The Measures Between Us (32 page)

Dr. Eliot leaned forward. He was holding a box of Kleenex, offering it to Cynthia so she could wipe away her tears.

Henry left a note for Samantha in her mailbox in the psychology department office, asking her to stop by his house. He hadn't known exactly how to say it: “My wife's out of town” sounded too leading, too sleazy. “My wife won't be there” was likewise too leering. Finally he settled on “It'll be just me,” figuring Samantha would know what that meant. On the back of the note, he drew a crude map so she wouldn't get lost. Sketching Comm Ave., he couldn't help remembering the day of the marathon, the random hours that had landed him in such trouble.

He wanted her to come to the house because he had to tell her he couldn't sleep with her anymore, and he didn't trust himself to do it in his office, so tainted with lust. Just the day before, he had found a stray button from Samantha's shirt on his desk, which only confirmed what he already knew. He was afraid that whatever he had promised himself, which was that he would say it was over, would be erased by the sight of her body. Her breaking the threshold of the doorway, striding in and looking impossibly sexy. Her running her forefinger across the waistband of her jeans, her not saying anything, just looking at him, gazing in a way that no woman had in many years, making him into someone who could do no wrong. He was determined to end it, and
the only way was to talk to her somewhere that didn't reek of their recent past, somewhere he couldn't be seduced.

He had made the decision weeks before, but Lucinda's abrupt journey to Texas sped everything up. When she told him of the trip, he felt it like a smack. He said, “Why?” and she delivered a line that sounded too rehearsed to be honest: “I just want to get away for a few days.” He decided that if he objected, it would only inflame whatever it was that was driving her away. So he merely nodded, muttered, “Okay.” He had had no idea she was even considering going out of town, and he tried to mask his surprise and hurt. She minimized it, saying things like “It'll only be for a few days” and “I have to get all my traveling in now, before the baby comes and I become a slave.”

He couldn't resist pressing her slightly. “Texas?” he asked.

“Yeah, why not?” she said. “My old college roommate Janet is there. I've always wanted to go.”

“Is it okay for you to be on a plane?” he said.

“The doctor said I had a week and a half left,” she said flatly.

Partly he was worried she had begun to suspect the affair and that her trip was a reaction to the fears building inside her. He had been ultracareful, though, always keeping a change of clothes in his office to change into after his afternoons with Samantha. He stopped at the gym to work out before he went home, hoping the sweat would camouflage everything. And then he showered there, soaping his body over and over again, afraid his unfaithfulness kept rising to the surface no matter how scalding he turned the water. He stayed in the shower so long his finger-tips wrinkled. Days later he would take the old clothes to a dry cleaner to wash away any residue of Samantha's perfume or makeup.

He comforted himself with the fact that Lucinda would confront him if she suspected anything. She had never been shy about picking fights, and it wouldn't be like her to flee to Texas and an old roommate if she thought he was sleeping with his student. She wasn't passive like that.

He had wondered, before, what exactly she would do if she ever found out. Though she wasn't shy, she wasn't the dramatic type. She wouldn't hurl all his books and clothes onto the front lawn and scream at him loud enough for the neighbors to hear; she wouldn't try to humiliate and embarrass him. Instead he pictured her sitting down, dangling some piece of evidence like a note or a lipstick-stained shirt, and calmly telling him he could go fuck himself. Part of the punishment would be her instant iciness. She wouldn't want to reveal how much he had hurt her. She was too proud for that, and she wouldn't want to remember herself as someone he could injure. She would tell him he had to move out of the house: “Henry,” she would declare, “go have yourself a wonderful life, alone. You'll regret this.” They'd talk about the baby and how to handle custody later, when they both had hired lawyers, surrogates to say what they didn't want to. In a second they would turn into strangers, two people with no chance at reconciliation, two people who might as well have never touched each other, never laid bare secrets, shame, hope. Two people raised on opposite ends of the earth. In fact, for all his panic years ago about her leaving him, he had never imagined a future without her. Not before he started sleeping with Samantha and not until now, when she was about to get on an airplane, and the possibility was excruciating.

The night he made the decision to cut things off with Samantha, he was seized with a desire to confess. The guilt had infused his
blood, his tissue and bones and muscles, and he thought Lucinda was bravely admitting something by going to Texas, confessing something most people were unable, unwilling, to say, and he wanted to say something honest in return. It reminded him of the first time she cried in front of him. How grateful he had been that she could be vulnerable like that.

They were in bed and he didn't say anything. He turned away from her and watched the clock turn minute by minute. The next day her flight would depart, pierce the clouds. She would be high above, staring down at the cities reduced to microchips, the farmlands bisected into verdant green and brown rectangles. She would touch down in Texas, a smooth landing, the runways transformed into mothering arms. The ground crews and semaphore men, their orange sticks sure as divining rods.

Watching the dim red digits of the clock, he scoured his brain for a way she had hurt him, something nasty she had done to cause his betrayal. There had been moments of disrespect, times she had injured him, but nothing lasting, nothing malicious. Occasionally, even before she was pregnant, she could be distant, retreating to a remote place where there was no space for him. For several days she wouldn't speak extra sentences, kept her physical affection to a minimum. She reverted to the achingly beautiful, aloof college girl he was always scared he would lose. But who didn't go through moods? And she always eventually returned, settling back into the Lucinda he could reach. Maybe those moments were more frequent now, or they had finally accumulated into something intolerable. Something he couldn't keep deconstructing and recover from. Her withdrawal fanned the insecurities he'd tried to bury all these years, ever since the first morning he'd woken up next to her and touched her back to make sure she was actually lying there.

What he feared was that he was sleeping with Samantha because Lucinda made him feel like he didn't deserve someone so beautiful. Not by anything explicit she said, no withering judgments about his work or his face or his body or his intelligence. And not by anything she did—no prolonged withholding of sex or coiling away when he kissed her. No, when he slipped his hand beneath her underwear and touched her like she was gold, it was like he was meeting her and falling in love for the first time. She had said that to him once, turned to him and said, “You hold me like you are amazed. You touch me like you don't ever want to let go.” She said it and then she kissed him, and he was so proud to have given her such a gift.

So it was this: Those times when she withdrew, lived in the same house but only in the most literal way, had hurt him more than he'd realized. Maybe he had always been frightened that she was on the verge of leaving, and cheating on her was a way out of that torturous fear. A way of both affirming his appeal and giving her a reason, should she want to leave. A reason besides the crushing simplicity of I don't love you anymore.

The bedroom window faced the street, and from it he would be able to see Samantha drive up and park outside the house and walk to the door and ring the bell. He could see what he would no longer touch, and all that he had done wrong, lodged in the same person. She would be carrying a folder, a prop in case Lucinda had changed her plans and was at home. She would explain that she needed to drop off a paper for Dr. Wheeling. She was savvy and she had no desire, Henry knew, to get him in trouble, either with his wife or at school. This was all so complicated and tawdry anyway, he thought. How lucky he hadn't chosen a vindictive girl.

Outside. He would have to talk to her outside, in front of the house, or leaning against her car, no doubt something shiny and expensive and fast, one more futile gift from her doomed boyfriend. He'll never own her, Henry thought, because women like that can't be owned no matter how much money and love you spill on them. Try and try some more. Henry couldn't let her into the house, since he didn't trust himself. Impulses might take over and he could end up hurting Lucinda even more, cheating on her in their own home. In their own bed, staining their sheets with something vengeful. Henry knew from years of psychology courses that everyone has sadistic urges, things we'd rather not admit. No one is pure saint or sinner. Not Gandhi, not infants. To think otherwise was hopelessly naïve, its own kind of crazy.

He was drinking a glass of whiskey to steady himself. Without Lucinda the bedroom felt airless and empty, as if she had taken more than a small suitcase stuffed with a few days' worth of clothes. He wondered what she was doing at that moment, where, under the wide Texas sky, she was standing, what she was eating and where she was sleeping and what she was saying and what she was seeing. He wondered if he was anywhere close to her.

She had called him the day before from the airport, to tell him she had landed safely. It was a bad connection, so their conversation was short. Something about the scene seemed so lonely to Henry: Lucinda in the El Paso airport amid a stream of strangers, and Henry at home in Newton, the house too quiet despite the Big Star record on the turntable. He had set it on repeat because he didn't want to leave the couch. A decade before, in college, music could lift him from despondency. Occasionally he smoked
a joint while he listened to his favorite records, and the combination was transporting.

She told him she would call again from Janet's, yet she hadn't. He could phone her if he wanted to. He had Janet's number pinned under a magnet on the refrigerator, right next to the movie schedule from the art theater in town. But he didn't want to, didn't want to do anything that might threaten the suddenly fragile peace between them. Maybe after Samantha had come and gone. Maybe the severing would renew him. The guilt would begin to dissolve, and they could talk without avoiding the truth.

The doorbell rang. Henry was at Lucinda's dresser, fingering the bracelets and orphaned earrings in her jewelry box. They made him want to tear up the house and hunt for the mates, look under the carpets, the bed, between the couch and love-seat cushions. He could find each one, restore every pair, tuck them back into the jewelry box, and let her discover his work whenever she happened to—give her another reason to stay.

The doorbell again. He walked to the window and looked down. It was Samantha, holding a manila envelope. A navy BMW was parked by the curb, and Henry wondered if the other students were jealous or if they took it as one more sign, along with her beauty, that she was a dilettante. He remembered his own years in graduate school, the competitiveness that sometimes turned people mean and ruthless. There was, ultimately, very little you could do about it, aside from complain incessantly over pitchers of beer at the local bar.

Samantha rang the bell a third time. Henry tapped the window but she couldn't hear, didn't look up. Even the top of your head is sexy, he thought. This is going to be harder than I anticipated. He drained his whiskey and headed downstairs.

He opened the door and immediately stepped outside, closing the door behind him. “Samantha,” he said stiffly. “Hello.”

“I brought this,” she said, showing him the manila envelope. She had written his name on the outside in block letters. Henry found the ruse oddly touching.

“It's okay,” he said, softening. “My wife's out of town.”

“Oh, right,” said Samantha, taking back the envelope and folding it under her arm. “What's that in your hand?”

Henry hadn't realized he was holding one of the stray earrings, a small garnet embedded in antique silver. He had been trying to remember whether it was a gift from him. “Nothing,” he said, stuffing it in his pocket. “I mean, it's an earring of Lucinda's. She must have dropped it.” For the first time he could remember, he had said his wife's name in Samantha's presence.

“Why did you want me to come here?” Samantha asked.

To be young and gorgeous and direct, Henry thought: The world must be a much smaller place when you are blessed like that. He smiled nervously. The house rose behind him, solid, encouraging. The life he and Lucinda had built with neither announcement nor fanfare. On other days it could look insignificant and depressing, but not today.

“I thought we should probably talk somewhere besides my office,” Henry said.

“Okay,” said Samantha. “What do you want to tell me?”

Could she really not know? Henry wondered.

“I think …” he started. “I think we should stop seeing each other.” The words came out surprisingly smooth. He didn't hear his voice catch like he thought it would.

Samantha sighed, looked from Henry's face to the ground. She jammed her hands into her pockets. “Why?” she said.

“Why?” Henry repeated. “Come on, many reasons: I have a wife, you're my student, you have a boyfriend … Do you want me to keep going?” Say no, he hoped, be more generous than I deserve. Please, please don't make me say it:
Lucinda's pregnant
.

“You can stop,” Samantha said.

There was mercy in her, Henry thought. “Are you surprised?” he asked.