“What did I tell you?”
Osgood huffs.
Now he’s off the trail he’s more reasonable. I cannot for the life of me understand this maddening pursuit of my private life. “Am I not allowed to have women in here?”
“Women!” he booms. “You’re the moral center of this whole operation, Beck. This is exactly what I was afraid of. Women!” And then he squats down and looks under the bed.
“Do you see any? Do I seem like the kind of guy who’d turn into some kind of sex maniac overnight?” The irony of this is totally out of hand since that’s just exactly what Naomi has done to me. Turned me into a sex-hungry testosterone-laden beast. But I manage to keep a straight face.
“You dodged a bullet this time,” Osgood says, slowing coming up from the floor. I hear some creaking joints. “But I’ll tell you something. If one of your conquests is that Costa girl like I suspect? You know how she affords tuition?” He points at his chest. “Durham Dean’s scholarship. My chaired position. So…”
He doesn’t need to say the rest of it. I get it. He wasn’t kidding when he said he could ruin both of us. My gut churns at the thought. That’s the real deal. That’s tangible.
“Nothing. Is. Happening,” I say. “Now, I’ve got to get back to work. Don’t you have a butterfly to pin or something?”
He stomps off down the hallway, but I stay with him, pressing my hand to his meaty, slightly pudgy back. I’m not a violent guy—situation with the wall excepted, and sexual kinks aside—but I am seriously tempted to shove him down the stairs. But I don’t. I just imagine it in my head.
“Thanks a bunch for stopping by,” I tell him as I guide him out the door.
“Don’t forget. I’m watch—”
I slam the door in his face, lock the deadbolt, and hustle up the stairs. I fling open the closet. She’s there, in a ball on the dryer. Petrified. Instinctively I hold her close. Into my shirt, her voice comes out muffled and extra quiet, “Ben. I shouldn’t have come here. This was a mistake.” Her hair smells so good, her body feels so good, she’s such a drug. “I know. It’s risky. But when I see you, when I think about you, and all my reason just vanishes.”
She swallows hard. She doesn’t reach out to hold me, but stays in that tight ball, before finally unraveling and sliding off the dryer. “I should go,” she says, putting her clothes back on in some semblance of order. She’s having a tough time with her flip-flop, her toes keep getting tangled in the straps. I get down on one knee and fix it for her.
Gazing up at her, terrified and so young, I’d do anything she wanted. I’m not going to keep her here. No matter what I want, it’s less important than what she needs. A parallel universe streams through my head, where we met somewhere else and things were different. Where we collided like planets and were allowed to stay in each other’s orbit. But that isn’t this universe. That isn’t this world. The cosmos is nasty. I've always said so. A vengeful, soulless bastard of a place.
Still on my knee, I lean my forehead on her shin. My stubble rustles against her smooth skin. I hang on to that leg with both arms, clutching at her for a long moment. I close my eyes. I breathe her in.
And then fish the key from my pocket. Because I know I have to let her go.
17
Days slide into weeks, and I immerse myself in the grind, digging down right into my core to stay away from him. It was a stupid, immature, ridiculous idea in the first place. Who falls in love after a one-night stand? Nobody, Naomi, nobody.
But it becomes increasingly clear, day by day, that it wasn’t just a one-night stand. Nope. Not a fling, not fading. Just getting so, so much worse. Every Thursday, the Lux et Veritas initiates go out and party. Sometimes Lucy convinces me to go, but most Thursdays I find myself just staring down at his house hoping to see him. One glimpse of him passing the French doors or standing in his kitchen.
The fellows’ dinners are agony. Whether on purpose or by chance, we end up bumping into each other about six hundred times each night. Like we’re magnets, but our poles are all out of order. In the kitchen, in the foyer. At the table where I lay out the nametags.
“I miss you,” he whispers one night when the main speaker is a lady with an expertise in rare beetles. Osgood, he organized that one. Obviously.
My whole body stiffens. He’s standing next to me, facing the other way.
“Are you okay?” he asks in a hush. “I want to look after you. Even if I can’t have you.”
I think that if I begin to talk to him, I’ll never stop. I’ll tell him that I want him and I miss him and how stupid it is because I have only been with him twice, just twice, and it was nothing, really nothing, and that we barely know each other, right?
Except that isn’t true. Because of his class. I have come to know him, deeply know him, through what he says and how he says it.
That happens twice a week, three beautiful hours of my life every week, I sit there and listen to the man I am hopelessly, helplessly, stupidly in love with. Every hour is more wonderful and gut-wrenching than the last. But I never miss a lecture. Not once. Because he talks of mystics, and love, and sadness. He talks about things that make sense to me for the first time ever. And I’m completely and utterly hypnotized. When he shows us films or clips from YouTube, he dims the lights and comes to stand near me. Just standing nearby, crossing his arms. Letting me feel him standing near me.
He talks about infinity and the end of the world. He talks about the days when people believed if they saw the saints in a painting, they were real. Like spirits in their house.
Then he pulls out The Four Loves.
He talks about mystical worship and hope, and how Lewis exactly expresses the nothingness of losing love, once found.
And he looks right at me when he says that, holding my stare as he dismisses class. But I’m the one to lower my eyes first, and I don’t look back.
A month into the semester, on the first really cold day of fall, Lucy sneaks a bottle of wine into our room.
“We can’t have this here.”
“Shhhh,” she says, and works the cork out halfway with an opener and the rest with her teeth.
We crawl in her bed together. Her windows shut tighter than mine so it’s nice and warm. She’s got this downy mattress cover that makes it feel like we’re in an ad for toilet paper, falling into the clouds. I bring my own pillow and wear my favorite hoodie. This old gray thing with a rainbow on the front.
We look for something to watch. My penchant for period dramas gets resoundingly rejected. I try to talk her into Wuthering Heights, saying it’s actually about a neighborhood in Orange County. “Like Real Housewives.”
“I’m not that stupid,” she says, and flicks along on her iPad as HBO GO predicts what we might like.
Upon the screen pops True Detective.
“God. That Matthew, he’s so fucking dreamy. Have you seen him in those bizarre Lincoln ads?” Lucy says.
My stomach turns. There’s no question that Ben’s book is the inspiration for those ads. I can’t even stand this. The world is out to get me. “Oh look,” I say, flipping along, “A documentary on poisoners. That sounds fun.”
She shakes her head. “True Detective.”
I sigh. I don’t have the will to resist. And I stick my hand in the bag of almonds—these are sort of a smoky paprika, where does she find these things?—and resign myself to my fate with a Solo cup of chardonnay in hand.
It hurts. The whole thing hurts. But again, I’m mesmerized. It’s him, but not him. It’s a dream. We binge-watch the whole thing over one weekend, and for the next two days, every single time I close my eyes I see that introductory montage, but see Ben’s face instead of Matthew’s.
Upstanding righteous proper conduct. It’s wearing me out.
I want to get my hands on him. I need to get my hands on him.
The other place we bump into each other, every day, is in the dining hall. I’d go to another college to eat, but my allegiance to Durham kee
ps me coming back here. And the knowledge that I will invariably see him. I even know when he eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes I purposely stay away. But not usually.
Usually it happens over the dessert trays. They always have lemon bars. I love lemon bars.
“These remind me of you,” he says one day, picking one out of the case.
“I don’t even have the verb for what I feel for you,” I say as our fingers brush on the tongs.
“It’s fucking killing me, Naomi,” he says, pretending to look busy deciding now about fudge or possibly a cookie.
“What do we do?” I say. Now I’m considering fudge too.
“That’s completely up to you,” he says.
I look up at him.
“I’m right here,” he says. “Just say the word.”
And I stick my lemon bar in my mouth, the whole thing, so I don’t have to answer.
18
It’s October 10. I wake up to a shocking thunderstorm battering the windows with rain, a real old-fashioned Atlantic squall. I just lie there, listening to the wind whistle eerily in the Harkness Tower way above me. My phone shows me the fingers of a hurricane over Connecticut, and the water is lit up red with small craft warnings. I pinch my fingers on the map and see it’s not going to hit Maine, thank God.
Exactly a month since I snuck into Master Beck’s house. Exactly a month since I lost my nerve and left.
Lying on my bed, I watch the water outside. I even actually feel the water inside because a little spews in from where the window doesn’t quite meet the frame. I've lived in this room for two years. I don’t even know why because it’s nothing but trouble. I think if weren’t for me, they’d stick an extra water heater in here or something. Yet it’s all mine and quiet and weirdly old-fashioned and romantic, which is why I love it so much. Three times, facilities have tried to fix the windows, and three times they’ve been air- and water-tight for about a week. But then the building shifts, like a stretching old woman, and they crack open again.
I take a roll of packing tape from my bottom drawer and cut off a length, sticking it to the frame and pressing it down hard and tight with my fingers.
Out my window, through the driving rain, I see Professor Beck inside his house, passing the French windows that he once pressed his face up against, looking at me. My stomach somersaults when I see his silhouette. Professor Beck. I’m calling him Professor Beck now exclusively. That incident with the lemon bars is proving about as sticky as the lemon bars themselves.
Just say the word.
My history with guys isn’t insanely long, but nothing to whine over either. The usual smattering of ups and downs at college, most of them giggle-worthy after all the tears fell. A boy freshman year told me he loved me the first day I met him and then cried for an hour for no discernable reason. A boy I slept with later freshman year, he was a smotherer, and he smelled so much like Gain laundry detergent I began suspecting he kept dryer sheets in his pockets. I dated a football player sophomore year who told me not to pretend to be too smart in front of his friends. Then there was Isaac, who loved me senseless and scared the shit out of me too.
Before that, of course, there was Joe Riley. My fiancé. The fact that I was engaged to him, not even Lucy knows. I only call him my high school ex if I ever have to mention him. Which, I make sure, is hardly ever. Somehow it’s embarrassing to me that I was once that girl. But I wouldn’t mind telling Ben, I realize. I’d like to tell him. Somehow I think he’d understand. I don’t even know why. Maybe because he understands the dream of something bigger. I can see it in his eyes.
But the dream, it’s awfully glamorous from the outside looking in. With the dream came responsibilities and worries, things I just have no idea how to deal with sometimes. Call me foolish. Call me not quite 21. But it does get to be a little heavy, the grind through a world that never feels like I belong. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way. I see it in everybody aching for something bigger.
I wake up my computer and see in the corner what I’d forgotten: October 10th. Yesterday was fishing quota day. I grab my phone to call Dad to see how it went.
The seagulls squawk at me before he even says hello. “I got my IFQ. It’s a big one.”
“That’s great news,” I say.
Clang, clang, clang goes a rope on one of the sheerlines. I’ll bet the water is high today, up there north of the storm. I can hear it on my dad’s end, the spray a little louder than normal. I imagine the lobsters with their banded claws flopping around in their crates while the waves batter the hull. Unconsciously, my hand travels to my scar. I haven’t been on the boats since the day I went over the side.
Yet for just one second, I get a profound, aching pang of homesickness. That smell, the sounds, that place.
“I think we’re coming up on a glut,” he says. “So Thanksgiving. Promise me, Naomi. You’ll give me a hand. I can’t run this ship solo in the ice.”
Dread overcomes me, and it feels like I’ve eaten a dozen bad oysters. That clammy, panicky, half-faint feeling. “Dad…”
“There’s nobody else. You know that. Times are goddamned tough. So promise?”
“I’ll try,” I say. I actually mean it. I do want to help, but I’m also scared shitless.
A seagull squawks, and he ends the call without saying goodbye.
My schedule pops up on the screen. Google Calendar tells me what I know but had willfully forgotten.
Paper due for Professor Beck. Today. 7:59pm.
I flip over to V2 to see the prompt.
Tell the story of a mystic. Try to channel the medieval scribes. Have fun with it.
I listen to the hurricane on the windows.
I think about going down under the water and just wanting to wring every last ounce that I could get out of life. Wishing, just wishing that I had seen what was right in front of me.
The thing is, I still feel that way. Wring it right out. Life is so short. A month without him, that’s been more than I can stand.
Just say the word.
I work all day. I skip my classes, making excuses about “the strep that’s going around.” I run on tea and apples alone.
19
Two things nobody prepared me for before I took this job.
First. Falling for a girl with hair the color of black lacquer and the sweetest eyes in the world, who sits in my lecture staring at me, never even blinking, and jotting everything down without looking at the words on her page. And who lives four floors away.
Second. The weather, the rain that’ll come right up from the ground and soak you through so you give serious consideration to investing in a wetsuit to walk even one block at all.
I’m sitting in my house, in front of an actual fireplace. One of the staff guys had to show me how to light it and seemed to take a kind of delighted pride in showing the Master of College how to light a fire.
“Your dad never taught you?”
“California, man. We never needed one.”
And he laughs, like Connecticut weather is a curse, but like we’re all in it together, and that makes it not so bad.
But now warm and safe in my house, I don’t mind it. That noise, that rain. It reminds me of throwing water balloons off the roof of our trailer, trying to hit my brother on the asphalt down below.
I haven’t stopped thinking of her, not for one second, not in the 29 days since she was in my bed. It’s verging on obsession, one of those obsessions that settles in so deep it feels like it might be chronic.
Naomi Costa. My chronic illness.
I open up my laptop, anxious to see the term papers. It’s not quite 7:30 pm and they’re still rolling in, fast and furious before the deadline.
This class is so big that the TAs have the grading covered, but I can see everything. There’s only one I care about, of course. Only one paper that really want to read.
Hers still isn’t there. I get up and pour myself a whiskey and a grab stack of Oreos from the pack. Then
I sit back down. The roster says:
Carlisle: Submitted
Cohen: Submitted
Connelly-Armstrong: Submitted
Costa: NOT SUBMITTED
But then that vanishes, the red letters peel back from the screen.
Costa: Uploading…
I shove four Oreos in my mouth at once. Holy hell. This blows every single sporting event right out of the goddamned water. Screw Hail Mary touchdown passes. This is where it’s at.
Costa: SUBMITTED.
Fuck! I clutch my whiskey and hit Read submission.
In 1959, Francesca Newham was born on a beach in Maine. Her mother was a fisherwoman, and her mother’s mother before her, and for all the generations going back to the beginning of time, the fisherwomen felt the labor pains and moored their boats, and then squatted down in the water like women do even now in birthing pools. It was the way things had always been done. So that’s how she was born, right there into the water on the stony shore. When Francesca was born, the first thing all the fishermen on the wharf said was that she looked like an angel because she had the right cheeks and she never cried. She grew up on her boats, and was proud to say she’d never lived on a house that didn’t rock all the time. At age five, she got her first job on her mother’s boat, putting rubber bands on claws. They say she talked to the lobsters, and when she did, they settled down. She wore a tiny rain jacket and loved to hang her head over into the spray. At 18, she became the first female greenhorn to work the Arctic routes. At 20, she had saved up enough to buy her own boat and hire her own crew. She was that kind of woman. It was the 1970s, and when she wasn’t fishing she read books by Betty Friedan and marked up the pages with arrows and hearts.
Decades passed, and every year is chronicled in a slim little journal, marked with the year on the side in white ship’s paint, applied with a toothpick. Every day, Francesca kept a journal like all the good captains in the world have, going back to when they wrote it on whale bones. Like any good captain’s journal, hers detail the weather and the magic of the sea and also her feelings about life and the world.
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