Be Mine (8 page)

When, I thought, looking at her in my office, did we get old?

Certainly, it seemed a long time ago that we stood together in one corner of the Writing Center laughing about the department chair's polyester dress (all geometric designs, tied up with a patent-leather belt) but not
that
long ago. That afternoon in the Writing Center, the late-summer sun had been pouring in through the plate glass windows. There was a gentle dust settling in long angular streams on the tables and chairs and on the hair and arms of the part-time English instructors. The smell of autumn—its textbooks, its ditto fluid, its calendars and red ink—was in that dust, all implication, suggestion, that the future was on its way, but, outside, the sky had been entirely empty and blue. Not a cloud anywhere. The carpet, then, was orange, institutional. In a few years it would be replaced with mauve carpeting, which would not seem, at first, to us, as institutional as the orange, but then would become the color with which every institution replaced its orange carpet. Twenty years ago—and it felt, perhaps, like a few years.

Or even less than that.

But, I thought, looking at Sue's arms, those years were a part of us now.

They had settled in our bodies.

We had not, of course, felt them passing, because they
hadn't.
They had instead
accumulated.
We were
wearing
that passed time.

And, still, through the mystery of love and friendship, Sue also hadn't changed for me at all. She'd remained the young woman who'd sat in the backseat of my car with me when I got the news (through campus security, coming for me to the door of my first-year writing course) that my brother was dead, and who, the next year, wore a chain of daisies in her long blond hair as maid of honor at my wedding.

Before Sue, I had never particularly wanted or needed to have female friends. The girlfriends I'd had in high school and college—I let them go without much interest, just a slow loosening, a gradual forgetting. But here Sue still was, my best friend. I'd never even
chosen
her as a friend. There was simply a bond formed between us that first day in the Writing Center, and here we still were, serving out the comfortable terms of it.

"Well," Sue said, leaning forward. "Tell me. Who is it?"

"Bram Smith," I told her. "He's a part-time auto-mechanics instructor."

Sue lifted her eyebrows. I couldn't tell if she was skeptical or simply surprised.

"Bram Smith?" she asked. "That unbelievable stud?"

"I don't even know who he is," I told her. "Is he the one with the dark hair, the—?"

"Yeah," Sue said, as if humoring me, as if she knew I perfectly well knew who Bram Smith was. "The one with the muscles, Sherry. The one with the dimple. The sexiest man who has ever set foot in this godforsaken place. The one every woman here with any estrogen left in her system at all has been fantasizing about for three years. The one who looks like every sexy cartoon ever drawn of the devil. Don't play dumb with me, Sherry. You know perfectly well who Bram Smith is."

"No," I said. "I mean, I've seen him, I guess. Now that you ... describe him."

Sue snorted. "Right." A half smile. She looked away from me.

"Honestly, Sue," I said. "It was Chad's friend Garrett who told me it was him, that he'd been talking about me in his class."

"Well," Sue said, standing up, smoothing down the wrinkled front of her linen skirt, no longer smiling. The sun from my window was gray but mottled with a bit of yellow, as if it were shining through clouds that had been washed into thin patches. It fell on Sue's chest where it was exposed by the too-right blouse, and the skin there looked, I thought, damaged. (When, I thought, had
that
happened?) Thin. Spackled with brown. I remembered a low-cut black dress she'd worn to a New Year's Eve party, how all the men seemed to gravitate toward the hors d'oeuvres table near which Sue stood, flirting with the one she was going to marry and with whom she would have twins. It had looked painful for those men when they had to tear their eyes from that slit of white flesh revealed by her dress.

I looked from that damaged skin back to her face.

Could I be reading her expression correctly?

Was she
jealous?

"I've got to go," Sue said. "I'll be late to get the boys." She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. "Good luck with all this, Sherry," she said. "Keep me posted."

***

A
NY WORD
from your lover today?" Jon asked when I walked in the door.

I said, "Yes. As a matter of fact there was."

He put his newspaper down on the ottoman and looked at me.

The sunset in our picture window lit him up, made him glow—robustly, handsomely. Jon, I thought, at least, has not changed much. There's some gray in his hair now, and a few lines around his eyes, but, if anything, these things have made him more attractive. Women have always looked at Jon when we walked into a restaurant together. The demeanor of the mothers of Chad's friends always changed when we joined their semicircles at an event—posture improved, stomachs sucked in, a lighter laughter, more batting of the eyes. And, if I showed you a picture of him twenty years ago and a picture today, you would know instantly that this was the same man, and that the decades that had passed had been fairly kind ones, that life had been mostly good to him, that he was a physically vital man and would remain so for many years.

"Tell me," he said.

I took it out of my purse, the note, and handed it to him.

Jon looked at it for what seemed like much longer than he needed to read it, and then looked up. "Holy shit," he said. "We aren't just talking some kid with a crush here. This is serious stuff."

"Are you upset?" I asked. I thought of those months, so many years ago, of my infatuation with Ferris Robinson, how, when I confided in Jon, he had been titillated at first, then angry, and then sad, and then desperate, and then giddily attentive, and then had grown so cold I thought our marriage was over. "Are you angry?"

"Frankly," Jon said, standing up, walking toward me, stopping in front of me, putting his arms around my lower back, "I'm a little embarrassed to say that I'm almost unbearably turned on."

He pressed his body against me. He had an erection.

L
AST
night, after we made love (or was that
making love
?—Jon, pushing me onto my side, then onto my stomach, putting himself in me from behind, saying,
You think this is what jour mechanic wants to do?
grabbing my breast, cupping it, pinching the nipple hard enough that I gasped, then orgasmed so quickly it shamed me) he fell asleep, but I lay awake a long time.

Too long.

I woke up exhausted.

In the morning light, the kitchen looked hazy—everything haloed with that glow that comes from exhaustion, and a kind of dull ringing deep in my ears. I thought, briefly, about calling in sick, but I'd missed my classes last week, having taken the time off to spend with Chad. If I missed again today, they'd be confused, my students. The ones who were doing poorly might throw in the towel altogether. The ones who were doing well would feel betrayed.
Another crappy absentee teacher.
I had to go.

I drank a cup of coffee black, standing in my bare feet, wearing my bathrobe, at the kitchen window. Before Jon left for work, he bit my neck and said, "You be good today."

In his dark suit, he'd looked so handsome, smirking at me as he stepped through the back door into the driveway, that I had a sudden recollection of the thrill of seeing him for the first time, at that bar, and how I thought (maybe because he was friends with the wild bunch who'd introduced us) that he looked a little dangerous.
Too
handsome. The kind of man you'd have to worry about losing to some other girl, some flashier girl. He'd be, I thought then, the kind of guy who would be constantly pursued. Or, he would, himself, be the pursuer. Surely, I thought, he knew how beautiful he was, and the power it gave him. What man
wouldn't
abuse such power? Those blue-green eyes. The solid build.

Tail chaser,
my mother used to say about certain kinds of men. It was derogatory and appreciative at the same time, coming from her. She liked a man with spunk.
Milquetoast
was the kind of man with whom you didn't want to waste your time.

But, as it turned out, Jon wasn't dangerous.

As it turned out, Jon was the safest man in the world.

When we walked down the sidewalk together, he always insisted on placing me on the inside so I wouldn't be splattered with mud, or hit by a car. After Chad was born, Jon installed smoke detectors. Not just a few, but a smoke detector in every room. Even the .22 in the garage, even the shooting of the squirrels off our roof, was his attempt to keep his family safe. Never once in twenty years had it ever crossed my mind that my husband had lied to me, or had anything to hide, or had even had a thought he'd chosen not to share with me.

No, if he ever looked at other women, it must have been when I wasn't in the vicinity.

Surely, he did look.
All
men looked at other women. Joggers, bikers, college girls waiting at the bus stop in short skirts.

But I couldn't imagine it.

Jon's loyalty seemed so fierce that it was impossible to picture him, like every other man on the planet, following with his eyes, from behind the anonymity of his steering wheel in a passing car, the line of spine and hip and leg exposed by shorts and a halter top on a summer day crossing the street.

Did
he look at other women?

Does
he?

And if he doesn't—does such loyalty come at a cost?

Or, is it the loyal one, anyway, who pays the price for such loyalty?

Maybe the
object
of that loyalty—me—would be the one who paid. Maybe the price was finding yourself married for twenty years to a handsome man, a perfectly lovely man, in a marriage without tension, in a life without apprehension, or mystery, or surprise. I always knew, after all, what Jon would say when I asked him if he loved me. I always knew that he would walk in the door every night at 5:45, after an oddly stimulating day designing computer software ("I love my job," was the only thing he ever really said about his job, and the only thing I really knew about it) and say, "Hi. Sherry? Are you home?" Or, if I came home later than he did, that he would be waiting for me in the love seat with his newspaper.

But, last night, for a moment, entering me from behind, grabbing my breast too hard in his hand, he
was
the stranger he was pretending to be.

And, maybe, that was what he was trying to achieve—the status of a stranger.
(You think this is what it would feel like to get fucked by your mechanic?)
Have I, perhaps, become as little of a mystery to him over these years as he has become to me? Is that why it turns him on to imagine me through a stranger's eyes, or a stranger inside of me?

Do I seem as safe (and dull) to him as he does to me?

Should I be flattered that he's so excited by another man's attention, or insulted?

I
WORE
the silk dress again—although by late morning there was an east wind, and I could feel it streaming through the cracks in the windows as I got dressed for work. It rattled them in their frames.

Yesterday, with the sunlight and the warmer temperature, a fly, dead between the glass and the screen all winter, came back to life. (Or
seemed
to come back to life: Is that possible, do flies hibernate, or die and resurrect?) This morning it was buzzing when I woke up, tossing itself frantically against the storm window, making a fuss. But by the time I was out of my shower, that wind had started up, and the cold front could be felt coming in, and that fly was fading, and then by the time I'd bothered to open the curtains, its bumping into the glass had stopped, and it was crawling slowly, despondently, through the dirt at the bottom of the sill—and then, by the time I was dressed, it appeared to be dead again.

Well, spring crept out for a moment and retreated, but I was determined to wear a spring dress. I shivered in it as I started the car, which was so cold that the engine sounded, grinding to life, as if it were deciding whether or not to start, whether or not it was interested in pulling out of the driveway in this cold. But it did start, and the heater began to work quickly, blowing sashes of heat hard into my face through the vents with the smell of the dust gathered there a little at a time over the many miles traveled—72,735 of them on the speedometer this morning—and being spewed back at me in the form of warmth.

I turned the radio to the classical station, but it wasn't classical music. It was, instead, some kind of half-modern symphony, the soulless straining of violins and synthesizers in disharmony.

A gray frost on the dead grass.

The trees were bare and black against it.

The snow had melted just enough to expose the shoulders of the road, littered with fast-food bags and cigarette packs.

April may be the cruel month, but March is the dirty month. The garbage month. The white had turned to the color of ashes, receded enough to reveal the litter that was there all along, but there were no leaves or flowers yet to distract the eye from the trash piling up around us on every side—our own trash, of course, but seeming to be nature's trash, the trash of the gods, so much of it.

I merged onto the freeway, feeling, as I always did, the rush of it—the smooth tar of it under my wheels and the way the traffic parted and shifted to let me in.

I was an object among other objects. A particle in motion. I didn't need to think about driving, I was so accustomed to it—so I thought about
him.

Bram Smith.

Had I ever, really, even seen him?

I wasn't sure.

I had been over and over that scrap of memory from—when? A year ago, two years ago? That man in the corner of my eye, in the olive T-shirt, with the chiseled features—could that really have been him? Was I really even remembering anyone at all?