Chapter 45a

“You don’t look okay,” Kat said. 

A wave of something intense was coming from her, the deep opaque red on her lips, the way she was hovering over him, the heat radiating from her chest. The clingy black fabric next to his face, the rough outline of her nipple.  The cup of wine she had just set on the desk, bloody, thick.

Things were going black again. Fainting. That’s what was happening. He was about to go unconscious in a small space with Katherine Curtis.  It seemed like the worst thing that could happen.

“You need to lie down,” she said, motherly, bossy.  He didn’t want to, but when she tugged at his waist, he slid like a noodle onto the floor.  

“Are you awake?”  Now she was crouching next to him, tapping on the front of his shoulder.  How long had it been?  Everything was colored weird, like there was green in the red of her hair and her face looked blue.  He didn’t like looking up at her from the floor, so he pulled himself up to sit against the wall. He felt dizzy, too high up, even though his head was probably three feet off the ground.

“Here, drink this.” 

She held the plastic cup in front of his face, the one that used to have wine in it, but now it was filled with water.  He could still smell the wine, knew the water would taste like it, didn’t want to drink something Kat gave him.  But she had probably dumped out her wine for him—unless she had just chugged it really fast—and anyway he was really, really thirsty all of sudden.  

“Thanks.”  He gulped it all at once, tried to ignore the lingering bloody wine taste.  On the way down, it crashed into something in the back of his throat like a wave hitting a wall. He had to wait a few seconds until things settled down and he could speak again.  “Um, why are you down here?”

He didn’t mean it to sound like that.  At her boyfriend’s memorial service and everything, no time to be asshole.  It was just that she’d never had an office—hadn’t stayed in the program long enough to teach a class—so there was no reason for her to be wandering around the graduate student instructors’ offices on a Saturday afternoon. Like maybe his key was illegal, but she had never even had a key.

“Yeah, why was I?”  She made a guilty face like, oops, you caught me, and sat down on the floor next to him.  She had to bend her legs sidewise in the fitted black dress.  “So okay, I was totally stalking you.  After I saw you leave without even saying hi to me.”

Oh. So that meant she’d hiding somewhere around here the whole time, during his manic cleaning of an office that didn’t belong to him, and those ten minutes he spent bawling like a mental patient. Fine, whatever. She got a pass today, he supposed.

“I’m really sorry,” he said.

“You should be.”  She gave him a half-smile, a half-wink, sort of sadly sassy. “So rude.”

“No, I mean about.” What was the nice way to say it? “Your loss.”

“Oh, yeah.  Thanks.”  She picked up the empty cup from the floor between them, twirled it between glistening red nails, put it back down. “I mean, I knew he was gonna die.”

A weird thing to say, but he got it. Actually it was kind of a relief to hear her say the d-word, to have the go-ahead to talk normally.

“Everyone’s gonna die,” he said.  

“You know what I mean.  Soon.” She sighed, kicked off the crazy heels, shifted her knees the other way.  Her toes were painted bloody red like her fingers. “He was a total mess. I drove him to the E.R. like so many times.”

She squirmed around a little, trying to get better situated on the floor in her tight dress, settled herself the same way she had started.  He didn’t feel too comfortable himself, the too-small suit pants cutting into his gut and straining across his ass like they might split.  He thought about suggesting they move to the chairs.  But there was something kind of helpful about the hardness of the ground, the definitiveness.

“I’ve been waiting like forever to tell you.” Her chit-chat voice was kind of jarring after all the death talk. “I loved your article in Irish Modernism Studies.”

“You read it?”

“Yeah, I stole it from Jer—”  She stopped, let the name hang unfinished. “That whole part about Maddy’s baby was amazing.” 

Of course. 

“Yeah, that’s everyone’s favorite part,” he said. Nobody seemed to notice the subtle discussion of abjection and time, how Stump’s use of silence conveyed the horror of the unknown, of death. It was always Maddy’s baby, Maddy’s baby. 

“It’s like, so impressive. You set out to do something, and you’re really doing it.  Like you’re on your way up.  And I’m still here.  I never went anywhere.”  She looked around the room as though she’d spent the past decade sitting on this office floor. “I thought by now I’d have my fabulous professor job all lined up, in like New York or Boston, or maybe Europe, Florence or something. That’s probably why I didn’t finish.  Too unrealistic.”

“I guess I always knew I’d end up in Kansas.  Someplace like Kansas.  It’s one of those career sacrifices.”

A cackle exploded out of her, low and bitter. He laughed, too, more at her laugh than what he had said. He wasn’t trying to make a joke, but yeah, it was funny, the stupid ideas you had when you were young.

“Is it totally shitty there?” She sounded like she hoped it was.  

“Yeah, it’s pretty shitty.”

“Like New Buffalo.  I don’t know how I let myself get stuck here.  Just going along with things, not making decisions.  That’s the worst part, how I didn’t get to choose. At least you chose Kansas.”  

Did he?  She sounded pretty persuasive, but it didn’t feel that way to him.

She picked up one of her shoes, held it out in front of her like it was a piece of artwork. It sort of was, with all those straps and buckles like a cage for her foot, and the heel so thin and violent. It wasn’t really an Indiana type of shoe.

“Maybe I’ll move somewhere,” she said.

“Where?”

A heavy sigh, like this question is way too hard. “I don’t know.”

She’d never been Gavin’s favorite person or anything, but wow she sounded sad. Sadder than he’d ever heard anyone sound before.

“You know, you could move anywhere you want,” he said. “There’s nothing keeping you here, and you’re really young.”

She sighed again, then leaned her body over.  Her arm touched his, her weight sunk into him, her settled onto his shoulder.

What was happening?  Say something else, talk faster.

“Like you could move to New York or Boston or California.  Or um, Paris or wherever.”

“Shh.”  She covered his lips with her hand, so he was breathing her smell into his mouth, leather and spicy lotion.  She was on her knees, looking at him.  He could see the little wrinkles on the sides of her eyes, which weirdly made her look younger, less like a dress-up doll and more like a person.

She moved her hand off his face and replaced it with her mouth.

So now he was—hmm. It was kind of hard to believe, but yeah, this was happening.  He was kissing Kat.  

Not what he would have expected, like not at all, ever, but here it was. A woman in black, fleshy and round like a pin-up, climbing onto his lap. Tracing her nails along his scalp, letting her tongue get tangled up with his. Probably he should tell her to stop, it was just that—

Actually it was kind of nice. Like too nice. Scary nice, actually, like fuck. That’s what happens when you don’t have sex for three years, don’t so much as touch a woman—your body gets fucking crazy. There was a shaking deep in his stomach, a hunger and straining, that feeling like the first time you made out with a girl (you know, really made out with a girl) and your desire was so bottomless that you were terrified you might bite a hole in her or smash her into pieces with your dick.

“Where are you staying?” she asked, scratchy-voiced.

“Campus Hilton.  It’s just a few blocks past the—”

“Never mind, it’s good right here.”  She unbuttoned his shirt, pulled up the white t-shirt under it, tugged at his chest hair with her teeth.  His stomach was horrible in the florescent light, swollen and pale, covered with lost-looking hairs.  He looked up at the curtainless window right above them.  Probably no one would come down here to the third floor.  Probably not. 

“Maybe I should turn the lights out.”

She was unzipping the top of her dress, pushing her breasts into his face.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.  “No one’s out there.”

Right, okay, focus.  Boobs right in front of him, nice round ones, big, pushed up in black lace.  He wondered if they might be fake.  Could you tell just by feeling? He squeezed one, then the other.  Reached around her to undo the bra.  Stuck a nipple into his mouth.  The tasted nice, seemed real enough, based on boobs from his past, but of course it had been a while. 

She started to unbutton his pants, crawling backwards onto the floor so her face was next to his zipper.  She was crouched like a cat, her rump a round black hill in front of him, the ruby hair coming undone and falling across her cheek.

He looked at up at the window.  Someone was there, he could feel it.  Some presence looming there, watching. Fuck.

Nope. Nobody.

Or wait, what was that movement?  The top of a face, just peeking around the edge of the window? Someone hiding, waiting until they could get some really incriminating evidence, maybe a photo: Kansas Professor Fucks Dead Advisor’s Girlfriend During Funeral.  

Okay: he wanted this to stop. Nice as it felt, it was wrong, not what he wanted, a bad decision.

But how do I stop it?  It was a bad movie, the predictable sex scene, rolling along towards its obvious conclusion whether he liked it or not. Hand on his dick, mouth on his neck, breasts against his chest.

“Stop,” he said.

“Huh?”  She lifted her head to face him, pushed loose hair away from her face. “What’s wrong?”

Her lipstick was all smudged, a red stain around her mouth, but it didn’t look bad, more like she’d been drinking cherry juice or something. She was smiling, but a bit of worry was in her eyes. She seemed sweet like that, and he wondered if he was making a mistake.  But no, he was sure.  Pretty sure.  Ninety percent sure at least.

I am not the next Jeremy Frick.  

That was it.  It clicked, so obvious.  It must have been sitting in the front of his brain all day or all week or for years, and he just hadn’t thought to notice it.  He didn’t want Jeremy Frick’s girlfriend or Jeremy Frick’s job or Jeremy Frick’s rock star status or any part of Jeremy Frick’s miserable fucking existence.  He didn’t want to be Marjorie Mendelssohn, Randy Ledbetter, Grover Maloney, didn’t want an office or a professorship or to write the definitive book about abjection in the works of Liam Stump.

He needed to get the fuck out of here. Before this office, this barren, newly-clean office opened its giant barren jaws and swallowed him forever, before he found himself married to the woman sitting on top of him, who wanted this life even less than he did. Wanted it less, that’s right.  He didn’t want it.   A revelation, clear as though it was written across the inside of his forehead, across the dotted ceiling tiles:

THIS

WAS NOT

WHAT HE WANTED.

He reached down to his pants, shoved his dick back into his underwear, fixed his zipper.  Pulled his belt through its loop. 

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

<Chapter 44a

Chapter 46a>

Chapter 44a

“Bullshit!”

It was scrawled in red pen in the margins of a photocopied article.  Gavin had broken into his old office on the way down from the memorial service.  Okay, broken in sounded more exciting than it was.  Really he’d just let himself in with the key that was still on his keychain, but he wasn’t supposed to have it anymore.  As though anyone was going to spend their last afternoon in town trekking to campus security, which was, oddly, way off campus, just to get the five dollar deposit back on their office key.

The shelves were as dusty as ever, same ancient journals. Someone had added a beat-up copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume One, but otherwise, everything looked pretty much the same.

The article was lying on the one of the empty desks towards the back.  Something about lesbian identity in the late Middle Ages.  The margin notes didn’t say “bullshit” just once. They said it over and over, like five times just on the first page, first written out in plain lowercase, then in all caps, underlined: BULLSHIT!

Gavin sat down in the rolling chair, always too low for the desk, scanned the article.

The category lesbian thus becomes an ontology. —Bullshit! The term lesbianism suffers from an excess of meaning, overflowing its boundaries and contaminating the words and ideas surrounding it. —BULLSHIT!!! 

And sure, of course it was bullshit, but not, like, especially. That was just the way you thought when you were a student. Someone would write that lesbianism was an ontology, whatever that was supposed to mean, and you would be like, no way!!! You are such an asshole!!! That’s how he used to feel when he read Grover Maloney’s writing.  All that stuff about the false dichotomy of Bo and Mi, how they were aspects of one unified whole, the stupid comparisons he made to show their fundamental similarities.  It used to drive Gavin fucking crazy, like he wanted the run the whole book through the paper shredder. He would scrawl in the margins, No! Wrong! Idiotic!

Now he couldn’t imagine getting so worked up about something like that.  Or really about anything. What could possibly make him angry enough that he had to express his rage through marginalia?  Now he would just head to the bar—they actually called it a saloon in Fancy, Kansas, for real—and have a couple beers, and everything would be fine.  You could only stand so many bad feelings in one lifetime; no point wasting them on frivolous crap.

He dropped the article into his lap and stared across the office—not a long ways, five feet maybe—at the computer.  The screen was covered in a thick layer of that dust that you could only see when it was turned off.  He wanted to wipe it off, looked around for a box of tissues, but of course there was nothing nice like that. 

Somebody needed to take care of this office.  Not like he ever had.  You couldn’t feel any kind of ownership over a room you shared with twenty other people.  But now, with some distance, he felt bad for it.  Like it was a forgotten childhood toy, roughly used and then left to collect mold in some basement.

He went to the bathroom down the hall, ran a big pile of paper towels under the faucet and squeezed the water out, got another stack of dry ones.  Back in the office, he wiped the dust from the computer screen, scrubbed the sticky film off each letter on the keyboard, the coffee stains from the top of each of the four desks.  He even moved the journals and the Norton Anthology so he could run the wet towels over the bookshelves. He dried everything off, threw all the wet and dry towels in the garbage in the hall, so he wouldn’t mess up the fresh new liner in the office wastebasket.

It looked a lot better when he was done, still plain and ugly, but at least clean.  It smelled better, too, with the dust gone and the door open, less stale and sad.  He sat down, breathed deep through his nose, looked at gray wall, the blank computer screen, the photocopied article, bullshit, bullshit.

Then, rushing over him, the feeling of being a student.  The fuzzy pleasure of uncertainty, of pretending to be an expert, of not really being one.  Of being a child, dreaming of the day you’d become an adult, a man: a professor. Maybe you’d be unhappy, like your own professors were, but that didn’t matter. Unhappiness was a sign that you were living the life of the mind.  If you were miserable, you were probably doing something right. It had seemed—what? So glamorous.

Sobs erupted out of his mouth, unexpected, loud wailing noises. He put his face on the desk,  felt its cool, clean surface on his forehead.  Cried until it was foggy and smeared, until his eyes stung and his voice was tired.

He stood up, wiped his face with one of the unused paper towels. Kind of laughed.  Funny to be standing alone in the English building on a Saturday, crying into the silence of an empty office in an empty hallway.  “I’m okay,” he said, like there was some concerned party outside the door somewhere. 

Then he began to sob again. He closed the door, leaned his back against it, slid his butt downwards until he was sitting on the stained carpet. He held his head in his hands and let out loud womanly wails. Like someone had died, but it wasn’t about that, exactly.  It was just. That thing Frick had said, the last time they had spoken—what was it?

Academia is a test of resilience.

Yeah, it was that.  Academia was a test of resilience and Jeremy Frick was dead. And now Gavin couldn’t remember the point of being resilient anymore. What goal was his resilience propelling him towards?  To get out of Kansas, maybe land a job somewhere a little better, New Buffalo even.  Maybe move up to some kind of respectable east coast university in a pleasant town by the time he was forty-five or so, if he kept at it.  That was the dream, wasn’t it?  His dream for the last ten years, and he knew it was hard, that you had to keep faith and stick with it through hard times and whatever. But when was it okay to give it up? There had to be a point when resilience stopped being resilience and turned into a kind of lemming situation.

He pulled his head up from his hands, sat up straight, wiped his face with his sleeve. Stood up, a little woozy, sat in the chair. Then it was like the floor disappeared, and he was sinking. Down, down, down.  The computer was still in front of his face but he could see through it, through to blackness beyond it, engulfing it. Like the spaces between atoms were spreading. Like something was become consumed by nothing.

Knock knock.

Knock knock.

Gavin shook his head a little, blinked his eyes.  The computer became solid again. 

Knock knock knock!!

Someone was outside the office door. He looked over, saw his own reflection in the window, his eyes all swollen and puffy, his hair sticking up.  Then he looked higher.

It was Kat.  Katherine Curtis, Renaissance drama.  All in widow’s black, though actually she always wore black.

She was banging on the window, fast, hard, like it was an emergency.  He didn’t feel ready to stand, but he wheeled the chair over to the door, opened it.

“Fuck.” She was leaning over him, putting her hands on his face. Warm, a little damp, smelling like some kind of musky lotion.   “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”  It wasn’t exactly true.  But then, he was alive, well-fed, healthy.  Safe.  He had a place to live.  He owned a car.  He had a job. 

Of course he was okay.

<Chapter 43a

Chapter 45a>