Still married to Jerome, I considered my coffee dates with Yahav simply, if thrillingly, social. We shared an interest in Israeli cinema, and he wanted help finding some early Uri Zohar movies, which led to us watching A Hole in the Moon in his office. I was more taken with the books on his shelves than the film, doubly so because he was a law professor and I hadn’t expected to find David Mitchell and Audre Lorde in lieu of anything leatherbound. I understood that because we were becoming friends, we would never sleep together. Specifically: Because I’d opened myself up to him in unflattering ways, because I’d worn glasses and no makeup on our walks, griped about Jerome’s anxiety, even moaned to him about the stretch marks my kids had gifted me, I’d taken sex off the table.
And then, at a wine bar late one night after we discussed our foundering marriages and the panic attacks Yahav was getting in traffic, he looked at me with such imploring eyes that the future rolled out in front of us, soft and green.
We’d only been seeing each other six months when his wife was diagnosed with severe chronic fatigue syndrome and he realized he needed to stay with her, take care of their daughter, live in the house. Her illness put us on hold, turning a legitimate relationship into an illegitimate one. I found myself in an affair by default, not because I chose to transgress but because I was unwilling to cut off a full-throttle romance just because circumstances had changed. We saw each other, we didn’t see each other, we were together, we were undefined, he emailed, we texted, he begged me to send nudes, he said he needed me, he went silent, we met in hotels, we met at my place, he felt guilty, he felt relief, she was getting better, it was back, she had heart issues, I was the only thing keeping him together, I was the reason he was falling apart. He took the BU post that fall—a yearlong sabbatical from UCLA, but he’d be teaching a couple of classes in addition to writing his new book—and his family came with him. His wife was doing better, somewhat. They were still talking divorce, but I was in no position to rock the boat. I couldn’t fault him for any dismissive action, because he was doing the Right Thing when he ignored me. And I couldn’t advocate for myself without being wrong.
So: Here I was, giving him the easy out. Reduced to the girl I’d always refused to be, happy with crumbs.
After the break we were supposed to talk about editing, but the other kids had grown interested in Thalia’s case, had started googling things, developing their own theories, and wanted to talk about it.
Lola forked fingers through their purple hair and said, “The guy who killed that Spanish teacher in the ’70s, he was out of prison by then. There’s this whole thing about how he might’ve been living in the woods. Just hanging out by campus. And they never look into him?”
“That was only something we said to freak each other out.” The rumor must have come from an alum, someone who’d heard four years of tall tales—how an old jacket found hung on a branch clearly belonged to Barbara Crocker’s estranged boyfriend, who now lived in an old lacrosse goal he’d tied blankets over, or maybe he lived in the clock tower, watched us all with binoculars. “There’s no substance to that.”
Jamila said, “Those mattresses in the woods? I read he was supposed to live there.”
“Oh, God no. It was where students went to drink. That was where Thalia’s friends were that night.”
And then they wanted to hear about the mattresses instead, and whether I used to go there, but I wasn’t falling for the distraction.
“My friends and I smoked more than we drank,” I said. “It was all pretty regrettable.”
In any case, I never attended an actual mattress party. But I passed the mattresses many times, and once you knew they were there, you couldn’t miss them, just a few yards off the Nordic trail that the cross-country skiers used in winter and the cross-country runners used in fall. The media took the presence of mattresses to be a sex thing, when really it was just two disgusting old dorm mattresses that marked a meeting spot, and anyone having sex there would risk tetanus and fleas. Senior spring, when I dropped crew and smoked half a pack a day, Geoff Richler and I would walk there during our empty third and fourth periods, stepping over broken bottles to sit not on the mattresses, which were always wet, but on the logs people had dragged into the clearing. I’d smoke, and Geoff would entertain me. Sometimes Carlotta would ditch her unsupervised studio art time to join us and smoke half a cigarette, and Geoff would watch like that was his actual cock she was putting to her lips.
Half an hour sounded right for the walk—that’s what I’d seen quoted online, as people questioned whether someone could have left the party, killed Thalia, and returned—but it took longer in snow and ice, longer in the mud. I can tell you with certainty that we couldn’t have walked to the mattresses and back in one class period. The mattresses were, as we now all know, 1.4 miles from both the theater and the gym. It was a bit farther than that from the darkroom in Quincy, which was where Geoff and I would start our trek.
I tuned back in to Britt, preaching to her choir. “Plus,” she was saying, “the only evidence that Omar ever even talked to her was student gossip. She’d told a few friends she was having trouble with some older dude. And her friends look around for someone older and creepy, and they settle on the Black guy.”
“That’s not quite how it happened,” I said.
There was chatter in the room, but it only swam around me. It was the word creepy, an echo of something just out of reach.
And then—I wonder if I actually sat there slack-jawed, or if I managed to keep my face composed—it was as if the hemispheres of my brain jolted out of decades-long disconnection.
The time the two of you stayed behind and missed the firefly show. The days I’d waited endlessly outside your door while Thalia’s convocation coaching ran overtime. Low rumbling when you talked, the sound of Thalia projecting her voice across the room, long periods of silence. I’d seen her turn red, junior year, when she talked about you. I’d seen you sitting too close. I’d seen her stay late after Follies practice.
We had talked about it, me and Fran and Carlotta and Geoff. We joked that she was obsessed with you, we joked that you were sleeping with her. Wasn’t it a joke? Or, it was something we only believed for fun. The same way we chose to believe in dormitory ghosts.
And what if—
You didn’t even seem that shaken up after Thalia died, at least not more than other teachers. You asked again and again at our convocation practice if I was okay, talked about how your kids, who’d known her as a babysitter, were so shaken. By then, I must have abandoned any notion that something illicit was going on.
Back in ’95, I’d learned first that there were rumors about Omar, then that he’d confessed, then—after we graduated—that he’d been convicted, and only then that part of the evidence against him was Thalia’s alleged statements about some older guy.
It had thickened the air in the classroom: Thalia having trouble with an older guy.
Not that you would hurt her; this wasn’t what I was thinking. Your hands were so thin. You were scared of bees. I couldn’t imagine you bashing someone’s head. I reminded myself of the DNA evidence against Omar. And you had an alibi: You’d stayed behind at the theater, making sure instruments and sheet music got packed up, wheeling the timpani back into the closet. I was your alibi, for Christ’s sake. I told the police how we’d chatted about Braveheart. And then you went home to your wife and kids.