In the Middle of Somewhere (8 page)

“But you never said we needed to make a claim,” Malcolm says, scanning his paper. “I mean, like, if I’d known that was a requirement, then I totally could have done it.”

“Well,” I say, “this assignment is called ‘Advancing a Claim.’ I’d suggest, in the future, that you draft your papers with the assignment sheet in front of you. And I’d suggest making sure you find out what you miss on days when you aren’t in class. Anything else I can do for you?”

“I mean, I basically made a claim. It’s right here.”

“As I mentioned, this is a restatement of the prompt I gave you in class, so it can’t be your claim.”

“But it’s totally a claim.”

“It’s a question, Malcolm. My question. I wouldn’t really assign a paper where you were supposed to make a claim I already made on the assignment sheet, would I?”

“How am I supposed to know what you’d do?” Malcolm says, sounding sincerely confused. But it’s clear that his confusion masks aggression. He disliked me on sight.

“Look, I’ll give you the same opportunity I gave your classmates who were unhappy with their paper grades. If you’d like to rewrite the paper and give it to me next week, I’ll regrade it with a cap at a
B-
. It’s up to you.”

“So I can’t get higher than a
B-
? No way, man!” Ooh, Malcolm’s pissed now. I admit, I get a little bit of a rush out of staying perfectly calm when I know that a student would be punching me in the face if we were at a bar instead of across a desk from one another.

“Well, as of now, this is a
D
paper. Whether you choose to keep that grade or try the assignment again is completely up to you.”

Malcolm gathers his things up angrily, sliding his chair back with a loud scrape on the old hardwood floor.

“Yeah, fine, next week, thanks,” he mumbles, and jerks his backpack over his shoulder. He pulls my office door shut behind him. Hard. It’s an old building, and, as the new kid, I clearly got stuck in the office that either: (a) was recently cleared out when some faculty member who never used it died, or (b) is a gateway to the fires of hell. As such, when Malcolm slams the door, a crack peels open in the ceiling drywall from the corner of the door to the rickety light fixture hanging precariously from the ceiling three feet away. The light fixture droops from the drywall and hangs cockeyed from a cluster of wires.

“Have a nice weekend,” I mutter.

Then, as I watch, the light fixture falls to the floor in a gunshot of dented tin, frosted glass, and plaster dust.

Great.

T
HANK
GOD
it’s the end of the week. After I call maintenance at the college and leave them a message about the disaster that my office has become, I order pizza and call Ginger. She’s always in the shop on Friday nights but only works by appointment because she doesn’t want to be implicated in people’s stupid, drunken mistakes. After some sorority girl’s mom came into the shop, dragging her daughter by the wrist, to ask why Ginger gave her daughter a tattoo of a cupcake on her ass with the words “sweet to the last lick” curling in a banner underneath, and didn’t respond well to Ginger’s assurance that the girl was very much of legal age to get a tattoo and quite insistent on this one in particular, Ginger stopped participating in Friday night walk-ins, leaving the easy cash to her employees. She answers on the first ring.

“Have you seen him again?” she says.

“Dude, come
on
,” I say. She’s asked me this every time we’ve spoken since I told her about running into him—well, about Marilyn running into me.

“Sorry, sweet cheeks. I’m just having a hell of a dry spell in the city of what is clearly
exclusively
brotherly love and I need a little pick me up.”

“I’m not holding my breath, Ginge. Like I told you, he didn’t even want my phone number. I think maybe he just saw it as a onetime thing.”

“Come on. There are, like, thirty-seven people in your town. It’s totally inevitable. Besides, he knows where you work. I think he could find you if he were trying.”

Well, she’s right about that.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says. “I just mean that he’s obviously into you, so I don’t get why he’s playing it so cool.”

“Changing the subject for the millionth time…. What’s new back home?”

“Oh, the yuzh: you’ve missed a bunch of good shows, everyone always asks where you are, everyone else in this city sucks, and SEPTA workers are on strike, so I can’t take the subway and even though I totally support their cause—go, union!—it’s basically ruining my life. Oh! And your fucking brother came into the shop yesterday.”

“Brian?” Brian is the only one of my brothers I could see getting a tattoo.

“No, Colin.”

“What? What did he want?”

“Not what did he want—what did he want
covered up
?”

“No!”

“Pumpkin, were you aware that your idiotic, gay-bashing, misogynist brother had a tramp stamp?”

“Impossible.”

“Of a butterfly.”

“No.”

“Swear to god! His story was that his girlfriend made him get it last year and now they broke up and he wanted me to cover it up with a vintage car.” She says “story” and “girlfriend” like they have enormous air quotes around them.

“Oh my fucking god, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“He swore me to secrecy.”

“Yeah, right. So, did you do it?”

“I told him that a tattoo of a car just above his ass would really give people the wrong idea about what kind of a lady he was. He got all offended and left. I guess I forgot what a total misogynist he is for, like, five seconds.” I laugh. “Oops!” she says in a baby voice that is not at all sorry.

I
GET
up early the next morning, eager to get to my office and get my course prep for the next few weeks done so that I don’t have to work tomorrow. I hate Sundays. They’re depressing enough without having to work on them. Besides, structural issues aside, I’ve grown to really like my office. I’ve never had one before. In grad school I’d work at the library or in a coffee shop. And I was always trying to get reading done behind the bar at work. Consequently, I’d have to air out the books before I returned them to the library because they always ended up dotted with booze. Even in my apartment in Philly, I just worked at the kitchen table. The place was really only a couch, a bed, a bathroom, and a kitchenette anyway. It’s nice to have a place to work that’s just mine (and
isn’t
two feet from a toilet). And, interesting as it always was to read Emily Brontë or Schopenhauer against a backdrop of tipsy concertgoers, it was pretty hard to concentrate.

As I walk to Sludge to get a coffee, the early morning air has a bit of a chill. It’ll be hot again by noon, but for now I can almost pretend I’m home, walking out to the middle of the Ben Franklin Bridge and watching the sunlight crest the crisp wavelets of the Delaware. Everything’s still in bloom, so the early morning sun filters through the trees lining the streets.

I like Sludge’s brown and white striped awning and its photographs of used coffee grounds on the brick walls. It’s early enough that Marjorie—the owner of Sludge, as I learned the first time I stumbled in fiending for coffee and was treated to a twenty-minute introduction in addition—is behind the counter. She smiles broadly at me, but her smile fades when she looks down to my arms.

“Hmm, Daniel, honey, I don’t understand why you kids do that to yourselves.” She’s looking at my tattoos. I guess I’ve only seen her when I was dressed to teach, wearing long sleeves. I don’t get some people’s assumption that you want to hear their opinion of your personal choices. And they say it like it’s not rude. I would never say, “Hey, Marjorie, I hate the way you dress,” or, “Oh, Marjorie, you should really have plastic surgery, because your nose would be so much better another way.”

“You’re such a handsome boy. Why would you want to look like a hoodlum?”

“Well, I actually am a hoodlum, Marjorie, so I was required to get them,” I say with what I hope isn’t too annoyed of a smile. “Can I have an egg sandwich and a triple shot in a large coffee to go?” I add, before she can comment.

“How on earth can you drink that much caffeine?” Marjorie asks.

“It’s what all the hoodlums drink,” I say, shrugging, and she turns away to make my drink, shaking her head.

The walk to campus only takes about fifteen minutes. Sleeping Bear College is a hodgepodge of old and new buildings. It was built on land that originally had a large estate and a smaller farmhouse. When they opened the college, they built a number of new brick buildings to house the math and science departments, one that looks kind of like a greenhouse for the art department, and, at the very back of campus, farthest from my apartment, a blocky brick monstrosity to house the library. The sidewalks connecting the buildings are clean and they must pay someone a hell of a lot of money to landscape, because there are flowers everywhere. During the week, students congregate on wooden benches around campus and eat lunch under the trees that dot the grass, which must have been original to the property because they look too old to have been planted when the college opened.

The estate was turned into the student center and the farmhouse into Snyder Hall, where the humanities classrooms are on the first and second floors and our offices are on the third. It’s a cool building from the outside—weathered wood and a huge front porch where students hang out between classes. In fact, it reminds me more of a Cracker Barrel restaurant than any academic building I’ve ever seen. Still, it’s got a relaxed vibe that I like. Inside, though, it’s rickety and worn, especially the offices.

It’s locked on the weekends, so I don’t have to worry about running into students—another perk of my office. The building is quiet and dark, and my heels echo on the hardwood floors. The downstairs walls are white and dotted with fliers for film screenings, clubs, fundraisers, and tutors. My office is on the third floor, in the back of the building, which overlooks the parking lot.

I barely manage to avoid scattering glass everywhere as I juggle open the door with my egg sandwich in one hand and my coffee in the other. I drop my stuff on my desk, making a mental note to clean the mess up before I leave for the evening, and settle in with my course planning for the upcoming week, playing Mark Lanegan on my iPod (which, thank god, I did not squash when Marilyn knocked me over).

I’m so caught up in what I’m doing that I don’t even notice anyone’s in the building until the door swings open and scares the shit out of me.

“Fuck!” I say, dragging my earbuds out. I’m lucky not to find myself clutching my heart. I don’t like to be startled.

And double-fuck me. The huge form in my doorway, carrying a heavy toolbox, is Rex.

For a few days after our… um, encounter, in the woods, Rex was on my mind constantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way he smelled, about how it felt to be held like that, how he touched me. I mean, sex is great and all, but it felt different with him. He was so sure of everything he did, and it was like he knew me already—what I’d like, how I’d respond. He seemed to know things I didn’t even know myself. And while he was touching me, it felt like he actually cared. I know it’s stupid to read anything into someone getting off, but it felt… I dunno, personal. Then, after, it was clear I was wrong, since he didn’t even ask for my phone number. But then, that kiss. No idea what to make of it.

As soon as the semester started, all thoughts of Rex and his strange hot-cold switcheroo were replaced by teaching, office hours, putting books on hold, finding the best printers on campus, course planning, grading, finding the best coffee in town, getting a school ID, making nice with/avoiding my colleagues, and so on.

Well, maybe not
all
thoughts.

At night, in the uncomfortable bed that Carl left in the apartment for me, thoughts of Rex still trickled in. Like, I still hadn’t seen him completely naked. That I wondered what his come tasted like. That, although I usually topped, I was fairly desperate for him to fuck me.

Then there were the other thoughts. Idiotic, sappy, confusing thoughts that must have meant I was half-asleep. Like, I wondered how his mouth tasted in the middle of the night, just woken up from sleep. I wondered if he let Marilyn sleep in bed with him. Did he shower in the morning to get ready for the day, or at night, falling into bed clean, with the day washed away? What would it feel like to kiss his stubbled cheek?

And somehow it’s those thoughts—the sappy, confusing ones—that flood through me when he appears in my office doorway. I realize that I’ve never seen him in the daylight before and that there’s a lot of red in his brown hair and in his stubble, and a little gray in his sideburns. I wonder if there’s a chance at all that giving him a hug so that I could smell him and feel his heavy arms enfold me could be seen as in any way normal, and immediately answer
no
.

“Hey,” he says, sounding confused. “This is your office?”

“Yep, every last crumbling inch of it.” He’s still hovering in the doorway, looking around. “Um, do you want to come in? Watch the glass.” He closes the door behind him and I can hear the glass crunch under his heavy footfalls. “So, do you work for the school?” I can’t believe I never asked him what he did when we met in February. I guess I was too busy freaking out.

“No,” he says, setting down his toolbox on the corner of my desk. “Well, yeah, I do work for them, but they don’t employ me.”

That clears things up.

“Um,” I say, “what?”

“I mean, I’m not a janitor. I fix things. For lots of folks around town. And the school sometimes calls me to fix things for them. And I make furniture.”

Does he think I’d think there was something wrong with being a janitor? Well, maybe so. A lot of professors are weird about class shit—crusading for the working classes in their lectures about Dickens but thinking anyone who does a blue-collar job is too stupid to do what they do.