Diana stood, distracted — furious, actually — on the St. Charles neutral ground. A late spring afternoon, the rain was pouring on that grassy median strip down the middle of the boulevard where the streetcars run.
It wasn’t like Diana to let her emotions get the best of her. The chair of the English Department of the university just across the way, Diana Banks was a focused woman. An extremely busy focused woman. On her plate: a creative writing seminar, the deadline looming for a collection of her own short stories, endless committee meetings, and a department contentious as the Balkans.
The peacekeeping was particularly wearisome. Just this afternoon, even before the incident that had moved her to rage, Diana had said to her friend Abby, “Cristabel is having another nervous breakdown. Peter’s complaining that Marcus isn’t pulling his load on the honors issue. And Gloria and Phil are at it again, duking it out on the hiring committee.”
“As if hiring itself weren’t demanding enough, right here at term’s end,” Abby, a university research librarian, commiserated.
“I know. We’ve got to make a decision this week on the new instructor. And snipe, snipe, snipe, that’s all Gloria’s done since Phil won the editorship of the journal. I wish she’d just go ahead and slash his tires, get it out of her system.”
Diana had called to see if Abby could give her a ride to pick up her car from the repair shop. Her friend couldn’t, but while Diana had her ear, why not vent a little?
Abby had laughed. “Well, you know what they say about academe.”
“The politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low? And we’re locked together forever, like lifers with no parole.”
“Tell me about it. Despite the pain of hiring, if it weren’t for the occasional new blood, I think I’d shoot my brains out. Speaking of which, did you see the new men’s baseball coach? A dead ringer for the young George Clooney. Hubba hubba.”
“You’re a naughty woman, Abigail Markson. I’m telling Steve on you.”
“How do you think we’ve stayed married twenty-six years? It’s my dirty mind that keeps Steve panting.”
But Diana hadn’t heard Abby’s answer. Her friend’s hubba hubba had taken her elsewhere.
Taken her to thoughts of Rob, an adjunct in her own department and one of the candidates for the full-time position. The candidate she was rooting for. No, amend that. The candidate Diana was set on hiring, come hell or high water.
Rob, Rob, Rob, that’s where Diana’s mind was now, while her body stood in the downpour, waiting for the streetcar. Behind her sprawled Audubon Park, its green lawns puddling, mighty spreading oaks spectral through the mist.
“The bod of a thirty-year-old,” Rob had whispered to Diana more than once, the sweet words more intoxicating than the small crystal pitcher of Sazerac that had become part of their pre-loving pas de deux.
Clever man, Rob.
What words could a woman hovering on the cusp of fifty more want to hear?
Now, from behind her, from Riverbend, Diana heard the hum of the streetcar approaching. Here it came, rain pelting off the top of the olive-green electric car from the 1920s trimmed with reddish mahogany. She climbed on impatiently, her black mood not improved by the dripping gaggle of tourists, the handful of laughing students.
Thank God, there on the river side of the car was a pair of empty seats. Diana piled her things in the aisle seat to discourage takers. She turned, then frowned at her reflection in the window, her brunette curls gone to frizz.
“Sexy, sexy hair” was another endearment Rob had murmured more than once, loosing it from the barrettes keeping it out of her face. Keeping it more professional.
Certainly no paean to her intellect had ever flipped the same switch as Rob’s honeyed pillow talk about her looks. Not for Diana, who’d been told since girlhood how smart she was.
“This little girl of mine’s gonna be a lawyer, you mark my words,” her daddy had said more than once. At seventy-five, he was finally retiring this year, crowned in glory, sheriff of the rural parish in the northern part of the state where she’d grown up. “Gonna be a lawyer and world-class skeet shooter.”
Her mother had given him a hard look when he’d talked like that. Smart girls, lawyers, didn’t find husbands, and she’d never approved of his dragging their only child along with the dogs and the guns on hunting expeditions. Though Diana had been a pudgy child, her teeth a train wreck, so what were her chances of a decent husband anyway?
But braces had fixed Diana’s smile, and she’d grown out of the pudge into a rather attractive woman. When she’d returned south from Boston with a shiny new Ph.D. in hand, the engagement ring she’d sported was even more dazzling.
“How long were you married?” Rob had asked her on their second date, about six months earlier, just before Thanksgiving.
Their second surreptitious date. Dinner at a place out by the lake where no one ever went anymore.
Diana closed her eyes and settled into the streetcar’s mahogany slotted seat, rainwater dripping off her cherry-red raincoat. Audubon Park disappeared, and a bit of her anger, too, as she let the memory of that evening wash over her.
It wasn’t really the done thing, a department chair dating an adjunct, one of that roving band of academic gypsies who subsisted by stringing together a class at one college here, another there, praying for full-time faculty to retire or die so a real job, with benefits and decent pay, would open up.
Also, Rob was twelve years her junior. Boy toy. Diana could just see the smirks.
“Honey, I was divorced before you were born,” she’d laughed, that second date.
“Awh, come on.” Rob had laid his slow grin on her. Cocked one eyebrow beneath dark golden locks.
He was a near dead ringer for Harry Connick, Jr., that lean, languorous home-grown crooner, that hunka hunka burnin’ love. Rob had then tapped her hand with one long finger, his touch like heat lightning.
Now the streetcar was passing Temple Sinai, a simple stone building with three tall iron doors. Diana never passed the temple without smiling at the memory of David Markson, Abby and Steve’s son, manfully delivering his bar mitzvah speech from the bema with not a hint of the stutter that had tortured his childhood. He was an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon now, doing a post-doc. Diana couldn’t be prouder of David.
She had no children of her own.
She often said that her students were her children. Not the same, of course, but she did invest enormous passion and energy in them. Something very much like love.
“Nawh, really, tell me,” Rob had insisted. “How long did that lucky man enjoy the supreme pleasure of your company?” Exaggerating his south Alabama drawl.
Sharecroppers, he’d said, his people. Po’ whites. Diana wasn’t so sure that that was true, but it fit Rob’s bad-boy image. The slightly dangerous English instructor/bartender/writer. He was working on a noir screenplay. L.A. Confidential meets The Big Easy.
Diana had been writing a collection of short stories for a couple of years now, stories linked by various characters’ connections to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, just around the corner from her house.
“And how could that fool stand to give you up?” Rob kept pushing. “Or did he die of consumption or somethin’?”
No, that wasn’t what happened to Richard, the smart-as-a-whip, thin-as-a-whippet, handsome young Jewish dentist she’d met in grad school in Cambridge. Richard had always thought New Orleans was “ever so romantic” and had been thrilled to pieces when the university had tendered Diana a position.