In Stereo Where Available

by Becky Anderson

  “That sounds like baggage.”

  “Like Jerry’s got any less.”

  I sighed. “You’re right about that.”

  Lauren stood up and regarded me sympathetically, her hands on her hips. Light from her bedside lamp reflected off her glasses. “Come on, I’ll help you make up your bed. I’m sorry for you, Fee, really. You see the best in people, and I admire that. But every guy’s got good qualities. It’s the scuzzy qualities that really make the difference. And then, it’s all in how they strike the balance.”

  “I’m getting tired of telling you you’re right.”

  She laughed and put out her hand to me. “Come on, chica. Let’s get a move on. Prabath needs to be at the club at eight.”

  I spent the next hectic day finishing up the testing we’d been doing all week and thinking about everything Lauren had said. Just as I was cramming a box of standardized test papers into the backseat of my car, my phone rang. I assumed it would be Jerry, but when I flipped it open, a picture of Alexa was up on the screen. Relieved and slightly disappointed, I answered.

  “What’s up, Lex?” I said flatly.

  “Hey, Phoebe. I need you to come and get me from school.”

  I drove my knee into the side of the box to make it fit and slammed the door. “For crying out loud, Alexa. I just got off work. Why can’t Dad come and get you?”

  “He’s stuck in a meeting. And Mom’s phone is off. I got detention, and so I didn’t get to go home on the bus, and my stupid teacher made me miss the activity bus, and now I don’t have any way to get home.”

  “Don’t you have any friends who can come get you? What about those guys who went on that little rescue mission with you?”

  “No. They’re off at—I can’t remember their numbers. Please, Phoebe? And I’ve got the worst cramps ever, and they don’t even let you bring Midol to school because they say it’s a controlled dangerous substance, and I’m starving because they said the school lunch would be vegetable chili but it turned out to be hot dogs, and—”

  “All right, all right. I’m on my way. I want you to be standing right at the curb when I get there, okay? I’m not getting out of the car.”

  “Actually, you sort of have to come in to get me. I’m in room 226.”

  I stopped midway to turning my key in the ignition. “What?”

  “It’s this stupid teacher. He says you have to come and get me because it’s detention. He won’t let me go until he talks to a responsible adult.”

  “It’s not Jerry, is it?”

  “Jerry? Who’s that?”

  “Mr. Sullivan, Alexa. Come on.”

  “Oh, him. No, it’s my chemistry teacher. I guess I was goofing off in class or something. Hurry up, Phoebe. I’m like totally out of Tampax, and it’s going to be gross if you don’t get here in, like, fifteen minutes or less.”

  I sighed. “You sure you can’t get in touch with Dad? I can try to call him if you want.”

  “No, don’t do that. It’s like some kind of thesis defense or something. Really important. He already yelled at me when I called. Are you coming to get me or not? ‘Cause if you’re not, I need you to tell me so I can go raid the paper towels in the bathroom.”

  “No, no, no. I’m on my way.”

  When I got to the school, I parked illegally in the bus lane and hurried inside. The security desk was empty. I took a back stairwell to the second floor and came out in exactly the hallway I was looking for. Perfect, I thought. All of the classrooms were dark except for 226. I opened the door slowly and peeked inside. All of the student desks were empty.

  “Come right on in and have a seat,” said a familiar voice. “I’ll be right with you.”

  My eyes froze on the teacher sitting at the desk. He sat bent over a stapled essay scrawling a note in red pen, but there was no mistaking that voice, those hands, or that bald spot. It was Jerry.

  I stood in the doorway, unmoving. He looked over at me blankly, then with guarded surprise. He had his glasses on.

  “Hey there, Fee,” he said cautiously.

  “Hey.”

  He looked past me, as if he was trying to see out into the hallway. “Did your stepmom get hung up at work?”

  “Yeah, Alexa said—where is Alexa, anyway?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “She said I had to come here to pick her up from detention. Her chem teacher kept her late.”

  “Who, Ed Harvey? He left an hour ago. I ran into him in the front office.”

  “So…why are you still here?”

  “Alexa’s mother sent in a note requesting an emergency conference this afternoon. Something about the C I gave her for her Pride and Prejudice essay. I can go over it with you, I guess, if Melody can’t make it.”

  I took a step out the door and rechecked the room number. Then I stepped back in and folded my arms in front of me.

  “You set this up, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Set what up?”

  “You got Alexa to lure me here. Admit it.”

  He gave me a dirty look and turned his attention back to the essay in front of him. “Question my sexual ethics all you want, Phoebe. If you want to start questioning my professional ethics, you’d better leave.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “Sure sounded like it.”

  I pulled one of the student desks up to the front of his and sat down in it. He glanced up at me fleetingly, but he didn’t stop writing. His desk here was as tidy as the one in his bedroom. There was an in/out box, a daily tear-off calendar of SAT vocabulary words, a mug crammed full of pens and pencils, and the red commuter mug that he washed out every evening, the one he’d gotten at the conference where he met Karen. I sniffed the air and then looked at him suspiciously.

  “Have you been smoking?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said quickly.

  “Why do I smell cigarette smoke?”

  “Beats the shit out of me.”

  “Jerry.”

  He glanced at me impatiently and I realized why he was wearing his glasses. His eyes were completely bloodshot. There was no way he’d be able to wear his contacts with his eyes like that.

  “I’m just trying to make it through the day, Phoebe.” He gestured to a corner of his desk. “Your sister noticed I put away your picture. She tried to ask me about it yesterday and I told her it was personal. Believe me, I wouldn’t try to lure you to my classroom to talk about this kind of stuff. I value my job.”

  I touched his hand, and he stopped writing for a moment, his eyes closing. “You want to go talk somewhere else?”

  He dropped the pen and pushed it aside with his fingertips. “Yeah, sure.”

  We each got in our own cars and drove back to his house. He pulled into his driveway just ahead of me; the slam of my car door was an echo of his. Without looking at me, he climbed the steps and unlocked the door. I was starting to realize he wasn’t in the same hopeful, groveling mood he’d been in a couple of days before. He was angry, and as I took the screen door he held open with grudging courtesy, I was already beginning to feel a defensive anger of my own.

  “I see you took your ring off,” he said accusingly, heading straight back toward the kitchen. “So much for ‘for better or for worse.’“

  “Don’t start turning this around, Jerry,” I warned him. “You know why I left. Don’t start acting like a victim.”

  He took a bottle of root beer from the fridge and leaned back against the counter as he unscrewed the top. “So that’s it, huh? We fall in love, get engaged, move in together, I tell you something you don’t want to hear, you leave me. Nice meeting you. Is that it?”

  The anger in my belly flared to life. “Unless you can come up with a good reason why I should stay with a guy who gets blow jobs from streetwalkers.”

  He nodded. There was a peevish expression on his face, like he was as fed up with me as I was with him. “I like the way you say that in the present tense, as if I’m going out and scoring
them while you’re at work.”

  “You’re not helping your case here, Jerry.”

  “No, I’m starting to think you’re right. I mean, I don’t blame you for being pissed off, but if you’re just going to pack up and walk out on me because of it, then we don’t have what I thought we had. Better to find out now than later.” He drank from the bottle and swished the root beer around in his mouth.

  I rolled my eyes. “Boy, are you ever throwing yourself a pity party. I walked out on you because you weren’t straightforward with me about something you should have told me long before it was forced out of you.”

  “It’s embarrassing, Phoebe,” he said harshly, and slammed the bottle against the counter with a clatter. Both of my cats raced for the dining room. “I didn’t want to tell you because I’m embarrassed as hell about it, all right? I wasn’t trying to put one over on you. I sure wasn’t trying to lie. I just didn’t want to come out and tell you I’m a loser.”

  In the silence that followed, he turned his back to me and shook his head hopelessly. His hands braced against the counter, but his shoulders slumped with fatigue.

  “But you told me about the drinking thing,” I said, my own voice halting and uneven, “and you told me about the first girl.”

  “Only because I had to,” he answered, his voice climbing. He turned to face me once again. “I’ve done a lot of embarrassing crap in my life that I’d rather forget about. When I screw up, I make it a point to learn from my mistakes and put it behind me. Sure, I knew I should have told you about this one, but for months I’ve been scared out of my friggin’ mind that you’d find out and walk out on me. And now you do, and what am I supposed to think, huh? I should have kept my goddamn mouth shut. It’s not like I’d ever have a reason to do it again, or like you’d ever have found out otherwise. But instead I had to go and be honest, and I accidentally flushed my entire relationship down the toilet.”

  I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and rubbed my eyes tiredly. I thought of his mother’s voice, the determined way she had held tight to my hand as she spoke to me about his flaws. Don’t be afraid to break his heart if you can’t abide them. I wondered if she had suspected that something like this was lurking in her son. I wondered if she had been trying to warn me.

  “You seem like the last person in the world who’d do something like that,” I told him. “I feel like I don’t even know you.”

  “Do you want me to tell you how it happened?”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “I don’t know. It might help.”

  I sighed. “Well, I guess it can’t hurt.”

  He let out a slow sigh and sat down in the chair across from me. With his glasses on it was harder to read his face, but he looked older to me all of a sudden, and tired. He crossed his ankle over his knee and slouched back, his jacket barely staying on his shoulders.

  “Five or six years ago I was driving back from Florida,” he said. “It was Christmas. Stella and Rick had been there, doing it on the other side of the wall every doggone night. They’d just gotten married. I hadn’t been with anyone in a couple of years, at least. I was feeling kind of bluesy and bummed out. I stopped at a rest stop on I-95 and went in to take a leak and get myself a root beer. It was pretty late, like around ten, and I was telling myself I needed to find a motel pretty soon so I wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. So I’m sitting in my car, drinking my root beer, and blasting the heater, and this girl comes over and knocks on my window.”

  “You didn’t know what she was?”

  “It never even crossed my mind. I was thinking she needed directions or something, who knows, maybe her boyfriend took off and left her there. So I roll down the window, and she says, ‘You want some company?’ And I kind of laughed, because I figured it out then, but I was in a crappy mood and I kind of wanted somebody to talk to. So I said sure, get in. I figured it didn’t cost anything to chat with the girl. I’d have a conversation, she’d get warm, and we’d all be happy. She didn’t really look like a prostitute. It was winter, and she had on jeans and a sweater and a parka, just like any other girl.”

  I watched him as he talked, picking up one of Pepper’s rope toys from the floor and wrapping the strings around his fingers one at a time, remembering. He just looked like the regular Jerry again, a face you’d pass by a hundred times a day, in a train station or a grocery store or on a crowded street. A trustworthy stranger.

  “I sat there and drank my root beer and talked to her. I could see the rest station out the windshield, with the big Christmas wreath on it and the streamers, and it was kind of depressing. Christmas was over, and I was in my late twenties with no girlfriend or hope of a girlfriend. Even my kid sister was married. All I wanted to do was go shopping for my wife and all my kids and wake up to all of them hugging me and being all excited about what I bought them, but instead I was sitting at a deserted rest stop on I-95 talking to a prostitute because I was lonely. It was enough to make a guy want to put a bullet in his head.”

  “That is pretty depressing.”

  “Yeah. So the conversation kind of drops off, and there’s this pause, and the girl says, ‘So is there anything I can do for you before I go?’ I set my root beer down on the dashboard and I think for a minute, and then I ask her, ‘Got any suggestions?’ And she says, ‘Forty bucks and you don’t even have to move.’“

  “So you did it.”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t even really all that horny. I just wanted to get rid of that awful lonely feeling I had looking out the window at the Christmas wreath listening to a hooker quote me her rates. It’s pretty hard to be lonely when someone’s that happy to get a ‘yes’ out of you.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you did it the other times, though.”

  “It gets easier after the first time. You know the drill. It’s something I’ve only done when I was out of town, going to a conference or to Florida or wherever. It’s easier when you’re on the road, I guess. You can just do it and forget about it. It feels like you’re driving from one point in your life to another, and what happens in between doesn’t really count.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I don’t believe that at all. I think it’s completely wrong. It goes against everything I believe about sex and women and obeying the law and following God. But it’s just so easy. It’s like sticking to a diet all week long and then driving by Burger King and smelling the Whoppers they’re grilling. You don’t even have to get out of the car. All you have to do is get into the drive-through lane and pull out your money and they take it from there, and in ten minutes, it’s all over and you just blew that whole week of hard work and starvation.”

  I looked at him for a long minute, slouched in the chair in his work clothes, his eyes reflecting a mix of resignation and embarrassment.

  “There’s a real difference between breaking your diet and paying a stranger for sex,” I pointed out.

  “I know. Believe me, I figured that out when I accidentally picked up the cop. That was humiliating as hell. Whether you’d come into my life or not, I never would have done that again anyway.” He shook his head, then sighed through his pursed lips. “There’s no amount of horny I could get that would make me risk being tossed in the back of that squad car again. All I could think was, oh, God, what if this shows up in the papers…what a friggin’ beautiful example I just set for my students.”

  I sighed and raked my fingers through my hair. “But if you hadn’t gotten arrested, you could have kept doing it forever, right? Even though you knew it was wrong. You knew, but it didn’t stop you.”

  His gaze flicked up to meet mine. “Please forgive me, Fee. I wish to God I’d known you’d come along one day. What I did before—it’s just me being shortsighted and stupid. It’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “I believe that,” I told him, “but it’s got something to do with you.”

  He set his jaw and looked away from me, over to where my cats were curled up together und
er a chair. The dismal silence settled over us like a sticky layer of pine tar. I could feel my disappointment in him spreading inside my chest, flat and hopeless, covering all the spaces where I filled in what I didn’t know about him with a giddy dose of optimism. He was a good guy, in a lot of ways, but he was still just a guy. Like every other guy I’d ever met, there was a part of him that was a pure and self-centered jerk. Like every other guy, the civilized self that he presented to the world was only half of who he was; there was still that primitive animal inside him that only wanted to hunt and copulate and shake itself free of the leash. I had to decide if my love for the first part of him could live in the presence of the second.

  “I’ll stay,” I said, finally, “but only while I make up my mind. And downstairs, where Stella was. Not in your bed.”

  “I’ll do whatever I need to do to keep you here,” he said. “Just give me plenty of space.” I plunked my keys on the table and got up listlessly. “I’m not making you any promises.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I made up the creaky twin bed that was tucked into a corner of the damp basement and slept there that night, the silence strange and solid around me, tomblike in the unsettling darkness. The muted ticking of the water heater and whirr of the furnace made the silence seem louder when it did come, like an awkward pause in a conversation, the discomfort growing by seconds. Jerry had made dinner that night, fixing up a plate for me and setting it on the counter; I hadn’t noticed until afterward, once he was already done. By the next night, when I came upstairs to find that he’d done the same thing again, I was starting to be sorry that I hadn’t stayed at Lauren’s.

  He was trying everything—making my favorite foods and stocking the freezer with my favorite ice cream and cleaning out the animal cages for me. In the morning he filled the coffee machine with the hazelnut coffee that he hated and I loved. He renewed my library books and picked up my clothes from the cleaners. And every time I looked at him, all I could think about was how magical it had seemed the first time I felt that shudder run through his belly, how sweet his gratitude when he’d curled up with me afterward, and, in the end, how meaningless it all had been. Whether I loved him enough to fill the measure of my soul or didn’t even care what his name was, it made no difference at all. I could have been anybody.