"What difference does it make?" he asked, pulling me to him. "I can't think of anywhere I'd rather be than here."
"What about your class?" I asked.
"Fuck the class," he said. "They'll figure something out." He kissed me. He pushed the sheet away from my body, ran his hand from my neck to my hips. "You're so beautiful," he said. "You're like a sculpture."
His kissed my shoulder, where he'd bitten me before. He ran his tongue down the inside of my arm to the elbow. He moved down to my legs, kissed the skinned knees—first the left, which had begun to heal, and the right, which stung under his lips and made me flinch. "I'm sorry," he whispered, then moved back up, kissed my shoulder again, and then moved down my arm, from the elbow to my wrist. He kissed it. He bit it lightly. He took the wrist in his hand and pinned it over my head, then the other. He said, "I want to tie you up and make you come."
It surprised me how my whole body was electrified, involuntarily, at this suggestion—a tuning fork struck somewhere in my stomach, which caused my back to arch toward it, my nipples to harden without even being touched.
Bram got up and picked his pants up off the floor, and took from his pocket a length of rope so obvious I couldn't believe he'd been carrying it there and I hadn't noticed.
I looked at it.
He turned, smiling, and held it up so I could see it better—a laundry line, the kind my grandmother always kept strung between two trees in her backyard. I saw her, incongruously, suddenly, in a pink dress—the kind of dress she would never have worn, with big pockets stuffed with clothespins. My grandmother, twenty years dead. Bram snapped the rope and said, "Your husband ever tie you up?"
"No," I said. I was breathing so hard I could barely get the words out.
"Well," he said, and smiled. "I'm going to tie you up."
At first, despite the desire, the flicker of fear, I felt a little foolish, lying there quietly on my back, patient and naked, waiting for Bram to secure my wrists over my head, and then to tie the rope to the leg of a chair he'd hauled over to the side of the futon. I thought that, to give this anything more than symbolic significance, shouldn't I be struggling to get away? Or at least pretending to struggle?
Instead, I lay still, with my eyes closed, thinking, despite myself, about the office, about my class. It would have started and ended already. How long, I wondered, had my students sat and waited? Had they finally huffed in exasperation? Or did they high-five each other, hurrying out the door? (Yeah!No class!) Did someone go to the English department secretary and tell her that Mrs. Seymour hadn't shown up? Would Beth try to call me at home, or simply e-mail me, or just shrug?
But when I realized that the rope was tight enough around my wrists that, to get away now, I would have to knock the chair over, scramble away on my injured knees—that I would be awkward, trying to get away, and easily overpowered, and that Bram was spreading my legs, and moving between them, kissing my thighs, so that I could feel his hot breath there, and I opened my eyes and looked straight at the ceiling, I forgot about class, about my skinned knees, about Jon, Garrett, Chad, my father, about being a middle-aged English teacher on a futon—and my hips strained skyward, and it was all sky then, as he eased two fingers into me, and I thrashed against the rope despite myself, futilely, and Bram hardly needed to touch me with his tongue before I started to come.
AFTERWARD, still with my arms tied above me, as Bram slid in and out of me, I thought—is this what it is? To have sex purely for pleasure? Is this the great gift of growing older, of having procreation and marriage and the future over, to be with someone without grasping for more, without wanting anything in exchange for what I was giving—the negative capability of it. This pure pleasure was all there needed to be between us.
But, as I was thinking it, Bram looked down into my face and said, "Remember, babe, you're all mine."
I TRIED to slip into my office without being noticed, but Beth whirled around at her computer the second I stepped in and shouted, "Sherry! Are you okay? Why weren't you in class?"
"Oh," I said. "I overslept. I'm—not feeling that well."
She looked at me for a second, then said, "Well, you look great."
On my voice mail, there were seven messages.
Two were from Beth—the first one checking to see if I was in my office, the second confirming that I wasn't and that I'd missed my class. One was from a student telling me she'd left her paper in my mailbox. One was Sue, who'd heard from Robert Z that I'd missed my class, wondering if I'd be missing my afternoon class as well, and saying, "I hope you're okay," with the cold concern of a colleague, not a friend. And two messages from Jon.
"Jesus, Sherry. You missed your class. What's going on?"
I felt happy to hear the edge of worry in his voice. It seemed familiar, spousal—the reaction a husband in an ordinary domestic situation would have upon hearing that his wife had not gotten, that morning, into work on time.
But then, the second message from Jon was half whispered:
"I hope what's going on is what I think is going on. When you get home, I want to hear all about it."
The last message was from Summerbrook. "Just calling to tell you your father's doing much better. Give us a call if you'd like an update." The woman's voice on the message was unfamiliar. Chirpy. Childlike. Full, I thought, of false cheer.
I needed to return these phone calls, but I did not yet feel I would be able to speak without revealing myself, where I'd been, what I'd been doing. It had to be in my voice, the long morning in bed with my lover. Surely, anyone hearing my voice would be able to hear it, too.
I turned on my computer.
In my in-box, an e-mail from Chad:
Ma, So. Hey. If you and Dad aren't too busy you think you could pick me up from the airport? Week from Sunday. I'll be the guy at baggage claim formerly known as your son. Remember me? You're my mother?
Chad
PS. Talk Garrett out of his warrior ambitions yet? I say go for it, chump. More food for the rest of us...
After I turned the computer off, I picked up the phone to call Summerbrook, where it didn't matter what the physician's assistant thought of me or my extramarital affair. Who cared what she could hear in my voice? When I asked for her, they said she was in and transferred me to her.
"Hello?"
She answered the phone cheerfully, musically, the same tone of voice with which she'd spoken in her message, to a machine. I told her who I was, who my father was, and she sang out, "Oh, yes, yes, yes!" He was, she said, doing much, much better since they'd started him on the Zoloft. Yesterday, they'd managed to talk him into coming down for arts and crafts (I thought I heard her flipping through papers here, as if consulting her files on my father, on his relative happiness or despair—files full of papers I imagined blank, white, the thinness of onion skin) and he seemed very, very happy. He'd made Easter baskets with some of the ladies. He was eating again. (I had to pull the phone away from my ear, she was speaking to me so loudly, so excitedly.) "You should see him!" she said—and I felt the guilt of it stab me somewhere near my sinuses, the tears starting there, trickling behind my face, into my throat, where I could taste them, a little sweet, with the lingering taste of the peppermint I'd eaten in the car on my way into the college, as if something sharp, but also sugary, had stung me between my eyes. I said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I haven't been in to see him. I've been so—"
"Busy!" she said, as if it had been a contest, as if she were pleased with herself for having shouted out the correct answer, having filled in the blank for me with the very word I'd been searching for. "Mrs. Seymour," she said, "that's what we're here for. It's our job to take care of people who don't have anyone with the time to take care of them."
I sat up straighter in my chair.
Was she criticizing me—brilliantly, subtly, with this pretend-cheerfulness, this friendly reproach—or was this simply the brutal truth?
It didn't matter. I wanted to apologize more. I wanted to tell her
, Look, he's always been a hard man. Even when I was a child. Years would pass when he hardly smiled. We were really never close. It was my mother I was close to; my father, he was like a shadow on the wall, he...
I wanted to tell her that I'd had a brother. My father and he were much closer than he and I had ever been, and my brother had killed himself, had taken his own life—and wasn't that the ultimate act of abandonment, hadn't he deserved some blame for that, shouldn't he, having bowed out so completely with no concern whatsoever for our father, for me, shouldn't he bear some responsibility now, too? Why should it always be the daughter who—
And then she chimed in, as if with good news, "There's nothing you can do for him, Mrs. Seymour. We're taking great care of him ourselves."
She sounded proprietary, I thought—as if my father now belonged to her.
OVER the freeway, two sandhill cranes were flying low, looking prehistoric and determined, like long smooth crucifixes in the sky—one obediently trailing the other, making loud trilling sounds as they flew.
Were they speaking to one another? Or were they, I wondered, calling out to the rest of the world?
"SO," JON said, greeting me at the door. "What happened to you last night to make you miss your class this morning?"
There was a splash of light from the window on his face, and it washed his features so brightly that I would never have been able to pick him out of a lineup, or recognize him on the street. I could see that he was smiling, but I had no idea whether or not the smile was forced, or sincere.
"The alarm clock was unplugged somehow," I said. "I overslept."
His smile faded. He took a step toward me, out of the spotlight of sun from the window. "I don't believe you," he said. "I think you were with your lover."
I tossed my purse onto the floor, shaking my head.
"Yeah," he said, taking me in his arms. "I can smell it on you, Sherry." He put his face in my hair. "It's okay. You can tell me."
I felt a dull pain tapping me at the base of my skull—some vein beating against a nerve, I supposed. I felt the tears well up in my eyes again, but I blinked them back this time and said, "You're right." I swallowed. I said, "He tied me up."
"Jesus Christ," Jon said, pulling away from my hair to look at me. "He tied you up?"
"Yes," I said.
"Oh, Sherry," Jon said, putting a hand on my breast. "That's good," he said. "I want to go upstairs, and I want you to tell me exactly what happened."
WE'D ALREADY made love, taken a shower, and gotten back into bed, but Jon instantly had an erection again. While we were having sex, he'd made me say Bram's name. Say his nam, Jon had said. I want to hear you saying it when I come.
I'd said it, and when I did, I saw Bram's face over mine, looking down, saying, Remember, babe, you're all mine.
How had this happened, I wondered, that my lover had become jealous, possessive, while my husband was trying to give me away? I said his name again, and Jon pushed into me hard, and came.
Afterward, Jon pulled me to him and said, "Did you tell him you want him to come over here? That you want to fuck him in your sacred marriage bed?"
Jon was laughing and serious at the same time, and it cut through me, the sarcasm.
It was all a game to him, I thought at that moment, bitterly. Not only the affair, the marriage. I remembered my mother standing over my brother when he was twelve or thirteen. He'd just said something vile to her—one of those things he so often said. You bitch or I hate you or You smell like piss, and he was smiling up at her, and she said, "I should slap that smile right off your face, buddy."
"So? Did you ask him?" Jon asked.
"No," I said. "I forgot."
"You forgot?' Jon thought for a minute, but he was still smiling. "You've got to be kidding me, Sherry. How could you forget a thing like that? Come on. You forgot."
In truth, I hadn't forgotten. I'd thought about it all day—Bram in our house, in our bed—and most of the night. I'd thought about it while I was teaching my class. I lay beside Bram on the futon and thought about it. On the drive home, I'd thought about it. And again, that echoing tunnel:
Did I want—could I want—to bring Bram to my home, to my bed? Did I want it because Jon wanted it? Or not want it because Jon wanted it? Did I want Bram to want it?
And why did it feel, despite my husband's insistence on it, like more of a betrayal than anything else—of the marriage, of our life?
Was it?
No. I thought, no, of course, it wasn't.
How could it be more of a betrayal of our marriage than spreading my legs for Bram? Taking him into my body? Sleeping beside him?
In truth, even before Jon had brought it up, I'd wanted to bring Bram here, hadn't I? I'd wanted to show him where I lived, who I was. I'd begun to feel that the efficiency was the place, the way, he thought I lived—who he thought I was—a woman with nothing but a futon and two sets of dishes, no history, no family or possessions or taste. I'd wanted him, I thought, to see my garden, my woodstove, my life. I'd imagined taking him on a tour through my house. See. I live here, these are my things...
"You better tell him tomorrow," Jon said.
I looked over at him.
His erection was still pressed against my hip.
I'd almost forgotten that he was there. He said, "Chad's home next Sunday, and after that it will be too late."
Chad.
Sunday.
I'd nearly forgotten about Chad, too.
I hadn't even returned his e-mail.
The mention of his name at that moment sobered me entirely, and I inched away from Jon and his erection and his heated whisperings, and suddenly the whole pathos and absurdity of the situation washed over me, through me, all blood, and shame—and also the sense of desperate, pointless urgency. "Okay," I said. "Okay. I'll tell him."
BRAM came around the corner of the hallway to my office while I was standing outside my door, unlocking it, with a student beside me—Merienne, flunking out of my Intro to Lit class, a blond in a top cut so low it would be impossible for anyone not to stare into the shadows into which it plunged. She was gorgeous, and when I saw Bram behind us, I wanted to throw a blanket over Merienne so he couldn't see her, couldn't compare her dazzling firmness to me.
But, he did see.
How could he not?
And, before I could turn back to my door, I saw his eyes travel over her, and a surge of humiliation coursed through me—chemical, fluid, smelling of household cleaning products, formaldehyde, opening every pore of my skin at once.
"Hey," he said to me, looking at her.
I stepped into my office and Merienne followed.
"I'll have to talk to you later," I told him, closing the door.
***
"SO," BRAM said, later, in the cafeteria. "Am I truly forbidden to come to your office?"
"No," I said. "But it's awkward. I have students I have to see. And, seeing you—"
"Does it distract you?" Bram asked. His hand hovered for a moment over the Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of him, and I realized that he was, perhaps, looking for some kind of reassurance. He was asking about his own power over me, checking on it.
"It definitely distracts me," I said.
"Well, I don't want to distract you at work," he said, and reached across the table with his hand, ran his fingers over my knuckles. "But I'd like to distract you elsewhere."
I pulled my hand away and looked around. The cafeteria was nearly empty, but Derek Heng was at the table next to ours. He was looking at me. He hadn't been in class since the day we'd discussed the first act of Hamlet, when he'd asked me what the point of reading it was if they couldn't understand it.
Derek nodded at me noncommittally. I nodded back.
I turned to Bram again.
He was looking at me. The smoky darkness. Something right behind his irises, smoldering. I could feel the blood pulsing in my neck. I put my fingers there. I opened my mouth to speak, but just as I did, something lande
d on the table between us. A hornet? Something buzzing and golden. I pushed my chair away from it as it tripped through a bit of stickiness that had been left to dry on the table. Bram waved his hand over it, and it flew away, making the sound of a very tiny, stifled alarm as it did.
I looked back up at him. I said, "Can you come to my house?"
"Sure," he said, still looking at me. He didn't blink. "I'll come to your house, babe. Are you sure your husband won't walk in on us?"
I said, "He won't."
"Okay," he said.
Bram followed me from the cafeteria back to my office. When we walked into the department together, Beth raised her eyebrows, but then turned back to her computer, a line of clubs and hearts on her screen.
After I'd shut the door behind us, Bram moved around, touching my things.
A paperweight. The stapler. A box of paper clips.
He picked up a photograph of Chad and looked deeply into it, looked at it so long that I had an impulse to snatch it out of his hands, but didn't. I let him look. I looked over his shoulder. In the photograph, Chad was eleven years old in a baseball jersey and a green cap. His smile was so wide and eager it was almost too bright to look at. That moment, I always thought when I looked at that picture later, was the last part of his childhood. After that, he learned, as we all do, how to hide his naked enthusiasm for life from the world, and especially from the camera. After that, there was never a photograph of Chad again in which he did not have a half-ironic smile. A bit of a smirk. An expression that said, Yeah, this is me, I'm smiling.
Bram put the photo of Chad in its little brass frame back down on my desk gently, then he picked up a picture of Jon. He looked at it for only a second, scoffed, put it back on my desk, facedown. He turned to me, put his arms around my waist, and pulled me to him. "You're mine now," he said, kissing me deeply, bending me backward, until we were against my desk, and he was between my legs.
He moved the crotch of my panties to the side with the fingers of one hand, then took himself out of his jeans with the other, and pushed himself deeply into me. I stifled a gasp against his shoulder, but he moaned loudly enough, I thought, for Beth to have heard from her desk, for anyone passing by my door to have heard as they passed.
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