Vladimir(35)

When I opened my eyes, there was a halo of light surrounding a mass of hair that could be compared to a lion’s mane were it not so shiny and well-coiffed. Florence. Florence once said at a faculty retreat that the only thing she would bring on a desert island was a round brush. “And that’s all you need to know,” I said to anyone who would listen. She taught postmodernism, apparently quite well, but it was nearly impossible to imagine her reading a book. She was around forty, and her uniform was aggressively “hot”: short dresses, high-heeled boots, big earrings, ripped tights. She had enviable long legs, which she would furl and unfurl excessively, like an anthropomorphized spider. Her use of uptalk was deliberate and defensive, and she spoke primarily about recipes and restaurants and her children’s extracurricular activities. In most faculty meetings she complained about labor and how she didn’t want to do it. She purposefully misunderstood the pact that tenured faculty had: the exchange of volunteered service for the security and freedom of her position. After she got tenure she never published, and she was late to everything. She was contradictory as a way of life—challenging any statement or assumption made in our meetings. She could be fun—there was one night about six or so years back that she and I embarked on a caper after a dean’s cocktail hour that ended up with her getting a summons for public urination—but as a colleague she was a dud.

She had been especially irritating about John. Like many beautiful-ish women, she was obsessed with the idea of men sexually trespassing. To hear her speak, she had never had an encounter with any man that had not resulted in some form of the man expressing his longing for her or taking advantage of her. I secretly thought she was offended that John hadn’t invited her to join him in a tryst, although she was the kind of woman John would stay away from out of instinct. She had led the charge to say that he could not teach this year, even before his hearing, and she resigned from the budgetary committee, saying she could not sit in the room with “that man,” though we all knew she had joined the budgetary committee only after a performance review that threatened penalization if she didn’t sign up for at least one working group (I, for example, was on four).

I straightened myself up to greet her and saw she was with David. David, my old lover, currently the interim chair while John was suspended. In the past, God, almost twenty years, David had declined. When we came together he was a lean, compact man with a shaved bald head that I loved to rub my hands over, to feel between my breasts. He had a strong forehead and a prominent nose, which could physically arouse me by sight. At the height of our coupling, I would catch a glimpse of his nose during a meeting and could manipulate myself, using the ridge of the chair and my muscles, into a small, secret orgasm.

David was now fifty pounds overweight and dissipated. He no longer shaved his head, but wore a little tonsure of short hair surrounding his shiny pate, a style that made him look like the character-actor version of a tax accountant. His nose had lengthened into a beak, with an extra bit of hanging cartilage at the tip. He dressed as an afterthought—I am sure his wife bought shirts and slacks for him in bulk and he accepted them like a prisoner accepts their uniform. Ah, but I shouldn’t be so mean to David. For years I had focused on his flaws. It was the only way I could survive his great betrayal. Was I pleased when I compared him with my husband, whose light hair and eyes allowed him to fade so gracefully into age? Who was still vain, who used the gym more than the library, who dog-eared pages in fashionable men’s catalogues? Certainly I was. But I would wager that David, with his meaty, masculine fingers, could still be a thrilling lover: focused, playful, receptive. He had marked the end of my experimentation, the commencement of my unimpeachable existence. Our affair lived in my thoughts like a once-loved but mostly forgotten piece of music, popping into my head occasionally, bringing all sorts of feelings.

He lost a son, many years after we ended things, in a freak accident at a lake. At the funeral he had embraced me tightly and whispered in my ear, “See?” I didn’t see. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t see. During our affair, he had not had any understanding, unspoken or otherwise, with his wife. Guilt about leaving his family had prevented what I had believed at the time was my greatest chance at happiness. His son was born a year after we ended things. I assumed he was putting all his sexual energy back into his marriage, doubling down on the life he chose. His “See” seemed to suggest that he believed the punishment would have been much worse if we had gone overseas, that the death of his son was already a result of his transgression. Understandable in the moment, at the peak of shock and sadness, but ultimately ridiculous. Grief makes people wild in their thought. As if we are ever punished or rewarded in that kind of way—a random tragic death in exchange for a secret indiscretion. Since his son died David moved through the world heavily, as though his entire body was draped in the lead apron one wears for X-rays. I never liked that “See.” It was like a line written by an aspirational Ibsen or Strindberg or Bergman, some Scandinavian obsessed with being haunted by their actions—a line that sounded like a profound truth, but meant nothing.

“Tired?” Florence looked at me with irritating sympathy. I shook my head. “No, I just closed my eyes for a moment.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “This fall weather makes me tired. Hot in the sun, cold in the shade, I close the door of my office and take a twenty-minute nap, then wake up and eat some chocolate-covered raisins and it’s like I’m a new woman. Do you nap, David?”