“Coffee.” Bobby set the mug on the desk beside her open laptop.
“Thank you.” Writing about Saul and all the rest, Susan felt disloyal. He leaned down and kissed the top of her head, and she felt like a fraud because she knew that this wasn’t writing. This was some self-conscious journal of her sputtering little life, that’s all. But she could not deny that it was coming for her in a way no writing quite had before.
She knew Phil Bradford was going to hate it, but she didn’t care. Maybe she’d send it to Diana Clark. But why? Susan liked and respected her, but she didn’t really care what she thought, either.
. . . watches it “spread its light over the dirty land.”
There was simply this dark quiet tug to pull it out and get it down, and it did not even matter whether or not anyone would read it at all.
Adjuncts shared an office. The afternoon she met with Gary to discuss his paper, Susan Lori had it to herself.
Susan remembered his ball cap pulled low over his eyes. She remembered that his T-shirt was yellow and that made his arms look dark, and she remembered how directly he looked at her as she praised his essay. It seemed as if he were listening and not listening. Or that, sitting there so still and quiet, he was honoring another conversation going on in his head at the same time, and it was telling him what he wanted and what he wanted was her.
Susan Lori was wrong to think that she was the one in charge of that moment. She sat across from him at the worktable that passed for a desk, and when she began to point out his errors in grammar and mechanics and punctuation, he said, “I have a lot of stories.” His voice was as low as Brian’s, but it had sand and smoke in it, too, and he smiled at her and she found herself agreeing to meet him for a beer.
“Suzie?” Noni’s voice calling up the stairwell. There was the steady low hum of the air conditioner, then Bobby walking down the stairs, his voice in the foyer. Susan was just about to call back to her, but she could hear the front door shut, then the VW start up, her good husband protecting her solitude so she could follow herself back to herself.
Gary scared her. When they had sex he put his hand around her throat. He didn’t squeeze hard at first, but when she twisted her face away he grabbed her chin and grunted, “Look at me. Look at me.” Her hair had been long then, and he flipped her over and entered her from behind and wrapped her hair in his fist and pulled on it. She told him to stop, but he pulled harder and she had to arch her neck back and all he said was, “You sure? You sure about that?”
She was, but she still let him into her apartment three or four nights in two weeks and slept with him every time. His hands were big, his fingers thick. On that last night he squeezed her throat till darkness began to fill her eyes and she was floating above a maroon sea with Saul and they were both knocking on an iron door and he kept whispering, “Rachel, Rachel,” and then Gary let go and Susan Lori gasped and screamed at him to get the fuck out of her house.
It was after midnight. She lived on the first floor of a complex in the rear of the building. The yard was a strip of grass with a chain-link fence alongside a concrete culvert, a streetlamp shining over it and into her bedroom window. Gary sat naked in a chair smoking a cigarette.
“I said get out.” She was kneeling on her mattress, the sheet around her. She seemed to be waiting for something, and she knew it could not be good and there was nothing she could do about it.
“You act like you’re better than everyone else in the room.”
“Leave, Gary.”
“You think you teach people, but you’re really just showing off how many fucking’books you’ve read.”
“I’ll call the cops.”
“But I can see through your bullshit. You’re a fucking’misfit and you know it.”
Misfit. It was a word she had not seen or heard in a very long time. She could feel something inside her prick its ears like a dog being called by its master, and she said nothing.
“But that’s cool. I’m a misfit, too. That’s why we’re together.”
She sipped her coffee. It was hot and a little too strong, and her empty stomach seemed to receive it carefully. Her top sheet was hanging off the bed where Bobby had left it.
“Please leave.”
Gary took his time. He stubbed his cigarette out on the arm of the chair. He stood and slowly pulled on his clothes.
“And we’re not together.”
He leaned close to her. He tucked one strand of hair behind her ear. “That’s what you think.” He picked up his work boots and walked barefoot through the living room and out the door. He left it open and unlocked and she still had the sheet wrapped around her when she pulled her door shut and dead-bolted it.
The next class, Gary’s seat was empty. Susan Lori could only see this as a good thing, and she hoped he’d dropped her course. But when she started her car in the faculty lot, there was his brown Jeep across the street, Gary flicking his cigarette away and climbing in behind the wheel and following her home. She pulled into her parking space. She thought about using her cell phone to call the police. But then Gary’s Jeep pulled up beside her, and he was smiling and holding up two or three sheets of paper. His cap was tilted back a bit. He was clean-shaven and looked like he’d just showered.
“I wrote something new.”
“You could’ve given it to me in class.”
“Yeah, I’m taking a break.”
“From school?”
“You.”
“Then why’d you follow me home?”
“No, the fake you. Professor Bitch you.”
She should have told him to leave at that very moment. He handed her his paper—“Misfits I Have Known” —and she paused too long and he put his arm around her and walked her to the door of her apartment complex as if they were a couple, as if they’d been one for a very long time.
She sipped more coffee. She had to pee again. But she was back in that living room sitting on that rented couch—coarse plaid with wooden arms scarred with the black worms of cigarette burns.
Gary sat across from her, watching her and waiting.
This was nearly ten years ago, and she couldn’t bring it all back, especially after what came next, but once again Gary’s writing was focused on images and many had stayed with her.
His mother standing drunk and naked at the top of the stairs. He was twelve and he’d brought his friend home from school, and she was accusing her son of being a “fairy.”
His older brother’s collection of magazines he kept on the floor of their closet. More naked women, but they were tied up or chained and they clearly didn’t like it.
His father’s hands. How his disease made them curl into “baby’s fists.” The way his muscles shrank to bones under clothes that used to be “too tight on him.”
Gary’s girlfriend Jessica. When he thought of her he could only see her tits and teeth and the restraining order she pulled on him.
Susan Lori glanced across the room at him. He’d crossed his bare legs, and she saw for the first time a long pink scar from his ankle to his knee.
There was this little “haji girl” walking away from a blasted marketplace. Stone dust covered her face and shoulders, and her hair was sticking wetly to the side of her head. “And the thing is” she had a sad little smile on her face. Like she was about to cry but could not.
When Gary was a boy, there was this drunk he would see riding his power mower in the breakdown lane of the highway to go get his daily bottle.
There was this neighbor’s cat who thought he was the “bee’s fucking’knees.”
Susan stopped. That’s when she began to know she was in real trouble, and she didn’t want to call up those images now, Gary back stateside and luring the cat to his patio with an open can of sardines just before he “stomped its head.” He went on to describe driving to a neighborhood with his .45 and shooting two dogs three streets apart. One was leashed to a post on its front porch, the other was barking at him from the front yard and sid
ewalk, and Gary shot it from his slow-rolling Jeep.
That old lady in her wheelchair at “Mama’s home.” Her hair was gone and she had to be over ninety, and she wore smeared red lipstick and smiled up at him “like an old whore.” The last page was all about one whore after another. His mother again. Past girlfriends. His brother’s ex-wife, who left with their son and never came back. There were airport whores and barroom whores. Military wives, who were “base whores.” There were hair salon whores and bank teller whores. Waitress whores and street whores and tattoo parlor whores. There were nurse whores and doctor whores and rehab therapy whores. Those were the worst, the bitches who were supposed to be helping you. “Like the Teacher Whore reading this right fucking now.”
That was his exact line word for word. It had floated darkly inside her since, but she’d never written it down before and now that she had, there was no stopping what came next. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and she was typing fast.
She lowered his last page and perhaps it was the way she looked at him. Or perhaps he was going to do this no matter what because he was on her before she could even speak. A jolting shock of white, a thudding bloom of green and red, her shirt bunched in one fist while he kept shooting burning colors into her brain with the other. There was his screaming and her head knocking back against the wall. There was the splintering of her cheek, the strangely far-off thought, like a small voice in a black well, that she would die now.
“You fucking’use people! You hear me? You use!”
He was so much stronger than she was, and her shirt was ripping, her arms flopping on either side of her. It seemed he was just getting started, but then she was lying on her side on the carpet and the door slammed and she was alone.
Susan stopped. Her fingers hummed just above the keyboard. The room was cool, but she could feel the sweat on the back of her neck. She sipped her coffee, and it was nearly the temperature of the room.
As soon as she could stand, Susan Lori locked her door and sat back against it and cried. Her head throbbed like it was giving oxygen to an accidental fire, and one of her eyes began to close up, her nose bleeding into her mouth. She spat it into her hand and stared at it. All those years reading and wanting to write, she fancied herself a seeker of the truth, and now her young war veteran student she never should have fucked had delivered it to her, hadn’t he?
You use people.
She did. Men anyway. But no more than they used her. And how did he know this? Did he see immediately why she’d slept with him in the first place?
Why?
Because Saul dumping her made her question whether she still possessed what had always come so easily. And this one had seen that she was working her levers and he was simply the machine. But did he also see how afraid she’d always been of being alone?
Did he see anything but what he wanted to fucking see? Susan Lori wished for her grandmother’s silver pistol then, and she imagined raising it and pointing it at Gary just before he got to her with those impossibly heavy fists, her finger pulling the trigger again and again.
She stood and made her way to the bathroom. Her face was not her face. She ran warm water over a washcloth and dabbed at her nose and lips. Her left cheek was swollen up under her eye. She should have driven to the emergency room or called an ambulance, but instead she took three aspirin and broke ice into a plastic baggie and lay down on her bed with the ice over half her face.
The way Gary pulled on her hair and thrust himself inside her. “You sure? You sure about that?” As if he could see clearly what the others never could—the soft black guts of her shame, that she could not love anyone who would love her. What Gary had felt was her resolve not to love anyone.
Bobby. Susan stared at the empty bed. She stared at the cup he’d brought her. There was his trusting smile. His good cooking and open door. There were those two red lines in that kit she’d dropped into the trash container of the Walgreens ladies’ room. She should stop soon. She should go spend some time with him, and they should talk. Because she could not say she did not love him.
She was a misfit like Gary. Susan Lori reached for the phone and she called the police.
A car engine starts up outside. Bobby’s Kia. The last time they were here two falls ago, he’d found a rare Coltrane album in a shop on Oak Street, and he was probably going off to explore again, but as she listened to his car driving away she sat there feeling disappointed and just a little relieved. She walked across the hall into the bathroom and peed. Without looking into the mirror, she washed her hands quickly. In the kitchen she poured more coffee into a new cup, but now it didn’t smell so good to her and she dumped it in the sink and filled the cup with water. She grabbed a banana from the counter and carried it and the water back up the stairs. It was as if she’d been in a deep mine for a very long time digging on her hands and knees. But in the past, there had been mirrors on either side of her, a bank of bright lights at her back, a stand of bleacher seats filled with men and women who read books, all of them watching her and waiting. But now it was just her kneeling in the dirt, her and this one stranger and no one else, and perhaps for the first time, she was beginning to glimpse something real just inches and feet ahead her, something she could only find with words, words that were not lies.
It was a time for aired ugliness. Gary was arrested and there was a police report in the newspaper then an uncomfortable phone call with Susan Lori’s department chair, her “inappropriate involvement” with a student. There was resigning before she could be fired, and there were charges to be filed against Gary, and there was a judge who denied him bail and locked him up to wait for his hearing.
No, this was too distant. She was writing this like a journalist. “Just let the shit hit the fan, honey.” Diana Clark. Susan wanted to talk to her about all this, about what she was writing and how, but not now.
Me:
He sits across the courtroom from me in a pea-green jumpsuit. He’s grown a beard and let his hair grow longer. This makes him look softer and a bit bewildered, and I fight the urge to revise in my head what he did to me.
Six weeks have passed. My face has healed though my left eye seems a bit narrower than before. Sometimes it twitches and tears up. My cheeks used to be high and pronounced, but now they look asymmetrical, my left a bit wide and flat. In the dead center of my upper lip is the thin line of a scar.
He denies nothing. Then he is sentenced and escorted handcuffed out of the courtroom and he looks back at me as if I’ve done precisely what he’d always known I would and he doesn’t care either way, the sun spreading over the dirty land.
Susan Lori:
What remains about this fall and winter just north of Miami is not Gary being sentenced to two years. It was not moving to an apartment closer to the water and living off the very last of Saul’s money while she looked for work. It was not the way she began to check the locks of her doors and windows each night in a way she never had before.
Wasn’t it? When did she ever do that before? Lois was the frightened one. Lois was the one who had bars bolted over their windows in their old apartment behind the arcade. Lois was the one who had two dead bolts installed on the front and back doors of this house off the county road. Her grandmother was the one who had all the downstairs windows replaced with new ones that locked and that she never opened and covered with dark drapes and kept the house in an air-conditioned cocoon. Noni was the one who owned a gun.
No, it was the way Susan Lori began to check the locks. She kept imagining Gary getting released and coming for her. She imagined other men coming for her, too, men she did not know, though why would they? She rarely left the house at all. But this new gesture of checking locks in the middle of the night, it was like hearing the faint strains of music from a horizon you’ve been driving away from for years then finally beginning to dance to it. Susan Lori never had the dread that moved through her grandmother, but it was like growing up with someone who’d survived Auschwitz then seeing a
swastika and starting to run.
The light in the room was different, her unmade sheets bright with the sun. Outside the window the oak leaves were almost too green, the sky beyond bits of blue that could shatter.
But more than this, it was her face in the days and short weeks after her beating. It was how people looked at her new face.
Susan Lori went out only when she had to, mainly to the grocery store a mile down the street. Women, old or young, would look at her with pity, some with knowing expressions, and one or two older ones looked like they wanted to come over and talk to her. But boys and men were different. They looked at her as if they’d just opened a surprise package in the mail and found something broken that needed to be sent back. One boy, seventeen or eighteen, leaned against the wall outside the Kroger’s smoking a cigarette, a skateboard at his feet, and he glanced up at her from his cell phone and actually shook his head as if she’d disappointed him.
She felt utterly exposed. Not her face, but that her outsides were now as plainly ugly as her insides. She may as well have been walking up and down the aisles with no skin at all, her entrails shining and stinking like dried blood.
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