by Alan Rossi
Her phone buzzed, which caused Louis Walters to seemingly glance at the area of his screen from which he heard the buzzing sound. She felt the strangeness of the effect: she felt that everything in her room was unavailable to him somehow, that they were in separate realities, that the screen defined this separation, and yet now she remembered that wasn’t true. He was there with her and not at the same time. She picked up her phone, read the text from Nathaniel, that said, Mom, the lawyer is acting strange. Can I talk with you in private? She read the text and when Louis Walters asked what was it, she wrote, My son. Give me a moment. The lawyer is acting strange, Nathaniel had written. It was their little joke about David: the lawyer. She almost wrote, when isn’t he? But didn’t. After all, she wasn’t even speaking. She thought of how this week of silence that Nicholas did once a year had seemed so out of the ordinary to her, but to David it was just another Nicholas thing. He’d easily dismissed it, or not dismissed, not accepted either, but just assumed normalcy. Didn’t look at it too long. This was the routine they followed, too: she taught at the university, she met with students, she wrote a paper or two each year, which were accepted and published in journals that no one read except her colleagues, who greeted her small success with pleasure undercut by an obvious jealousy, and this was what she did, while David did his thing. They spoke to their sons, mainly Nathaniel, met with Nathaniel a couple times a month, and maybe saw Nicholas twice a year, not looking at anything too much, certainly not the idea that they were aging, that their children were gone from them, into the world, that they didn’t really know Jack, their lone grandchild, that well, and death was closer. She and David discussed their separate lives over dinner, occasionally meeting in the middle of the relationship, shedding their singular selves, but not looking too closely. They went to a movie twice a month, they drank coffee in coffee shops, they watched television, sometimes many hours of it, they walked their dogs, they talked about how Nathaniel and Nicholas were doing, Jack, too, occasionally April. David told her he wanted to try growing a rare heirloom tomato next year, it grew very small, very red, didn’t require much water, was intensely flavorful. Very hard to grow. She had told him something like Nathaniel would love to have some of those, that she would too. He told her that was exactly what he was thinking, wouldn’t it be neat if Nathaniel could visit for a weekend and just choose things to make from the garden, like his own personal farm-to-table thing. Again and again David surprised Katherine with his thoughtfulness – it was surprising because he could be so distant, and so cruel, as with the Laura Moser emails. She told him that sounded like a good idea. If I can grow them, he’d said. Katherine thought now that there’d be these small occasions of coming together that barely even counted, separated by larger spaces in which it seemed almost no real communication occurred, then a fight. David occasionally claimed that she didn’t do any laundry, didn’t help with meals, didn’t help with the house, and she, in turn, claimed that she never saw him, he was always in his office or in the garden, he seemed to take no interest in her or her life. Though as they had these fights, she wondered if she wanted anything to change. She liked that she could leave for a weekend, attend a conference with a co-worker, she liked that she could go to her feminist book club alone, and talk with the other women there, that she could go on a hike alone, walk the dogs alone. At night, in front of the television, streaming some detective show, there was still David on the sofa with her. Nothing had been lost really. He’d rub her feet while watching the show. He’d absently comment on the contrivance of an episode. They’d laugh. She felt no passion from him, no desire from him for her, certainly, but there was some comfort she didn’t want to disrupt. There was comfort, and directly below that comfort, a danger in the comfort itself. She didn’t know why exactly. Maybe it was that while she seemed to feel things emptying in the monotony of their lives, David was able to find one or two things that supplied meaning. He was able to find some meaning within the monotony that she could not. Gardening every day. She wondered if Louis Walters was in her life simply because she wanted something new. Loneliness was the accusation she often directed at David. She sat inside while he worked in the garden, she watched television while he researched old cases to present to his classes, she called Margaret, her sister, and they complained about their jobs, she called colleagues to see if they wanted to meet for coffee. She was free in her aloneness and didn’t want to be alone but still wanted to be free. This felt irreconcilable, some cage of language and wants she couldn’t see out of. She enjoyed her freedom, and she did feel alone, but she also knew that she was using the accusation of feeling lonely almost as a preemptive measure. There was something other than aloneness there, but it felt unreachable, unknowable. If he ever found out about Louis Walters, of course, she could use it, her loneliness and David’s distance, in conjunction with his little email affair with College Sweetheart. It was an accusation she cultivated in the same way he tended to the plants in his garden, so that if she was ever found out, she could point clearly: I told you I felt alone. But in her most shameful moments, she was afraid she was only bored, bored with David, bored with herself, bored with her life.
She typed to Nathaniel, Is he looking for the will? If that’s what it is, don’t worry about it. We’re just not sure why this Tammy person is driving across the country and want to make sure our ducks are in a row. She had no idea why she typed that phrase. She couldn’t imagine what else David could’ve said or was doing that would’ve offended Nathaniel or been strange in a way that was beyond David’s usual strangeness. Maybe he was worrying Nathaniel by making up some battle that was going to happen with this Tammy person, but even though the police had bungled that, even though no one had contacted this Tammy person until four days after the accident, even though she’d been in, in David’s words, a serious rage when he finally contacted her and told her, Katherine knew that even if this woman put up a fight, she had no legal rights. Jack was Nathaniel’s charge now, everyone in the family had to know it, and she was glad for it. He was the right person, despite the troubled years of his youth that, in retrospect, felt almost banal. She put the phone down, and looked back to the computer screen, where Louis Walters said that they hadn’t really been talking anyway, but that he’d be right back. He was going to leave his computer on, he wasn’t leaving her alone, but he had to take the dog out very quickly. He now held up a Shih Tzu, and said that Morten had been circling his feet, just give him like ten minutes and he’d be back. She began writing that this was probably a good time to sign off, but he said, I’m not saying goodbye. Right back, he said, and left the room. She saw him carry the dog out of the room, his back to her momentarily, then there was only the room where Louis Walters had been sitting. His desk chair swiveled slightly to the right, turning around with the motion of him getting up and leaving, the remnant of the act. The chair soon stopped moving. The Skype window showed bookshelves behind him, a side table covered with what appeared to be papers he was grading for his classes. Several stacks in different manila folders. A coffee mug on top acting as a paperweight. Another coffee mug on top of the bookshelf. Morning sunlight came slanting into the room, cut neatly by the blinds, then jaggedly lying across the uneven surface of the shelves and books. There were two framed photographs on the bookshelf, in which she could see both his wife and daughter. In the photograph of the daughter, she was holding Morten. In the photograph of the wife, there was Louis Walters. His bald head, smiling face, slight bug eyes hidden by glasses. He was moderately good looking, intelligent, and successful, though who among her and her husband’s friends weren’t? Hovering behind these thoughts, like a haunting of them, was Nicholas, Nicholas’s life, his absence, that she would never see him again. There were sketches of further thoughts and feelings at the remote corners of her consciousness, which her thoughts of Louis Walters, and other things, covered, repeatedly, over and over, the thought, for instance, that there would never now be a new photo of Nicholas like there could be a new pho
to of her, or David, or Louis Walters, just as the photo of Louis Walters with his wife that she was looking at now through her laptop screen was a picture of a Louis Walters that had been and was no longer, and there would never be a photo of Nicholas now that was a photo of him that could possibly contradict his presence. She looked at the photo of Louis Walters and his wife and wondered who he was to that woman.
She thought that what Louis Walters was to her, mainly, was younger. A younger person, a man, a romantic interest who’d taken an interest in her when that had not occurred in so long, had seemed like it maybe couldn’t occur again. So long, in fact, that at first, she hadn’t even noticed his advances, like she’d deprogrammed herself, years ago, from noticing romantic advances. Oh, she could still flirt, but if someone else did, she couldn’t see it, couldn’t believe it. She had spilled her coffee one morning in the sociology department’s parking lot. She had pulled in, set the coffee on top of her car, and then pulled out her bag with her laptop, the day’s lectures, papers that needed to be handed back. When she shut the door, she did it hard, unthinkingly, and the mug had sort of flipped off the car, hit the ground, the lid cracking, the mug rolling away and spilling all the coffee. Fuck, she’d said. Louis Walters happened to be walking by, and he’d waved at her. He’d given her a kind of weird look, an unhappy or confused smile, and kept walking. Later that day, he’d left a coffee on her desk in her office, and then she thought, Okay, maybe I wasn’t giving the guy enough credit. That was nice. She sent a thank you email. After that, he walked with her each morning into the building, having learned they both arrived for teaching at the same time. She caught him sitting, waiting for her in his car one morning when she was late. He pretended to be shuffling papers into his briefcase, also just arrived, so that they could walk in together. He bought her lunch, on the department. He left occasional lattes, banana bread. She began to get it. It’d been so long. Is this real? she thought. Or is my sex software failing? Then he called her into his office for her annual review and not only found no faults with her teaching, but said something about the fact that she was the most elegant person in the department by far. He made comments on the two papers she’d published that semester: ‘The Bechdel Test and Social Networking’ and ‘Voting Against Oneself: Why Rural America Is Blind to Itself.’ He said that he loved that she brought the Bechdel test into everyday life as a way to challenge its descriptive nature and association with mere pop culture, and that in doing so, she basically questioned its usefulness, and she’d replied with the idea that she wasn’t questioning the test’s authenticity, she was merely attempting to figure out if it had any practical applications beyond being used in film and other narratives, and that, somewhat lamely, of course it didn’t, it couldn’t. I said hello to a woman today when buying my coffee – does that mean I interact with enough women? Is the narrative, the film of my life, complete, full? That’s really the difficulty I discovered with the Bechdel test, she’d said. That if two women can say ‘Hey, how’s the weather,’ the movie somehow passes the test. This is meant to show, Hey, look how patriarchal and misogynist movies are. Two women can’t even talk about the weather, but I can’t help but feel that the test is actually granting too much space, and confusing some people about a film’s or story’s overall openness by leaving out the idea of ‘meaningful’ conversation. So its mere descriptiveness acts as a confusing factor in a way. Yes, yes, he’d said. That’s exactly it. He’d continued the meeting, commenting on her body of work, and then said that on a personal note he liked watching how she moved in front of a class, her presence in the classroom. There was a quiet power, a certain elegance to her movements, as though she were dancing through the lecture. She almost couldn’t reply, until she said, That’s more than slightly exaggerated. He’d then said, See, it’s that directness that I never see anymore. It’s so refreshing. I know you’re not bullshitting me. I have no idea if you’re bullshitting me, she’d said. There it is again, he’d said. Who says that to someone? Especially their boss. Later that week, the end of the semester, she went to his office – she’d scheduled a meeting – sat in the chair across from him and asked him if he was making advances toward her. Yes, he’d said. I am. Good, she said. I want you to be. That began it. They made love in his office, she gave him a blowjob like a naughty secretary, they met at his house when his wife was away. His youth served as a doorway to her past, her own youth, her own passion, her carelessness – some thrill of living. It was difficult to even think of how clichéd this was, that because she was dissatisfied and bored in her own life, with herself, with the fact that she was aging, was, in fact, old, or deemed by society as old, at sixty-two, that she had accepted the advances of a man younger than her, as though this could really do anything, change anything. She hoped this wasn’t true. She hoped that she was, in actuality, lonely, but she was afraid that she wanted to be young again, didn’t want to be growing old. As a young woman, she’d been terrified of not being pretty enough, smart enough, interesting enough, but in this anxiety the world presented itself forcefully, fearfully. This feeling had returned with Louis Walters: how could this younger man find her so attractive, she wondered, while sitting in front of her computer. He desired her with a certain hunger. He went down on her in his office, propping her in his office chair, her feet on his desk. She walked out of his office with a buzzing feeling of secrecy. Passing her colleagues in the hallway, her students, she felt as though the world had transformed into a mysterious place again: no one knew what she’d just done, no one knew who she was, no one knew, including her, what would come next. Maybe he’d come into her office, tell a student that he would have to meet with her another day, send the student away, then bend her over a desk like a scene out of a noir film. She was free to be desired again. So maybe that was why Louis Walters. It wasn’t that David made her feel alone, it was that he made her feel ignored. Though when she thought this, which she had thought before in the same way she was thinking of it now, as though it was the narrative of her life, the recursive theme of her thinking, which she constantly ignored and then re-approached: did it actually matter what the motivation was if the act itself was a hurtful one? Was she simply distracting herself from what she was actually doing by thinking that there was some way that what she was doing could be justified?