Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  Andrew sat up, still holding his temples. “He was my height. Six-two and a half. Very close to his father, extremely close. He married Martha when he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-four. Dash and I were twenty-nine and twenty-five. I think of these things. He never made a speech. He had weak vocal cords, couldn’t talk long without getting hoarse. So he wrote. The Declaration of Independence took him seventeen days.

  “If you know a man well enough, you can forgive him for almost anything. Don’t you think so? Not that a historian’s job is to forgive. But a man’s might be.”

  He sat in silence awhile, staring at a commercial, images of a woman laughing with happiness because her laxative worked.

  “I can’t decide what I should do. Jefferson was only really happy at home in the country, but he made the sacrifice and returned to public life when he thought he could do some good. Became vice president. What do you think I should do, Dad?”

  Edward snorted himself awake. He dabbed moisture from his lips, readjusted his oxygen tube. Regarded Andrew pleasantly. “I wanted to be an actor,” he said. “When I was a young man. Tell Chloe that.”

  “An actor? You did?”

  “I played the Stage Manager. College play. Stage Manager, that’s the biggest part.”

  “Our Town,” Andrew said, astonished. This was news to him. If it was true.

  “Loved it. Told my father—your grandfather—that’s what I’m going to be. An actor.” He put his head back, opened his mouth wide in a pantomime of mirth. “Funniest thing he ever heard! That’s what he said. Funniest thing he ever heard.”

  The smile faded to bitterness. Instead of acting, Edward had studied the law and joined Bateman and Tate. He’d wanted his son to make it Bateman, Tate, and Bateman.

  He reached for the TV remote and thumbed the volume back on. Andrew’s cue that the visit was over.

  nineteen

  At home, he went for a run, relying on Dash’s say-so that it was a beautiful day. But everything had a gray tinge he attributed to depression. He couldn’t think of anything to look forward to, nothing he wanted to happen. He had forty journals to read before exams started next week, after which he’d have 130 exams to read. He had never looked on the task as drudgery before, simply another chore like bricklaying or floor waxing. Garbage collection. Why not? What the hell was it good for? Studying history, one could argue—and he was ready to argue it—was another make-work industry, like greeting cards. It kept a certain number of people occupied and off the streets. Deluded people.

  “Why don’t you just go down there and get her, Dad?” Chloe suggested when he called her. He wanted company, not advice, so he went silent. Alertly, she changed the subject.

  His stomach hurt again. He shouldn’t have gone running. Not his stomach, more in his diaphragm. He emptied a roll of Tums into a coffee cup and set it by his chair, for convenience, while he read student journals.

  Elizabeth was right, he was a voyeur. Not by choice, though; if he wasn’t already depressed, reading about how depressed his students were would have pushed him over the edge. Some even had good reasons to be. This boy, Stephen Berger, sat in the back row and never spoke, just stared stonily out of thick black glasses when he wasn’t sleeping. On tests he was never more than average because of mediocre writing skills. But in his journal, Stephen became eloquent. His flimsy journal persona was Stephanus Bentham, a student at the University of Virginia. He wrote of classes, classmates, the obligatory current events in his usual spare, flat style, but when he chronicled Stephanus’s home life, the words poured out in a flood. His father was an abusive, alcoholic monster, his mother an ineffective wraith. He feared every day for his fourteen-year-old sister who was alone now, no one to protect her.

  How could it not be true? And what in the world was Andrew supposed to do about it?

  And here was Sasha Maloney, a sweetheart of a girl, blonde, cheerleader perky, good head on her shoulders. She wrote page after page about “Lavinia,” a silversmith’s daughter who suffered for her “lewd, ungodly thoughts and perversions”—read lesbianism. At the end of the journal, she killed herself by drinking silver polish.

  How could he not be affected by such revelations? All the journals, even the ones with better-disguised alter egos, revealed intimate things he felt humbled to know. Helpless to change. Tonight they weighed on him like hands pulling at his coat.

  When he wasn’t turning a page or scratching a note in a margin, the room was utterly silent. Hobbes had been more company to him than he’d known. Without his scruffy presence the house felt empty and vast, extravagantly too big for one person. Peace and quiet. He’d craved them not that long ago. They felt like a trick he’d fallen for, a swindle. Like—what was it?—the Love Canal, the idyllic community that had turned out to be polluted with toxic wastes.

  The phone rang. He knocked a stack of journals off the ottoman in his hurry to answer it.

  “Hey, Bateman. Feel like going for a swim?”

  “Elizabeth?”

  “No one’s here but me.”

  “Where?”

  “Sports Center. It’s faculty swim night, you’d think someone would be here. But no.”

  “Wait for me, don’t go. Give me thirty minutes.”

  It took forty minutes, ten to locate his swim trunks. Parking the car, practically sprinting into the campus sports complex—empty; everybody studying for exams—shucking off his clothes in the men’s locker room, Andrew kept telling himself she hadn’t waited and he didn’t care; in fact, he was relieved. Big hassle, eliminated.

  Doors from the men’s and women’s lockers opened on opposite sides of a metal balcony over the deep end of the pool. His first whiff of warm air smelled of strong chlorine. He heard splashing below. She’d waited!

  No. When he peered over the rail he could see—somehow, since they were unidentifiable from here—that neither of the two women swimming laps in adjacent lanes was Elizabeth.

  “What did you do, walk?”

  He leaned over farther, looked sideways. She smiled up at him, stretched out on the first bench of bleachers, using a rolled towel for a pillow. Without his glasses, details blurred; he saw her white skin and black swimsuit, her black hair. Blinding white skin. “I knew you’d look like that,” she said, her voice maddeningly uninflected. She curled up from the bench and stood. Wet dark hair cascaded to her shoulders. “I’m going in,” she said, impatient, and made a running dive into the water.

  He watched her, unsurprised that she swam lithe and fast as an eel, barely making a splash. The women beside her, their hair obediently covered in bathing caps, swam like…he couldn’t think, but compared to them she was a mermaid. The concrete steps to the pool area felt gritty and warm under his feet. Funny how simple shoelessness could make you feel half naked; take away your watch and glasses—there went the other half. That was how he felt, naked; open and exposed to the wet, steamy air, already starting to melt into it.

  He threw his towel on the bleachers, over which the swim team’s banner hung: MASON-DIXON OTTERS. He used to swim for his prep school’s team. What were they called? He couldn’t remember. “I knew you’d look like that.” Like what? Hairy legs, pale feet, the blue and green bathing trunks Dash had picked out for him a few summers ago. He walked to the lane next to Elizabeth’s and jumped in.

  The shock wore off in seconds. He treaded water, waiting for her, but when she reached the wall she ignored him, spinning off the side and reversing like a pro. Of course. He set off at a moderate crawl, smiling to himself. Elizabeth, Elizabeth. Her abruptness and her attitude of weary contempt for almost everything didn’t put him off anymore. He liked them. And God, it was good to be in this pool, out in the world, up against something. The water felt like a hard, sinewy barrier he had to break through, and he could, his arms and shoulders were strong, his legs were kicking machines churning him forward. He fell into a rhythm he thought his body had forgotten. His mind turned off. Back and forth, back and forth. When he tired,
he flipped onto his back and blinked up at the vaulted ceiling high above, and it was like floating in a flooded cathedral. He caught his breath and swam some more.

  At a turn he paused, hanging onto the side with one hand. What was different? Besides the fact that he was alone in the pool. The lights—someone had turned off the overhead lights; the whole echoey, cavernous building seemed to be illuminated only by the pool lights. He heard the slap of feet and turned around to see, dimly, Elizabeth descending the steps from the balcony. She smiled her snaky, come-hither-if-you-dare smile as she passed, heading for the shallow end. The siren look jarred intriguingly with a big red beach ball, exercise ball, she carried under one arm. Swim-team equipment. Where had she found it? Maybe she was on the team. No, but nothing would surprise him. He pushed off and swam underwater to the other end, coming up only twice for air.

  “So how are you?” She threw the ball to him and slipped into the water, agile as a dancer. “Help me with this.” She couldn’t unhook the heavy lane divider from the side of the pool. He lifted it up and out and let it fall, glad to be useful for once. Part of her allure and part of her tiresomeness was her disdain for help, especially men’s. “This one, too,” she said, and he lifted out another lane divider. Now they had a place to play.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Great, in fact. Lots of journals to read, but I’ll be done before exams.” He lofted from the water to catch a high pass, pitched the ball back to her with smoke on it. “How are you?”

  “I’m pissed.”

  “About—”

  “My merit raise. I told you.”

  She was furious with Richard Weldon for, among numerous other things, not signing off on her demand for a raise based on a year’s superior performance. She’d only been teaching for four years, but she wanted tenure and a promotion to associate by the end of next term, too, a year earlier than usual, and she blamed Richard for thwarting her.

  “If I were a white male,” she snarled, slamming the ball hard, so a plume of water hit Andrew in the face.

  He’d heard it all before. “You’d be tenured and on sabbatical by now.” He threw the ball in the air and whacked it at her, volleyball style. Bull’s-eye. It hit her on top of the head. “Hey, sorry,” he started, but Elizabeth laughed. She laughed. Not for long; soon she was back to bitter bitching about Richard—“I’ve got an eight o’clock class next term, Bateman. Eight o’clock. If that’s not punishment, tell me what is”—but that flash of self-knowing humor doubled his affection for her.

  “I might leave.” She batted the ball between her fists, short, hard punches on the surface of the water, showing off her biceps. “I could go just about anywhere. Maybe not Ivy League. Although why the hell not. I know Binghamton would piss themselves to get me.”

  He didn’t know if that was true or not. “Why did you come here? Why Mason-Dixon?” She’d arrived two years ago from a bigger, more prestigious school.

  “Old time’s sake. The old neighborhood and all that.” What a sneer she had. Her cynicism used to disturb him, but lately it provoked only a touchy tenderness. He’d always known she was a train wreck, but now he cared about her. And rooted for her, the way he might for the headstrong principal in a disaster movie. “Of course, if you were the chair.” She lay back in the water. Her hair floated around her face like black seaweed.

  “You’re a terrific swimmer,” he said.

  “I know. I’m part fish.”

  Mermaid. He, too, had always known she would look like that.

  “If you were the chair, Bateman.”

  “I’d miss teaching.” She had red polish on her toenails. Shocking intimacy. He couldn’t get over it. He stared at them as if they were her breasts, her pubis.

  “Oh, balls. All those journals you have to read. You wouldn’t miss that.”

  “They teach me things.”

  “What things?”

  He bent his head back, put his ears under water as warm as a bath. Closed his eyes and listened to the heavy, rushing silence. When he spoke, his voice sounded disembodied, like someone else’s. “No life is bland to the one who’s living it. The coolest student can be the most troubled. The funniest in the most pain. No one escapes loneliness.”

  A nautical pinging sounded pleasant in his ears. He could stay like this, limp in the water with his knees bent, toes almost grazing the bottom. But just then he felt something, a hand on his heel. He straightened and looked down. The mermaid was circling him, her back arched, feet thrusting. Above him, blackness; light below, sinuous, aqueous silver blue. Everything alive was below his waist. He sank to his knees.

  Her hair curling away, behind the corner of his eye, just brushed his shoulder. He turned the other way, but she’d already reversed. He feigned that he couldn’t find her, only accept the slide of her fingers on his neck, behind his knee, along his spine. Until finally a firm grip under his arms, lifting him. They surfaced together.

  They stood chest to chest, thigh to thigh, the closest they had ever been. His eyes were level with the part in her streaming hair, the jagged white zigzag seeming too vulnerable to him, childlike. She lifted her face and kissed him without touching him with her hands. She was smiling when their lips parted. With pleasure, not slyness or triumph. He reached for her—she glided away. He caught his breath instead of chasing.

  “Not enough time,” Elizabeth said, gesturing toward the clock at the far end of the pool. He pretended he could read it from here. “My house is closer than yours.”

  He ducked under, shot up in the air, shook water from his hair like a dog.

  “Right?” She was backing up toward the ladder. She scooted her hands along the water’s surface, patted it gently, splashed it. She turned her head sideways, looking at him between spiked lashes. “Right, Bateman?”

  Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Who said that? Probably Tim after a few pints. “Right,” Andrew answered, although he doubted if right had anything to do with it.

  Dash would approve—in a way: He was being spontaneous. He was putting his clothes on like a man in a race. The only way to be spontaneous was to move, not think.

  Nothing to think about anyway. This would be free and consequenceless because, for reasons of her own, Elizabeth, who wasn’t in love with him, wanted him. That was a blessing to be counted, not a puzzle to unravel. Most men wouldn’t think twice. Most men would think he was unbalanced, weighted down by pathology for so much as hesitating.

  Was he hesitating? He had to look at himself in the foggy mirror to comb his hair, had to peer into his own eyes. They looked worried. In the same way he’d wondered all his life when he would die, and how, he had also wondered when, or if, he would have an affair. A sense of inevitability had tracked him, a cloud of dread and avidity that lifted gradually as he got older and began to see that it might not happen, might not be fated.

  Fated? Because of his father, a serial philanderer? To hell with that. Whatever happened tonight, he swore by God it wouldn’t have anything to do with Edward.

  Elizabeth. Remember how she’d looked, how she’d felt snaking around him underwater, supple, seductive, a pale-limbed Lorelei. Think how it might be with her, how she would look without her clothes. How aggressive she would be. He was surprised she hadn’t initiated sex in the swimming pool. An uncharacteristic moment of discretion.

  Once, over a weekend when Chloe had stayed at a friend’s instead of going down to the cabin with them, he and Dash had swum naked in the pond. He hadn’t wanted to. It was freezing—it was last spring, before her mother died, before everything went haywire. “You can’t come in with your clothes on,” she’d warned him as she’d stripped hers off in the chilly sunshine. “Not one toe, Andrew, don’t even think about it. Naked or nothing.” Yipping at every step, she pranced into the water while he stood on the bank and laughed, watching her lips turn purple, her skin pebble with gooseflesh, her nipples shrink to buttons. The last thing in the world he’d wanted to do was get in that cold brown
water, with or without his clothes. But her teeth started to chatter and she looked so miserable and bossy and tickled with herself. Her hugging arms made pretty round hills of her breasts—he’d wished he had her camera. “Ch-chick-chicken! Come on in, it’s warm as toast.” What could he do? He’d undressed and waded in, and when he got to her, he’d put his arms around her to try to warm her. She’d stuck her foot behind his knee and tripped him. They’d gone crashing into the frigid water together while she shrieked with laughter.

  Outside, Elizabeth was waiting for him, slouched against a light pole with her hands shoved inside the pockets of her trousers. Behind her, the balustraded roof of Mason Hall, the oldest building on campus, looked medieval silhouetted against a hazy pink sky. The night was quiet and sweet-smelling. Elizabeth lifted her head and smiled. “Two cars this time,” she said, and pushed off from the pole, heading for hers.

  He thought of her museum-house, the high-ceilinged bedroom and the canopied bed with its heavy quilted coverlet. It couldn’t be a black room, but that was how he remembered it, black or brown, everything shadowed but modern, a carpet thick as mulch. He pictured the room candlelit, shadows flickering on the canopy overhead. Elizabeth’s hard, elastic body astride his. Her hair tickling his face. Her viperish smile.

  He called to her and she stopped, turned. “Let’s walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “Here.” He gestured across the bright, empty parking lot to the concrete footpath that wound up a slope to the main campus. “Around.” He spread his arms. “It’s a nice night.”

  She stood motionless, watching him with glittery eyes. She lifted her top lip in an unambiguous snarl.

  “Please,” he said, and waited for her to whirl around and stomp off, to curse him, both—but she raised her handsome shoulders and let them fall. Then she stalked past him, knees unflexed in that peculiar gliding gait she had, and headed across the parking lot.