Vladimir(9)

I stopped making dinner when Sidney left the house for college ten years ago, unless we were having people over or I was struck with some urge. The end to cooking had been a relief to both of us—I had certainly resented the endless tick in the back of my mind, what will we have for dinner, that would start up at noon each day, and John had resented my resentment. After John and I had dropped her off at Wellesley and driven back, and I spent a tear-drenched twenty-four hours in bed, I announced the end of my culinary career. Instead, I tried to keep a well-stocked pantry and fridge—roast chickens and eggs and vegetables and sausages and salami and lentils and olives and smoked salmon and whitefish and fruits and yogurts and cheeses and grains and breads and nuts. Salads from delis—all the things one likes to eat that can be easily assembled. Which is to say we didn’t eat together. We used to gather breakfast and meet on the porch, but when I was trying to reestablish my morning writing practice I started taking my food upstairs with me. We used to have a cocktail hour around 6 p.m. to check in with each other, but a few years ago I found it hard to maintain my ideal weight unless I curtailed my daily drinking.

We traveled (still very well) as a couple, and, of course, we saw each other at work. Our offices were on the same floor in our small department at our small college—the walk from his to mine was less than ten loping paces. And it was at work, when we could pretend that the personal didn’t exist between us, where I would feel my resistance to him, so stubborn at home, slide off. Here, we dealt with the common enemy. Here, I could be his ally. It was like the early days between us. If we were ever feeling at emotional odds with each other, distant or angry, we knew that the only thing we would need to do was go visit his parents. After less than eight hours of his father’s Marine-style barking and his mother’s glazed disassociation we would fall into each other’s arms with relief and unity, so glad to be who we were, together.

He rubbed his forehead back and forth in my hair. I pushed him away. Clearly, he was restless today, eager for someone’s companionship. “What do you want?” I asked him. He looked at me chastened. All this drama at the college had brought out his neediness—more and more these days he played the part of the old dog that has done something wrong coming to look for the approval of its master, all contrite sweetness. More and more I played the part of the angry owner, pushing the dog away, knowing it would always return. It was bad behavior on both our parts, the patterns were dangerous. John was not a happy fool, and he was not content to sidle up to me day after day only to be rejected over and over again. At some point he would decide he had been mishandled too many times, and he would bite back hard.

What I had said to Vladimir the other night, when he visited, had been true. I had known about the affairs, the existence of them. I had known they were with students. But I hadn’t known the details about the behavior, which, as such details have been revealed, are more unsettling than I cared to admit. For example, there are records of 1,183 text messages exchanged between John, fifty-five at the time, and Frannie Thompson, twenty-two. I find the mental image of my husband with his fat thumbs on his phone, texting back and forth with this young woman—who, as far as I knew, had a certain transplant-from-the-city élan and nice and shiny hair, but no real humor—very undignified. When I think of his little excitements at his own quips, the amount of time he spent caressing that device with quivery anticipation when he could have been doing something worthwhile, it all feels grotesque.

I also had not expected that I would be caught in the fray. The tide had been shifting away from his behavior being acceptable since even before we received our PhDs, I knew that. There were always whispers about him, and occasionally a new and drunk colleague would, with righteousness, confess to me that they knew about one of his indiscretions, and I would have to explain to them our arrangement. But because he was a general advocate of women in academia and women writers, and was committed to all sorts of social justice and diversity initiatives in the college—because, in effect, his politics were not only impeccable but admirable—I, not as his wife, but as a professional, along with the rest of the college, had collectively decided to look the other way. These women were of age. The whispers remained whispers and nothing more. That’s the way it is in these schools. I was a beloved teacher, my classes were waitlisted. I was fit and stylish and until around forty-five I was occasionally mistaken for a student. My last name was different from John’s. Outside of the department, not many people knew we were married.

However, when the wave of accusations and the petition came, I found that suddenly everyone knew that I was the wife of the disgraced chair. Toward the end of the spring semester, I was sitting in my office when a group of five young women from my Adaptations class entered, giggling with what was clearly their own sense of self-importance and buoyed-up enthusiasm they had roused in whatever cabal they’d had before. I invited them in, and they exchanged daring glances until Kacee, clad in a flowered baby doll and lace stockings with a Japanime hairstyle—two buns, one on each side of her head—a girl who would attach a pen cap to the fat bottom part of her lip during class and “accidentally” pull her shirt down so that one nipple was exposed, a girl who always laughed too loudly at anything the one very handsome boy said in class, stepped forward.

“We wanted to talk to you, um,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. They were already annoying me. They were an annoying bunch. Individually I’m able to drum up, most of the time, a sense of patience and tolerance for each student. Even the extremely grating ones. I don’t know what happens in one’s youth to make one student so tolerable, so pleasant, so secure in themselves, so eager to learn, and what makes other students so irritating. But I pride myself on not discriminating against them because of it. With most of my students, I’m able to understand their need to be seen, and I’m able to focus on that need and let their ticks and blips, their entitlements, their insecurities or overconfidences, simply wash past. I’m able to see them in progress, and to know them in progress. To know that they don’t yet fully grasp what they are presenting to the world as they present it.