Love in the Time of Climate Change (7 page)

An hour and a quarter had flown by. It was close to the end of class. Mr. Condom exited out of his PowerPoint, then turned and faced my students.

“How many of you plan on having sex tonight?” he asked, dramatically pausing for just a moment to chuckle at the stunned looks. “Don't answer that. Although I encourage you to do so. It is fun, healthy, and much, much better than anything you will ever find on television.”

There was a final burst of applause, accompanied by a few hoots and hollers from the boys in the back.

“Not to be overdramatic but, for those of you who do, please, for yourselves, for your future, for the future of life on this precious planet…” He reached back into the magic genie lamp and pulled out the condom. “Put this on!”

He bowed, passed around the lamp which just so happened to be loaded with condoms, and thanked us all for our attention.

My students flocked to him, asking questions and pressing for additional details. I couldn't help but notice the Twenty-Nine-Year-Old reaching out and lightly touching his arm, profusely thanking him. Pressed for time and needing to leave, he was still surrounded by students as he made his exit.

I knew I should have been appreciative. He had had the class eating out of the palm of his hand. I knew I should have been thankful. They'd be referencing his presentation for weeks.

But, as ludicrous as it was, I couldn't help but agonize over the situation. Samantha didn't touch
me
on the arm or tell
me
how wonderful I was. How could she fawn all
over him like that? He wasn't an inch over five feet. He was old. He had lost a few of his teeth and most of his hair.

Self-centered, narcissistic, delusional ass that I was, I was consumed with jealousy.

I had just placed the opened condom on my finger and was wagging it in the air, making a point to the invisible masses that I was every bit as awesome as the guest lecturer, when Samantha poked her head around the corner.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I replied, stopping my finger in mid wag, which sent the condom flying across the room.

“I'm sorry. Am I interrupting something?” she asked.

“No, no, of course not,” I stammered, feeling the blush creeping through my face. “I'm just … tidying things up here.”

“I can see that!”

I made my way across the room, picked up the condom, and dropped it into the trash can.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I just came to tell you how fabulous Mister Condom was! Thanks for inviting him. Think I'd get fired if I had him speak to my seventh graders?”

“Job security is overrated,” I laughed. “Anyway, 'tis always better to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission.”

“Hmm…” she pondered. “I better sleep on that one.”

She bent down and picked up one of the unopened condoms that had fallen underneath one of the desks.

“Here,” she said, handing it to me, smiling. “Somebody must have dropped it. I won't be needing it.”

Awkwardly, I took it out of her hand.

“Anyway, have a wonderful weekend,” she said, turning to leave.

“You too,” I replied.

I sat back down on my desk to catch my breath, waiting for the pounding in my chest to subside.

—

“It can mean a lot of things,” Jesse said. He was pondering the words of the Twenty-Nine-Year-Old. As always, I had told him everything. This was, after all, the kind of shit he lived for.

“One: Just like I said. She's a lesbian.”

“For the last time, she was not—”

“—Holding hands with that woman. Whatever. Two: She's on the pill and doesn't need them. Which seems extremely likely. She's totally hot, she's employed, how could she not be in a relationship?”

“Whoa!” I cautioned. “Wait just a minute. We're hot. We're employed. We're not in relationships.”

Jesse snickered dismissively.

“I'll pretend you didn't just say that. Reason Three: She's a nun and has taken a vow of celibacy and forsaken the pleasures of the flesh for a marriage to Christ.”

“Jesus, give me a break.”

“I'm simply going through the options. Some may be ones you don't want to hear. But hey, how about this one? Reason Four: she's been waiting, waiting, for what is it, three weeks now, for you to make the move. Her slipping you that condom is about as Freudian as it gets. She was flashing you the green light, dude—go, go, go! She would have taken you right then and there in your classroom if you had just had the balls. I could see her right now, bending over the table, hiking up her skirt.…”

I put my hands tightly over my ears.

“
La-la-la-la-la-la-la!
You can stop talking now because I can't hear you! I can't hear you!”

I went to my room, shut the door, and for the fourth time that evening, took the condom she had handed me out of my wallet, closed my eyes, and rubbed it counterclockwise three times.

Factoid: Incandescent lightbulbs use four times the electricity of a compact fluorescent and five times that of an LED for comparable light. Switching over to compact fluorescents or LEDs means that you will release 75–80 percent less CO2 into the atmosphere from lighting.

W
E WERE AT THE FARMER'S MARKET
, Jesse and I, doing the right thing, buying local. It was the height of harvest and everything was fresh, good-looking, and yum, yum, yummy. We bought all the veggies and fruit for our week: potatoes, summer squash, lettuce, broccoli, apples, pears, onions, tomatoes, carrots, and loads and loads of purple pod beans. All of that plus a chicken, a free-range, happy-as-a-clam-till-its-head-got-lopped-off chicken, born and bred in our very same town, now dead and frozen and ready for our Sunday night fiesta.

The farmer's market was the place to be and be seen. Granted, the ultimate was growing your own, but Jesse
and I had had limited success with that one. Try as we might, our backyard plot had turned into a desolate, neglected tangle of weeds and rocks, our beans decimated by Mexican bean beetles, our cucumbers stalks whacked off by leaf-cutter worms, our tomatoes all leaves and no fruit. Even our zucchini, which friends had said that even the green-thumbless could grow, had some sort of fungal infestation that turned them black and stunted and mushy and very, very scary.

So Saturday mornings we did the farmer's market. I went out of my way to look conspicuous, making sure my students, whom I often saw there, saw me. Mostly I liked to chat it up with the garlic lady, an old hippie in her seventies with braided gray hair, a wide brim Mexican sombrero, a flouncy skirt and a button-down hot-pink cardigan.

Back in the day I had assumed that garlic was garlic, that one bulb was the same as any other. Silly me! How could anyone be so wrong! With the help of the garlic lady I had turned into something of a garlic snob, and I could now delightedly talk garlic talk with the best of them, waxing eloquent on the difference between softnecks and hardnecks, Elephant, Porcelain, Rocambole, Silverskin, Creole, Turban and, my hands-down favorite, Purple Stripe.

“You know he's got a thing for you,” Jesse said, pointing at me and winking at the garlic lady.

“Most people do,” she grinned. “It's the garlic. The sweet breath of life. Even the smell is an aphrodisiac. You can't imagine how many offers I turn down every market. Too bad I'm a one-man woman.”

She glanced over at her hubby, offloading a crate of Purple Stripes; a poster child for hippiedom, he wore overalls, big clunky boots, a shirt with “Make cheese not war,” and a red bandana tying back his wild gray ponytail. They were clearly two peas in a pod.

Or was it two cloves in a bulb?

“Half dozen of the usual?” she asked.

“You got it,” I replied, slipping a sample sliver of an Elephant into my mouth.

“And we'll see you and your class in a few weeks?”

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

Shopping done, I was set to head back to the house when I noticed that Jesse had waylaid two young women, not much older than most of my students. He was madly waving the bulbs of garlic around, slinging shit about some classy garlicky hors d'oeuvres I knew he would never get around to making.

“Typical,” I sighed, and sat down on an empty apple crate to wait, content to watch the gaggle of happy farmer's marketers parade on by, bags and strollers and dogs in hand.

I had faded into a sensual daydream involving the Twenty-Nine-Year-Old, me, and a lovely field of garlic in full, luscious bloom, when Jesse rudely interrupted and tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up to see him flanked by his two new friends.

“Casey, this is Patty and Rebecca. They're grad students in Renaissance Studies at U Mass. Casey teaches at Pioneer Valley Community College.”

“Oh, really?” said Patty or Rebecca.

I couldn't tell which one was which.

“What do you teach?”

“Environmental science, climate change, that kind of stuff.”

“Awesome.” Rebecca/Patty replied.

“They invited us to head over to their place,” Jesse said, giving me a wink and a follow-my-lead-and-we-could-get-lucky look.

“It's just up the street. Maybe roast a little garlic. Smoke a joint. Spend a lovely afternoon with two lovely ladies!”

God, he moved fast. He had known them for what, five minutes, and already he was halfway to first base!

“I don't know,” I said. “I've got a lot of grading to do. I should probably head back.”

He shot me the evil eye, silently mouthing the do-as-I-say-or-I'm-going-to-kick-your-ass command. I had been down this road with him before. To disobey was not an option.

“Dude, grading can wait. These two can't. Let's go!”

The twins (they weren't, but they could have been) had a spacious second-floor apartment on Federal Street, about a block from the center of town.

We sat on their couch. Jesse, clearly taking to heart the market woman's words of wisdom, proceeded to hold forth with garlic still in hand.

The two women put on the Red Hot Chili Peppers, passed around a quart of fresh apple cider and a killer joint, and gave us the lowdown on the trials and tribulations of Renaissance Studies. Gossip and palace intrigue fit for queens and kings. They went off on the relationships between the natural and the supernatural in sixteenth-century England, and the animated discussion about visions, apparitions, miracles, demonic possession, and mystical ecstasy reached such a crescendo that Jesse disappeared into the bedroom with Patty (or was it Rebecca? The pot had not helped in keeping the two of them straight … as it were).

I was enjoying myself. What was not to like? They were animated, smart, witty, and cute as hell. I was high, and so were they. Whichever one was left was clearly interested in me. God knows, I hadn't had it in a long time, and here it was being handed to me on a silver platter. Ripe for the plucking. A feast for a renaissance king.

But just as Rebecca/Patty moved closer next to me and things began to get really interesting—curse and nuisance! blight and bother!—my OCD kicked in. Big time. The goddamn climate-change freight train came roaring down the tracks!

No! I silently screamed to myself. No! Not now!

From the moment I had walked into their apartment door I had done my best to ignore the surroundings and keep my eyes on the prize.

Don't go there! I had told myself, as I breathed deeply in through the nose, out through the mouth, desperate to banish the incoming explosive images from my head.

Just close your eyes! Close your damn eyes. Don't look around. Focus on her beautiful breasts. Screen out the picture of climate chaos that was their apartment.

It didn't work. Try as I might, the combination of pot, an unfamiliar setting, and my general anxiety around women had made my climate radar kick into high gear. I was helplessly falling, flailing, unable to stop myself.

Be gone, ye demons! Out, out, you devils!

None of my manful efforts to silence the shrill voice of OCD had any effect.

Their apartment was a torture chamber, an inquisitor's tool kit of energy no-nos.

Disaster #1: Incandescent lightbulbs. The evil ones. Energy-sucking little bastards. Their apartment was full of them. Not one lamp had a compact fluorescent or LED bulb.
And they were all turned on!
It was the middle of the day and all of the lights were on—
all of them
!

Disaster #2: Everything else was on. And there was a lot of everything else! Three computers, two tablets, two Kindles, six digital clocks, the list went on and on and on. They had every electronic gadget known to human kind. Multiple generations of the same gadget. Their apartment was a virtual museum of electronic gadgetry.
And they were all turned on! All of them!

Disaster #3: The heat was blasting and it was a beautiful September day. And the windows—the windows, for Christ sake—were
wide open
. I am not making this up. No wonder I was dripping sweat. It was pushing ninety-five in the apartment and
the goddamn heat was on!