But that afternoon, while he sat in Dunkin’ in Garrison Hall, the noose snapped tighter than ever.
He was having coffee and reviewing his notes on The Human Stain for his Modern American Novel course when he looked up to see Taryn descending on him like a hawk. Without a word, she scraped a chair across to his table. She was dressed all in black today, the color of doom, her face so rigid it might have been chipped from granite.
“Taryn,” he said, “I was wondering why you didn’t show up for—”
“I’m going to do the talking,” she snapped. “And you’re going to listen.” She dropped into the chair and leaned toward him with a predatory lurch.
He glanced at the students sitting a few tables away, worried that others would hear, but no one seemed to be paying attention. They were all in their own little bubbles, unaware of the nasty little drama unfolding just a few feet away.
“Can we do this outside?” he asked.
“No. Right here.”
“Then please can you keep it down? Let’s not make a scene.”
“I don’t care if we do make a scene, Jack. All things considered, I think I’m being pretty fucking calm about this.”
He shot another glance around the room. Said quietly: “What do you want? Just tell me what you want.”
“Let me lay it out for you, bullet point by bullet point. One, I won’t be returning to your seminar. I know you’re probably relieved as hell not to see me in class anymore, but it doesn’t mean I’m dropping out. Oh no, I’m enrolled till the end.
“Two, you’re going to give me an A because I deserve it. And because of all the pain and suffering you put me through.
“Three, you are going to pull every string you can and get me whatever I want. For a start, I’ll need a paid position as a teaching assistant, and you’re going to write me a recommendation worthy of Heloise d’Argenteuil. And if you don’t, I’m going straight to Elizabeth Sacco and telling her how you fucked my brains out.”
“It’s your word against mine, Taryn. How are you going to prove—”
“I’ll tell you how I’m going to prove it. You left behind a little souvenir at my apartment.” She whipped out her cell phone and thrust it at him.
He stared at the photo on her phone, a photo that made no sense. All he saw was a close-up of dark-green fabric. “What is this?”
“Don’t you recognize it? It’s the sofa in my apartment.”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
“Have you forgotten what we did there? Maybe you can’t see the little white stain you left behind. But it’s still there, on the fabric.”
His stomach clenched. Semen. She’s talking about semen.
“I’d call that pretty good proof,” she said, shoving her phone back in her pocket. “I’ve also got a witness in Dr. Hannah Greenwald. She saw us together at the conference hotel. At breakfast, remember? And I’ve also saved all those texts you sent me. Even if you’ve deleted them from your phone, I’ve still got them. I’ve got proof, Jack. So much proof.”
Yes, he had sent her texts, but he couldn’t recall what he’d written or if there’d been anything incriminating in them. He’d since deleted them, but she already had more than enough evidence to destroy his job, his marriage, his life. And nothing in her face, cold with purpose, made him doubt that she was ruthless enough to do it.
“This is blackmail,” he said.
“Call it what you want. I’m just collecting what I’m due.”
“All right. All right.” He tried to steady his breaths, tried to think past his panic. “If I give you the A, if I do everything you want, what happens then? Can we just end this? Can we get on with our lives?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Haven’t decided what?” His voice rose, and suddenly he felt the collective lines of awareness from others in the café converging on them. At least there was no one here whom he recognized.
“I haven’t decided what else I want from you,” she said. She scraped back her chair and stood up. “But when it’s time for me to collect, I’ll be in touch.”
“But stay away from my wife.”
“What?”
“You visited her at her office, and it wasn’t for a physical. I don’t want you to ever get near her again.”
“Or what?”
“Just don’t.”
She snapped on dark glasses and walked away.
He watched her push through the door and exit into a cold gray drizzle. And he thought about the metaphor at the core of Philip Roth’s novel, the universal human stain—that messy moral complex of imperfections that pollutes everything a person touches.
And we all end up paying for it.
CHAPTER 34
JACK
“Your girl’s officially in the program!” announced Ray McGuire. He stood grinning in Jack’s doorway, his head bent at a rakish tilt. “I just signed the acceptance letter. It’ll go out in today’s mail. That should make her pretty damn happy. A teaching assistantship is still pending the fall budget. But she’s in.”
“She certainly earned it,” said Jack. In more ways than one.
“The grad committee had it narrowed down to two final candidates. It was your recommendation letter that nudged her over the finish line. We’re expecting great things from her, Jack. Must make you proud, eh?”
Relieved was what Jack really felt. Relieved that he’d delivered the goods as promised. This should be the end of it, because Taryn couldn’t afford to expose him now; it would nullify his recommendation letters and jeopardize her future at the university. They’d been partners in sin, and now they were partners in deception. However much they despised each other, they were now forever chained to each other, and Taryn was clever enough to understand this.
This was absolutely the end of it.
When another week went by with no word from her, he allowed himself to breathe again. He could even laugh again when Charlie showed up for dinner at their house. Charlie had brought along his laundry so they could wash it for him, sparing him the chore. As Jack carried the laundry basket into the house, Charlie followed, holding aloft a bottle of his favorite Lagavulin in one hand and a carton of organic whole milk in the other.
“One drink for us fellas, one drink for the mommy-to-be,” he said.
“Oh, Dad, you know I’ve never been crazy about milk,” said Maggie.
“Better learn to like it, darlin’. That little bump’s counting on the calcium.”
Little Bump was what Charlie had started calling the baby, a far better name than Maggie’s first choice, Taryn. Whether it was a boy or a girl, that was the name she kept returning to, a name straight out of Jack’s nightmares.
“What Little Bump really needs is for Mommy to sit down and take it easy,” Jack said. “Daddy’s got everything under control.”
He was, in fact, happy to leave the two of them alone in the living room. He brought Charlie’s laundry down to the cellar, loaded it into the washing machine, and headed back upstairs to finish cooking dinner. After all, how many months did Maggie have left with her father? They were all painfully aware of the passage of time. As the metastases spread through Charlie’s body, it was a race between the pregnancy and how fast cancer would take him down. But Charlie had always been a fighter, and now he had something to really fight for: a glimpse of his very first grandchild.
That evening, looking at his ruddy, laughing face over the dinner table, Jack had little doubt Charlie would win that fight. He piled pasta onto his plate, poured himself another glass of whiskey, and dived into his meal like a man starved for life. Jack and Maggie exchanged smiles because, at that moment, everything was as right with their world as it could be. Her father might be dying, but a new life was on the way. And they had each other, a blessing that he would never again put at risk.
From the cellar came the buzz of the dryer. Jack stood up. “I’d better get downstairs before everything gets wrinkled.”
�
�You’ll make someone a very good wife, Jack,” Charlie said.
“Well, you can’t have him, Dad,” said Maggie. “He’s mine.”
All yours, thought Jack as he headed down to the cellar. And I’ll never forget it. While he pulled Charlie’s laundry out of the dryer, he could hear Maggie upstairs in the kitchen, grinding coffee beans and loading the dishwasher. Everyday domestic sounds he’d once taken for granted. He’d come far too close to losing it all. Now, just the act of folding Charlie’s sheets, still warm from the dryer, made him happy. Soon there’d be baby clothes and crib sheets to wash as well, and diapers to change and baby bottles to warm. He looked forward to it all—yes, even the diapers.
He carried the basket of folded laundry upstairs to the kitchen, where Maggie was arranging coffee cups and saucers on a tray. She didn’t hear him and gave a little squeal as he ambushed her from behind, hugging her close.
“Hey, you,” she laughed.
“You smell good.”
“Probably like cheese and tomato sauce.”
“I like cheese and tomato sauce.”
Maggie turned around to face him. “God, I wish we could hold on to this moment. You and me and Dad. I wish we could just freeze it as it is now, before—”
The sound of a throat being cleared made them turn. Charlie stood in the doorway, looking a little sheepish that he’d caught them embracing.
“Everything okay, Dad?” said Maggie.
“It’s starting to rain. I think maybe I should call it a night, before the weather gets worse.”
“You don’t want to stay for coffee and ice cream?”
“I couldn’t eat another bite, anyway. I’ll leave you two lovebirds to have at it.” He picked up the laundry basket from the kitchen table. “Thanks for washing my sheets, Jack. I never could get the hang of folding ’em as nice as you.”
“Your daughter taught me well!” Jack called out as Maggie walked her father to the front door.
When she came back, she looked worried.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s really starting to pour. Maybe we should have driven him home.”
“He’s not an invalid, Maggie.”
“Not yet. I’m dreading the day when that happens.”
“But you saw him go through dinner. It’s hard to believe he’s sick.”
“We can always hope for a miracle.” She turned to the tray of coffee cups.
“Let me carry those. How about you dish out some ice cream?”
Jack brought the tray into the dining room. Just as he set it down, his cell phone rang. He picked it up from the windowsill, where he’d left it earlier, and glanced at the caller ID on the screen: Spam likely.
Of course. Half the damn calls he got at dinnertime were spam. He declined the call and was about to put down the phone again when he saw the text message. It was from Taryn, and it was only two words long.
I’m pregnant.
For a moment he could not move, could not even breathe. His legs suddenly unsteady, he sank into a chair. He was still sitting there when Maggie walked into the dining room carrying dishes of ice cream. She sat down across from him, but he could not bear to look at her. Instead he stared off into the living room, focusing on the fire crackling in the hearth. At that instant he wanted to leap into those flames, let them consume him. It was what he deserved.
“Don’t you want your ice cream?” Maggie said.
“I—I’ll be right back.” He grabbed his phone and lurched to his feet.
“Are you okay?”
“Just a little, uh, stomach thing.”
He bolted upstairs to the bathroom and suddenly felt so light headed he had to steady himself against the sink. He looked at the text message again: I’m pregnant.
He deleted it.
She couldn’t be pregnant. This had to be a lie and one more way of torturing him. Frantic, he thought back to the two times they’d had sex. Neither time had he been wearing a condom. What a fucking idiot he’d been. He’d simply assumed she was on the pill, but what if she hadn’t been? He counted back the weeks and realized that, yes, it had been long enough ago for her to now test positive on a home pregnancy test.
God, it was possible. Very possible.
He dropped to his knees, hung his head over the toilet bowl, and threw up. He flushed away the contents but stayed huddled there, waiting as the nausea passed. But this nightmare would not pass. He was living it, trapped in it. He longed for the coward’s way out: a convenient heart attack that would take him down here, now, before Maggie learned the truth.
I need to find a way out of this, he thought. There has to be a way.
CHAPTER 35
TARYN
The face of Medea glared up at her from the cover of the textbook, the eyes alight with fury, her hair crowned in flames. It was the face of a woman who had been betrayed by the man she loved, a woman who was about to exact a price for that betrayal. Unlike the pitiful Queen Dido, Medea did not ascend her own funeral pyre and plunge a sword into her breast. She did not allow herself to be crushed and defeated when her husband, Jason, abandoned her for another woman. No, Medea embraced her rage. She reveled in it.
She acted upon it.
Taryn set the textbook down on her kitchen counter, where Medea’s fierce image would remind her to stay strong and fight for what should be hers. Tonight she would need that strength, but already she felt her resolve wavering. For an instant the kitchen seemed to tilt, and she reached out to steady herself against the counter. She’d had a glass of Zinfandel, and now her stomach felt unsettled. That was why she was dizzy, of course; alcohol tossed into an empty stomach. She knew she shouldn’t be drinking at all, but tonight she’d needed something to calm her nerves.
She opened the freezer, removed a carton of macaroni and cheese, and put it in the microwave. While it heated up, she thought about what she would say to him when he arrived. She would remind him of all the reasons they belonged together, all the reasons he’d forever regret it if he did not choose her. This was his child growing inside her, and even though it was still too small for her to feel it move, when she pressed her hand to her abdomen, she could almost believe a tiny hand was pressing back, reaching for her. For its mother. She thought of Maggie Dorian, thirty-eight years old and pregnant as well. When a woman was that old, her pregnancy could go wrong. How much simpler it would be for everyone involved if it did. The baby could die. Maggie could die. It happened to other women, didn’t it, so why couldn’t it happen to her? Taryn didn’t hate her, but that wife was the one thing standing between Taryn and her happiness. The one thing that was pulling Jack away from her. The one thing that was making him abandon her, just as her father did. Just as every man in her life did.
Tonight he had to choose. And she was determined he would choose her.
The microwave timer dinged, but she was still nauseated from the wine, and she couldn’t bear the thought of eating anything. She left the mac and cheese in the microwave and paced into the living room, then back into the kitchen. All this waiting was unbearable. It seemed all her life she’d been waiting for something. For love. For success. For someone, anyone, to see her. Instead of pacing, fretting, she should be at work on her new paper, the one due in a week: “Hell Hath No Fury: Violence and the Scorned Woman.” She stopped at her desk and glanced down at the printed manuscript, where she’d scribbled revisions in the margins. Oh yes, she could write entire books about scorned women. About men and their casual cruelty, about the women who loved them, the women they betrayed. Women who chose to fight back.
Women like her.
Suddenly the room felt stifling. She crossed the living room and opened the balcony door. Rain-swept wind blasted her in the face as she stepped outside to scan the street below. At this hour, in this storm, there were no passing cars, not a single soul walking below. A driving rain was falling in sheets beyond her balcony overhang, rain mingled with sleet, but she lingered outside, watching. Waiting. Lately, she c
ould not abide overheated rooms, and only now, standing in the cold, did she finally feel she could breathe.
As she gazed down at the unforgiving concrete far below, she suddenly wondered what it would be like to climb over this railing and to dive off. To plummet through the darkness, the wind rushing past her face and clawing at her hair. A few seconds of terror, ending in nothing at all. But if she died, it would not be as another Queen Dido, meekly surrendering to grief. No, she would make her death matter. It would not be a surrender but the start of a slow and inexorable tightening of screws that would eventually crush Jack Dorian. She would die victorious, knowing that by ending her own life, she would forever ruin his.
Oh yes. She’d make certain of that.
AFTER
CHAPTER 36
JACK
To All Members of the Commonwealth Community:
With deep sadness I write to share the news of the untimely death this past weekend of one of our students, Taryn E. Moore. Taryn was a senior English major who had excelled in her studies and who was planning to enter our English doctoral program this coming fall. We send our heartfelt sympathies to Taryn’s family and friends and we want everyone to know that the Center for Spirituality is open for those who need counseling about this terrible loss.
The email had been sent at 6:10 a.m. that Monday from the president of Commonwealth University. It was buried among the dozens of other emails that daily streamed into Jack’s inbox, and he might have skipped right past it were it not for the name on the subject line.
Taryn Moore.
With a feeling of dread, he’d opened the email, bracing himself for the worst. An accusation, a demand that he resign, or even worse. Instead, what he’d found was a mass email, sent to the entire university community. There was no mention of the circumstances of her death, no speculation about why she had died.
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