Maple smiles. “It’s better than clerking at Howland’s.” He turns his profile to me. He has three amethysts in his ear. He combs back his hair with his fingers, eyeing the piano. “I’m worried about Gerard,” he says. “He’s drinking too much.” The music has stopped. Gerard’s on a twenty-minute break. I see him start to wend his way over here but get waylaid by a woman in red slacks.
I try to think. Is Gerard drinking too much? Am I? Have I really noticed? “You think so?” I ask. And the waitress brings over two glasses of white wine.
“This is from Gerard,” she says.
“You know he’s going to audition for opera companies?”
“Yeah, I know,” I sigh, all weariness and concern, and then neither of us says anything. We tap our fingers, gaze down, gaze off. “Do you realize,” I say at last, “that there’s a guy sitting at the bar eating Vaseline?”
In class the teacher was teaching poetic forms. She defined villanelle, sestina, limerick. Last night she had looked up terza rima in the dictionary; it followed tertiary syphilis, something she’d always suspected.
Saturday dinner with Darrel is at the Fitchville Souvlaki House, where Gerard and I first went years ago. There’s a permanent sign on the door that says CLOSE ON MONDAY, and I worry that somehow Darrel and I won’t be.
This is where Darrel wants to go. He likes the checked tablecloths, the accents flying around in the kitchen. You can hear them when someone pushes in or out of the door in back. I look around the place and wonder who all here’s on first dates.
We order recklessly. I’m not sure what we’re getting. Darrel tells me that the Greek name for stuffed grape leaves means liar eggplant.
“Personally,” I say, “I’ve never put much store by honesty. I mean, how can you trust a word whose first letter you don’t even pronounce?” I light a cigarette and try to look sophisticated. I am that afraid of the world. Really, I have never gotten out of Tomaston High.
Darrel smiles and says that before he was in Vietnam, he was in Italy for six months, a weird mix of orders, and, on leave for a week, he went to Greece, island-hopped, learned a few phrases, never slept at all. He describes things: some fishermen he met, a village woman, a disco on the beach.
“What about the Acropolis?” I am into the authentic partaking of foreign countries, not ever having been to one myself, unless marriage counts.
Darrel describes the Acropolis, and, yes, it sounds like marriage: high, stunning, stony, and old with a gift shop at the bottom. He goes on to talk about neolithic architectural sites, the ancient Epidauros amphitheater. I feel ordinary and ungrammatical, and as always blame the trailer, blame growing up in a trailer.
When dinner comes we eat it. I’m not concentrating. Why is it that I can’t quite describe or picture Darrel? I close my eyes for two seconds and try. Is it that I’m not paying attention? I think of him as tall and strong, but perhaps he’s not really. Does he have a mustache? I open my eyes quickly to check. No, he doesn’t.
“Do you feel okay?” asks Darrel.
“It’s the liar eggplant,” I say cryptically.
Darrel is looking at my teeth. “You have nice teeth,” he says.
Afterward, at home in my living room, we drink wine, but we don’t kiss. Behind him, like a movie screen, I see the war, the muck of the paddies, swoop of helicopters, the hollers and cries. I suppose that is why we do not kiss.
But perhaps the reasons are not large and public but small and personal. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m too unattractive, older, perhaps my body has forgotten how to do things, my lips no longer firm or flip, my nipples no longer pink as calamine, my tongue no longer newly, nimbly amphibious but a thick, thrashing fish-muscle. Now I’m middle-aged: hairs sprout, skin sags, my mouth grows stupid as a boot. How can I make it work? I try to think about Congress and about polyps: how they make currents with their lips in order to receive food.
Darrel is talking aesthetics, poetry, voice, my thesis, and at the mention of the last all I can think of is how my whole life all I’ve ever really wanted was for my small, bug-bite breasts to heave seductively up over the neckline of my shirt, like a scientific wonder. Perhaps one might learn it with practice, discipline, commands: Heave! Heave-ho! “Do you like Joan Baez?” Darrel is saying. “I think her voice is more beautiful than any other singer I can think of.” I burst into a medley of all the Joan Baez songs I know. Darrel sings an old army thing about Nixon, set to the tune of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
Our laughs grow louder and hazy. Soon we are kissing. Soon we are unbuttoning. I haven’t kissed or unbuttoned in a long time and it’s like, at long last, a meeting of friends, falling into a familiar, ineffable dance we’ve both learned elsewhere, long ago, but have revived here, a revival! perhaps like Agnes DeMille’s Oklahoma! something like that. It is as if our separate pasts were greeting each other, as if we were saying, This is how I have been with other people, this is how I would love you. If I loved you. Everything always seems to boil down to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Off you would go in the mist of day and all that.
“You know, I’m probably old enough to be—” but here I stop for a second. “I’m old enough to be older than you,” I whisper. “Don’t look at my body. Don’t say anything about it.”
Darrel smiles. “I wouldn’t dream of bringing it up at a time like this.”
And soon we are upstairs, pulling down the bedspread, something in us pounding and accommodated, a mashing of hips, a pressing of faces, a slow friction of limbs and chests and lips against the sheets, this argument that is sex. Sometimes his chest moves up from mine with a soft sucking sound from the damp, trapped space between our sternums — something wet and reluctant, like marine life or a heart that can’t stop beating no matter how it tries. We are gasping, quiet, in the dark, and then the wash of violet and night tornadoes through my legs and up behind my eyes, plumbs and spirals my spine, and I know if I can keep feeling like this I’ll be okay, if I can feel like this I’m not dead, I won’t die. Life is sad. Here is someone.
The next three Saturday nights we sleep together. They are full of chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders. They are sweet and gentle, not at all like my marriage, where my husband used to laugh and slap me on the back after I’d had an orgasm, like a buddy, like I’d just hit this crazy home run. I don’t remember feeling such relief at the start of an affair: I’m not afraid. It’s like the joy of meeting someone who knows your favorite cousin — everything proceeds from this momentous, bridging fact. Like two Maine license plates honking and waving on a California freeway: the warmth of shared exile; two ugly step-siblings meeting at a ball, smiling and waltzing and, having no fairy godmother, not having to rush off in a tizzy like Cinderella who was all jitters and economics, foot small as her bank account. We don’t have to rush home, we can dance all night, curfewless and happy, our feet warty and huge as skateboards.
“You’re out of your mind,” says Eleanor, not smiling. “Your professional position is precarious enough. Why jeopardize things further with another affair with another one of your students?”
“What do you mean, another?” I ask warily. She has said it twice. I’ve noticed. “It’s not like I sleep around with my students. Look, you don’t know Darrel. He’s great. He’s the sort of guy who tells you just the edge of his whole tragic life story, then smiles and leans over and sniffs your hair.”
Eleanor shrugs. “It only matters how things look.”