“This other person … girl … a student of mine from the same poetry class Cheryl was in named Sophia Androcelli, very brash girl, can be quite bullish about announcing her opinions.… Sophia was in my office a while back, with a loose-leaf notebook of Cheryl’s. She apparently had a crush on me. Cheryl, I mean. She wrote me a letter and actually, you’ll be amused by this, said that while she was fond of me, or however she put it, I was too old for her. Anyway: an awful thing had happened to Cheryl. Really two awful things, pertaining to the same event. She said in the letter she’d been forced into sex with her godfather — this stuff is all so awful, it’s what you hear about on daytime TV or read articles about when you’re sitting in a waiting room, you really don’t know what to say — and she told Livan about it, and the next thing she knew, Livan had appropriated the story. And she’d written the letter — well, she’d written it because she had a crush on me, I guess, but she’d also written to apologize because, inadvertently, she’d made the situation worse for McCallum, and like everybody else, she assumes McCallum’s my great buddy and anything anybody might say to him, they might as well say to me. She wanted me to tell him about the rape, and about Livan Baker’s parroting her story, so McCallum … I don’t know; so McCallum would see how fucked-up Livan Baker was. As it turns out, it’s quite an irony that his wife got furious at him about something besides Livan Baker. But anyway, Cheryl told me, and now I’m telling you.”
“I don’t quite get it,” Sonja said.
“I know, it’s so convoluted. It’s just one kid who went through a traumatic event having the misfortune of rooming with a real loony, an undercover cop with a drug problem, for Christ’s sake … and when she left school, she wrote her teacher a letter to explain. A confession, because she felt guilty, even though anything she’d done was unintentional.”
“Her teacher?”
“Me,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. She was slouched in the chair McCallum had once sat in, little jumping embers sputtering in the fire, her feet, in the ballet flats, stretched out on the newspaper she’d read and then piled on the footstool. He could remember their former quiet nights of reading things aloud to one another from the newspaper, having leisurely dinners in which the only subjects of conversation weren’t disturbing things, their planning vacations, talking about possible house sales before it became a buyer’s market, relaxing. She tucked her hair behind her ears, which made him smile fondly at her. She looked rather like a schoolgirl herself, as she gazed up at him. Recently, she had been looking at him quite often — the night before, she had put down the book she was reading, propped up in bed, and simply stared. He had come out of the bathroom, mistakenly wearing her robe.
“Why did she leave school?” she said.
“I don’t know. I think it had all been too much for her. Generally.”
She shifted in the chair, glancing over her shoulder, probably considering whether to add wood to the fire. He hoped she wouldn’t; the discussion had gone on long enough for one night.
“You know, McCallum feels the way I do right now,” she said. “He says there’s no way he can go back to teaching. He doesn’t know what he wants to do. I suggested, sort of half seriously, that he think about selling real estate. It would give him plenty of time to read books, in this market. He was upset today because he still can’t concentrate. It was worrying him that there was a pile of books on the night table and he couldn’t remember which one he’d been reading. I think it’s common after something like what he’s gone through that the person forgets things and can’t concentrate. I tried to tell him that.”
“What about his son?”
“McCallum’s mother-in-law doesn’t want him to visit him in the hospital. Whether that’s for her sake or the boy’s sake, I don’t know.”
“How does McCallum feel about it?”
“Oh,” she said, letting out a long sigh. “I don’t know how McCallum feels. He’s a pretty hard one to read. I’m glad he’s your great buddy, not mine. I’d always wonder what he was really thinking.”
He snorted a little laugh. It was cold in the room. He got up and pulled the screen away from the fireplace, lit a section of tightly rolled newspaper he took from a brass bucket, and laid the quickly burning paper on the last remaining orange-centered log, then placed two others on top. He replaced the screen, centering it on the tiles.
“Whereas, I usually think I know what my husband is thinking, although tonight I don’t,” Sonja said.
“What?” he said.
“You know. My husband. You. The same person as ‘her teacher.’ ”
“What does that mean?” he said, dusting off his hands and sitting on the footstool, gently moving her feet aside to give himself a few extra inches. Her feet felt light, delicate. He was surprised at their weightlessness.
“Was that the whole story?” she said.
“What part do you think I’m holding back? My wild affair with Cheryl Lanier? My true sympathy for Livan Baker, probably only a product of her troubled times, not to blame for deceiving the enemy?”
“You’re pairing the two because you want me to think it’s ludicrous you’d have an affair with Cheryl Lanier. You’re trying to put that on a par with feeling sorry for Livan Baker.”
“Sonja, I never had anything to do with Cheryl Lanier,” he said.
“Would it be the end of the world if you had?”
What a peculiar response. Was it a rhetorical question?
“Well, you tell me,” he said.
“Not the end of the world,” she said. She got up and poked a burning ember. “I have a certain interest in espousing that opinion.” She leaned the poker against the firescreen and went back to the chair, raised her feet to the seat cushion, and brought them up beside her, tucking the afghan around herself. Evie had made the afghan for Sonja’s birthday, in November, and Sonja loved it the way Linus loved his blanket.
“What do you mean?”
“For a while I was having an affair with Tony,” she said.
As she spoke, he began to try to distract himself so he wouldn’t hear what was coming; he wondered if the logs were catching fire, or whether he should have used more newspaper, or whether it might not have been a good idea to place the logs on one at a time; he tried blocking her words, though “Tony” slipped through, and also the word “affair.” He felt a physical sensation, a scrambling in his throat. She had managed to astonish him.
“Off the subject, I suppose, but so did Evie. Did you know that? That she’d slept with your father when your mother was still alive? She said she looked at the Kinsey Report when it was first published — that sneaking a look at it in those days was the same as flipping through a porn magazine now — and wondered whether women had been honest, because so many more men than women claimed to have had affairs. She and your father began their affair before she left her parents’ house in Canada, and it continued when she went to live at their house. Can you imagine Evie being so brazen? She said she’d never known how much her mother or father knew about any of it. That sometimes she thought they knew exactly what was going on. That they were looking the other way from the first and expected her to, as well. I guess I’m trying to divert your attention from what I just said. I mean this, for what it’s worth: I never wanted to break up our marriage. I know I should have found a better way to tell you, but I hate him now, Marshall. I hate myself, too, but I could sort of, you know, move aside with my own self-loathing and let you take over. I’ll understand if you hate me.”