Vladimir(15)

I did worry that something about the afternoon had made us appear parental to him. John wasn’t exactly slapping me on the ass, or throwing his arm around me and kissing me, but we were pretending, and enjoying to pretend, a communication and solidarity we hadn’t felt in a long while. Had Vlad’s wife been there, we would have been two couples, peers, fellow academics and coworkers. But because she was gone, we seemed to take on the role of an august mentor couple. And why shouldn’t we, I kept telling myself. John was sixty-three, I was fifty-eight, and although I wasn’t really old enough to be his mother, I was old enough to be his mother. He continued to flirt with both of us throughout the evening, laughing loudly and repeatedly touching me on the arm and shoulder, so much so that he even commented on and apologized for it and I shrugged it off, pretending I hadn’t noticed.

I drove the conversation toward intellectual concerns and politics, forcing discussion like I would do with my students. We talked about the rise of autofiction, and how most of the creative-writing students at the college did not even want to write fiction, but creative nonfiction instead, and primarily autofiction and memoir. I said it was because they were so obsessed with themselves they couldn’t imagine existing outside of their viewpoint. John said it came from an anxiety about representing identities and experiences other than their own. Vlad posited it was because they had grown up online, representing themselves via avatars, building brands and presences and constructions of selves before they even knew that’s what they were doing. We talked about the rise of populist ideology, both on the left and the right. Cautiously sidestepping any Title IX discussion, we talked about how different the college used to be—rigorous but freewheeling (drugs, drinking, sex)—and how neutered the kids were now, calling their moms every day, prizing friendship over romance. Philomena drank so much lemonade that she threw up on Vlad’s shirt. John lent him a linen button-down—the kind of shirt for touring amphitheaters during Grecian summers, and, with it hanging off his tanned body, Vlad looked like Jay Gatsby, or the owner of a yacht. When, finally, Philomena fell asleep on the couch, Vlad picked her up in his arms to leave. Truthfully, he said, he was just so relieved that he didn’t have to do bedtime. He had been hoping she would fall asleep in the car ride on the way home, but this was even better.

We watched him go from the front doorway. As his car pulled out of the driveway John leaned down and whispered, “Are you in love?” and I walked away from him so quickly it was as if I jumped. He followed me into the kitchen and began to help me clean in silence, but after a few minutes in which his bustling presence became more and more unbearable, I snapped at him to leave me alone.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I had drunk more alcohol than usual that afternoon, and though I knew I was angry with him, I also knew I wouldn’t be able to find the correct phrasing to tell him why. He pressed and pressed, becoming more and more aggressive, until finally I told him to fuck off, and that as far as I was concerned he was a sadist. It wasn’t the right word, but I couldn’t express how he had taken a beautiful, almost spiritual afternoon, the kind of afternoon one remembers long after it has passed, and ruined it, for no reason, with his cruel and leering comment. In response, he, drunker than me, volatile and irascible, emptied the full recycling bag he was holding on to the floor, so that beer bottles and plastic clamshells tumbled out onto the tile. He told me I was a miserable woman and accused me of taking a shit on every nice thing, all because of what other people thought, not even what I thought. I told him what people thought had nothing to do with anything, and besides, he was the one who took a shit on things, he was the one, he did that, and then I lowered my voice and told him I couldn’t go on like this anymore. He told me fine then, please, file for divorce, please, miming begging gestures and histrionically picking up the scattered recycling he had spilled and throwing it back into the bag. I watched his display with what I knew was a look of ugly disdain, then laughed and told him not to worry, that I was seriously considering it. He paused, then threw the empty tin can he was holding at the wall to my right and let loose on me a torrent of blame and expletives so foul and hideous that I can’t repeat them other than to say that by the end I felt like there was a sandbag in my stomach, and my head hurt from crying, and my limbs felt limp, and I couldn’t finish cleaning, I could barely even walk to my bed before succumbing to a sleep that felt like the heaviness of death.

The next morning we resumed our distant cohabitation, contrite but bruised from our inebriated altercation. I wrote to Vladimir about his book. I told him that I deeply admired it and that I would like to take him out to lunch once the semester “got rolling” to discuss it. I hadn’t brought it up the day before because John hadn’t read it, and I didn’t want to hurt Vladimir or embarrass John. As the day wore on and I didn’t hear back from him, I began to feel more and more sick about what had transpired at our home the day before. I went over it in my mind—was I too eager, somehow tense or hovering? Was he mad about the lemonade, or did I talk too much in the conversation? Did I interrupt him—I was known to interrupt, I hated this about myself. Did he think I was merely unworthy of his time and respect? But no, no, I didn’t want to work myself up like that, it was Sunday, he wasn’t on his email, nobody writes back right away on a Sunday.

At around two in the afternoon I took a drive (with my phone on Do Not Disturb and locked in the glove box) to my cabin near the lake, an hour north and west of where we were, where the reception was nonexistent unless you hooked up to the Wi-Fi. The last renter of the season had gone the week before and I needed to bring in the outdoor furniture and lock up the boats before it was too cold. I had received an inheritance when one of my childless uncles on my father’s side died, a moderate sum of money with which I bought a modest amount of property with a little entryway to a medium-sized lake that didn’t allow motors. After clearing and replanting the trees and leveling the ground I bought a prefabricated, non-winterized log cabin and had it installed along with a dock. I had purchased it as a retreat for myself, a summer writing cabin, though since it was built I had rented it out, first to help pay for Sidney’s college, then law school, and now to help her with her student loan debt.