Still hanging on to the lingering feelings from the fight, I saw a meanness creep onto John’s face. “So I’m supposed to come when you call? And shove off when you don’t want me?”
“No,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You have always done exactly as you’ve liked. You will not get me into a fight right now, you will not. I won’t allow it. I have to teach.”
“I think you just don’t want to bother with me anymore,” he said. “I don’t even think you care about any of this.”
“Stop hounding me, John,” I said. “I know you’re getting restless, but I’m begging you, don’t hound me. I need time.”
After swallowing several times in quick, mad succession, he stepped to the side. As I passed out of the room he let me know that I’d neglected to pluck the reoccurring hair that had, in the last few years, begun to sprout perpetually from my chin.
V.
Your office is glorious.”
Cynthia Tong was waiting for me by my door when I came back from teaching—a distracted class in which I felt like I was both overly acquiescent to my students’ poorly read opinions and overly combative. They could critique only based on representation, they missed the formal elements of a story. Of course Rebecca is, in many ways, a story that is erected in misogyny, demonizing women, demonizing the other, but I was not interested in that for them. I wanted them to see how suspense was created, how symbols were utilized, how repetition made the ghost of Rebecca rise from the page. Again and again I told them, you need to see these things, these forms. Oh, they drove me crazy, being so completely obsessed with whether or not people were represented well, wanting every piece of literature to be some utopian screed of fairness.
I had to slide past her awkwardly, so it could seem like I was welcoming her, rather than her welcoming me. I made a gesture toward my couch, but she stood and looked around appreciatively, wanting to impress upon me how much nicer my situation was than hers.
“Are you in the windowless room? I was put there when I first came. Sit down,” I said, but she didn’t sit, she looked out the window, not in direct defiance—more as though she didn’t hear me. The light made a line across her face. She was truly outstandingly lovely, with thick, curling black hair, firm cheeks, a dress shaped like a box that was modest, chic, and sexy all at the same time. She had dancer’s or runner’s legs, muscles at the top of the calves, indentations above a strong-looking knee, a clear line running up the thigh separating the front muscles from the back. I always noticed that line because I remember a boy I knew in high school telling me how alluring he found it. I didn’t have it, and as he was telling me, I found myself understanding a new sort of truth: that there were all kinds and types of bodies, different aspects of physical form, that could spark arousal. That women’s bodies were to be noticed and scrutinized and found attractive in all sorts of ways that I had not heretofore conceived. Chins, hands, throats, bellies, asses, legs, feet, all were to be considered and fetishized or dismissed.
“I don’t have an office,” she said, after staring for a long while at the view of the campus’s rolling hills, then eventually sitting opposite me on the couch facing my desk. “They don’t give them to adjuncts anymore.”
I told her I would look into it, that if nothing else, she should be set up in a shared office. I wanted to make sure she knew from the beginning of our conversation that I was on her side. I complimented her dress and asked her where she got it, I told her I could never pull it off. I told her how much we missed her on Saturday, that I had been so looking forward to getting to know her, that I had read an excerpt of her memoir in Prairie Schooner （I had not, yet）， and that it was inimitably impressive.
“I wanted to come and talk to you about Saturday,” she said, and as she said it a wave of tension seemed to leave her body and I could see in her face the look of a swimmer before they enter cold water for the first time, the mental recklessness needed to trick oneself to jump in before you could stop and think about it too hard.
“I know all about migraines,” I said. “I had them until I was around forty-five. The whole world would be insufferable.” This was not true—I had bad headaches, but I never had migraines, never had the refracting of light that people describe, the spots, the auras—but I wanted to insist on our similarities.
“I didn’t have a migraine,” she said. “The truth is that Vlad and I had an awful fight and I couldn’t get down from the ceiling after. He had to drug me and put me to bed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know all about fights, too.”
“I sometimes have migraines,” she said. “I think. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that.”
“What was the fight about, if you don’t mind me asking—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” There was a fantasy that flashed into my mind quickly—as quickly and intrusively as those horrid images that used to haunt me as a young woman, of shit being thrown in my face or a rapist stuffing my used maxi pad into my mouth to gag me—of her telling me that the fight was about me, about Vladimir’s lust for me. No, fool. I pushed the thought from my mind as immediately as I would push back those other images.
“I don’t mind telling you,” she said. “That’s why I came here. To tell you. Do you know I’ve read both your novels? I loved them. I wasn’t going to tell you I read them. But I want to know you, and I want you to know me. Do you think that’s strange? But we’re working together and now my daughter has swum in your pool and I didn’t come and it was so rude and I want you to know why. Listen. I’m going to be frank.” She paused and leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m kind of a fuckup.”
“Me too.” I said to her. I had not expected, when I saw Cynthia sitting quietly in the faculty meetings, that she would be like this. I had been prejudiced—not against her being Chinese American, although who knows what assumptions were lingering unconsciously in my mind. I had been prejudiced because she was a wife. A hanger-on. I was a wife too, but my husband and I were hired for tenure-track positions at the same time. We made equal salaries until he became chair. I sold my first book for an advance that allowed us to make a down payment on our home. This woman, teaching one class, had moved with her husband, parasitic and helpless.
But here in my office, she impressed me. Not because she had liked my novels, but because there was an intense desperation to her, as though after all that she had gone through, the last stop on the train for her was truth, and the pursuit of truth.
She told me what I expected, that when Vladimir had suggested she text to coordinate lunch, she had bristled and told him she wouldn’t let the first text she wrote to me concern food. She told him to check with me about towels, because they only had slightly stained white bath towels, and she would have to go to the store and get new ones. She told me that she had gone to a spa to get her legs and underarms waxed to prepare and had bought new bathing suits for herself and Phee. She told me she was so nervous that morning that she was snappy and irritable. When Vlad, after one snap too many, snapped back, she broke down in tears and told him that all she wanted was to show us, me a writer, and my husband—an academic mind she admired—that they were a normal family. （She took a detour to say that she had fucked a couple teachers during her undergraduate and graduate experience, and while in general, looking at the drawn and papery skin that pulled toward their penises, or their crinkled eyes in morning light, she found them sad, she felt herself to be free and aware enough of the dynamic between them and was disappointed in women these days whose first thought after a consensual love affair was of their trauma—me, she said, I know trauma.）