In the safety of his office, Dobbin unloads his shoulder bag, his laptop and papers, and then walks to the window. His gaze travels across the wave of still-tanned students that descend from the steps of the Humanities Building and out across the once verdant but now blanched quad. A few students talk idly on cell phones; a group of boys gather for a game of Frisbee. Eventually he catches sight of Poe’s skinny, restless form. Though Dobbin is tall and paunchy, though he has thinning brown hair, he still feels more stately and attractive than Poe. Dobbin feels Poe dresses like an indigent—a wrinkled shirt only half-tucked into shabby-looking pants, no belt, an old leather satchel strapped across his chest, long hair despite the advancement of middle age. Poe stops and extinguishes his cigarette before entering the Humanities Building. There, on the third floor, he and Julia have the benefit of proximity, his office just down the hall from hers. Julia once confessed that she and Poe often mull over scansions at lunch, or discuss Simic’s latest collection, share new work. It seems to him no more right or wrong than things he’s done with Annie.
A wave of bitter jealousy comes over him, and Dobbin calls the adjunct office for what feels like the hundredth time this week. Once again he’s greeted by the palsied voice of one of the female instructors, who tells him Julia is unavailable. She urges him not to come over like he did earlier that week. No one really wants another scene—Dobbin calling down the hall after Julia, her ditching into the bathroom, his shouts to her increasingly urgent. Disgusted, he hangs up the phone. He feels hotly embarrassed at how public his life has suddenly become.
Dobbin knows—he believes—he should be able to place the matter of his marriage into perspective. Given all of history, the fallout of love could only be seen as a small tear in the fabric of American life. Compared to problems experienced by countless others—war, famine, genocide, poverty—his problems are insignificant. Still they are his, and as such they are amplified in his mind and heart to catastrophic proportions. He tells himself that if the world at large can recover from war and terror, if the earth can replenish itself after nuclear fallouts and mass extinction, then surely he, with his personal disasters, can recover, too. But who knows how to decode the covert gestures of love? He feels certain Julia remembered their own complicated history—the accumulation of it, the sheer mass of days and years—in that moment she held up the mask. Her face contorted when she saw it. He wonders: Isn’t contortion practically synonymous with love?
IT IS CLOSE to noon when Annie arrives at Dobbin’s office, holding takeout from the sandwich place downtown. She knocks, peers in, and gives Dobbin a friendly, slightly tactical look, as if she’s trying to gauge his mood in the wake of Julia’s leaving, measuring it against her own feelings regarding this development, the new possibilities inherent in it for them. A more recent hire, Annie is twenty-eight and pear-shaped. Her broad, attractive face is framed by a mass of blond curls. Her dark eyes are always alert, probative. Dobbin serves as her faculty mentor, and that is how their friendship, and then affair, began—going out to lunch to discuss teaching and research expectations, questions about student advising, that sort of thing.
She sets the takeout bag on his desk and sits in the chair across from him. Her tone is gentle, teasing, when she says, “I’ve been sent on a reconnaissance mission.”
“Barron?”
“Now what did that man say, exactly? Something about a line of demarcation being crossed among the tenured and untenured. He was very concerned about boundaries, so I guess my three-year review is sunk. Did you ever notice that Barron looks like George C. Scott?”
“Everyone says that.” Dobbin leans back, regards her. “Anyway, I doubt you’re sunk,” he says. He knows that this type of fraternizing with colleagues is generally frowned upon, but it’s also understood that among like-minded people, things frequently can and do, often, happen. It’s only an issue when students are involved—that’s when you have to worry. That’s when your job is really put on the line. He says, “Barron is probably jealous he didn’t think to do it first.”
“A compliment,” she says, and unfolds her napkin. Her silk blouse brushes against the desk. “Well, thanks.”
Dobbin knows she wants to talk about them, but the truth is, he doesn’t quite know what to do with Annie. She’s been his undoing, yes, but he doesn’t, after six months of their affair, actually see them together in any long-term sort of way, either.
He eats in silence, while Annie talks about changes to the curriculum that the provost proposed, the addition of new classes for history majors. She’s spirited, her hands gesturing as she speaks, yet however much she motions, however much her facial expressions change from willful to earnest to amused, her dark eyes never veer from him, as if she were locked and loaded, ready for whatever he might say.
And though he wants to play along now, he finds the situation a bit contrived, too—Annie’s visit, the casual way she talks to him, as if nothing has happened this week at all. It irritates him, really, how she believes she has the upper hand in all this. And she does, in a way: She has nothing to lose.
“You okay?” she asks finally, after she exhausts her small talk. “About Julia?”
“I’m fine.”
“Rumor has it she hasn’t taught her Tuesday or Thursday class. That’s not going over well. Maybe she’s been busy with the move?” Annie bites her sandwich and waits for his response. She watches him with an effortless concentration that he finds alarming.
He feels suddenly defensive, angry. Annie has no right, he reasons, to ask about Julia’s state of mind, or emotions. He reclines in his chair. He says, “What is it about southerners and gossip?”
“Southerners?” she asks, amused. “Everyone talks, Dobbin. Southerners hardly have the corner on the market. Everyone’s entitled to their opinions.”
“Talk, then,” he says. He tosses the remains of his barbeque sandwich in the trash, wipes his hands with a napkin. “What do I care? You should know we’re working on things. Talking things out.”
Her voice becomes falsely appeasing. She smiles in an indecipherable way. “Good,” she says. “That’s all anyone wants.”
He wants to tell Annie not to obfuscate things, not to confuse sex—or the sometimes false sense of intimacy that being naked and next to someone can create—with love. When they started sleeping together they both defined the terms, as well as the situation. They were attracted to each other, plain and simple. They met in parks and at Annie’s apartment, stripped each other bare, took pleasure in those few, stolen moments. Perhaps for a few weeks or a month maybe, Dobbin fancied himself in love, but there was never a time he indulged being without his wife, never a time he thought he wouldn’t in the end stay with Julia. Julia, after all, was substantial in his life, solid. She was there every night when he went to sleep, there in the mornings when he woke up, there at the table eating breakfast or dinner with him. Though Annie could be spirited, fun, eager in bed, it was still Julia who remained a permanent fixture in his life. He could imagine a time before Annie. He couldn’t imagine a time without Julia. Finally, he says, “What happened between us was a mistake.”
Annie holds his gaze. Her eyes are penetrating. “I know,” she says. “But it did happen, so there’s no point in acting like it didn’t. There’s certainly no point in ignoring me. And anyway, let’s not forget. It was fun.”
TELLING ANNIE IT might be fun was an error in judgment; Dobbin realizes this now. But they had spent so much time together and seen each other so regularly that he started to indulge the possibility of an affair. When they first began having lunch a year ago, Annie was so freshly idealistic, so opinionated and comfortable with herself. She was easy to talk to in a way that Julia hadn’t been, and he sensed that Annie found his experience and age refreshing, perhaps even attractive. He’d give her advice on how she might win more departmental favor for tenure, what high-profile committees she might join that would garner notice. If she found his discussion of pedagogy or departmental po
litics to be too pedantic, she never let on. She’d tilt her head, listening intently as Dobbin discussed what amounted to petty departmental gossip, old stories and rivalries, and she’d give him her undivided attention. They’d talk about the antebellum period—Annie’s area of specialty—and localized regional conflicts, Confederate grave sites that were still, after nearly 150 years, being unearthed in the region. She’d ask him questions about the Great War and Germany. Sometimes when she’d talk she’d absentmindedly touch his hand in a tantalizing, pleasant way, and she’d let her hand rest there a moment longer than she should.
After a time, their lunch conversations turned into a little window shopping or a walk in the park afterward. He savored those walks, the smell of new leaves, the clouds that stretched thin above them. Annie would speak pleasantly and keep a brisk pace. She confessed that she was trying to shed twenty pounds in time for her old college friend’s summer wedding. Julia knew about the outings, of course, but Dobbin perhaps made light of how often such things occurred. Then, on a drizzly afternoon walk when Annie needed to pick up a textbook she’d forgotten, Dobbin walked her to her apartment near campus. If he was flirting, he wasn’t doing it strenuously. He simply joked that he hadn’t stepped foot in another woman’s place in years, and Annie casually replied that it might be fun to have an affair with a married man. “For the experience of it, only, of course,” she said. How that one statement and his teasing response that Yes, for the experience of it, it might be fun turned into a tryst Dobbin scarcely wishes to remember. But she came close to him then, chin upturned, and everything in the moment seemed to reduce itself to her intense look of desire. He’s ashamed when he thinks of how he delighted in Annie’s body—her rounded stomach and breasts, her full bottom dimpled in the dim afternoon light. There was nothing else—not Julia, not his marriage—to consider. Afterward, he considered everything, of course.
“I can’t leave my wife,” he told Annie.
“I didn’t ask you to,” she said, and dressed.
He had crossed a line, but once it was crossed there was no going back. He asked to see Annie again. He needed to see her. And that was how the affair began, and continued.
Dobbin admits that in his insignificantly small life the absolute worst memory he holds was the ruined expression on Julia’s face when she finally confronted him. There was a frantic tone in her voice that was so uncharacteristic of her when he came home that night, only a few weeks ago—came home, actually, from Annie’s.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed. “Why are you lying?” He denied it, of course, denied Annie, denied everything. What else could he do? They were rumors, he told Julia, but tears ran down Julia’s face, and she only shook her head. Then she proceeded to smash dish after dish on the kitchen floor, until there was a mosaic of porcelain around him. “I know you,” she said. “Don’t you think I can tell when you’re lying?”
THAT AFTERNOON IN CLASS, Dobbin shows black-and-white slides of aerial attacks, airplanes dropping large cylinders down to the ground, soldiers in the trenches, wind gusts carrying gas in the enemies’ direction. He discusses, how, in those early years before artillery shells were marked with red, green, and yellow crosses, the wind would often shift and send toxic gases back to the very camps from which they came—an act of subterfuge by nature, men choked by the miscalculation of their own actions. He talks about the dangers of excessive force, the isolationism that ensued after the First World War, the implication of that national sentiment when it came to entering into World War II, Nazi Germany. Dobbin teaches because he believes that it gives him the opportunity to transform students into freethinking individuals. But what he sees today is a room half-full of students who are overwhelmingly disinterested. These are young men and women who care little for history and who anxiously await the end of class, or simply slink out from the lecture hall early and pass—hopefully unnoticed, unscathed—into the world of fast food and tanning salons again. He surveys the future generation. “You all depress me,” he says unexpectedly. “You know, someday your networking grid will collapse, and then where will you be? You might have to actually read a book.”
After the lecture, he drives out past the orange-and-white banners that designate campus grounds, then out to the main road, past the IHOP and the park where lovers meet on weekends. He passes under bridges encrusted with kudzu, drives out five miles from campus. He’s careful to park at some distance from Poe’s house, because he still believes Julia knows him so well she will sense his approach, hear the familiar rattle of his car engine. He gets out. He glances over his shoulder. Then he skulks down the hill, past the still-full trees and the row of bungalows with white, scalloped lattices.
At the bottom of the dead-end street, he sees Julia’s sedan parked next to a compact that Dobbin suspects must be Poe’s. He looks right and left, but sees no one short of an old woman carrying a grocery bag into her house. A black Labrador stalks around a fenced yard, and, as Dobbin passes, the dog barks. He feels foolish, immensely so, but he crouches against Julia’s car and takes cover. His heart races. He waits but hears nothing—no doors opening, no one asking the dog, “What is it, boy?” If he could see himself, he guesses he’d be filled with dread and disgust—his heavy breaths and sagging stomach, his beard grown to compensate for his thinning hair. Not only is his life an abbreviated spectacle, but now he’s a bona fide Peeping Tom. Still, he feels desperate to speak with Julia. He’s certain that being in the same room with her is the only thing that will afford him any solace, and so he continues.
He walks across the cobblestoned garden, ducks behind shrubbery, moves around the side of the house. He peers down through the smudged basement windows. The space below is fully furnished, equipped with a small kitchen.
He doesn’t recognize any of the furniture: a square kitchen table and chairs, a sofa and love seat with broken rattan, a simple glass table with boxes and stacks of books and papers piled on top of it. On the facing wall there is a mirror, positioned to catch light, though now, with the sun going down, the room looks small and darkly comfortable. Dobbin’s eyes adjust. Is Poe here? he wonders, imagining Poe’s scrawny, naked form emerging from the bedroom. Sickened, slightly titillated, he waits, anticipating. He senses disaster, as if he’s released the pin on a grenade and somehow absentmindedly forgotten to throw it.
After a while, when his knees ache from bending and the warmth from his pressed hand has fogged the window, Julia walks out from the bedroom. She is dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater. He pauses momentarily and holds his breath until he’s certain she’s alone. Relieved, he taps on the window, and when she looks up he gestures. “Julia,” he says through the pane of glass. “Hello.”
Julia nears the window. She does not seem alarmed, not really. Didn’t she know he’d come after her? How foolish, how possibly romantic it might seem to her, her husband squatting outside, waiting in a hopeful way just for a moment to see and speak with her. He knocks on the glass again.
“What do you want?” she asks.
He reads her lips. “I already said: To T-A-L-K. Can we please just talk and put this behind us?”
She shakes her head, and, gradually, her look registers a feeling that Dobbin can’t quite decipher. There’s a sudden angularity, a stiffness that comes over her face and lips. She walks rigidly back to the bedroom, slams the door. Dobbin pulls his jacket tighter. He bangs on the window, yelling at her to open up, to just open up for Christ’s sake.
After a few minutes Poe calls out to him, and Dobbin turns to see Poe rushing toward him, his look serious, his face slack, his ridiculous hair pulled back in a ponytail. “What do you think you’re doing here?” Poe demands.
Dobbin stands up. He’s flushed, he’s breathless. “This isn’t any of your business,” he says. “So just go and let me speak with my wife.”
“It is my business,” Poe says. He comes closer to Dobbin, so close that Dobbin can smell Poe’s spicy aftershave. “Your wife just called me. Your
wife asked me to tell you to leave.”
“You fucking presumptuous twit,” Dobbin says. He’s faintly aware of his clenched fist, the rush of adrenaline. He lunges at Poe. He wrestles Poe to the ground. His fist connects with Poe’s jaw, hard, cutting. They writhe around. Dobbin punches Poe again, then hits him once more, in the stomach, before he hears Julia’s screams and feels the grip of her hand on his shoulder. He turns toward her and then feels a sharp blow from Poe, right above his eye. “Stop it, both of you!” Julia yells. “Just leave, Dobbin! Just leave.”
AT HOME THAT NIGHT, Dobbin takes two shots of whiskey, to dull the pain from the cut above his eye and to dull the headache that is already forming. He watches television in the living room, commercials that warn against the dangers of soapsuds. The fight ended badly and relatively quickly, with Poe threatening to call the police, a threat issued with such sincerity and outrage that Dobbin tucked his loosened shirt back into his pants, wiped the dirt from his knees, and left. His marriage and Julia aside, there was his career to consider. An affair might not leave a permanent mark on his record, but an arrest surely would. Now the room spins. He pours another shot of whiskey, then greedily downs it. He sits in the dark room, the glare of the television the only light. He listens to nothing in particular—the voice emanating from the TV, the clock striking the hour, the occasional car that drives by his house—and he feels as though his entire life has been reduced to a state of madness, as if everything he’s spent years building is collapsing, slowly, around him.
The phone rings, and the sound travels through his throbbing head. He picks it up and hears Julia’s unnerved, oddly distant voice. “Why did you do that?” she asks. “Poe almost called the department chair and the provost after you left. It was all I could do to get him not to.”
Everyone but You Page 13
