“It’s just that I was crazy,” he went on. “That’s it. Crazy, Mary. What we had scared me. It was a frightening thing. I had never been in love. You know that. I fought it. Like an idiot, I stifled it until I was the one in control.”
Mary wondered, Is this happening? Am I here, really, in body?
“So, you’re almost at your seminar,” he said then, shyly, just like a boy. And it was this boyishness that she had always found charming about Dennis Flaherty-the fact that he could be so innocent, so harmless, yet his intelligence was always there, like some dogged energy that he could reveal just at the precise moment.
They talked. Mary lost track of the time. At first she was nervous-she tucked her hands into the couch cushions, laughed too loudly, kicked off her shoes and slid them with her toes across the rug so that there would be some background noise, something to take his mind off the gigantic beating of her heart-but after a while she fell into a natural pattern with him. It was as if they were together again.
When the sounds from upstairs had slowed, the scrapings and thumpings of footsteps, she knew it had gotten late. But here was Dennis, still on her arm, looking at her. What did he expect from her? He probably expected things to return to normal, to how they’d been two years ago. No way, Mary thought. There was no way she could just forget about Savannah Kleppers and all that he had done to hurt Mary two years ago.
“I like you, Mary,” he was saying.
She breathed, and she felt him breathe beside her. A dual rhythm. The old couch puffing out a musty, disused odor from its cushions every time one of them shifted.
“Dennis,” she said flatly.
“Yes?” It was almost a whisper, coquettish in a strange way. So harmless.
“I’m going to go home. I’m going to think about this, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He was smiling at her, his eyes soft and pleading. The smile talked, as most of Dennis’s gestures did. It said, Come here.
“Please,” she said, looking away. She felt his gaze, his breath on her neck. She would have given in to it had she sat there for two more minutes. A feeling was building up inside her, that old and lost roil. That urge.
She began to stand up.
Then, perhaps feeling her pulling away, he said, “I know where Polly is.”
His words didn’t register with her for a moment. He was still looking at her, his stare now active. Then it dawned on Mary what he was propositioning, and the knowledge fell on her like an anvil. Like she had been crushed. Waylaid by it.
Of course. He was trying to get her into bed by telling her the secret.
The goddamned bastard.
She managed to fully stand. Her knees were weak, and she was in that early stage of drunkenness where everything was lurchy and loose. She made her way to the steps, one uneasy step at a time.
“Wait,” he called after her.
She kept walking, moving up into the light of Williams’s home.
“Mary,” he begged. “Your shoes.”
Too late, she realized that she had forgotten her shoes. She had kicked them off downstairs, and now they were the property of Dennis Flaherty. No worries. They were old, anyway, from high school. She would get new ones.
Mary emerged into the living room. A few people still buzzed around. Williams was sitting on one of the leather sofas, his hand gesturing wildly, talking to Troy. “Mary!” he said when he saw her, too loudly, too awkwardly. He got off the sofa and approached her, did a funny little bow. “Thanks for coming,” he said. He, too, was a little drunk, his eyes nervous and kinetic. Then he saw her bare toes, and she explained that Dennis had her shoes and he would return them to her.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
She couldn’t focus on him. He was blurred, fuzzy. Swerving. Another awkward moment: she shook his hand. “Well,” she managed. And still he smiled that actor’s smile. Brian had called it-what had he called it? Scripted. Yes, Mary concurred now. There was something fake about it, something positively unreal.
As she was leaving, she thought, My jacket. She found her way into the back room. The kid was asleep in the master bedroom, and Della Williams was beside him. She had the television on. The coats were piled up next to the sleeping boy. Mary dug out her jacket and put it on. As she was zipping it the woman turned and looked at her. Della still had her dress on, was still wearing her shoes, buckles and a sensible square heel. Her legs were bare and bruised in various places, Mary noticed.
“Good-bye,” she said.
“Bye,” Mary replied.
“I wanted to give someone this,” Della Williams said anxiously, “but I could never decide who.” She revealed a slip of paper, its edges soft and moist from her hand. “Don’t read it until you’re outside.”
Mary knew what that meant: Don’t let him see it.
She left the house and ran across Montgomery Street and back onto campus, the bottoms of her feet slapping the pavement. She ran across the grass of the Great Lawn, sticks tearing at her stockings, the grass wet and cold on her toes. When she was under a security light, in the alleyway that ran beside the Orman Library and opened up onto the viaduct, she unfolded the slip of paper the woman had given her.
None of this is real, it read. I AM NOT HIS WIFE.
Two Weeks Left
20
Actors.
On Monday afternoon, Brian House went out looking for them. When Jason Nettles told him about Cale, his first thought had been, That’s how I can find the girl from the party. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt like driving to Cale might reveal them all. Detective Thurman, the Polly he’d met, maybe even Williams himself. He now knew that he had been tricked. They had all been tricked. The boundary between Logic and Reasoning 204 and the real world had been altered by Williams, reconstituted by the man’s deception. Brian had found himself wondering if any of it was genuine-his other professors, people he met at parties (he had not even dared hit on a girl after the Polly incident in Chop), even his roommate. Always, wherever he went, he felt this uneasiness, this fear that the world was coming unglued on him and turning inside out, its mechanisms becoming exposed like the sharp springs of an old mattress biting through the foam.