I straightened myself up to greet her and saw she was with David. David, my old lover, currently the interim chair while John was suspended. In the past, God, almost twenty years, David had declined. When we came together he was a lean, compact man with a shaved bald head that I loved to rub my hands over, to feel between my breasts. He had a strong forehead and a prominent nose, which could physically arouse me by sight. At the height of our coupling, I would catch a glimpse of his nose during a meeting and could manipulate myself, using the ridge of the chair and my muscles, into a small, secret orgasm.
David was now fifty pounds overweight and dissipated. He no longer shaved his head, but wore a little tonsure of short hair surrounding his shiny pate, a style that made him look like the character-actor version of a tax accountant. His nose had lengthened into a beak, with an extra bit of hanging cartilage at the tip. He dressed as an afterthought—I am sure his wife bought shirts and slacks for him in bulk and he accepted them like a prisoner accepts their uniform. Ah, but I shouldn’t be so mean to David. For years I had focused on his flaws. It was the only way I could survive his great betrayal. Was I pleased when I compared him with my husband, whose light hair and eyes allowed him to fade so gracefully into age? Who was still vain, who used the gym more than the library, who dog-eared pages in fashionable men’s catalogues? Certainly I was. But I would wager that David, with his meaty, masculine fingers, could still be a thrilling lover: focused, playful, receptive. He had marked the end of my experimentation, the commencement of my unimpeachable existence. Our affair lived in my thoughts like a once-loved but mostly forgotten piece of music, popping into my head occasionally, bringing all sorts of feelings.
He lost a son, many years after we ended things, in a freak accident at a lake. At the funeral he had embraced me tightly and whispered in my ear, “See?” I didn’t see. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t see. During our affair, he had not had any understanding, unspoken or otherwise, with his wife. Guilt about leaving his family had prevented what I had believed at the time was my greatest chance at happiness. His son was born a year after we ended things. I assumed he was putting all his sexual energy back into his marriage, doubling down on the life he chose. His “See” seemed to suggest that he believed the punishment would have been much worse if we had gone overseas, that the death of his son was already a result of his transgression. Understandable in the moment, at the peak of shock and sadness, but ultimately ridiculous. Grief makes people wild in their thought. As if we are ever punished or rewarded in that kind of way—a random tragic death in exchange for a secret indiscretion. Since his son died David moved through the world heavily, as though his entire body was draped in the lead apron one wears for X-rays. I never liked that “See.” It was like a line written by an aspirational Ibsen or Strindberg or Bergman, some Scandinavian obsessed with being haunted by their actions—a line that sounded like a profound truth, but meant nothing.
“Tired?” Florence looked at me with irritating sympathy. I shook my head. “No, I just closed my eyes for a moment.”
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “This fall weather makes me tired. Hot in the sun, cold in the shade, I close the door of my office and take a twenty-minute nap, then wake up and eat some chocolate-covered raisins and it’s like I’m a new woman. Do you nap, David?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’ll take a nap. I like a nap.”
“I love a nap. How about you, do you nap?” She sat herself down at the table and beckoned for David to grab another chair.
“No,” I said to her. “I hate naps.”
What I truly hated were conversations about sleep. It felt like all anyone talked about—work and sleep. When Sid was young the world seemed obsessed with sleeping—her sleeping, my sleeping, my husband’s sleeping—the schedule, the tiredness, the endless tiredness.
“Wow, you’re amazing.” Florence winked, to herself it seemed.
“Are you joining me to eat,” I asked them, “or is this an ambush?”
David smiled. “More the latter, unfortunately.”
Florence batted him on the shoulder. “This is not an ambush, don’t say that.” She kept looking nervously at him; it was clear they’d banded together to come and tell me some news that I didn’t want to hear.
David looked around the café. “Maybe we should walk,” he said.
“Scared I’ll make a big scene?” I asked him.
“Not at all!” Florence flipped her hair so that it looked like an ocean wave on the top of her head.
“Yes,” he said.
An image cracked in my mind at that very moment. It was of Vladimir and Cynthia, with faces more weathered than now, holding hands on the front steps of the English Department building, posing for a photograph. John and I, when he was promoted to chair, had posed for a shoot such as this. In quick succession I saw flashes of them posing, climbing the stairs to their offices, kissing chastely, and then Cynthia walking into my office, which was now hers. I stood outside, visible from her window, except I was costumed like a leper in a church musical, with distressed and tea-stained Ace bandages dripping from my arms. I reached toward her in supplication. From her mind’s eye she zoomed in on my face, and it was toothless, tearstained, covered in dirt.
I finished my soup and coffee, put the pastry in my bag, and threw out my garbage as they waited for me by the door. I was seized by the impulse to run. This felt like the walk that a doomed man takes with a couple of Mafia stooges. The walk Camille Claudel took with her brother before he locked her up in that insane asylum for the rest of her life.
We left together in silence. There was a narrow, poorly designed rocky stairway that led from the café to the grounds. David held tightly on to the railing and limped down the stairs. When I asked about his injury, he told me that he had helped move Mercy, his daughter, in with her fiancé over the past weekend and had injured the lower right part of his back. “Fiancé,” I said, and congratulated him. “He’s a great guy, we really like him,” he said, nodding sadly. “They don’t want a big wedding, so that’s a relief.” And we fell into silence again, trudging over the grass until we reached a footpath that encircled the campus.
Florence began.
“You know that John’s trial begins on the twentieth?”
“His hearing,” I corrected.
“Were you planning on attending?”
“No,” I said. I was in fact ambivalent, but I didn’t want to admit that ambivalence to either of them.
“Good,” she said.
David started in. “Look, you know the times we are living in.”
“Certainly I do.”
“Absurd, you have to be so careful, you get no support from the administration—nothing to back you up—the students rule the roost—you know what I mean.”
“What are you getting at? Did I do something wrong? Something offensive?”
Florence shook her head vigorously. “No no no no no no no no no no.”
“So then what is it?”
As Florence seemed unable to speak, David nodded at her to show he would take over. If there weren’t such a discrepancy of attractiveness between the two, I would think they were together.