Mrs. Fletcher(19)
“Well, if you’re gonna study this crap, you might as well do it with a shemale, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t know?” Barry seemed pleased by her cluelessness. “Our professor used to be a he.”
“Really?”
“Yup. Margo was Mark Fairchild. He was a great college basketball player. Even played pro in Europe for a couple of seasons.” He tugged his beard. “Not a bad-looking woman, actually.”
Eve’s surprise was short-lived. The signs were there, now that she knew what she was looking for—the voice, the hips, the incongruous breasts, the riddle of the “coed” basketball league. But she never would have guessed it on her own.
Live and learn, she thought.
“I’ve never met a transgendered person before,” she said. “At least I don’t think so.”
“Not that I’m attracted to her,” Barry added, in case she’d misunderstood his earlier comment. “I mean, to each his own, right? But that’s a bridge too far for me. I wonder if she tells the guys she dates beforehand.”
“How do you know she dates guys?”
“Just the general vibe I’m getting. You think she got the surgery? I’m not really sure how that works.”
Eve was relieved to arrive at her car. She’d had more than enough of Barry for one night.
“All right.” She clicked her remote key, and the van flashed its lights. “Guess I’ll see you next class.”
“Hey,” he said, as she reached for the door handle. “You want to get a nightcap? My bar’s right down the street. Drinks on me.”
“It’s been a long day,” she told him. “I need to get home.”
“Suit yourself,” Barry said with a shrug. “I’ll take a rain check.”
*
It was too bad she didn’t like him a little better, because a drink after class would have been nice. At the very least it would have given her an excuse to stay out for another hour or two, to delay the inevitable moment when she returned home and had to once again confront the enormity of her son’s absence—the fact that he’d grown up and left her, and the knowledge that this was good and proper—exactly what nature intended—and that she had no right to complain.
The fact that her life had turned into this: this lifeless hush, this faint but elusive whiff of decay. This absolutely-nothing-to-complain-about.
She didn’t linger downstairs, just poured herself a glass of wine, grabbed her laptop, and headed up to her bedroom. She locked the door behind her, not a real lock, just a hardware store hook-and-eye that wouldn’t have kept out a determined intruder, but might give her a few seconds of advanced warning, hopefully enough time to grab her phone and dial 911. She’d installed it six or seven years ago, after a couple of embarrassing incidents where Brendan had wandered in while she was getting dressed. He’d insisted that these were honest mistakes, but she wasn’t so sure—he was just at that age when boys get curious—and decided that a little deterrence would go a long way.
*
For the past few years, ever since she’d opened her account, Facebook had been an integral part of Eve’s bedtime ritual. She found it soothing to scroll through her news feed one last time before turning in, paying a visit to her various friends and acquaintances, reminding herself that she wasn’t really alone. They were always right there where she’d left them, the usual suspects posting about the usual stuff: recipes, pithy sayings, scanned photos from the good old days, the inevitable pets, the banal declarations, witty memes, deep thoughts, political rants, viral videos. A group from her hometown had a new thread rhapsodizing about the Freezy Cone Ice Cream Stand on Franklin Street—gone for at least two decades—that included eighty-seven comments, most of which expressed sentiments like “Yum!” and “BEST. ICE. CREAM. EVER.” and “Vanilla with Rainbow Sprinkles!!!”
She forced herself to read every last one of them. That should have been enough to put anyone to sleep, but Eve was still wide awake when she finished, still as restless and aroused as she’d been when she started. So there was nothing to do but the thing she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do, though it was, admittedly, a promise she’d made with her fingers crossed, knowing it would probably have to be broken.
*
For a sexually liberated person in her mid-forties, Eve had had, until a few days ago, a fairly limited acquaintance with pornography. She remembered thumbing through a friend’s brother’s stash of magazines as a teenager, being intimidated by the airbrushed beauty of the centerfold models in Playboy, and genuinely shocked by the “beaver shots” in Hustler. Her visceral distaste turned ideological in college, where it was a feminist article of faith that porn degraded and objectified women while exploiting them for financial gain. Why would you want to have anything to do with a dirty business like that?
After she graduated, she began to notice that this opinion wasn’t universally shared. Lots of supposedly enlightened men she knew seemed to like porn—or at least they liked joking about liking porn—but she was surprised to learn that a number of her women friends were fans, too. Her grad school colleague Allison reported that she and her fiancé had a standing Friday night porn date that they both looked forward to all week. (Allison also had a vibrator that she’d nicknamed Black Betty and half jokingly described as the best thing that had ever happened to her.)