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>