Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

  “Mrs. Pachenko,” I said warmly, trying to serve as a distraction from Janet’s invective. “I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten your first name.”

  She took a long sip of her club soda. “It’s Eleanor. But I really prefer Mrs. Pachenko.”

  I nodded, willfully clenching my sphincter to avoid my eyes involuntarily rolling in disgust. “And what does Mr. Pachenko do?”

  She shook her head slightly, informing me this was not the correct question to ask. I tried again, cheating this time.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Bloomingdale Green,” she said. This was her first answer that reflected any sort of pride or acceptance.

  “Oh.” I nodded. “Nice neighborhood. Quiet.”

  “It could be a little more peaceful,” she said. There was another round of expletive shelling from Janet, and Mrs. Pachenko stood to leave.

  “Happy birthday,” she announced, flashing a nervous smile. “I believe I need to get back to my son now.” Then she turned and walked toward the door so quickly that she appeared to be running.

  “Nice lady,” Janet said to us. “Gonna help me out again next year. But boy is she wound up tight.”

  I became more and more fixated on getting back to school and the delights I might find waiting on the first day. I’d often spend Ford’s entire shift online, looking at adolescent pornography and stealing features from separate photos to fuse together into the perfect student. The disparaged statements about how quickly the summer was flying by that other teachers made at preparatory meetings gave me strength to combat the day-to-day waiting game, and I tried injecting my dead engagements with Jack, passionless though they now were, with new perspectives of fantasy; my favorite tactic was to look at his body, never his face, and pretend that he was a boy I’d found on the side of the road, struck down by a car—that he had one last burst of life left inside of him and he wanted to use it to lose his virginity with me. This made the wounded aspects of Jack’s posture, like his curled shoulders, his wincing squint I couldn’t help but catch in my peripheral vision that made it look like he was fighting any good feelings with equally opposed reserves of pain, all make sense. Only by crafting these fatalistic and temporary contexts surrounding our sex was I able to convince myself that I could indeed last until the end of August, that I wouldn’t have to go fishing at the mall or the supermarket for an untested, unvetted boy who could ruin me.

  But the final trial of my will came just two weeks before school started. Ford wanted to take a weeklong vacation at one of the beach houses his father owned. “Can Bill and Shelley come too?” I asked. Even though I didn’t like them, a couples’ trip would be better than isolated alone time with Ford. But that was of course what he wanted.

  His face stretched into a charmed smile of surprise. “Whoa, there, social butterfly,” he teased, clearly happy that I’d asked. “Glad you’ve warmed up to the two of them. But no way. This one’s you and me. Before school starts up and I hardly see you again till next summer.” I shook my head at him to suggest he was exaggerating, but secretly I was happy he’d voiced this expectation: it meant I’d established a shared understanding that when the school year started, everything about me—my presence at home, my focus, my attention—would become extremely scarce. This sense of achievement gave me the needed courage to enter into one last hurrah of summer tedium.

  Incredibly, I would go so far as to call that week one of the greatest successes of our marriage, probably due to the knowledge that a fresh onslaught of young men would soon be greeting me each morning and afternoon on the hour, save for the cognac-driven conversation on the porch the night before we returned home. In the dark, I kept feeling Ford stare at me with confusion, then look off in the distance. I knew it was a look of failed reconciliation; he was trying to understand how our life together could look so good from the outside but somehow fail to actually feel that way. I could sense him palpably restraining himself from speaking—Ford excels at never admitting he’s disappointed—but a few glasses later his filter was finally breached. “I guess I thought things would be different once you started teaching,” he managed to say. The dark amplified the near-mechanical sound of the cicadas’ screams all around us; they seemed like an audience goading him on. “That you’d be happier,” he finally added.

  “I am happier,” I countered. “It’s just a busier, more distracted sort of happy.”

  I worried about what would come next but he left it at that; he stood and went inside while I remained on the porch in the warm air, hearing the ocean and wishing the eighth grader I’d soon pluck from my roster was there now to go for a naked swim. The moon’s thin light upon the moving waves lent itself well to illusion; I could almost see us together out in the distant water, bobbing heads whose bodies could mingle unworried beneath the ocean’s cover.

  When I did finally go to bed, Ford was asleep with the firmness of denial. It was only in times like these, when he would ask a funny question but then show he was overtly ignoring the answer, that I wondered if Ford suspected more than he let on. He seemed to understand that resolution didn’t need to have anything to do with truth, and to choose a sense of harmony over insight every time.

  I lay down as far away from his reach as possible and had a dream about the first day of class. I entered through the classroom door wearing only a silk bathrobe that I shed as the bell rang. Every desk was taken by a young man and they all stood in unison, using their numbers to lift me into the air, their collective centipede fingers crawling across every inch of my flesh.

  When I woke with a gasp it was morning. Ford’s head sat mere inches from mine. It took a moment for me to realize his hands were resting atop my hard nipples, as though my chest was a control panel he’d been manning. He gave me a smile that didn’t fade as confusion and a slight terror overtook my face. “Some dream you were having,” he said. “You feeling horny, babe?”

  chapter fourteen

  The timid affect and classroom behavior of Jack’s eventual replacement so belied his hidden perversities that I missed him entirely at first and had a failed attempt with a new boy named Connor, whom I misread from the first day forward. I began each class simply by smiling—perhaps my nervous hope showed through—then scanned the room for any eye contact that was returned to me with a promising streak of restraint. Connor initially seemed to be perfect: he was quiet, studious but not exceptionally smart, and didn’t appear to have a great deal of friends nor an interest in gaining any.

  The Monday of the second week in, having had the entire weekend to pine and fantasize, I asked him to stay after class for a moment. I’d managed to keep my portable classroom despite AP Rosen’s repeated offers to take an opening in the main building; I claimed I’d become fond of its deficiencies—“It almost feels like a one-room schoolhouse,” I told him. “When I was a little girl I always played that I was a teacher back in the pioneer times.” He absolutely loved this white lie. Apparently a great-great-grandmother of his actually did preside over a one-room school; he told me a long story about it while I thought about humming “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the tip of a student’s penis in my mouth.

  I hadn’t once entertained the idea that it could go differently with another boy than it had with Jack. Instead it felt like last year I’d forged a permanent path that all other candidates would obediently follow. But there was also the looming weekend—Jack wanted to take a bus down from Crystal Springs and stay at his father’s house Friday and Saturday under the guise of seeing friends. If I knew with certainty that our depressive sex would soon be just one option on a menu rather than my only opportunity with a young partner, the atmosphere wouldn’t feel so choking and leaden. I could relax a little, care less about when the time would be right to break it off with him and more fully enjoy what remained of our dwindling sessions.

  As soon as the other students were gone and Connor and I were alone, I turned from him and unbuttoned two extra buttons on my shirt so that it hung open a
nd exposed my bra. I expected him to stare at me as I spoke inane details about his essay topic, then I could act surprised that his gaze had met my opened shirt and possibly get a confession that he was indeed looking at my bra—information I’d pretend to find so overly flattering that I might offer to show him an even better view.

  But the moment I turned around, his eyes immediately averted to the left. “Your button opened,” he said, pointing to the middle of his chest to demonstrate.

  I glanced down, pretending to be confused. “Oh dear,” I said. “So it did.” I waited for his eyes to return to mine but he wouldn’t turn his head back; he was not only looking away from me toward the door but also actually using his fingers to shield his eyes.

  “Are you decent yet?” he asked.

  “Sure.” He lowered his hand but upon seeing I hadn’t rebuttoned my shirt immediately covered his eyes again.

  “Aren’t you going to fix it?” There was something accusatory in his question; his voice held disbelief but not excitement.

  “I will before my next class. But it’s nice to have a break for a moment. I’ve always thought clothes can be a little constraining,” I said. “Do you?”

  Beneath the desk, his feet were busy fidgeting. “Why did you keep me after class?” he finally asked.

  I exhaled a long, disappointed sigh; this one didn’t seem to be any fun at all.

  “Like I said, I just wanted to talk to you about your essay topic.” But he had a hard time following.

  “Everyone wrote on the same topic,” he said, defensive. “Was my essay worse than everyone else’s or something?”

  I didn’t answer, hoping it would mean he’d look at me in an attempt to break the silence and our eyes could communicate the unspoken, but he didn’t.

  “I was just interested in yours,” I said. “That’s all.” The lunch bell rang and his paranoia flipped into high alert.

  “Will I be marked tardy to lunch?” he asked. From the fear and anger in his voice, I could tell he’d never been tardy before in his entire life. The kid was far too square. I decided to cut him loose and pop a Klonopin to help nurse my wounds.

  “No, don’t worry. I’ll write you a note.” There wasn’t an inch of his body that seemed calm; his tension was starting to make me anxious too. “Look, I’m writing it right now,” I said, stopping to wave the paper in the air with a little hostility. “Jesus.”

  I walked over to his desk and bent down, giving him one last chance at a full view of my chest that he didn’t opt to take. “Can I go now?” he demanded.

  “Go, go on,” I said. The incident gave the rest of the week a sour, empty feel. I kept butting heads with my worst fear, a prospect so extreme that I hadn’t allowed myself to think it before the train wreck with Connor forced me to: the possibility that I might go the entire year without finding a replacement.

  Yet just two weeks later, all tides had turned. Normally I’d have rejected any student who acted first; it was a sign of brashness and impulsivity, both traits that could easily lead to our getting caught. Furthermore, the power dynamic would be in his favor if he came on to me. But Boyd showed a more advanced level of mastery—part of his genius was that it was indeed so subtle I hardly noticed for almost a month. Yet there the offer was one day, unmistakable as he left class. With a glance, his face transformed from an expression of blank nonchalance to the smallest possible detectable grin and he locked eyes with me. It was sudden but unmistakable: his look conveyed both that he knew exactly who I was and what I wanted, but also that he held a similar secret. We locked eyes for what could only have been seconds, but it was enough; we were two deviants who had recognized one another in an identifying game of telepathy. The next day when I asked him to stay after class, he nodded with innocence, every ounce the demure boy who always sat quietly at his desk, but when the door finally shut he licked his lips and smiled: the costume came off and he was a completely different animal.

  Boyd was less outwardly attractive than Jack, another reason why he didn’t stand out to me at first. He had a prominent nose and ears that he hadn’t yet grown into, and he frequently wore oversized shirts and sweaters that made his short limbs appear dwarfed. His smile was a metallic track of braces, but his roguish desires had the effect of making them seem like a punitive measure that he wore as a badge of pride—a punishment for his words being so vulgar, perhaps.

  His forwardness allowed me to drop all introductory pretenses. The first and only thing I asked him in that initial meeting was straightforward. “Would you like to touch me?”

  He’d responded by approaching and beginning to do so. His hands were so small that one could easily fit inside me up to his wrist. After our very first time alone together, he left the classroom five minutes before the end of lunch with Jack’s former cell phone in hand.

  I let him have sex with me twice in the classroom that first week, but we were at work on another plan. “My house is out of the question,” I explained. “Are you ever home alone after school?”

  Unfortunately Boyd’s parents, in particular his stay-at-home mother, were far stricter and more present than Jack’s. But there were still slots of possibility throughout the day: Boyd was allowed to do after-school activities as long as he was home by dinner around six. That made a rendezvous in my car dangerous; it wouldn’t be dark yet, and parking lots and shopping plazas would still be full. When I decided upon the venue I wasn’t trying to be sacrilegious or perverse, only careful: Jack’s house really was the best option.

  Objectively, Jack unknowingly benefited from this arrangement too. Sex with Jack in the same bed where I’d had Boyd just a few days ago was an enormous turn-on. The first time Jack returned home after I’d slept there with Boyd, I bounced atop him so hard I feared his pelvis might break; there was an almost hallucinatory interplay between my mental images of the two of them as we fucked. Gasping, I occasionally looked down at Jack to see Boyd’s smaller, wryer mouth and nearly exploded. “Wow,” Jack said afterward. It was definitely a change that warranted comment; our sex had grown to be more an act of hostile aerobics than of pleasure.

  “Wow indeed,” I replied. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  Although Boyd had roughly zero actual sexual experience prior to our relationship, he was far more advanced in terms of perversion. His kinkier suggestions didn’t bother me the way they might have with Jack, perhaps because of the theoretical naïveté with which he spoke about them—breathlessly, in excited whispers, as though fetishes were fabled legends wrought from the fabric of dragons and mermaids—or perhaps because he’d had these fantasies even as a virgin. They weren’t the product of his growing tired of routine intercourse. He wanted to try everything right away; sex and its oral variants weren’t enough for his curious mind. He once asked me to pee a little in his mouth, which I did; he didn’t love it but grew immediately rock hard from the experiment. He also liked to blindfold me and be blindfolded and hated my insistence that we couldn’t bite one another hard enough to leave a visible imprint.

  I was happy enough to indulge him in anything that wouldn’t produce telltale evidence. But some of his desires simply weren’t possible. Boyd longed for others to watch us fucking; he often had dreams where I was giving him head in a bustling street’s storefront window. Of course we couldn’t open the curtains at Jack’s house or record ourselves on camera, but he did enjoy having a movie on in the background during sex; he was able to pretend, he told me, hearing the voices of the actors, that they were right there in the room looking on.

  It was only after beginning to sleep with Boyd that I realized my animosity toward Jack wasn’t solely due to the melancholy he’d dragged into our relations; it was also spawned by the fact that I’d almost grown to feel dependent upon him—after all, he had been my only true source of sexual release—and I’d resented that. But now, even during Jack’s bluest moods, some of my initial warmth for him was returning, and I was no longer so anxious to break things off. “I hate
my new school,” he confessed one night. “I hate only seeing you a few times a month. I want to see if I can live with the Ryans again in the spring and transfer back to Jefferson.”

  “But don’t you think it feels a little more special this way?” I asked. “Having to bear the time apart, then being able to fuck away the built-up frustration?” I was trying to help Jack look on the bright side, but perhaps this was a misstep.

  “What are you saying? That you like me not living here?”

  “Of course not,” I answered. “Just pointing out a benefit.”

  Still, I loved being able to oscillate between the two of them. It allowed for a comparison between their bodies and highlighted minuscule physical differences that I might not have noticed and savored otherwise: the freckle just to the left of Jack’s sternum, the fatty ripeness of Boyd’s detached earlobes. The scheduling of it all had worked itself out so that the separate compartments of my life tied together with a manageable fluidity. I arrived home on nights I saw Boyd—allegedly coming from a curricular steering committee—just in time to eat a late dinner with Ford and send him off to work. Whenever he did request a quickie before he left, it was in a very passive way that was easy to turn down. “I guess you’re too tired to fool around,” he’d state, and I’d yawn and nod, trying to apologize as sweetly as possible.

  My classes, too, seemed to be on a sort of autopilot that let me focus my attention almost exclusively on sexual pursuits. My students this year included several transplants from a recently closed theater magnet school who were happy to act out Romeo and Juliet in its entirety. All the while I sat at my desk and did my best to draw a rendering of Boyd’s penis in both flaccid and erect states, then ripped the illustrations into pieces when the bell rang.