“I can imagine a lot about Lyle makes you feel claustrophobic. Has it been hard leaving Manhattan behind?”
“Definitely a little strange. But I felt I had to get away. I was looking for a place to think, to regroup, that sort of thing.” She smiled, feeling a little self-conscious. “And then Glenda made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“Someone told me you two went to the same boarding school.”
“More or less.”
He cocked his head in a gesture that said, Please explain. He’s a little like me, Phoebe thought. He likes to go below the surface.
“Glenda graduated from there,” she said. “I ended up staying for just my sophomore year and then finished up back at my hometown high school.” She paused for a moment. “Homesick.”
He narrowed his brown eyes, studying her.
“You don’t seem like the kind of girl that gets homesick.”
“Well, I’ve had my wuss moments in life,” Phoebe said. She looked away involuntarily and kicked herself for it.
“What’s amazing,” Duncan said, “is that you and Glenda stayed friends after knowing each other for just a year when you were, what, fifteen?”
“I know. But she’d helped me through a tough situation, and we forged a pretty strong bond. We did drift apart for a bit—this was before cell phones and e-mail. But right after college we both ended up in New York—I was in the magazine business, and she was getting her doctorate at Columbia—and we started spending time together again. It was fantastic to reconnect, and since then we’ve been very close.”
“And are you glad you accepted her offer to come here?”
“By and large, yes. But like I said, I miss the city.” She smiled. “You cannot get a red velvet cupcake in this town. But at the same time I’ve enjoyed the quiet, the lack of chaos. And teaching has given me something to focus on besides my recent fuckup.”
“I bet the kids find you utterly fascinating.”
“Oh, yeah, but not necessarily in a good way. There’s that whole elephant-in-the-room thing to contend with—with both students and faculty.”
He cocked his head. “Meaning?”
“The whole scandale,” Phoebe said. “The plagiarism charges. I know people start buzzing about me the minute I walk into a room. I feel like Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby. They’re all wondering whether I really cheated in that golf tournament.”
“Did you?” he asked, holding her eyes intensely. It was the first time she’d been asked so bluntly, and she found it strangely appealing.
“No,” she said, shaking her head with a rueful smile. “A freelance researcher mislabeled some research notes. And yet . . .”
He didn’t say a word, just looked at her. So he knows how to do the pregnant pause just like I do, she thought.
She shrugged. “I’m not blameless. I’ve always been such a stickler for detail, but in this case I hired a person without the right experience and didn’t pay enough attention to the process.”
“Maybe something about the process didn’t interest you anymore.”
“Maybe,” she said.
God, she thought, how did I get into this? He was asking all the questions. Mercifully the timer she’d set for the pasta went off just then.
In the kitchen, she tested a strand of the linguine, drained the pot, and then stirred the creamy sauce into the noodles. Perhaps it was the glass and a half of wine she’d already drunk, but the carbonara smelled heavenly to her.
“Does Tony know you can do this?” Duncan asked after she served the pasta and he’d consumed two big forkfuls. “This is amazingly good.”
“Thank you. I don’t have much of a repertoire as a cook, but I’m generally pretty decent at pasta. My Italian grandmother loved to teach me in her kitchen.”
“You’re adopted, then. You can’t be Italian with that fair skin and blue eyes.”
“I’m just a quarter Italian, the rest is English and Irish.” She needed to get the attention off herself. “Do you like to cook?”
“Some nights, though nothing fancy. A lot of nights I end up working late in the lab and I just grab takeout.”
“Is it strange—working with rats?”
“Why, do you find them unnerving?”
Phoebe shuddered a little. “Yes,” she said. “I—I can’t stand it when I see them on the subway tracks in New York.”
Duncan laughed that deep, melodic laugh of his. It was the kind of laugh that made you want to linger in a room with him.
“They have their charms, believe it or not. One of the things we’ve been studying is how cleverly they teach their pups. They make pretty good mothers, too—except, of course, when they eat their young for reasons we don’t quite understand.” He laughed again. “Sorry about that. Not the kind of comment I should be making over dinner.”
Phoebe smiled. “No problem—it’s very interesting stuff.” But she was anxious to get off that topic, too.
Duncan set down his fork and leaned back in his chair.
“So how did you end up writing about actors?”
“I’ve always found them intriguing—though not so much because of the sexcapades and outrageous behavior. I had a second cousin who had a fair amount of success doing TV and off-Broadway theater, and I could always see that she was desperately trying to be something she wasn’t. I kept wondering what demons she was running from. And as I began to do celebrity profiles, I saw that they all were trying to be something different than they were, that they all had these secrets. I love figuring out what makes them tick; there’s an exhilarating rush when I find a clue that helps me piece everything together.”
For the next few minutes they tossed around several different topics: why Duncan had chosen psychology as a field; Lyle’s issues as a college; and how different Gen Y was from their own generation. I like this, Phoebe thought.
They finished their pasta, and Phoebe realized that the night was going faster than she wanted it to.
“Would you like an espresso?” she asked, rising from the table. “I lugged my machine out here from the city.”
“That would be great,” Duncan said. “Let me help you clear, though.”
“No, no, there’s really so little to do.” She returned from the kitchen a few minutes later with the espresso, the fruit, and a plate of chocolate biscotti she’d discovered while searching quickly through the pantry.
Duncan peeled opened a tangerine, not saying anything but seeming content, comfortable with the silence.
“So how long have you been at the school?” Phoebe asked. “And is it a good fit for you?”
He was the one who looked away this time, as if gathering his thoughts, but she knew from experience that people broke eye contact when the other person’s words had thrown them off.
“About two years,” he said, looking back at her. “And it’s been pretty good. It’s just not the kind of place where I saw myself.”
“I hear it’s hard to get a job in academia these days.”
“It wasn’t that, actually.” He sounded grave. “I take it the campus grapevine hasn’t served up my personal story, then?”
She suddenly felt a prick of anxiety, though she wasn’t sure why. “No,” she said.
“My former wife’s parents were from Lyle. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago, and she wanted to come back here to die. I’d been teaching at Northwestern—we were living in Chicago—and fortunately a job opened up at the college here not long after we moved back.”
Phoebe realized she’d been holding her breath. She let it out slowly.
“And?” Phoebe asked haltingly.