One More Time

by Deborah Cooke

  “A website? Why does a scholar need a website?”

  “Maybe he’s going to do an HBO deal on the side.”

  “Since when was academic research about entertainment?” This was outrageous. “And besides, you don’t even have tenure yet!”

  “Don’t remind me.” Naomi glanced at her watch. “Ah, the unwashed heathens await me, in all their splendid ignorance. Though my fate may be unpleasant, I cannot resist their siren call.” She bowed, then lifted her right hand high. “Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutemus!”

  Leslie chuckled. Hail, Caesar: we who are about to die salute you! It was the traditional greeting given by gladiators to the emperor before facing battle and almost certain death in the arena.

  “You’re not going to die, you fool, not even metaphorically unless you do something stupid.”

  “Without tenure, I’ll starve in a gutter.” Naomi shrugged. “It doesn’t look like I’ll be seeing that deal anytime soon, so I’ve pretty much got nothing to lose. I’ll go down defending the moral high road, if I’ve got a choice.” She gave Leslie a look. “It’d be nice to not be fighting the good fight alone.”

  Leslie didn’t say anything and she noticed Naomi’s disappointment.

  “Ciao, doc.”

  Leslie watched her go, hating that Naomi’s achievements weren’t being appreciated by Dinkelmann. The new-hire Dias with tenure…and a website.

  Could she defy Dinkelmann without him noticing?

  On the other hand, how much further could she bend to accommodate his demands? Surely the rest of the department didn’t really dislike her for putting up and shutting up? She had to keep her job: didn’t they?

  But at what cost? She would have given a paycheck just to talk to Matt again, to get his thoughts on what she should do. Maybe he was really just going to New Orleans to fetch Zach and she’d have that chance to talk to him.

  As if.

  A glance at the clock made Leslie jump. There were unwashed heathens awaiting her too, clamoring for higher grades for less work, and this despite their splendid ignorance. Duty called, putting Leslie in mind of Naomi’s earlier comment.

  Because really, lecturing to a hall of university students was a lot like being tossed to the lions.

  * * *

  Matt marched through the terminal to the first bank of telephones he saw, then punched in the number he knew as well as his own name. The line had already connected before he checked his watch and realized Leslie would probably be giving a lecture.

  The phone rang and rang, giving him plenty of time to curse the university and their failure to install voice mail. Or maybe they had it and Leslie the Luddite hadn’t read the instructions to install it on her phone.

  Either way, the phone was clearly going to ring until Tuesday.

  He looked at his watch and winced. He did have four hours to kill, and he did need to talk to her just one more time. He could punch Redial as well as anybody.

  One more call; just one.

  * * *

  Leslie strode into her lecture hall, to the general disinterest of the students who had bothered to gather there. About half had shown up, which was pretty much an average measure of the burning desire to learn in a post-secondary institution in mid-January. Over the course of the term, their numbers would dwindle to a few hardy survivors, then she would be astonished by how many were present for the exam.

  Sometimes the process seemed to have little point.

  But then, Leslie had a feeling that if Matt was really gone, there was going to be a lot of her life that didn’t feel as if it was worth the trouble.

  She put down her papers on the podium, glancing through them as if they contained her lecture when in fact they did not, and braced herself for one of the rituals of her job.

  Leslie was a scholar of medieval history. The particular focus of her own research was social history in high medieval society, and she had studied, in sequence, table manners, rituals of courtship, and—her current mare’s nest of choice—the dances, songs, and pageants of secular and/or seasonal festivals.

  Everyone knows about May poles, of course, and Yuletide festivities, but there were lots of other ones. Often the customs were particular to a certain region or town; sometimes variations on the same theme occurred throughout an entire region. If the sources had been complete or even close to it, the topic would be a massive one. But these were primarily pagan celebrations—or the vestiges or them—and since most medieval source materials were recorded by churchmen, there was either no information or very biased information to be found.

  Leslie had to look for snippets, dozens of them, hundreds of them, then try to fit all those jumbled bits together in a coherent way. It was like a puzzle, or solving a detective story, and she found it fascinating. She’d spent as much time as possible—which hadn’t been nearly enough—reading chronicles in the past three years, sifting through court records and reading the marginalia in vernacular stories. She didn’t have a whole lot to show for it as yet, at least not much that was new, except for some hauntingly weird and interesting vignettes.

  This was one of those subjects that made her realize just how little we know about the great swath of a millennium of time and a continent of dirt blithely lumped together as ‘the Middle Ages’, never mind how poorly we understand the thinking and motivation of the people who lived then. Ferreting out details, finding the patterns and making cautious conclusions was the primary reason Leslie had become a scholar.

  Teaching a second-year medieval survey class to two hundred and seventy-five inattentive twenty-some-year-olds—most of whom had other majors and were looking for an easy breadth credit, preferably not below a B- was not.

  This was a lecture she had given a thousand times, more or less: the emergence of centralized secular authority under the regimes of Henry II of England and Louis VII of France, compared and contrasted. It was chock-full of statistical figures that made students all scramble to take notes quickly enough, generated at least one essay question on the final exam, and took precisely fifty-three minutes to deliver.

  Matt, who had endured numerous versions of it, invariably told Leslie that it was as dry as a popcorn fart. She had to admit that he was right. She had no real interest in political history, but when teaching a survey course, it was inescapable.

  And it was part of her job to teach no less than three survey courses each year, as well as three or four seminars on more specialized topics. The seminars could be interesting, but it was hard to consider the survey classes, with their massive registration, to be more than a waste of everyone’s time.

  She thought of popcorn farts, wondered how dry they really were, and smiled.

  Then she thought of Matt—gone for good, never listening to another test-run of one of her lectures, making wry comments and making her laugh—and felt faint.

  The gathered masses straightened at that, newly nervous. Crabcake Coxwell never smiled, unless she envisioned a particularly nasty future for you, and when she frowned right afterward, well, word was you’d better watch out.

  That was the party line and they all knew it. Leslie wasn’t known for giving good lecture either. “Tough but fair marking, dry lectures” was inevitably what it said about her in the student calendar.

  Nobody but Matt ever mentioned popcorn farts.

  She spared a glance to the large wall clock—a purely theatrical move—cleared her throat—ditto—and commenced the lecture.

  At least she would have commenced the lecture if she could have remembered it. Not one word came to Leslie’s lips.

  Not one.

  Leslie cleared her throat and tried again. No luck.

  In fact, as she stared into that sea of expectant faces, she couldn’t even recall the title of the lecture.

  Or what it was about.

  This despite the bolstering effect of new La Perla lingerie.

  What she thought about was Matt, the look on his face that morning, the angry glitter in his eyes, the tas
te of his kiss.

  What she thought about was coming home to find the house empty.

  What she thought about was coming home to find the house empty every day for the rest of her life.

  And her mind stalled cold, refusing to process such a distinctly possible and horrific notion.

  Such a thing had never happened to Leslie before. She’d never been uncomfortable at the front of a classroom, never been at a loss for words. She’d certainly never drawn a blank. She could never have anticipated that this lecture, of all lectures, would abandon her thoughts completely.

  But she was a veritable tabula rasa, as well as left feeling as if someone had ripped out her heart and stomped that sucker flat. Leslie looked at her students—expectant, impatient, amused—and the words didn’t just leave her: they left town. They were crossing the border to Mexico, never to be seen in the contiguous forty-eight states again.

  What the hell had happened to her?

  Or more importantly: what was she going to do about it?

  Leslie adjusted her glasses and gathered her papers, frowning in apparent concentration. She forced herself to breathe. In and out, in and out. The situation might be dire, but dying would only exacerbate matters.

  And then these kids would know about her lingerie.

  She had to grip the podium to steady herself at that prospect. Leslie tried a prayer, but still the lecture did not pop into her thoughts.

  So much for divine intervention. She must have used up her allotment by finding the bra and panties on sale. Pick your divinity of choice: he, she or it clearly had better things to do in this moment of moments.

  Leslie was on her own.

  This called for showmanship of the highest order. Above all, Leslie had to get out of the lecture hall before her deodorant failure became apparent.

  “There will be no lecture today,” she said as if this was no big deal. A ripple passed through the lecture hall, but Leslie lifted her chin. “This is due to circumstances beyond my control. I apologize for any inconvenience to you.”

  And before they could ask about make-up classes, about getting their money’s worth, whether any of the material that should have been in the lecture would be on the exam, Leslie left.

  No, that’s not quite true.

  She fled. As she ran down the corridor, her mind turned over and over the improbable truth, trying to make sense of nonsense. She had forgotten a lecture.

  She had failed.

  And she had failed spectacularly. No half measures for Dr. Leslie Coxwell. No losing an essay paper or forgetting a well-turned segue. Nope, she’d forgotten an entire lecture in one fell swoop.

  She made one stop en route to her office, at the vending machine in the lobby below the offices of the history department. She had enough change to buy two chocolate bars, and even though they were just Hershey’s, she had inhaled one of them immediately.

  Sometimes even a great bra wasn’t enough.

  * * *

  Leslie was shaking when she got back to her office: the aftershock was setting in. She was still mortified, but already thinking about the repercussions of her screw-up.

  She could hear her phone ringing on the other side of the locked door, and haste made her drop her keys. Of course, the lock jammed again, fighting her attempt to open it. She finally got the door open and lunged into her office, half-convinced that whoever was calling would hang up as soon as she touched the receiver.

  “Hello?” Leslie winced at her tone. Great. She sounded breathless, like a telephone sex provider—or at least how she imagined they would sound. She took a deep breath and tried for more professional tone. “Dr. Coxwell here.”

  “Hi.”

  One word and her knees gave out. The man’s power over her was frightening sometimes.

  No, it was only frightening when she believed that what she had always been afraid would happen was happening, right this minute.

  The fact was that Leslie had been blind-sided by Matthew Coxwell one random Wednesday morning a good eighteen years before and been smitten ever since. She hadn’t believed then that he—wealthy, handsome, wry, destined apparently for success—had been interested in her—middle-class (if you measured with your thumb on the scale), plain, destined for a dry-as-dust academic career.

  She had spent much of their marriage (and all of their so-called dating) pretty much convinced that he was going to figure out at any minute that he’d made a mistake. His mother had figured it out right away, after all. Leslie had expected for eighteen years that the other shoe was going to drop at any moment.

  She could hear that shoe hitting the ground somewhere, with Matt’s single word of greeting, and suddenly, the bottom fell right out of her universe. She had hoped and yearned and tried for eighteen years, and it hadn’t been enough.

  She dropped into her chair, knowing she’d sound breathless again. “Hi.” She reached over and flicked the door shut with her fingertips, glad for once that her office wasn’t big enough to swing a cat. She could reach everything without getting out of her chair and on this day, that was an advantage.

  “I’m in Chicago.”

  Hope woke up and took a look around. Had he changed his mind? “I thought you were going to New Orleans.”

  “I have a connection here, and a bit of time.”

  Hope died, a writhing death on hot pavement with a stiletto through its heart. It was a nasty death, the kind of death nothing could ever deserve.

  Leslie didn’t say anything more, couldn’t say anything because of the lump in her throat. Matt’s voice sounded gravelly, rougher than it usually did but maybe it was the connection.

  Maybe it was the Scotch.

  Maybe it was regret.

  Maybe she’d never know for sure.

  Leslie felt again the burden of things unsaid, secrets that she’d never meant to become secrets—no, there was only one thing she’d never mentioned to Matt, one thing that had grown in silence beyond all expectation. Her tongue was swollen with it now, especially given what she had just done.

  But where do you start to talk, to really talk, when you haven’t done it for years? How do you begin to tell someone you love about the sacrifice you made to keep him around, especially when he’s going going gone? How do you admit that you haven’t told him what you were really feeling because you loved him enough to protect him from your nasty little truth?

  How do you cough up the nerve to show your vulnerabilities, especially when he’s already out the door, maybe forever?

  Leslie didn’t know.

  Finally, Matt cleared his throat. “You’re so quiet.”

  “I was always taught that if I couldn’t say anything nice, then I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  “But you’re usually quiet.”

  Leslie kept silent, letting him work that out all by himself.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” he asked softly. He sounded so close that his voice made the hair on the back of her neck rise. She could imagine him, leaning in a telephone stall, receiver tucked under his chin, hand braced against the wall. Maybe he’d loosened his tie again. She closed her eyes, imagining that he was whispering directly into her ear.

  His next words were somewhat less than the romantic murmur that would have been ideal. “Laforini was guilty, Leslie. There was absolutely no doubt about it. I had to lose the case.”

  “Had to?” She couldn’t bite back her sarcasm completely, not this time, not this day. “I thought it was your job as defense attorney to, um, defend your client.”

  “Right. How could I have lived with myself if I had encouraged any mitigation of his sentence?” His tone hardened. “He was a mobster through and through. He’d killed lots of people himself and ordered the killing of many others—the charges were only the tip of the iceberg. The police reports were something else. Do you want someone like that on the streets? He didn’t deserve a defense, so I didn’t give him much of one.”

  A new fear seized Leslie. “But wait, if he
has mob connections…”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Matt was dismissive. “He just thinks I’m incompetent. You know, I was sure he would change lawyers. I don’t think he had a lot of choices, though, or as many allies as people thought. You’re one of the few who knows that it wasn’t stupidity on my part.”

  Leslie wasn’t so sure that she was glad to be in on this particular secret.

  Matt cleared his throat. “The point, Leslie, is that I couldn’t have done anything else. How could you have looked at me if I had kept the truth from getting its day in court?”

  Leslie straightened in her chair, a spark of anger lighting within her. “You aren’t suggesting that you did this for me?”

  “No, I’m saying I did it because of you.”

  “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you want to win the case that was your golden opportunity to have a successful career?”

  “A golden opportunity to become like my father.” He snorted. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

  “But it was the one you had to win to permanently join the partnership with your father. You won’t blame me for your not having a high power career. I wouldn’t have stopped you…”

  “But I didn’t want that partnership. I never did.”

  Leslie fought to push her feelings back into their neatly labeled boxes. She never lost her temper, and she wasn’t going to start today. She pulled away the neck of her sweater, reassuring herself with a peek at the silvery Italian bra. “You might have mentioned as much,” she said, then balled the chocolate bar wrapper in her fist and flung it toward the garbage can.

  She missed.

  “Wait a minute. You can’t have really expected me to win.”

  “Why not? You were his defense attorney, and I know you’re neither stupid nor incompetent.”

  His voice rose in anger. “You expected me to win?”

  Hers was not an unreasonable expectation. Leslie took a shaking breath. “Matt, you’re a lawyer. Winning court cases would be your job…”

  “I never wanted to be a lawyer.”

  One more time, Leslie was shaken not only by what Matt said but how firmly he said it. How could she not have known this? Her sense that he had become a stranger returned, redoubled. “But you went to law school,” she said more cautiously. “People who go to law school become lawyers. You must have wanted to be a lawyer!”