“I really don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to share yourself with me. I want you tell me how I can make things better for you.”
“I’m fine. You don’t need to do anything for me.”
He dropped his face into his hands, rubbed, and then sat up again with a red forehead. “I keep going back to certain moments. At Emma’s, remember that night? It was the first time I’d spoken of my children, really. You had so many questions, so many insights.” He went on and on, each date, each conversation.
He was right. She’d been good at talking; she’d been good at listening. She had that English teacher’s ability to communicate, to draw out meaning, to produce the larger picture. She had taken great interest in his children as characters. But he had expected more from her when they became flesh and blood.
“Everyone said to take it slowly but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. When I saw you go up to that podium last June I knew. Honestly, it was all I needed to see. I felt I knew you, and I wanted to be with you.”
“I can’t be that person you saw. You’ve got to forget about her. She existed for a few minutes and then she sat back down.”
“But Vida—”
“That morning my friend Carol’s son hung himself in an apartment in Boston. My favorite class was graduating. It was an emotional day.”
“And you’re saying you’ll never be emotional again?”
“It’s not something I can turn on and off.”
“Just turn it on. Forget about off.”
He took her hand with the rings on it and cupped it in both of his. It quickly warmed to his temperature. She wished they could just stay like that. Why did relationships have to be so verbal? All day long she dealt with words, adjusting them, negating them, praising them.
“I know you’ve begun drinking to stop it from turning on.”
“Begun drinking?”
“From what Peter says this is pretty new.”
From what Peter says.
“When I was a little boy I watched my father disappear every night. He came in from the shop joking and laughing and by the time dinner was over that man had died. And a bitter disappointed man was in his place.”
Oh Lord. She couldn’t bear the cliché of it. Had he plucked it directly from one of Fran’s books?
“I can’t watch that happen all over again in my house. I know where it leads. I’d like to ask you to stop.”
“Stop drinking?” She was still incredulous.
He nodded.
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Oh God. You’re way off track.”
“Am I?”
“I’m a hell of a lot better with a few drinks in me.” Didn’t he at least understand they’d never have sex again if he cut her off?
“I don’t think so.”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t, Vida. I don’t trust you at all.”
And then, like the junior boy who’d sat on this couch last week begging for a better grade, he began to cry. He made no attempt to stop his tears or cover his face or turn away. Her eyes, which had been locked on the sleeve of his jacket, drifted up toward his, and when they met she felt a shifting of the weight inside her and she could feel how it might be to speak about the falling falling falling feeling she got sometimes even when she was drunk and Tom was touching her, a feeling as close to feeling like you don’t exist, have never existed, as you can have in this life, like the whole universe is a joke, an enormous joke and you’re finally being let in on it, and how somehow this feeling was worse than the terror she had felt in that bathroom that afternoon all that time ago. How a memory could be worse than the thing itself made no sense but it was the remembering she was scared of, and if she unplugged that memory for him it would always be there between them. It would spread everywhere; it would spread to Peter, and then her life would truly be over.
Once she got ahold of herself again she grew bored by his performance. She had the impulse to get up and grade a few papers until he had finished. Then she understood that he wasn’t going to stop until she stopped him.
“All right,” she said. “If it’s so important to you.”
“Not just to me. To all of us. Stuart, Fran, Caleb, and Peter.”
“Peter has nothing to do with this.”
“Peter has everything to do with it.”
“I’ll see you at home.” She got up off the couch, sat down at her desk, and swung the stack of freshman essays around to face her.
When she looked up again, he was gone. She was soothed again by the sensation she’d had in her kitchen the day he proposed, that this was practice, and that the real event, the one that counted, the one that would be graded and put in the book, would happen later, when she had studied harder and knew her lines.
Her sophomores were in the midst of some intrigue. She could tell at once by the sound of their feet, which were clustered together and moving quickly as if trying to keep up with the pace of their gossip. Even the boys were in on it, their voices cracking with surprise. By the time they reached her door they had all composed themselves somewhat, greeting her with their usual blend of resentment that people like her existed and reassurance that the world, dastardly as it was, had not changed over the weekend. Peter seemed out of the loop. He was the last to enter the room and took his regular seat, which was removed from the froth of gossip. She admired him for this, and tried not to think about Tom’s words.
Whatever it was had gotten them all stirred up, and they took longer than usual to get settled. Lindsey scribbled something and handed it to Brian, who giggled like a third grader.
Karen was the only one who’d gotten out her book. “God, Mrs. Belou, why did she tell him?”
“Why did who do what?” She wished she’d had time to review last night’s reading.
“Tess! Why’d she have to tell Angel?”
So they had gotten there already. “All right,” she said to the most agitated corner of the room. “Give it a rest now. Why don’t you take out”—the commotion stopped and she could hear them breathing, waiting—“your book.”
A ripple of relief spread through the room, though there were a groaning few who had read carefully in hopes of a quiz to boost their grade.
“Brian, could you give us a little summary of what happened last night?” she said. Then, as an irritating little grin grew on Brian’s face, she added, “In the book.”
“Well,” he began, clutching the unopened novel like a football, “after a lot of talking talking talking Tess finally agrees to marry Angel. On December thirty-first, which I think is a really weird day to get married. And then she tells him about the Alec dude and the baby and it’s all over.”
Vida was surprised he’d understood that much of it. “Anyone want to add anything to that?”
“She tells him because after the wedding he tells her about some woman in London he was with for a while and he asks Tess to forgive him,” Harry said. “She is so psyched because she thinks now it will be easy to finally let out this secret she’s been keeping from him, but when she tells him he has a completely different reaction.”
“What does he say?” Vida felt an energy returning to her, an energy she’d begun to suspect she’d lost. Lately, she found herself vacillating between anger and lassitude, unable to find the vigilance and rigor she once had. But today she would talk about the ill-chosen location of the honeymoon, the crumbling d’Urberville mansion, and how Hardy plants his Darwinian theories of social determinism in the faces of Tess’s two ancestors on the wall (paintings built into the wall that cannot be removed), one representing treachery, the other arrogance.
“At first he wonders if she’s joking or going crazy, and then he gets mad.”