Though again, if things were reversed, he wouldn’t be reminiscing that way. In fact, when he was seventeen—three years younger and light-years more naïve than Kerri Engel—his high school English teacher, Candice Bracknell, had made a move on him. He was still a virgin and so infatuated with her that when she placed her hand on his lap, he’d been too stunned to react. Before he could snap out of it and fulfill the fantasy he had entertained countless times, “Candy”—as the leering boys called her when she was out of earshot—had immediately withdrawn her hand and never so much as flirted with crossing that line again. Which, of course, was the right thing to do. But even now, he wished it would have gone the other direction. Despite a love life that has been, for the most part, satisfying and even adventurous at times, he still wondered what it would have been like to lose his virginity to an older woman that inexperience and masturbatory fantasies had elevated to a sexual goddess. What might she have taught him in their first few sessions that took years to figure out with girls his own age, fumbling in backseats and dorm rooms?
He didn’t have nearly enough money to cover the cab and the women had contributed nothing so he had to wake Graham before they got to his place and hit him up for the fare. “See,” he said to Graham, as his buddy handed over a fist full of cash, “if it weren’t for those golden shackles of the corporate world, we’d be on our way to jail.”
Graham mumbled something inaudible as they walked into Seth’s place, a beautiful home that was on loan to Northeast’s guest instructor until May. Graham went straight to one of the spare bedrooms. Seth checked his email one last time and found what he’d been looking for. In fact, there were two emails from Kerri-Go-Round121. He scrolled down to the one she had sent first. The subject read: Two Ships Passing in the Night…
“Oh no,” he said, to the empty room, and opened it.
Dear Mr. Hardy,
Although my heart is broken, I want to thank you for letting me down so gently and reminding me that I am still an “attractive and intelligent young woman.” You are a very nice man. That’s probably why I liked you so much. I guess it is natural for girls to have crushes on their teachers. It was very courteous of you to remind me of this. I hope we can still be friends. (Check yes or no in the box below)
Your Former Student,
Kerri Engel
“‘Check yes or no?’” Seth said aloud and laughed. “Smartass!” He opened the second email, sent five minutes later and titled: One More Thing…
Sorry, Seth. I couldn’t resist. But it serves you right after that insipid reply. Honestly! Self-deprecation is not your style, nor is waxing philosophical about boundaries and judging someone solely on the amount of years she has spent on the planet. Just so you have it in writing: I am not naïve. I am not a child. I know the risks, if you want to call them that. I considered all of the possible consequences of that first email long before I sent it. I thought about it all semester long, in fact, and had the good sense to wait until the class was over and grades were turned in.
My feelings haven’t changed and the offer still stands…if you think you are up for it.
Kerri
Still slightly buzzed, Seth had hit reply, typed: Noon on Monday—downtown Willoughby at Coffee and Books, sent the email and swaggered to the shower.
And here he was. It was exactly noon now. He was relieved in a way that it was finally too late to turn back. He climbed out of his Escape—the first vehicle he’d ever paid payments on, the first he’d acquired with less than 100,000 miles on the odometer—and walked into the coffee shop.
Kerri had been there all along drinking a cappuccino and reading a book. Striking in a black, leather jacket and casual blouse, her thick golden hair spilled wildly over and well below her shoulders. She wore designer jeans and knee-high boots, her long legs crossed, the pointed toe of a high-heeled boot rocked gently back and forth as she read. She could have been an actress directed to exude confidence, to vibrate with it. Just then she looked up and their eyes locked for barely a second before her demeanor cracked with a nervous laugh that brought her hand to her mouth as if she weren’t expecting him. Seth broke into a grin, shaking his head feeling like they were serious actors trying to do a sexy scene from a soap opera and breaking up in the middle of it.
She stood and moved to hug him like an old friend, but they weren’t old friends; the distance between them and the book in her hand made it so awkward that she nearly fell. “Oops!” she said, as he caught her and a whiff of her apple and spice perfume. “New boots,” she said, her face bright red, then added, “Hey! We match.”
He was dressed the same way he would have for class, and had in fact, probably worn this exact outfit to school before: leather jacket, burgundy button-down, faded Levi’s, and the well-worn cowboy boots the students sometimes teased him about. “Twins,” he said, realizing it was the first time he’d seen her without glasses. Those eyes. Stunning. “Who are you reading?”
She turned the book toward him. “W. Somerset Maugham.”
“The Moon and Sixpence,” he read. “That’s one of my favorites by him.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s funny. I’ve been rereading his stuff over the past few months.”
“That’s weird. I just picked it up this morning.” She held the book up and flicked the sales slip sticking out between the pages as proof. “It was recommended to me ages ago by,” she glanced at the ceiling, “I don’t even remember who. I got here early and there it was on their classics shelf and so I bought it.”
“That is weird.” He noted that she was wearing eyeliner and light makeup. She rarely wore makeup to class. She didn’t need it but it did add a little something extra. He had a flash of her getting ready for their day together, leaning toward the mirror as he’d seen past lovers do, carefully tracing her eye with a tiny pencil. “Shall we?” he said, gesturing toward the door.
“We shall,” she said.
2
Kerri Engel’s heart hadn’t stopped racing from the moment Seth Hardy had walked into Coffee and Books, and now, sitting in the passenger seat of his bright red, too clean SUV, she felt like a five-year-old who should have, but didn’t pee one more time before getting in the car.
Things had been so different in her imagination. She had looked up from her book, meeting him with just the hint of a smile, stayed seated, gestured to the chair next to her, ordered him a cappuccino without asking, and in the vampy manner she’d perfected in the emails, said something like, “I was half-expecting you to chicken out.”
But when he walked in looking so relaxed and yet exuding the very intensity, or charisma, or whatever it was that drew her so strongly toward him, her composure vanished. She’d gotten too cocky with the emails, forgetting that the sheer aliveness he crackled with in class wouldn’t be divided among twenty-four other people but focused solely on her. She swallowed, and trying to make her directions sound predetermined, said, “Bear to the right at the stoplight. This will turn into Euclid Avenue and we’ll pick up I-90 from there.”
“Where are we going first?” he asked.
“It’s a surprise,” she said, which of course, it was. After all of her careful planning—the emails written and rewritten to sound more siren than slut, the online interviews she had practically memorized, the book by Maugham, the casual yet classy blouse bought for the occasion, the new lotion from Bath and Body Works, the entire morning spent shaving, plucking, applying the right makeup, doing and redoing her hair—how the hell could she have not planned a tour!?
In her own defense, she never expected him to literally want a tour. She had offered one, yes, but it was just an excuse to hook up. Her ability to tell when a man liked her in that way was something she never doubted. Ever since she was thirteen years old, boys and men wanted the same thing from her, and by the time she was seventeen, she’d learned how to control the dance. Whether she seduced them, allowed them to seduce her, or strung them along for whatever reason, it was her dance.
This was not the case today. The sexual attraction was intense but she was suddenly afraid that it was one-sided, that she had misread his interest in her.
She’d been smitten from the moment he had walked into room 121 and maybe that was the problem. Maybe her infatuation had clouded her judgment. Could she have read too much into those times their eyes met? Maybe the day he’d lost his place in the lecture—that moment she was sure they’d shared and had given her the courage to be so bold—had been a misunderstanding on her part. Maybe it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. Maybe he’d simply lost his place and happened to be looking at her at the time. Which would explain why he’d made no mention of it in his response to her email: he had no idea what the hell she was talking about. Oh God! She wanted to crawl under the seat. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Not at all. Put on whatever you like.”
Good music would give her confidence. When she leaned toward the radio, she was close enough to catch the clean, masculine scent of his cologne. Her stomach did a somersault. She imagined kissing him. Her hand was shaking as she reached for the tuning knob and she was sure he saw it. Strike one, she could almost hear an umpire shout.
“I’ve explored some on my own,” Seth was saying as she moved through her favorite R&B stations, praying for something to calm her down. “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Flats, scalped a ticket to a Cavs game,” he continued, “but it’s always fun to see a new place through the eyes of someone who lives there.”
“Of co—” her mouth was cotton dry, she coughed, swallowed, tried again, “of course.” She needed to settle down. Her mind raced. She could take him to Tremont or Little Italy. He hadn’t mentioned either of those. Finally, the sultry voice of Alicia Keys was filling the space between them, promising to keep a lover’s secrets like the pages of a diary. Kerri tried to let the music seep into her.
“Have you traveled much?” he asked.
“Not much,” Kerri said, counting her second strike, the fantasy of seduction well on its way to being another of the countless disappointments that made up her miserable, little life. She told him that growing up, there had been family trips to Chicago, New York City, and Niagara Falls. He wanted to know what she thought of these places and the truth—that they didn’t make much of an impression on her at all—made her feel like a fool. But seriously, what was there to say about a place built around a waterfall and catering to every conceivable view of it? She had a stomach virus when they were in Chicago and it had rained the whole time they were there. It was sweltering when they were in the rotten apple. The only good thing about that trip was getting to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. Everything else she could think of was negative, unoriginal, or both: unbearable heat, blaring car horns, throngs of rude people, and the moist smell of garbage mixed with body odor and expensive cologne. “New York was great,” she said.
He agreed. He had the opportunity—that was the way he put it, “the opportunity”—to live there for a few months, staying with a friend. She imagined that this friend had been a lover and that she’d been beautiful and sophisticated: a woman of the world with a career and a well-decorated apartment in a trendy area of the city. Kerri felt sure she couldn’t compete with the women he’d known. Seth was going on about the grit and radiance of the city, the endless varieties of food and people. During his time there, he had walked Manhattan Island from end to end, making it sound like every day was some exotic adventure. He visited the World Trade Center four months before it was destroyed. “I remember being in the elevator to the observation deck,” he said. “Everyone was excited to go up, all these hushed voices and nervous laughter. I counted four languages other than English being spoken in that one elevator. It was the coolest damn thing. Standing on the roof, it honestly did feel like you were on top of the world. I remember looking down at a helicopter.”
He had been to Chicago and Niagara too, but again, he was interested in her impressions. Her mind was blank. She was screwed. Or rather not screwed and out of her league. He was Professor Hotness—as the girls in Comp One had privately named him—and she was just another silly female student crushing on him. Unable to come up with a decent lie and too smart to tell the truth, she turned the question back to him. He seemed a little disappointed. Even in class, his lectures were always more of a dialogue between teacher and students than a straight lecture, but he answered her question, bringing the places more alive to her than when she had actually been there. So much so, that she honestly found herself wanting to go back and have a second look.
In the meantime, she was leading him randomly through downtown Cleveland unable to decide between Tremont and Little Italy. He must have figured out that she didn’t know what she was doing because he started asking about whatever was in front of them: the Terminal Tower, the giant rubber stamp sculpture, this bridge, that bridge. Then, he started asking her about area restaurants, where her favorite book store and movie theater was, the best place to buy ice cream. “I appreciate what you’re doing,” she said, “but you can stop now.”
“Stop what?”
“Rescuing me.”
“Rescuing you?”
“You’ve clearly written me off as a real date and you’re showing me mercy, keeping the conversation going so I don’t make a bigger ass out of myself than I already have.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I see. You just really want to know where to buy the best ice cream?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“Scoops and Sprinkles,” she said, flatly. “Sorry. This was a stupid idea.”
“It’s not a stupid idea. You’re just a little nervous. So am I.”
“What would you possibly have to be nervous about?”
“Well, maybe nervous isn’t the right word. More like…guilty.”
“Guilty?”
“Yes. Do you know how old I am?”
“I don’t know. Thirty-one? Thirty-two?”
“I just turned forty.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
“What kind of moisturizer do you use?”
He gave her a look.
“What? I’m supposed to see you differently now?” she asked. “Be less attracted to you. You never struck me as the kind of guy to label people by age and shelve them accordingly.”
“I’m not. It’s my own age that I’ve become aware of lately. Not that I feel older. I don’t. A little smarter maybe, a little more confident, but otherwise, I do all the same workouts, play the same sports, and everybody’s cool until I tell them my age. Then they look at me like I have a disease that’s not being properly treated.”
“Forty isn’t old.”
“No, but it’s probably too old to have never married, to be writing books without a shred of proof that I’ll ever make a living at it, to be traveling the world on a wish and a prayer, supporting my writing habit with odd jobs, to be…spending the afternoon with a twenty-year-old.”
“‘Probably too old?’ What? You’re not sure?”
“I’m not sure about much these days. My internal compass is out of whack. In fact, I have the sneaking suspicion that it never worked at all, but I was so enthusiastic about living a life of adventure and becoming a writer that I didn’t notice until now, when I’m pushing middle age with no other skill set to fall back on and nowhere near being able to make a living as a writer.”
“So you’re giving up.”
“No. I never said that.”
“But you’re not writing.”
“Teaching takes a lot of time and energy. And what makes you think I’m not writing?”
“In class, anytime someone asked about the second novel, you’d make a joke and change the subject.”
“I did?”
“Every time. Which tells me, you’re not writing and it’s freaking you out.”
He looked impressed. “Y
ou’re a pretty smart cookie, Kerri Engel.”
“Certified genius, actually. IQ of 163.”
“Wow. Seriously?”
“Seriously. And yet, still dumb enough to piss away a scholarship to Oberlin and with it, any financial support from mommy and daddy to start over somewhere else. At least, until I prove myself worthy, which is what I’m doing at the community college. Penance. I’ve read your published short stories too.”
“Bet you had to dig to find those.”
“Not really. I just Googled you…like every other girl in class. Most of the literary journals are online.”
“Those stories were the first things I ever published. I got paid in contributor’s copies. The Fourth Option came quite a bit later.”
“I could tell. They were good, but the novel is great.”
“Thank you.”
“Is it true?”
“I hope so. You tell me.”
“It feels very true. Like it really happened. Did it?”
“Sort of.” He told her that the book wasn’t exactly a roman à clef though it did fictionalize the general direction his life took after leaving the tiny, hick town of Cherry Run, Pennsylvania, and spending that first year or so living on the road. “Some of the stories were kicked off by real people or experiences in my life, but once the story started to breathe, it became its own thing, went its own way. What did and didn’t actually happen isn’t important at all; the only thing that matters is telling the emotional truth. Fiction is the most direct route.”
“Sounds like a contradiction.”
“Not really. When you’re writing ‘fiction,’ there’s no need to protect or explain yourself or anyone else. You just let it fly. The truth of the moment is all that matters and you get there anyway you can, without getting bogged down on what someone actually said or did in real life. That’s half the battle.”
Something Fierce Page 2
