She was ten minutes late, her plaid skirt and black blazer a sharp contrast to the proletariat uniform of jeans and work shirts I and most of the class wore. She sat on the front row, a supercilious smile on her face. I continued with my lecture, trying not to be distracted by the presence of a woman who might be involved in deciding which faculty were let go during the college’s next budget crisis.
I was talking about Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” explaining how the poem’s seeming sympathy for the downtrodden ultimately reinforced the hegemonic structure of society. The students had been responsive, good questions and comments. Kelly said nothing, her lips pursed in a tight smile I found more and more disconcerting as the period passed.
She did not leave her seat until the rest of the class had gone.
“Did I pass the audition?” I asked, an ironic smile on my face to match hers.
“Maybe,” she said. “That’s not the kind of thing we discussed in my lit classes at Bennington. There it was all scanning lines and looking for archetypes.”
“That’s the problem with small liberal arts colleges,” I said. “It wasn’t until grad school at Duke that I saw literature had some connection to the real world.”
I’d realize later Kelly sensed I was about to launch into a lengthy anecdote about my conversion at Duke, so she cut me off in midsentence.
“Do you have plans for the evening, Professor?” she asked.
“Just a few student essays to grade.”
“Well, how about I buy you a drink at the Grey Pheasant? Let the essays wait a while.”
“That would be nice,” I said.
I followed her taillights to the restaurant. We parked and then walked into the bar the college’s employees shared with the town’s other professionals.
“I picked your class to attend for a reason,” Kelly said, handing me my drink. “We met at the dean’s party last fall. You don’t remember me there, of course.”
I didn’t. Kelly is an attractive woman but there’s not that one feature — lush lips, high cheekbones — that makes an immediate impression.
“You were holding forth about the rigors of academic life. It sounded pretty pretentious, especially to someone who sees how empty the faculty parking lot is by midafternoon. But I could see you had potential. Nice eyes too.”
Kelly placed her hand on top of mine and I did not withdraw it. She was, after all, my superior. I wasn’t tenured and didn’t need any enemies in administration. But it was more than that. I liked her cynicism, the mockery in her voice and eyes, how she viewed everything the way I viewed literature. I wanted to match her cynicism, and I did. I matched it enough to marry her.
ON SUNDAY EVENING I bumped up the washed-out driveway to Lee Ann McIntyre’s trailer, parking behind a decade-old Ford Escort with a smashed rear fender. A couple of leafless saplings wilted in the front yard, no more alive than sticks jabbed in the ground. An orange and blue plastic tricycle was wedged under the trailer, a saggy beach ball beside the concrete steps.
I knocked on the screen door, and the voice I’d heard on the phone told me to come in.
“I’ll be out in a second,” Lee Ann McIntyre said. “Have a seat.”
I sat on the couch. Across from me a playpen bulged with bright, cheap toys, above it a picture of three kids sitting at a picnic table, in the corner a TV and a plastic bookshelf filled with paperbacks, books with “Desire” and “Passion” in their titles.
“I’m ready,” she said, and I looked away from the books.
Lee Ann McIntyre stood in the doorway that led to the rest of her trailer. She wore black high heels, a dark blue dress, probably what she’d worn that morning if she’d gone to church. Her hair was blond, too long for a face that had aged quickly — maybe from too much sun, maybe from too many kids too soon. But there had been a time when she was pretty, I could see that.
“Where are your kids?” I asked. “I’d like to meet them.”
She blushed, as if they’d been a secret she’d hoped to keep from me.
“They’re at my sister’s.”
I waited a few seconds, but she offered no drink, no small talk. She had her pocketbook in her hand as if she couldn’t wait to get out of the trailer.
We didn’t say much in the car. I asked about her children, but she didn’t warm to the subject. Maybe she thought I was prying, or maybe she was so exhausted from raising three kids alone she wanted a few minutes without having to think about them. I asked who she liked to read and that got us to town without too many more long pauses.
Inside the Grey Pheasant, the maître d’ led us past the bar where Kelly and I had come three years ago after my class. He seated us in the corner opposite the bar, and it made me a little nervous, because sometimes faculty members came in for an evening drink. I sat facing away from the bar and the mirror that filled the wall behind it.
I ordered a gin and tonic and Lee Ann said she’d take the same. I drank mine and ordered another, while she stirred her drink with the red straw as if searching for something in it, only occasionally taking a sip. She was nervous and seemed suspicious as well.
We both ordered filet mignon, and when she’d finished her drink she opened up a little more, telling me about the upper part of the county where’d she had grown up, where I went trout fishing some days when I tired of pretending to be a writer. She knew the places I fished, and that seemed to make me more credible. Our salads came and she ate with more relish than I did. She asked if I had kids, and when I said no she seemed to assume that meant I’d never been married. She talked more about her children, how the oldest, who was only ten, was already boy crazy and how that bothered her.
“I married at eighteen,” she said. “I don’t want her making the same mistake.”
“How long have you been divorced?” I asked.
“Two years.”
“Does your ex-husband help with the children?”
Lee Ann laughed humorlessly.
“No.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“He’s in prison.”
She didn’t look down at her drink when she said it or act embarrassed. Her tone was matter-of-fact.
“He’s in prison?” I said. “Prison?”
“At least until next February.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
Lee Ann hesitated. “He tried to kill me.”
She must have thought I didn’t believe that either, because she pulled back her hair. A welt long and thick as a cigarette purpled her neck. But it wasn’t a welt. It was a scar, a scar that hadn’t healed right, or maybe covered a wound so deep and ragged it could never heal right. As I stared at the scar the restaurant became bright and strange, as if, until that moment, I had been someplace else, someplace far away. I was the one looking at my drink now.
“That’s why I need a knight in shining armor,” she said, her laugh brittle. “To get me away from here, away from North Carolina, someplace where he can’t find me when he’s out.”
Lee Ann paused. Her right hand lay beside the silverware. She moved her thumb and index finger so they touched the knife’s handle.
“He swore he’d kill me when he got out,” she said, looking right at me.
“People say all sorts of things,” I said. “They’re just words.”
I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince.
Lee Ann just shook her head.
“You don’t know him.”
She started to say something more, then decided not to speak. A man wearing a jacket and tie passed our table, but it wasn’t anyone I knew.