punishment would have been much worse if we had gone overseas, that the death of his son was already a result of his transgression. Understandable in the moment, at the peak of shock and sadness, but ultimately ridiculous. Grief makes people wild in their thought. As if we are ever punished or rewarded in that kind of way—a random tragic death in exchange for a secret indiscretion. Since his son died David moved through the world heavily, as though his entire body was draped in the lead apron one wears for X-rays. I never liked that “See.” It was like a line written by an aspirational Ibsen or Strindberg or Bergman, some Scandinavian obsessed with being haunted by their actions—a line that sounded like a profound truth, but meant nothing.
“Tired?” Florence looked at me with irritating sympathy. I shook my head. “No, I just closed my eyes for a moment.”
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “This fall weather makes me tired. Hot in the sun, cold in the shade, I close the door of my office and take a twenty-minute nap, then wake up and eat some chocolate-covered raisins and it’s like I’m a new woman. Do you nap, David?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’ll take a nap. I like a nap.”
“I love a nap. How about you, do you nap?” She sat herself down at the table and beckoned for David to grab another chair.
“No,” I said to her. “I hate naps.”
What I truly hated were conversations about sleep. It felt like all anyone talked about—work and sleep. When Sid was young the world seemed obsessed with sleeping—her sleeping, my sleeping, my husband’s sleeping—the schedule, the tiredness, the endless tiredness.
“Wow, you’re amazing.” Florence winked, to herself it seemed.
“Are you joining me to eat,” I asked them, “or is this an ambush?”
David smiled. “More the latter, unfortunately.”
Florence batted him on the shoulder. “This is not an ambush, don’t say that.” She kept looking nervously at him; it was clear they’d banded together to come and tell me some news that I didn’t want to hear.
David looked around the café. “Maybe we should walk,” he said.
“Scared I’ll make a big scene?” I asked him.
“Not at all!” Florence flipped her hair so that it looked like an ocean wave on the top of her head.
“Yes,” he said.
An image cracked in my mind at that very moment. It was of Vladimir and Cynthia, with faces more weathered than now, holding hands on the front steps of the English Department building, posing for a photograph. John and I, when he was promoted to chair, had posed for a shoot such as this. In quick succession I saw flashes of them posing, climbing the stairs to their offices, kissing chastely, and then Cynthia walking into my office, which was now hers. I stood outside, visible from her window, except I was costumed like a leper in a church musical, with distressed and tea-stained Ace bandages dripping from my arms. I reached toward her in supplication. From her mind’s eye she zoomed in on my face, and it was toothless, tearstained, covered in dirt.
I finished my soup and coffee, put the pastry in my bag, and threw out my garbage as they waited for me by the door. I was seized by the impulse to run. This felt like the walk that a doomed man takes with a couple of Mafia stooges. The walk Camille Claudel took with her brother before he locked her up in that insane asylum for the rest of her life.
We left together in silence. There was a narrow, poorly designed rocky stairway that led from the café to the grounds. David held tightly on to the railing and limped down the stairs. When I asked about his injury, he told me that he had helped move Mercy, his daughter, in with her fiancé over the past weekend and had injured the lower right part of his back. “Fiancé,” I said, and congratulated him. “He’s a great guy, we really like him,” he said, nodding sadly. “They don’t want a big wedding, so that’s a relief.” And we fell into silence again, trudging over the grass until we reached a footpath that encircled the campus.
Florence began.
“You know that John’s trial begins on the twentieth?”
“His hearing,” I corrected.
“Were you planning on attending?”
“No,” I said. I was in fact ambivalent, but I didn’t want to admit that ambivalence to either of them.
“Good,” she said.
David started in. “Look, you know the times we are living in.”
“Certainly I do.”
“Absurd, you have to be so careful, you get no support from the administration—nothing to back you up—the students rule the roost—you know what I mean.”
“What are you getting at? Did I do something wrong? Something offensive?”
Florence shook her head vigorously. “No no no no no no no no no no.”
“So then what is it?”
As Florence seemed unable to speak, David nodded at her to show he would take over. If there weren’t such a discrepancy of attractiveness between the two, I would think they were together.
“Please, David, just say what you’re going to say, this is agonizing,” I said.
Without deciding, we all stopped walking.
“A number of students have expressed that, given the circumstances of John’s case, they find your presence in the classroom to be objectionable, even triggering. They feel as though you were complicit in the alleged indiscretions. They have asked that you stop teaching classes immediately until the hearing is over. Depending on the verdict, they asked that we then reassess the situation.”
A heavy ball sank into the base of my stomach, and my arms and chest tightened in anger. “And what does the department say?”
“We don’t think that the students should have the say about who comes and goes here,” David said quickly.
“Still,” Florence cut in, “we want them to feel heard. Some of the students have suffered sexual assault, and to be in the presence of a rapist’s wife—”
“My husband is not a rapist.”
“Maybe not according to you—”
“According to anyone.”
“He used his power and position to find women thirty years his junior to fuck.”
“And that’s still not anywhere near rape.”
David put his hand out to quiet Florence. “Let’s not say that word. She’s right, it was never used.”
He went on, “The department is almost mortally wounded by this whole mess. Enrollment is down—”
“Enrollment is down in all the humanities. You both know how it is. Nobody wants to be an English major anymore. The ones who used to be on the fence and chose it as a default—they all want to go into psych or environmental studies or poli-sci. We’re dinosaurs, all of us—” I smiled at them, but neither returned my smile. Florence was staring at me, tight-lipped and perturbed. David looked at the ground.
“You’d still be paid,” he said.
“And then what?” I tried to keep a shriek from rising in my voice. I started walking again, and fast, and was pleased to see Florence’s chunky heels sinking into the muddy mulch.
“A student walked by and saw John sitting on your desk the other day. You were laughing together. It would be unprofessional in any circumstance, and with the allegations, students feel as though they’re surrounded by a hostile learning environment.” Florence was the one yelling now.
“Is this coming from the administration?” It seemed as though the curving hills of the campus were tilting, like paper waves in a puppetry performance, and I was a flat figure held up by a stick, bobbing up and down between the waves, getting tugged out of the frame.
David looked sternly at Florence, and then placed his hand on my arm, which I shook off like it was a diseased crow. “This is coming only from the department. As you might have already gathered, we can’t make you do anything. You have a contract. We are asking that you consider this for the good of the students.”
“Who would teach my classes?”
“I would teach the Gothic Novel class, and we were thinking Cynthia might take over the Women in American Literature class. She’s interested in taking on more classes, she told David. You’re only teaching two this semester, right?” Florence said this so quickly, and I thought about how long the department meeting must have been to come to this decision.
“How would that work?” I felt as though an iron band were being wrapped around my chest. I tried to remember the fairy tale in which someone wraps iron hoops around their chest in order to prevent their heart from breaking. Oh, what was that, why couldn’t I remember it? When he gets his heart’s desire they come pinging off, Ping, Ping, Ping.
Florence busied herself locating and picking off invisible hairs from her sweater. “If you wanted to maintain the syllabus, you’d give us your notes.”
I laughed. Give my beautiful notes, written with gorgeous precision for each class—a legal pad per session? Written in my handwriting, the one aspect of myself I felt was aesthetically perfect? My classes were part of my art, they were journeys. I held out a raft for students at the beginning, which they all boarded, and once they got on I skiffed them down the river of experience, pointing out things they should notice, on your left, thematic resonance, on your right, imagery, giving them a chance to reflect, to notice for themselves. At the end, I reminded them of where they had come from, what they saw, what they might take with them on the next journey. Give away my notes. It would be like a singer giving away a song. Come, stand in for Nina Simone, she’ll let you sing “Mississippi Goddam.” Idiocy.
“Does the entire department feel the way you do?” I quickened my pace, enjoying Florence’s stumbling, David’s limping.
“There was a meeting of the tenured faculty and the vote was five to two,” David said, huffing.
The currently tenured faculty (excluding John and me) were David, Florence, Tamilla, Andre, Ben, Priya, and Julia. Vladimir, of course, was tenure-track; he and the other adjuncts like Cynthia would be excluded from any discussions, thank God.
“Five voted that I should stop teaching? And two wanted me to stay on?”
He nodded. “Five voted that we should ask if you would consider the proposal. Two thought that the measure was too drastic.”
I made a quick tally sheet. Priya was my age, she was my friend, she was New Criticism to the core, she wouldn’t have voted against me. Neither would Andre, an older Frenchman who shook his head in amusement whenever the debacle was mentioned. That left the rest of them: Tamilla, Ben, Julia, Florence (all under fifty), and David.
“And you both were part of the five?” David and Florence nodded.
Given there was a divide, there was something far more treacherous about the fact that David had chosen against me. If the vote had been unanimous, I might have understood it—though our affair was ancient history, he would still not want to seem preferential to me for any reason. But there had been room for him to side with me and he hadn’t. I don’t think he believed that I should stop teaching. I think he was simply scared and wanted to protect himself. He wanted to hang on to his hat while the wind was blowing. An old white man, he was both savvy and spineless enough to be afraid of coming out on the wrong side of history. I thought about his stubby little penis peeking out from below his now bulbous stomach. A little white-capped mushroom. I thought about how it might feel to take garden shears to the top of that mushroom, how it might feel to watch the inside of his fat feminine thighs get soaked in blood.
I stopped abruptly and turned on the two of them. David, breathing hard, Florence, half hobbling. I wanted to tell them they could go fuck themselves. My brain was employing a liberal use of fucks. There was no fucking way I would ever stop teaching my class unless they fucking dragged me out of there with campus security. That it was completely fucking illegal to try a wife for the crimes of her husband and they were fools and should know better. That each one of them, and everyone else who had voted for this decision, as if they could even make such a decision, would be on my shit list for the rest of my life, and I would come and find them and exact my revenge upon them. Hostile learning environment? I could sue for a hostile work environment. I could sue endlessly, I could cripple this department.
But as I faced them, I felt the words fall away from me. A rush of confusion clouded and coated my thoughts. My eyes crossed. I felt spikes in my chest, like a large burr had lodged behind my breastbone.
I closed my eyes. When Sid was three or four, at her little hippie preschool, they used to teach breathing techniques to help the children calm down. Smell the flowers, Blow out the candle. I still thought about those words whenever I was trying to collect myself. Smell the flowers, Blow out the candle.
When I opened them, David was once again looking at the ground and Florence dropped the arm that held her phone.
“Sorry,” she said. “Childcare.”
I didn’t let myself contemplate the slight. I mentally cut her out of the picture, like a figure in a cartoon that runs through the scenic backdrop, leaving a hole in the shape of their body. I looked up at the balcony of one of the covered walkways, where the students were crossing back and forth to class.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I turned abruptly and began walking through the middle of the field away from them as quickly as I could. The ground had thawed in the sun and squelched beneath my feet, sucking at my shoes as I stepped. I walked straight toward the English Department and made my way around to the back, where the dumpster was, crouched beside it, like a surreptitious teenager, and lit a cigarette. I slid against the wall and sat down on the pavement, leaning my back against the brick. I envisioned myself as an ancient, mangy addict sitting outside of Penn Station in New York City, a half-hearted sign propped up, hoping to gather as much money with as little effort as possible for fentanyl, bumming cigarettes and McDonald’s fries in the meantime.
Which student had complained about me? Oh, but it didn’t matter. I could picture the cafeteria, outfitted with gas fireplaces so it looked like an upscale ski lodge, and three Formica tables pushed together to create a long banquet, at which were seated ten or so students, mostly female. I could see the different body types and the different foods, most probably incongruous—the thin ones with cream-sauce pastas, the thicker ones with lean proteins and salads. What started out as a question, “Oh my God, guys, do you think it’s weird that his wife still teaches?” grew into more and more of a rallying cry, as together they decided that my presence was offensive, that it made them frightened, that it reminded them of bad people and bad events that had happened to them, or to their cousins.
Picturing them in the cafeteria, I started to view their utensils as little pitchforks that they moved up and down. I understood not only the bonding that comes out of complaining but also the incredible sense of identity that comes with discovering why you think something is wrong. I wanted them to feel that fire, that was what college was for. They were enacting a right of all young people, unearthing what they felt were the systemic wrongs of the world. It was their right to look at us murderously, longing to stand where we stood. It was their right to believe that they could do our jobs better than we could. We, who had experienced enough bitterness in life to expect flaws, faults, and complexities in every situation we encountered. They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.
Or something. I shook off my grandiose thoughts. I didn’t know them or understand their world at all. I prized myself on liking them. I defended them at dinner parties. The Kids Are Alright! I liked their action, their strict moral code, their stridency—
“Ma’am.” From my seat on the pavement I saw the wheels of a golf cart and looked up to see a square woman from campus security wearing wraparound sunglasses and a fisherman’s hat.
“You need to put out that cigarette right now, ma’am, this is a no-smoking campus.”
“I know. I’m a professor here.”
“I’m going to have to issue you a ticket, ma’am.”
“I’m a professor here, I teach here. I’m not a student.”
“You should know better, then, ma’am.”
“Stop calling me ma’am, please. This is the first time I’ve done this—I just had some bad news—”
“In the future you can walk beyond the perimeter of the campus, ma’am. It’s right out that way.”
“I know where the perimeter of the campus is, thank you.”
“Can I get your name, ma’am?”
“Why?”
“For the ticket I’m about to write you.”
“May I have your name?”
“My name’s Estelle. My mother died of lung cancer. I have one job on campus, and that’s to issue tickets to illegal smokers. Name.”
Estelle drove off into the sunset, her back emanating triumph. She did it! She nabbed another culprit! It was a good day, baby, I heard her saying to some wiry wife in an A-line skirt as they drank stupid home-brewed beer. I even nabbed a professor! Wasn’t she a piece of work. I showed her!
I held the ticket in my hand. Fifty dollars. A hundred for repeat offenders.