Unreliable

by Lee Irby

  “So cheesy! I adore those shoes! You have to get them, especially for this wedding.”

  “I’ll be straight-up hustling in these bad boys.”

  “I thought you needed oxfords?”

  “Nah, white is right. Isn’t that what people say in Henrico County?”

  “You’re so bad, Eddie.”

  “Sold!” I exclaim to the sales associate, who’s been watching us with a blank expression, as if the hours of retail toil had robbed him of any ability to appreciate mirth. With a solemn nod he begins to sort out the boxes and then, kneeling down, gestures to me, indicating that he wants to put the pimp shoes back into their box.

  “No, I’m good to go,” I say manfully, admiring my new kicks, which are deliciously hideous. “I think I’ll wear them out.”

  “Now there’s a real brave heart for you!” Leigh Rose sings in delight, clapping her hands while egging me on to make a fool of myself, something I’m only too happy to oblige.

  “I need to break them in, right?”

  “Of course you do!”

  “And these go with shorts.”

  “I think so.”

  In the blink of an eye, we’re eighteen again, mercurial and undaunted, ready to sally forth like a couple of oddballs in weird clothes, impervious to disapproval, our inner punk rockers arising from dormant ashes. It feels like we’re on our way to slam-dance at Hard Times and hop on the tabletops at Domino’s, but I also realize that I know nothing about her current situation. There’s no wedding ring, but who knows what that means. I’m sure she’ll fill me in at Starbucks, yet the person I want to ask about, but am afraid to, is her older brother, named Jeb. Even better, his full name is Jeb Stuart Wardell, in honor of the Confederate cavalry hero.

  Jeb hated my guts. One presumes he still hates my guts, despite the fact that we haven’t laid eyes on each other since high school. Normally if a person hates me, I try to smooth the troubled waters between us, and consequently most people don’t hate me for very long. But not only did Jeb hate me, he’d warned me to stay away from his sister or else. At the time he was a sophomore at some party school like Elon, and he’d been kicked off the football team for breaking the starting quarterback’s leg in a scrimmage (not to mention the horrible grades and other off-the-field issues), and so he was someone I rightfully feared because not only was he capable of violence, he seemed to enjoy inflicting it. Nothing in his background indicated that he felt remorse. He was large, beefy, and rash. He told me that I had no business being with Leigh Rose and suggested I “get a clue” before “it was too late.”

  So after I reported his threat to Leigh Rose, brother and sister got into a huge fight, she wrecked a Mercedes on her way to Casablanca, and her parents grounded her for a month, which had the indirect effect of separating us, and a few weeks later she ended it, perhaps because of pressure she was getting from her parents or she just got bored. I was ready for college to begin anyway, so I just wished her well and moved on. But something tells me that Jeb has never forgotten, and here I am, again with his sister.

  Is Jeb Wardell the man in the black hat, my nemesis, my killer?

  “You’re just what the doctor ordered,” Leigh Rose gushes as we make our way to the register. “All the people I’ve been hanging out with are just so uptight and prim and proper. I actually joined the Junior League. I really did.”

  “I haven’t exactly set the world on fire, either.”

  “You’re a college professor.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You touch the lives of young people.”

  Oh, I touch them! There’s no doubt about that. Or is there? What is true and what is false in my tawdry tale? I’m confessing, but I’m also conflating, confusing, and contorting reality, because who would want to read a book about a college professor who goes home for a wedding? Yawn! On my phone is a photograph of a former student standing in front of a mirror admiring his massive erection. Is it really there? Or if you looked, would you just find the ordinary sorts of texts that a lonely man might get? Married friends checking in, college chums too busy to call, my cell phone provider updating my minimal data usage…you recognize this life, because it’s yours, which is why you want my story to drag you away from the banality that enshrouds you.

  So guess what? This is delicious and you’ll love it. As we’re standing in line to pay, Leigh Rose gets a call on her cell phone. I’m a little surprised that she answers it, but she does say “Excuse me” before turning away. I take this moment to check my own phone, and find an unread text from Lola. It includes another photograph, this time of her and her roommate, a pinch-faced though chubby vixen named Dahlia, both of whom are naked and in a bed, with arms around feckless Priapus. Lola is gripping the swollen mandrake of this otherwise nondescript nobody as if she’s just captured a snake and holds its head so it can’t bite her.

  The caption reads:

  he calls it thor

  The Norse god of thunder and lightning, from which we derive our English word “Thursday,” and so one day a week for the rest of my life I’ll have to think about this venereal pervert who fouled Lola (and her roommate). She’ll grow out of it, I ardently believe that. She’s just in an experimental phase and indulging every whim, and next year she’ll graduate and we won’t have to hide our affection, assuming any remains, because right now what I’m feeling is disgust. Disgust mixed with a tremendous desire to cry in her lap. Leigh Rose, get off the phone! Look what happens when you separate from me! My mind boggles, my id becomes hideous, and my desire for life ebbs with the neap tide…

  She hangs up and rejoins me in line. “Sorry about that. My kids are at camp and I go get them on Sunday. My daughter is pretty sure I’m leaving her there.” A sardonic laugh. “Which isn’t a bad idea.”

  “You have kids?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  But any further explanation will have to wait because it’s my turn to pay. The sales associate at the register scans my item with the alacrity of a lobotomized simian, and I reach for my wallet, slowly and surely, like the sheriff in a Western movie readying for a shoot-out, but in this fight I’m woefully outgunned. The quite interesting question is: will my credit card even work? Count me as someone who’s eager to see the result of this experiment in creative finance. Will I be mortified if my card were to be declined right in front of my ex-flame? Then again, what’s one more emasculating indignity? The more, the merrier! There’s no shame left for me to give to the world, and at this point the best I can do is grudgingly accept my pitiable plight. I swipe my credit card with rococo certainty and then hold my breath. In less than a second, Leigh Rose will learn that my life is one big lie, artlessly constructed, a ramshackle dwelling for pent-up hostilities and warped sexuality (which Lola undeniably adores, much to my chagrin).

  Miraculously the transaction goes through. I’m thrilled, but really had my credit card been denied, my story might have turned out very differently. Poe would appreciate the macabre irony of desiring that which ultimately will prove to be your undoing. From a banking standpoint, there’s no logical reason why I was able to buy the shoes, but I don’t quibble. I quickly scrawl my name on the electronic pad, grab a big, billowing bag (containing the sneakers I’d worn), and now I’m free to go.

  “I’m proud of you, Eddie,” Leigh Rose prods me as we scud out of Macy’s. “You haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

  “In my line of work, you need a sense of humor.”

  “Please. I bet all the girls are secretly in love with you.”

  “Right.” A nervous giggle, straight from the Lee Harvey Oswald School of Charm. Maybe I should confess everything, and I mean everything. It’ll feel great to unburden myself, to lift the onerous weight from my sagging shoulders. How much guilt can one person lug around? I thought I had the right build for it, but my knees are starting to buckle.

  “At Tulane there was this English professor and I thought he was so handsome and debonair. I tried flirting
with him but he wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

  “I bet he was gay.”

  “That’s sweet, Eddie. But he wasn’t. He was sleeping with half of our class.”

  “Really?”

  “So I heard.”

  Starbucks abuts the Macy’s, and as we walk to it, I feel strangely liberated from the years-long embargo Bev waged against spending money at Starbucks, which at times forced us to drink coffee from convenience stores whose labor practices were far worse. “It’s been a long time since I’ve indulged in a biscotti,” I say with gusto.

  “Why’s that?”

  “My ex-wife hated Starbucks and so I kind of picked up her feelings and made them my own, which is one reason she’s my ex-wife. But I know lots of students who work at Starbucks and they all like it.” Take that, Bev! Empirical evidence that Starbucks isn’t the corporate criminals you made them out to be, a charge you based on highly subjective rants from the leftist bloggers who fueled your almost-but-not-quite Marxism. Occupy Ithaca lasted how long? Barely a week?

  “It’s a guilty pleasure of mine,” she concurs.

  “Those are the best kind.”

  “You are so bad!”

  My insouciance has quickly become her oxygen. She’s beaming joyfully as we head off for coffee. My new white shoes make a funny clacking sound, almost musical, and my feet feel light in them, like any second I could break into a rousing tap routine, Gene Kelly to her Debbie Reynolds, but instead of singing in the rain, we’ll be confessing at the mall.

  Or not.

  Why do I need to let Leigh Rose see Ithaca Eddie in all his tattered glory? Ithaca Eddie is gone forever. New shoes, new attitude, new identity. Leigh Rose doesn’t need to know about Lola and Thor and the letter from the dean I got last week requesting to meet with me. Deans in academia love meetings, and so now it’s my turn to sit in the hot seat. It’s not like I’ve been having sexually inappropriate relationships with six (or more) of my current students, no matter what you think. I disclose to you what you need to know and nothing more.

  “This is my treat,” Leigh Rose informs me once we get in line.

  “But I’m the man. I wear the pants in this relationship.”

  “I like you so much better without pants.” She delivers this line in a whisper, and I can’t tell whether she’s playing with me or inviting me to seduce her. I don’t mean to suggest that our high school fling was an epic adolescent fuck-fest, because we spent most of our time together going to shows and groping in parked cars. We enjoyed each other in the informal way of teens, but mostly for her I was a sort of rebellious outlet, a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, and not a Lothario with a pocket full of condoms. But we have had sexual intercourse, which could mean myriad different things depending on the situation.

  “Well, I guess you’re paying then.” I chuckle lightheartedly.

  “Thanks. I only feel alive if I’m spending money.”

  “At least something makes you feel alive.”

  We’re at the counter now, and I’m struck by how openly quirky Leigh Rose still is. The suburbs haven’t yet eroded her, though solitude clings to her the way a smoky smell can persist in the kitchen despite opening all the windows to air out the burnt odor—because just the fact that she’s even at this mall makes me wonder about her life, her two kids, her lack of a wedding ring. I’m enjoying myself, maybe a little too much, considering the dire straits I’m in.

  I order a double espresso (and biscotti), and she opts for a mocha latte. “We’d better grab a table,” she suggests, surveying the interior with an expert gaze. “I see one in back.”

  “You get it and I’ll wait for the coffees.”

  As I stand there alone, out of habit my cell phone finds its way into my hand, as if it were tethered to my palm by an invisible string. Lola has sent me yet another text, and I really don’t feel like looking at it. There’s so much about our relationship that doesn’t work. My weakness is just another symptom of a more virulent disease that threatens my very existence. Her latest missive:

  9 inches

  I close my eyes and then with a puritanical rapidity begin deleting her texts, one at a time, but I’ll never get through them all. I’ve fallen into a pit of quicksand and struggling to get out only makes it worse. I have to endure photo after photo, her rogues’ gallery of conquests, and her pithy commentary on each.

  But then our coffees are ready and my purging comes to a halt. I shove the biscuits into a pocket, along with my phone, and carry the cups over to a table in back, scooting around a hirsute technophile who’s typing on a laptop with a Bluetooth earpiece affixed to a lobe. Leigh Rose puts her phone down and shoots me a wan smile.

  “Of all the gin joints in all the world,” I growl in my best Bogart imitation, which is actually decent. Even Bev thought so, and she pretty much detested all my celebrity imitations.

  “We’ll always have Paris,” Leigh Rose replies right on cue.

  “I took you to see that film, if you recall, at the Biograph on Grace Street.”

  “I do recall. We smoked dope in my dad’s old Mercedes and when he smelled the interior in the morning, he made me scrub the seats.”

  “You were such a troublemaker.”

  “Some things never change.”

  We each take a prolonged sip of our coffee. I see no point in beating around the bush, and so I make the first foray into personal disclosure. Perhaps I’m being inspired by the enlarged photograph on the wall opposite me, of a sturdy Central American farmer hoisting a load of coffee beans, grown organically, of course, just the sort of corporate propaganda that used to drive Bev batty. But who’s to say that the brown-faced peasant isn’t deliriously happy? Well, if he can shoulder a burden, so can I.

  “So let me guess,” I venture in my nasally ironic tone. “You married a doctor.”

  Her placid face betrays no emotion. We could’ve been talking about cloud formations or cookie recipes. “No, he was a lawyer.”

  She delivers this clarification in the past tense, which might explain the lack of a wedding ring. The idea of her availability motivates me to wade farther in, an intrepid explorer roving across the hostile landscape of adult failure. “I don’t mean to pry. Okay, I do mean to pry. I’m totally prying right now because I’m a terrible person. Are you divorced? Do we share the stigma of botched matrimony?”

  “You can definitely say that we screwed up our marriage, but we didn’t get divorced. He died two years ago.”

  “I’m so sorry! Now I feel like a jerk.”

  “You were trying to be funny, and that’s something I’ve always liked about you. So don’t apologize. Trust me, widows get tired of being the object of pity.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Everybody makes the assumption that I’m too frail to walk down the street or cook pot roast. This might sound cold, but I wasn’t exactly torn to pieces when Trevor died. The kids were obviously very hurt, but my husband was a mean person, cruel even.”

  “To you?”

  She leans forward like she wants to tell me a secret. “When I was pregnant with my second, I went to the ob-gyn for a normal checkup and it turned out I’d contracted an STD. Hmm, how did I get that? Trevor was the only person I was having sex with. It was a miracle I didn’t miscarry. I actually started to hate him after that little faux pas.” She shakes her head in disbelief, eyes fixed on a point far, far away from us. “I haven’t told anybody that story. Not even Trevor.”

  “You didn’t confront him?”

  “He would’ve just lied or blamed me. There was no point.”

  A gaggle of pregnant women takes up a large round table and their confident voices form a kind of singsong counterpoint to the sotto voce dirge of Leigh Rose’s tale of woe. We actually sit back and observe the surreal scene unfolding: these all-white women in the throes of baby-making reverie, radiant in displaying the fruits of their successful mating strategies, with belly bumps perfectly framed in trendy expecting-mommy attire, smi
ling, laughing, oblivious to the ravages of marriage, the incipience of disharmony, the very real possibility that one day they will hate their husbands. Perhaps a decade ago Leigh Rose had belonged to their ranks, but now she’s on the outside looking in, a stranger in a strange land, a widow who’s run into an old flame—little old me, who just might be a tragedy in the making.

  I’ve got no reason to harm Leigh Rose. None. I won’t even insult your intelligence by contorting the plot in such a way as to make it seem possible that I’ll choke her with my bare hands. The real issue here is her brother, the one who hates me. He’s lurking in the background, a ticking bomb. He’s the one to keep an eye on.

  Now, there are certain novelists who strain credulity on every mediocre page they produce, the worst offense being the amazing coincidence that advances the threadbare plot but leaves a lingering odor of artlessness wafting in the stale air. I will never stoop to that banality, mostly because I’m dedicated to delivering you the Truth, without concern for the niceties involved. But sometimes in life, in ways impossible to predict, surprising tangents arise, two vectors intersect, and we’re left shivering in the vast cold blackness of a universe we’ll never understand. If I were composing a work of fiction, I’d never allow this scene to play out in the manner I’m about to delineate. But this isn’t fiction.

  Against all odds, at that very moment, Jeb Wardell, Leigh Rose’s brother, comes storming into the Starbucks like he’s been fired from a cannon, eyes ablaze, hulking physique padded by a layer of fat that makes him resemble an inflamed walrus, with a bushy mustache that seems to have belonged to a Halloween costume. Judging from his attire, he’s been golfing. Judging from the gold chains around his flabby neck, his taste is still poor. He’ll forever remain malevolent-looking enough to belong in a Bosch painting, and I certainly don’t want this greedy trust-fund demon to be my executioner. Anybody but him!

  “What’s he doing here?” mutters Leigh Rose, straightening up in her chair as if she’s prepared to launch a counterattack. Maybe I should ready myself for combat as well. Jeb looks awfully pissed. For a second I worry that he’s going to steamroll the pregnant women, but he does dodge them, thereby avoiding senseless tragedy. For now.