He decided to push a little. “Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?” he said. “I’ll never meet her. Maybe I could give you some advice.”
More of the big eyes. A deep sigh as her shoulders relaxed. Her hands nervously rearranged her hair. She said, quietly, “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“What do you think? I’m the Big Bad Wolf and I’m going to blow down her door?”
“It’s my door, too,” she said.
What a strange answer — as if the discussion had been about the possible destruction of personal property. But she had become quite petulant. He saw it in the minuscule, sulky protrusion of her bottom lip. Perhaps, in her fantasies, he had already walked through the apartment door. In his own, just now, as his mind raced, he certainly had. Once he found she did not live in one of the dorms, one of those ugly towers put up in the late ’70s that looked like gigantic smokestacks which bordered the campus, he had wished her to live without roommates, in a cozy apartment he could walk into, shutting the door on the cold winter afternoon. From what he gathered, though, there were two roommates. On the radio, the theme music of All Things Considered began. Marshall had friends who had, as a joke, used that same music instead of the wedding march. In a flash, the program about to follow was summarized first by a female voice, then a male, the two seesawing between sound bites on the famine in Africa to the results of a study analyzing sudden, strange changes in bones removed from an Indian burial ground. He did something he never did: he turned off All Things Considered.
“Somebody hurt her,” Cheryl said.
“Hurt her in what way?”
“What do you think I’m talking about? Her emotions?”
“Hurt her physically?”
A nod. Her head quickly turned away as she looked out the side window.
Just when she had finally coaxed him into curiosity about her roommate, forcing him into the present moment, Cheryl intended to drop the subject. It made him a little angry. He thought about Sonja, the night before, turning out the bedside lamp while he was finishing the last paragraph of an article he had been reading, Sonja saying, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought the light was still on on your side.” Her quizzical look: Could he really have taken offense at such a simple, sleepy mistake? The room suddenly lit up again. He had gotten out of bed and gone into the bathroom, where more things had displeased him: a copy of International Wildlife magazine tossed on the bathroom floor, curl-edged from humidity; the towel thrown over one side of the bathtub instead of draped over the towel rack so it would dry. Lately, Sonja kept house the way Paul Delario ran the curriculum meetings: the inconsequential quickly overwhelmed anything of importance. The theorists were allowed to engage in endless rhetorical debates. But what did it really matter? The students were accepting of anything, while the faculty wanted to do as little as possible to keep their jobs. Everybody lived for sports and any new restaurant reported to be good, where they could deconstruct their broasted chicken. Frowning in consternation, he looked at Cheryl and was startled to see her young face superimposed on his wife’s — this face that looked back at him with Sonja’s narrowed eyes.
He took Cheryl’s hand. As he had taken Sonja’s hand when he returned to the bedroom, sliding into bed beside her, the night-light burning in an outlet just above the baseboards: a three-inch-high visage of Donald Duck, his big, protuberant lips glowing yellow, plastic hat jauntily tilted atop his head.
You need a vacation, Sonja had said, going limp-wristed as he slid into bed beside her, took her hand, and tried to nuzzle his way to a reconciliation. Now, through Sonja’s limp hand, rose the slight pressure of Cheryl Lanier’s smaller, gloved hand, returning nothing of his strengthening grip, but not withdrawing, either.
Well past the college now, he turned onto a smaller, winding road, knowing there was a tavern near the end, before the road looped back past the dairy farm onto the highway.
“I appreciate your concern,” Cheryl was saying to him.
“Ms. Lanier,” he said. In his head, he was mocking youth, in general, as if he had things figured out, as if he had things under control, when really his inadequacies could make him feel slightly faint, when he focused on them. Which was what he was doing at the moment, and no wonder: Did he think Sonja might be out riding in someone’s car, with her hand in another man’s? Any possibility that Sonja would be off having a drink with some handsome client? Possibly there were advances she warded off that she never told him about, but what he really thought was that since she gave out no signals of availability, most men simply got the message. At the tavern, he would call Sonja and tell her he’d be late — maybe even say he was giving a student a ride home. It was turning into a bad night, with rain falling on already slick roads. He wondered whether the tavern would be empty or crowded and decided it would be crowded; by this point in the winter, everybody was woods crazy. A beagle wandered onto the road, and he braked, thinking it a raccoon, at first, later realizing it was someone’s dog that had a high-hipped swagger. He kept his eyes on the dog, transfixed by the animal though he couldn’t say why. It was a fat beagle, old, probably used to crossing this road, because it was suddenly gone, disappearing through a hole in the fence and vanishing into the darkness.
“I don’t think I should,” Cheryl Lanier said.
“You don’t think you should what?” he said, playing it cool about the meaning of his hand holding hers.
“Tell you,” she said. “I mean, Livan made me promise.”
“Well, you don’t have to,” he said. “But if you want to, the secret’s safe with me.”
“Secrets never stay safe,” she said.
A cliché, but it gave him a moment’s pause. “You mean,” he said, “you’ve never confided anything that has stayed confidential?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “How would I know? The next person who was told wouldn’t be likely to repeat it to me, would they? They might tell somebody else, but they wouldn’t tell me.” She sank lower in the seat. “You know Professor McCallum?” she said.
Jack McCallum. Nice looking, Harvard man, interested in literary theory, managed to get his salary raised every couple of years because he was always hunted by other colleges. A mean softball pitch, a brown bagger, a recent convert to Catholicism. “Bless you,” McCallum had said to him, earlier that week, when Marshall loaned him Gide’s Strait Is the Gate, a book McCallum had had trouble getting. Did he know him? No, he didn’t really know him, but that seemed an unnecessarily oblique answer.
“Livan’s his research assistant,” Cheryl said. “They went to Boston in November, over Thanksgiving break, to do research at the Boston Public Library.”
“I don’t assume that’s all that happened?”
Another beagle darted in front of the headlights, moving dangerously close to his car. That’s all I need, he thought, to kill a dog. He wondered if it might be the same beagle: if the dog might have circled around at a greater speed than the car in order to tempt fate one more time. Not likely, yet it reminded him of being a young child, having no sense of distance or time, thinking the craziest things might be possible. That if you sat on your horse on the carousel and kept waving your arm with your fist forward, you could catch up with the other horses. There had been a carnival in their town when he and Gordon were young, and the two of them had gone constantly, their pleading so frenzied their father had simply given in, and he and Gordon had made up a series of rituals they thought would make their desires materialize: if you could blink fifteen times before you passed the devil’s face in the ride in the dark, you’d find money on the ground when you exited; if you said “Whirl” out loud every time the Tilt-a-Whirl circled, the ride would last longer. But, he thought, this wasn’t a ride on a gilded horse, and he wasn’t seated in a metal cage that would twirl around a tipping disk; here were two people in a car, about to have a conversation in which would be revealed — no matter what ritualistic incantation he might try to banish the announcement — that sometime after Thanksgiving, McCallum had screwed Cheryl Lanier’s roommate in Boston. He turned his head sideways to receive this information. As he did, Cheryl reached up with her gloved hand and touched him briefly, lightly, on the jaw. It was so unexpected, and so intimate, that his mouth dropped open. It was the way a person would touch you if they loved you, or perhaps if their own sadness was inexpressible except through touch. Was she this sad? Was he?