Always Happy Hour: Stories(8)

There are two ponds, a tennis court, a lumpy croquet court, and an overgrown baseball field. There is an old home site, steps leading to nowhere that someone roped off with vines. There are two garages. In one of them, I found the famous writer’s baseball cards scattered all over the floor and a neat stack of postcards, the paper cheaply curled. The photograph on the postcard must have been taken there: bare wooden slats behind him, blue jean shirt, staring directly into the camera. He was younger then, and newly famous. The watch on his wrist sits oddly high on his arm. His wedding band seems to be sliding off his finger.

The famous writer and his wife are everywhere: their names carved into the driveway, wallpaper they picked out themselves. His books on the shelf, unsigned, worthless. They aren’t dead but they’re gone, which is a little bit like being dead, and which is, perhaps, the reason I keep moving. This has been my life for so long now: counting the number of paychecks until the paychecks run out and I have to find new paychecks, new boyfriends and friends and living arrangements. There is so much promise in these new places that I can almost convince myself I’ll be different there.

I looked up the baseball cards on eBay and found they weren’t worth much so I gave them to the chair of the English department to mail back to him. Perhaps it might mean something, my gesture of goodwill.

My students roam about, taking pictures to send to their mothers and aunts, the women who buy his books and have made him so rich he can afford to donate his house and land to the university. They take pictures of the staircase, the carpets. They take pictures out the windows.

“I scare you,” I say to the boy. His skin turns red and splotchy. It is remarkable, his skin, a defect, but so pretty. I like people whose insecurities are obvious, when I don’t have to pull them out of them.

“I’m not scared of anything,” he says, taking a slug of his beer. He’s from one of the O states—Ohio or Oklahoma—either way, it means nothing to me. Earlier he touched the side of the house and talked about the grain of wood. He has come here for graduate school and seems to have no idea how he got to this place or why; he wears blazers and collared shirts as if he might learn by dressing the part but it only makes him stand out more.

I imagine unbuttoning his too-tight pants, taking him upstairs to my bedroom. The other students listening as they eat slices of pizza. They say on your deathbed you only regret the things you didn’t do and I remember a time when this was the case, when I could picture myself alone in a hospital room and there was nothing I would take back, nothing I would do differently.

The boy is unfailingly late to every class, and every time, he is sorry. During break, he has to run to Starbucks for coffee and sometimes there’s a long line—totally out of his control. There are other issues as well: he talks too much; he has a lot of opinions and I almost never agree with any of them but I nod and make neutral-sounding noises while admiring the way he has styled his hair, his nose. And his skin, I love his skin, how it betrays him. I play mediator between him and the other person in class—a very pretty but emaciated young woman who constantly talks about food—who also has strong opinions, and marvel over the fact that they can be so passionate, because I, too, believe I am right, that everyone who disagrees with me is wrong.

It hasn’t been long since I was a graduate student, and I don’t know how to be anyone’s teacher. In an undergraduate psychology course—so many years ago now—my favorite professor said he didn’t think of himself as a professor; he considered his own professors the real professors and they must have thought of theirs as the real professors and so no one was ever truly real. We’re all just derivatives, he said, pretending. He had married one of his students. Businessmen marry their secretaries and professors marry their students. But I am a woman and I won’t marry this boy; I might have sex with him, but I won’t marry him. I like to think I have some say in the matter.

I hate this house, I think, as I stand in the kitchen with its two dishwashers and double oven, the Sub-Zero refrigerator. There are so many cabinets that I often open three or four before I find what I’m looking for. I imagine lying under the canopy of a magnolia tree until someone comes to scoop me up, but I could lie there for days and no one would come. Perhaps on the fifth day my mother would have gotten worried enough to call the university. She once had the police do a welfare check on my sister in Nashville; two officers came to her door and she’d had to explain, after which she was horrified and refused to speak to our mother for weeks, and so our mother is less inclined to react.

I’m supposed to be working on my second novel but I can’t write because there’s all this time and space and no one watching, no one checking in; only one day a week that I have to show up to teach. I don’t even know if I want to be a writer anymore. I’ve become so self-conscious of what I’m writing and why, and whether I ever had any talent in the first place. My sister—who left the music business for a job in nursing—says that nearly every band’s first album is their best because they’re working in a vacuum; there’s no outside pressure to be something or to do something great. And so I spend the majority of my time watching cable, which I haven’t had in years. I watch the ID Channel and consider becoming a detective, or committing a murder. I think I could do either sufficiently well at this point. I only watch it during the day because if I fall asleep when it’s on the stories seep into my dreams: people missing, rape, women buried alive with their hands bound as if in prayer.