by Toni Graham
Oh Lord—he gets it now—all she wants is to score some Vicodin off him. He does not wait for her to ask, just pulls the bottle from the pocket of his blazer, snaps off the lid with his thumb, hands off one tab to the woman and washes down another with his cocktail.
She emits a husky laugh, extends one slim, tanned hand to shake Slater’s hand, and with the other hand pops the Vico and washes it quickly down with wine. He notices she has those long, squared-off fingernails he has seen a lot of in L.A.
“I’m Stella,” she says.
“Stella by Starlight,” Slater says—always one of his favorite songs.
She looks at him with a frown of incomprehension. “I’m sorry?”
Shite, it’s the age gap again. She must be part of the Diddy generation, or at best a Michael Bublé fan. Well, never mind. “Another round for the lady and me,” Slater tells the barkeep.
Slater wakes just as the plane begins its descent to Will Rogers. He remembers missing his flight from LAX, a flurry of phone calls home, and catching an evening flight, but the time between his leaving the airport bar and getting on the plane is a tad blurry. His last clear memory is of looking at the LAX sign from the plane window as they took off. Yes, he has been lax, no doubt about that.
Apparently he fell asleep soon after he took his seat on the flight home. He had managed to get the window, and the middle seat remained miraculously empty. The little old lady on the aisle has already unbuckled her seatbelt and looks as if she wants to vault for the door. Old gal probably has a weak bladder. The sky outside the window is black, though his original flight was to have landed in the afternoon.
Face it, Slater, you went on a bender. He would have guessed, had he even thought about such a thing, that his days of benders were over, not to mention that picking up strange women was a thing of the long ago past, when he was still single. But one thing he does remember from the late sixties and early seventies is that drugs and alcohol have a way of making strange bedfellows. Not that he and the woman at LAX made it to bed—thank you Jesus, as Oklahomans are wont to say. But a series of nearly unfathomable events went down in that airport bar, this much he does remember. There was the Vicodin and the second round of cocktails. There were still more cocktails after that, followed by a highly, highly ill-advised second Vicodin each, at which point they vacated their bar stools and moved to a small table in the back of the bar. And, yes! they made out, and apparently made out for hours, as he and Stella both missed their flights.
He remembers the taste of vanilla and the scent of jasmine—God, it was a feast of the senses, and he has a shameful memory of fondling the woman’s breasts, and even of her giving him some crotch action. Jesus, from where has all this come? There’s that phrase you hear all the time now, “spiraling out of control.” Well, he spiraled, all right, big-time. At the same moment that he flushes with shame, his oozing torso begins to throb beneath the pressure belt. He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out the Vicodin container, opens it and tips it toward his palm. Holy crap, only two pills remain! He had at least twenty-five when he entered the airport this morning. Stella must have weaseled the rest out of him—he’s been rolled. Reflexively he checks his wallet. While there is no cash left, that is not exactly surprising. Cocktails at the airport bar were an unprecedented eighteen bucks a pop. His credit cards are all there; at least there’s that. He swallows a pill without water, the tablet scraping against his throat.
After his elderly row-mate has made it to the aisle and started moving forward, Slater wrenches his bag from beneath the seat in front of him and scooches out to deplane. The pain of his sluicing midsection is nothing when compared to the anguish that overtakes him now as he steps from the plane and back into his real life. He remembers that acronym FUBAR. Yes, his situation now is fucked up beyond all repair. At fifty-nine and having been married for more than thirty of those years, he has learned that after crossing certain bridges, there is no way back, period, end of story, that’s all she wrote. And the fact is, he has never before cheated on Beth, understanding from the get-go that to do so would change things so irreparably that there would be no recovery. Enough damage to their marriage was done in the early seventies during the Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice days, when he and Beth had experimented a bit sexually, but at least then they had both been in on the poor decisions and bad behavior. Recovering from that folly had taken years. But does necking in the airport really count as cheating? It seems more like momentary foolishness he should just forget about. He steps onto the escalator going down to the parking garage, his bag feeling as if it weighs ten stone, his torso vibrating with pain. He has ninety minutes’ driving time between OKC and Hope Springs during which he has to think of a way to hide two huge misdemeanors from Beth: the lipo and the interlude with Stella. No, don’t even think of her name ever again. Take a page from Slick Willy and think of her as “that woman.” Better yet: don’t think of her at all.
Something edges into Slater’s periphery of pain. Not only is his torso on fire, but his feet hurt, too. The sensation of gnawing, throbbing pain in his midsection is now accompanied by a sharp, lancing stinging from his heels. He finds himself limping, hobbled, tottering off the escalator like some decrepit gray-beard.
And now this recollection comes to him, too, rising from the brownout in which he has found himself: He nearly missed a second flight out of LAX, and only that woman checking the time on her cell phone and yelping had alerted him to the imminence of his outbound flight. He’d had to run forty gates, hell for leather, in order to board before the doors shut. Evidently while he was asleep on the plane, blisters formed on his heels, now pulsing with pain and doubtless weeping like the flesh of his midsection. His limping involuntarily slows as he drags himself toward the lot where he parked his car. People push past him impatiently. He can’t make it, Slater realizes, shuffling off to the side and leaning against a wall. He is forced to remove his shoes and carry them, like a teenager sneaking back into the house after curfew. He slips his sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on so he can avoid eye contact with anyone, and limps back to one of the airport shops, where he buys a pair of fleecy little slippers and pulls them onto his battered feet.
Beth is lying on the sofa when Slater lets himself through the front door. No lights are on, but the television disperses a flickering blue glow throughout the living room. He cannot discern whether her eyes are open.
Slater hears the voice of Dr. G., Medical Examiner. “Was it natural?” the doctor queries in her high-pitched voice. “Was it trauma? Or was it a combination of natural and trauma?”
“Bethie?” Slater says. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” she answers immediately, her voice flat as if she’s pissed off.
Off goes the TV, and on goes the lamp on the end table. Over the archway between the living room and dining room hangs a banner several feet wide, consisting of individual plastic letters linked together by pink ribbon, the letters spelling out IT’S A GIRL! For a moment his gut ices over, but then he remembers the baby shower. “How was the party?” he says.
She does not answer, but sits up, points at Slater’s feet, and says “What’s the deal?”
“Blisters,” he says, “bad ones. I had to run for my plane. Bought these at Will Rogers.”
“Good grief, Dave, did you have to buy red slippers? You look like a clown.”
“That’s all they had. Left over from the holidays, I guess.” He sees now that clinging to the ceiling above Beth’s head is a Mylar balloon in the shape of a baby bottle, the nipple a lurid pink.
“How was your trip?” Beth says.
“Okay, but I’m exhausted,” he says. “Mechanical trouble with the plane was the last thing I needed.” He forces a laugh. “Unless you count blisters.”
“Did you see Gehry?”
He says no, that he just shot the house and did some research in the library. “I’m going to take a quick shower and then hit the rack. You coming?” He doe
s not wait for her response but drops his bag and heads for the bathroom, where he can stash the pressure belt in the linen closet and from the hamper scrounge a T-shirt under which to hide the oozing lipo area. He first turns on the hot water, then undresses on the fluffy red bathmat that matches his unfortunate new slippers.
Do I tell her, or not? About either of the things I’ve done? He decides he needs to sleep on the matter and stoops to pick up his trousers and remove the last Vicodin from a pocket. He steps into the tub, swallows the tab and drinks from the shower, then lets water pound on his head and steam overcome him. He gives himself over to blind sensation, no past no future. In the here and now, as they used to say in the sixties.
Slater has already taught his morning seminar and is fulfilling his mandatory afternoon office hour. He hopes no one comes into his office today: failing students begging for mercy, truants offering trumped up excuses or asking for Incompletes, TAs overwhelmed by their responsibilities, students or former students asking for letters of recommendation—often the very worst students, who if they had any brains would know better than to ask for a rec letter from the professor teaching a course for which they did not earn an A—and the perennial students who just want to talk. These students want badly to secure positions as designers or PAs in good firms as soon as they graduate, or want to bag assistant professorships somewhere. They mistakenly assume he holds the key to how they can succeed in their professional desires. He often offers benign banalities such as “Do your best work—worry about the work, not the rewards,” or “Brilliant designs will always rise to the top like cream—be brilliant.” He seldom tells them the truth: that maybe one or two students in a section of sixty will ever be good enough to succeed in the private or public sector or academe—that they might as well have gone to trade school in HVAC. Many of them have read The Fountainhead and have a weird-ass misperception of what it is to be an architect.
He does still have passion for teaching, and knocks himself out trying to reach the students, to help along the weaker ones by teaching them everything he knows, and to discover the talented ones and help them find their way. But in his less inspired moments, he sometimes feels as if at least some of the time he might be casting pearls before swine.
Being a professor of architecture has changed a great deal since Slater was appointed assistant professor at Pratt nearly thirty years ago. In those days he was still idealistic: oh, visions of Taliesin! At that time 95 percent of his students were male. The few female students were often homely, hairy, serious young women wearing Birkenstocks, who sometimes smelled of onions or of rank perspiration. Things were simpler then. He had very few female students until the 1980s, and until the late 1990s most of the women ended up transferring out of architecture. Now his seminars are packed with bright, often beautiful young women, many of whom shamelessly flirt with him and/or make crude passes. He wasn’t trained for this shit. The university offers regular mandated seminars on sexual harassment, but these consist only of trotting out the lawyers, who lecture the professors about how to cover their asses liability-wise. What Slater feels is actually needed is behavioral specialists who teach faculty how to deal with advances from students. It would not hurt, either, if there were some special advice available on how to avoid being attracted to some of these girls. Things are especially complicated these days, since many of the male faculty are taking daily-dose versions of ED meds like Cialis and are likely to pop a woody at inappropriate moments. Slater would likely fall into this category himself, if not for the fact that both Viagra and Cialis give him headaches that feel as if a stiletto and a steel drum are simultaneously at work in his cranium.
He has closed the door to his office, hoping to deter students from coming in. If a student knocks and enters his office, university policy dictates that—whether the student is male or female—professors are to prop their doors open wide so there can be no perception or accusation of sexual impropriety. Students sometimes claim they have been the victim of molestation by professors, and it is also not unheard of for a disgruntled graduate student to come to campus and gun down a professor who declines a dissertation or assigns a failing grade. Three years ago one of his suite mates, a visiting scholar from Rutgers, was shot dead in his office; Slater heard the gun go off. While most often the litigious students or the gun-toters are nut jobs, what is also true is that certain faculty offices are furnished with the equivalent of the Hollywood casting couch. One colleague’s office door is closed many hours in the afternoon several times a week, after which a pretty dark-haired young woman is seen to leave the office, carrying an armload of books and wearing a stagy “scholarly” expression on her face. The buzz in the department is that semen stains glow white upon the dark cushions of the guy’s office sofa.
Well, who can blame the guy? Isn’t Slater sick of his currently sexless existence, the life of a eunuch? When tension builds up to an untenable level, he makes a move on Beth, or submits to one of her advances, but invariably he can’t cut the mustard. Things have been this way since the day of Poppy’s funeral, and while he understands his dysfunction to be a byproduct of his grief, that awareness does not help the problem in any significant manner. Beth has obviously begun to resent him, maybe even hate him, and he has started to realize the feeling is somewhat mutual. He is sick of being expected to make love to Beth and no one but Beth. Enough is frickin’ enough, for godsake.
Above his desk hang photos of Wright and Pei and Gehry and Julia Morgan, along with posters of Fallingwater and the Louvre pyramid. He stares at them, oddly transfixed, though the photos have hung there for years. He suddenly feels bogus, as if he should instead have a Ringling Brothers poster hanging there, or maybe a poster featuring a third-string rock band or a movie poster of Brando astride a Harley. He might as well have a vulgar velvet painting of a clown, something fit for the “bonus room” in the cheesiest of suburban tract houses. He is irrelevant in his own profession and an outsider in his own life.
His father would have preferred castration to sitting at a desk or gabbling in a classroom or lecture hall, his arms as unmuscled as a girl’s. A longshoreman’s trade was a masculine undertaking, a job that was vigorous and kinetic.
From one of the desk drawers Slater removes a small, framed black-and-white photo of his parents on their wedding day. Years ago the photo stood on the desktop, but he soon realized that none of his colleagues kept family photos in their offices. Also, the students asked too many questions and Slater grew sick of making the same small talk. Mom and Poppy were married during World War II and wear their uniforms in the photo. Poppy, a curly-haired sailor, is sporting his dress whites, and Mom, a lovely, red-lipped WAVE, wears a dark suit nipped in at the waist, and an unflattering military cap. She always expressed regret about not being married in a white gown and veil, but war was war, she said. At least his parents had not been the sort of dorks who wanted to “renew their vows” twenty years later, aging people donning the youthful attire of dewy brides and grooms. In this instant he recalls something he has not thought about in years: after the war, Mom made David a little suit of clothes out of the fabric from his parents’ military uniforms, a child-sized navy blue suit with short pants. Somewhere there is still a photo of Slater in the getup. He can remember being proud of the suit but embarrassed by the headgear: Mom had for some inexplicable reason made a tartan Glengarry cap, trailing ribbon and all, and everyone but David had found the headgear adorable.
He continues scrutinizing his parents’ wedding photo. Are there visible signs of something in his father’s psyche that would drive Poppy to annihilate himself only months after Mom’s death? Or maybe he is searching for clues to what it is about a couple that can bind them together for fifty years.
There is a knock on Slater’s office door, followed by a female voice. “Dr. Slater?” The voice is thin and high-register; she’s probably an undergrad. At first he does not respond. “Dr. Slater?” she repeats. He calls out for her to come in.
&nb
sp; Out of his unconscious rises a random phrase he remembers from long ago—he’ll google it later—”swift and secure flight.”
Slater sits at a table in Siesta Sancho’s with two women from the Wednesday night suicide survivors support group. He and the expat Californian, Holly, and the Oklahoma gal named SueAnn have begun having margaritas weekly after group for a postgame recap. Tonight Slater has declined a cocktail and substituted a club soda with lime, unnerved by the booze fest in L.A. His midsection throbs, but the pressure belt is not visible under his shirt. No one seems to have noticed that his spare tire is gone.
Slater spies a young woman with an iPhone pointed directly at him. He recognizes her as one of his grad students, sitting at the bar along with some other girls. Every now and then, he spots students photographing him about town with their smartphone cameras. Who knew that when he left New York, he would go on to garner paparazzi in Oklahoma, any semblance of privacy kaput? He gives the girl a mock salute and she quickly turns away.
“Sometimes, going to group starts to seem like self-indulgent whining,” Slater says.
For a moment neither woman speaks, and Slater hears the steady crunching sound of Holly chewing the ice from her margarita.
“Do you mean me?” SueAnn says, her round little face reddening. “I guess I shouldn’t have been complaining about Gilbert again.”
Slater feels a pang of regret. Why does he never consider how other people might respond to things he says? “No, no, I didn’t mean you, hon. We’re always interested in what you have to say.”
Holly says, “Dave, is that why you said almost nothing tonight in group—because you didn’t want to whine? Or maybe there was something you didn’t want to say?”
“Nah, nothing like that,” Slater says, telling her he is simply overtired from a trip to California for book research.
SueAnn, who always seems cognizant of uneasiness in others, chooses a topic-changing gambit. “I saw your wife today when I was at work in the store,” she tells Slater. “I recognized her from the time I saw you together at the Farmer’s Market, but I don’t think she recognized me.”