I made a point to lift my head as I walked on campus, meeting eyes and saying hello to everyone I knew. Vladimir and I ran into each other frequently, in hallways, in the cafeteria, and at the coffee stand. Whenever we met we lingered, discussing students, new books that were overpraised, and old books that were underappreciated. Often we spoke of the twentieth, and how we looked forward to a long and uninterrupted conversation. Every time we parted it was as though we had to tear ourselves away.
I felt willing to face all that I had not faced before. Besides working every day on my book （I was nearly halfway through a draft and confident enough to call it a book now）， I read Cynthia’s memoir excerpts. Well-written, terse, biting, they centered on the day that her mother committed suicide, when Cynthia was ten years old. I didn’t think she would make much money from it—it was too good, written without an ounce of sentimentality. I sent her a note with a list of my favorite sentences. I enrolled in a 6:30 a.m. boot camp at the Y. I went to the dentist and had my teeth whitened. I contacted and met with several contractors up at the lake to collect estimates for winterizing the cabin. I opened a separate bank account, a thing that, to the disbelief of some of my friends, I hadn’t kept since before my marriage, into which I redirected my salary and put half of our savings. I did a face mask every other day.
That summer, John had enlisted the services of Wilomena Kalinka, a lawyer from town who Sid deemed “fine.” “As long as you have a woman, as long as you prepare.” He had initially wanted to represent himself at his hearing, but Sid had convinced him to bring on counsel. He argued he was sure to be dismissed, so what was the point of paying someone. She told him that he had to prepare in case civil suits were brought against him after his dismissal. As the hearing loomed, he spent more and more days at Wilomena’s office, in the front room of a historic house, with “W. Kalinka, Juris Doctorate, American Bar Association” stenciled in white letters on the leaded-glass entrance. He would come home from her office around dinnertime, change, and leave once more. Sid grew increasingly agitated about his absences and begged him to tell her where he went, at first in a joking way, and then in earnest frustration, but he evaded her questions just as he evaded mine.
My nights were full of feverish and intense meditations on the lustful joinings of Vladimir and me. He would run his fingers, ever so lightly, from my earlobe down my neck. He would press me against a bathroom sink from behind and reach around and grab my breasts. He would slide his hand up my leg while I drove. Those simple flashes were enough to send me into an erotic frenzy. I would masturbate, climax, step outside to smoke, then return to the futon in the office and repeat the process two or three times. At night when I dreamed it was always of him. Often he would stab me with a kitchen knife, and I would see black-cherry pools of blood on my tile before I woke.
Two nights before John’s hearing Sid convinced me to follow him so we could discover where he went every evening. She could no longer bear being excluded, like when she was a small child and would get so upset when her father and I would disappear into the bathroom to discuss an issue she was not supposed to hear. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I agreed because I was so pleased that Sid wanted to treat me like a comrade. It felt like a new stage in our relationship. I pictured the two of us in Argentina, visiting the birthplaces of Borges and Cortázar, sitting in outdoor cafés with red wine and seafood buried in rice, or in Norway, waking in the middle of the night to see the aurora borealis, or in New York at a lesbian bar—Henrietta’s if it still existed. “This is my mother,” she would say. I would be attentive, supportive, and interesting for her friends, who would come to see me not as a parent but as an equal member of their group.
We weren’t particularly subtle in our pursuit, but John wasn’t particularly careful or attentive as a rule. We jumped into my car the moment he pulled out of the driveway. Once he reached Main Street we let a pick-up come between us. There was a long, uninhabited stretch of road before one of the college entrances, and once I realized he was taking that, I turned with a screech to approach the campus the other way. I acted excited for Sid, who was palpitating with the idea of the chase, but as soon as I realized he was headed for the building that housed the English Department, a hard lump rose in my throat. Poor man, had he been going to his office all this time? Sitting in his very well-appointed room, maybe at his desk, maybe in one of the two leather club chairs, or lying on the tartan chesterfield, considering the life that would no longer be his? For while I had my writing, John had nothing other than the college. He had made the program what it was today, developed its curriculum, brought on most of the current staff. He had helped students go on to achieve master’s degrees and PhDs and become well-regarded writers and influential scholars in their field. Our program was ranked second in the nation in colleges of our size. He was proud of the status, he felt responsible for it. We were considered diverse and progressive, due to his insistence on active recruitment. All over the internet, alumni and students would refer to our department as “a special place.”
One could observe the staff parking lot for our building from the general parking area, which sat below it on a hill. Sid and I pulled into the lower lot in time to see John walking from his car toward the back entrance. Just as he approached the door, it was flung open toward him, a square of bright white light against the heavy dark of 9 p.m. Standing in the doorway, one hand at her neck, the other pressing against the metal bar latch, stood Cynthia Tong.
* * *
I prayed they would say a few words and she would continue out to her car, the whole run-in a coincidence. But then I saw John touch her face, and she pulled him in by the hip, the door closing behind him so that they seemed to be swallowed by the night.
We watched in silence as the light in John’s office turned on, and then I started the engine and backed up without looking, nearly hitting a Subaru behind me, and drove out of the parking lot at an irresponsible speed.
“Where are we going?” Sid asked.
“Home,” I said. The image of John and Cynthia was thudding in my brain as if lit by a pulsing strobe, and I fixed my eyes on the white line of the road, like one is supposed to do in dense fog, to stabilize my thoughts.
“Don’t you think we should go in?” Sid shifted her body so she could look over her shoulder out the rear window, trying to keep her eyes on the building as I drove away.
“For what?”
“To see what they’re doing.”
“We know what they’re doing, honey.”
“I didn’t think it was so clear.”
“Sid, it’s nine o’clock.”
“So?”
“So it’s clear.”
Sid turned back to face me, chewing the inside of her lip, an old habit. “That was the woman I met the other night, right?”
“Right.” Had Cynthia been on her way to meet John when she came by the house that night? Or worse, had she come looking for him? Had he given her our address, or had they met there before, an afternoon tussle in our marital bed, arranged for a time when his family was sure to be away?
“Why would she do anything with Dad?”