The Measures Between Us (17 page)

“Say it,” she said. “I want to hear you say it.”

For a second he thought he might throw up, right there on the table between them, over their locked hands, dribbling over the
edges onto the floor, one more reminder of absent Cynthia. He swallowed and the nausea passed, though now he was sweating, his forehead and temples instantly damp.

“Say it.”

What if he couldn't? What if he was destined to never utter a word again, become a freakish mute, someone who could read and hear and see and drive and do pretty much everything except speak? They would know him around town—the woodworking teacher who went dumb. An oddity the neighbors saw in the grocery store, driving through town. Maybe that would be his punishment. He had passed some disease, unawares, to his daughter, an innocent, and for that God made him mute at thirty-three, imprisoned him in a life in which he could talk only to himself.

“Say it.”

And it was the hardest thing. Much harder than sending a student to the principal's office, harder even than the race to the hospital hours earlier. That had been all instinct, adrenaline. He never had to think about what to do, there was no decision making. There was a cool, detached efficiency to it all, as if he had been training for years and he was simply proving he was a man. Daughter sick: rush to doctors. This, however, required a much deeper strength. He saw his wife across the table, and all that she was asking, and it was something far more difficult, far more serious and demanding, than dashing out the door and speeding onto Route 9.

“Say it.”

Their hands were still pressed palm to palm, though she couldn't look at him. She would take her hand away if he failed, might never touch him again. The years they had spent together,
the solemn times and the trivial, the monumental and the disposable, would dissolve. That is what he feared most, the two of them transformed into strangers. Two foreigners hovering, stuttering, mangling basic words, no common language between them. No one to console him. No one next to him when he climbed into bed, no one to love and confess to.

“Do you remember when we went to Walden Pond?” he asked.

She took a sip of the thick coffee and stayed silent.

“Cynthia didn't want to go in because she saw a lizard. We kept trying to coax her but she was adamant.”

“I don't want to hear this, Vincent.”

“I kept going deeper, calling to you both onshore, promising it was okay.”

“Vincent!” She slammed her mug on the table and the coffee splashed all over its surface and started dripping onto their knees.

“I can see the two of you standing there, right at the edge of the water, Cynthia in her little swimsuit, the one she was so excited to wear.”

“I'm going to bed,” Mary said, standing. “Wake me when it's time to go.”

He listened to her climb the stairs, and when he was certain she wasn't coming down again he began toweling off the table and their chairs. Then he got down on the floor and shut his eyes and waited for sleep that would never come.

Lying on the carpet in his office, staring at Samantha's naked ass, Henry couldn't help thinking, What the hell am I doing? He shivered as the words shot from his brain down to his chest. They coursed through his neck, along his arms, to his fingers even, then doubled back like atoms trapped in an accelerator. Samantha felt his body quiver and she turned her head and asked, “Are you cold? Do you want your shirt?”

“No,” he mumbled. “Just a chill.” Their clothes were scattered about the room, change from his pocket cast like confetti across the floor.

It wasn't the first time the question came to him, but it was the first time it intruded with Samantha beside him, as they lazed on the floor in the drowsy, slurry aftermath of sex. Their bout that day was like it always was—lustful, immediate, without words. Something at once deeply right and deeply wrong. Samantha would enter his office and close the door behind her, and before she turned the lock she was unbuttoning her shirt. She always wore sexy underwear, skimpy lacy things in dark colors. At first Henry wondered if she wore the seductive lingerie just for him, and he was flattered, until he realized she probably owned nothing but.

Sometimes he made her undress slower because this had always been one of his favorite parts of sex, the building up to it, the expectation second by second, once there is no turning back, no chance of refusal. Attentive and experienced, Samantha learned quickly what he liked, pausing while she unzipped her jeans, while she shimmied out of her skirts, while she slid off her boots. She did it as if she too loved these slow steps.

What the hell am I doing?

The question ricocheted around in his head, transforming into something nearly solid. He was tempted to sling an arm around Samantha, kiss her and start all over again.

But the truth was that he knew exactly what he was doing. There was no mystery, no excuse, no fancy rationale and nothing to make it okay: He was fucking his student, regularly, in his office on the carpet, the couch, wherever the tide had swept them. He was cheating on his wife, Lucinda pregnant with their baby. He was betraying someone he loved, vowed never to hurt, and he didn't know how to stop. He knew how to do many things, solve many complicated problems, but not this one. He could detail the Stanford Prison Experiment, untangle Freud's distinction between the ego and superego. None of that mattered at this moment.

When he knew Samantha was coming to his office, he would stuff the two desktop photos of Lucy into a drawer. He didn't remove or even touch his wedding band; tampering with it seemed to be crossing some holy line, admitting something he still wanted to lie about. And neither he nor Samantha ever spoke Lucy's name, as if somehow this too was a sign of respect.

What the hell am I doing?

He had always prided himself on not being one of those men
who turned weak and stupid in the presence of a beautiful woman. He thought he was better than that—smarter, subtler, more in control of his emotions than to have the mere sight of a ravishing female disrupt his brain. Yet here he was with the absurdly gorgeous Samantha, and whenever she entered his office, no matter the promise he'd made to himself earlier in the day or earlier in the week to tell her they couldn't do this anymore, he was powerless. The spectacle of her standing there, ten feet in front of him, shedding her clothes, sent all the blood in his body to his crotch, pumped it there so rapidly that he often felt light-headed even if he was sitting down. His body became pure reflex, and everything he was determined to tell her, just hours before, was inaccessible.

What the hell am I doing?

The first time was a Friday afternoon, the end of the week of the marathon. Four days earlier they had had lunch together and toasted with mugs of beer, and the afternoon, even under a sky tarped gray, seemed ripe with possibility. Samantha stopped by at the end of his office hours, ostensibly to discuss a presentation she was due to make to the seminar in a couple weeks. She sat down in the armchair that faced Henry's desk and took a notebook from her bag, which she had tucked between her feet. While she was flipping through its pages, she said, “I had fun on Monday, having lunch with you.” She was looking down, perhaps afraid to meet his gaze should he simply want to forget about their earlier outing. “I enjoyed it too,” said Henry, staring at where her eyes would be when she raised her head, willing her to pull her chin up. He was surprised at how much he needed her to look at him.

Then, before he realized entirely what was happening, he
stood and walked around his desk, so there was nothing between them. She stood up as well and they kissed. Timid at first, asking permission, then with hunger, with gasps and tongues, their teeth crashing. In the background a radio played, soft classical music from the local public radio station, because Henry couldn't tolerate silences when his students came to talk to him. He thought he was supposed to fill every quiet moment and the music prevented him from prattling on merely to paint the room with meaningless sound.

That first time, and every time thereafter, Samantha's hands gripped his hips just over his belt, and he did the same with her. Yes, he knew he was doing something wrong. Yes, he knew he was betraying his wife and their unborn child. Lucinda in an office forty-five minutes away, pecking at a computer, thinking the dull ache in her hand was one more cost of being pregnant. He knew he was jeopardizing his career by violating the faculty conduct code. Yes, he knew he should explain to Samantha why they shouldn't be doing what they were doing, doing so well and so effortlessly. But he couldn't. Not yet. He couldn't break their embrace, couldn't stop kissing her and palming her ass through her jeans, couldn't keep his hand from reaching up her sweater until he felt her bra. Couldn't help cupping her breasts. Couldn't help biting her neck, letting her push him to the small couch, where they unzipped zippers and unbuttoned buttons. Where they teased each other, learned each other, and didn't talk except to moan and grunt and gasp. She made his heart race, she made his temples sweat, and he smelled her perfume, something new and exotic. And when she opened her mouth he put a finger across her lips, terrified she would be the one to say it was wrong, terrified that she would be more of a man than him. He
was afraid she would mention his wife, afraid she would say they had to stop—and stopping, at that moment, was the one thing in the world he would not do.

When they finished they were on the floor, spooned together. They had slid off the sofa, and it somehow felt more right down there on the floor, grinding away on the thin carpet, more crude and elemental and immediate and painful, no need for the comforting softness of the couch cushions. Please, thought Henry, please don't say anything yet. He wanted Samantha Webster to be feeling all the same things he was. He wanted, for a moment at least, for minutes maybe, to love her, to think that she would never leave and never tell him no.

What the hell am I doing?

I don't know, Henry finally decided, tracing the curve of Samantha's spine with his index finger. He went from one vertebra to the next. I have no fucking clue. Down to where the small, precise bones disappeared behind muscle. But it feels much too good to stop.

What the hell am I doing?

Part of his excuse to himself was that he
wasn't
in love with Samantha. Nor would he ever fall in love with her. However heady and rousing their sex was, he knew not to mistake it for love. They were together out of lust and loneliness, and neither of those things, powerful though they are, were enough to sustain a relationship. Henry understood this; he had been with enough women to sense the trajectory. A few weeks or a few months into the future, the blaze of this initial attraction would flame out. Months or years later, he thought, they would recall it as a strange, temporary interlude in both their lives.

Samantha's boyfriend did something in finance and worked in one of the skyscrapers that had sprouted a decade before in downtown Boston. Henry had seen the two of them walking on campus together, the boyfriend in a sleek suit that looked incongruous against the green quadrangles and lounging, sloppy undergraduates. He doesn't understand what I'm studying, she had once complained to Henry. He wants me to quit because he says he makes plenty of money to support both of us. I tell him it's not about the money, but he doesn't get it. He grew up in Europe, so he's not that used to women having careers. The first time I met his parents I'm pretty sure his father tried to pinch my butt.

They had talked about him when they met unexpectedly for lunch the day of the marathon. He travels all the time, Samantha had said. He's gone half the year—Korea, Hong Kong, South Africa … name a country and he's been there, toured its factories and villages. He always brings me back presents, she added, too many presents, really. I end up giving half of them to my friends and family. I never knew it before, she said, but there's such a thing as too many gifts.

Of course he brings you presents, Henry remembered thinking while she told him the story. He gives you presents because you give him the gift of sleeping with you. If I were him, I'd go into mountains of debt.

I know he has girlfriends all over the place, Samantha had said, as if already justifying her impending infidelity.

How? Henry asked. He tells you about them?

No, he doesn't need to. Women are good at sensing that kind of thing. Plus, the European thing—I figure it's in his blood. It's almost not his fault. She tucked her chin into her neck and
laughed to herself. I guess he gives me perfume and dresses and bracelets to buy himself out of guilt.

Why don't you break it off? Henry asked.

I don't know. I keep telling myself I will, and then I don't. I guess I'm confused. There are things I really love about him.

Henry saw for a moment how young she was, young enough to still admit the truth, to assume it won't get you slapped, leave you prone and starving.

He was flattered, too, flattered that a girl as beautiful as Samantha found him attractive enough to fuck. Henry didn't consider himself ugly, but he wasn't the handsomest, either. He knew it and had come to accept it many years before. In a word, he was average. Which wouldn't have been such a curse except that the women he was drawn to—Lucinda, Samantha, past girlfriends—weren't average in the least. They were haltingly beautiful creatures who turned heads and made men sick with wanting, who had been driven a little crazy and suspicious from so much male attention over the years.

Henry made a decision early on, in high school, that he would pursue these women despite the fact that he wasn't captain of the football team, wasn't destined to be a famous actor or a powerful senator. And he found that the way into their bedrooms was with his talking and with his listening. One of the first girls he slept with told him, You know what? It's impossible to have a bad conversation with you. I don't know how you manage to do it, but you're always interesting. You make me want to stay here all day with you.