Girls (3 page)

“He doesn’t love anyone,” the kid told me. “He doesn’t love his wife—I mean, his ex-wife. And he doesn’t love the ex-wife before that, or the one before that. And you know what? He doesn’t love me. I don’t know anyone who
does!
”

“It isn’t your fault if he isn’t smart enough to love you,” I said, steering her toward the Jeep.

She stopped. She turned. “You know him?”

I couldn’t help it. I hugged her hard, and she let me, and then she stepped back, and of course I let her go. “Don’t you touch me! Is this sexual harassment? Do you know the rules? Isn’t this sexual harassment?”

“I’m sorry,” I said at the door to the truck. “But I think I have to be able to give you a grade before it counts as harassment.”

She got in. I told her we were driving to the dean of students’ house. She smelled like marijuana and something very sweet, maybe one of those coffee-with-cream liqueurs you don’t buy unless you hate to drink.

As the heat of the truck struck her, she started going kind of clay gray-green, and I reached across her to open the window.

“You touched my breast!” she said.

I said, “Does it count if it wasn’t on purpose?”

She leaned out the window and gave her rendition of my dog.

But in my rocker, waking up at whatever time in the morning in my silent house, I thought of her as someone’s child. Which made me think of ours, of course. I went for more ice, and I started on a wet breakfast. At the door of the dean of students’ house, she’d turned her chalky face to me and asked, “What grade would you give me, then?”

It was a week like this: two teachers locked out of their offices late at night, a Toyota with a flat and no spare, an attempted rape on a senior girl walking home from the library, a major fight outside a town bar (broken wrist, probable concussion), and variations on breaking and entering. I was scolded by my vice president of nonacademic services for thumping softly on a student who got drunk and disorderly and tried to take me down. I told him to keep his job, but he called me back because I was right to swat the kid a little, he said, but also wrong, but what the hell, and he’d promised to admonish me, and now he had, and would I please stay on. I thought of the fringe benefits—graduation in only sixteen years—so I went back to work.

My professor assigned a story called “A Rose for Emily,” and I wrote him a paper about the mechanics of corpse fucking, and how, since Emily clearly couldn’t screw her dead boyfriend, she was keeping his rotten body in bed because she truly loved him. I called the paper “True Love.” He gave me a B and wrote, “See me, pls.” In his office after class, his feet up on his desk, he trimmed a cigar with a giant folding knife he kept in his drawer.

“You got to clean the hole out,” he said, “or they don’t draw.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“Bad habit. Real
habit
, though. I started smoking ’em in Germany, in the service. My CO smoked ’em. We collaborated on a brothel inspection one time, and we ended up smoking these with a couple of women.” He waggled his eyebrows at me, now that his manhood was established.

“Were the women smoking them, too?”

He snorted laughter through his nose while the greasy smoke came curling off his thin, dry lips. “They were pretty smoky, I’ll tell ya!” He was wearing cowboy boots that day, and he propped them on his desk and sat forward. “It’s a little hard to explain. But—hell. You just don’t say
fuck
when you write an essay for a college prof. Okay?” He sounded like a scoutmaster with a kid he’d caught jerking off in the outhouse. “All right? You don’t wanna do that.”

“Did it shock you?”

“Fuck no, it didn’t shock me. I just told you. It violates certain proprieties.”

“But if I’m writing it to you, like a letter—”

“You’re writing it for posterity. For some mythical reader someplace, not just me. You’re making a
statement.
”

“Right. My statement said how hard it must be for a woman to fuck with a corpse.”

“And a point worth making. I said so. Here.”

“But you said I shouldn’t say it.”

“No. Listen. Just because you’re talking about fucking, you don’t have to say
fuck.
Does that make it any clearer?”

“No.”

“I wish you’d lied to me just now,” he said.

I nodded. I did, too.

“Where’d you do your service?” he asked.

“Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland.”

“What’s in Baltimore?”

“Railroads. I liaised on freight runs of army materiel. I killed a couple of bums on the rod with my bare hands, though.”

He snorted again, but I could see how disappointed he was. He’d been banking on my having been a murderer. Interesting guy in one of my classes, he must have told some terrific woman at an overpriced meal: I just
know
the guy was a rubout specialist in the Nam. I figured I should come to work wearing my fatigue jacket and a red bandanna tied around my head. Say “man” to him a couple of times, hang a fist in the air for grief and solidarity, and look worn out,
exhausted from experiences he was fairly certain he envied my having. His dungarees were ironed, I noticed.

On Saturday, we went back to the campus because Fanny wanted to see a movie called
Seven Samurai.
I fell asleep, and I’m afraid I snored. She let me sleep until the auditorium was almost empty. I asked her, “Who was screaming in my dream?”

“Kurosawa,” she said.

“Who?”

“Ask your professor friend.”

I looked around, but he wasn’t there. “Not an unweird man,” I said.

We went home and cleaned up after the dog and put him out. I drank a little sour mash and we went upstairs and didn’t make love. It got to be Sunday morning, maybe four or five, and the dog was howling at another dog someplace, or at the moon, or maybe just his shadow thrown by the moon onto snow. I did not strangle him when I opened the back door, and he limped happily past me and stumbled up the stairs. I followed him into our bedroom and I made myself not groan a happy groan for being satisfied Fanny hadn’t shifted out of it yet.

He stopped me in the hall after class on a Thursday and asked me, “How’s it goin’?”—just one of the kickers drinking sour beer and eating pickled eggs and watching the tube in a country bar. How’s it goin’? I nodded. I wanted a grade from the man, and I did want to learn about expressing myself. I nodded and made what I thought was a smile. He’d let his mustache grow out and his hair was longer. He was starting to wear dark shirts with lighter ties. I thought he looked like someone in
The Godfather.
He was wearing his high-heeled cowboy boots. His corduroy pants looked baggy. I guess he
wanted them to look that way. He motioned me to the wall of the hallway, and he looked confidential and said, “How about the Baltimore stuff?”

I said, “Yeah?”

“Was that really true?” He was almost blinking, he wanted so much for me to be a damaged Vietnam vet just looking for a bell tower to climb into and start firing from. The college didn’t have a bell tower, though I’d once spent an ugly hour chasing a drunken ATO down from the roof of the observatory. “You were just clocking through boxcars in Baltimore?”

I said, “Nah.”

“I thought so!” He gave a kind of sigh.

“I killed people,” I said.

“You know, I could have sworn you did,” he said.

I nodded, and he nodded back. I’d made him so happy.

The assignment was to write something to influence somebody. He called it “Rhetoric and Persuasion.” We read an essay by George Orwell and
A Modest Proposal
by Jonathan Swift. I liked the Orwell better, but I wasn’t comfortable with it. He talked about natives and I felt him saying it two ways.

I wrote “Ralph the Duck.”

Once upon a time, there was a duck named Ralph who didn’t have any feathers on his wings. So when the cold wind blew, Ralph said, Brr, and he shivered and shook.

What’s the matter? Ralph’s mommy asked.

I’m
cold
, Ralph said.

Oh, the mommy said. Here. I’ll keep you warm.

So she spread her big, feathery wings, and hugged Ralph tight, and when the cold wind blew, Ralph was warm and snuggly, and he fell fast asleep.

The next Thursday, he was wearing canvas pants and hiking boots. He mentioned kind of casually to some of the girls in the class how whenever there was a storm, he wore his Lake District walking
outfit. He had a big hairy sweater on. I kept waiting for him to make a noise like a mountain goat. But the girls seemed to like it. His boots made a creaky squeak on the linoleum of the hall when he caught up with me after class.

“As I told you,” he said, “it isn’t unappealing. It’s just—not a college theme.”

“Right,” I said. “Okay. You want me to do it over?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all. The D will remain your grade. But I’ll read something else if you want to write it.”

“This’ll be fine,” I said.

“Did you understand the assignment?”

“Write something to influence someone—‘Rhetoric and Persuasion.’ ”

We were at his office door and the redheaded kid who got sick in my truck was waiting for him. She looked at me as if one of us was in the wrong place, which struck me as accurate enough. He was interested in getting into his office with the redhead, but he remembered to turn around and flash me a grin he seemed to think he was known for.

Instead of going on shift a few hours after class, the way I’m supposed to, I told the dispatcher I was sick, and I went home. Fanny was frightened when I came in, because I don’t get sick and I don’t miss work. She looked at my face and got sad. I went upstairs to change. When I was a kid, I always changed my clothes as soon as I came home from school. I put on jeans and a flannel shirt and thick wool socks, and I made myself a dark drink of sour mash. Fanny poured herself some wine and came into the cold northern room a few minutes later. I was sitting in the rocker, looking over the valley. The wind was lining up a lot of rows of cloud, so the sky looked like a baked trout when you lift the skin off. “It’ll snow,” I said to her.

She sat on the old sofa and waited. After a while, she said, “I wonder why they always call it a mackerel sky?”