My Education (10 page)

So shocked was Laurence's tact, or so tactful his shock, that I would never know how long it took him to gain our attention. He might have been there the whole time.

“Regina,” he coughed at last, “time to go now. I've got your jacket and bag.”

Hearing Laurence's voice was like stumbling while strolling along in a dream. I jerked with alarm and lost hold of Martha, who stepped quickly away, yet I felt when I turned my eyes toward her I'd gained her to a greater degree. She stood crimson-faced and extensively rumpled, as if she'd been rousted from bed, and my guts avalanched within me and I knew I adored her.

Laurence was crimson-faced also, for even if he'd been blind, the aroma of incipient sex assailed all our nostrils like the yeast-earthy blast from a hardworking bread oven. Somehow, Martha managed a smile. “Thank you, Laurence,” she told him, and gave him a peck on the cheek.

“What are you thanking me for?” he managed, in feeble imitation of his chivalrous self. “It was lovely.”

“Good night,” Martha said, and went quickly inside before either of us could reply.

In the Alfa Romeo Laurence lay his forehead on the steering wheel a moment, as if in unutterable pain, before starting the engine. I was trembling again with even more energy than before; I was barely sustaining contact with my seat. My appalling carnal stench was so strong now penned into the car that only the moment's paralysis kept me from jumping back out. Then it came to me that the smell was roast chicken. The car reeked of it. We started descending the winding and secretive streets, past the stone walls and dense privacy hedges and wrought-iron gates. “Laurence,” I croaked.

“Perhaps we won't talk much just now,” Laurence said, sounding strangled like me.

“I've never done anything like that before,” I burst out, for Laurence's horror had made me ashamed. “I've never kissed another woman, or one who was married, or in fact anyone who was married—”

“I really would rather not talk much just now.”

It wasn't just the misery of shame, but of quashed exaltation, that bore down unendurably on me. For though Laurence's presence had made me feel mortification, its dull tar was shot through by threads of pure gold, and I was approaching a state of such euphoric excitement I thought I might shriek. And these went together, the shame and the glory, the self-horror and the blood-lusty triumph, so well that I might have been some kind of Viking whose pleasure in killing is only enhanced by the twinges of conscience. How awful it was and how good! I wanted to exult in my crime and also be excused for it, and who else could I speak to but Laurence? At the same time I wanted more Martha. I was starting to shiver and twitch from withdrawal. It was so absolutely unpleasant, so far from the ravishing pleasure in which I'd been lost only moments before, that I covered my face with my hands and heard myself cry, “I'm hungry! I'm so fucking hungry! Where the hell did you go for the chicken? Why wasn't there
more
?”

“Oh no, darling! Don't tell me you didn't get any?”

“There was only a back when it reached me. And pieces of skin.”

“Oh, Regina! I didn't buy nearly enough. But they only had two and both very dried out, they were from Hobo Deli's rotisserie—”

“I didn't know they had a rotisserie—”

“It's brand new. And not bad. I took one home the other night when Sahba was too tired to cook. They won't have started more at this hour but they'll surely have something.”

“No, Laurence, please don't, you don't have to take me, you should go home to Sahba—”

“It's right on the way. I could use something also.”

“You really don't have to—”

“But Regina, we're practically there—”

Speeding down the hill with new purpose I think we both truly believed that whatever had happened, whatever mad impulse I'd hotly pursued, was actually Laurence's fault, for failing to guard my interests, and thus leaving me hungry and weakened and vulnerable. If that were true, Laurence only need act like himself and it all would be mended. He only need find me a nice midnight snack and I wouldn't go on craving Martha; I wouldn't assist her in smashing her marriage with the unavowed bludgeon that swung from my hands. . . .

Hobo Deli was a landmark of town life, the only store of its kind open twenty-four hours, glowing blue with fluorescence by night on its skirt of asphalt at its puzzling location amid dilapidated Victorian houses in an otherwise entirely residential part of town. It less violated the usual rules of municipal organization than seemed attuned to a powerful node that municipal leaders had tried to ignore. Its parking lot was a changing tableau all night long, clattering with skateboards, hosting swing-shift meals of microwave burritos, but even by day it was more of a center of town than the “Commons,” a failed urban renewal pedestrian plaza, or the mingy town park with Town Hall to one side and memorial plaques at the center. And Hobo Deli belonged utterly to the town, and not at all to the school, so that the nearer we drew, the farther away for the moment felt the realm of the Hallett-Brodeurs, and the more possible my reprieve. And who should happen to be there, when we came through the door, but Dutra, leaning against the back counter sharing a Tombstone pizza with his old friend Ross from community college, amid the microwave and coffeepots and ramen noodle tubs and the freezer chest of defrostable dinners.

“Aw, was the food at your swank dinner party that bad?” he razzed me, but the state of my face must have drawn him up short. “Head on home, man,” he reassured Laurence.

Laurence didn't need to be persuaded to say good night then, nor did I. As he left I imagined my secret went with him. He was the soul of discretion, and what had happened with me and the wife of our host and shared friend was no more than a typical drunken night's damage. It would be neither repeated nor acknowledged, and might not have happened at all. By the end of that night I'd convinced myself of this, and, determined to shore up the conviction, when I got home with Dutra, after two chili dogs at the Hobo and a Saranac Ale in the car, I followed him into the room we'd once shared and slid my hands into his pants.

“Hel
lo
,” he said.

I wonder how often the ravenousness of a lover, her uncharacteristic degree of abandon, is suspected by her partner of the moment for the fraud that it so often is. I fucked the stuffing out of Dutra that night, as he poetically said when at last we were done. He couldn't have known he'd been used to shore up my convictions. He succeeded so far that, though groundless, the convictions survived the entire sleepless night. They only expired, with a furious struggle, at dawn.

E
ven now, all these years later, I pause at the brink.

Any telling seems sure to diminish, to transpose what was so overwhelming and painful into something absurd. And perhaps it was absurd, in its keening emotions and weakness for froth. At the time, I believed the least relevant factor of all was that we were both women. Of course this was the first fact that anyone saw, but for us it felt last. It failed to register, at least with me. My adoration of her was so unto itself it could not refer outward, to other affairs between women or even between human beings. It was its own totality, bottomless and consuming, a font of impossible pleasure that from the start also bore down on me like a drill until at last it accomplished a permanent perforation. And yet, irrelevant as I thought gender was to our sex, and to all the disasters it wrought, I now see that the form our love took was fundamentally girlish. The gender-blindness I sensed did apply to the content: I didn't love Martha for being a woman, and would have loved her no less had Shakespearean whim turned her into a man. So much for the reasons for love, if such even exist. But the
way
that I loved, and the way she loved me . . . we might as well have been sylphs capering through the glade, crowned with daisy tiaras and trailing lace rags. We lay hours on end raptly stroking the other's smooth face, or disbelievingly tracing the wavelets of damp lip and brow; we wept a great deal and loudly; and endured our orgasms like shipwreck survivors with hoarse shrieks of actual fear.

That spring Nicholas was teaching his undergraduate Spenser survey on Tuesdays and Thursdays; his graduate seminar, close-reading
Areopagitica
, Wednesday afternoons; his office hours he held after Spenser lectures, or by appointment; he had no obligations on Monday. Having worked with him so closely, having come to know him so well, being in possession as I was of his schedule even now that I no longer TA'd for his class, had either heightened my conscience in favor of him, so that I might have hesitated at stealing his wife; or, less happily to upholders of morals, it might have given me such knowledge, as of the hours he was sure to be out, to assist in the theft. And so the fact that I phoned their house Monday seemed to suggest that my motives were pure, if “pure” can be meant to describe a compulsion forbidding the slightest resistance. I felt no malice. I meant no one harm. Saturday night I had kissed her. The wee hours of Sunday I'd willfully sullied my body with Dutra. In the hard light of dawn I had washed myself clean, yet the ardor for Martha remained, after torrents of water, immobile as bedrock. Realizing this was a sort of bereavement, and bearing it alone, for the rest of Sunday's daylight and darkness, had been almost intolerable. How could I wait until Tuesday to call her? Likely immediate consequences—Nicholas picking up his own phone—I disregarded with a rashness I mistook for courage.

But neither Nicholas nor Martha picked up. “Ah-lo,” said a distracted Latin voice. “Hellett-Brawder rezidenze.”

“Is Martha there, please,” I exhaled.

“Whoze calling?”

“. . . It's a student.”

When she came on the line she said, quietly, as if assuming someone was eavesdropping, “Miss Gottlieb. I thought it might be you. You know I'm not teaching this term, and even if I was, I never give my home number to students.”

“I was wondering,” I began with new uncertainty, for she was so reduced and abstracted, and I couldn't watch her mouth for the telltale asymmetry, or scent the heady nectar creeping out from her clothes, or lay hold of any other encouragement, so that my wonder, like a shy tentacle finding nothing to grasp, began to shrink back on itself. “I was wondering if you'd meet me for lunch.”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” she said so kindly I thought she might pity me, and a sweat of righteous anger broke out on my scalp.

“Just coffee, then,” I countered.

“Listen. The other night, everyone here had a little too much—”

“Just meet me in Memorial Park, by the flagpole. Just for a minute. We'll just take a walk.”

“Regina—”

“You want to see me,” I declared, for she'd spoken my name, and all at once I'd felt the telephone disclose her. I knew that if indifferent or bored or alarmed she would have promptly hung up without scruples. She wasn't a courteous woman. She didn't protract conversation in honor of form. She had thrown stale baguette at her guests in the hopes they would leave—and she was still on the line.

“Maybe we should have this conversation in person,” she conceded. “Because you really can't call here again.”

“I understand,” I said, dismissing her injunction like tossing a hat in the air.

She ruled out both lunch and a walk, I knew without her stating it outright because both were too personal; the cup of coffee she accepted. She chose a downtown café highly favored by professors and students for off-campus meetings that was always crowded, that played at excess volume the three-chord anthems of frenetic social outrage favored by the melancholy pierced and dyed counter employees who were all the teenage dropouts and faculty brats of the town, and that was long and shallow with no secret crannies and located on a street corner, with two walls of full-height windows, that made of passersby an exhibit to the patrons, and of patrons no less to the passersby. Its tiled floors were permanently grimy, its pastries were stale, its coffee was rancid, and its bathrooms were effectively public and frequently used by denizens of a bar down the street which had delicate plumbing. Even the most dirty-minded of lovers would not choose this place for a tryst. And so I knew, from the trouble she went to, that the solarium was as vivid in her mind as mine.

I arrived more than an hour before the appointed time, and she was more than fifteen minutes late, so that I was able to secure a booth along the inner wall, with relative if scanty privacy. Most of the privacy there was provided by noise, and by the self-absorption of the other patrons. Before rushing out of the house I'd remembered to bring a notebook and a pile of paperbacks, and these sat on the table as camouflage. I even tried to absorb myself in them, so that she would come upon me in beguiling profile, bent scholastically over a tome, but I couldn't; I couldn't take my eyes from the windows, nor stop readjusting my clothes, over which I'd gone crazy before leaving the house, putting on and taking off until I ran out of time, so that I was dressed very strangely, in a gingham sheath dress that the weather was not ready for, and a thick cardigan, and scuffed, ugly black boots.

She turned out to be dressed strangely also, in a fancy and ugly silk blouse, matching slacks, and dark, chilly lipstick, as if to make the point of her superior age and position while also denying her beauty, but this final objective, which couldn't succeed, had confused the effect of the rest. As soon as I caught sight of her through the windows I erupted all over in mutinies. An idiot's grin split my face, even as I saw, in her face, a clear series of calculations; she seemed to toss out the script she'd prepared as, perhaps, too polite. “We're talking about your term paper,” she said warningly as she sat. “Don't lean so far across the table. I shouldn't have come.”

“You wanted to,” I insisted, fearlessly combative now because so replete, not with particular joy or desire but whatever that common juice is that engorges the pump works of all the extremes of emotion. Now that she was here at arm's length, there was nothing inhibiting about the café. If not for her schoolmistress gaze keeping me in my place, I would have lunged over the table.

“I don't always act in my best interests,” she agreed, “but I didn't come here to protract our,” and my heart threatened to burst when she used the possessive pronoun, “misunderstanding,” she finished.

“I don't think it was a misunderstanding.”

“It was very much a misunderstanding.”

“It didn't feel like one.”

After a moment she said, carefully, “I hope I haven't hurt you.”

“Do you think—” I gasped suddenly with unpleasant insight. “Do you think I'm just a student with a crush? Who's going to stalk you, and threaten suicide over you, and tell the dean you harassed me, to get my revenge?”

“I could argue you're stalking me now,” she said, attempting levity but failing, for gravity had condensed at our table; she was leaning far forward now also, as if she hoped to trap my words under a dome.

“I'm not a student with a crush.”

“Then what are you?”

“I'm in love with you!” I declared with exasperation, for she'd enraged me with this repeat of her coy question:
what are you doing?
And then I saw her blanch behind the stain of her mouth, and knew at least she was listening.

“Keep your voice down!” she said.

“And you,” I went on, ignoring her. “You—”

“I cannot get involved with a student,” she stated, all the color of her face, having ebbed out of sight for an instant, resurging now as if she'd been slapped. “Let alone a student of my husband's.”

“We're already involved.”

“That's absurd.”

“It's true. You're the one in some kind of denial—because you think it's inappropriate, or because you feel guilt—”

“I'll thank you not to tell me how I feel or what I think,” she exclaimed, now as livid as I; she'd equally forgotten where we were. “You're very young,” she warned me. “I'd rather not say that I'm old but I'm older than you. I've been stupid and had stupid impulses, but I'm not ruled by them anymore. I don't know what you know about me. I haven't been an exemplary wife and I've caused my
husband
, your
mentor
, many serious problems and he's caused many problems for me but that's over, that chapter is closed. I'm married. That's what marriage is about: you work this crap out. Recommit. I have a child. In fact, I have to go now. I'm sorry we all drank and smoked far too much this past weekend. I hope you'll forget it.” I sat stunned as she delivered this speech—so the script had not been irretrievable—and as I did, my mute astonishment grew its reflection on the silk of her blouse, for in the course of her words, her heart started to bleed. The stain spread as I watched, a dark drenching that more and more clung to reveal her breast and its hard, bumpy nipple. She must have noticed my gaze the same instant she felt it, and her hand went to cover the spot. “You see,” she murmured, but her voice had sunk and its low roughness thrilled me. “You see, I have to go.” She rose and threw a last glance at me which remained even after she turned and wove back through the tables, and past the bank of windows until out of sight.
You see
, the glance said,
my body tells the truth, if you think that I don't
. But I already knew this.

•   •   •

Once, when still heavy and tethered; and intimate and yet hard, like some tool of a doctor's, against which, with a sense of transgression, we could squash a hot cheek; when transmitting the sound of the other with that erstwhile fidelity that allowed us to feel they were with us in bed; the telephone, that old bludgeon-shape thing with the corkscrew-curl cord, was intensely romantic. We always wanted to seduce it from its central location to some lovers' nook, hearing the serpentine hiss of its cord as we dragged it the length of the hall. Success of connection was never assumed; the beloved's voice saying “Hello?” always felt like good fortune. The handset a seashell, enclosing the perfectly audible breath of far-off, inaccessible flesh; it was no wonder that Dutra had found me, asleep and entwined with the phone as if clutching a proxy, when he followed our household's cord under my closed bedroom door.

“Hello? Hello?” he barked into the handset, roughly uprooting the phone from my arms before slamming the handset back into the cradle. “Your boyfriend hung up,” he said, pulling the phone back out into the hallway and kicking my door shut behind him.

I understood why he was furious with me. After persuasively ravishing him on the night of our relapse, not only didn't I touch him again, I could hardly speak to him. Either I stormed into his room without knocking, when the urge to confess what was happening with Martha was too much for me to resist—yet I always did resist, once I saw his outraged bafflement—or, instead of bursting through his door, I closed mine, with our shared telephone as my hostage.
“What?”
Dutra would shout when I opened his door and stared stricken at him and then turned and rushed back out again, “close the door, you premenstrual freak!” or, as the case might be, “OPEN THE DAMN DOOR. I NEED THE DAMN PHONE.” For, the night of the day she forbade me to call her, Martha instead had called me.

“I didn't mean to flounce off,” she mumbled, barely audible even by way of that outmoded, quality phone. “I'm sorry. I was embarrassed. I should've worn pads. For lactation, I mean. You don't even know what I'm talking about.”

“You don't need to apologize,” I said, in my trembling elation very consciously quiet and calm, to preserve the enchantment. I comprehended the fact of her voice, of her having called me. I blithely disregarded her words. Of course I didn't know what lactation was; nor did I wonder. “Where are you?” I said.

“I'm at home.”

“I mean, where in your house?”

“Are you wondering whether Nicholas is here?”

“Yes.”

“He's at a dinner. To which I was invited as well, but I pled overdeveloped maternal instincts.” I laughed when she said this, again in response to her wry tone of voice, not her meaning, which brushed over me. I was intoxicated, by my hoard of her voice, which I clutched in my hands and against which I squashed my hot cheek, so much so I hardly know what I replied to her comments; I hardly know how we conversed. Yet we did, sleepily, as if the process of early acquaintance had been declared over, and the critical questions—who were we, and what would we do—long since answered, yet at the same time more profoundly unknown. But isn't this always the progress of love: circular, full of gaps and unlikely accumulations, and unevenly governed by sense.