In each of the following sentences, underline the direct object once and the indirect object twice. Not all sentences have an indirect object.
1. I gave Renfield instructions not to wake me until sunset.
2. Lizzie offered her father a close shave that morning.
3. Oliver, have you told Mr. Fagin about the missing waller?
4. Vita showed Virginia a thing or two.
5. Eagerly, Oscar taught Bosie the backstroke.
6. Sid gave Nancy the surprise of her life.
7. Affectionately, Mrs. Donner gave Jeffrey a second helping.
8. Tara offered Willow a token of her affection.
9. After a delicious Irish stew, Mr. Swift told us his modest proposal.
10. Norman gave his mother a carving knife for her birthday.
Paul complained bitterly about Bonnie at home, especially on those days when she had caught him asleep in front of his monitor in the middle of the afternoon. What he didn’t tell Kym was that most of his coworkers were pert and stylish young women ten years younger than him, women just out of college who wore airy sundresses or tight, wraparound skirts to the office all summer long and decorated their cubes semi-ironically with magazine photos of pretty-boy actors. Some of these girls found Paul’s wiseass bitterness intriguing, and they slouched fetchingly in his cube doorway and flirted with him about books and movies, grad school life, or last night’s episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of them, a dark little Russian emigré named Oksana who worked in the Harbridge science department, took Paul into her bed on the evenings when Kym was working. Oksana had a wry twist to her lips and an adorable accent. “Say ‘moose and squirrel,’ ” he’d murmured to her in the clinch, and she’d slapped him on the backside and whispered salacious Russian in his ear.
On those evenings when Kym was working and moody Oksana did not want to see him, Paul haunted the coffeehouses near the campus, where he could eye bohemian young women or intense graduate students in sleeveless blouses over a copy of the local alternative weekly. He had prepared a story to explain his situation in case he managed to engage one of these thrilling women in conversation; the last thing he wanted them to know was that he was a failed English professor. Instead, he told them that he was a former writer/producer for The X-Files, and that he had walked away from his television career and moved to Lamar to write a novel. “I wanted to get out before the show went down the tubes,” he was going to tell them, and he had prepared answers to the questions he thought he was likely to get: “He’s an asshole.” “She’s even smarter than she looks.” And “I wrote the ones about worms. If it had a worm or worms in it, that one was mine.” But in the end, he wasn’t able to use the story. In one of the coffeehouses, a renovated old house with creaking floors and mismatched couches and easy chairs, he ran into Virginia Dunning, an old friend of his ex-wife’s from graduate school. Paul had always considered Virginia a bit too, well, virginal for his taste, but since he had known her in Hamilton Groves she had picked up a mordant wit that Paul found instantly attractive. To Paul’s astonishment and envy, Virginia was not only a tenured full professor before she was thirty, she was already chair of the Longhorn State History Department. To his further surprise she invited him back that first night to her little Texas bungalow, where, as luck would have it, she lived with a cat, whose name was Sam, and who put his ears back and flattened himself to the floorboards at the sight of his mistress and Paul coming through the door. “Don’t mind him,” said Virginia, “he’s an idiot.” Paul laughed, but he wasn’t quite sure if Virginia was talking to him or to the cat.
Virginia’s avidity in bed was yet another surprise. “I’ve never fucked a department chair before,” he murmured in her ear, and Virginia flung him onto his back, straddled him, and said, “Let’s see if you’re tenure material, Professor.” Afterwards she rolled over and went to sleep, and on the drive home, Paul had time to contemplate the three women in his life, none of whom knew about the other two. He’d told Oksana that he lived alone, and he’d told Virginia that he was working as an “independent scholar,” a dodge he’d come across during his abortive attempt to write a book. Rattling home through the hot Texas night, Paul thought, my life could be worse.
Shortly thereafter, it was. Oksana discovered Paul and Virginia tête à tête one evening in a coffeehouse near campus, while Kym coincidentally happened to be on the television set in the corner, making vapid small talk with the Weather Gnome. Oksana stalked across the creaking floorboards, screaming abuse in Russian. Then, as Virginia looked on in astonishment, Oksana emptied her double latte into Paul’s lap and stalked off, pausing only to add, in her adorably accented English, “Focking esshole!”
Oddly enough, this incident didn’t seem to bother Virginia, who simply shrugged it off. But later that same night, as Paul followed Virginia into her bungalow, Sam went into his crouch, hissing and growling before he bolted from sight.
“Idiot,” muttered Virginia.
“I don’t think he’s hissing at you,” Paul said, still brushing at the coffee stain on his trousers. “He’s hissing at your dog.”
“What dog?” Virginia whirled on him.
“That big black dog that came in right behind you,” Paul said. “I assumed he was yours.” He glanced about Virginia’s living room. “I don’t see him now.”
Virginia stared at him, all the blood draining from her face. “Get out!” she gasped.
“Sorry?”
She drew a shuddering breath, as if gasping for air at high altitude, and shouted, “Get out!”
“Is this about the girl at the coffeehouse?” Paul asked, as she slammed the door in his face. “I can explain that!”
The following morning he lost his job at the textbook company. A sharp-eyed copy editor had caught some of Paul’s subliminal messages, and that morning the efforts of the entire department had been diverted to reading through every grammar exercise written in the last six months.
“ ‘EAT ME SATAN’?” said Bonnie, gleeful with schadenfreude. “I suppose you think that’s funny?”
In the end Paul was escorted from the building by a beefy security guard who repeatedly called him “sir” as he yanked Paul’s arm up behind his back and marched him to the elevator on his tiptoes.
“I have a real Ph.D. from a real goddamn university, not some peckerwood teacher’s college in Arkansas!” Paul shouted. “I graduated summa cum laude! I was a finalist for a Guggenheim!” He glimpsed Bonnie’s triumphant gaze one last time, and he shook with rage in the guard’s painful grip.
“You fucking cow!” he roared as the elevator doors closed. “I was almost a Fulbright!”
By late that evening, Paul was drunk on wine coolers, the only alcohol Kym allowed in the house on the theory that they were less fattening than beer. He lounged in bed watching cable, a clinking heap of empties beneath the bedside table. Hypnotized by the endless whine of some NASCAR race on ESPN, he dirtily heard the front door slam and managed to push himself up in bed as Kym posed primly in the doorway in her lime green on-air suit, broad in the shoulders and nipped in at the waist.
“We have to talk,” she said, very gravely.
“I can explain,” Paul said immediately. In his fruity stupor he tried to cipher out what Kym knew and how she knew it.
“I’m in love with someone else,” she announced, luckily before he started to stammer about Oksana, Virginia, and the loss of his job.