She moved to the windows at the back of the room. A dog she didn’t recognize trotted briskly up the driveway. A few years ago Walt would have charged out to meet it, smell it, inform it of whose territory it had trespassed. This morning she’d had to lift him up and hold him before his bowls as all four legs quivered and shifted desperately for a painless balance. He took a tongueful of water, then looked at her, confused by his lack of appetite.
Behind her Patrick Watkins cleared his throat. He’d let his raised arm fall unbent into the crook of his other hand just to let her know how long he’d been trying to get her attention.
When she was beside him he asked, “Is it okay if I call Seymour Glass Morie? I mean, just sometimes? My father’s best friend from college is named Seymour but we call him Morie so I’ve kind of gotten used to calling Seymour Glass Morie in my head.”
“That’s not okay, Patrick.”
“Really?”
As she weaved through the desks back to the perimeter of the room, she saw that Mandy Hughs was dotting all of her i’s with daisies. She’d only written half a page for all the time it took to make the petals. “No flowers,” Vida said as she passed. “Just letters.” How did those middle school English teachers sleep at night?
Finally the bell shook the floor. Her students dashed off their last thoughts and tossed their pages onto the pile on her desk. Everyone was suddenly free.
Peace returned to her classroom. She realigned her chairs, picked up flecks of torn notebook paper from the floor. She gathered up the essays, each page puckered on both sides from the ballpoint ink pressed on hard and nervously. If she were focused, she could get through half of these, then glance at the pages her sophomores read over the weekend before the next bell. But focus had eluded her lately. She was behind on her grading, and had been less than inspired in the classroom. Her students rattled her in a way they didn’t used to. And the material, once so easily intellectualized, seemed to writhe under her inspection of it. Even Hardy, whose theories on Darwinism, religion, and social codes were as cold and straightforward as mathematics, was becoming a sensualist, with all those disgusting passages she’d never noticed before about the oozing fatness and rushing juices of summer, the dripping cheeses in the dairy where Tess takes refuge after her baby dies and meets Angel Clare.
“Vida.”
A wild yelp came out of her as she spun toward the voice. It was Tom. Fuck him for sneaking up on her like that.
“I was just hoping …” he said, looking around, making sure they were alone. “I called to find out when you had a free period, and I thought we could talk.”
She couldn’t speak for the sudden thrumming of her heart. She’d heard nothing, no scuffle on the stairs, no crack of an old board in the hall. Fear, unable to hear reason, flooded her body.
“Is there someplace we could go? Someplace”—he looked around the dim, cavernous room—“smaller?”
The scare had heightened her perception yet dulled her reaction. She could smell the vinyl of his station wagon on him, but it took her a delayed moment to turn and lead him to her office.
He sat on the ratty green sofa and she moved to take her seat behind her desk. He patted the cushion beside him. It was the first attempt he’d made to be physically close to her in eight days, and she gave in. She regretted it instantly; the springs were shot, the cushions nearly featherless. She felt trapped in a rabbit hole.
How often, in September and October, she had conjured him up in this room as she worked at her desk. How often she had stared at the empty couch and wondered who he really was, and what he wanted with her, her blood churning at the memory of the slightest gesture from the night before. And now he had come and it seemed perverse to think back to that other time when his lips shook against hers, when he said things no woman should ever let herself believe.
“I came here to try and talk.” The sound of his voice in this tiny room that had been for fourteen years reserved for the dispassionate talk of books, made-up people’s blunders and heartaches, not her own, disturbed the very molecules in the air.
“Okay. Shoot,” she said, feeling the gulf between this smooth, teacherlike response and the mayhem inside her.
Disappointment flickered in his face. He began again. “I think we need to air out a few things. I came here because I thought it might be easier for you to talk in your own element.” His eyes traveled briefly around the room, which after all these years bore little evidence of her presence. The books on the shoulder-level shelf across from them could be found on the shelf of any high school English teacher in any state across the country: Norton anthologies, the Riverside Shakespeare, Melville, Dreiser, Brontë, Hawthorne, Cather, Faulkner. Nothing contemporary, nothing edgy, nothing out of print, nothing in translation. Not even a slight leaning toward a theme, a preference of gender or time period. The passionless shelf embarrassed her.
“All right,” she said, straining for the appropriate tone to cover up the hollowness she felt, as if all her emotions and the words for her emotions were scurrying to the farthest side of her brain where she couldn’t reach them. Years ago, her first year at Fayer, Gena had flown in for Christmas wanting to talk, wanting to know what had happened, why Vida had left home so abruptly, and though she’d planned, that whole fall, to tell her sister everything, when the time came her mind went blank. She had let Gena hold Peter, feed him a bottle, walk him around the pond in her arms, but she was never able, not even with an easy lie, to explain his presence.
Tom began talking. He had a lot of things to say, rehearsed phrases that he’d clearly refined over the course of days and maybe even weeks, phrases like “off on the wrong foot” and “between the sheets.” Her years at Fayer, with all their assemblies, banquets, and dedication ceremonies, had made her an expert in the art of not really listening. She let his clichés roll easily over her. She did not let their eyes meet, and instead looked at the cuff of his dress shirt, a wedge of which poked out from beneath his jacket sleeve. His clothes did not have tags. They were softer to the touch than regular men’s clothes; their colors were unique. The tweed of the jacket he wore today had bits of scarlet, bits of turquoise, though looking at it from a distance you’d never guess it had anything but shades of brown. And the jacket fit him in a way that men’s clothes off the rack wouldn’t. Even though he was sitting down, there was no bulge at the back of the neck. He was pleasing to look at, pleasing to touch, without trying to please at all. His clothes fit because he had been making them for himself since he was nine years old. There was something she resented about the comfortableness of his clothes, the comfortableness of his body in this world. Even now on the green sofa beside her he seemed to be pretending to be nervous, pretending to be awkward and wary of her reaction to his words, pretending to care about who she was and what would become of them. But no matter who she turned out to be, no matter what happened to them as a pair, if they could really call themselves that, he would be fine. In his soft tagless clothes in his little mouse house (he was talking now about the house, how it was a challenge, merging families, merging lives) with his precious, badly educated children, he was going to be just fine.
“Hey.” His eyes, squinted, fierce, accused her of not listening. He clutched her two hands, his fingernails stinging the flesh of her palms. “Please talk to me. Please.”