The Englishman (31 page)

“Giles…”

“No, forget it. I’ve been as civilized about the whole thing as I can—maybe too civilized. But this is where I draw the line!”

“You were glad I gave you an excuse to leave me!”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“You weren’t even angry!”

“
Then
I wasn’t! I was too busy feeling like a complete failure because my wife cheated on me with the biggest wanker on campus!”

He’s sure as hell angry
now
.

“I didn’t think…about how much it would embarrass you, Giles,” she says in a very level voice. “And I never thought it would go on. I certainly never thought we’d be caught.”

“One never does, I suppose.” Giles, too, is calmer again, though still sardonic. The steam seems to have gone out of him a little. My stomach muscles unclench.

“If you’d taken the job at Stanford, none of this would ever have turned into a problem!” Amanda is audibly nettled by his acquiescence.

“I can’t believe you are seriously suggesting that it would have saved our marriage if I’d gone to California! It would have turned it into even more of a travesty! For fuck’s sake, Mandy!”

“Look, Giles, I know you’re riled, but this is my office and I won’t have you using that kind of language!”

“I’ll swear as much as I like, thank you very much. And to make this as petty as possible, I was here first. I’m not saying you wouldn’t have got the job on your own merits, but the fact remains, you were a spousal hire! I made way for you and Nick by going to Stanford and by shifting my sabbatical forward, but enough is enough. I will not chair the English department while Nick is accused of raping one of our students! And I want my name back.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My name. I want you to use your maiden name again.”

“Why? This is pure malice!”

“Not a bit of it. You’re not my wife anymore—well, as of any day now you won’t be my wife anymore, and you didn’t want to be my wife anymore. We’re done, and I think I may ask you to give up the use of my name without being accused of gratuitous cruelty.”

“But why do you have to advertise it all over campus?” She sounds more annoyed with him about this than about anything else so far. Frankly, I can see her point.

“What, our divorce or your adultery?”

“Oh, stop wallowing in self-pity just because you’re the wronged party in this, Giles!”

“I am not wallowing! I just want to be free of it!” he says stubbornly. “The whole bloody thing! And I don’t want people to think I’m married.”

“People? You mean students! So now
you
are going to—”

“Fuck,” he says. “Go on. Am I now going to fuck our attention-seeking little snowflakes? No, I’m not. But anyone who looks up
Cleveland and Ardrossan
on the Internet will find us both and assume we’re married, and that irks me. So if you wouldn’t mind, I want to see
Amanda Saunders
on that door next time I look.”

“Giles, what is
wrong
with you?” Her voice, remarkably calm so far, rises in pitch. “You wouldn’t just be harming me but also yourself! Everyone would
know!”

“No, they wouldn’t,” he says, ignoring her tone. “The last thing Holly and Elizabeth want is to besmirch Nick’s fair name any further. They wouldn’t blab. Nor Dancey, if he must know. Dancey least of all, no matter how much he’d like to drop me in it. They’ve been amazingly generous about my leaves of absence, so I need them to understand why I’m not going to help extinguish this fire.”

“Give me time to think. I need to—to talk to Daddy about this.”

“There is nothing for you to think about, and I don’t care what Robert says. I am merely here to give you warning that I am going to do this. Complain to Nick about it, not to me. This isn’t about revenge. I don’t give a flying toss about the whole thing anymore.”

“The breakup was your fault! I never wanted a divorce! If my parents hadn’t made me—”

“
My
fault?” There is a loud thump; I think it was his fist on a table top. “
You
suck the campus dick in your office, and
I’m
supposed to take that on the chin and shut up about it, just to save appearances? You always did take me for a blundering idiot, didn’t you? Is
that
why you married me, Amanda?”

Instinctively I check Liz’s silhouette through the glass pane in the door. She can’t
not
have heard Cleveland’s flare-up. Her head turns, she peers through the glass, sees me sitting on the sofa where she left me. For one tense second we stare at each other, and with all my might I will her to sit down again. No such luck.

“What’s going on here? Where’s Ms. Cleveland?”

“Ms. Saunders,” I correct her weakly. I’m toast anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Hurried murmurs from the next room, the sound of a chair scraping along the floor.

Giles stops in his tracks as if he had collided with an invisible barrier.

“What the hell are
you
doing here?”

The mysteries of sexual attraction. How—
how on earth
—could any woman even contemplate sex with Nick Hornberger when she can have this man? It’s clearly not true that he doesn’t care anymore. His blood is up, and it is shocking to me how intensely I respond to that. I expected to be mortified with embarrassment, and I am. Embarrassed, a little afraid, and mightily turned on. Giles Cleveland has come out of his shell.

“Don’t let ’em screw you!” He darts his finger at me as if he wanted to recruit me for military service.

I nod obediently at this harsh order and—while I am still looking up at him, half startled, half playing at being startled—the air congeals between us.

Will you?

No, I didn’t say it out loud. But I might as well, because he heard it, and it flusters him terribly. His chest is heaving with emotion, and he is staring at me as if panicked by what he read in my face.

This time I am sure. I am calm. Not physically—my hands are cold with sweat, my chest hurts with excitement—but in my mind I am calm. I mean it.

If you want, I will make you forget your humiliation at the hands of a silly woman and a man who thinks with his cock. Oblivion may only last for a few minutes, but I promise you it will be sweet and intense.

Screw me, Cleveland.

“How much of that did you hear?” Amanda asks the big white crystal on her desk when we have sat down.

“Not much. Almost nothing, in fact,” I say deliberately. “I am very hard of hearing…well,
can
be.”

It works in mobster movies. I wonder whether it also works in the office of an Associate Vice President of Finance and Administration. Apart from the heightened color in her cheeks, Amanda Cleveland, née Saunders, betrays no sign of agitation. My natural sense of tact made it difficult, at first, to look her in the face when she asked me to take a seat at her desk; she would join me in a couple of minutes. And she did. A couple of minutes later she entered her office from the hallway, and if I didn’t know that she was just involved in a shouting match with her soon-to-be ex-husband, I would never have guessed it. This is one cool chick.

Chic, too, in a tight-fitting, pale green skirt suit and a charcoal top underneath that shows off her cleavage. And she may actually be a real blonde, styled in that medium-long way that looks as if she was wearing spaghetti tongs on her head, its teeth framing her jaw and chin in a many-layered wave.
Put together
hits it precisely. She is very slim, very good-looking, well-groomed and self-assured: exactly the sort of girl I envied at school and college. Today, if I were a man, I wouldn’t even attempt to get close to her. No point, no joy.

And yet this is a woman who had quickies in her office—
in her office!
—with Nick Hornberger. I try to picture her, hot and tousled, her slim legs wrapped around Hornberger’s no doubt hairy football player’s torso. Or maybe he would hike up her skirt, bend her over her desk, and take her from behind? Did she actually enjoy having an affair with him? It seems so improbable. And what is it with that man, anyway? What kind of potion does he ply them with to make these females—babes, all—lift their skirts for him? I think I understand what draws a certain kind of student to a certain kind of philandering professor. But Amanda Cleveland is no attention-hungry co-ed who knows that she carries her best assets in her blouse. No, I don’t get it.

She is a professional. I show her the original letter stating salary and benefits, my reply bidding for a higher sum in view of my publications, a print-out of the email that agreed to this higher sum, my contract and my paycheck. She takes her time reading everything, and I wonder whether she is merely very thorough, buying time, or finding it hard to focus.

“This was signed by Greg Newburgh,” she informs me, and I shrug and nod, too preoccupied to talk.

Irene would slap me if she knew how little I am interested in the material issue here—my money!—because I can’t help wondering, is this what Giles fancies, or is this what Giles doesn’t fancy? Used to fancy, but not anymore? No matter, really, because I couldn’t be like her if I tried, and the hair and the cleavage are the least of it.

Ex , ex , ex!

The syllable had been drowned out by the shouting and the aggravation and the sudden flare of sexual energy and the necessity to concentrate on figures and contracts. But in the hush of rustling paper and the clicking of her keyboard as she opens my file, it is echoing in my head like an alphorn.

Giles Cleveland is getting a divorce.

“You’re right, Dr. Lieberman. There is a discrepancy here, and I am for the moment at a loss to account for it. I must ask you to give me some time to look into it.”

What a self-righteous cow I’ve been, taking sides where I had neither the right nor the necessary information to do so! Wife cheats on husband with senior colleague, colleague flutters on to graduate student in the manner of a testosterone-driven butterfly. Said student accuses him of sexual violence, husband is given the opportunity to be as unhelpful as a department chair can be in such a case. Husband refuses, preferring the opportunity to come clean about his wife’s fling to the college authorities.

WTF?

Giles must still be mightily pissed off about his wife’s infidelity to prefer humiliating her to settling his score with Hornberger. I think he overestimates his colleagues’ discretion. Someone always blabs. He will be known as a cuckold all over campus, cuckolded by the very man who is currently suspected of having raped a student. How is that better than chairing the department and washing his hands of Hornberger once the case is dealt with in a court of law, as it surely will be? He must be driven by revenge. No other motive makes any sense at all.

Why won’t you take the department chair?

I can’t tell you that.

What he also didn’t tell me is that he is divorced. About to be divorced. Separated from his wife, a free man! And indeed, why would a man who doesn’t even change out of his dog-walking pants before he meets a woman in a bar tell that woman that he is as good as single? No wonder he looked so disconcerted just now when I gave him my best come-hither look! Whoever he is dating now that he is rid of Amanda Saunders, she is sure to be cool and blond and enormously stacked. And who was that big-mouthed
yuchna
who told him that she saw the hole while he saw the bagel? Well, the hole in this bagel is that he did
not
invite me into his home for tea! Whatever it was that sparked the impulse, he regretted it almost instantly. He did not want me to know that he is divorced.

O soul, be changed into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!

I cannot remember when I was last so comprehensively, so painfully ashamed.