The Englishman (46 page)

“I see you’re here with Giles Cleveland,” she says crossly.

“Actually, no, I’m not here with Giles Cleveland. We left the same town this morning and came to the same town this afternoon, that’s all.”

The one positive thing I can say about Kathleen is that she is fully alive to Giles’s brand of attractiveness.

“Anna, you have to introduce me! Come on, he’s standing by himself!”

Groaning inwardly, I allow her to pull me across the room to where Giles is leafing through one of the new publications on the book table.

“Giles, meet Kathleen Murray. She and I were at Columbia together before I went to London.”

“Professor Cleveland!” She beams at him. “I’m so excited to meet you! Your biography of Raleigh is wonderful! I’m going to use it to teach next semester!”

“Kathleen got the job at Brandeis that I also applied for.”

“Did you? I’m so glad!” He gives her his blandest smile, and I have to hide in my coffee cup not to burst out laughing.

“Why do
you
never tell me things like that?” he murmurs when we file back in again for the third panel. I cast a speaking glance up at him, and he laughs quietly.

“So, are you happy?” He means my paper.

“Whatever,” I grumble. “It’s not as if you paid me any attention!”

“I did!” he protests. “You were very…sexy.”

“Giles, you rotter.”

He laughs, and his eyes are very warm and very bright.

He
has
come to Indiana to seduce me.

Paul French has a lot of fun with “my pupil, Cleveland, my creature, my single success story as a tutor!” He is a charming, buoyant Botticelli angel of a man, impossible to dislike, but by the time we adjourn to get changed for dinner, he has turned into a rival.

“Actually, Giles, I was hoping to abduct you tonight! I know a quiet little place downtown—we have such a lot to catch up on!”

No! Tonight he’s mine!

Giles accepts. Smiles, accepts, and explains to the bystanders that he and Paul last saw each other in nineteen ninety-five, when they got vilely drunk on Sangria at a conference in Barcelona.

“Sorry—I’m sure you understand—older rights, and all that!” This is not addressed to me but to Kathleen, and I feel as if someone had hit me over the head with a Riverside Shakespeare. Worried that shock and disappointment are written all over my face, I turn away from the group, mutter something about the effect of the coffee on my bladder, and flee into the restroom.

What the hell did I say to make him change his mind about me?
I wanted him!

To have dinner with, at any rate, since sex is…should be…out of the question. I’m so disappointed I could cry. Scream. Kick in the door of the cubicle in which I am hiding my humiliation from the world.

Rationally, I understand what is going on. The moment he becomes unavailable, I want him. I wanted him before, I’ve been wanting him—oh, who am I kidding?

But my career…

I want my career more than I want a man. Naysayers, detractors, even haters I can deal with. The more enemies, the more honor. This afternoon I convinced a roomful of scholars of my intricately woven analysis of Renaissance images of dissected bodies. Like a barber-surgeon’s knife through the dead flesh of a criminal, my intellect cut through conflicting layers of discourse, isolated the semiotic codes by which these images hang together, and carved a coherent argument out of a mass of material. But the sense of triumph this gave me was short-lived. Now I am tired. And frustrated. And so lonely.

What is
wrong
with me?

Since I cannot run away, and since I do not trust myself alone in my hotel room tonight, there is nothing for it but to team up with Kathleen and a couple of delegates I know from other conferences. Project the successful young tenure-track professor. Wear the high-heeled boots.

“Anna!” Giles is hurrying down the hallway with long strides, Barbour still open, scarf hanging around his neck. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Out.” I hitch my purse up on my shoulder and pull the door shut.

“But you’re my date!”

“Well, that’s what I thought until you blithely agreed to have dinner with Paul French!”

“Smokescreen, darling. I was sure you’d get that.”

“No, I didn’t get that,” I mutter defensively.

“Do you have Kathleen’s number? Tell her that you have a headache. Ask for the name of the place they’re going to and say you’ll follow on later. If you’re feeling better.”

“What did you tell Paul?”

“Headache.” He grins.

On our way downstairs and across the lobby, I am still so overwhelmed by confusion, relief, joy, suspicion, and resentment that I am dumb, but outside on the sidewalk I snap.

“I don’t know that lying was such a bright idea, Giles! If anyone sees us now, we’re toast!”

“We’re not going to be seen. They’ve all gone to South Bend, and we’re going to Mishawaka.” He hails a cab from the stand down the street. “Unless you’d rather stay in and order room service…”

He says it like something he didn’t think he would have the guts to say, and then it slipped out at the first opportunity. The taxi draws up, and Giles and I are still gazing at each other, teetering on the brink.

“Get ’n the car.”

I make my voice sound extra gruff, and the quick nod of my head would have done any mobster proud. He holds the door for me and exchanges a few words with the driver while I sort out my coat, then he climbs in after me. We drive along the southern edge of the campus and turn right.

“I’m—I’m sorry.” He has to clear his throat before he can speak. “I can’t believe I said that. It was crass and—God, I can’t believe I’m such a…klutz!”

“Giles.” I reach over and slip my hand into his; he claps it firmly, without hesitation. “You’re not a klutz for spelling out what we both know is in the cards. I’m glad you did.”

It’s too dark to see his face properly, but he doesn’t let go of my hand.

“You’re much better at plain-speaking than I am.”

“Well, I am still a New Yorker while you are a freakin’ Englishman.”

This clears the air a little, and I give in to the innocent—I hope—pleasure of linking my fingers with his and leaning a little closer when he lays our hands on his thigh. I am sinking back into my fantasy of being with Giles—of being allowed to be with Giles—like I would sink into a hot, foamy, scented bath. It is a drive of some fifteen minutes, during which we hold hands but do not speak. We pull up in front of a country club-style building, brightly lit, in what appear to be quiet, park-like surroundings. While he is paying, another taxi draws up, and I hold my breath for fear it might be conference delegates, but it’s an elderly couple with what I take to be their college-aged granddaughter. They are chatting quietly and walk in before us. Giles is about to follow them when I grab his arm.

“Giles!”

“Hmm?” Immediately he swings round, stands very close to me and reaches for my hands. I love that he likes holding hands. I love everything about him.

“Giles, I’m…very tired and…and emotional, and I don’t want to end up having sex with you tonight merely because it is something I can do horizontally.”

He smiles and lets me go. Three nimble steps and he is up the front porch of the restaurant—light-footed, happy.

This is so dangerous.

The restaurant is generously laid out but feels cozy because the space has been compartmentalized by big potted plants and painted paravents. Giles hangs up my coat and takes off his Barbour, and although I am ashamed to admit it, the warm glow in my belly is fanned by the pride of possession. I managed to suppress this feeling all day today—at the airport, at the conference—but now that he is lavishing his whole attention on me, my heart swells.

The waiter is leading us to a booth with a window at the back of the room when a hot, painful rush of panic sets my skin on fire, and it takes me a paralyzed eternity to register the cause.

“I say, Cleveland! Over here!”

Paul French. At a big round table, with Kathleen, Pete, his wife, and several other people from the conference.

“
Varkackt
,” I mutter next to Giles’s shoulder, and he, lifting an arm to acknowledge Paul’s salute, mutters back, “If that means what I think it means, I’ll say
oy
to that.”

He turns round to look at me. “I don’t want them!” he pleads, with the pitiful but helpless frown of a thwarted boy. “I want
you!”

“Let’s run!” I whisper. We stare at each other, and I am so in love with him, all my resolutions have evaporated into thin air; if he grabbed my hand to run, I’d run with him. But we are both too responsible, or too cowardly, and we both know we won’t run.

“Good, so you got my message! I wasn’t sure it would reach you!” Paul pulls out the chair next to his, and his voice and behavior tell me—and I hope no one else—that he is covering Giles’s ass. And mine. Giles glances over at him, too annoyed to play the game, and I greet the others far more enthusiastically than I would in any other circumstance, except possibly on a mountain top in the Himalayas. All I can do is prevent the ultimate frustration of having Giles sit next to Kathleen.

“Here, Paul, Giles—you haven’t seen each other in yonks—” I push Giles into the chair offered by Paul and slip in next to Kathleen myself.

“I’m so glad your headache is better, Anna!” she trills sourly. “How boring it would have been for you to spend the evening all alone in your room!”

When Paul fills our glasses with wine, I drink.

“Anna? Anna, would you say you had a fair impression of your college after you’d been to your campus interview?” Vicky, one of the conference organizers, has to raise her voice to alert me.

“Oh, I—I don’t know. How can I—” I gesture toward Giles.

“How can she answer that in front of a colleague?” one of the other women scolds Vicky. “Is Giles on your P&T committee, Anna?”

We glance at each other, and I hope my embarrassment is taken for the defensiveness of a junior professor. “That hasn’t been settled yet,” I say.

“Probably not,” Giles says.

At first I am relieved when someone starts asking about the Hornberger scandal. Only a few of them had not heard of it, and so a censored version of life at the Ardrossan Observatory becomes a safe topic to pass the evening.

Once embarked on this salacious topic, each of them has a similar story to relate: of the eminent professor who got up in a faculty meeting to announce what she wrongly assumed was an open secret—her affair with an adjunct lecturer; of the female professor who married her much younger teaching assistant, who ten years later threw himself off a bridge; of the bright young female student who serially dated three professors during college, only to end up taking a job as secretary in a firm of car dealers.

Be quiet!
I want to shout them down.
Does nobody know any stories with a happy ending?

“I’m on the third floor—you, Anna?” Kathleen asks me as we are walking up the stairs back at the hotel together at the end of this fucked-up evening.

“Um, yup.”

“Giles?”

“I think so.” He rummages in his coat pocket and produces his keycard. “Three twenty-one. That’s sort of round the corner and behind the sofa, underneath a potted plant.”

Why doesn’t he draw her a freaking map?

I am seething.
Seething
. It makes no difference that her room is near the elevator, while both Giles and I are further along the hallway and round a corner.

“See you in the morning,” I mutter, slam my keycard into the slit on the door and throw myself against it.

“This is—” he says, as if he had suddenly remembered something important.

“Good night.”

“This is the moment Grace Kelly turns round to kiss Cary Grant.”

“Look, Giles, don’t even—go there—” I shake my head, so distraught and disappointed I could cry.

“I know. Scandal-mongering is awful. Poisonous.”

“It is! And I don’t want to become the object of—”

“I wouldn’t let them.”

“You couldn’t stop them!”

The tension leaves his body, his shoulders slump. He gazes down at the floor.

“I would do my best.”

“Giles, I—I’m really sorry we didn’t get the chance to have dinner together. I am. But I asked you not to do this. Hit on me.”

“Not hitting,” he says softly, looking up. “I just want a kiss.”

He is very still, all flippancy gone. So handsome, in his suit and Barbour, melted snow glistening on his sleeves and in his hair. And at the same time—shy. He is shy, and neither smooth nor masterful.

That, or he is playing me.

“Hit me again,” I say softly, mockingly. “Only this time, choose a better quotation.”