Still, he felt bad about only pretending to read the books she’d given him, and he wished he could’ve figured out how to get her to stop. He also wished she’d quit asking him about the ones he claimed to have read. Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely? Old Lady Peoples, he feared, forgot exactly nothing, and she had no intention of forgetting him.
Like so many of his anxieties, this one proved well founded. Throughout high school, Miss Beryl persisted in tormenting him. “What are you reading, Douglas?” she asked whenever their paths crossed, and when he couldn’t come up with a single title, she’d tell him to stop by her house because “I have several books I think will interest you.” Each time he promised he would, though of course he never did. She’d retired from teaching by then, and it was possible she was just lonely, her husband, the high school’s driver’s ed teacher, having been killed in the line of duty a decade earlier, launched through the windshield by a nervous beginner. He was sorry if she was lonely, but that was no fault of his, and he sensed her firm intention to keep posting her queries in the margins of his psyche forever.
After graduating, he tried a year of community college downstate, but then his mother fell ill and there’d been no money, so he’d returned to Bath. Having lost touch with Miss Beryl, he discovered he was no longer so afraid of her and maybe even missed her a little. More than once he thought about paying her a visit, maybe asking her what she’d meant by giving him all those books. He might even confess that he had no more idea who Douglas Raymer was now than he did in eighth grade. But by this time she’d become Donald Sullivan’s landlady, and he doubted it was possible for the same person to feel affection for two such different men. Fine, he told himself. Let the old woman write in Sully’s margins. See how he likes it.
It was during this same period that he got a custodial job at the college in Schuyler Springs, and it was there he met an old campus cop who suggested he go to the Academy, which he’d eventually done. A uniform, he then discovered, was the next best thing to an identity, and even Miss Beryl seemed genuinely pleased, if a little surprised, when she saw him in it for the first time. “That outfit seems to have done wonders for your self-confidence,” she told him. “Your mother must be proud.” Actually, unless Raymer was mistaken, his mother was more relieved than proud. His becoming a policeman seemed to have eroded her conviction that he would end up in the clink. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that the two career paths weren’t mutually exclusive.
Then Becka had come along. Raymer pulled her over for doing fifty in a thirty-five. She had a Pennsylvania license and plates, having moved to Bath just a week earlier. She was an actress, she explained (she was certainly beautiful enough), and she was speeding because she was late for rehearsal in Schuyler Springs and the play’s director was going to be furious. In fact, she might even lose her part. Was there any chance he could let her off with a warning? God, her smile.
He wanted to, but no. She’d been traveling at an unsafe speed, and it wasn’t right to let her off just because she was beautiful and had smiled at him and because she managed in handing over her license to touch his wrist. His decision to write her a ticket seemed to genuinely astonish her, and she later admitted that she’d been stopped for speeding any number of times without ever having been given a citation. It had made her wonder what kind of man he was. Three months later when she said, “You know what? You should ask me to marry you,” he couldn’t believe his good fortune.
How swiftly that sense of good fortune had been undermined. He’d noticed when they left on their honeymoon that Becka’s suitcase was suspiciously heavy, but he was pretty sure that asking her about why would be getting off on the wrong marital foot. When they arrived, though, and he hauled her bag up onto the king-size bed and she released the clasps, several plays and three or four thick novels tumbled out, causing the blood to drain from his face. There’d been lots of books in her apartment, of course, as well as groaning bookcases full of books about acting, as well as novels and plays. It was okay with him that she liked to read. She was a girl, after all, and many of them, like the scrawny ones at the college in Schuyler, were similarly afflicted. But their honeymoon was only for a week. What did she need with so many books? His first horrified thought was that they’d somehow gotten their signals crossed and she meant for the marriage to be platonic. That turned out not to be the case, though after they finished making love, Becka would often sigh contentedly and pick up a book and immediately become engrossed, which made Raymer feel like a short, possibly insignificant chapter. She also read by the pool and on the plane ride back, closing the last of her books just as the wheels touched down.
At the baggage claim, as they watched other people’s luggage circle and waited for their own to emerge, he decided to ask straight out, “Why do you read so much?”
At first she didn’t seem to understand the question, or maybe that its source was genuine, profound bewilderment. Shrugging, she replied, “Who knows? Same reason as anybody, I guess. To escape. There’s mine!” she pointed, momentarily confusing Raymer, who thought maybe she’d spied an escape from their marriage, not just her suitcase. Still, she read to escape? Why? Not once during their glorious week of warm sun and fancy food and drink and knee-buckling sex had Raymer wanted to be anywhere other than right where he was.
“I suppose you know all about the rhetorical triangle,” he said, feeling his eyes fill with unexpected tears. Because naturally she would. Worse, she probably understood it, that and the Holy Trinity and every other abstract concept that had stumped him during his long, tortured childhood and adolescence. Somehow he’d managed to marry someone who’d actually enjoyed school. He could picture his new wife as a kid, sitting there in the front row with her hand raised, practically waving in hopes of being called on, always confident she knew the answer. He could even imagine the expression on her young face — a combination of pity and exultation — when the teacher called not on her but some dullard trying his best to remain invisible in the back row, a boy who almost never knew the right answer and, on those rare occasions that he did, lacked the courage to risk volunteering it.
“What’s a rhetorical triangle?” Becka asked him, hoisting her suitcase off the conveyor and studying him closely. “Are you…crying?”
In fact, he was. “I love you,” he explained, which was true but hardly the reason for these tears. What had become powerfully obvious to him was how profoundly, impossibly different they were. He would be wise to enjoy her while he had her, though that wouldn’t last long.
“Where’s yours, I wonder?” she said, scanning the trundling bags, or pretending to, perhaps annoyed by his unmanly public show of emotion. “They went on the plane at the same time. Wouldn’t you think they’d come off together?”
“It’s probably lost,” he said, suddenly sure of it.