“It’s a fucking bloodbath over there,” is what he said.
At which point she tried to imagine what it would be like to lie in a bathtub full of blood. But it was the image of a warm bed that dominated her conscious thought. She must have started to yawn.
“It’s getting late,” said Bruce.
“It’s getting late,” agreed Phoebe.
“I should drive you home.”
She didn’t answer.
He drove her home in his dark red Chevy Caprice with the beige acrylic-knit interior, and he said good night before she’d even gotten out of the car.
BUT IT WASN’T so many nights later that the visiting professor rang Phoebe up to see if she might be interested in joining him and a few of his colleagues for a drink at a local cocktail lounge.
“Sure.” She tried to sound casual even while she was practically bursting with gratitude for the invitation. That Bruce Bledstone thought she was worthy of associating with actual faculty members!
That Bruce Bledstone wasn’t embarrassed to be seen in the company of Phoebe Fine.
He said he’d swing the Caprice by at nine.
She dressed in a black leather skirt and a fake-fur coat.
He was wearing a gray suit jacket and a navy blue Mao cap.
“Hello there,” he greeted her from behind the wheel.
“What’s this music?” she said, fastening her seat belt.
“It’s Bulgarian folk.”
“I didn’t know they had bagpipes over there.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
“It’s okay. I mean, it’s not really my taste.”
“What’s your taste?”
“More like Madonna, Lisa Stansfield, that kind of stuff.”
“I like Madonna.”
Phoebe couldn’t believe her ears. No matter that his tone was equivocal. It made her think he understood. It made her want to reach over and hug him. “You like Madonna?” she squeaked with joy.
“I like that one from a few years back,” he continued. “What’s it called? ‘Material World.’ ”
“You mean ‘Material Girl’?”
“That’s the one—it’s a very clever song.”
“Yeah, it’s a good song,” Phoebe concurred. “But I think a lot of people misinterpreted it. I mean, they thought Madonna was celebrating being materialistic. But I think she was actually making fun of it. Don’t you think?” She turned to the visiting professor for validation.
But he had none to offer. “It could very well be,” he said, smiling cryptically, his green eyes glinting in the headlights of a passing camper.
Then she didn’t know whether to feel like a genius or a jackass—not until she got to Pete’s Tavern.
Then she felt like a genius.
“THIS IS MY tireless research assistant, Phoebe Fine,” he said, introducing her to the assembled crowd.
They were a motley group—an AIDS activist with pock-marked skin; a raven-hared graduate student of indeterminate sexuality who was writing her dissertation on eighteenth-century witchcraft; a British guy named Todd who’d been invited to Hoover to deliver a paper on the Hegelian infinity in relation to the British pop-rock act the Pet Shop Boys; a Mary Shelley scholar with a large flat butt, and her semiestranged husband, Ron, a labor-history guy with a comb-over. Phoebe found their company riveting—if only because they treated her as if she were one of them. As if there wasn’t anything strange about her being out with her professor on a Tuesday night. They shook her hand warmly and asked her what she was studying. And she returned the favor by asking them about their own particular fields of expertise and showing interest in their answers, even while she couldn’t have cared less. Even while her primary interest remained the mirror over the bar—a mirror by which she was able to evaluate if and how Bruce Bledstone acted differently with the Mary Shelley scholar from the way he acted with her.
Alternately, if he was standing right next to her, how the two of them looked together. (Like father and daughter, Phoebe shuddered to herself before banishing the thought from her head.)
“Your friends are really cool,” she informed him an hour into the whirlwind. He’d come over with another drink. He was always coming over with another drink.
“Glad you think so,” he said, grinning. He seemed to find everything about her amusing that night.
She asked him, “Would you rather I thought they were losers?”
“Not at all,” he answered. Then he took a drag on his cigarette, turned sideways to release his dragon plume through his patrician nose. “I’ve promised to give Todd a ride back to the Holiday Inn.”
Phoebe wasn’t sure how Todd’s plans affected hers.
But that they affected hers at all! “That’s fine with me,” she said with a dishonest shrug.
The bar was closing. More hands were shaken, double cheek kisses exchanged. The three of them walked out into the parking lot. Bruce was in the middle, Phoebe on his right. The temperature had dropped, but there was a stillness to the air that foretold spring—and bred restlessness. “I can’t believe this town shuts down at midnight,” whined Todd.
Phoebe remembered suddenly what Spitty and his fraternity brothers used to do after last-call in Hoover. “We could always drive over to Altoona,” she piped in.
She hadn’t meant it as a joke.
Bruce and Todd seemed to find the suggestion hilarious.
“No, thanks,” gagged Todd.
“Next weekend,” choked Bruce.
“It was just a joke,” Phoebe said, cringing. She couldn’t tell if they were laughing at her or with her.
“Well, it was very funny,” said Bruce.
“Thanks,” she whispered, but not loud enough for anyone to hear.
She felt suddenly ridiculous in her own body—as if her feet were too short for her legs, her hands too big for her arms. As if her essential boring blahness were on display for all the world to see. She climbed into the front seat, rolled down the window, lit her umpteenth Camel of the night in search of the levity cigarettes occasionally precipitate, though rarely beyond the first one of the night. Todd got in the back, but he hung over the front. Arms outstretched over the backs of their seats, he chattered on about his boyfriend’s mother, his mother’s boyfriend— Phoebe couldn’t say for sure. She was too distracted. She was too busy wondering what next. But she didn’t want Todd to leave— not yet. She found his presence strangely comforting, the way the presence of a third person sometimes is.
She was sorry when the Holiday Inn came into view and Todd sprung from the backseat.
“Sweet dreams,” said Bruce.
“It was nice meeting you,” said Phoebe.
“Nighty night,” said Todd, leaning into her window with what seemed to her a leering smile, but maybe she was over-interpreting the curl of his lips. Maybe he was just smiling. It was hard to say for sure.
Then he was gone, and it was just Phoebe and Bruce. They were pulling out of the circular driveway, turning left on McGuire in full view of the hippie kite store, when he asked her, “Should I take you home? Or do you want to come in for a nightcap?”
She swallowed hard before answering, “I’ll have a nightcap.”
They parked down the block. There wasn’t anyone else on the street. But the stars were out—millions of them. And to Phoebe they seemed like coconspirators in their fantasy; to Phoebe the stars seemed to be lighting the way to Bruce Bledstone’s bedroom. He walked a few feet in front of her, his head bent forward over the crabgrass. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking about. She wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. She was too busy holding her breath, trying to stop her teeth from chattering.
SHE DIDN’T REMEMBER his house being such a mess. There were books and newspapers and half-empty mugs strewn all over the floor. The visiting professor made two screwdrivers, one for Phoebe and one for himself. Then he joined her on the striped sofa, reached for the remote. They watched a little news. They watched a rerun
of Married with Children. He said it was his favorite sitcom. She asked him why he didn’t have any children. He said, “That’s a very provocative question to ask.”
She told him, “I’m a very provocative girl.”
He grimaced, said nothing. But when the show was over, he glanced at his watch and announced to no one in particular, “It’s getting late.”
Just like last time.
But it wasn’t like last time at all. It was different. Phoebe could tell by the way the visiting professor was sitting—awfully close to her, his legs splayed on the coffee table, his elbow digging into her arm. She was sitting on her calves. “It’s getting late,” she seconded the observation, the ball of her stocking foot brushing the side seam of his jeans. (It was an accident—just like the Political Philosophy Library.)
He didn’t take his eyes off the TV. He rattled his ice against the side of his glass. Then he asked her, “Do you want me to drive you home, or do you want to stay here tonight?”
She didn’t answer immediately; her heart was beating too fast. And besides, she wasn’t sure Bruce Bledstone wasn’t inviting her to spend the night on some pull-out cot.
She wasn’t sure until he reached for her hand.
He squeezed it so hard she thought her knuckles would break. Then she knew. Then she turned to him. He wasn’t smiling but he wasn’t frowning, either. He was looking at her as if she had something he wanted. And she was looking at him as if she was looking at the sun. She couldn’t keep her eyes open so she closed them. That’s when he unsnapped her barrette. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders and onto his hands. Then he took one tendril, wound it behind her ear, brought her to his lips. And his breath was hot like car exhaust. And his kiss felt less like a surrender than a coronation. She had to open her eyes to make sure it wasn’t all a dream.
She found the visiting professor exactly where she left him— sitting there, waiting for an answer.
“I guess I’ll stay,” she managed. “I mean, if you don’t think it’s too weird.”
“Why would it be too weird?” He spoke to her in the same flat, affectless monotone he used in class. And it unnerved her just enough to send her fleeing from the room.
“Could I borrow your phone?” she asked him mid-flight.
“It’s in the kitchen,” he said.
She took the phone into the broom closet with her. Then she dialed home. Holly picked up halfway through the first ring. It was pretty obvious that she was alone. And that she was disappointed it was only Phoebe. And that her thirty-ninth lay had yet to materialize. “Guess where I am,” Phoebe whispered into the receiver.
“Don’t tell me,” said Holly—as if she meant it. As if she didn’t want to know. No matter that seducing the visiting professor had been her idea. She couldn’t bear the thought of its actualization. She couldn’t bear the idea that she was losing her quasi-virginal sidekick. At least, that’s how it seemed to Phoebe. Here she’d called in search of reassurance. All Holly had to offer was sarcasm.
Or was Phoebe kidding herself?
Had she called to warn her best friend that she was “catching up”? And what hope was there for a friendship that competed for attention with sex? Or was it rather that sex was the stage upon which she and Holly competed for each other’s attention, with men mere props in their own psychodrama? (Was it Holly who she loved the most, always had?)
“Fine, I won’t,” said Phoebe.
“Do what you want,” said Holly. “Just make it quick. I’m expecting company.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“Oh, so now you’re the only one who gets to have a sex life?”
“What are you talking about?!”
“Forget it.”
“Fine, I will.”
“Fine.”
The two girls hung up as worst enemies. Though at that moment Phoebe couldn’t have cared less. What did she need Holly Flake for when she had Bruce Bledstone waiting for her in the living room?
Except he wasn’t there when she got back. Her panic lasted only a few seconds. Then she heard the floorboards creaking overhead. She climbed the stairs one at a time. She found the visiting professor standing at the top of them.
He didn’t have to say, “Come here.”
She went to him. She fell between his arms, and he held her there—against his chest, against his heart, against his groin. And it felt safe and dangerous all at the same time to be engulfed by this massive warmth—this pulsing stranger—in whom she had decided, for unclear reasons, to place her bets for salvation. And they stayed like that for who knows how long. At which point he took her to his bed and pulled her on top of him, his hands gripping her hips, his mouth ajar but no sounds coming out, not until it was all over, and he was lying flat on his back, a single, languid leg tossed diagonally over her own. Then he said, “Well, that was fun.”
“Yeah,” she whispered back.
BUT IT WAS so much more than just “fun.” Or so it seemed to Phoebe that next afternoon after class on the third floor of the colonial mansion where she and Bruce Bledstone sat in weighted silence, the rain candy-striping down the little window under the eave, the air between them not quite robust enough for two simultaneous breaths. At least, it felt that way to Phoebe. She’d never been so proud. She’d never been so aroused, either. Which is mostly to say that she could tell that Bruce Bledstone was aroused.
And was there really any difference?
“I’ll be in New York this weekend,” he told her.
“Whatever,” she told him.
Because she could tell he’d just as soon have stayed in Hoover with her. In fact, he came back early. But first he called to say he was on his way. He said Evelyn was out shopping for a new raincoat.
She said, “I hate raincoats.”
He said, “The sound of your voice makes me hard.”
She said, “I like your hard-on. Can I like your hard-on?”
He said, “You can like anything you want.”
He said, “It’s time we reclaimed the relations of reproduction.”
He said, “The fucking thing wouldn’t cooperate.”
He said, “It was really very embarrassing. When I tried to fuck my wife, I could only think of you.”
And Phoebe took it as the highest form of flattery. She didn’t see how else to take it. Especially since good sex was what kept couples together, just as bad sex was what drove them apart. That’s what Bruce Bledstone said. And Phoebe had no reason to doubt him. Experience didn’t suggest otherwise.
Experience didn’t suggest anything.
She waited for him on the porch of his falling-down house. At the sight of his approaching car, her stomach collapsed like a Japanese folding screen. “I missed you,” he said before he pinned her against the front door. He smelled like cheap cologne; he smelled of sandalwood and burning leaves.
“I missed you, too.” She could hardly get out the words.
She could hardly believe that, of all the girls in the world, it was Phoebe Fine he wanted the most.
SO THEY RARELY went on real dates. (He said it was a small town and you know how people in small towns talk.) And he balked at the prospect of attending the Hoover Symphony Orchestra’s Spring Concert, in which Phoebe currently played (what else?) second violin. (Classical music he deemed elitist.) But he picked her up after the show and took her back to his falling-down house, where she sat face forward in his lap and played him Beethoven’s Romance no. 2 in F Major, op. 50. She told him it was his punishment for being a bad husband. And he seemed to take the insult in stride. But she hadn’t made it through the first page before he yanked her violin out from under her neck, then her bow out from under her fist. And then he carried her upstairs, where he offered her his own version of romance. And she kindly accepted. She couldn’t get enough of Bruce Bledstone. He couldn’t get enough of watching TV. Sometimes they watched sitcoms while they had sex. Maybe it doesn’t sound that romantic.
It was to Phoebe.
&n
bsp; It was as if she were seeing the world for the first time. Which is to say that she saw nothing at all, so blinded was she by the spectacle of their passion—a passion that rendered the humdrum routines that had once marked her daily existence mere background noise. She kept forgetting who’d called. She kept leaving the keys in the door. She’d finally, triumphantly, lost her appetite. Even conversation came to seem superfluous. What words could begin to live up to the gravity of their lust? And who, for that matter, had the energy to talk?
Oh, but it wasn’t just the passion. To wake against Bruce Bledstone’s sleeping chest, her hot cheek rising with his every breath and the morning sun casting oblong shadows across the light blue floorboards in his bedroom on the second floor and everything quiet and calm and contained within this one shimmering bubble of space and time, their very own and no one else’s—that was as close to bliss as she’d ever known.
During class time, they’d revert back to teacher and student—well, almost. The visiting professor would do everything in his power to avoid eye contact. But sometimes he’d fail. Sometimes he’d be caught speechless in the middle of his speechifying. Then he’d have to clear his throat and start all over again—as if nothing had happened, even though it clearly had. That’s when Phoebe felt the most powerful.
That’s when she felt the world was hers, and she was the world. IS IT ANY wonder she almost forgot about the existence of Evelyn Nuñez? The visiting professor rarely mentioned his wife’s name except to complain that she stole all his best ideas. (She was a critical theorist herself.) Then the phone rang. It wasn’t that early. It wasn’t that late. They were still asleep—not for long. Phoebe knew it was Evelyn calling because the voice on the machine said, “Hey, Honey, it’s me.” And while the tape rewound, she sat up on her elbows, opened her mouth to speak. She wanted to let Bruce Bledstone know she wasn’t half as stupid as she looked. She wanted to tell him that his marriage sounded “pretty convenient.”
She didn’t have the nerve.
Somewhere along the way, she’d gotten scared, if not of the visiting professor himself, then of the possibility of losing him. Which is to say, the possibility of saying the one thing that would make him realize that she was more trouble than she was worth. And that he didn’t need her the way she thought she needed him. No matter that she’d walked and talked, inhaled and exhaled, before she met him. Without him, she was nothing, no one—that’s who she’d become. Or, at least, that’s who she thought she’d become—the image of his desire: nothing more, nothing less.
What She Saw... Page 16