by Nina Lemay
The second is my grade for the Art History paper: a D.
A note typed in red at the end of the PDF file:
Hannah, you really need to reconsider your commitment to this course and perhaps even this program. Effort has been declining and if this trend continues you might find yourself on academic probation. Please set up an appointment to discuss this.
Best,
Michael Leary.
I flip off the computer screen, scream a few obscenities at it. Yeah, real mature.
At least I have Monday off. That means I don’t have to see Emmanuel until Wednesday.
The thought chokes off my oxygen.
Back at work, welcome to Slow October. Just the gateway to Comatose November and Average December, a short two week respite of holiday office parties to give me an edge over Cold Dead January. I wander through the half-empty club, teetering in my crystal heels. I sketch during the downtime: disembodied parts, a shoulder and neck, a thigh, a tense calf pushed up by a high-heeled shoe. Anything to keep my mind busy.
The evening picks up way past midnight, and I get one of the guys from a large group to take me to the champagne room. I’m an automaton as I pull the curtain closed and explain the rules, run my hands over my hips and between my legs to “demonstrate” where he can’t touch—an old trick Maryse taught me. But right now I feel about as sexual as an icicle. I can’t believe he can’t see it. I can’t believe everyone can’t see it. But men are never tuned in to such things. They’ll easily mistake a slick of lube for excitement and a faked moan for an orgasm, and ask themselves no questions. I stand over him, my skinny body aglow blue from the overhead black lights. An ice zombie from Game of Thrones, wow, hot.
He’s young, way younger than I like them. He has that longish curling hair with blond streaks, which reminds me of the jocks at my old high school. In my head I dub him Frat Boy.
“Oh my God, you’re the hottest girl I’ve ever seen.” I writhe, pushing my breasts into his face. The thought of Emmanuel’s mouth on my nipple bursts into my mind, making me falter and catch his hand at the last minute as it shoots toward the forbidden zone.
“What the fuck did I just say?” I bark.
“All right, all right. I’m sorry.” He rolls his eyes. “I couldn’t help myself. You’re just so hot.”
I can’t shake the feeling that if he really wanted to do something to me, I couldn’t stop him. He has more strength in one arm than I probably have in my entire body. Not a comforting thought.
We go on like this, every time I try to drift off into my own thoughts he tries to make a grab or kiss me or stick out his tongue and tickle my belly button ring. After a while I just give up and kick him out. He insists it was just one dance.
“You want me to call the manager, asshole?” I stand over him, hands on my hips.
“Hey, I don’t want to rip you off—”
“Then how about you pay me what you owe me, huh.”
“Come on, be fair with me. It was one dance. You know it was one dance.”
The manager sticks his head in through the curtain, what’s the problem here. I tell him. Frat Boy starts to raise his voice, hey, man, I’m not stupid, okay, you can’t just rip me off, I can count, it was one dance. The manager says he saw us go in at least twenty minutes ago but the guy only gets more riled up. The manager makes me settle for $50, twenty less than he owes me, and this is my first money of the night. Then the asshole doesn’t have the cash, and the manager takes his cell phone and gives it to me until Frat Boy can get money from his stupid friends.
While I wait, I realize he wasted another twenty minutes of my time. I turn on his phone, which isn’t locked—is he too cocky or just too dumb to remember a code?—and scroll through his contacts. I aim the phone at the neon sign reading LIVE NUDE GIRLS $10 LAP DANCE, snap a photo and text it to the contact marked Mom.
The guy comes back and I give him the phone with a beatific smile. He throws two crumpled twenty dollar bills at me, muttering stupid slut. The punishment was well-deserved, I think vindictively.
Still, I have to crouch to pick up the twenties while he and his friends watch. Pride is pride but I’m not letting money go to waste.
I can’t believe I left Emmanuel for this shit, a thought flashes through my mind. For this.
I run upstairs to the changing room. It’s a miracle I can hold it in that long, but the second the door swings closed behind me I kick off my shoes, sink to the floor and drop my head onto my hands. My vision swims with unfocused red and blue and green neon behind my closed eyelids and each breath is a conscious effort.
“Hey,” says a voice above my head that might as well be light-years away. I look up only when it speaks again, calling my name this time, my actual name and not Alicia. I look up and see Maryse crouching next to me, concerned look on her face. She’s wearing a gold bikini top that ties in the front and her boobs spill out of it when she leans in—I can see the peekaboo edge of an areola. She tucks my hair behind my ear, her vertiginous nails clicking. She has diamonds glued to her ring finger nail, I notice. Not diamonds, obviously. Rhinestones. They glitter like tears.
“You okay, babe?”
“Yeah,” I breathe through the sobs.
“I just wanted to check, see if you’re OD’ing or something.” I can’t even tell if she’s serious. “You all right? Is it because of that shithead client?”
I give a bitter laugh. “No.” For once, that’s the truth.
“Good, cause fuck him,” she says matter-of-factly.
“Fuck him,” I agree.
“Hey.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “You wanna go out the back and smoke a joint?”
“I don’t feel like smoking a joint,” I say, cringing.
“Whatever. More for me.” She shrugs. “Just come along. We’ll talk.”
We sit perched on the fire exit out back, with a view of a garbage-strewn back alley. It’s freezing and I huddle in my jacket over my sweatshirt over my work outfit. Maryse brings a ratty old bathrobe for this purpose, and in a pink fluffy robe with full makeup she looks like a Real Housewife. She lights the joint and the smell of burning hay fills the air, stinging my nostrils. She offers it to me, but I decline again.
“So what’s up?” she asks. “I didn’t see you all weekend.”
“I was out of town.” I stare at the rusted stairs at my feet.
“Family? Wait, I thought you said you were American.”
“I am. I just… went out of town. For fun.”
“Was it to work?”
“No.” I wrap my arms around myself.
“I see.” She takes a puff of her joint and breathes out the smoke, carefully trying to angle it out of my face. “Does it have to do with that guy?”
I blanch. “What guy?”
“The guy you were arguing with at that rave.”
“What?”
“I saw him here. You danced for him, couple months ago, right?”
“A month and two weeks,” I mutter. A knowing smirk spreads over her face.
“Well, wow. Who’d have thought you of all people would be messing around with a customer! Our straight-edge virgin gone bad. Everyone will be so disappointed.” She must see my panicked look, because she pats me on the back. “Figure of speech. I’m not gonna tell anyone, why the fuck would I?”
“He’s not just a customer,” I say grimly.
“Of course he’s not,” she singsongs. “He’s different from all the others, he’s a real man, knows how to treat a girl, he’s special.”
“No,” I snap. “Well, not like that anyway. He’s my teacher.”
Her eyes go round as two-dollar coins.
And then the whole story just spills out of me, the rave, our sneaking around, Quebec City and how it ended. By the time I’m done Maryse is looking at me slack-jawed, her joint burnt to a tiny nub clenched in her sharp diamond nails.
“Fuck, osti de calisse.”
“You can say that.”
�
��I knew it,” she says. “I didn’t want to leave without you that night. I knew something terrible had happened.”
“It wasn’t terrible,” I murmur. “He didn’t—”
“Oh, yeah? And you’re feeling just fantastic about it right now, I bet.”
I swallow. I don’t know how to explain it: even if that night hadn’t happened things had already been set in motion. It just pushed us together faster.
“Well, if you ask me, you did the right thing,” Maryse says. She flicks her lighter, vainly trying to light the nub of the joint, gives up and throws it into a water-filled pothole.
“Really?” I ask grimly. “Which thing was that?”
“Telling him to go fuck himself. That’s what I would have done.”
I almost say but he was right, he was right when you get down to it, but I don’t want to offend her. She’s the one with the acrylic nails and the fake tits and I know she’s been doing this for years.
“You know what? Fuck what he thinks. He wants to pay your bills, your rent, and buy you new clothes every season? He can do that. Until then you make your money in whatever way works for you, and he doesn’t get to tell you what to do.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Yeah, guess what, it is that fucking simple. You do what needs to be done, girl, you’re taking care of yourself, and don’t ever let anyone give you shit about it. What, he’d rather have you flip burgers for ten bucks an hour?”
I don’t tell her that it’s pretty much exactly what he told me to do. That and take out loan after loan and “get by.”
“You have any idea how many shitheads like that I’ve dated? First you apologize and you apologize, and you pick up the tab at restaurants and pay his rent because he works hard all day and you have all that free money.” She chuckles. “Just so he won’t give you a hard time about your job. And then he dumps your ass anyway because you’re still a stripper and that’s not who he wants to be the mother of his children or whatever. Well, you know what, life is too short. Either he’s okay with what you do, or he can fuck right off.”
“And have you met many? Who were okay with it?”
She gives me a salacious smile. “I’ve met enough.”
“Maybe you should introduce me,” I mutter.
“Don’t worry about it. He’ll come along and you’ll know it when he does. And he won’t give a shit if you’re a stripper or if you give five-dollar blow jobs in the parking lot. He’s gonna look at you with stars in his eyes and worship the ground you walk on.” She leans in, winks and adds: “…and hey, if he wants to, you know, te faire vivre, too, that’s a nice bonus.”
I do my best to smile. I don’t want a sugar daddy, I don’t need anyone to pay my bills. I just want to be able to go on a date with Emmanuel without my job sitting between us like the giant pink cheetah-print elephant in the room. I just want it to not be an issue.
But of course, that will never happen. Life is full of disappointments.
I wrap my jacket tightly around my shoulders and we get up to go back inside.
Wednesday.
I dread the moment I set foot at school. On my way there, I linger, miss my metro on purpose even though the next one is only two minutes behind. Two minutes that I’ll be away from him.
I picked up the photos from the drugstore on the way. I go through them while I wait for the train, those old photos from that day in September, the ones I didn’t dare develop in the school lab. Emmanuel is in them and he’s smiling, so beautiful and carefree. And then I flip to the next photo and find myself staring at my own face. I’m not quite looking at the camera, and there are dimples around my mouth like I’m holding back a big grin. In spite of the washed-out black-and-white photo, I look illuminated from within. This isn’t the same face I see in the mirror every day. This is me—through someone else’s eyes. Through Emmanuel’s eyes.
I stuff the photos into my backpack before I can burst into tears in front of the entire rush hour crowd.
Everyone is already there when I get to class, three or four minutes late. The first thing I notice when I step in is that Audrey is in my seat at the farthest right, closest to Emmanuel. The only spot left is at the other end of the table. I stumble for a second before directing my steps toward it, not looking at the front of the room.
He doesn’t even glance up from his laptop when I take my seat. I watch him discreetly as he gets up and starts the lecture on advanced techniques. His eyes look puffy and a bit red, and his hair is mussed, but it doesn’t look intentional.
He avoids looking at me the whole time. He doesn’t make it look like he’s avoiding me, he just makes sure to find another spot to rest his gaze and it’s usually Audrey.
She’s listening to him raptly, asking questions without raising her hand. And he answers. He makes sure to call her by her name, pronouncing it the way she likes it, in the French way: AudRAY. Of course he does. She can speak to him in his own language. And I’m just a stupid American slut who’s too dumb to learn it.
At the end of the class, people start to shuffle out and he has yet to let his gaze so much as slip over me. I know what I have to do.
I get up and take the envelope with the photos out of my backpack. “My homework,” I say, in a loud and clear voice. The people who haven’t left yet turn.
“Homework?” this is the first and only word he’s said to me all class, and still he manages to make it sound like he’s just talking at me, not to me. “I don’t believe anything is due today.”
“It’s the late assignment,” I say, keeping my voice neutral and cold. “I was supposed to hand it in a while ago. But I only got around to it now.”
I hold out the ugly orange envelope in front of me, its corner pointing accusingly into the center of his chest. Daring him to take it.
After a short beat, he does. He holds it by the corner with two fingertips.
I leave without saying bye.
I’ve never been so happy not to have to see him until next week.
Friday.
I sneak out of Leary’s class as soon as he lets us go, hoping to get lost in the crowd before he can single me out and demand that I make an appointment. The last thing I want right now is to talk about my dedication and commitment and academic this and that. I could barely concentrate on the lecture itself.
But the second I’m out in the hall, I practically bump into Emmanuel. Literally. I collide with his chest head-on, stumble and have to steady myself against the wall. I look up at him, confused and furious.
“I’m on my way out,” I say. “Please let me pass.”
His eyes narrow. He pins me to the wall, his arms on either side of me. Students pass us by, a few stare, and with an angry glance over his shoulder he lowers his arms. But he’s still blocking my path.
“We need to talk,” he says, his voice a low hiss.
“I don’t think so.” I keep my tone even and steady, but my heart is a balloon on a string all over again, yanking and twisting and pulling. Is it about the photos? Is it about—?
“Oh, I think we do.”
“Then talk. If you have anything to say to me, you can say it out here.” I hold his gaze with a confidence I don’t feel. My insides alternately turn to lava or ice.
Students stream on either side of us until the last shuffle away in the direction of the stairs. It’s just us now, and the odd person loitering at the vending machines.
“What do you think you’re playing at?” he snarls.
“Just throw them out,” I say. “I didn’t give you those photos to try and convince you of anything. I just don’t want them anymore. I have nothing to do with them.”
“It’s not about the fucking photos!” he snaps. “I can’t believe you! I should have expected something, but honestly, I thought you were better than this.”
“What are you talking about?” A quiver of worry starts deep within me, but I don’t let on.
“You know what I’m talking about. A mi
sconduct claim? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“What claim?” My heart sinks, the hot air in the balloon gone to ice.
“Someone,” he utters the word with a grimace of disgust, “deposited a misconduct claim about me. With the school directors. Anonymously.”
I nearly trip over my own feet. “What?”
“Please don’t play innocent. It doesn’t work very well.”
“I’m not playing!” I snap. “I didn’t deposit anything—who do you think I am?”
I don’t really want him to answer that.
“Do you realize what it could do to me?”
“I thought you didn’t care about this job. Last week you were ready to up and quit.” This is no joking matter, but I can’t help myself. An angry glint flashes in his eyes, and even though I had nothing to do with it, it’s oddly painful and satisfying at the same time, like picking on a scab.
“It’s one thing to quit and another to get dismissed because of a misconduct claim!” He runs his hand over his hair in an achingly familiar gesture of anguish. “I thought maybe you’d be mature enough to understand that. I couldn’t teach again, and with that on my resume good luck with finding any other job.”
There are so many mean, ugly words dancing at the tip of my tongue. Maybe you should have thought of that before you started to stalk one of your students, I want to say—but that won’t be entirely true. Maybe you should have thought of that before you dragged me into the darkroom in the art department. Maybe you should have thought of that before you made me fall for you.
But the only thing I can bring myself to say is the truth.
“I didn’t do it, Emmanuel. I’m not that vindictive.”
“Well, someone did.”
“Maybe,” I say, unable to hold back the malignant glee, “maybe it was Audrey.”
He glowers at me in shock and anger. I force my lips into a fake smile—I’m good at that.
“I didn’t do anything. And it’s not my responsibility what else you do around here in your free time.”
