Losing the Light

by Andrea Dunlop

  “Well, do you love her?” I pulled my legs in closer to my chest, sweat pooling behind my knees, Regan’s antiquated air conditioner doing nothing to combat the mid-May heat wave. He had one elbow propped up on the opposite arm of the couch, and with his free hand he was scratching the uneven beginnings of a beard that dotted his jawline. I hated him when he gave me the look he was giving me now, as if I were a student who was boring him with a question to which the answer was obvious. Truthfully I never listened to him when he spoke in class anymore. For one thing my grade was hardly a concern, and for another I couldn’t focus; half the time I would be fantasizing about him, and the other half, increasingly so lately, I spent thinking up reasons to pick fights. During these lectures I made a deep and nuanced study of his reactions and facial expressions. Horrifyingly, he made the same face when a student he had been leading to a certain conclusion finally reached it as when he finally achieved orgasm and let out a similarly triumphant “Yes,” and his deep look of focus when considering a well-made point was just like the face he made when getting a blow job. Recently this had made me prone to horrible bouts of giggles not only in his classroom but occasionally also in the bedroom.

  “It’s a fair question,” I said now, poking him in the rib cage with my big toe. I meant it to be a playful gesture, but it felt aggressive on contact. He seemed so tired these days that even the slightest movement made him seem like a weary, beaten-down dog. He hadn’t been sleeping, he’d told me, and it was putting him on edge. I wasn’t sympathetic to this since I naively couldn’t quite imagine having done something that kept me up at night.

  “You know what the answer will be,” he said, irritation edging into his voice. A flush swept over his face; his transparent, pale skin always made it difficult for him to hide his emotions.

  “If that were true, I wouldn’t be asking the question. I thought you said you didn’t even sleep together anymore.” I was tempted to move closer to him on the couch, but I was suddenly gripped by a nauseating fear that he would push me away if I did so.

  “We don’t,” Regan said, now facing me. He didn’t wear his wire-rim glasses in the house though I liked him better with them on. Without them his eyes looked beady and the skin around his eyes appeared looser and more damaged, making him seem older than thirty-six. “I’m not in love with her. There’s a huge difference. You’ll understand someday. . . .”

  “Oh, don’t you dare.” I stared straight ahead. “Don’t you go there.”

  The subject of my age, or rather my age relative to his, was our mutual weapon in these fights, the double-edged sword that we would take turns threatening each other with. He used it to remind me that he had wisdom on his side; I to remind him that other people would think that he was taking advantage of me if they ever found out about us.

  There was a long pause. I examined the army of tchotchkes that was stationed on every flat surface of the living room: little ceramic animals, Russian nesting dolls, miniature silver picture frames. None of this could have been Regan’s; how could I not have noticed before that it was all her? I suddenly fantasized about walking over to the cabinet and sweeping off a whole batch of them with my forearm. I could practically hear the dozen little pops of the tiny ceramics as they smashed to the floor.

  “Brooke, I’m sorry. What do you want me to do, lie to you?”

  “Ha! As though you don’t lie every day.”

  “Lies of omission are different. You asked me a direct question, and I gave you a direct answer. There is a difference between love and sex.”

  Normally in these kinds of arguments, I solved the problem by crawling into his arms and kissing him. Right now nothing sounded less appealing, not to mention that I would, in essence, be proving his point. The truth was that my sympathy for his passionless marriage that he seemed incapable of leaving had turned into a sort of disgusted pity, and pity has a way of extinguishing desire. The heart is simply not equipped to feel these two things simultaneously.

  After a few more minutes, I got up wordlessly and left. He didn’t try to stop me.

  A pleasant breeze was blowing outside, and as I made my way up the walkway to my car, I passed through a pocket of orange-blossom fragrance and momentarily felt better. Mulling over our discussion, I drove back to campus past parched hillsides dotted with billboards and sad little houses surrounded by chain-link fencing. My stomach was growling. I could never eat in front of Regan; I wouldn’t even feel hungry when he was around. However, after spending a few hours with him I would leave and instantly become ravenous. This nervous energy that extinguished my appetite was yet another thing that I mistook for love.

  Something had changed between Regan and me. I reminded myself that what we were doing was risky and dangerous, and if people found out, he would be fired and I would be scandalized. Yet in reality it was all starting to feel pretty commonplace.

  The next morning Regan was not in his Contemporary Lit class. Instead, poor, nervous Mr. Flannigan was filling in for him. I was distracted throughout class. Regan hadn’t been sick the night before and hadn’t mentioned being out. I racked my brain for a possible explanation.

  After class, Flannigan motioned me away from the stream of students leaving the stuffy lecture room and said, avoiding eye contact, “Brooke, Dean Keller asked me to send you up to see him after class.”

  “Oh,” I said stupidly. “Um, I have a meeting with Professor Miller in a few minutes.”

  “She’s been informed, Brooke, you should go.” As he said this, he gave me a strange look: sympathetic and accusing at the same time. It didn’t make me feel any better. The idea of getting caught out with Regan had always been thrilling, but now that it seemed to be happening, I felt nothing but an empty thud of dread in my stomach.

  “Okay,” I said, “thanks for letting me know.”

  Flannigan shot me a tight smile.

  I was anxious walking up the hill to the admin building, so much so that I was short of breath by the time I arrived. At the door of Dean Keller’s office, his assistant, Patricia, greeted me and asked me to wait. The bristly seat covering on the chair scratched at the back of my legs and I regretted having worn shorts.

  Eventually Keller appeared at the door of his office. “Come on in, Brooke.”

  Keller’s affable nature was a thin veneer, as he was a vicious old disciplinarian with a penchant for Jerry Falwell’s brand of Christian values. As a child, I would come with my mom to work and visit him in his office, where he would ask me what new words I’d learned since the last time I’d seen him and give me a few pieces of the candy he kept in his desk. Now that she worked in the registrar’s office, my mother didn’t see him much, though he loved talking about us: the university’s hard-luck charity case.

  “Brooke, how is your mother?” Dean Keller began. He never had any conversation that wasn’t padded on either side with small talk, as if that changed what came in between.

  “She’s fine. Dean Keller, why am I here?” I blurted, feeling unable to withstand chitchat.

  Dean Keller let out a long sigh before telling me the news that would change my young life. Regan had resigned. He would be relocating with his wife, Michelle, to his home state of Ohio. He had broken down the night before and told Michelle everything, and she had gone straight to Dean Keller early the next morning. Until that point, I had carefully avoided knowing her name, and just like that, she became a real person. I imagined her showing up in person, puffy-eyed and ragged, to stake out Keller’s office. Or maybe she filled up his voice mail with angry tirades. I imagined Michelle would want to be reassured that the girl would be dealt with, would have reminded him of the moral code that the students were obliged to sign during freshman orientation. Maybe she was unsatisfied that only Regan should pay for the affair and decided that she, who’d gotten nothing out of it except perhaps for the endless contrition of her husband, must be vindicated. Or maybe she’d done none of this and only the dean himself was so concerned with my behavior.

/>   I sat stunned in Dean Keller’s office as he spoke, nodding from time to time when some sort of response or affirmation seemed necessary. But I wasn’t listening. My own thoughts overwhelmed me. I would never see Regan again. And now the wife was not an abstract but a person named Michelle who’d just found out her husband was a philanderer. Was there a way around my mother ever knowing about this? I wondered. I felt as long as she didn’t know, all was not lost.

  The administration was full of promises that the situation would be kept quiet as long as I cooperated. Keller told me I was still an important and valued asset to the university and that they didn’t wish for me to leave permanently. Fortunately for me, the moral code contained no language specific to fucking one’s literature professor. So they were left to their own creative devices for an acceptable solution.

  Miraculously, my fellow students didn’t seem aware of what had happened. If there were rumors, they never reached my ears. I added this oversight to the mounting evidence that I was a person who could slide through life without anyone’s noticing, even, evidently, if I did something outrageous. At that time, I felt this trait would eventually prove useful, as though I might be called to espionage or a career as an anthropologist.

  I must give Keller his due; he promised I wasn’t going to be punished and so I wasn’t. Instead, a “sojourn,” the word he jauntily used, to France might be a good option since I was a strong student of the language. This was something of an overstatement, however. I was an adequate student of French, but I spent a fair amount of each class trying to avoid eye contact with the professor. I knew that Keller’s encouraging me to spend a year abroad was more influenced by his desire to have me far enough away that he could distance himself from the scandal than by his belief that I would benefit from the experience.

  It didn’t matter. Getting away would be welcome, and a year in France appealed to me as a measured adventure with little risk. The language choices at my high school had been slim and limited to Spanish—which half of the students at my school spoke fluently already—and introductory French, and I chose French because it fit much better with my idea of a future self. I liked the language, the preponderance of lazy vowel sounds, and the extraneous consonants. Even the fact that the language was less rich and diverse than English had its own special appeal and gave me the idea that the French were less pedantic, more laissez-faire, than Anglophones. Je t’aime, darling, “I like you, I love you.” What’s the difference? Imagine not needing different words for love and like; half of the girls I knew practically lived and died by this nuance.

  And what about Sophie? We weren’t exactly friends in those days. We knew each other from French class, but we weren’t close, and friendship is something girls of that age take quite seriously. If I was the kind of girl who could slip into class ten minutes late unnoticed, Sophie was the kind of girl whose arrival might as well have been heralded by a marching band.

  She was the kind of gorgeous, athletic blonde that California specializes in. She was from a small, wealthy town on the coast, where everyone has enormous, gleaming kitchens full of granite and steel and knows how to play tennis. You wanted her to be an idiot just to prove that the world was fair, but she was at the top of her class of econ majors, a permanent fixture on the dean’s list. I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t find anything to justify it.

  Our worlds didn’t cross much in those days. She was occupied with the volleyball team and the boys I would always see following her around campus, hanging on her every word. We sat by each other in French class and occasionally got coffee afterward, a casual flirtation. Part of me wanted to know her better, but I was a little intimidated by her, and I was a little awkward then. I had friends, but not a lot of them. The bonds that seemed to come so naturally to girls like Sophie and her friends often eluded me, and I was simply more comfortable alone.

  At college, I did have something of a best friend in Allegra. The daughter of wealthy hippies from Berkeley, she was a fellow English major who was pretty in a pale, ethereal way that no one seemed to quite appreciate the way she felt they ought to. We talked mostly about books and moving to New York or Berlin after school.

  But our friendship had been strained recently by my relationship with Regan, since the burden of keeping the secret left me with little energy for other relationships.

  Now I found myself facing a void, alleviated only by the school year’s drawing to a close.

  I smiled to myself when our French professor brought up the study-abroad program in a medium-size French city called Nantes. She gave some stats about the city: the sixth-largest in France, located on the Loire River. None of it meant much to me. All I cared about was that it was France, which was enticing no matter which city. My enthusiasm was only slightly tempered by the knowledge that my own bad behavior had landed me the opportunity. My eyes swept over the other students in our small class of ten. Sophie looked rapt; I caught her eye and she smiled.

  As the class spilled out into the baroque corridor of the old Arts and Letters building, Sophie grabbed my arm and pulled me toward her conspiratorially. The intimacy of this startled me, since we’d never touched before.

  “We’re going,” she said, giving me a sly smile. Her eyes were lit up with excitement.

  “Where?” I asked, struck a little dumb by her torrent of energy.

  She leaned away from me to playfully smack my arm and let out a peal of laughter, a melodious sound that most men and almost as many women found completely irresistible. “To France! We’re going.”

  I admit the we thrilled me. And though I knew I was going, I felt as if I had to seem to be still considering it. “It does sound cool. I worry that my French isn’t strong enough, though.”

  She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “Your French is fine. And it will get better so fast.”

  “I’ve never been out of the country before,” I said, suddenly embarrassed that I’d admitted to her what was actually a sizable understatement: I’d never even been on a plane before.

  “Brooke!” she said, stopping at the top of the stairwell. “Come on.” She held my shoulders with both hands, her grasp had an almost violent cheerfulness.

  I relented. “Okay,” I said, as though the decision were both spontaneous and wholly my own. “I’ll try to make it work, I promise.”

  “Ha!” She hugged me with one arm.

  Turning the corner, we found Stacey—Sophie’s teammate and most recent sidekick—waiting for her, staring at her phone disconsolately. Stacey looked like a cheap facsimile of Sophie with her harshly dyed blond hair, and unlike Sophie, Stacey did actually seem a little bit stupid.

  “Stace,” Sophie said, causing the girl’s head to snap up, her brow furrowed and looking as if she was on the verge of tears. “Oh my God, no. I told you not to text him!”

  Stacey sighed and her shoulders drooped as if someone had deflated her. She looked straight at Sophie, without seeming to register me. “It’s not like I’m being crazy! I just asked him how his Tuesday was going.”

  “And he didn’t write back.”

  “Maybe he’s just busy.”

  “What is Brad busy with? He barely goes to class.”

  “Water polo . . . ?”

  Sophie shook her head. Suddenly both of them seemed to remember that I was still there. “Stace, you know Brooke?” It was something of a rhetorical question: almost everyone at our school of fifteen hundred knew each other on some level.

  “Hi,” Stacey said with a smile as if she’d smelled something a little sour.

  “Brooke, we’ll talk later.”

  With that, the two blondes glided off down the hallway, Sophie taking Stacey’s arm, presumably comforting her. Their world seemed no less foreign to me than France.

  Even if I hadn’t already been going to France, Sophie might easily have convinced me. She was a difficult person to say no to. She had the robust sheen of a girl who gets what she wants in life, usually without trying too hard. And she
was adventurous in a way that made you think that going along with her wasn’t something you’d regret. In the middle of her sophomore year, she had taken time off from school to go on a mission trip to Peru with her cousin. That she’d somehow convinced the famously uptight administration to let her go was a testament to her powers of persuasion; that she’d caught up with schoolwork so quickly after her absence was a testament to her smarts. I was slightly in awe of her, as was almost everyone I knew.

  The joint adventure in front of us gave Sophie and me a reason to get closer.

  “Oh, please come,” she said to me of her volleyball game the following Tuesday night. “I’m afraid no one will show up in the stands!”

  I dragged a pouting Allegra with me. Despite Allegra’s obvious disdain for the game, she was clearly happy to have me back from my affair with Regan, and she agreed to accompany me there and to a handful of other places Sophie invited me: a frat party where I was introduced to every member of the men’s water polo team, including the infamous Brad, who looked rather worth the fuss that poor Stacey had made over him. He was, like his teammates, flush with good health despite the vast quantities of beer and pizza they all seemed to consume, tall and impossibly broad shouldered, golden tan from the sun with chlorinated hair sticking up in a way that gave him a vulnerable, boyish quality. My mom would have called him a hunk.