Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

  He certainly wasn’t prepared for the spectacle of Janet Feinlog.

  She was my defense’s sole character witness; in addition to hardly knowing me, all the other teachers at the school, in fear for their jobs, would never have agreed to come say anything nice about me on record. Perhaps Janet wouldn’t have either, had she still been employed at Jefferson. Shortly before the Christmas following my arrest, Janet had had an expletive-laced meltdown in front of her class and thrown her chair against the wall. Nearly half the students captured video of the incident on their cell phones: by the end of the day, the recording was well on its way to going viral on every social media website imaginable.

  The entire court seemed to come to a standstill as she waddled to the podium in a black sweat suit that appeared to have dried toothpaste around the collar. Once she got seated inside the witness-box, she grabbed the complimentary glass of water and began chugging as though she’d just finished a marathon. But after her thirst was quenched, she was more than ready to go.

  She didn’t wait for a question from my attorney, instead choosing to take an “open mic” approach that lost her some points with the judge. “Celeste is a good woman,” she barked, pulling the microphone closer to her mouth. “Teenage boys’ minds are in the gutter.” After several warnings to only answer the questions asked, she apologized in a conciliatory manner that warmed my heart: it was clear she wanted to be an effective witness on my behalf.

  “Mrs. Feinlog,” Dennis began, “have you ever known a teenage boy to make a sexual advance on a teacher?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Janet scoffed. “I taught junior high for nearly twenty-five years. Their brain is a gerbil and their libido is Sasquatch. You really think the gerbil is going to win?”

  On cross, the prosecution chose to focus more on Janet’s recent career change. “You were fired from Jefferson last fall, isn’t that correct, Mrs. Feinlog? For low job performance and inappropriate classroom behavior?”

  Janet chose to perjure herself just a little. “It was mutual,” Janet remarked. “I didn’t want to work there anymore.” Then she rubbed her nose with the back of her palm several times and squinted at the prosecutor as though his head was rapidly shrinking and she could hardly make out his face anymore.

  During the prosecution’s presentation, Jack and Boyd had been asked nothing beyond simple questions that established if the events had taken place—they didn’t need to prove why or assign blame; if it had happened I’d broken the law and was guilty. Jack had kept his head low, refusing to look anywhere near me, while Boyd openly grinned and repeatedly tried to catch my eye. Rather than cross-examine them then, Dennis decided to call them back as witnesses for our defense—he hoped this might give the jury more of an impression that the boys were still on my side. This was certainly true with Boyd; he was a smiling, gift-wrapped witness who wore his pride at having slept with me on his sleeve. From the moment we’d begun having sex, Boyd’s greatest wish was for the world to somehow know all that he and I had done together, and now that it did, he couldn’t have been more ecstatic. When Boyd came back up to testify, his newfound confidence made his steps nearly buoyant; I half expected him to pause on the way up to the witness-box and do a backflip.

  The prosecution objected to the relevance of nearly every question my attorney asked—the details, in their mind, didn’t matter as long as the crime had occurred. Most were sustained, but occasionally some slipped through. It was still a payoff to ask them and have the seeds of doubt planted in the minds of the jury: Was he sorry that it had happened? His smile said it all. Had he enjoyed our time together? Before an objection could even be made, he’d already begun nodding enthusiastically. “You began the sexual advances toward Mrs. Price, didn’t you, Boyd?” my attorney asked. This was a risk but a calculated one: I knew how much he’d want the credit and the attention; given the chance to claim initiation, he’d certainly accept. It was overruled but the jury knew he would’ve answered yes had he been allowed.

  Bringing Jack to the stand was a much greater gamble. But since we’d brought Boyd back up, if we didn’t call Jack it would seem like we were scared of what he might say. Which, in fact, we were. Though there was nothing my attorney would ask him that would be a platform for his going off on a tangent, if he grew upset enough, he might yell something out of turn in anger or frustration that would look very bad to the jury. Dennis was confident he could spin any outbursts; in short, if Jack grew upset, Dennis would imply the anger stemmed from my cheating on him with Boyd. Still, when Jack took the stand a second time, I’d never been more nervous in my life. I knew that one deeply credible explosion on his behalf could easily send me to prison for years.

  Looking at him was no small chore. Far more than Boyd, he’d aged greatly during the year that had passed since my arrest. I supposed his stint in juvie certainly hadn’t helped. His voice had dropped and was coarse with grief; even though he was still shy of sixteen, trauma had expedited the development of adulthood’s physical design upon his body. Although I’d always known he’d quickly age beyond attraction, I suppose a part of me had hoped that somewhere—in Jack’s eyes, perhaps, or in a fleeting expression—I could see that our relationship had been forever preserved, a sign that laying my body upon Jack’s had been like stopping the moving hand of a clock on at least one part of him. But the eager and credulous boy of eighth grade whom I still thought of with desire didn’t seem to be buried inside him at all. The fluorescent lights of the courtroom magnified his newly pronounced stubble; the ill-fitting suit he wore, likely one of Buck’s that his father had optimistically held on to in case he ever lost his spare tire, didn’t help either. Each moment of his testimony, I had to look away and think of the future and the hope of other boys in other places. His adult features felt like an insult of erasure, a failed experiment on my behalf that would never cease to finish failing.

  “Jack,” my attorney began in an authoritative tone, “we all know the things you did with Mrs. Price.” Jack shifted in his seat and looked down at his lap, his lower lip wavering. “I just need you to tell us a few things honestly. Did she force you to kiss her?”

  Jack exhaled too close to the microphone, causing the sound of a loud gust of wind to echo forth. “No.” I knew Jack well enough to guess what was spinning in his thoughts. Admitting that I hadn’t forced him was surely making Jack contemplate his own guilt in the entire situation—at not pushing me aside and calling 911 the night his father died, at losing all his old friends and his former home and way of life, at being sent to juvie after attacking Boyd. Jack started to cry.

  My attorney approached the stand and laid a fatherly hand upon its wooden railing. His voice softened as though he and Jack were speaking completely in private, the only two people who would ever hear the words. “And did she force you to make love?”

  “Objection,” said the prosecutor. “‘Making love’ is not an acceptable euphemism for statutory rape.”

  “I’ll rephrase,” my attorney offered. “You had sex with Mrs. Price. Was it consensual? Did you want to do it?”

  “Yes,” Jack answered. “I wanted it.” His voice was breaking; it sounded like a confession to something much greater.

  “Thank you, Jack. I’m sorry you had to come here and do this.” My attorney returned to the table and sat. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Despite being told he could step down, Jack stayed for a moment, crying, then looked over at me. It wasn’t at all the look of hatred I’d expected. Instead it was a look of mutual knowledge, Jack conveying to me his new understanding that the world could be a terrible place. His eyes said that no one at all was looking out for him or able to fix this essential flaw in life’s fabric; my eyes stared back and told him that he was right.

  But the jurors and my attorney, and even the prosecution, apparently, saw something far different within the span of that gaze. “Dynamite!” Dennis proclaimed after court was adjourned for the day. “That look he gave
you after testifying? It was like he wanted to crawl off the stand and into your lap! Plus the tears. The tears could not have been better. Hell, I felt ashamed for making him feel guilty about his own impulses. What that jury saw was a red-blooded American teenage boy asked to repent for nailing a hot blonde. I think our chances are good.”

  We still had psychological experts ready to testify that I had a mood disorder and low impulse control, but Jack had proven himself to be a gift that kept on giving. Worried that jurors might sympathize with the boys for being attracted to me, and sympathize with me for having given in, the next morning the DA offered me a plea deal of four years’ probation that I accepted. I couldn’t go within one thousand yards of a school, couldn’t be unsupervised with anyone under the age of eighteen, and had to attend group meetings for convicted female sexual offenders. But I was free.

  On the day of my release, my attorney wrapped me in a congratulatory hug that suggested we’d proven triumphant in a noble moral struggle. “We did it,” he announced proudly, then he gave me an exaggerated pat on the back; his eye flinched with what may have been a passing thought of discomfort, but only once. “Now keep your hands to yourself out there, hear me?”

  *

  A year after my release, I got permission to move away to a sleepy beach town and was reassigned to a probation officer who wears flip-flops. She commonly uses the phrase “your best estimate is fine” during our Q & A at my monthly check-ins. It’s low-key.

  Currently, I work at a cabana bar for a seventy-year-old man named Dave who is overly fond of Viagra jokes. “I’ve had five heart attacks,” he’ll say, opening the flap of his Hawaiian shirt to reveal an impressive collection of sternum scars amidst his reddish-tan, papery skin, “and I probably wouldn’t survive a sixth. But dying might be worth getting it up for you.” I just roll my eyes and call him a pervert. His antics are easy to put up with because he pays cash under the table; so far, I’ve never had to tell anyone here, save my probation officer, my real name. I rent a grotesque trailer on the swampy edge of town so I don’t have neighbors I have to divulge my sex-offender status to; the nearest resident to me is a Citgo gas station three miles down the road. This town is nothing more than a place to regroup, and it’s temporary; for now the most important aspects of my self-care—restarting the oxygen-infusion and LED-light facials, adhering to a micronutrient diet for optimal skin elasticity—eat up nearly all of my earnings. Someday soon when my patience has rebounded, I’ll find another wealthy man to date, but after the ordeal of the trial, it’s nice, just for the present, to not have to do anything that repulses me other than live in squalor.

  Most of my time is spent on the beach by the resort hotels or at an open waterfront bar where I sit in wait for disgruntled teenagers fed up at being in a hotel room with their family—sometimes they come out at dusk for a solitary walk. I look for the telltale pallor that implies they’re on vacation; I’m not willing to take any risks on local boys. Instead I give them a name like Mindy or Jenna and tell them I’m on vacation too, state that I’m in college and ask questions that assume they are as well. A few lie and pretend they actually are but most laugh and confess they’re only fourteen, then feel flattered when my interest doesn’t wane. We find the pool-supply sheds of their hotels or one-person fast-food restrooms, dark corners of the beach where two bodies on a towel won’t draw attention. When they insist on a phone number I give them a fake; if they’re adamant about meeting up the next day, I tell them to meet me at a snow cone hut on the opposite end of the beach and never appear.

  For now, my youth and looks make this easy. I try not to think about the cold years ahead, when time will slowly poach my youth and my body will begin its untoward changes. I’ll have to pare down to certain types: the motherless boys, or those so sexually ravenous they don’t mind my used condition. Eventually I’ll have to find a better-paying job in an urban area with runaways hungry for cash whom I can buy for an evening. But that won’t be for many more years; there’s lots of fun to be had between then and now.

  I’m certainly mindful not to press my luck too far. On slow weeks, I’m training myself to be more content with memories. I have a near-photographic recall of my good times with Jack and Boyd and still think of them often, exactly the way they were when they entered my classroom. Sometimes the thought that they’re now nearly eighteen wraps around my images of their younger selves like a snake, and my stomach reels as I imagine them fully grown. If a vacationing Boyd were to stumble into my bar one night, I would have a visceral reaction of nausea—it would be no less horrifying than seeing a three-hundred-year-old corpse reanimated. The two of them are still my favored fantasy, if only by aggregation—after all, I had them each so many times—but occasionally the subconscious knowledge that they are basically adult men now is so bothersome as to make masturbation difficult. Some nights, in order to orgasm, I have to reimagine history and tell myself that neither of them made it past the eve of my arrest alive: that Jack suffered a fatal wound at my hands in the woods, and Boyd, bleeding alone from the skull in Jack’s bedroom, succumbed to shock and died.

  acknowledgments

  I have enormous gratitude for my agent Jim Rutman, whose encouragement and support nurtured this book from its inception. Your warm humor, avuncular counsel, and savvy feedback have been indispensible assets on this journey, and your unflinching bravery and restrained poker face when exposed to my office décor and fast-food habits are likewise noteworthy of admiration. Thank you for excelling in humanity on all accounts. A hearty thanks also to Dwight Curtis, Kirsten Hartz, Anna Webber, and everyone involved in helping this manuscript find its way.

  I’m likewise indebted to my genius editor Lee Boudreaux, who could not possibly be smarter; the brilliant wisdom of your comments was a continually energizing wind, and the nuclear glow of your enthusiasm brightened each day of this great adventure. A boisterous, thundering thanks goes to Karen Maine, Andrea Molitor, Michael McKenzie, all the phenomenal people at Ecco/HarperCollins, and Kathleen Schmidt. Equal thanks go across the pond to Lee Brackstone for his immediate enthusiasm, vision, and belief, as well as the keen notes and fabulous insight that helped shape the book’s final version.

  Thank you to the relatives, friends, and peers who surround and support me—I am so lucky to be encircled by a fantastic group of fellow writers, academics, artists, and eccentrics who make a rich creative life possible. Thank you to my family.

  For all your unconditional love and support, thank you to my husband, Shawn. You could not be more essential to me, in every way. And thank you to Sparrow, who was my literal copilot for much of the editing of this book. Welcome, my love. You are already my everything.

  About the Author

  Alissa Nutting is an assistant professor of creative writing at John Carroll University. She is the author of the award-winning collection of stories Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Oprah, Tin House, Fence and Bomb, among others. This is her first novel.

  also by alissa nutting

  Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

  First published in the UK in 2013 by

  Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74-77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Alissa Nutting, 2013

  The right of Alissa Nutting to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is copyright
material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–30335–9