She had nobody to blame but herself. Making a monthly trek north to see Nick about “work,” stealing an afternoon here or there to meet for “drinks” at the Bowery Hotel — all under the auspices of developing a hundred acres of land that weren’t trivial so much as tangential — this was crime enough. But leaving evidence of their trysts on her phone, there, on the bedside table, where Oliver could do nothing but find it — how could she forgive herself that? She wanted to be caught — she accepted that — but she couldn’t have devised a more cruel or cowardly way of announcing her betrayal than to let him stumble upon the photos that she and Nick exchanged with the hormonal indiscretion of the millennials she taught. Her breast here. His cock there. Some employing a well-draped sheet to artistic effect. Some with all the pretense of amateur porn.
Guilt bit into her viciously, but probably not as viciously as it should. Its grip lacked that grab-you-by-the-throat-and-shake-you-till-you’re-dead quality of a pit bull attack, leaving her in the clutches of something closer to a cocker spanieclass="underline" pain latched on, but eventually, she knew, she’d shake it off. She’d live. Dare she think it: she’d thrive. Whenever her mind drifted toward the calm blue waters of freedom, of satisfaction, of newly refurbished love and the late-blooming family she always considered herself too ambivalent to embrace, Claudia felt a sudden stab of happiness against which she once thought herself impenetrable.
Nick, with no grander gesture than taking her hand, buttressed her change of mind. When she warned him that she’d sooner move to Staten Island than Alluvia, he replied that certain people depended on distance for the closeness in their relationships. She’d heard that somewhere before. But couldn’t say whether it was true; for there was more than one type of distance, and Claudia charted figurative miles as well as literal ones. She and Oliver had lived in the same 1,200 square feet for the last ten years, and yet on some very real level their love seemed transatlantic: Oliver on one shore, she on the other. Occasionally they met for happy and passionate reunions, but those times of togetherness were brief and separated (at least for Claudia) by long weeks of ambivalence and abstemiousness and anemic wants that Oliver decided to accept. She withheld sex. She blunted her affections. He sat like a dog at the table, waiting for scraps; they lived as if this was the way life should be. But with the reappearance of Nick and their nomadic son, Claudia’s compulsion for this sort of emotional distance collapsed under the weight of desires she used to think herself too evolved or too philosophically sophisticated to feel. She loved Nick. She loved Max. She wanted them. She wanted them near.
She graded papers on the train uptown. At 116th Street, she got off and had the handsome Armenian from the corner cart refill her thermos with strong black coffee before hurrying up Broadway to the main gates. In April, Barnard’s campus radiated like a veritable oasis of green, the patina’d statue of the torchbearer, the yellow and green and blue banners flapping along the mullioned face of the library, the lovely expanse of lawn bordered with hedges and trees. As she made her way across the flagstone walk, Claudia took in the magnolia, its riotous blooms of dark and pale pink as beautiful as they were brief, an otherworldly confection balanced against a china-blue sky, whose petals were already letting go, tips curling with brown and wheeling through the air to make a shaggy carpet at the base of the trunk. She considered it for a moment, the sad beauty of the tree that proved if you looked at something long enough, you were bound to see its end in it, coiled, perhaps remote, but there. Amused by her own moroseness, she walked on, slipping into the steel-and-glass wedge named not only for the donor whose millions had made the building possible but also for the virgin goddess of the hunt, the Romans’ protector of women. Her office nestled in the architecture department on the fifth floor.
She took the stairs, expecting perhaps to find her favorite grade grubber, the only student who turned Claudia’s office hours into an occasion for weekly pilgrimage, who took up residence outside her door like it was the entrance to Lourdes, but Dylan (née Emily) Speck had yet to appear. In his place, sturdy and attractive as some particularly robust weed, stood Jennie Halvorsen, scribbling on a Post-it note she’d stuck to Claudia’s door. Claudia, having no idea the frustration that co-chairing a committee with Jennie would cause, had agreed to oversee two other faculty members, a handful of students, and selected staff on the Campus Beautification Council. Because the primary task of the council — reviewing the design and installation of campus way finding — had stretched from a two- to four- to eight-month commitment, Claudia and company had been recruited to offer their opinion on a number of smaller (supposedly simpler) improvements, from the color and weave of rain mats meant to spruce up the lobby of campus buildings to the placement of a tree to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (the planting of which now lagged eighteen months behind schedule), jobs that, in Claudia’s opinion, required due consideration and a quick rubber stamp of approval, but that, thanks to the likes of Jennie, seemed doomed to languish in a swamp of academic inertia. Claudia had witnessed this phenomenon before. She’d seen the launch of the college’s refreshed website, the adoption of its visual identity system, the delivery of stationery and business cards specially designed for faculty (because the suite of materials designed for administrators didn’t quite pass muster) derailed by professors whose criticisms flowed as endlessly as the minutia they focused on. Ready with an angry tirade against a “childish” shade of blue or the Oxford comma, one could always rely on a Jennie Halvorsen or Jack Yu or Linda Garcia-Silvestre to steer a project into the bog.
Jennie, hearing the decelerating approach of Claudia’s heels, looked up with a sour expression (her default) that immediately turned sweet. Her angular, deeply lined face brightened as she said, “Claudia! I was hoping to catch you.”
“Jennie.”
“Do you have a second?” she asked, not waiting for an answer but following Claudia into the cool white hush of her glass-fronted office. “I’d like to run something by you before tomorrow’s meeting.”
Claudia dropped her bag on the floor, shrugged out of her jacket, and, indicating a lime-green plastic chair for Jennie, sat herself.
“It’s this tunnel project,” Jennie began, digging into the folder in which she collected notes on the photo exhibition to be hung in the underground tunnel that ran from one end of campus to the other and allowed students to attend classes, even during the coldest months, in their pajamas. She pulled a photo from the stack of papers and slid it across Claudia’s desk like some ominous classified document. “I think we need to revisit some of these images.”
Claudia pried her attention away from Jennie’s preferred hairdo, a thin, perpetually damp ponytail that made her look like a woman who’d just been pushed into a pool, and gave the printout a long, quizzical look. She couldn’t immediately see why a photo of a slender Asian girl striding across the quad with a college tote bag under her arm had been condemned with a question mark scrawled on one of Jennie’s infamous purple Post-its. Perhaps the girl’s boots were too militaristic? Her blazer too businesslike? Claudia apologized, opening a desk drawer to find her reading glasses, but Jennie rushed in to provide a clue.
“It’s the bag. Look at the bag.”