She had talked Tommy Macon into driving her down there that night. She smiled, thinking of Tommy. Tommy who used to have a crush on her. Tommy, taking her out to drag Main in his big old Chrysler. Kaylie calling “Hey!” to Sue Halloran, just to rub it in. Sue calling back, half-heartedly, like a beaten pup.
Willowy. That’s what Joseph called her that night. If his eyes had moved over her just a little more slowly, it would have been insulting. He had taken in her skinny frame, a body she dismissed with the word “awkward” up to that moment, that moment when Joseph asked, “Who’s the willowy blonde, Tommy?”
When he introduced them, Tommy, who would never be a Thomas, whispered to her, “Don’t never call him Joe.” He needn’t have bothered with the warning. She knew from that first moment that Joseph would be extraordinary. He would never be “an average Joe.” Tommy was sweet and clumsy, but she was too stupid in those days to see the advantages of being with a sweet and clumsy man.
She sighed, closing her eyes. Too late to mourn the loss of Tommy, still married to Sue. Five kids and fifty pounds later, he would stay married to her. Kaylie couldn’t even bring herself to contemplate the idea of mourning Joe. She tried it. Not mourning him — calling him Joe.
Joe. Joe. Joe. She said it like a curse. Joe you. It suited him now, she decided.
He was a poet, he had told her, when he was Joseph. A poet. Tommy confirmed it. Tommy, naively bragging about a man he hadn’t even realized was already his rival. Joseph’s poetry had been in every issue of the Butler County College Literary Magazine every semester he had been there. Tommy didn’t claim to understand it all, but he thought it was pretty interesting that Joseph used all small letters, like that Ogden Nash — no, hell, no, that e. e. cummings fellow. That, and did Kaylie know that Joseph could recite all the words to “American Pie” and tell her exactly what they all meant?
Joseph never did recite “American Pie” for her or unravel its meaning. Too late now.
Kaylie shifted to her side, looking out the top half of the bedroom window. The broken air conditioner sat in the bottom half. It made her mad just to see that air conditioner, so she forced herself to look up over the top of it.
The refinery was still burning. Flames, in the distance, reflected odd colors off the clouds of smoke that billowed and rolled into the night sky. Even with the wind blowing most of it away from town, the air was filled with the stench of burning oil and gas, and would doubtless be for some hours.
Maybe it was the fire. Was that why Joseph had died this night, and not some other night? Had the stinking, burning oil made the sky so different tonight, so different that things had come to this?
She turned away from the window, restless, unwilling to watch it, knowing neighbors had died there tonight. No time to think of that, not now.
Damn, it was hot.
She wondered if Joseph’s students would miss him. He had always managed to have a coterie of A.Y.M.’s around him. That was one of Kaylie’s secrets, calling them that. An A.Y.M. was an Adoring Young Miss, and many of them had fastened their hungry, barely-lost-my-innocence gazes on Professor Joseph Darren.
And why not? He could have been a made-for-TV English professor. He taught poetry, was a published poet (mostly through a small local press owned by a childhood friend). All those A.Y.M.’s thought he was so sensitive. (Their own boyfriends were sweet but clumsy, and so immature, i.e., not twenty years their senior like Professor Darren.) He was handsome and tall and distinguished looking, with an air of vulnerability about him. Slender but not gaunt. Big, dark, brooding eyes. Long legs. Long lashes. Long, beautiful fingers.
His fingers. Only one of Joseph’s poems had been published in the American Poetry Review, and it was Kaylie’s favorite. For some years now, it had been the only one she could stand to read. It was a poem about something that had really happened. It was a poem about the time he righted a fallen chair, the chair beneath his mother’s dangling feet, and stood upon it, then reached up and placed the fingers of one hand gently around her ribs, and pulled her to him, holding her until he could use the fingers of the other hand to free the rope from her neck.
He had shown the poem to Kaylie not long after they met, and told her that his mother had committed suicide one hot summer day. Kaylie could see at once that he was a troubled man who needed her love to overcome this tragedy. Thinking of that poem now, she held her own strong hands out before her. Had she taken him that seriously then? Well, yes, at eighteen, the world was a very serious place. At forty, it was serious again.
But the poem had genuinely moved her, and after they were married, she had sent it off to the Review. Joseph had been unhappy with her for sending it in, told her she had no business doing so without his permission, and he was probably right. But in the end, it had been that poem in the Review that got him the teaching job.
Joseph’s talk of his travels around the world had pulled at her imagination. He had traveled a great deal after his mother died. His father had passed away the summer before, and there was an inheritance from that side of the family that he came into upon his mother’s death. Joseph told her of places he had been, of Europe and North Africa and India. She had pictured the two of them traveling everywhere: riding camels on the way to the pyramids, backpacking to Machu Picchu.
But after they married, he didn’t want to go anywhere. He had satisfied his wanderlust, it seemed. When she complained about it, he gave her a long lecture about how immature it was of her to want to trot all over the globe, to be the Ugly American turista. Those other people didn’t want us in their countries, he told her. Besides, he couldn’t traveclass="underline" he had to get through graduate school.
So she washed his clothes and darned his socks and typed his papers instead of riding camels. One of her friends was almost a feminist and told her she shouldn’t do things like that for him. But her almost-feminist friend was divorced not long after that and, as Joseph asked Kaylie when he heard of it, didn’t that tell her something? Soon she stopped having anything to do with the woman because Joseph told Kaylie that the woman had been coming on to him. Now she wondered if it was true.
There had been years of small deceptions, she knew. He had seemed so honest in the beginning. She had misunderstood the difference between baldly stating facts and being honest. On the night he told her about his mother, he also told her about his daughter, Lillian. He said he loved Lilly, but he didn’t marry Lilly’s mother exactly because she had tried to trick him into marrying her by getting pregnant. He might as well have said, “Let that be a lesson to you.”
When he finished graduate school, Joseph told Kaylie that he had decided against having any more children. He had a vasectomy not long after he made that announcement. She was twenty-one then and didn’t object very strongly; it was a disappointment, but she could understand Joseph’s point of view. She told herself that they would have more time to do the things they wanted to do. And even every other weekend, Lilly was a handful.
But somewhere around thirty-five, it became more than a disappointment. It was a bruise that wouldn’t heal. Every time her mind touched upon it, it hurt.
By then, their isolation was nearly complete. They were estranged from her family and most of the people she knew before her marriage. Their few friends were his friends; their hobbies, his hobbies; their goals, his goals. He reserved certain pleasures for his own enjoyment. Infidelity was one of them.