“You’re obviously paying attention, so please participate more. That’ll help your grade.” He showed her to the door.
In the following weeks, Evie flitted in and out of class carefree as ever. Moses avoided prolonged eye contact or speaking to her alone in the halls. He realized he was acting as if something unseemly had actually passed between them.
In late May, the semester was officially over and all were preparing for the summer break. Moses was staring at a text from Jay asking him not to cancel the meeting with his divorce attorney again, when Evie knocked on Moses’s office door. “Hey, Professor T, you got a minute?”
“Sure.”
Leaving the door open, Evie sauntered in, stood in the middle of the room, and grinned. “Thanks for the grade.”
“You did extremely well on your final exam. Scholarship intact, I presume.”
“I studied hard. And I did really love your class. You’re the first guy that ever made history like fun. Hey, my band is playing at the Smell tonight. Evie and the Bralasses. I’d love it if you came. Some of my music profs are coming.”
Moses demurred. “Previous plans.” He did have a meeting with his divorce attorney.
“Another time, then.”
Moses mumbled, “I don’t think so.”
“Professor T, don’t you get it? Your marriage is history.”
Annoyed, he asked rather curtly, “How do you know about that?”
“The Itch List knows everything.” The Itch List was a student-only Web site, which apparently carried more information than just about teachers and their classes. “I like older dudes whose faces have life lived in them. And you’re so smart.” Evie spread her arms, with her palms at forty-five-degree angles, and bowed her head as if she were onstage. She held the pose for Moses, who stared at the green lace top that didn’t do much to hide her freckled breasts, and she pronounced, “It’s my abandoned child thing. My dad — my mom kicked him out for good reasons — after a while he decided he didn’t need to see me or my sister.”
“I’m sorry. It’s terrible when parents punish their kids for selfish reasons.”
Evie shrugged. “So, tonight?”
Moses thought, Evie, you need to be around men your own age. I’m not a cure for your problems. “I’m sure you and your band are terrific. But I can’t.”
With the semester’s end, Moses found himself adrift in space and time without the usual soothing summer routine. No vacation with Jay. No visit to New York to see Hannah and old friends. Mostly he ate takeout or frozen dinners alone in the empty house. Sometimes he felt so lonely he wished for a solicitor to call. But when he’d meet with friends, he almost always wished he had stayed home.
He found himself languishing in memories of his Jay-life. He thought about returning to Budapest, where the inexplicable out-of-body vibrations of the dead entered his body, tears welling unwillingly in his eyes, as he sat in the Great Synagogue desecrated by the Nazis and their minions in the Hungarian Arrow Cross. What foolishness — that out-of-body idiocy — for a descendant not of the slaughtered but of the slaughterers. If he returned, he’d be looking for an entirely new set of clues to his past. No, he couldn’t go back.
The land mines exploded, the shrapnel of divorce lodged in his lungs, he reflected on his new identity and what the cancer had wrought: Was he no longer the same person? For centuries, Jews had pretended to convert to Christianity to save themselves. Others had converted out of belief. How had that changed them? How would this change him? He had often been perceived as a type — a transplanted New York Jewish intellectual. Would he unconsciously surrender his invisible yarmulke and unmask a secret identity previously unknown to himself? No, he was still Moses, only non-Jewish, motherless, unmarried yet unfree. A lost man with a surfeit of wars still raging in his soul. Would he even find peace in the arrival of eternal nightfall?
Moses cursed Butterfield for his sly way of giving up on him. He began therapy with a psychologist in Santa Monica. After one disappointing afternoon session, he drove to Bergamot Station, hoping to find Jay perusing the galleries, as she often did for her clients. He drifted to the café, took a seat in the outdoor patio, and scanned the parking lot and open spaces, pleading for his soon-to-be ex-wife to pass by, when, from behind, he heard a cooing voice. “Pro-fessor …” He recognized Evie’s voice as she approached and stood by his side. “You mind? Or is this off-limits, too?”
“Please. Not at all.”
Before she sat, she pulled her sweater over her head, and Moses stared at her tattered, sleeveless T-shirt (it read THE JAM). “Getting hot.”
“So, Evie, what brings you so far west of the 405?”
“Stalking you,” she teased. “C’mon. I came to see Exene Cervenka’s collage exhibition. One of my idols. She was the lead singer for X.”
“Someone once dragged me to see X after I first moved to L.A.”
“Knew there was a hip dude hidden under that buttoned-up shirt. That why you’re here?”
“No. I’m here because … I was hoping to run into my wife.”
“Sorry. I’m not her. But you got me. You believe in fate?”
“No.”
“Dude, you sure know how to charm a lady.”
Moses half laughed. “Evie, I am glad we’ve run into each other. I did not handle our last conversation particularly well. You mentioned problems with your father, and I was hastily unsympathetic.”
“You were.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Apology almost accepted. How about we finalize it and go someplace less oinky for a real drink …” She reached for his hand and dragged him out of his chair and toward her car. He resisted. Why? She was damn cute. Seemed kind of goofy. He had nothing to go home to. He needed to change his life and he still regretted his youthful timidity with women. So … he surrendered and suggested Chez Jay, the forty-year-old dive of the older “hip” crowd. There was little chance either his students or Jay would see them there.
A few hours later, dizzy, besotted by liquor and lust, Moses found himself laying out his credit card for a room at the nearby Loewes Hotel. Once inside the room, Evie, in a series of swift motions, slipped her iPod into the room’s player and turned up her band’s CD. She pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Evie, I don’t …” She thrust her breasts in his face, which Moses found himself kissing frenetically before she slunk down between his legs. She unzipped his pants, dismissing Moses’s halfhearted admonishments.
“Tastes good.”
Moses, enthralled at being seduced so boldly, suppressed his rising panic.
“Professor T”—she giggled, pulled off her jeans, and sat on the bed—“now suck me then fuck me.” She put her legs on Moses’s shoulders and gently pressed him into a kneeling position as she lay on her back. Moses surrendered. Consequences be damned.
A few hours later Evie woke Moses. She was already dressed.
“Geez, how long have I been asleep?”
“Not that long. It’s only ten. Sorry, but I have to go.”
Nonplussed by the sight of this young woman he hardly knew standing over him in a hotel room, Moses mumbled, “Oh, okay. I guess.”
“I’m meeting my band at eleven. I don’t want to have to explain why I can’t make it.” Evie bent over and kissed him. “That was very nice. And don’t worry, Prof”—she pulled her hand across her lips as if zipping them shut—“our secret. Maybe next time I’ll stay, if, ya know …”