Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  Liam didn’t have much stuff—he’d been traveling light for years, he told me – but his presence immediately pervaded the house, a clean salty smell like the sea, a peaty tang from the Irish whiskey he sipped watching the sunset from the front porch when he’d finished writing for the day, and something sweet and evasive, like a breath of honeysuckle on a summer breeze. The ledges of the windowsills and the empty bowls and baskets filled with things he brought back from his walks – a twisted piece of honeysuckle vine that looked like driftwood, round gray riverstones, a bird’s nest – things a twelve-year-old boy or a nineteenth-century naturalist might collect … or, I sometimes thought, the things a wild animal might bring back to its lair.

  I didn’t want him to feel as if he were squatting in the house rather than really living in it, though, so on the weekend before classes were to begin we borrowed Brock’s pick-up truck and drove out into the country to comb antique shops to turn one of the spare bedrooms into his study. We found a Stickley Morris chair and a Victorian roll-top desk in an antiques barn in Bovine Corners. The town still creeped me out a bit after my night drive though it, but they did have some great antiques and a general store that sold artisan cheeses, fresh-baked bread, and homemade chutneys and jams. We probably could have bought everything he needed there, but it was a sunny day, the temperature above freezing for the first time in weeks, and the hills beyond Bovine Corners seemed to beckon.

  We drove further east into Delaware County, across snow covered fields and sun-burnished mountains that Liam said reminded him of his home, and through farmland and small lonely villages whose once grand Victorian and Greek Revival houses were sadly faded and dilapidated. Many of the farms outside these villages had clearly been deserted. The long ridgepoles of their barns sloped like the backs of horses that had been ridden too long and hard. Some had collapsed completely and lay like great mastodon skeletons rotting in the fields.

  We stopped at another antiques store on the way back.

  “That’s pretty,” Liam said when he saw me looking at a lovely old fashioned emerald and diamond engagement ring. The old woman who ran the shop seized the opportunity to open the case.

  “Ah, the gentleman has a good eye. That’s my best piece – got it from the Trask estate over by Glenburnie. Victorian, platinum setting, one carat emerald flanked by two half-carat diamonds.” She took the ring out of its velvet case and handed it to Liam instead of me. He held the ring up in the weak wintry sunlight, turning it back and forth to release a spray of fiery sparks in the dull, dusty shop. Then he took my hand and slipped the ring onto my ring finger. It fit perfectly.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, holding my hand up in the light. The old stones glittered as if they held a spark of forgotten life inside of them. Then I turned my hand over and read the price tag. “But expensive.” I started to take the ring off but Liam had already had a quick whispered confab with the shop owner, who was smiling like a schoolgirl at something Liam had said. He grabbed my hand and pushed the ring back on my finger.

  “It belongs to you,” he said. “I want you to have it.”

  I looked down at my hand. It was my right hand, not my left, so not an engagement ring. Still, it was a diamond ring. “Oh, Liam, it’s beautiful, but I don’t know …”

  He held my hand up in the light again. A bit of the spark from the diamonds lit up his eyes. “The diamonds remind me of the snow in the moonlight New Year’s Eve,” he said, and then leaning down to whisper in my ear, “and the emerald is the color of your eyes when we make love.”

  I felt the warmth of his breath on my ear travel straight down my spine.

  “Well, I’d better keep it then,” I said, my voice wobbly with desire. “I can’t have anyone else wearing those memories.”

  That night when we made love I twined my hands around the bedpost as I had on the night before New Year’s Eve. The moonlight caught the ring and cast a spray of diamond and emerald starlight across Liam’s face. It made him look insubstantial – as if he might dissolve into a zillion atoms and blow away. I unwound my hands from the bedpost and gripped his arms instead, his hard, solid biceps, and remembered what he’d told me that night.

  Hold on, he’d said.

  And so I did.

  Of course it was the ring that my students noticed first.

  “Oooh, Professor McFay, did you get engaged over the break?” Flonia and Nicky asked simultaneously.

  “It’s the wrong hand,” Mara said, pressing in between Flonia and Nicky and reaching out to touch my hand. “She’d be wearing it on her left hand if she were engaged, right Professor McFay?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, surprised Mara knew such a thing. Apparently Nicky thought so too.

  “How do you know that, Mara?” she asked.

  “I read it in one of Dean Book’s magazines. Your left hand says you’re taken.” Mara moved her hand to touch my left hand, and then back to my right where she left it. “Your right hand says you can take over.” I recognized the slogan from an ad campaign that had run a few years ago. It had annoyed me at the time because even though the ads seemed to promote an image of women as independent and capable, it had also suggested that the woman who couldn’t afford to go out and buy an expensive ring for herself was somehow lacking in those qualities. It had also made me want to go out and buy a ring and I could still remember another line from the ad: Your left hand believes in shining armor. Your right hand thinks knights are for fairy tales. “So she must have bought it for herself, right, Professor McFay?”

  I should have been glad for a graceful evasion to my students’ prying questions, but when I saw the disappointed looks in their eyes I smiled enigmatically and, removing my hand from under Mara’s, wiggled my fingers so that the diamonds and emerald caught the light.

  “Maybe,” I sang, “or maybe not.” My students oohed as I waved them back to their seats with a flourish that made the ring flash again. “Now let’s get to work. You were supposed to have read Dracula over the vacation.”

  The oohs were soon replaced by groans as my students complained about Lucy Westenra’s passivity in the book. I’d hoped that they’d have exactly that reaction. I wanted them to be impatient with the helplessness of the heroines of Gothic novels so that they could fully appreciate the Buffys and Sookies of the modern vampire genre. I also wanted them to stop wondering who gave me the ring, but in that I failed, sabotaged by Liam showing up at the end of the class with a book I’d forgotten at home.

  I believe it took about five minutes after that for the news that I was “shacking up with” and “nearly engaged to” Liam Doyle to spread throughout the campus.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to keep it a secret,” Liam said later when I confronted him at home. “I don’t. I want to shout it from the rooftops. Why do you want to keep it a secret?”

  I had no good answer for that and I didn’t want to fight. I felt tired suddenly from the stress and excitement of being back at work after a long break.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, letting my head drop and rubbing my neck. I felt achy as well as tired. Maybe I was acting so cranky with Liam because I was coming down with something.

  “What’s right is us – you and me. We fit together perfectly. How could anyone begrudge us our happiness when they see how good we are together?” He massaged the back of my neck. “Your muscles are really tight. Why don’t you take a nice long bath while I make dinner?”

  That sounded like such a good idea that I followed Liam’s advice. I think he still felt bad about the argument, though, because he came upstairs while I was in the tub and offered to shampoo my hair. He sat on the rim of the tub and rubbed the lavender-scented shampoo into my scalp, kneading the muscles in the back of my neck and shoulders. Then he picked up the soap and lathered my back. “Hmm … I could do this better if I were in the tub …”

  I heard his clothes slipping to the floor and then he was climbing into the tub behind me, sliding his legs around either side of me. H
e massaged my scalp and neck, his fingers whisking the tension away as though by magic. He soaped my back, stroking wide arcs along my shoulder blades.

  “Ummm,” I moaned, leaning back against his chest, the soap from my back making his skin slick. He reached around me and lathered my breasts, pinching my nipples lightly. I moaned and scooched my behind back between his legs and felt him go hard. He lifted my hips, tilting me forward, and came into me from behind, sliding inside me so fast and so far that I felt a part of me that had never been touched before leap into life. I cried out with a sound that startled both of us.

  “Did I hurt you?” he panted in my ear.

  “No,” I said, although in truth I wasn’t sure if what I was feeling was pleasure or pain. I only knew I wanted more.

  I got up early the next day to go by the dean’s office before class to make sure that she heard the news that Liam and I were living together from me and not from one of the students.

  “That’s nice, dear,” she said smiling vaguely while accepting a cup of tea from Mara who was there helping her sort admission forms. “He seems like a nice young man. We were so lucky that he happened to have sent in his application just when we lost poor Phoenix.” She shivered and drew a shawl up around her shoulders. The shawl made her look old – she’d lost weight over the break and her hair was so thin I could see patches of her scalp. She’s fading, Frank had said. She did look as if she were dissolving into the muted wallpaper of her office. “I guess it was lucky for you, too.”

  “Lucky?” I asked.

  “Yes, if Phoenix hadn’t left you wouldn’t have met your new young man.”

  I stared at her, aghast that she was suggesting I was lucky that poor Phoenix had had a nervous breakdown.

  “I’m sure what the dean means,” Mara said, laying her hand on the dean’s frail shoulder, “is that we were all lucky to get a very competent teacher to replace poor Miss Phoenix while she is getting a chance to rest and get better.”

  “Yes, that’s just what I meant. Thank you, Mara dear,” the dean said, patting Mara’s hand. “And I am lucky that you were here to help with the next year’s applications over the break. Usually I read each and every one myself and then hand them over to admissions with my recommendations, but this year I just didn’t feel quite up to it so Mara has read them to me. She has a very soothing voice.”

  I tried not to look incredulous, but I couldn’t help wondering what Mara’s fractured English had done to those applications – nor be somewhat shocked to see Mara’s hand still lying on the dean’s shoulder. Maybe in Mara’s country such physical contact between young and old people was more common – maybe Mara thought of the dean as a surrogate grandmother – but I had been brought up in the sexual harassment era and the easy physical contact made me uncomfortable.

  “We’re almost done with all the applications, aren’t we?” Liz looked up hopefully, like a child asking if she had to take any more distasteful medicine.

  “Almost, Dean Book. We have a handful left that I think we can finish today.”

  “Excellent, Mara. But I’m afraid I won’t have enough work to keep you busy then. Perhaps someone else needs an assistant …”

  “What about you, Professor McFay, aren’t you writing a book? That must be hard to do with your teaching responsibilities?”

  “That’s right, Callie, you’re working on a book about Dahlia LaMotte, aren’t you? How’s that coming?”

  “Oh, it’s coming along fine,” I lied. The truth was that I hadn’t done any work on it in weeks. “There’s a lot of material to organize.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you take Mara? I’ll assign her to you as a research assistant.” The dean beamed at me and at Mara – the first really animated expression I’d seen on her face since I’d come into the office. Clearly she was pleased with herself for solving two dilemmas at once. And honestly, I could use the help. It was only the second day of the semester and already the essays I’d asked my students to write in class yesterday were weighing down my bag. Maybe I could get Mara to grade them. Although her spoken English was awkward, her written command of the language was impressive and she was a punctilious stickler for grammar and spelling. I could also have her catalog the Dahlia LaMotte manuscripts.

  “That would actually be great,” I told Liz. “If it’s okay with Mara,” I added, glancing worriedly at the girl. We’d been talking about her as if she were a piece of chattel to be traded between us. But Mara looked almost as pleased as Dean Book.

  “It will be an honor to work for you,” she said in her stilted, formal English. “I’m happy to be of use.”

  I was still a little worried that some of my students – especially the ones who had crushes on Liam – would be jealous of my new relationship, but I couldn’t detect anything like that in class. After class that day, Nicky Ballard came up to tell me that she was glad I wasn’t all alone in “that house” anymore and that she thought Professor Doyle was perfect for me.

  “You’ve both been so nice to me. I’m really looking forward to doing the independent study with both of you. I wrote a lot over Christmas.” Nicky, looking well-rested and happy from her break, didn’t betray any sign of jealousy even though I knew she had a crush on Liam.

  The only person who did begrudge my new romantic liaison was Frank Delmarco, who cornered me in the department office later that week.

  “I hear you and Mr. Poetry are shacking up. That was pretty quick. Didn’t you just break up with some other guy? Do you think it’s such a good idea to move in with another man so soon – especially one you don’t really know anything about?”

  “Who are you, my mother?” I snapped angrily – partly to cover up my inability to answer his questions.

  I knew it was too soon, that Liam and I were moving too fast. At times I felt like I’d stepped on one of those conveyor belts that moved tired travelers through airports. How exactly did I get here? I would wonder, coming home at night to find Liam lighting a fire in the library and handing me a glass of wine to drink while he finished dinner. (I knew I should offer to cook sometimes, but I’d started working with Mara in the afternoons and I always felt so tired when I came home.) After dinner we’d curl up on the couch in front of the fire and I’d think, Who cares? Why question happiness? And when, later in bed, I watched Liam’s face above me, pale in the moonlight that struggled through the opaque ice-coated windows, I’d think: All we ever have is now – this moment – so how can it ever be too soon to be happy?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  IT WAS AN unusually cold January all over, with record low temperatures from New York to Florida – where the citrus crops were destroyed, nesting sea turtles were brought into hotel rooms to keep from freezing, and manatees huddled around the warm currents coming from electrical plant pipes – but in Fairwick it was arctic. For most of the month the temperature stayed in the single digits. Who wouldn’t choose to hibernate? Each day I drew Ralph’s shadow and burnt it while repeating the spell for safe travel, but he remained soundly asleep. When I put him back in his basket I’d find myself wanting to crawl back into bed instead of tromping through the snow to lecture a class full of sleepy college students in an overheated classroom.

  It was perfectly normal, I told myself, that I’d want to crawl back into bed when I came home from campus and that I’d want to spend all weekend curled up on the library couch with Liam. It’s not as if we made love all the time. Sometimes we’d read and Liam would make tea and cinnamon toast at 4a.m. Sometimes we’d watch old movies. Liam, as I’d guessed from this Facebook page, loved the same romantic comedies I did – the old classics like Bringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story and also their modern counterparts, like Annie Hall, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail. He knew them all practically line for line, and yet they still seemed to surprise him.

  “They start out not liking each other, but then they fall in love. They keep fighting even while they are falling in love. Why is
that? Do they have to start out not liking each other to fall in love?”

  “It makes a better story,” I told him. “It would be too easy if they liked each other from the beginning and the things that irk them about each other … Well, maybe those are things they really are looking for but are afraid to believe exists.”

  “Is that why they’re always with other people in the beginning? Because they’ve given up on finding the right person and settled for the wrong one?”

  “Maybe,” I said, wondering if he was thinking of me and Paul – or him and Moira. When we got to the part in You’ve Got Mail just before Tom Hanks appears in Riverside Park and Meg Ryan finds out that her secret pen pal is really the man who put her out of business, Liam asked, “If I lied to you about something that big – like pretending to be someone I wasn’t – would you be able to forgive me?” he asked.

  “Uh oh, don’t tell me, you’re a spy from the Dahlia LaMotte Society and you’ve been having wild, passionate sex with me just to gain access to her papers.”

  I hoped the reference to “wild, passionate sex” would divert him – perhaps toward some more of the same – but instead he became even more agitated. He got up and started pacing back and forth in front of the bookcases.

  “All these books you read and write about, your romances, do you think they really tell the truth about love?” He plucked a copy of Evelina from the shelf. “Could a person read them and learn how to be in love?”

  “They’re not operating manuals,” I snipped, growing irritated now. I didn’t have the energy for a philosophical debate on the nature of love. Or maybe he’d hit a nerve. I sometimes wondered if the reason I read romances was to figure out what it meant to be in love. “There’s no such thing. People learn to love from experience. It takes time. You can’t study it like studying the piano or economics …”