Goodnight Beautiful(40)
“No,” Sam says. “No more pills. I need to call Annie.”
Sam tries to turn his face away, but Albert is gripping Sam’s chin and forcing three pills into his mouth, holding Sam’s jaw closed with a shaky hand, long enough for the pills to dissolve. The taste is bad, Buckley’s Mixture bad, the stuff his mom used to give him when he had a sore throat. “It tastes awful. And it works” is Buckley’s actual slogan, printed right there on the box, but even that tastes a million times better than these pills, which work impressively quickly, melting his body, summoning the moths, reducing reality to two facts: his head doesn’t hurt anymore, and he is just so very fucked.
Chapter 30
“Hang on, Professor Potter,” the kid sauntering down the center aisle calls to Annie the following day. “Nice job today,” he says, throwing her a smile as she hands him the paper she’d finished grading this morning, barely in time for class, in which he twice put the word “patriarchy” in quotes. “You’re almost starting to convince me I should question the assumptions I make when I read. Almost.”
“Thanks, Brett,” Annie says.
His face reddens. “My name’s Jonathan.”
I know your name’s Jonathan—you’re one of the guys who signed up for this class solely because most of the students are women—but Brett is a prick’s name, and you seem like a prick. “Sorry,” Annie says. “Have a good day.”
She collects her notes and waits for the last students to leave before turning off the lights, unsure how she survived that class. Forty-five minutes in front of a packed auditorium of sleep-deprived college kids, exploring how male authors describe female characters in six works of popular fiction, beginning with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. “‘Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood,’” she read out loud from the front of the room, hoping the students didn’t notice the way the book trembled in her hand. “‘She was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.’” She had gone back and forth a hundred times about canceling the class, but decided this morning not to. She’s going to lose her mind at home, waiting to hear his key in the lock.
She hurries across the quad to the department building, simple and run-down, nothing like Columbia. But this is what she wanted, what she and Sam both wanted: a simpler life. She’d been carrying a heavy load since getting her degree at Cornell, where she stayed on to teach. She was finishing up her next stint, a two-year gig at Columbia, when she met Sam, contemplating what was next. She’d been offered tenure track at Utah State with little expectation to publish, but she turned it down and accepted a visiting scholar position here, at a tiny liberal arts college in upstate New York, following the first man she ever loved.
There’s a small crowd waiting for the elevator, and she decides to take the stairs to her office on the third floor. She’s unlocking the door when Elisabeth Mitchell, the dean of the department, steps out of her office three doors down.
“Annie,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“I have office hours,” Annie says.
“I know, I mean . . .” Dr. Mitchell hesitates. “I saw the article about Sam.”
“Oh, that,” Annie says.
“You don’t need to be here,” Dr. Mitchell says. “You could have—”
“My dad was from a long line of industrious Irish Catholics,” Annie says. “I’ve learned to work through my pain.”
“Well, if you need some time . . .”
“Thank you,” Annie says, stepping into her office, keeping her door slightly ajar as she checks the clock. One hour. She can do this. She sits at the desk and takes out the sandwich she bought before class, at the café in the student union. A pressed turkey with Swiss cheese and extra jalape?os, the same sandwich she gets before office hours each week. It’s a habit of hers, ordering the same thing again and again. It drives Sam crazy. Back in New York, when they first started dating, they’d meet at the same restaurant at least twice a week: Frankies 457, a block away from her apartment. Sam would stare at her, incredulous, as she placed the same order, every time—sausage cavatelli and a green salad.
She can picture the bewildered expression on his face. “You’re not going to try anything else?”
“I know what I like, and I’m okay asking for it,” she told him. “Get used to it.”
But today the sight of the sandwich turns her stomach, and she drops it into the trash can and digs for her phone in her bag. She opens FaceTime and calls Maddie, who answers right away. Her brown curls are pulled into a bun, and she’s wearing earphones.
“What are you doing?” Annie asks.
“About to go for a jog,” Maddie says, and just the sound of her voice calms Annie’s nerves.
“You hate jogging.”
“I know I do, but everyone at the restaurant’s doing some stupid 5K, and— Wait.” Maddie stops walking. “What happened? I can tell by your face.”
Annie stands and shuts her office door. “Some bills came for Sam,” she whispers.
“What do you mean, bills?” Maddie asks.
“Credit cards.” The first arrived yesterday: Chase Sapphire Preferred, maxed to its credit limit of $75,000. She was stunned, but tried not to read too much into it. The move, the new house—she knew things were adding up. But when she checked the mailbox earlier today, she found another: Capital One, with a $35,000 balance.