But I did nothing to stop it. We both came there, like that, quickly, and then he stepped back to look at me, his pants still unzipped, the underarms of his white shirt damp, his lips parted, his eyes narrowed. "Don't forget it," he said. "All mine." He zipped up his pants, tucked in his shirt, and left.
I sat for a long time at my desk, not daring to leave the office. I waited until I thought it was lunchtime, and Beth would have left for an hour. I wanted to see myself in the bathroom mirror before anyone else saw me.
AFTER the women's room—where I stood looking at myself for a long time in the full-length mirror—I went down to the cafeteria. There, I saw Garrett from a distance, and I called out to him, but he didn't turn around. And then, from behind me, I heard Sue say, "Hey, girlfriend."
I turned to find her standing a few inches behind me with a cup in her hand. She was wearing a blue dress with a wide tan belt around her waist, smiling.
"Sue," I said.
She looked good, I thought, rested. She'd gotten a new haircut, and the little curls on her forehead seemed girlish, optimistic. I said, "Sue, you look great."
"I am great," she said.
"You look better than ever," I said. "You look—radiant."
"Well, how are you, Sherry?" she asked.
"I'm fine, too," I said—feeling suddenly prudish, exposed, knowing she knew what she knew about me, that I myself had told her. Now, I wanted somehow to take it back, to tell her that what I'd told her about Bram, the affair—that I'd made that up. That it had been a fantasy, a story. It had not actually happened.
Could I? Could I somehow laugh, and lie, and turn it into a little joke?
No.
If I'd ever lied to Sue, I didn't remember. Of course, I'd told her on several occasions that I'd liked a pair of pants or shoes she'd bought, when I didn't really—but did that count as a lie? And, anyway, what possible explanation for having made up such a story could I give her? She knew me better than that. She knew it all, now, all about Bram. I'd told her myself, of course—but, still, I felt some resentment about it, as if she'd borrowed something of mine she was refusing to return. I'd given it to her, of course, but she was holding it now against my will—or we both knew she could if she wanted to.
Maybe to distract us both from what hung between us, I pointed in the direction of Garrett, who was standing in his usual spot in the cafeteria, talking to his friend in the red nylon jacket, and I said, "Do you remember him? He used to be Chad's little pal in elementary school. Garrett."
"The one whose dad died?"
"Yes," I said.
"Whew," she said. "They grow up fast. Will my boys get that big someday?"
"They will," I said. "In the blink of an eye."
"In the meantime," she said, "I have to go because I have to take cupcakes into their classes today. I'm Snack Mom today."
"Snack Mom," I said, and remembered it. The weight of a tray of cupcakes, the challenge of covering them with tinfoil or plastic wrap without ruining the frosting and the sprinkles on top. The little paper napkins. The children at their desks. The smell of cake in a small room. The perfume of something sweet having been made by someone's mother. The great simple pleasure of being the mother who'd made it.
"He's joined the Marines," I told her.
"Oh, no," Sue said. She took a sip from the cup of coffee in her hands, and we started to walk slowly together toward our offices. I saw Robert Z on the other side of the cafeteria as we passed through it, but I looked away, not wanting to have to talk to him, especially in front of Sue, about where I'd been yesterday, why I'd missed my class.
"Yes," I said. "I tried to talk him out of it—"
"There's no talking them out of it," Sue said. "Some of these boys—I've had them in my classes, it's like moths to the flame. They don't believe in death yet. And they believe in what they're doing."
"I know," I said. "With Garrett though—I feel responsible. I feel—"
"Why?" Sue said. "You're not his mother." She stopped to sip her coffee again. "It's got nothing to do with you."
I stopped, too, and turned to her. I said, "I feel as if it does."
"Why?" she asked. She started walking again. "You don't even really know him, do you?"
"A little," I said. "I do know him a little."
"Well," Sue said. "A little is nothing. You can't go around feeling responsible for every kid you know a little"
I stopped then in the hallway and turned to her. I said, "You know those notes I got?"
Sue kept walking, nodding, and didn't turn to look at me. I followed her.
I said, "You know, I thought they were from—Bram?" I pronounced his name under my breath, and she stopped then, turned around to me, but didn't look up. She was looking into the black pool of her coffee as if she'd lost something in it. "But they weren't," I said. "They were from Garrett."
Sue snorted and looked up, shaking her head.
She wasn't looking into my eyes. She was looking at my neck. She kept shaking her head, and a bit of black coffee spilled out of her cup, trickled down the side of it onto her hand, but she didn't seem to notice. She inhaled. She said, as if it exhausted and relieved her at the same time to say it, "No, Sherry. The notes weren't from Bram, and they weren't from Garrett."
"I know," I said. "I know it sounds ridiculous, because Garrett's so young, but I think he may have, I don't know, projected some feelings, maternal feelings maybe, onto me, and—"
Sue sighed then and looked straight into my eyes. She smiled—a smile that looked weak, I thought, apologetic, and she said, "I was going to tell you eventually, Sherry, but I guess I really have to tell you now, because this has gone too far. I guess it was a mistake. I had good intentions, but it was obviously a big mistake. The notes"—she inhaled—"were from me."
I put my hands, instinctively to my throat.
A little sound came out of my mouth.
Sue looked up as if she expected me to say something, and I tried, at first, but no words would come out. She opened her own mouth then, and closed it, then shrugged, and looked down at her feet.
I looked at them, too, and thought I saw the floor move slightly under us. A shifting of light on the linoleum. A trick of the eye. But I moved over to the wall, to lean against it, to steady myself. My hands were still at my throat. I swallowed. Finally, I said, "Why?"
Sue said nothing.
I asked again, more insistently this time, "Why?"
Again, Sue shrugged. She said, "I felt sorry for you, Sherry. I thought Chad leaving for college had really taken a toll. You always looked so tired, like you weren't taking care of yourself anymore—sort of washed up. I wanted to spice up your life a bit. I thought it would do you good to think you had a secret admirer. I guess it worked just a little too well."
BACK in my office, I gathered up the notes from my desk drawers and the filing cabinet and, without looking at them, crumpled them up and threw them away.
In the hallway, I had stood speechless before her for what seemed like a very long time, and even after all that time during which I might have gathered my thoughts, the only thing I'd managed to say was, "Oh."
Oh.
Oh.
She was observing me, I felt, from a distance, with a look on her face that I recognized, I thought, as satisfaction.
What else could it have been?
She did not look sorry, or sad, or empathetic. She was standing very straight, looking into my eyes, and her gaze never wavered. She had done something, and had meant to do it, and she'd kept the secret of doing it long enough, that gaze seemed to say.
And that was all there was to it.
But, standing in the hallway, being looked at by her, I'd felt myself zooming backward, at great speed.
A woman strapped to the mast of a ship.
No, a woman strapped to a rocket.
A woman growing smaller, being observed. All the years of our friendship, then, telescoped in a few heartbeats, in the hallway, and suddenly I
was a million miles away. She couldn't possibly be seeing me, I thought, although she was looking straight at me, seeming to see me. But if she were still seeing me, I thought, she would need to be squinting. She would need to be holding binoculars up to her eyes—and, even then, I would have been an ant. I would have been a dot. I had been propelled away from her over the years in only a few seconds. I'd completely disappeared. I'd been blotted out by the sun in the Writing Center the day we first met. I'd been obliterated with the speed of my own propulsion—blown backward over a landscape strewn with Styrofoam cups, and discarded clothes, torn envelopes, white flowers—the ones she'd worn in her hair at my wedding—and all the Christmas and birthday cards she'd signed in that fluid, youthful script. Her handwriting, I should have recognized it immediately—why didn't I? Be Mine.
Love, Sue.
How had I missed it, all those years, in that Love, the hatred, too?
"Come on, Sherry," she'd said, "don't overdramatize this, okay?"
Three
On Jon's side of the bed, lying on his back, his head on Jon's pillow, Bram looked like the stranger he was.
Underneath him, in our bed, I'd felt hollow. Stupid. Fat. It had been weeks since I'd fallen out of my usual routine of going to the gym every evening. While Bram was moving in and out of me (that pained, erotic expression on his face seeming, in the too-bright afternoon light, almost cartoonish with pleasure) I could see that the lip of flesh I'd been so proud to have lost by dint of all those miles traveled nowhere on elliptical machines was back.
Jon had sounded shaky and exhausted that morning on the phone from work. "What time do you think you'll get there? What time do you think you'll be fucking him in our bed?"
The night before, he'd presented me with a tape recorder he'd bought at Best Buy. It was slim and silver, and he'd said, "I'm going to set this up under the bed."
"No!" I'd said. "What if it clicks? What if Bram hears it?"
"I thought of that," Jon said. His eyes were shiny. The pupils small as pinpricks. "I asked the salesman and double-checked it myself. It's digital. It doesn't click."
"Get that away from me," I said, heading for the bathroom, for a shower.
"Why?" He followed after me with it in his hand, holding it toward me as if it were a present—an engagement ring, a sum of cash—that should mean as much to me as it did to him.
"What," I said, whirling around, "you need proof, Jon? You can't just believe me, that I'll bring him here, you need proof?"
"No," he said. "I don't need it, Sherry. None of this is about what either of us needs. This—"
"This has gotten completely out of control, Jon. This has gotten sick, and offensive, and—"
"Offensive? What? What are you talking about? It's offensive that I want to have hot sex with my wife? It's offensive that I want to think about her fucking another man?"
"It doesn't feel as if you're trying to have hot sex with me, it feels as if—as if you're trying to resurrect me. When did I get so dull to you, Jon, so—so asexual that you have to titillate yourself this way to even see me, to even—?"
"Well, Sherry, Jesus. You know, we've been married for two decades, if you haven't noticed. I'm sorry if—"
"—if you have to think about another man fucking me in order to fuck me yourself?"
"But, Sherry, we've always fantasized about this. Right from the beginning. Before we were even married, we were always talking about—"
"That was different," I said. "That was about us. This is about you."
Jon laughed then—one quick burst, but then he kept laughing. Laughing as if he'd been keeping it bottled up for a long time. As if he'd been an actor in a comic skit for years, suppressing it, and now the show was over. Heartily, I thought. The word that would have described the way Jon laughed, then, was heartily. He let the arm, still holding the tape recorder stretched out toward me, drop down to his side as he laughed. He leaned up against the wall as he laughed. When he'd finally stopped laughing he said, "Okay, Sherry, then don't do it. I didn't realize. It seemed to me that having a little fun with a fantasy, with a tape recorder—" He shrugged, his eyes still teary from laughter. "I didn't realize, I guess, that you were such an unwilling player in all of this. You could've fooled me."
Again, I saw my mother standing over my brother.
She never did it. She never slapped that smile off his face. She'd only ever threatened to do it, and he'd been smarter than that. He'd seen straight through that.
Defeated, I said, "Okay, Jon. Just do whatever you want with the tape recorder. I'm taking a shower now."
"Okay, Sherry," Jon said. As I walked away from him he said to my back, "You're still going to bring him here, aren't you?"
I HADN'T stayed at the efficiency Wednesday night, as I usually did, because I hadn't, myself, slept at all the night before. After the argument about the tape recorder, I lay wide awake all night, but with my eyes closed, listening to the sounds moving around in the darkness outside.
A coyote calling out.
The Henslins' spaniel answering.
A car driving too fast through our intersection.
Breeze. Leaves. The spring peepers trilling in the Henslins' scummy pond.
How full of themselves they were!
It was, wasn't it, all about sex?
Did they have any idea how brief their lives would be, how shallow and dirty the pond into which they'd been born was, that this pond was not the only pond in the world, that it was just one of millions of ponds, not even one of the better ponds?
I imagined them in it. Trilling. Swimming. Fucking. I'd read somewhere that male frogs, during mating season, would happily make love to a fistful of mud if it were shaped like a frog.
They'd fuck the mud. They'd fuck other males. Presumably, they'd fuck sick frogs, old frogs, dead frogs. Theirs was just a blind instinct, directed at nothing in particular. Nothing personal. Nothing that mattered. I pictured all of this in the Henslins' pond—all the fuming and anxious groping—and, at the edge of it in the darkness, Sue, with that look on her face:
I wanted to spice up your life a bit.
Oh, I'd said, my voice sounding as if it were coming from somewhere far away from me. And then, weakly, walking away from her, audible only to myself, That did cross my mind.
But it had never crossed my mind.
As I walked back to my office, Robert Z passed me in the hallway again, only looking over for a moment, raising his hand in a soft hello. He'd seen something there on my face, I could tell, which kept him from stopping, kept him from teasing—"Playin' hooky yesterday, Sherry?" And it occurred to me suddenly then, sickeningly, that everyone knew—knew that I was having an affair with Bram, that the notes had been from Sue, that I'd fallen for it, the whole thing, that I was vain and stupid enough to continue to fall indefinitely as they watched.
Had that been what Sue had wanted all along?
Had I betrayed her somehow so deeply—not listened to her attentively enough, not called her often enough—that finally she'd devised a plan to humble me forever?
Had she, over the years, grown to have so much contempt for me—my worries about my weight, my taste in clothes, the way I talked, the books and movies I liked or didn't like—that she wanted to end our friendship this way?
All these years, had I simply overlooked it, as I talked on and on about Chad's accomplishments, about Jon's good humor, about the hollyhocks in the garden, about what I was making for dinner, or what I'd just bought at the mall, the signals she was sending?
I remembered noticing, once, the look on her face, one afternoon, showing her photographs from our week in Costa Rica. It had honestly puzzled me, that expression. I'd said, when I noticed it, "I'm sorry, Sue. Am I going on and on?"
"No," she'd said, but her expression had stayed the same, and I'd gone on, then, about the ocean, about the tropical flowers. I had totally failed to see it for what it was—boredom, disdain. Deepening, widening.
Maybe.
Or, perhaps, was she only telling the truth, there in the hallway that afternoon? That she'd only felt sorry for me? That I'd looked washed up. That she only wanted to spice up my life?
And, which of these possibilities would be the least painful to believe?
WEDNESDAY afternoon, when I'd called Bram from my office and told him I had to go home that night, not to the efficiency, he said, "You're kidding, right?"
Why would I be kidding?
"No," I said. "Bram, I have things I have to do, and I'm tired—"
"What do you have to do?"
I said, "Chad's coming home on Sunday. I have to do laundry. I have to—" I could think of nothing else to say, so I told him the truth. "I'm exhausted," I said. "I couldn't sleep all night."
There was a silence on the other end of the line that, it occurred to me, could quite possibly contain a third person, listening. Suddenly, then, I felt sure of it. Who were the phone operators at the college? I'd never even seen them, as far as I knew. I'd had the impression that they'd all been replaced years ago by a tape recording, but that couldn't be true, could it? Someone had to be there to talk to the people with more questions than a machine could answer.
So, where were they? Who were they? And did they, perhaps, get bored wherever they were and listen in on the conversations zigzagging back and forth across the campus?
"Oh," Bram said.
"But I'll see you tomorrow," I offered.
"Whatever," Bram said.
Behind him I could hear an engine start up, and something metal—flimsy and heavy at the same time—crashing onto cement.
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