Playboy Fiction: Not Me

This was a long time ago. I’d never heard the term sexual harassment in my life—nobody had. Men were men and women were women, and women had what I wanted more than anything in the world—if they were willing to give it to me, I paid elaborate attention to them; if they weren’t, it was another story. At the time I was just out of college and I’d picked up a long-term subbing job at the local high school because I had nothing better to do.

Beyond that, earning a living was right at the top of my list of priorities, what with student loans coming due and a certain unspoken pressure being exerted on me by way of my best friend, Rob, whose couch I’d been occupying for the previous three months. In any case, I’d heard from my mother, who worked in the superintendent’s office, that the English teacher I’d been filling in for sporadically had received a harrowing diagnosis from her oncologist and was going to be out for an indefinite period. I didn’t want a permanent job. I didn’t want to get up at dawn and have to pretend I was alive. But I knotted my tie in front of the streaked mirror in Rob’s bathroom each morning and tried to adjust to a new set of expectations.

Once I’d agreed to step in for Mrs. Leitner till whatever terrible thing that was happening to her came to its conclusion, the chair of the English department, a beefy florid old man of 50 or maybe 60 with a hairstyle that was 80 percent scalp, sat me down in his office and told me there was one cardinal rule: Don’t fraternize with the students, which was code for Don’t fuck the students. But this was hard to take seriously because at least three people I knew of fucked the students and for their part the students fucked back, and as long as it was kept discreet everybody looked the other way. One woman—girl, she was a girl my age, in her first year of teaching—developed a crush on one of her students, who’d turned 18 that year and even managed to grow a patchy reddish beard as testament to all he was prepared for. Her desk was next to mine in the department office, and when we weren’t plowing through scrawled-over compositions or skimming Masterplots to keep one step ahead of the game, Suzanne would lean in confidentially, a red-rimmed cigarette stuck between her lips, and fill me in on the details.

I was unattached at the time, my previous girlfriend having decided I wasn’t worth the effort, and the odds of getting reattached were hovering around zero, given the fact that I had to spend my nights on a narrow, dog-stinking five-foot-10-inch paisley couch pushed up against the wall in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment I wasn’t paying rent on. Suzanne narrated in a low matter-of-fact voice—where she’d gone with him, when, what they did together and the delicious fact that nobody suspected them, least of all his parents, whom she’d met only once, at parent-teacher night—all the while watching my face for signals, which I suppressed. Or thought I did. She wasn’t my type, or not entirely, but that didn’t stop me from picturing these situations, she spread naked across the bed and the student—Alec, who was tall and rope-shouldered—climbing atop her or taking her up against the wall in the apartment with the private entrance she shared with nobody.

Was all this a secret? If she’d told me, she must have told other people too, and I did mention it to Rob, who just shrugged and said, “Good luck,” and when I asked, “What does that mean?” he gave me a long look and said, “You’d have to be a monk to resist all that—and by the way, when was the last time you got laid?”

I took the question for what it was—a rebuke—but resisted throwing it back at him, since he wasn’t doing much better, his own girlfriend sealed behind the faded brick walls of a dormitory at the end of a dark street in a dark college town 400 miles away. So when Friday came along—one of a long tottering row of Fridays that fell like dominoes and left me as far as ever from resolving the issue, or any other issue, for that matter—I found myself cruising the bars in my roommate’s company, looking for whatever might be out there. Which wasn’t much. This was in northern Westchester, by the way, a place of unupholstered nights and unremitting boredom. We went to one place, then another, clutching sweating drinks in our hands and hoping something we could listen to would come up on the jukebox. I danced a couple of times with a girl in a tight skirt whose legs spoke volumes to me, but nothing came of it—though I practically begged, she wouldn’t give me her number.

Our last resort—Brennan’s, a steakhouse with a big semicircular bar that could get lively with people our age once they shut down the kitchen—was enticingly crowded and there was an album we both liked playing at a healthy volume when we walked in the door, so we decided to go up to the bar and order a drink. It took me a minute, scanning the room for people I knew, before I spotted Suzanne and Alec at one of the tables squeezed in the cubbyhole behind the door. It was a table that was familiar to me, one I’d occupied a dozen times myself over the course of the previous summer with Corinda—then my girlfriend, now my ex, who, as far as I knew at the time, had been as happy with me as I was with her.

I didn’t react. I might have felt a little punch to the gut, a tightening down there, but I didn’t want to embarrass Suzanne—or myself either. I ordered. Stared into my drink. Rob said something. I said something back. The song that just then came on featured a pair of lead guitars doing a kind of mating dance, harmonizing, then breaking away and coming back again, and I was lost in it, bobbing my head and rapping the bar rail with both forefingers, when Suzanne came up and laid a hand on my arm. I turned my head and there she was, with Alec at her side, and far from being embarrassed, they were both grinning as if they’d come there expressly to meet up with me. Suzanne was tall, almost as tall in her heels as Alec, and she was wearing a dress that left her legs exposed from mid-thigh down, which was a different look for her, or different at least from what I’d seen of her at school. I found the view illuminating. As did Rob, who swung around and gaped at her.

“What a surprise seeing you here,” she said. “I thought for sure you’d be home taking notes on The Ancient Mariner—or what, Death of a Salesman?” She let out a quick squeal of a laugh, high on the moment, giddy with this new thing in her life and the aura of sex that hung round her like heat radiating off a hot blacktop road.

“Oh, yeah, well, in fact I was. Actually Rob and I—you know Rob, my roommate I told you about?—spent the whole evening translating Coleridge into Chinese and back again, just for the exercise. Right, Rob?”

Rob was too stunned to grin. He just let his eyes drop to her legs and work their way back up again before he said, “Yeah, sure. Chinese. It’s practically my first language.”

If I expected Alec to be intimidated or at least circumspect, that wasn’t the case at all. He was grinning too and his eyes were lit with the same venereal fire as Suzanne’s. He was my height. He outweighed me. He had a beard and I didn’t. “Yeah,” he said, “I should be home doing my math homework, right? But wait a minute”—he looked from Suzanne to me—“either of you happen to be a math whiz?”

“Afraid you’re out of luck,” I said, and here we were, the four of us, standing at the bar, fraternizing. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Would I have been happier if Alec didn’t exist, if he were shorter, lamer, back at home working on his car or jerking off amid his sports trophies? Or if Suzanne were with me? Or Rob? The drinking age was 18, I reminded myself. Draft age too. What was my problem—we were all adults here, weren’t we?

Rob offered to buy them a drink, but Suzanne just shook her head. “No,” she said, “we’ve got things to do, haven’t we, Alec?” and I thought they were going to give us a demonstration right there at the bar, but the implication was enough. She half-turned to the door so that her hair swung loose and settled back over her shoulders. “Got to go,” she said, and he said, “Later,” leaning in for the handshake I reflexively gave him.

After they’d left, Rob turned to me and said, “What do you think? One more?”

I shrugged. We were prolonging the moment, as if to fully absorb it, and I didn’t know why. Or maybe I did—at home was the couch. At home was the terminus of Friday night.

The music faded, then started up again. “So that was her?” Rob said, draining his glass and pushing it across the bar for a refill.

I nodded.

“She’s”—he took a moment to find the word, weighing the circumstances—“different, huh?”

I felt angry suddenly. I wanted to say She’s headed for trouble or She doesn’t know what she’s getting into, but I didn’t. Who was I to judge? They were both adults, weren’t they? “Yeah,” I said finally. “You could say that.”

The other two teachers I knew about—or I’d heard the rumors anyway—were both male, which was the way people assumed it would be, predator and prey, the wolf and the lamb and all the rest. One was the drama teacher, whom I didn’t know at all but whose opportunities were limitless, what with late-night rehearsals, hands-on direction and the shedding of personae like layers peeled down to the core. The other was a member of the English department, like Suzanne and me, though I was only temporary and he’d been there since he got out of college. Roger was tall, stoop-shouldered, in his late 20s or early 30s—old, that is, by my accounting—and he wore loafers with tassels instead of boots, dressed as if he should be propped up in the window of a department store and sported what was once called a “regular” haircut. I knew him casually, received his formulaic jokes as stoically as I could and found him totally uninteresting but for this one thing, this affair he was having with a girl on the debate team, of which he was the coach. I didn’t know her very well either—Elizabeth, or Libby, as everyone called her. She wasn’t in any of my classes, but I saw her in the hall with some of the other girls after sixth period every day, when she must have had a class in one of the rooms near mine. If it weren’t for the rumors I wouldn’t even have noticed her.

She wasn’t the first one your eyes would go to in a crowd, but once I caught on I began to see her appeal. She wasn’t flashy, always dressed in a turtleneck and skirt or jumper, minimal makeup, minimal jewelry, but she seemed self-contained, confident, and her body—expressive and replete—was right there itching to burst out of her tartans and knee socks. Suzanne had her in her honors class and told me how gifted she was, on track to be salutatorian if not valedictorian and sure to have her choice of colleges, but when I asked her about the rumors—about Roger—she just made a face and shook her head.

“What do you mean?” I pressed. “Is it true?”

We were in the office, at our desks, eating tuna salad sandwiches from the cafeteria and sipping lukewarm coffee. She shook her head again and we both glanced down the row of desks to the one at the far end, where Roger should have been peeling an egg his wife had boiled for him that morning or slurping soup out of a Thermos while thumbing through the sports pages of The Daily News, but wasn’t. Was he off on one of the debate team’s overnight trips? With his young orators, male and female both? With Libby?

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Suzanne’s eyes had gone cold. There was a smear of mayonnaise on her upper lip, which made her face look off-kilter. I was about to reach up with my napkin and brush it away, an intimacy I hadn’t earned, but then her tongue found it and it was gone.

“Why not? What’s the problem?” I didn’t quite get it—she was doing the same thing herself, wasn’t she? I wanted gossip. I wanted to be titillated. I wanted to hear it from her lips.

“He’s married, for one thing. With kids, little kids, I don’t know—two of them, three of them. He’s too old for her. He’s ruining her. I mean, isn’t that enough?”

What her eyes were telling me was that I shouldn’t push it, that her situation was utterly different, night and day, that she was in love and Roger Hinckley wasn’t and that was all that mattered. I gave it a moment’s thought. Roger was a jerk, yes, and marriage, at least as I viewed it then, was like some sort of prison sentence, but still I didn’t quite see the distinction.

“What about Alec?”

“What about him?”

One of the other teachers, an older woman named Tammy, pushed through the door then, gave us an automatic smile and began extracting her lunch from a paper bag decorated with grease stains. We both fell silent a moment, then I said, “I don’t know—isn’t it kind of the same thing? Not that I’m saying anything, but you know the way people are, you know what they say.”

“No,” she said, “what do they say?”

I looked down the row of desks, past Tammy and her meatball wedge and diet soda, to where Roger’s desk stood empty. “I don’t know—same thing they say about Roger.”

“You know what?” She balled up her half-eaten sandwich and flung it in the wastebasket in the same motion.

“What?”

“Screw people,” she said. “Really, screw them.”

We had a succession of sunstruck days that fall, Indian summer, but nobody had a chance to enjoy them because we were all stuck inside, racing like gerbils around the academic wheel—and on the weekends, without fail, it rained. I met a girl or two along the way—in bars, where else?—but nobody I could talk to. They were secretaries, receptionists, waitresses, the ones left behind after graduation when their cohort went off to college. Not that I was looking for anything long-term, but no matter how compelling their faces were, their hair, their bodies, or how enormous my need, nothing seemed to click. Rob, out of desperation, had begun making the long dark hurtling journey up the thruway to be with his girlfriend on weekends, so most of the time I didn’t even have him there to distract me from myself. And yes, there were girls in my classes who were as smart and funny and well put-together as you could ask for, girls not much younger than I, but nothing happened there either, though I had Suzanne’s example before me, not to mention Roger’s and the drama teacher’s and God knew who else’s. Was I a rock? A saint? A model teacher? Would I have slipped if the opportunity had presented itself? I don’t know. Truly, I don’t.

The weeks piled up like drift. Somebody told me Mrs. Leitner was never coming back, and it was as if I’d been given a life sentence for crimes I’d never committed. The students wrote essays; I corrected them. I gave up smoking and started in again a week later. Beers, multiples of them, in six-packs or served up in foaming glasses on one bar top or another, were my counters. Then there came a night in November, another Friday, the leaves gone from the trees and a cold rain rattling the gutters, when things suddenly shifted on me.

By the time I got home Rob was already gone, charging up the thruway while radio stations faded in and out and the tires hissed beneath him. He was on a mission, and the thought of that—and of his girlfriend, Lee Ann, with her pouting underlip and swollen brassieres—just depressed me. I had a beer. Ate something out of a can. I was watching TV with the sound off, killing time till it was late enough to make the rounds of the bars—albeit alone, like some sort of outcast—when the bell rang. This was an unusual circumstance. The bell never rang—it was just Rob and me in the apartment, and I couldn’t imagine anybody actually mounting the front steps and pressing the buzzer, unless it was some official, a cop, that is, alerted to the smell of marijuana or fielding a noise complaint because the stereo was cranked up to the maximum. But I wasn’t smoking marijuana (not that night anyway, or at least not yet) and I hadn’t put any music on, preferring to sit in silence and watch the shapes shift on the screen in a parody of desolation.

It was Suzanne at the door. Her hair was wet, her mascara smeared and her coat hanging open to display her legs in that same dress she’d worn at the bar—or one just like it. She didn’t say hi or apologize for barging in on me or explain that she’d found my address in the faculty listings, just brushed by me the minute I opened the door, stalked to the middle of the room and swung round on me.

“Have you got anything to drink?” she asked, her voice strained and theatrical. “Please tell me you have something, anything, because——” she broke off, as if suddenly aware of how intrusive all this was—or maybe that was play-acting too. “I just—can I sit down?”

“Yes, sure,” I said, “of course,” and watched her wriggle out of the wet coat before crossing the room and sinking into the couch. She didn’t seem to know what to do with the coat—I should have offered to take it, but a fog of confusion had settled over me. After a moment, she dropped it discreetly on the floor at her feet. “I’ve got beer,” I said. “You want a beer?”

“You don’t have anything stronger?”

“I think that’s about it. Rob had a bottle of vodka in the freezer, but I think we——”

She waved me off. “Beer’s fine.”

When I came back into the room with the beer she was sitting cross-legged on the couch, working her fingers through her wet hair. She took the bottle from me and drained half of it in a gulp, then gave me a self-referential smile as if she’d just realized where she was. “You wouldn’t have a towel I could borrow, would you? And maybe a hairbrush?”

What had happened—what had brought her here, to me—was potentially catastrophic. Libby’s parents had begun to field rumors about their daughter’s relationship with the debate coach, which both Libby and Roger denied out of hand, but the principal was involved now and the chair of the English department and, last Suzanne had heard, even the police. “They could get him for rape, you know that, right?”

I was seated in the armchair across from her, my own beer propped up on one knee. “Rape? I thought they were—I mean, it’s consensual, right?”

“Statutory. She’s under 18.”

I didn’t really know what that meant or how to make the distinction, but Roger Hinckley’s haphazard face suddenly rose up before me and I felt a dark surge of joy. I didn’t dislike him, but I didn’t really like him either.

“Tammy’s saying he’s going to have to take a leave of absence.” Suzanne patted her hair with the towel I’d fetched from the bathroom, a towel that could have been cleaner and could have smelled better too, but I was doing the best I could. “Really,” she said, her voice gone hollow, “I don’t know what to do.”

I wanted to say, What do you care? but I could see where this was going and I liked the way she looked sitting there on my couch—Rob’s couch—in her moment of extremity. I said, “Alec’s 18, right? So you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Except my job. Roger’s got tenure, but me? They could just fire me.”

“For what?”

“There’s a morals clause in our contract, isn’t there?”

“I don’t know, I never read it. You mean the ‘Don’t-Fuck-the-Students’ clause?”

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny.”

There was a moment then in which we both tried to gather ourselves, a moment we needed to get past. It was raining still. The images flickered across the TV screen. I took a sip of my beer, then set it down on the coffee table. “What does Alec have to say about it?”

“We broke up. Over the phone, if you can believe it. He said we couldn’t risk it—he said I couldn’t risk it—and all I could say was ‘I love you’ over and over. Isn’t that pathetic? I mean, he’s being more mature about it than me.”

“Maybe nothing’ll happen,” I said.

She got up and crossed the room to me then, perched on the arm of the chair and leaned in close so I could feel the wet strands of her hair curtaining my neck and shoulders. “It already has,” she said.

On Monday, there was a stranger sitting at Roger’s desk, a hammy old man with a long nose and rheumy blue eyes who was probably gay, though I didn’t know anything about gay in those days either—I’m not even sure the term had been repurposed yet. But there he was, Phil Leicester, looking and sounding like a bit player from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the traveling production, propped up in Roger Hinckley’s chair and talking nonstop to anyone who would listen. I wasn’t listening. We’d made our introductions when I came in and then I’d gone straight to my desk, trying frantically to put something together for my first-period class, which I should have done the night before but hadn’t.

The night before I’d been at a bar—at several bars—and stayed late, drinking alone. I wouldn’t admit to being depressed over what had happened Friday night, or worse, Saturday morning, but that was the fact. Suzanne had stayed over and we’d made love (or had sex, that is) in Rob’s bed, which was all right, which was fine—I liked her, we were friends, I was needy and so was she—until the next morning. The minute she opened her eyes she said, “Oh my God, what am I doing?” She was up out of bed before I could so much as reach out to her, pulling on her dress with her back to me. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—forgive me, will you? Please, please, please?”

I wanted to say, There’s nothing to forgive, wanted to say, Let me take you out for breakfast at least or I’ve wanted to do that for a long time and let’s do it again, now, right now, but she was already gone. Out the door, down the steps and into her canary yellow VW Bug with the heart sticker on the rear bumper.

And now, on this morning when a total stranger, wearing a bow tie of all things, had taken Roger’s place, Suzanne wasn’t at her desk. Which seemed ominous. Not that I was all that eager to sit there elbow-to-elbow with her—what had happened Saturday morning filled me with shame and anger—but the fact was she could lose her job too. Or already had lost it. And what would they do to her—tar and feathers? Criminal charges? What did the morals clause say anyway? And where was she? It wasn’t like her to be late.

As it turned out she’d taken a sick day and driven up to Rhinebeck with Alec, who’d likewise skipped school, and they’d stayed overnight at the hotel there, where nobody would know them. The next day she was back at her desk, making notes in her copy of The Odyssey, which was required reading for her world literature class, acting as if nothing had happened. She didn’t avoid my eyes, just glanced up with a smile, said hello in her soft puff of a voice and caught me up on the details as if Friday night and Saturday morning had never happened. She was in love with Alec, and that was all there was to it, and she was sorry if she’d given me the wrong idea. “Anyway,” she said, “I was in a state. I mean, all I could think was the worst——”

I didn’t have anything to say to this.

“But really, the focus is on Roger—what he was doing was wrong. And I hate to say it, but he should have known better. Have you ever met his wife? No? Well, she’s pretty, very pretty, and the kids are, I don’t know, kids.”

I watched her lips move. She wasn’t talking to me, she was talking at me, talking as if I cared—and I didn’t care, not anymore. I said, “What about you—aren’t you afraid you’re going to be next?”

She shook her head, dropped her eyes to the page. I watched her make a notation in the margin, as if the Greeks were what moved her. “We’re going to go underground, at least till after graduation.” A complicit smile. “No more Brennan’s. Or any other place within 20 miles of here.”

I was bitter—I couldn’t help it. She wasn’t my type, as I said, but four nights ago she had been. “Just stay at home, huh?”

Her smile widened till I could see the glint of a gold-capped molar. “Yeah,” she said, and her eyes never left mine, even when Tammy and two of the other teachers came in the door and brought all the racket of the hallway with them. “That’s the best part.”

The department chair, whose office was separate from ours and whom we hardly ever saw except during meetings, was out shoveling snow in his driveway after an early December storm when his left side went numb and he pitched face-forward onto the frozen pavement. He might have lain there till he froze to death but for the quick thinking of his next-door neighbor, who saw what had happened and went out and cradled him in her lap till the ambulance came. The upshot was that Tammy, who was a 42-year-old divorcée and wore her hair in coppery beauty-parlor ringlets, was appointed temporary chair, nominally in charge of us and our affairs, though the real power was invested in the principal, and beyond him, the superintendent, who’d put Roger Hinckley on unpaid leave till things could be sorted out. As far as I knew, Roger hadn’t been arrested, so there was that at least, but the administration was aroused, and what had once been an open secret was buried so deeply even the drama teacher was forsaking after-school activities—beyond rehearsing the plays themselves, that is.

All this had a chilling effect, to say the least. Suzanne and Alec wouldn’t so much as glance at each other in the hallway, and in the class he was taking from her—creative writing—they kept things on a strictly formal basis. Or that was what I’d heard. The fact was, I didn’t get to talk with her all that much at this juncture—she’d asked to switch to Tammy’s desk once Tammy had vacated it for the chair’s office, and why she’d asked I could only speculate, since she was done confiding in me. Did she feel as uncomfortable around me as I felt around her? Did she feel guilty? Like a slut? A hypocrite? All of the above? She tried to make a joke of it—“I just need to be closer to the door in case they come for me with a lynch mob”—but it was bogus and we both knew it. “We can still have our miserable crumbs of lunch together once in a while—it’s not like I’m moving over to the math department or anything,” she said, but I wasn’t having it. “Yeah, sure,” I said.

What I want to make clear here, for the record, is that I was not the one who typed up the anonymous note on the IBM Selectric in Tammy’s office and slipped it in the principal’s mail slot in the main office after everyone had gone home one afternoon, though no one believes that, least of all Suzanne. She had some explaining to do (lying, that is) and so did Alec when they were called separately into the office and grilled by the principal, Mike Blumenthal, who had a thug’s face and was as innocent of intellect as anybody I’ve ever met. What happened? Nothing, as far as I could see. Suzanne was a woman and women got a free pass in those days.

I kept my head down. I needed the job because the job meant money and the money was like a drug. I started helping Rob out with the rent and saving up for my own place because when Lee Ann graduated at the end of the year, she was planning on moving in with him, which left me precisely nowhere. Thanksgiving found me at my mother’s house, bored right down to the soles of my feet. There was a hard freeze. Everything smelled of exhaust fumes. Then it was Christmas, and what Christmas meant, beyond the onslaught of syrupy tunes tinkling out of every speaker in existence and the conundrum of what to get for my mother, who already had enough perfume to float a canoe, was the department Christmas party.

A Friday night, yes—one more Friday night. Tammy, as acting chair, hosted the affair at her house, which was at the dead and final end of a rat maze of unlighted streets and looked no different from the 200 or so exact replicas I had to drive past to get there. I was 23. I didn’t know -protocol—or even good manners, for that matter. I brought nothing but myself to the party, though the others, I saw, had offered up various dishes—a tuna casserole, chili beans, a mold of Jell-O with grapes embedded in it—and even flowers for the hostess. I knew at least half the people there, my colleagues, but most of them had spouses with them, and that was a kind of ordeal I hadn’t factored in when I made my calculations as to whether to attend or not. The attraction was the free food and booze—everybody drank in those days, and drank -heavily—and I figured I’d get tanked at the party and then go on out and make the rounds of the places where somebody might have registered an actual heartbeat.

I was well into it, having put away two plates of food and three or four scotch and sodas and politely endured the posturing of the various spouses, one of whom took me for a student, when Suzanne came hurtling through the front door in high heels and an ankle-length coat wrapped around one of her extracurricular dresses. She was late, the last one to the party, and she whirled around the room, spouting jokes and excuses until she was sure everybody was watching her before she slipped off her coat to reveal the dress. Which looked good on her. Very good. My perceptions were dulled, but when she went up to embrace Tammy over the makeshift bar with its punch bowl and dented ice bucket, I saw that Tammy was wearing the same dress—or one that wasn’t much different, though Tammy’s was red and Suzanne’s green, as if they’d color-coordinated beforehand. It was just a moment, a quick embrace of the two women while people turned back to whatever they were saying and one of the endless corny -records provided a musical backdrop, but it made an impression on me—or Tammy did—in a way that left me confused. She was my mother’s age and here she was wearing the same dress as the girl who’d slept with me in Rob’s bed and avoided me ever since, and what was all that about?

Eventually, after she’d made the rounds, Suzanne did come up to me, as if it were an afterthought—or worse, an obligation. She was wearing a serene smile that told me Alec was waiting for her back at the apartment and that the reason she was late didn’t have anything to do with Christmas shopping or traffic or the ice on the roads. “Having fun?” she asked, the old edge of sarcasm in her voice.

“It’s better than Woodstock,” I said. “Have you met all the spouses yet? Like”—I nodded to a man across the room who was wearing a sweater that looked as if it had been knitted by the blind—“Mr. Kathy McCaffrey?”

She laughed. “No, but before it’s over, I’m sure I will.” She gave me a look then that rose from my scuffed boots to my jeans and the leather jacket I’d been affecting lately, and let her face go serious for a moment. “And how are you? Everything okay? I mean, I hardly get to see you anymore, what with the rush around the office and the holidays coming on——”

I shrugged. What did she want me to say? That I missed her? Was she really that venal? “I didn’t write that letter, you know,” I said.

She kept her eyes on me, the steadiest gaze in the world. I didn’t want to flinch, because I was innocent, I was, but I had to look away. Across the room, one of the other young teachers, Matt Ricci, was mouthing the words to “White Christmas,” the song that was just then laboring through the speakers of Tammy’s ancient hi-fi like some sort of tribal dirge. “Yeah,” she said finally, “okay,” and she was already turning her back on me, her bare shoulders, hair in motion, her thighs. “You take care,” she said. “And Merry Christmas.”

I should have left then, but inertia had set in and the next drink sat like a barbell across my shoulders. Suzanne found her coat, thanked Tammy in dumb show while Bing Crosby or one of his accomplices—Nat King Cole—obliterated all sense and meaning, and then vanished into the night. The party began to wind down. Phil Leicester, who’d been lighting one cigarette off another all night and laughing at his own jokes in the register of a wounded animal, finally took his sagging face out to his car, then the McCaffreys left and I pushed myself up from the couch in a kind of panic, counting only six people left standing. It was almost nine o’clock. I had appointments to keep—or at least make. I was wondering how to extricate myself, debating whether to hit the bathroom and slip out the back door or suck it up and thank our hostess, who would after all be evaluating me at some point in the coming term, for the great time I’d had, when there she was, Tammy, standing right beside me in her dress with the thin shoulder straps that was just like Suzanne’s but for the color.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” She waved a watery cocktail in one hand, then brought a cigarette to her lips with the other.

I told her I was meeting somebody at Brennan’s. “At”—I made a show of looking at my watch—“9:30?”

“Bullshit,” she said. “I know you—you’re just going home to what, didn’t you tell me, a couch? Come on, one more drink. And if you want to know, I could use some help cleaning up too.”

“No, really, I’m supposed to meet somebody——”

“A girl?”

My mind was full of sludge. The lie couldn’t break free of it. “Yeah,” I said.

“What’s her name?”
I couldn’t think. She was right there, watching me. “Suzanne.”

“Suzanne? Not our Suzanne?”

“No,” I said, and I didn’t know how much she knew, “another Suzanne.”

“Okay,” she said, “but she can wait, can’t she? It’s not even nine yet—and I really could use some help here.” She slipped an arm around my waist as if we were out on a dance floor, and it was the first time we’d ever made physical contact, beyond maybe a handshake when we’d first met, if that. “Come on, one more drink?”

After the others left I went dutifully around the room, dumping ashtrays, gathering up bottles and cans for the trash and hauling trays of dishes, glasses and silverware out to the kitchen, where Tammy stood at the sink, a pair of yellow rubber gloves clinging to her bare arms. She’d fixed me a final drink—for the road—and I’d stationed it on the bar, where I could refer to it as I went back and forth. I was drunk enough that my thought processes pretty well shut down and everything became usual, as if all my life had narrowed to this point of rudimentary usefulness. The music persisted, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and the like, but it operated on me now like a kind of anesthesia, the world washed free of pain, loneliness, hurt, anger. Tammy was in the kitchen. The music flowed. I transported objects, one after another, until the only thing left was the punch bowl, a cut-glass receptacle the size of a birdbath identical to the one my mother kept on the top shelf of the pantry at home. I took it in both arms, lifted it from the bar with all its dregs of brutalized lemons and limes and discolored fruit juice sloshing merrily against my chest, and backed my way in through the swinging door to the kitchen, where Tammy, craning her neck over one shoulder, admonished me to be careful. “That was my mother’s,” she called out, and in the next moment she was coming across the room, her arms outstretched, to take it from me.

I didn’t drop it. That would have been too easy. No, I shifted it gently into her arms, her face inches from mine—both of us on the same page, concentrating hard—but the physics of the transaction caused some of the liquid, viscid with its load of citrus and sugar, to splash over the rim and dribble down the front of her dress. She let out a soft curse and then the bowl was on the counter and we were looking at each other in a way that might have been hilarious under other circumstances. But this wasn’t hilarious, this was something else I was just in that moment beginning to understand. I watched her drop her chin to peer down the front of her dress in disbelief. The liquid had darkened the material in a spreading stain that was shading from red to maroon, and my first impulse was to make amends, dab at it with something, paper towels, a wet cloth, but I just stood there watching her as her eyes rose gradually to mine. “I guess I’ll be making a trip to the dry cleaner’s after work Monday,” she said.

“What about a wet cloth? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to——”

She sighed, peeling back the rubber gloves. “And I really liked this dress too. The minute I tried it on I said to myself, ‘Tammy, this is you, it really is,’ and with my figure it isn’t always easy to find something to fit right, believe me—but here, help me, will you?”

She’d turned around, fumbling with the zipper the way my mother did when she got home from work and couldn’t decide whether to change first or make herself a drink. I did what I was told. Under my fingers, her skin seemed hot to the touch, though maybe that was my imagination. It took me two tries, but then I got the zipper down to the point where she could reach back and manipulate it herself, which she did with a soft frictive release that was the only sound in the whole house because the Christmas records—I realized it in that instant—had finally played themselves out. I took a step back, just to give her space, but she turned to face me, to look into my eyes, before she eased the dress down to her waist and I saw that she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

The truth? I did what I had to, what was expected, though when it was over I pulled on my jeans and went straight out to my car. Yes, I was drunk, but it seemed I was always drunk in those days, and nobody ever thought twice about driving under the influence, least of all me. The headlights were a revelation: They opened up the road to me and the road took me home. To Rob’s. Where I poured out a beer I couldn’t finish, tried to watch something on the TV and fell down hard into a black dreamless sleep. The next day my head hurt and I stayed in the shower so long the water began to go cold, after which I flipped through the channels, stared at a book I couldn’t concentrate on and went to the movies, alone. I didn’t go out that night, though it was Saturday and Saturdays were almost as precious as Fridays. Sunday was gray, cold, bleak. Then it was Monday and Rob was in his bed, snoring, when the alarm went off. I spent a long time staring into the bathroom mirror in my underwear thinking of what it was going to be like to see Suzanne and Tammy there in the office or the hallway, and the students too—Libby, who’d never missed a class though her coach was in exile, and Alec, who fingered his beard and carried himself like an astronaut just setting foot on earth again. Then I went to the phone and called in sick. I called in sick the day after that and then the following day until there was no point in calling anymore.

It was no great tragedy. I hadn’t wanted to be an educator in the first place—it was just a job, that was all. What I missed most was the paycheck, but that took care of itself in a way that wedded need and serendipity. It happened that one of the bartenders at Brennan’s quit to go back to school and since by that point I’d become not only a regular but a kind of prodigy of drink, hyperbole and free-form bar banter, the manager took me on as second bartender, three nights a week. It was hardly a career, but I accepted it for what it was—a place marker—and on most nights, even the slow ones, there were usually a couple of girls sitting at the bar gossiping over their brandy alexanders and tequila sunrises, watching my every move.