Ladies and Gentlemen

by Adam Ross

  Instead of turning off the interstate, Thane took the next exit and headed for downtown.

  He pulled into Billy’s Ritz, a bar and restaurant that was always crowded on the weekends. When he’d started teaching at the university this past fall, the department had taken him there for dinner. Besides the refurbished hotel down the street, it was the only public place he’d been to in Roanoke. The bar was three-deep with patrons, and after Thane ordered a drink he tried to look like he was waiting for someone. He watched the basketball game that was on TV, nodding at the group of guys in front of him whenever they turned to high-five each other, everyone else also paired off, tripled off, grouped.

  Standing behind them all, Thane quickly drank three whiskeys and finally approached the hostess. “Where’s a good place to hear music?”

  At Corned Beef & Co., a band played on a stage with its back to the front window, the red klieg lights shining down from the second-level balcony and casting the room aglow. The club was packed wall-to-wall with kids from Hampden-Sydney, Washington and Lee, Roanoke College, and with plenty of Thane’s own students from Hollins. He felt out of place, absurdly old, but he ignored it, pushing forward to the bar and yelling for a beer. The music was terrible, unforgivingly loud. Then someone tapped his shoulder.

  “Professor?”

  It was Ramelle Foster, one of his seniors, a beautiful girl from South Carolina. She had the same eyes as Ashley, green and wide set, and a number of times during his seminar he’d caught her staring at him. He’d warned himself to be careful around her.

  “You’re here,” she yelled over the music. She elbowed the girl next to her, nodding her head toward Thane.

  “Indeed I am,” he confirmed.

  She indicated the band. “What do you think?”

  “They’re good.”

  “My cousin’s the drummer.”

  Whenever Ramelle leaned toward him to talk, she squeezed his wrist lightly. There was a sweet, citrus smell on her breath. Thane had to put his ear close to her mouth to hear her over the music, and he could feel her words on his face.

  “I’ve never seen you out before,” she said.

  “That’s because I lead the life of a monk.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I’m serious. Nothing but evenings of deep study, grading, and meditation.”

  “It sounds lonely.”

  “Profoundly.”

  She smiled at him. “Here, hold my beer.”

  Ramelle took the blond ringlets hanging loose around her face, pulled them back, and tied them off, watching him as she moved, and before Thane realized what he was doing, he took a sip from her bottle.

  “Come with me while I smoke,” she said.

  The bouncer at the back door let them out into the parking lot. Thane lit her cigarette, then draped his jacket over her shoulders and put his scarf around her neck. Perhaps it was the comparative silence out there, or the awareness that they were completely alone now, but she abruptly became more formal with him, having lost her confidence, he guessed. She talked about his Gothic Lit seminar so self-consciously that he was enfeebled by regret. He wanted to talk about regular things, to forget he was a professor for a while, to leave this safe middle ground and get to the place where they were headed.

  “Have you ever seen the star?” she asked.

  “What star?”

  “On Mill Mountain. The big star they light up every night.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s only, like, fifty feet tall.”

  “Oh, that star. I’ve always wondered about that thing.” He was standing closer to her now. “Why’s it up there?”

  “Because duh,” she said. “This is the Star City.”

  “Right, but did they put the star up there because this is the Star City? Or is it the Star City because of the star?”

  “You know, I have no idea.”

  She laughed at this. He laughed with her, relieved. She stepped closer. Then she reached a hand out from under his blazer, took hold of his belt buckle, and gently pulled him toward her.

  “So,” she murmured, “how about I go inside and get my coat and things. And in the meantime you wait here like a good little monk, and then the two of us take a drive up there to see it.”

  Thane laughed once, his mouth dry, and leaned back. She pulled him toward her again. “You want to see the star, right?”

  “Yes.” He couldn’t help it, he was whispering.

  “Good. I want you to see it.” She took off his blazer and handed it back to him, but left the scarf around her neck. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  She tapped on the door and the bouncer opened it. With the red lights shining off the stage, the noise, and the smoky air wafting out, Thane felt like he was standing before a dragon’s maw. The bouncer nodded at him, then let the metal door slam, muffling the sound coming from inside the club almost completely.

  He stood in the parking lot, blowing smoke rings. A few minutes passed. He imagined the star on the mountain as clearly as if he’d spent many cold evenings bathed in its light. He closed his eyes and imagined himself lowering his mouth onto Ramelle’s. He thought about what that might taste like, and everything that came afterward. Then he stamped out his cigarette and left.

  Elliott Doyle, another professor in the English department, and his wife, Marcie, who taught at a nearby college in Lynchburg, owned the house Thane was living in. They were on sabbatical for the year, in Ireland until spring. Back in August, Doyle had been one of the few faculty members to make a sustained effort to welcome him on board, he and Marcie taking him out to dinner a few times, showing him around downtown Roanoke. They had him out to the house for brunch one Sunday afternoon—another in a series of magnanimous gestures that in suspicious moments Thane had come to believe were part of a setup. It was a spectacular day, and the drive from campus to Troutville was splendid. It was late August and still hot, but the leaves were just beginning to turn; and as Thane took in the beauty of the rural Virginia farmland, he thought about Ashley. The road leading to this house wound through hundreds of acres of cow pasture bordered on the horizon by mountains. When Thane pulled into the drive and saw Doyle and Marcie sitting on their porch swing, he mourned that he and Ashley hadn’t made it to this point together. She had always loved such country.

  “This is a beautiful place,” he said as he got out of his car. The house was gigantic, a three-story redbrick foursquare situated on a hill. Several cats were lazing on the porch, and a fat English setter came bounding happily toward him, Elliott following behind. “If I lived here, I don’t think I’d ever leave.”

  “Then don’t,” Doyle said, taking the bottle of wine Thane had brought and looking at the label.

  “Oh, Elliott, for crying out loud,” Marcie said. “At least let the man have a drink first.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Stay while we’re gone. Save your money and enjoy the place. Just pay the utilities and don’t let any of our pets die.”

  With Ashley very much on his mind, Thane accepted the offer on the spot. He’d imagined her seeing the house someday—which was ridiculous, of course. But after a few months, he’d come to hate the place. He hadn’t accounted for the isolation. Though Troutville was only thirty miles from campus, the drive was all on winding two-lane roads, poorly lit and treacherous in bad weather. Once he got home, there was no leaving again for the night. The cows in the nearby fields made the most remarkable sounds—an eerie slogging as they walked the pastures, followed by throaty, prehistoric groans. The setter, Seamus, didn’t like Thane, or at least he didn’t respond to his commands, didn’t sit or stay or come, and he spent his days roaming outside—which Elliott and Marcie had strictly forbidden. Sometimes he showed up at the door covered in shit or mud or both, streaking the panes with slime as he scratched at the glass to be let in. Once he appeared on the porch with a cow’s skull in his mouth, the prize still webbed with purple muscle and blood, and when Thane tried to take it away, the dog bit him on the hand. Thane went ber
serk, kicking Seamus right off the porch. He grabbed a log off the nearby pile and hurled it at the fleeing beast, cursing him insanely. Since that afternoon, he never once let him inside.

  In the mornings, the mountains in the distance were beautiful, but in the evening, the pitch-black nights, trucks rumbled through them with gargling engines as loud as propeller planes. Their headlights winked on and off between the trees, their red and yellow marker lights running from tractor to semitrailer, outlining the rigs’ twisting length as they hugged the dark curves, making it seem as if the vehicles themselves were in flight. He had underestimated, he realized, the difficulty of living in another person’s home. But now he was committed. Trapped.

  Sitting on the porch swing in Doyle’s parka, with Doyle’s whiskey poured into one of Doyle’s highball glasses, Thane shook his head and covered his eyes with his hand. Give him a million chances and he would never have guessed that he would end up here, in Nowhere, Virginia, living under another man’s roof—though Ashley certainly wouldn’t have been surprised. Do you know what I hate about your profession? she’d say. The lack of control. You don’t control where you work. You work wherever someone will take you. So you live in whatever place you can find. And once you find out where that is, you don’t even get to choose if you stay. You get to wait six or seven years to find out if this place you never picked to begin with is where you’re going to spend the rest of your life—or not. It’s like your life’s a big spin of the wheel. It’s like you’ve chosen never to have a choice.

  Drunk and cold, Thane moved into the living room and turned on the television, idly surfing the channels with the sound muted and thinking about Ramelle, feeling the cold air of another near miss wash over him. The university had a strict policy about sexual relations with students, and he easily could’ve gotten himself fired. As it was, he felt embarrassed by his behavior and dreaded seeing the girl on Monday, fearing her reaction. Police strobes flashed on the screen, and mug shots of a male suspect, in profile and front view, with a phone number below them, to which Thane paid no mind. Images of a wreck on I-81, a minivan’s entire front end accordioned, an indentation on the windshield where the driver’s forehead must have hit the glass.

  Thane turned off the set and picked up from the coffee table a stack of the Doyles’ letters to each other. He’d discovered them in Elliott’s study, idly snooping around one afternoon. The letters were dated and written in longhand, and once Thane started looking, he found them scattered in piles all over the house. It had taken him a few weeks to piece together their story, as he’d picked up somewhere in the middle: the purpose of Elliott’s leave wasn’t study or travel, but saving his marriage. He’d found more than a hundred pages so far. Which of them had initiated this correspondence? Did they actually mail these letters, or simply slide them under each other’s door? With a scholar’s attention to detail, Thane had catalogued the piles and mapped out a floor plan of the house, marking their location in each room, so he could return them to their original places come spring. But sometime last week he’d managed to lose the map.

  So let me paint the picture for you, Elliott, let me show you what it’s like to live with you when you’re like this, when IT’s got you in ITS grip. Because the most insidious thing about this disease is not that I never know when IT will take you. No, the most insidious thing about IT is that IT seems to come when I’m happiest, when I’m at my most hopeful, for us and for everything, for children someday, for all the bullshit everyone dreams of—as if IT can smell these things like blood. Say I’ve taught a great class or had a satisfying morning writing. Or I’m just excited to see you. I’m headed home thinking we’ll drink some wine before dinner. There’s good music on the radio and in my head I’m running through what we have in our refrigerator. I pull up the driveway and see your car parked, but all the lights in the house are off. And when I open the door, I can hear the television. I come in through the kitchen and see your dishes in the sink, the cereal bowl you used that morning, the orange juice carton left out, one of the cats licking the bar of butter. I call but you don’t answer. I think: he’s walking the dog, maybe. But then I come around the corner to the living room and Seamus is lying in the corner on his bed. He doesn’t get up, just gazes at me sadly. And that’s when I see you. You’re sitting on the couch in the dark. You have a drink in your hand, you’ve changed into sweatpants already, your shoes are off, and you have that inert look in your eyes—it’s somewhere between disorientation and exhaustion. I look at your thumbs first to see if they’re bleeding, and they are, which means you’ve been feeding on yourself, biting your nail down to the meat and rather than trimming the hanging piece you’ve performed a trapped-animal’s surgery on it, chewing off the whole pained part. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Are you all right?” “I’m fine,” you say. I look around. The place is a disaster. You look around too, like you’re seeing the room for the first time. And suddenly I’m furious with you for doing nothing, for not cleaning up, and at the same time it’s clear you’re suffering. (Though that’s what makes me angry: the lassitude. The inertness. The way IT sits on you. Pins you down.) “Do you want me to make dinner?” I ask. “Is there something you’d like? Something I can get you? A drink maybe? I bought wine,” I plead. And you look at me like I’m speaking Hindi. You appear almost offended and I feel like I’ve done something wrong. “No,” you say, “not right now.” “How about maybe later?” I ask. “No,” you say. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

  I watch you lumber upstairs and then try to collect myself—though honestly it’s like you’re dead. I came home to find you dead, maybe for tonight, maybe for a day, a week, a month. My happiness at seeing you is annihilated. Suddenly I’m so lonely and hopeless that I’m scared. I attempt to fend off this terror by cleaning. I scrub all your dirty dishes by hand and then put them in the dishwasher. I clean the oven, the sink, the microwave, behind the toaster. I wipe down the countertops. I wash the pet bowls and mop the kitchen. This takes an hour and calms me briefly, allowing me to temporarily forget that you never rally from this, that you’re down for the count, so I start dinner. Food, I think, will do you good. I go upstairs, hopeful. I knock on our bedroom door, and when you don’t answer I enter. You’ve got the lights off and a book lying open on your chest. You’re under the covers up to your neck, and the TV’s on. You’re watching a movie: Mommie Dearest. If the irony weren’t so bald, I’d put it in a story or a poem, but I’d be criticized for obviousness. So I get in bed. At least I can watch it with you. Faye Dunaway is strangling her child. Which makes me think of your father, of course, that son of a bitch, and all the stories you’ve told me about him, all his impossible acts of cruelty, like when your cat had a litter and he made you put the kittens in a pillowcase and drown them all in the creek behind your house. All those things I used to try to love out of you. I want to turn this off, for you not to see this horrible scene, but oddly it seems to be comforting you. There’s even something resembling a smile on your face. And that’s when it’s clear to me that I need to do one of two things:

  I could flee. Pack the necessaries and go, get out forever—though I can’t imagine life without you.

  Or I could go to your study, I think. Get one of the pistols. Come back into the room and say, “Elliott, I love you. Do you know I love you?” And if you say, “Yes, I know you love me. I love you too,” at that point—right at that moment those words are out of your mouth—I put a bullet in your brain. I put you down.

  For the better part of Saturday, Thane redoubled his efforts on a piece he’d been drafting for an academic journal on Robert Louis Stevenson entitled “The Gothic as Antidote” (“The Gothic,” he wrote, “is a radical form of delimitation, a concoction as potent, as destabilizing and fantastic, as Dr. Jekyll’s potion; a solution invented by the imagination that is a solution to the limitations of imagination”). He was productive, focused, and the work seemed to relax him. But that night he found himself unable to ramp down, and stayed
up so late watching television that he slept well into the next morning. He had a pile of papers to grade by Monday and a seminar to give the next evening. He was disciplined for the first few hours of the day, but turned on the television to watch a quarter or two of football, and the next thing he knew the whole afternoon had gotten away from him.

  He began the week behind in everything. It was frigid outside, the mountains crusted with frost, and his car took over twenty minutes to start. In answer to his worst anxieties, the first student he saw walking toward him on campus was Ramelle. She was with a friend, and Thane fought the urge to lower his eyes when she passed him. But she said hello brightly, without implication, as if everything had been forgotten.

  At his office, Thane found a note pinned to his door.

  Got a great one for you professor! Impossible to elaberate in abreviable form! Call my cell to set up a time. 233-1211.

  —Mike

  He crumpled the note, stuffing it into his pocket immediately. Donato’s enthusiasm for his idea embarrassed him now that his own interest had waned. He vowed to make himself scarce for the rest of the day, and to avoid Donato until he got the message.