The next day I felt clearheaded, if not energized, and resolved. After my conversation with Sid I felt a renewed urge to engage with my students, to prove myself as a teacher. I realized I had been approaching my classes, my entire presence on campus, with a bowed and apologetic posture. I had been teaching fearfully, as though I had to be agreed with, as though I weren’t a skilled enough instructor to allow for multiple opinions to exist in the room at the same time. I needed to listen, to make myself permeable and receptive. Naturally I made them all feel uncomfortable—I had never officially acknowledged the scandal. I had never, in any public sort of way, mentioned the accusations directly.
I wrote an email to the tenured faculty.
Dear Esteemed Colleagues,
I want to thank you for your dedication to the well-being of our student body. There is no doubt in my mind that your wish for my suspension (I believe that is what you are requesting) comes from a place of deep caring.
In the effort to be direct and upfront, I will say from “the get-go” that I do not accept your recommendation, or urging, or whatever you may call it. I will continue to instruct my classes. If you insist that I halt my normal duties, you give me no choice but to respond with legal recourse.
That said, I understand the great rift that has come about in the department, for both students and faculty. I believe I have shirked my responsibility when it comes to openly discussing the events that have caused such a rift. I will admit that I have felt personally wounded at the idea that I am attached to these events, and have ignored and avoided said idea at all costs.
Pride, obviously. Thanks to your confrontation, I am now aware that my pride must be swallowed, and my silence must end. I will be speaking to the allegations and the hearing in my classes, and sending a department-wide email to all majors, inviting them to a coffee hour in which I will talk a little and listen much.
Attached to this email is my class schedule. If any of you wish to come and observe my address to the students, you are most welcome. Questions and comments are also welcome, although for the sake of everyone cc’d on this email, please do not reply all.
From then on, and for the next two weeks, I felt strong, centered, and focused. In both of my classes I gave the following speech, which I wrote and memorized:
“I want to start by saying how much I admire you. In my (ahem) years of teaching, I have not encountered a generation of students as committed to improving their structures, institutions, and worlds as you are. I am impressed by you, and terrified of you.
“First, an apology: I’m very sorry that on the first day of class I did not speak to the suit brought against my husband. Remaining silent was a gross misjudgment on my part. When my daughter was young, and I noticed that something upsetting had happened to her, in school or on the playground, I would tell her that if she would only speak about it, the bad feelings would evaporate. It’s magic, I would say, talking is magic.
“So now, to attempt some magic. Many years ago, before any of you were students at this college, my husband, John, had consensual relationships with several students. These occurred prior to the rule that expressly forbid relationships between students and faculty. I assure you, he was not the only one.
“I knew of these relationships at the time, though I don’t wish to go into private details. I support him staying on at the college. He did not violate any rules, and he has not engaged with a student since then. I’m willing to discuss this with you, and I’m willing for you to prove me wrong. I will certainly accept the results of the hearing—which may reveal more than I yet know.
“As to that, I want to say that I am an ‘Independent Woman,’ to paraphrase Beyoncé, and John’s actions are not my own. I believe, deep down, you understand and respect that.
“That’s all. I don’t wish to talk; I wish to listen. In an attempt to dismantle any power dynamic, I invite you now to anonymously write any questions or statements you may have and pass them to the front and I will do my best to answer them.”
The address proved successful. The students passed up little slips of paper and I read their questions out loud in a tempered tone. They ranged from aggressive, “How can you live with a sexual predator?” which I answered, vaguely, “I’m curious to see if the hearing proves that John was a predator,” to intrusive, “Are you polyamorous?” which I answered by winking and asking them whether they thought that was any of their business. I urged them to answer as well, letting them discuss for the entire ninety minutes of class, nodding, only occasionally pinching my thigh to keep from reacting. Having been heard, they released their resistance. I even managed to win over the student who had criticized Kate Chopin—she came to me at the end of the following class and sweetly asked if I would look over one of her short stories. None of the faculty came to observe—I knew they wouldn’t; they could barely make it to their own courses. Similarly, only three students came to the coffee hour I had suggested, and they were all my pets, there to offer solidarity and affection. The only thing that felt odd was that Edwina neither attended nor responded to the department-wide invitation I sent out, and I started to wonder if I had said or done something that had caused her some offense. But she was probably simply involved in her own interpersonal situation, I told myself, a heartbreak or a rift with her peers. As a professor one shouldn’t overestimate one’s importance in the lives of students; they care about their friends and lovers far more than they care about you. It is critical to remember that. Whether they love or despise you, you are usually not much more than a minor figure in their dramatic landscape.
I made a point to lift my head as I walked on campus, meeting eyes and saying hello to everyone I knew. Vladimir and I ran into each other frequently, in hallways, in the cafeteria, and at the coffee stand. Whenever we met we lingered, discussing students, new books that were overpraised, and old books that were underappreciated. Often we spoke of the twentieth, and how we looked forward to a long and uninterrupted conversation. Every time we parted it was as though we had to tear ourselves away.
I felt willing to face all that I had not faced before. Besides working every day on my book (I was nearly halfway through a draft and confident enough to call it a book now), I read Cynthia’s memoir excerpts. Well-written, terse, biting, they centered on the day that her mother committed suicide, when Cynthia was ten years old. I didn’t think she would make much money from it—it was too good, written without an ounce of sentimentality. I sent her a note with a list of my favorite sentences. I enrolled in a 6:30 a.m. boot camp at the Y. I went to the dentist and had my teeth whitened. I contacted and met with several contractors up at the lake to collect estimates for winterizing the cabin. I opened a separate bank account, a thing that, to the disbelief of some of my friends, I hadn’t kept since before my marriage, into which I redirected my salary and put half of our savings. I did a face mask every other day.
That summer, John had enlisted the services of Wilomena Kalinka, a lawyer from town who Sid deemed “fine.” “As long as you have a woman, as long as you prepare.” He had initially wanted to represent himself at his hearing, but Sid had convinced him to bring on counsel. He argued he was sure to be dismissed, so what was the point of paying someone. She told him that he had to prepare in case civil suits were brought against him after his dismissal. As the hearing loomed, he spent more and more days at Wilomena’s office, in the front room of a historic house, with “W. Kalinka, Juris Doctorate, American Bar Association” stenciled in white letters on the leaded-glass entrance. He would come home from her office around dinnertime, change, and leave once more. Sid grew increasingly agitated about his absences and begged him to tell her where he went, at first in a joking way, and then in earnest frustration, but he evaded her questions just as he evaded mine.
My nights were full of feverish and intense meditations on the lustful joinings of Vladimir and me. He would run his fingers, ever so lightly, from my earlobe down my neck. He would press me against a bathroom sink from behind and reach around and grab my breasts. He would slide his hand up my leg while I drove. Those simple flashes were enough to send me into an erotic frenzy. I would masturbate, climax, step outside to smoke, then return to the futon in the office and repeat the process two or three times. At night when I dreamed it was always of him. Often he would stab me with a kitchen knife, and I would see black-cherry pools of blood on my tile before I woke.
Two nights before John’s hearing Sid convinced me to follow him so we could discover where he went every evening. She could no longer bear being excluded, like when she was a small child and would get so upset when her father and I would disappear into the bathroom to discuss an issue she was not supposed to hear. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I agreed because I was so pleased that Sid wanted to treat me like a comrade. It felt like a new stage in our relationship. I pictured the two of us in Argentina, visiting the birthplaces of Borges and Cortázar, sitting in outdoor cafés with red wine and seafood buried in rice, or in Norway, waking in the middle of the night to see the aurora borealis, or in New York at a lesbian bar—Henrietta’s if it still existed. “This is my mother,” she would say. I would be attentive, supportive, and interesting for her friends, who would come to see me not as a parent but as an equal member of their group.
We weren’t particularly subtle in our pursuit, but John wasn’t particularly careful or attentive as a rule. We jumped into my car the moment he pulled out of the driveway. Once he reached Main Street we let a pick-up come between us. There was a long, uninhabited stretch of road before one of the college entrances, and once I realized he was taking that, I turned with a screech to approach the campus the other way. I acted excited for Sid, who was palpitating with the idea of the chase, but as soon as I realized he was headed for the building that housed the English Department, a hard lump rose in my throat. Poor man, had he been going to his office all this time? Sitting in his very well-appointed room, maybe at his desk, maybe in one of the two leather club chairs, or lying on the tartan chesterfield, considering the life that would no longer be his? For while I had my writing, John had nothing other than the college. He had made the program what it was today, developed its curriculum, brought on most of the current staff. He had helped students go on to achieve master’s degrees and PhDs and become well-regarded writers and influential scholars in their field. Our program was ranked second in the nation in colleges of our size. He was proud of the status, he felt responsible for it. We were considered diverse and progressive, due to his insistence on active recruitment. All over the internet, alumni and students would refer to our department as “a special place.”
One could observe the staff parking lot for our building from the general parking area, which sat below it on a hill. Sid and I pulled into the lower lot in time to see John walking from his car toward the back entrance. Just as he approached the door, it was flung open toward him, a square of bright white light against the heavy dark of 9 p.m. Standing in the doorway, one hand at her neck, the other pressing against the metal bar latch, stood Cynthia Tong.
I prayed they would say a few words and she would continue out to her car, the whole run-in a coincidence. But then I saw John touch her face, and she pulled him in by the hip, the door closing behind him so that they seemed to be swallowed by the night.
We watched in silence as the light in John’s office turned on, and then I started the engine and backed up without looking, nearly hitting a Subaru behind me, and drove out of the parking lot at an irresponsible speed.
“Where are we going?” Sid asked.
“Home,” I said. The image of John and Cynthia was thudding in my brain as if lit by a pulsing strobe, and I fixed my eyes on the white line of the road, like one is supposed to do in dense fog, to stabilize my thoughts.
“Don’t you think we should go in?” Sid shifted her body so she could look over her shoulder out the rear window, trying to keep her eyes on the building as I drove away.
“For what?”
“To see what they’re doing.”
“We know what they’re doing, honey.”
“I didn’t think it was so clear.”
“Sid, it’s nine o’clock.”
“So?”
“So it’s clear.”
Sid turned back to face me, chewing the inside of her lip, an old habit. “That was the woman I met the other night, right?”
“Right.” Had Cynthia been on her way to meet John when she came by the house that night? Or worse, had she come looking for him? Had he given her our address, or had they met there before, an afternoon tussle in our marital bed, arranged for a time when his family was sure to be away?
“Why would she do anything with Dad?”
“She’s a complicated person.” Sid waited for another answer, so I offered, lamely, “Women like your father.”
“Yuck,” she said, but there was a heaviness to her voice, a drip of sadness clogging up her sinuses.
Then her phone buzzed, and she gasped. Alexis was arriving at the train station in fifteen minutes, hoping to be picked up. She had said she was coming, but she hadn’t said when. I was relieved—I didn’t normally enjoy spontaneous guests but I didn’t want to spend time processing what I had seen with Sidney. I felt remiss that I hadn’t parented her out of this shakedown, that I hadn’t told her it was inappropriate for us to go tracking Dad together. Warmed by her attention, by the idea of us as partners, I’d broken a long-held pact I had made with myself to never go chasing after John. And what was I doing inserting Sid into all this? She may be a grown woman, but that didn’t mean the actions of her parents had no effect on her psyche and well-being. Wasn’t it finding out about John and the allegations that had spurred her into the affair with her colleague in the first place, upending her life, forcing her to leave her job, stranding her in her old bedroom turned guest room in her childhood house and town? Without work she was completely adrift, all the running in the world couldn’t counteract the amount she was drinking and eating—she looked perpetually puffy, distended, and ill.
Sid spent most of the ten-minute ride hunched over her phone, texting furiously with Alexis. The pace their thumbs could move. I forced myself to note the scenery around us as I drove. The elementary school, the old post office, the sandwich shop. It wasn’t until we were parked in the pickup area, watching the train pull into the station, that Sid turned to me and said, out of obligation, “How are you feeling about all this?”
I told her I had feelings about it, but I didn’t want her to worry. She was to worry about repairing her own relationship, if that was what she wanted. She took this as offensive.
“What do you mean, if that’s what I want?”
I said I thought that was what she was communicating to me, that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to commit in the way that Alexis was asking. “Not wanting to have a child is not the same thing as not committing,” she snapped.
I nodded. The bond that we had cultivated over the past few weeks was already being severed by the intrusion of her “real” life, which came toward us now in the figure of Alexis, toting a hard-shell rolling suitcase and wearing a very well-tailored power dress with soft leather flats, her braids loosely pulled back in an elaborate gold hair clip that looked like the branches of a tree, adorned with jeweled leaves.
She came around to my window first, greeted me, and told me that she had thought Sid would be the one to pick her up. She was mortified; she hadn’t realized I would have to come out at this time of night.
I told her not to worry, that it was just a coincidence and no trouble. Sid jumped out of the car to help her put her case in the trunk and I listened to their conversation as she rearranged the grocery bags and snow-clearing equipment to make room.
“You look beautiful, Lexi.” I saw Sid perform a half bow of appreciation.
“I was in court today. We got the verdict.” She waited a beat. “Now you’re supposed to say, how’d it go?”
“Sorry, babe. How’d it go?”
“I won.”
“You’re incredible.”
“Tim told me to take the week off.”
“I’m really happy you’re here.”
“Maybe you are, maybe you’re not.”
There was a moment of silence, a touch or a kiss.
“You look rough,” said Alexis, soft care in her voice.
“I know. I miss you.”
Alexis climbed into the backseat and Sid followed her. In the rear-view mirror I watched as Alexis squeezed her leg, scolding. “Babe, your mother is not a chauffeur.”
I spoke into the reflection. “Thank you, Alexis, why don’t you come into the front seat.” We often played the little game parents played with partners, pretending we were more aligned than she and Sid.
“I would love to,” she said, and thanked me again for coming to pick her up. I wished Alexis would be a little less polite with me, it enforced a distance between us. Whenever they visited, she and Sid became a conspiratorial unit, having what I imagined were honest conversations behind the closed door of the guest room and then emerging and making removed small talk with John and me. Still, I liked her considerateness better than Sid’s childhood friends, the entitled spawn of fellow academics who opened my refrigerator without asking, borrowed my books without telling, and on summer days used to drop by and swim in my pool whether Sid was there or not.
“I love your clip,” I said. Awkward around most women, I had trained myself to notice something on their person I could compliment. Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval. In my life I’ve been wounded more by compliments than I have by insults. (Once when I asked an acquaintance what they thought of my second novel they said, “I can tell you worked so hard on it.”)
“Thank you,” she said. “A friend made it for me.”
“Who?” Sid asked from the back. And they proceeded to discuss the friend who Sid thought was someone she met at a picnic but realized was someone else she had met at a party.
Excused from the conversation, I let my imagination return to John and Cynthia. The picture they made at the door grew more and more surreal in my mind; they became like figures in a biblical illumination, emanating golden rays. Had Cynthia been wearing an off-the-shoulder bandage dress? Had she been barefoot and standing on her tiptoes? Was she holding a glass of champagne? Was there a red rose wrapped around her upper arm, its thorns drawing blood? No, Cynthia didn’t drink. I didn’t see what she was wearing. She was so attractive I couldn’t help but feel aroused thinking of John feeling up her firm, voluptuous legs. Were she and Vladimir all but divorced? Was he soon to be free?
“Babe,” I heard Alexis caution Sid. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Okay? I’m exhausted. Tonight we’re just going to celebrate.”
My date with Vladimir was two days from now. Did he know? Could I tell him? It struck me that Cynthia had taken Edwina’s affection from me, she would have taken my class had I not resisted, she had Vladimir, whom I wanted, and now she had taken John. For what, for spite? She had youth and a body I always dreamed of, a body that would stay muscled and smooth well past her middle age. She had even, unlined skin and straight white teeth. She had attended the most prestigious writing program in the country, and her work would be better reviewed than mine ever was. She was the survivor of great trauma, she had something to say. I was jealous of every bone in her body, every moment of her history. She was acting wildly, I was jealous of that—jealous of her extremity, the fact that she was drawn to John, for who was the baddest boy on campus right now, who was the ultimate taboo? She had just arrived and was already so reckless—what would happen when the true, three-year-in boredom of small-town life worked on her? I wanted to push her into the mud and kick up great puddles of splattering filth, defiling her face, her clothing, her stylish shoes. I also wanted to worship at her feet, have her tell me all her secrets and methods for living so completely and exactly as she wanted.
At home Sid and Alexis sat outside, drinking wine next to the heat lamps. They half-heartedly invited me to join but I refused. They didn’t truly want me there, and I wasn’t in the mood to converse. I was so overwhelmed with thoughts I decided to grade papers. I needed a task that consumed me, nothing imaginative, no room for digressive thinking. I had learned to focus during my PhD, when I had to read complicated texts for hours at a time. People want books to absorb them, but one could force attention upon a book. It would be back and forth for the first half hour, but if you meant it, you could rope your mind into sublime and single-pointed concentration. I printed, stapled, and arranged my students’ papers on my desk and with great effort began to read and mark them. My whole body felt as though I wanted to bolt from my chair but I put a stress ball between my legs and pressed hard against it with my thighs. Eventually my mind settled and I worked fluidly—underlining interesting sentences, correcting muddled paragraphs, questioning sloppy word choice, and writing a paragraph of evaluation on a piece of yellow legal paper that I attached to each of their documents. After two and a half hours I rose from my desk, creaky and stiff. It was midnight. The girls had gone to sleep, there was no light coming from beneath the bedroom door. Alexis had brought her white noise machine, which blared the sound of a rolling rainstorm. Something about the aural barrier caught my breath, and I felt a sob collect behind my upper cheeks. I pictured Alexis pulling Sid into the bedroom like Cynthia had pulled John into the building, enclosing them in their own private world, leaving me alone, bereft, in the dark. I checked in the guest bathroom to make sure there were clean towels and saw that Alexis had hung her neat, segmented toiletry bag on the back of the bathroom door. Feeling rude and unloved, I opened it.
I suppose I could have deduced that anxiety-ridden, perfectionist, high-powered Alexis would have some pharmaceutical products. I noted that in one clear zippered segment of her bag she had a variety of prescriptions. When I examined them I saw that among a few medications I couldn’t identify, she had a bottle of Xanax and a bottle of Seconal. They were full, and I had no doubt she was measured in her use of them in a way I never could be, meting them out sparingly—taking them only in extreme circumstances, on an airplane or an insomnia-ridden night before a big court day. Pull This Lever in Case of Emergency.
Seeing the pills, I felt an inspiration begin to form. I thought of the white, cracked crumple of John’s hands running frantically over Cynthia’s hips. How much the lure of her taut beauty must ensnare him, turn him into a child, material she could manipulate, an object she could possess. Even when I had been her age and yes, somewhat beautiful, I had never let myself own a man in the way I assumed she did. The afternoon all those years ago, when David failed to meet and run away with me, I hadn’t chased him down and tried to lure him back. I hadn’t used the sexual power I knew I had over him to bend fate to my will. No, after lying on the ground for half an hour I had risen, bought a submarine sandwich (not a food I usually allowed myself), ate it in the car, semolina dust and bits of lettuce falling all over my lap, returned home, and unpacked my suitcases. After two failed attempts to meet him for a coffee and discuss what happened, I gave up, telling myself that closure was a myth, a concept fetishized by people under thirty.
Such a missed opportunity, I thought. And as I looked in the bathroom mirror at the webbing around my eyes, my frowning jowls, and the shriveled space between my clavicles, I felt desperation at the idea that I would never captivate anyone ever again. A man might make a concession for me based on mutual agreeability, shared crinkliness, but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, be in my thrall. Images of Sid as a two-year-old rose in my mind as well, the way she looked at me then, fixed and obsessed, like I was the sun and the entire world, the origin and limit of consciousness. All that was gone forever. It was true, wasn’t it, I would never experience power over another human being again for the rest of my life. I thought of Vladimir and tried to picture him as he might be in this exact moment, in his natural habitat. He was in bed, asleep but sitting up, a scratchy old camp blanket over his knees, wearing a cut-up college T-shirt, one hand clutching a book, the other, himself.
As I conjured him, I found my hands unzipping Alexis’s toiletry bags, opening the caps of the Seconal and Xanax, and removing two of each pill. Like a painter might conceive of the outlines of their next piece, a plan began to form itself in my mind, blurred but distinctly edged. Yes, there was something I could do, some action I could take. I didn’t have to accept what I was allotted and pretend I was grateful for it. I put the pills in a vintage pill case I used for travel and placed it in my underwear drawer. No, I was not required to accept the world’s rejection of me without a bit of a struggle. I went outside and smoked, trying to keep both my eyes and my mind on the stars. I changed into my night shirt, performed my skin regimen, and, fearing that my active mind would prevent my rest, took another Seconal from Alexis’s bag, swallowed it, drank three large glasses of water, and read until I blacked out.
The next day, one day before our fateful meeting (as I have taken to calling the whole event), I prepared. I packed a large suitcase with both John’s and my clothes, and my elegant daytripper with toiletries. I filled a sturdy canvas bag I had gotten from a conference with books and some other administrative supplies. I loaded them into the back of my car, along with a case of wine and a bottle of vodka, sweet and dry vermouth, bourbon, bitters, and a bottle of cachaça. I would visit the grocery store the morning of our meeting for the rest of the provisions. I tidied up my correspondence, finished my grading, drove to campus, and gave my students’ papers with my notes to the department admin for them to pick up when and if they wanted. I went to the Y and yanked dementedly at the handlebars of the elliptical trainer for seventy-five minutes until I was drenched in sweat. That evening I smoked the last cigarette in the pack. After I extinguished it I emptied the flower pot that had served as my ashtray into the large trash bin, pulled the bin to the street to be picked up the following morning, and firmly resolved to smoke no more.