You Think It, I'll Say It(5)

Quietly, he says, “I swear I don’t have it.”

“You should leave,” she says, then adds, “Now.”

Again when they look at each other, she is close to puncturing the theatrics of her own anger—certainly she is not oblivious of the nonequitability of their encounter ending at this moment—but she hasn’t yet selected the words she’ll use to cause the puncture. As drunk as she is, the words are hard to find.

“I thought we were having fun.” His tone is a little pathetic and also a little accusing. “You had fun.” It’s his stating what she has already acknowledged to herself, what she was considering acknowledging to him, that definitively tips the scales the wrong way.

“Get out,” she says.

In her peripheral vision, as she looks at her bare legs, she can see him stand and dress. Her heart is beating rapidly. Clothed, he folds his arms. If he’d reached for her shoulder…If he’d sat back down next to her…

“Eleanor,” he says, and this is the first and only time he uses her name, which of course is her real name, though not one that anybody who knows her calls her by. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just wanted to hang out.”

She says nothing, and after a minute he walks to the door and leaves.



* * *



—

Her headache lasts until midafternoon on Saturday, through the budget meeting, the meeting about the newly proposed journal, the discussion of where to hold future conferences after the ones that are scheduled for 2016 and 2017. She suspects that some of her colleagues are hungover, too, and she’d likely be hungover, anyway, without the additional drinks she had with Luke, so it’s almost as if the Luke interlude didn’t occur—as if it were a brief and intensely enjoyable dream that took a dreadful turn. And yet, after she wakes from a pre-dinner nap, the meetings are a blur and the time with Luke is painfully vivid.

Nell rises from bed and splashes cold water on her face. She wants days and weeks to have passed, so that she can revert to being her boring self, her wronged-by-her-partner, high-road self; she wants to build up the capital, if only in her own mind, of not being cruel. She no longer thinks she’ll tell Lisa anything.

Which means that when, while dressing to meet her colleagues for dinner, she finds her driver’s license in the left pocket of her jacket, the discovery only amplifies her distress. The lining of the jacket’s left pocket is ripped, which she knew about, because a dime has been slipping around inside it since last spring. But she hadn’t realized that the hole was large enough for a license to pass through.

When she was a sophomore in high school, the father of a kind and popular classmate died of cancer. Nell didn’t know the boy well, and she wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to write him a condolence note. He came back to school after a week, at which point she hadn’t written one. It seemed like perhaps it was too late. But a few days later, she wondered, Had it been too late? Weeks later, was it too late? Months? She occasionally still recalls this boy, now a man who is, like her, nearly forty, and she wishes she had expressed compassion.

This is how she will feel about Luke. She could have summoned him back on Friday night. She could have called him on Saturday, after finding the license. She could have texted him on Sunday, or when she returned to Madison. However, though she thinks of him regularly—she thinks of him especially during the Republican debates, then during the primaries, the caucuses, the convention, and the election (the election!)—she never initiates contact. She does join Match, she goes to a salon and gets fully waxed, she starts dating an architect she didn’t meet on Match, who is eight years older than her, pro women’s pubic hair, and appalled by how readily a gender-studies professor will capitulate to arbitrary standards of female beauty. Nell finds his view to be a relief personally, but intellectually a facile and unendearing failure of imagination.

Sometimes, when she’s half asleep, she remembers Luke saying, “You’re pretty,” how serious and sincere his voice was. She remembers when his face was between her legs, and she feels shame and desire. But by daylight it’s hard not to mock her own overblown emotions. He didn’t have anything to do with her losing the license, no, but it’s his fault that she thought he did. Besides, he was a Trump supporter.





The World Has Many Butterflies


Julie and Graham had known each other for eight years before they ever played I’ll Think It, You Say It, then they played I’ll Think It, You Say It for a year before Julie decided—decided, realized, idiotically fabricated the belief that—she was in love with Graham. Graham worked at the same investment banking firm in Houston as Julie’s husband. Also, their respective kids all attended the same private school, which meant Julie and Keith saw Graham and his wife, Gayle, regularly, in a way that (for almost a decade!) had barely registered with Julie. They showed up at the same soccer games and school fundraisers and Christmas parties and dinner parties. They greeted one another in a friendly fashion, and—in retrospect, Julie went over it repeatedly, that innocent earlier era before she became obsessed—she thought of Graham as slightly more appealing than most men, but neither fascinating nor smolderingly handsome. Even later, Julie considered Graham and Keith comparably attractive, if your thing was preppy middle-aged men, which hers apparently was. But neither of them was, like, hot. Nevertheless, for a stretch of several months, whenever Julie had sex with her husband, she pretended he was Graham.