She frowned, thinking about what I’d just said. “You’re probably right, but I guess I don’t particularly care one way or another if my husband is cheating on me for the first time. I don’t know why I feel this way but, honestly, it’s Pam that is pissing me off a little more than he is. I don’t know what game she thinks she’s playing. Hey, did you keep teaching after the seniors graduated early that year? I know you didn’t come back the next year.”
It was an abrupt change of topic and for that reason it made me answer honestly. “Oh, God, no,” I said. “I don’t think I could’ve ever walked back into that school. I felt bad about it, but there was only about two weeks left anyway.”
“You never taught again?”
“No, not high school. I do occasionally teach an adult ed class in poetry, but it’s not the same thing.”
“The basketball player,” she said, and her face brightened as though she’d just won a trivia contest.
I must have looked confused because she added, “It’s all coming back to me, now. For the last month of classes you had us read poetry because you knew we wouldn’t be able to focus on full books.”
“Right,” I said.
“And we read this poem about a kid who used to be—”
“Oh, right. John Updike. The poem was called ‘Ex-Basketball Player.’ I haven’t thought of that for—”
“And you got in a fight with Ally Eisenkopf because she said you were making up all the symbolism in it.”
“I wouldn’t call it a fight. More like a spirited intellectual debate.” And now I was remembering that day in class, when the lesson plan was to dissect that poem line by line, and I’d drawn a map on the chalkboard that located the gas station described in the poem, and the street it was on. I was trying to show how a relatively simple poem such as “Ex-Basketball Player” by John Updike could be as carefully constructed as a clock, that every word was a deliberate choice for both the text and the subtext of the poem. The students that were paying attention had rebelled, convinced I was reading things into the poem that didn’t exist. I’d told them I found it interesting they could believe that someone could go to the moon, or invent computer coding, yet they couldn’t quite believe that the described location of the gas station in a poem was a metaphor for the stalled life of a high school basketball champion.
Ally Eisenkopf, one of my more vocal students, had gotten visibly upset, claiming I was just making stuff up, as though I’d told her that the sky wasn’t blue. I was very surprised that Joan remembered that particular class. I told her that.
“I have a good memory, and you were a good teacher. You really made an impression on me that year.”
“Well,” I said. “You and no one else.”
“You know that Richard, my cheating husband, went to DM too.”
It took me a moment to remember that DM was what the kids called Dartford-Middleham High School. “No, I didn’t know that. Did I have him in a class?”
“No, you didn’t have him in one of your classes. No way did he do honors English.”
I was surprised that Joan had married a high school boyfriend. The towns of Dartford and Middleham might not be as ritzy as some of the other towns around them, like Concord, or Lincoln, but most of the kids from the public high school went on to four-year colleges, and I doubt many of them married their high school sweethearts.
“Were you dating him back then, in high school?”
“Richard? No, hardly. I knew him, of course, because he was a really good soccer player, but it was just random that we got together. We met in Boston, actually. I lived there for a year after college, and he was still at BU and bartending in Allston. That’s where I lived.”
“Where do you both live now?”
“In Dartford, I’m sorry to say. We actually live in Rich’s parents’ house. Not with them. They live in Florida now, but they sold us the house and it was such a good deal that we couldn’t really pass it up. I suppose you’ll need to know our address and everything if you’re going to be following Rich?” She pulled her shoulders back a fraction and raised her head. It was a gesture I remembered.
“You sure you want me to do this for you? If you already know that he’s cheating—”
“I am definitely sure. He’s just going to deny it unless I have proof.”
So we talked terms, and I gave her a rate that was slightly less than I should have, but she was a former student, and it wasn’t as though I didn’t have the time. And she told me the details about Richard’s real estate office, and how she was convinced that the affair was only taking place during work hours. “You know it’s the easiest profession for having affairs,” she said.
“Empty houses,” I said.
“Yep. Lots of empty houses, lots of excuses to go visit them. He told me that, a while ago, when two of the agents in his company were sleeping with one another, and he had to put an end to it.”
I got more details from her, then let her know I’d work up a contract and email it to her to sign. And as soon as I had her signature and a deposit I would go to work.
“Keep an eye on Pam,” she said. “That’s who he’s with, I know it.”
After Joan left my office, I stood at my window with its view of Oxford Street and watched as she plucked fallen ginkgo leaves off her Acura before getting inside. It was a nice day outside, that time of year when half the leaves are still on the trees, and half are blowing around in the wind. I returned to my desk, opened up a Word document, and took notes on my new case. It had been strange to see Joan again, grown up but somehow still the same. I could feel myself starting to go over that period of time when I’d last known her but I tried to focus instead on what she’d told me about her husband. I’d tailed a wife once before, but never a husband. In that previous case, just over a year ago, it turned out the wife wasn’t cheating, that she was a secret gambler, driving up to New Hampshire to visit poker rooms. Somehow, this time, I thought that Joan’s husband was probably exactly who she thought he was. But I told myself to not make assumptions. Being at the beginning of a case was like beginning a novel or sitting down to watch a movie. It was best to go in with zero expectations.
After locking up my office and leaving the building I was surprised to find it was dusk already. I walked home along the leaf-strewn streets of Cambridge, excited to have a paying job, but feeling just a little haunted by having seen Joan again after so many years.
It was mid-October and every third house or so was bedecked with Halloween decorations: pumpkins, fake cobwebs, plastic tombstones. One of the houses I passed regularly was swarmed with giant fake spiders, and a mother had brought her two children, one still in a stroller, to look at the spectacle. The older of the two kids, a girl, was pointing to one of the spiders with genuine alarm and said to her mother that someone should smush it.
“Not me,” the mom said. “We’d need a giant to do that.”
“So, let’s get a giant,” the girl said.
The mother caught my eye as I was passing and smiled at me. “Not me either,” I said. “I’m tall, but I’m not a giant.”