The Nest(42)

Bea couldn’t sleep for two reasons. The first was because of the horrible party at Celia’s. The second was no doubt directly related to the first: She’d had an upsetting dream about Tuck. She didn’t dream of him often, which was good, because he was usually tense and frustrated in her dreams. Dream Tucker couldn’t speak, just as he’d been at the end of his life after the stroke. Sometimes he’d write something down in the dream, but she could never read it—either the words were blurred or she kept misplacing the piece of paper or, on the rare occasion she did manage to read what he’d written, she could never remember what it was when she woke in the morning. Sometimes the dreams clung to Bea all day, leaving her unsettled and jittery, gloomy. Like today. She wondered why a relationship that in real life had been so sustaining and even-keeled was so fraught in her dream life. She decided that Tucker represented the part of her unconscious that struggled with writing, and that made perfect sense to her: why the deep recesses of her mind and soul would seize on Tucker as the right vehicle to deliver her own dissatisfaction to herself. He’d been dead for almost three years and she still thought of him constantly, mostly as he was when she first met him, standing in front of a classroom, reading poetry to his students, mesmerizing them with his sonorous voice, the voice he’d so cruelly lost use of at the end.

Bea had taken a class with Tucker after her book came out, after a year in Seville where she found herself so disoriented and adrift that she did little else than sit in tapas bars, smoking and sipping sherry, practicing her Spanish and writing funny postcards to her friends. She came home nearly fluent but empty-handed in terms of word count.

“How about joining a writing group or taking a class?” Stephanie had suggested, not concerned yet.

“A class?” Bea said.

“Not a fiction class, something else. Poetry. Nonfiction. Just to get the wheels greased. It might be fun.”

“Like go to the New School and sign up for Introduction to Poetry?” Bea was pissed. She had an MFA.

“No, of course not. Something at your level. Like how about Tucker McMillan’s class at Columbia. He’s amazing. You could audit.”

Bea ignored Stephanie’s suggestion only to find herself a few days later at a party standing before Tucker. She was mesmerized. He was appealingly craggy in the way of some older men who seemed to finally grow into their generous features in middle age. She’d seen pictures of him when he was younger and thinner and seemed burdened by his own physicality, nose too large, mouth too generous, ears too wide—but when she met him, some alchemy of time and girth and weathering of his face made him beautiful. And his voice. It was one of the biggest regrets of her life (and that was saying something) that she didn’t have his voice on tape anywhere.

“Ah, Beatrice Plumb,” he’d said, taking one of her hands in both of his and giving her his full attention. “As pretty as your picture.” Bea hadn’t known then if he was making fun of her. It was shortly after the “Glitterary” piece came out and although the photographer had taken what felt like hundreds of pictures of her for that article—at a desk, leaning against a window, curled in a chair—he’d chosen to use one of maybe three shots he’d snapped at the very end of the day when she was exhausted and had collapsed on her bed for a minute while he was changing lenses. “Hold it right there,” he’d said and had stood on a chair at the end of the bed and shot her from above, reclining, arms stretched to her side, looking sleepy and patently alluring (she had been flirting with the photographer a little, but not with the world). The picture had been ridiculed on various media sites, written about more than anything she said in the article. She was still angry about the stupid photo, which, in any context other than work, she would have quite liked.

“Not the one I would have chosen,” she’d said, trying to sound dismissive but not defensive.

“Why on earth not.” Tuck stared at her so intently she backed up a few steps. “The yellow dress, the parasol, those hanging ducks. I thought it was brilliant. Strong.”

“Oh,” she said, relieved. “I like that photo, too.”

“I didn’t know there were others,” he said. “I’ll have to find them.”

“That’s the best one,” she said. She could feel her face and neck flush and tried to back away. His stare was so direct. It was exhilarating.

“Stay for a bit.” He put his hand on her arm and her entire being lit up. “Everyone here is dull. Stay and tell me an interesting story.”

She showed up in his class the following week and every week after that for the rest of the year. She was a good student, serious and hardworking, quiet and unassuming. She wasn’t a great poet, but Stephanie had been right; it was fun to do something new, something without a particular result or pressure to perform attached.

Bea waited until she was no longer Tucker’s student to sleep with him. He assumed her reluctance was because he was almost twenty years older, married with grown children, but it wasn’t any of those things. Bea simply didn’t want to have sex with the teacher, didn’t want that to be the beginning of their story and by then—when it wasn’t a question of if but when they would be together—it was clear to both of them that they would, in fact, have a story.

Or at least that was the narrative she wove for Tucker, and it was partly true, but something else was true, too—she loved the power his desire afforded her. Her inability to produce anything significant of the novel made her feel like such an imposter, frightened even, and his desire was a balm. She loved the secret of what they were surely going to do. She flirted with him mercilessly at the beginning. Requesting private conferences that she dressed for as if she was going to be undressed, even though she knew she wasn’t. She carried his lust around like a magic coin in her pocket that she could spend when she decided she was ready.