Jane was not sure whether to be flattered or disgusted. He gave her one last deep kiss and handed her the joint. “A token of your affection?” she joked, but he just looked puzzled, clearly not getting her pun. He walked out the door with a sexy invitation to call him anytime she wanted to “get it on.”
She did not hear from him again until after the holidays, when one night he dropped by unexpectedly around 11 p.m. carrying a pizza and cheap bottle of wine. She was a bit embarrassed to be caught in her flannel pajamas and no makeup. He of the perpetual blue jeans and T-shirts did not care. Both had disrobed by the time they finished the bottle and were writhing on the floor once again.
This pattern continued for weeks after classes resumed. For Jane, the affair provided a type of excitement far beyond physical sensation. She enjoyed the power and scandal of having a young stud to service her whenever she wished while retaining the freedom to live her own life. For brief time, she thought she had achieved the ideal form of liberation.
Sitting in the darkness of her living room many years later, Jane realized that her lover had been nothing more than a conduit (albeit a very willing one) to gratify her own desires. A hole to fill a need.
Was this what had happened with Lewis and Mandy? Had he just been using the young woman to satisfy a physical urge? Had Jane been any different years ago? Was the current situation more serious because the gender roles were reversed? Was this happening to her own daughter? If these were hypothetical cases being analyzed by her grad students, they might make lively debate fodder. But this was not theory. These were real lives. Jane, like so many other professors before her, had gotten away with her indiscretions. Lewis Burns might not be so lucky. Neither would Coach, if he was the person she suspected he was.
Part Two:
Past and Present
Chapter 12
Denial and Anger
Lewis returned home from his worst holiday ever in a mental fog. He spent the rest of the winter break trying to work on his manuscript, with little progress. Even when he tried reading, which usually relaxed him, the words morphed into meaningless scratchings. He passed the time watching old movies on TV and catching up on the latest Internet video crazes, numbing his mind through distraction.
One morning while channel surfing, he paused on a television talk show featuring a psychologist talking about divorce. “You have to realize,” the expert told a rapt audience, “that people going through divorce pass through five stages of grief similar to mourning a death. First there is denial, then anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance.” Lewis concluded that he was probably still in the denial stage. Since returning home, he never cried nor thought about how he was going to tell people about the divorce. As the pop psychologist’s analysis became more depressing, he changed the channel to a reality show about large-load truckers. Those guys would know what to do with a wayward wife. Run ‘em down with the big rig! The mental image gave him some small comfort.
Occasionally reality would intrude on his fantasies: practical matters, such as what he would do with the house and the large number of Laura’s personal items she had left behind. She callously sent an e-mail asking him to ship her things to her, expecting him to sort through and return the detritus of their past life. He ignored the request, determined that everything remain the same until he was ready to deal with it.
Two days before spring classes were to begin, he went to campus for a department meeting, where he remained unusually quiet. A couple of people asked how Laura was, to which he borrowed Dr. Stevens’s pat answer: “Oh, fine.” Once back in his office, he sat down dejectedly at his desk and stared at Laura’s photograph, paralyzed as a tight ball of emotion formed in his chest and worked its way up through his throat and face. Slowly, he felt tears well up in his eyes. For the first time since that day at the ice skating rink, he was crying over the end of his marriage.
As he sat there softly sniffling, he heard a knock at the slightly opened office door. Mandy was standing before him in a school hoodie and jeans, not quite knowing how to respond to the sight of her weeping boss. “Hey, I’m sorry, I can come back later,” she said. “This looks like a bad time.”
“No, no,” Lewis assured, waving her in with a sniffle. “Come on in. I’m just having a little allergy problem,” he lied, grabbing a tissue. “Nothing contagious. It’s good to see you. How was your break?”
“Good,” she replied, still trying to decide if he really had allergy problems. “And yours?”
“It was fine,” he said. From the tone of his response, she knew that it must have been terrible, but did not say so.
She asked for an update on her assignments, to which he confessed to not even thinking about them. Sensing it was not wise to hang around too long, Mandy left, with a caring look. “I hope your allergies get better soon.” Her expression of concern made him feel slightly better and more pitiful at the same time.
Lewis did not tell anyone in the department about the divorce, though word soon began to spread. It was not hard to track the source of the news. One day, Perry accosted him in a hallway, grabbing him gently by both shoulders. For a moment Lewis feared the annoying little man was going to give him a hug. “Lewis, I am sooo sorry to hear about you and Laura. It’s just a tragedy. You know, I’ve been down this road myself, so if you need any advice or just want to talk, let me know.”
Lewis responded politely, knowing better than to let any important information pass from his lips to Perry’s half-hearing ears and straight to the rest of campus.
“And if you need a good attorney,” Perry advised, patting him on the shoulder, “I know the meanest bull dyke lawyer in town. She’ll take care of you.”
“Thanks, Perry. I’ll keep it in mind. Sorry, I’ve got to get to class,” he lied, surpassing his comfort level in the conversation.
As he walked down the stairwell to the ground floor, Lewis realized that Perry had made one very good point about needing a lawyer. He would probably just call the attorney they had used when drawing up their wills. It seemed an appropriate closure. The lawyer had been there when they were planning their lives, making provisions for possible future children and assets. Now he could handle the dissolution of the marriage.
A few days later, Laura called him to broach the subject. She agreed that he should probably use their will man, but said she wanted her own attorney, a suggestion that immediately irritated him. “Why do you need your own lawyer?” he snapped, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to have one guy handle it? You said you didn’t want to haggle over stuff.”
Now she became defensive. “I don’t want to haggle, but I want to make sure that I have someone who will look out for my interests.”
“What, you don’t trust me?” he threw back, raising his voice.
“It’s not a matter of trust, Lewis. I just need to look after myself.”
“You always do, don’t you,” he spat sarcastically.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she volleyed.
“Nothing,” he shouted, anger welling up inside him. Listening to her disembodied voice on the telephone, he allowed his denial to segue into anger.
She returned the bitterness in equal measure. The argument continued for 20 minutes, with shouting, screaming, and numerous profanities. They had never fought like this when they were together. It was as if two aliens had taken over their bodies. All the things they had been bottling up for months, years, unspoken behind a veneer of polite discourse, came bursting forth over the telephone. Perhaps it was precisely because they could not see each other that they could be so vicious.
When Laura finally hung up on him, he slammed the telephone receiver down forcefully, shouting, “BITCH!” three times to no one in particular. The last slam struck the tabletop with such force that the receiver cracked. Gentle Lewis Burns, who had never raised a hand to anyone in his life, cathartically imagined the receiver was the face of his soon-to-be-ex-wife.
The rest of the evening he tore throug
h the house, packing up all items that he no longer wanted, including the blue afghan wedding gift that had rested on the couch for so long. Just before sealing the last box, he threw in the broken pieces of the telephone for good measure and shipped the cargo off to his wife, C.O.D.
The next day he was even surlier than usual from lack of sleep and stress. At least it was Friday, when he played basketball against the grad students. He hoped the game would help him work off some tension.
He sat in his office after his 10 a.m. class let out, rubbing his temple to alleviate the atrocious ache shooting daggers through his head. Just as he popped two aspirin into his mouth and washed them down with a cola, Mandy appeared at his door, clutching a batch of papers. “Hey there,” she said, cheerfully. “I was just droppin’ off my research for the week. I found some really good stuff.”
“Oh yeah?” he replied without smiling.
“I listened to some of the presidential tapes and got a transcript of a couple of conversations that deal directly with the Indian policy,” she said, placing the stack of papers on his desk. He could tell that she was proud of her accomplishment, but right then he did not feel like praising anyone, especially not a bright, intelligent female. When he looked at Mandy, he saw instead the face attached to that angry disembodied voice on the telephone.
“This must’ve taken you awhile,” he said gruffly.
“It did,” she replied, “but it was actually kinda fun. It’s weird hearin’ the real voices of people you’ve read about in history books. I mean, I’ve seen some of his speeches on TV and in movies, but when you hear the voice without the face, it seems more real, ya know?”
Normally he would have been thrilled at this lightbulb moment, but even the joy of student learning could not pacify him today. It would have been so easy to allow her shining eyes to lift his mood, as they usually did, but today he did not want to be lifted. He preferred stewing in his anger.
“Good,” he said brusquely, without any added praise. “I’ll look over these later. Anything else?” he asked, dismissively.
Mandy’s face fell a little. She was hoping to be able to discuss the tapes and her findings in-depth with him, but sensed that he was in one of his weird moods.
“Nope, that’s it,” she replied, standing up. As she started to walk out the door, she stopped and turned towards him. “Have a good weekend, Dr. Burns.”
“Yeah, you, too,” he answered, feeling a twinge of regret about his attitude.
That afternoon he arrived at the rec center for his regular pick-up game. The ancient first-floor gym had four courts, which in the afternoons were usually filled with pick-up basketball games, or the occasional volleyball contest. On the second level, overlooking the gym floor, was a small workout area with stationary bikes, treadmills and other aerobic equipment.
Technically, anyone could play in their game, but over the years there had developed an unofficial tournament in which grad students and faculty from the liberal arts and social sciences faced off on court number one every Friday at 4 p.m. Most of the competing faculty, like Lewis, were former college athletes trying to stay in shape and/or get back a little of that glory feeling and camaraderie from their varsity days. So, while the grad students were younger and perhaps a little faster, the faculty usually gave them a good challenge and often won.
Some grad students looking to score brownie points found the game a good opportunity to force some male bonding with their professors. Occasionally a female student joined the game, usually one who had played college ball and shamed all the men with her skills. No female faculty member had ever joined them, so, for the most part, the game remained an all-male ritual.
The lack of female presence was particularly appealing to Lewis, who felt like embracing misogyny on this day. He arrived a few minutes early to warm up. Soon, a few more players arrived, including Kyle Foster, a southern history specialist and one of Lewis’s teaching assistants. Kyle was one of the more skilled student players, having led his small Georgia high school team to a district championship. Despite growing a bit pudgy around the middle since then, the boy with the drawl thick as sorghum molasses always offered a good challenge on the court. It never paid to underestimate Kyle, whose accent led some people to misjudge his keen intelligence.
The game began with Kyle guarding Lewis. He was doing a good job of it, too, blocking two shots and stealing the ball once. Lewis felt like the student was crowding him too much, at one point trying to stay close by placing a finger on the top of Lewis’s rear waistband. “Back off, Kyle,” Lewis warned between clenched teeth.
“Sorry, Professor,” Kyle repeated every time Lewis directed a negative comment in his direction. The professor sensed a mocking tone behind the overly polite response. Suddenly Lewis wanted to deal Kyle the same punishment he had inflicted on the innocent telephone receiver.
Lewis heard his name called, then spotted the ball coming towards him. As he grabbed for it, he felt Kyle reach from behind to try to knock it out of his hands. “Back off,” Lewis sneered.
“Sorry, Professor,” Kyle replied in the same jovial manner, moving around to block Lewis’s shot. He was crouching in very closely and smiling this goofy grin that only made the teacher angrier. As Lewis made a quick move to get past his blocker, he shoved an elbow hard into Kyle’s stomach, knocking him to the floor, and growling, “I said back off, ya dumbass redneck!”
Lewis took the shot and made it, but the game came to an abrupt halt as the other players rallied to check on Kyle, now lying on the floor clutching his stomach. A Psych professor asked Lewis sharply, “What did you do that for?” The look on his face suggested he thought the History professor might be in need of some serious anger management therapy.
“What?” Lewis asked, innocently.
“You elbowed him in the gut! Foul!” a student snarled indignantly.
Kyle was now sitting up, but still clearly in pain and winded. “And I ain’t no redneck,” he choked out, “yew dumbass prick!”
The group stood silent for this unprecedented moment. Even on the basketball court, it was understood that grad students were underlings. In questionable calls, they deferred to professors. If they needed to let one have a free shot just to win some off-court bonus points, they did. If a student took an elbow to the gut, he might shoot some dirty looks, but then would apologize for bumping the teacher’s elbow with his belly. No one had ever heard one of the students call a faculty member a “dumbass prick” to his face. And this was to a faculty member in Kyle’s department, on his dissertation committee, no less!
Everyone froze and watched for Lewis’s response, listening only to the sounds of bouncing balls and voices from other nearby games. Two students who had been watching from the alcove stopped working out to stare at the scene. Panning the faces around and above, Lewis’s eyes fell onto Kyle. For the first time Lewis saw the grad student’s face, turning beet red from a combination of anger and embarrassment. He realized that calling the southerner a redneck was just about the worst thing he could have done, akin to using the “N-word” against a black student, or the three-letter “F-word” against a gay student, neither one of which Lewis would ever think of doing.
Lewis felt ashamed. He actually liked Kyle and thought highly of him as a student. Recognizing the unfairness of taking out his bad mood on the guileless young man before him, Lewis let out a deep breath and with it, the anger he had been holding in all day. He walked over to the student, offering a hand up. “I’m sorry, Kyle. I’m just having a bad day. I got carried away.” Turning to the rest of the crowd, he announced, “This is one of the brightest grad students in my department. I was out of line.”
He then offered to buy Kyle and any other grad student a beer after the game, the ultimate peace pipe among young males. The tension broken, the men grunted approval for the passing crisis as one of them shouted, “Let’s play!”
Lewis wisely took a colleague’s advice to sit out the rest of the game, although he conti
nued to watch. After the game ended with a student team victory and the players showered, Kyle and three other grad students met Lewis in front of the gym. The professor suggested they head to the Chug-a-Lug, rationalizing that it was the closest bar within walking distance. In the back of his mind, however, he was hoping to atone for his rudeness earlier in the day.
He was not sure if she would be there, but he recalled Mandy saying that she usually worked weekend shifts. Lewis still could not recall the last time he had been to the Chug, but it looked exactly as he remembered, with a retro-60s décor that lent to its unique atmosphere without dating it. Lewis put in an order for a round of beers with chips and salsa for his table. The dingy bar was already beginning to fill up with happy hour customers, mostly students ushering in the weekend with cheap alcohol.
The sign on the door said the feature band that night was some group called Punked Out Jobe. The poster made Lewis think about Mandy’s father. He imagined the young Mr. Taylor as a member of a similar band and wondered how many of those aspiring musicians would lose their dreams to drugs and bad choices. Then again, how many might be lucky enough to sire the waitress that Lewis was hoping to see this evening?
For now, there was no sign of her anywhere. So he enjoyed the salty flavor of tortilla chips combined with spicy red salsa, washing it down with his locally brewed ale. Perhaps it was the chips or thirst from playing basketball, but he downed his first beer rather quickly before ordering another. Initially, the students tried to take advantage of their faculty audience to show off their own knowledge, but Lewis was not really in the mood for discussions of historiography or abstract social theories. Right now he wanted to relax and forget about this day and the previous night’s conversation.
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