“What?”
“She told me once she almost didn’t marry you; that what it came down to more or less was how much she loved this apartment.”
“That’s bullshit.”
She leaned in and kissed him and Timkin pulled away, as if from a flame.
He refused to believe Amy would ever say anything so unkind. His love for her was his insulation against whatever bad news the world had in store for him.
He stood now at the center of the dance floor, at the center of his party and soaked it all in, all the love and laughter. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, his guests were all looking his way. He could see everyone from everywhere: his childhood friends, and his high school teachers, his colleagues from work and people he had liked and admired, or secretly feared. They were all here, and likely Amy was here somewhere as well. That was the nature of the night — you could see your entire past all at once and you could figure out who you were and what it all added up to.
Timkin took a long sip of what he hoped was his own drink, then held the glass aloft. Someone cut the music; they were waiting for the host to speak.
“To Amy!” he called out to everyone he could see. “To Amy!” a chorus of them yelled back, and if this was only the start of the darkest part of his life, Timkin marveled at what he’d already been able to make of it.
Her Words
My son, Rajiv, is sleeping with a student from my Dante class. I had made the poor decision of inviting the twelve of them to my house — always perilous — always the chance of someone stumbling on an old letter or journal entry, or some embarrassing laundry or rotted piece of fruit in the refrigerator. And then my son started talking to Rachel Weisman, the slender, dark-haired junior from Santa Barbara, California, with the forthright eyes and the full-lipped mouth, who’d been three times to my office hours. And as I chatted with the rest of the class I kept the two of them in the corner of my awareness. My son has a lot of what I wished for when I was a young man growing up in Bombay. He is well read, and well bred to a point. He is a winning conversationalist, and there are friends of mine who can’t believe the eloquent sentences that come forth from his lips, on literature or politics — at that age. “What sort of food do you feed him?” my colleague Jan McAdam asked me. Which had to do, I can only presume, with Jan’s own overheated feelings for Rajiv. So I might have been wiser to have my class over — if I was to have them over — on a night when my son was out at a baseball game (though he doesn’t go to ball games), or at the alternative newspaper where he serves as arts editor, or at the movies. But one thing led to another, as things do, and he was, well, sleeping with this girl.
They became an item, which puts me in a difficult position, as you might imagine. It isn’t that I have another in mind for him, or that I believe he has made a poor choice. It’s just that — here’s the issue — each day when I walked in the classroom to teach, I had to pretend that I hadn’t just seen this Rachel Weisman walking from the shower in just a towel, her long hair wet, and her shoulders gleaming with little beads of water on them, and I had to pretend Rachel Weisman hadn’t spent the night within my walls, and that I hadn’t heard my son and Rachel Weisman making love, which I did, though I sometimes covered my head with two pillows nearly to the point of suffocation.
I am not stuffy or uptight about these matters. We are in America after all, and this sort of activity goes on. Remember, if you will, that I am in the position of grading her. There are no rules against this, but there probably should be. Our house is relatively small, which compounds the problem. At first she was like a ghost I caught only traces of but never directly encountered. But that began to change, and she became increasingly brazen. After two weeks of their sleepovers, I was reading in bed, which is one of my greatest pleasures, and I’d forgotten to close the door and when I looked up at the entryway, Rachel Weisman was standing there watching me. She had on one of Rajiv’s V-neck undershirts and a wraparound skirt worn low enough to expose the black waistband of her underwear, which I did not care to see. Her hair was tied back behind her head, her pale freckled arms folded before her.
“Good book?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
“It’s a biography. Of Lawrence.”
She seemed to be taking in this information and deciding something.
“I like Lawrence,” she said.
Her expressions were at once self-assured and desirous of affirmation. She had lived more than I knew, she seemed to be saying. I feared she was looking at my thinning hair, or the birthmark below my right eye that strangers often mistook for a terrible burn.
“Especially the stories,” she said.
“Well, good night then,” I said, and in my own house I gently closed my door.
When she saw me in the hallways at school, she would stop me to ask personal things such as, “Did you sleep okay, Mr. Singh?” Or “How’d you like the veggie calzone?”
Once, after class and within earshot of another student, she commented that the heat had stopped working halfway through the night, and she had nearly frozen in the too-thin quilt.
I took her aside. “Do you know how that sounds?” I asked. And she smiled, conspiratorially, as though we two were putting one over on everyone else. “I get it,” she said, but I only felt worse.
A few nights later I told Rajiv that I didn’t mind them dating, though I did, but that I’d prefer it if she didn’t sleep over. “As if,” he said. “It’s my house too.”
My son had begun in the last year to wear modish sideburns, as well as a cluster of beads along a leather strap tied around his neck, like an insouciant surfer, though we live more than two hundred miles from the nearest beach. His T-shirt had a picture of a chimpanzee with President Bush’s face.
“But I’m her teacher,” I said.
“So.”
“You don’t see anything strange about that?”
“Not really.”
It is at times like this that I wonder if it is possible to dislike your offspring, whether the rule about love holds for every father and son. Because I do not like his selfishness when it comes to me.
The fact that his mother and I have been separated for two years now has made me more pliable and then more resentful. It used to be that I set rules and enforced them. Here I’ve let him dictate matters, and so the matter of Rachel Weisman has been closed. She will sleep in our house and I will be uncomfortable.
The next thing that happened was that Rachel started missing classes. She’s very smart, but she’d miss a class and she’d make an excuse but where she’d been was at my house, in bed with my son.
I can’t say for sure they were in bed, but I’d bet good money on it. I would bet one of our cars on it, the six-year-old Volvo. I wondered what the other students thought, and what they knew.
After five missed classes, I told Rachel at dinner she was in danger of failing. And she said she would return, she’d been sick, and she had been working hard on her midterm paper.
“It’s really good,” my son said. “It’s one of the best papers I’ve ever read.”
“I won’t miss another class,” she said, but then she giggled, because my son must have pinched her under the table. She was dressed in a football shirt I’d passed down to Rajiv.
“If you miss many more, I’ll have no choice,” I said.
“I won’t miss one,” she said.
“Tough guy,” my son said, when Rachel carried their dishes into the kitchen.