“Wow,” Josie said, looking around again. “I’m so used to living with a ton of other people—it would be weird, but really awesome, to have a whole house to yourself.” There was a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she were actually imagining herself in the rooms of Shelly’s house, ambling between them on her own, considering what it would be like if they were hers.
“Well,” Shelly said. “It’s definitely better than—”
“A fucking sorority,” Josie said, and took another sip of her drink, looking demurely away from Shelly. She’d never said the word fucking in front of Shelly before—although, once, when the printer made three times the number of a long document than it was supposed to, Shelly had heard Josie shout, “Shit!”
Shelly cleared her throat. “Well, do you have to live at the sorority?” She hated the sound of her own voice, and the frumpy way she was holding her robe around her.
At the gym, lifting weights, looking at herself in the mirror, Shelly felt physical, powerful, beautiful. She flushed easily, and knew that men were looking at her. But in the presence of Josie Reilly—in the presence of a girl whose body had been through only nineteen, twenty years—she knew that the kind of admiration she got from men at the gym meant nothing. Here before her, in the form of Josie Reilly, was the embodiment of beauty and youth. This girl had just barely emerged from the cocoon of childhood. In fact, Shelly thought she could see a film of something like dew on Josie’s neck, on her chest, and she even thought she could smell something wafting off of her limbs like pond water—rank and sweet at the same time, so potent.
Why, Shelly thought soberly then, was she letting this happen?
Was this happening?
Never once had she thought of herself as the kind of old dyke who would sleep with a student, a girl. The only women she’d ever found herself attracted to in the past had been her own age, or older. She’d disliked the lesbians she knew who kept women half their ages, and paid their rent. It was so obviously nothing but physical—and wasn’t part of the point, the point of being a woman who’d chosen women over men, to reject that kind of objectification? To reject that abuse of power?
She was, after all, Josie Reilly’s boss. And the girl was less than half her age. But she was also radiating, indisputably, on Shelly’s couch, her own inalienable power:
She’d stretched out. One leg was extended luxuriously on the couch. Her fingers continued to move through her silky black hair. Her short top had made its way higher, and two lovely inches of white, flat stomach had been exposed. Under her arms was the downiest bit of unshaven hair. One of the straps of her tank top had slipped over her shoulder bone, and now the top of her right breast was exposed. It was painful to look at, and impossible not to stare. Josie rested her coffee cup on her crotch, and looked at Shelly and asked, “Do you have anything to eat? Like, a sandwich or something?”
36
It was impossible not to stare at Professor Polson as she cooked. Like Perry’s mother, she cracked the eggs with one hand, and then tossed the shells into the sink. She didn’t measure anything. Two burners were glowing blue on the stove at the same time. She grated cheese straight into the pan of scrambled eggs.
Professor Polson reminded him of his mother, but she was also like a girl Perry’s own age—hair uncombed, falling around her face in a mass of curls and tangles. Her hands were full, so she used her shoulder to push the hair out of the way as she leaned over the stove. In her jeans and Indian-print shirt, she could easily have passed for a college girl. She was thin. Even a little bony. You would not have known she’d given birth to twins. He imagined that she didn’t eat a lot, because she also didn’t look athletic. In Bad Axe the only women he knew who were mothers and weren’t overweight were the athletes: the hikers and bikers and swimmers. Or the smokers. The alcoholics. Professor Polson looked healthy, but she did not look like someone who worked out at a gym or who spent much time outdoors. She looked, Perry supposed, exactly like what she was: a reader, a writer, a teacher. Someone who’d spent her life studying something very particular and obscure, and who’d become an expert on it because she was more interested in it than anyone else had ever been or might ever be again.
And at the same time that Professor Polson reminded him of women like his mother, his aunts, the mothers of his friends—and also girls like Mary, Nicole, Josie Reilly, even Karess Flanagan—she was also nothing like them.
She was neither young nor old, fashionable nor out of touch. Professor Polson existed somewhere in between the worlds of the mothers he knew and the girls he knew, and he could not take his eyes off of her as she peeled slices of ham out of a plastic package and dropped them onto a skillet, where they shriveled up quickly and filled the kitchen with the smell of meat and maple. He was, he realized, ravenous.
They’d talked for hours since he’d come back to the apartment, he guessed. He’d lost track of time. But it was pitch-black night when he’d returned, and now the sun was shining through her apartment windows. Hours had to have passed.
After the interview, when they’d left Professor Polson’s apartment, Perry had walked Lucas back to his place, and then he’d turned around, intending to go back to his own apartment. But he’d found himself instead walking directly toward the Omega Theta Tau house.
The rain had stopped at some point during Lucas’s interview, and now the streets were shining with dampness in the moonlight. The sky was completely clear, looking as if some kind of blue-black satin had been rolled in enormous bolts all through the town. The moon was somewhere close to full, but not quite, and it turned the branches of the trees to a kind of parody of October—spooky, damp. Leaves had blown out of the trees during the storm and lay in tatters in the streets, and on the sidewalk, on the lawns. They caught at the toes of Perry’s shoes.
He couldn’t help himself.
He had to go there.
He had to stand outside the house.
He had a feeling, and when he’d had that feeling before, she had appeared, or seemed to appear.
Perry had already known, more or less, the story Lucas was going to tell Professor Polson, but it had terrified him anyway. The matter-of-factness of the account. The mundane details. Lucas’s plainspoken, shamed recounting of events. It had required self-restraint for Perry to keep himself seated, listening. More than once, he’d had the urge to flee. He’d seen himself in his dark suit again, pictured himself in Bad Axe at the funeral, walking with the coffin on his shoulder, the terrible, solid, indisputable shifting of weight inside the coffin when Nicole’s cousin stumbled as they carried her out of the church and into the hearse.
And there were other things he remembered.
Back in his dorm room, in Godwin Hall, just those few weeks before the accident.
Told you, didn’t I?
Nicole had kissed him afterward, and stood up, and, as she was buttoning her shirt, had said, “Told you, didn’t I? I knew you wanted to fuck me, and that you would.” Then, she put on her clothes, closed the door behind her—somehow managing to leave her panties at the foot of the bed for Craig to find (although Craig didn’t recognize them, and instead teased Perry mercilessly, pitifully, about his “mystery slut”). Why had she done that? It could not have been a mistake. He’d known Nicole most of his life. She wasn’t ever sloppy. Even in kindergarten she’d been the first one to throw her empty milk carton away, or fold up her nap mat.