He was in the teachers’ lounge, seven-fifteen a.m., sipping the latte he’d picked up on his way to work and checking his e-mail before classes started, when he clicked on a message from his brother Rob and a porno filled the screen. His first reaction was annoyance, shading rapidly through puzzlement to fear — in the instant he recognized what it was (a blur of color, harsh light, movement) he hit escape and shot a look round the room to see if anyone had noticed. No one had. The lounge was sparsely populated at this hour, and those who were there were sunk deep inside themselves, staring into their own laptops and looking as if they’d been drained of blood overnight. It was Monday. The windows were dark with the drizzle that had started in just before dawn. The only sound was the faint clicking of keys.
All of a sudden he was angry. What had Rob been thinking? He could be fired. Would be. In a heartbeat. The campus was drug-free, alcohol-free, tobacco-free, and each teacher, each year, was required to take a two-hour online sexual harassment course, just to square up the parameters. Downloading porn? At your workplace? That was so far beyond the pale the course didn’t even mention it. His fingers trembled over the keys, his heart thumped. He clicked on the next message — some asinine joke his college roommate had sent out to everybody he’d ever known, all thirty or so of them with their e-mail addresses bunched at the top of the screen — and deleted it before getting to the punchline. Then there was a reminder from the dentist about his appointment at three-thirty, after school let out, and a whole long string of the usual sort of crap — orphans in Haiti, Viagra, An Opportunity Too Unique To Miss Out On — which he hammered with the delete key, one after another, with a mounting irascibility that made Eugenie McCaffrey, the math teacher, look up vaguely and then shift her eyes back to her own screen. Rob had left no message, just the video. And the subject heading: I Thought You’d Want To Know.
By lunch he’d forgotten all about it, but when he checked his phone messages there was a text from Rob, which read only: ?????? Sandwich in hand, the noontime buzz of the lounge reverberating round him — food, caffeine, two periods to go — he called Rob’s number, but there was no answer and the message box was full. Of course. He summoned his brother’s face, the hipster haircut, the goofball grin, eyes surfing the crest of some private joke — when was he going to grow up? — then dialed Laurie at work because it came to him suddenly that they were supposed to go out to dinner tonight with one of her co-workers and her husband, whom he’d never met, and he was wondering how that might or might not interfere with the football game on TV, but she didn’t answer either.
Then the day was over and he was in his car, heading to the dentist’s. The drizzle had given way to a drifting haze that admitted the odd column of sunlight so that the last he saw of the school, for today at least, was a brightly lit shot of glowing white stucco and orange-tile roof rapidly dwindling in the rearview mirror. Traffic was light and he was fifteen minutes early for the dentist, whose office was on the second floor of a vaguely Tudorish building that anchored an open-air mall — bank below, Italian restaurant with outdoor seating bottom floor left, then a realtor and a sandwich shop and on and on all the way round the U-shaped perimeter. A patch of lawn divided the parking lot. There were the usual shrubs and a pair of long-necked palms rising out of the grass to let you know you weren’t in Kansas, appearances to the contrary.
He debated whether to drift over to the sandwich shop for a bite of something, but thought better of it, remembering the time the dentist had chastised him in a high singsong voice because he hadn’t brushed after lunch, the point of which had escaped him, since he’d been coming in to get his teeth cleaned in any case. The thought made him shift the rearview and pull back his lips in a grimace to study his gums and then work a fingernail between his front teeth, after which he took a swig of bottled water and swished it around in his mouth before rolling down the window and spitting it out. That was just the way he was, he supposed — the kind of person who did what was expected of him, who wanted to smooth things out and take the path of least resistance. Unlike Rob.
It was then that he thought of the video. He looked round him, his blood quickening, but no one was paying any attention to him. The cars on either side were empty and the only movement was at the door of the bank, where every few minutes someone would come in or out and the guard stationed there (slab-faced, heavy in the haunches, older — forty, forty-five, it was hard to say) would casually nod his head in recognition. Shielding the laptop with the back of the seat and the baffle of his own torso, he brought up the video — porn, he was watching porn right there in the dentist’s parking lot where anybody could see, and he wasn’t thinking about students or students’ parents or the rent-a-cop at the bank or the real thing either, because all at once the world had been reduced to the dimensions of the screen on the seat beside him.
He saw an anonymous room, a bed, the incandescence of too-white flesh and the sudden thrust of bodies cohering as the scene came into focus. In the center of the bed was the woman, on all fours, the man standing behind her and working at her, his eyes closed and his face drawn tight with concentration. The woman had her head down so that her own face was hidden by the spill of her hair, red-gold hair parted in the middle and swaying rhythmically as she rocked back into him. He saw her shoulders flex and release, her fingers spread and wrists stiffen against the white field of the sheets, and then she lifted her head and he saw her face and the shock of it made something surge up and beat inside of him with a fierce sudden clangor that was like the pounding of a mallet on a steel rail. He watched as she stared into the camera, her eyes receding beneath the weight of the moment — Laurie’s eyes, his wife’s — and then he slapped the screen shut. I Thought You’d Want To Know.
For a long moment he sat there frozen, unable to move, unable to think, the laptop like a defused bomb on the seat beside him. He wanted to look again, wanted to be sure, wanted to feel the surge of shock and fear and hate pulse through him all over again, but not now, not here. He had to get home, that was all he could think. But what of the dentist? Here he was in the parking lot, staring up at the bank of windows where Dr. Sedgwick would be bent over his current patient, finishing up with the pads and the amalgam and all the rest in anticipation of his three-thirty appointment. But he couldn’t face the dentist now, couldn’t face anybody. He was punching in the dentist’s number, the excuse already forming on his lips (food poisoning, he was right out there in the lot, but he was so sick all of a sudden he didn’t think he could, or should… and maybe he’d better make another appointment?), when he became aware that there was someone standing there beside the car window. A girl. In her twenties. All made up and in a pair of tight blue pants of some shiny material that caught the light and held it as she bent to the door of the car next to his while another girl clicked the remote on the far side and the locks chirped in response. She didn’t look at him, not even a glance, but she was bending over to slip something off the seat, on full display, every swell and cleft and crease — inches from him, right in his face — and all at once he was so infuriated that when the dentist’s secretary answered in her bland professional tone he all but shouted into the phone, “I can’t make it. I’m sick.”
There was a pause. Then the secretary: “Who is this? Who’s speaking, please?”
He pictured her, a squat woman with enormous breasts who doubled as hygienist and sometimes took over the simpler procedures when Dr. Sedgwick was busy with an emergency. “Todd,” he said. “Todd Jameson?”