Then she remembered how they’d met—“Who’s the dark beauty?”—and shuddered. It had been four days since the wedding, four nights. Perhaps Sadie had been here one of those nights. Perhaps Sadie had been in a situation exactly like this. No, she’d seemed utterly uninterested in—annoyed by, even—Will at the bar after the wedding and she’d left early with Tal. “Are they?” Beth had asked Emily. “Who knows,” Emily had told her, with a roll of her eyes. “He follows her around. She won’t talk about it. You know how she is.” Beth did. They all, rather, followed Sadie around. Beth couldn’t blame Will for wanting her, but what bothered her was the thought that he might have treated Sadie differently. Hung on her every word in the restaurant. Been unable to take his eyes from her.
This line of thought was pointless, she told herself firmly, willing her mind back into the moment. Will, she thought, had admired Sadie, but recognized in Beth a sensual—darkly sensual—nature she’d always suspected lay dormant, unrecognized by her few, inept lovers. Yes, she thought, yes. He was stroking her now, back and front, his breath hot in her ear, and she was, she was going to come, but she couldn’t, shouldn’t, would not with this stranger watching her—and she unable to see him—witnessing whatever contortions and contractions of her body, whatever ugliness she might possess at such a moment. She fought it, willed it away, twisting her hips and shutting her legs. “Stop,” he said firmly, like a schoolteacher, keeping his hand between her legs. “You’re being very, very bad.” Oh God, oh God, this is a terrible cliché, she thought, almost against her will (why, why, why could she not simply experience things, without comment?), from a thousand pornos. She tried to remember the names of the classic ones, Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, which she’d heard about—grad students liked to joke about them, to use puns on the titles in their papers (“Behind the Greek Door: The Frat House as Metaphor in Contemporary American Film”)—but never seen, though pretended she had on numerous occasions, Debbie Does Dallas, Anal Invaders, Electric Blue. The ridiculous titles, the list of them, calmed her and she thrashed her legs against his.
“You need to stop,” he said. His voice now closer, speaking directly into her ear. “You’re being a very bad girl. If you don’t stop, I shall have to bind your hands.” And at that, at those words, uttered in Will’s crisp Oxbridge accent, her body released in a thousand different directions, waves of hot and cold shooting through her—her low cries spilling, fuzzed, through the scarf. She pushed him, his hands, away from her, off of her—it was unbearable, too much—but he refused to move the front one, holding her against him by the pubic bone, feeling, no doubt, the mortifying waves running through her, her mouth clenched tight so as not to scream. Slowly, she became aware that he was close to her now, his front pressed to her back, and she could feel him, hard, against her. She reached behind her to touch him, thinking this the proper, appropriate thing to do, though part of her wished he would simply leave, but he grabbed her hand and said “No,” again in that firm tone. Then he gathered her other hand into his left one—the arm attached to it cushioning her head—and ran his right along her stomach. “Did you like that?” he asked. She nodded. “You did?” She nodded. “Tell me.” But she didn’t want to speak, not yet. “Yes,” she said, her mouth straining against the thick fabric. “I thought so. You’re a very bad girl, Miss Scarsdale.” Why did this sound dirtier, more appalling—but also somehow more manageable, more expected—coming from an Englishman?
As her body calmed itself, cooled by a stream of air from the kitchen window, her mind grew rapidly more awake, shaking off the fug of wine and food, so that she felt more alert than she had in days, weeks—bizarrely, grimly awake, her mind jumping from one thing to the next. Should she have danced with Dave at the wedding? Why had they not talked, as he’d said they would? And why was she wasting time worrying about all this—three whole days already—when she needed to get to work on her research? Tomorrow, she must go into the Museum of Television and Radio and get herself set up for the next phase. No, no, tomorrow she needed to call Gail Bronfman, at the New School, and settle things with her job, if she had a job, which she knew she probably didn’t, but she couldn’t quite admit defeat. It was all so humiliating—not just that she’d screwed things up with her credits, but that she’d handled everything wrong. “But I can be there by the first week in October,” she’d told Gail Bronfman (this was how she thought of her, not as “Gail” or “Dr. Bronfman,” but as “Gail Bronfman”). “So, if someone could sub for me for the first few classes—”
“Sub for you,” the woman had shrieked. “This isn’t elementary school. These are your classes. Your syllabus. Your students. You need to be there.”
“I know. But I can’t—they won’t—” At this point, shouting commenced on Gail Bronfman’s end of the line.
“I’m just going to have to find someone else for the fall. A week before classes begin. What a treat. Thanks. You’ve made my day.” Beth asked, sensibly (she thought), if she could simply begin teaching in the spring semester—if they could simply change the start date of her contract. “We’ll see. Call me when you get to New York” was Gail Bronfman’s response, followed by a loud click and silence.
She willed her mind away from this conversation—which she’d shared with no one but her advisor—and toward Will, who was also, for now, a secret. She’d rather easily managed not to tell any of her friends that she would be seeing him—in part because she had a suspicion that they would warn her away, and in part because, she realized only now, she didn’t want Dave to know about it, though she knew that was stupid, but she felt some dumb need—what was it?—to maintain the illusion that they might, if they wanted to, pick up exactly where they’d left off, four-odd years ago, at commencement, before he’d told her, in that mumbled, half-angry, Dave way, that he thought when they went off to grad school they should see other people. She didn’t know anything of his “other people”—her friends had been very good about keeping silent on this subject—and nor did he, as far as she knew, know anything about hers, so perhaps they could simply pretend there hadn’t been any—just as there had been no horrible, humid summer, while they waited to leave for their respective programs and spent countless silent hours wandering around the streets outside his parents’ apartment, drinking beer in barely air-conditioned bars, and fumbling awkwardly, gingerly, in his narrow childhood bed, which barely fit in his closet-sized room, Beth on the verge of tears each time they finished, each time she had to put on her clothes and board the subway to Grand Central, then the train back to Scarsdale, then her green Accord through the village and the curving streets back to her parents’ mock Tudor. Dave, she thought. The memory of that terrible summer—when she knew she’d lost him, yet continued to pretend she hadn’t, and he (worse) allowed her to—somehow reminded her, more than had anything else in recent years, of how she had loved him. Will, suddenly, seemed—in his not being Dave—even more alien than previously. Oh my God, she thought, why am I here? What did I just do?