If You Love It, Let It Kill You, page 9
My second thought, or realization, is that my legs are clenched, and my trachea is constricted.
The eleven-year-old is at her mother’s for the night, and I am in the basement, sitting on an enormous velvet sectional that I purchased with a grant meant to improve the lives of mid-list and floundering writers. Bruce is upstairs, getting us both scoops of ice cream so we can finish watching the finale of the seventh season of M*A*S*H.
The number on my phone is restricted.
I listen to Bruce’s movements in the kitchen overhead. The faucet is running. He’s heating the scoop.
Who is this? I write.
Three dots appear, disappear, appear again. And then: You know.
I text: this is a bad idea
He texts: hot. stuff.
The water above me stops. He texts: meet me.
Somewhat spastically, my hands trembling from the effort, I delete the conversation and silence my phone. My entire body is vibrating.
Bruce, in stocking feet, comes down the basement stairs gingerly, a mug in each hand. Recently, he was forwarded the obituary of a former colleague who, at forty-something years old, was found with a broken neck at the bottom of his basement stairs. He’d been wearing socks. Even more recently, a current colleague of ours, about my age, was found in her entryway, also at the bottom of her stairs, her ribs cracked and her skull fractured. She’d been wearing rubber slippers, but the coroner’s office issued a statement speculating she’d been tripped somewhere toward the top by one of her four cats. This is just to say: recently, Bruce is wary of stairs.
“Ready to watch?” he asks.
See me on the couch: cross-legged, breathless, in sweatpants, hair disheveled in a high bun; my T-shirt is worn thin, my stomach distended from dinner, my arm outstretched to receive a coffee cup filled with ice cream. See my ordinary life; see it ticking by one second, one hour, one television episode at a time.
I indicate my keenness to Bruce, hoping to appear composed, relaxed, living contentedly in the present and within the walls of our happy home. Inside, my pint-size shadow self is bounding up the stairs, phone in hand; she’s in the bathroom, door locked, water running; she’s opening her messages, desperate to know what more there is to read—words of seduction and betrayal. She is bouncing with agitation and confusion, throwing haymakers at the ceiling. He wants me, her tiny brain is screaming. He wants me again after all this time.
The other me wills my outer self to be still. Eat the ice cream, I tell my shell. Take a bite. Do it now. Eat the fucking ice cream. I do as I’m told.
“Pistachio,” I say. “Mmm.”
“Strawberry,” says Bruce, giving me side-eye.
I wink. “Duh.”
What am I doing up there in that bathroom, alone and unsupervised, the door still locked and the water still running? Am I making smart choices? Can I be trusted? Or have I—the vampire having knocked, the door having been opened, the hostess having said, “Come in”—have I already gone too far?
Later, while Bruce is brushing his teeth—he’s closed the door again—I chance a glance at my phone. There are five new messages, all within the last few minutes. Individual words pop out before I can slow down, pace myself, see exactly what he’s written:
I’m going to get up, flirt with the hostess, and when I get back I expect you to be sitting in the seat next to me
I’m back she gave me her number
Haha
last chance …
Time’s up, Hot stuff
I read the messages twice, three times, try to memorize them. The water stops in the bathroom. There’s the sound of Bruce’s stream, then a flush. Woozy with nostalgia for something I can’t have, I delete everything—Time’s up, Hot stuff—and block the number. Can you even block a restricted number? I don’t know. But I try. And there I am, phone tossed quickly out in front of me, on the bed, legs splayed like a rag doll’s, when Bruce finally emerges from the bathroom.
“Leave the light on? Or?”
“On,” I say. “I still have to brush.”
He turns away and strips down to nothing, which is how he sleeps every night, regardless of the possibility of sex.
“Why did you close the door?”
“Come again?”
“Just now. To brush your teeth. You closed the door.”
“Did I?”
“Are you catfishing me?”
“Am I what?” he asks, pulling back the covers and settling under them. He clicks off his bedside light and repositions his pillow to facilitate reading the news on his phone, which is something else he does every night, regardless of the possibility of sex.
He begins to scroll the news. I’m still sitting up, phone still tossed away from me as if it weren’t a thing to which I was spiritually tethered, as if it were a meaningless sidekick and not a means to something forbidden, something dark, clandestine, irresistible for its wrongness.
I elbow him. “We were talking?”
His dimples flex but he won’t look my way. I cover his screen with my hand.
He turns to me, gives me a look of extreme patience that he usually reserves for his daughter. “Dog-dog,” he says, which is a sometime endearment between us, “it’s bedtime. Brush your teeth. I’m reading. I have no idea what you’re talking about. If I closed the door, it was unintentional.” He removes my hand and returns to the news.
His forbearance is maddening. I want to rip the phone from his hands, jump on the bed, demand a bruise-inducing round of Dead Body. I want to shake us out of ourselves—pull his skin, bite his thighs, call each other by made-up names, fuck like strangers … Instead, I focus on my own silence, my own secrets. I plug my phone into its charger—deliberately leaving it visible on my side table—slip out of bed, and close the bathroom door behind me.
To the mirror, gritting my teeth, pinching my cheeks between my thumbs and forefingers until tiny red welts appear, I tell myself, There’s a reason people have affairs and that’s because they’re titillating. And there’s a reason people don’t have affairs, and that’s because they’re exhausting.
Mateo approaches me at the statue outside the building of the English department. I’m waiting for Bruce, so we can walk to his car together. Bruce is late, but I’m not even annoyed, not yet, because I’ve been staring at my phone, at another text from a restricted number, one that came in while I was teaching. It’s another invitation: Meet me. Now. Apparently, you can’t block a restricted number.
I type the words: I told you. This is a bad idea and let my finger loiter above the blue arrow.
When Mateo stops short next to me, his shoulder suddenly against mine, I’m so startled and frightened that I push the message through.
“Hey,” he says. “Watcha doing?”
“Excuse me?”
He gestures toward my phone, which I awkwardly pocket.
“You busy?”
“What? No. I’m waiting.”
“You should be on TV,” he says.
I take a deep breath and shake my head. “No.”
From his back pocket, he produces a baggie of tobacco. “I can roll you one,” he says.
“It’s a smoke-free campus.”
“I can just roll it for you.”
“I’ll pass. Thanks.”
“I’m serious about television,” he says.
Just then, Jane wafts from our building, an ankle-length raincoat catching like a seventeenth-century poet’s in the wind. She flashes me a hang ten. “Rock star,” she calls out. “Total rock star.” I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“What are you doing later?” Mateo asks. It’s like he hasn’t seen Jane, didn’t register her funny remark.
I take a step back and look up at him. “You shouldn’t be talking to me like you’re my peer.”
“You’d be great on TV, reviewing books or something.”
Jane disappears down the sidewalk. I look at my watch. Bruce is nearly fifteen minutes late. Now I am annoyed.
“You have a physical presence,” he says.
“Are you flirting with me, Mateo? Because you should not be flirting with me.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
I glance quickly over both shoulders. Anyone could be watching this, listening to this—to me, a professor, being spoken to by this … this … person. But the quad is empty.
“Who are you waiting for?” he says.
“None of your business.”
“You’re divorced but you have a boyfriend, who’s also a professor.” He’s grinning. “I gotcha. Okay. I get it. You have a type.”
“What do you want, Mateo?” I tighten my watchband as though doing so will magically conjure Bruce.
Mateo says, “Your husband has a book coming out.”
I whip my face in his direction. “How do you know that?”
“I read the newsletters.”
“Newsletters?”
“The trades. The weeklies. You know.”
“I don’t have a husband.”
“The synopsis sounded dot dot dot familiar.”
“What do you do for a living, Mateo? What exactly is your job? At this university?”
“You know the thing about the student who taught his class?”
“How do you know all this? Really?”
“That was me! I was the student. I mean, he flubbed some because he describes me as a twenty-year-old undergrad and not as an employee, but still. That was me. I taught his class.” He angles back on his heels, his chest puffed. It’s a gesture of triumph? He’s bragging? “I had no idea that I was quote-un-quote aiding and abetting.”
“You mean he fibbed, not flubbed.”
“If I told you I was an electrician, would you assume I’m good with my hands?”
“I’m not talking about my ex with you.”
“Why didn’t we workshop my story last semester?”
“Give me a break, Mateo. Please?”
“Just tell me why?”
“Because it wasn’t appropriate.”
Last fall, Mateo handed in a story about an older woman—“plump, borderline sexy, but not what she once was, and certainly not nearly what she thinks she is currently”—who’s a has-been playwright and now a deadbeat teacher at a community college in a nameless but dreary-as-Detroit city. The teacher in Mateo’s story is also a known flirt who openly plays favorites and who scribbles cheat sheets on her palm to remember the girls’ names in her class but not the boys’.
In Mateo’s story, this plump teacher—sitting across from a male student at a bar—masturbates beneath the zinc countertop. This public act is a dare. The teacher and her star student are drunk. Flirting, she tells the student, “One day I’ll be asking you for a recommendation.” The teacher, slurring, goes on: “One day I’ll be an anecdote, nothing more. I’ll deny it—whatever you tell them about us. You’ll get famous writing plays about me. You’ll love the rumors. You’ll never tell them who it was—this older professor—but they’ll all know, and you’ll love that they know.” In the margin, I wrote, issues of consistency. I circled the word “zinc” and wrote, relevant detail?
In the story, the teacher professes that what she hates about best practices and equal opportunities and sexual politics in the academy and the hashtag movements of the twenty-teens is that she never got to take proper advantage of the way things used to be. Next to this, I wrote, not synonymous. Then I drew a large equal sign and through it made a long slash.
“Men,” the teacher says, between sips of her umpteenth gin and tonic, “ruined it for us, for women. And it’s unfair. We should have gotten a proper stab at it before they took it fully away.” Provocative, I wrote, but unearned.
In the story, the teacher is married to another teacher and is known to be having an affair with yet another and known additionally to be somewhat of a she-wolf when it comes to her students. Here I checked the page number, then I wrote, ROR—rate of revelation is off. You’re introducing new and unbelievable material with only a few graphs to go.
On the last page, after a decent but purple description of the teacher in her fourth-floor office looking longingly at the pink-lit snow accumulating delicately atop a gazebo in a private courtyard across the street, I wrote, Grasping, don’t you think?
On the morning we were supposed to discuss it, I tore up Mateo’s story along with all my notes and sent an email to the class informing them that my father was in the ER and we’d need to reschedule. I never did.
“Why wasn’t the story appropriate?” Mateo asks. “Because it was about you?”
If I were drinking water—if I were drinking anything—I’d have spewed it out my nose when he says this. Instead, I spit out the words: “It wasn’t about me.”
“Sort of.”
“You have a rich fantasy life.”
“So what’s fair?”
“Meaning?”
“What’s off-limits? When I’m writing?”
“I’m off-limits.”
“You’re off-limits?”
“Yes.”
“Why can your ex write about you, but I can’t?”
“You weren’t writing about me, and neither is my ex. We didn’t workshop your story because you can’t use fiction as a means of making false accusations about living people. It’s unethical. Fiction isn’t a platform for revenge.”
“Not according to Elizabeth Hardwick,” he says.
Overhead, a red-tailed hawk—one of the half dozen that nest on window ledges across campus—circles. Maybe it thinks we’re prey. Certainly, I feel like prey.
“Please,” I say quietly, as the hawk spirals up and into the clouds and out of view. “Enough. You win. I don’t care. But please, please go away before someone sees us standing here talking like we’re friends.”
“We are friends.”
“No, we’re not.”
“What would happen?”
“I wouldn’t like it,” I say. “Your classmates wouldn’t like it.” I realize I’m shivering but also sweating.
“Which classmates?” he asks.
“Pardon?”
“Which classmates wouldn’t like to see us talking?”
“I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Just kidding,” he says, pinching tobacco into a neat and thin line along the crease of a rolling paper. “I know who you mean.”
“You couldn’t possibly,” I say, “because I don’t know who I mean. You’re my student. It doesn’t matter who sees us talking. That’s all I mean.”
“It’s not that they don’t like you,” he says. “It’s that they don’t like each other because of me.”
I can feel the arrhythmic pulse of my aorta, the quickening pump of my lungs. “Mateo, are you…” I begin to ask, looking over his shoulders, scanning for any sign of Bruce, any sign of anyone. “Are you trying to put me in my place? Because I feel … I feel like you’re both flirting with me and trying to put me in my place, which is absurd.” Then, after a beat, I quickly add, “Not to mention unacceptable.”
He squints a little, then gives me an amused smile. “If I were trying to put you in your place, I’d say you’re too old for me. But you’re not, and I appreciate everything you said just now. I appreciate you saying it out loud.” Carefully, with dramatic precision, like he’s performed this bit a million times before, in front of a million different women, he very deliberately—with the flattened tip of his tongue—licks the length of the paper he’s been rolling. When he’s finished, he tucks the cigarette behind his ear and says, “You say a lot of things out loud that you probably shouldn’t.”
“Are you threatening me?”
He laughs. “We should get a drink.”
“No.”
“The last thing I’m doing is threatening you, Teach.”
“Can’t you leave me alone now?”
“One drink.”
“I don’t drink with students.”
“Sure you do.”
“Never one-on-one,” I say.
In the distance, I catch a glimpse of Bruce, finally, heading in our direction.
“Never one-on-one,” he repeats. “I can make that happen.” And then, as if he’s sensed Bruce’s approach, he says abruptly, “Catch you later.” Then he turns and walks away. Just like that. He’s here, and then he isn’t.
Bruce gives a big grin when he sees me. I am aware of the skin on my face, a tingling in my ears, a chill across my shoulders … I am incredibly embarrassed. I am incredibly turned on. And I am very, very scared of myself.
The tabby is swaddled in a towel in a box in the passenger seat of my car, and it won’t shut up. It wants to know why I sent its mother away. It wants to know what the plan is here. It wants to know why the salmon tasted like lemons instead of like fresh dead fish. It wants to know where I’m taking it. It wants to know why its mother’s kid kept leaving the front door open in such an alluring fashion. It wants to know about squirrels and hummingbirds and especially those cute little chipmunks. It wants to know if I’ve ever eaten chipmunk, and it seems annoyed and put out when I say that I haven’t. Have you at least played a chipmunk to death? Swatted it and batted it and broken its bones? Please tell me you’ve at least known the joys of slow dismemberment and the crunch crunch crunch of thin bones cracking. I assure the cat I am deficient here as well. The cat tells me it’s in pain, real pain. It hurts all over, especially in its belly. “I know, I know,” I say, driving my neighborhood in circles as I figure out a plan. Can’t you just keep me? “No,” I say, “I’m sorry.” The cat wants to know why, and so I explain my love for animals and how it triumphs my love for humans. “I’m an animal person,” I say. “The eleven-year-old and her father aren’t. They think they are, but they aren’t.” What does that even look like? “You know, they say ‘down, down, down’ to a dog that hasn’t even nosed them when ‘off’ is what they really mean.” Fun fact: cats don’t pay attention to either of those commands because cats don’t care about diddly! “I worry I’d stop loving them if we ever got a pet. When we moved in, they asked for a puppy. I said no. Then they asked for a young dog. I said no to that as well. They asked for an old dog, a rescue dog, an aged kitten, a foster guinea pig, a parakeet. No, no, no, no, no.” The cat doesn’t understand the problem. So don’t keep them, it says. Keep me. I’m lovable. “It’s not that easy,” I say, taking the roundabout on South Hanover for the third time. “I own a house with him. And she thinks of me as a stepmother.” Are you married? it asks. “Only in our hearts,” I say. Ditch the humans, it says. Pick me. Choose me!
