“Charlie knows about the baby,” Abby said. “I told him.”
Nathaniel nodded.
“Is it okay if I come back in?” she asked.
Nathaniel looked away from her and shoved his hands in his pocket. He nudged a wet leaf on the sidewalk with his toe. “I have to tell you,” he said. “I’m seeing someone.”
“I thought you said she was your student—”
He shook his head. “Maggie, my friend from high school,” he said. “She moved back here a while ago.”
Maggie. When Abby first met Nathaniel, she would get jealous when he spoke of Maggie, this amazing “friend” of his, the artist who was going to take on the world. She had heard about Maggie enough times to know that he had kept her on a pedestal all these years, but she had old crushes that she held on high, too. Who didn’t? Besides, the last she knew, Maggie was far away in California. After a while, Abby started to see Maggie as a sort of celebrity crush of Nathaniel’s. He didn’t fall for actual movie stars the way some people do, but he invented a larger-than-life woman who lived near Hollywood, and he had about as much chance of being with her as he did an actual celebrity.
“She’s in there?”
He nodded.
He was seeing Maggie. Abby wished he’d said he was seeing the little blonde. Then he could have said she meant nothing to him, just a fling, a chance to sow his wild oats before fatherhood. But he wasn’t going to say that. He was seeing his dream girl.
“You should call me next week,” Abby said. “We need to start making some arrangements.” Her stomach fluttered as she spoke. The baby inside her wiggled. It had only happened a few times before, and she was not used to it, but every time she felt the baby move, she was overwhelmed with love. She tried to feel love as she looked at Nathaniel. She tried to feel the old compassion she’d always felt for him, the compassion that allowed her to overlook his alcoholism, his egocentrism, his superiority complex. He’d had a hard time. He deserved love as much as anyone. It just happened that he didn’t want hers. Still, he would be her baby’s father. Her baby would love him.
He leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” he said.
Abby didn’t want his thanks. She wanted him to be a better person.
“I’ll see you,” she said.
Abby walked back towards the front door. Breanna was waiting outside. “Let’s go,” Abby said, walking past her, back towards their apartment. She couldn’t believe how calm she felt. Sad, yes, but a calm sort of sad, a poetic sort of sad, a sadness that was like clouds breaking up to let through a few rays of sun. She was going to be a mother, and she was not going to have to continue mothering Nathaniel. If he wasn’t going to be her partner, he wasn’t going to be her burden, either. She saw this with new, strange clarity now. She did not need to worry about Nathaniel. She was released.
“Are you okay?” Breanna asked.
Abby said, “I’m no worse than I was before.”
“What happened?”
Abby shrugged.
“What did he say?”
“That he’s seeing someone.”
“Oh my God,” Breanna said, launching into a tirade about Nathaniel’s selfish neediness. Everything she said was true, and for once Abby did not try to defend him, but she didn’t give herself over to Breanna’s sense of outrage either. She was tired of being a sad, bitter person. What kind of mother would she be if she had a chip on her shoulder all the time?
“You are going to find someone so much better,” Breanna said, concluding her rant.
“I am,” Abby said, thinking of her baby.
Nathaniel
Stunned, Nathaniel watched Abby walk away. Of all the reactions she might have had, utter calm was the last one he had expected. He told her he was with another woman and she said nothing more than, “Call me later.” First she stayed silent for weeks, totally out of character, and now she showed up like a Zen priestess, unflinching in the face of news that would have previously sent her into alternating bouts of rage and hysteria. Pregnancy suited her, Nathaniel thought.
He pushed himself up off the stoop and brushed off the seat of his pants. He hoped Julie had left as he had asked her to, and he prayed Maggie had stayed despite his strange behavior. He imagined Maggie was pretty confused by now, but he wasn’t going to have time to explain to her. Jeff and Charlie were waiting.
The bar was less crowded than before, he noticed as he entered. He was relieved to see that Julie and her friends were gone. He scanned the tables for Maggie and felt a surge of panic. She wasn’t there. But he looked again and noticed her heavyset friend alone at a table. They hadn’t left. He glanced towards the stage, and Jeff gestured impatiently for him to come over. Nathaniel ignored him and went instead to Maggie’s friend, whose name he had forgotten.
She preempted his question, saying, “Maggie’s in the ladies’ room.” Then she added, “I think we’re going to head out.”
Nathaniel’s mouth felt dry. He swallowed and licked his lips. He noticed that his armpits felt clammy. He must look terrible, he realized.
“You guys are really good.”
“Oh, thanks,” he said, looking over her shoulder at his bandmates. Jeff made a show of tapping his wrist as if he were pointing at some invisible watch. “Do you think you could stay a little longer?” Nathaniel asked. What the hell was her name? Victoria? Veronica? Vanessa. He was almost certain it was Vanessa.
“It’s up to Maggie,” she said. “She’s the driver.”
Nathaniel craned his neck towards the restrooms, but he didn’t see Maggie.
“Will you tell her I can explain?” he asked. “Just ask her to stay.”
Vanessa studied him.
“Look,” he said, “I love Maggie. I have loved her since forever.” He was desperate. He would never be able to explain himself over the phone. He would chicken out, he’d avoid her, which would be easy given the physical distance between them, and then when they did meet again, maybe years from now, they’d both pretend none of this had ever happened. They’d act like they always did, good old buddies, full of emotions they could not express.
“I’ve screwed up so much,” he said, words tumbling out of him, the need to confess and the ease of confessing to a stranger overwhelming him. “I spout all these ideals and I get these stupid ideas in my head and then instead of trying to live them, I just go through the motions of this shitty life. I get into these crappy relationships. I drink too much and act like I’m better than everyone, but I get it now. I finally get it. I see what a fucking mess I am, but Maggie—she’s the best. She’s the one. She always has been. We belong together.”
He stopped and met Vanessa’s eyes for the first time since he started talking. She looked unimpressed. Then she tilted her head, just a slight inclination of her head to her right, and Nathaniel turned to see Maggie standing just behind him. How much she’d heard he didn’t know. She stood rigidly, her back straight, her mouth set in a firm line, her purse clutched by the top in both hands in front of her, her eyes blank. Looking at her, he was afraid he might weep.
“Maggie,” he said.
She shook her head. “This is nuts.”
Vanessa stood up and pulled her jacket on. She skirted around Nathaniel to Maggie’s side.
“You love me?” Maggie said, her voice full of disgust. “You don’t even know me.”
Before he could object, she turned and walked away.
Nathaniel watched her go, and then he turned back to the stage. He did the only thing he could. He got up there and finished the set, leading Jeff and Charlie through one song after another, not sticking to the rehearsed numbers, but playing whatever came to his mind, songs that let him express his heartache, confusion, anger, and desire. Singing was more effective than weeping, he found. Shedding tears—the only other thing he might have been capable of a
t that moment—only ever left him feeling weak, lonely, and empty. The lonelier and emptier he felt, the more he felt like crying. There was an eternal well of tears inside him that would never cease. But singing made him feel in control, and the ability of someone else’s words to say exactly what he felt made him a little less lonely. As long as he was singing, filling and emptying his lungs, he felt content. It was like drinking from a spring—a soul quenching fountain that would provide as much life-giving water as he could consume. He didn’t need Maggie in front of him to be his lucky charm. He could sing to her whether or not she was present. So he sang.
Maggie
“I am a fool and an idiot,” Maggie said, gripping the wheel and peering into the dark night. She had been muttering that refrain since they left O’Grady’s.
The enormity of her folly hit her when she heard Nathaniel say he loved her. How could he love her? He knew almost nothing about the person she’d become since high school, just as she knew almost nothing about him. She knew more about him from what Claire had told her than from what he had revealed to her. He had been misleading her, as the other women at the bar proved. Do you intentionally mislead people you love? Maggie didn’t want any part of that sort of love.
“I don’t get it,” Vanessa said.
Maggie tried to explain. The fact that it felt like the past fifteen years had never happened whenever she and Nathaniel were alone together did not make it so. And anyway, that feeling couldn’t last. Eventually they’d have to face the fact that they’d both done things they regretted and those things were part of who they were now. Would they still like each other then?
Maggie wanted to believe Nathaniel would still love her if he got to know her as she was now, but the problem was that he didn’t seem to realize that they needed to start fresh. He thought that declaring that he’d always loved her would solve everything. Apparently his conception of love was as simple now as it had been when he was a teenager. She didn’t want a teenager. She wanted a man. She herself had not understood all of this—not clearly, anyway—until she watched the drama unfold at the bar. Those women pulled the veil from her eyes. She and Nathaniel could not just be together and pretend their twenties had never happened.
In a way it was a relief to realize that she didn’t want to deny the past ten or twelve years of her life. It is very painful to want to erase a decade and then some, to want to be a person you once were and can never be again. She saw now that she needed to move forward, not backwards. And she was much wiser now than she’d ever been in her twenties. She wouldn’t go back even if she could. She used to think she’d like a do-over, but now she was ready to own her mistakes. She was her mistakes.
“I need a fresh start,” she said. “I’ve spent years imagining that if Nathaniel loved me, he could rescue me. What did I need to be rescued from?”
“Friends are better rescuers than lovers,” Vanessa said.
This was true, Maggie realized. Instead of focusing so much on finding romance, it was time she started focusing on her friends, who already loved her.
PART FOUR:
And They Lived
Happily Ever After
Nathaniel
On a bright, warm May day, Nathaniel checked his mailbox at Old Colony Community College, and instead of the anticipated schedule of summer teaching assignments, he found a note from the dean of the college requesting that he stop in at his earliest convenience. Not good. He knew better than to think the dean wanted to offer him a tenure track position. No, this meeting could only be bad news. He checked his watch. Two-thirty. As good a time as any to face judgment. He crossed campus under a canopy of spring-green trees. Kids were hanging out on the green, soaking up the sun and warm breezes between finals. How easy his life had been when the biggest problem he had was taking final exams. How he envied those kids.
He trudged up the steps of College Hall and into the cool, dark lobby, with its marble floor and wood paneled walls. Coming in from the spring afternoon, it took his eyes several minutes to adjust. He walked to the administrative wing, took a deep breath, and asked the secretary if the dean was in. He tried not to fidget as he watched her pick up her phone, murmur into the receiver, and hang up again.
“Have a seat,” she said. “It’ll just be a minute.”
He sat in one of the chairs that faced her desk with his back to the window that separated the office from the main hallway. He wondered if she liked working in a fishbowl. He folded his hands in his lap and tried not to shake his leg in impatience. It was cool in the office but he began to sweat. He’d never been in trouble as a kid, so he’d never had the experience of sitting outside the principal’s office, but he imagined it felt a lot like this.
“I could come back later,” he said, his stomach churning. He hated waiting.
Before the secretary could answer, the dean’s door opened and he waved Nathaniel in. Nathaniel stood, wiped his hands on his pant legs, and entered the office. The only other time he had been in Dean Simmons’s office was when he interviewed for the job four years earlier. It looked like no one had cleaned it in the interval. There were piles of books on every surface and all around the desk so that it was hard to even see the furniture, and the desk was covered in stacks of papers and file folders. The blinds were down but tilted to let in a little light, and dust motes hung heavy in the air. On the windowsill, a spider plant sat dying. Nathaniel sat in the one chair not covered in a stack of papers or books.
Across from him, the dean sat in his leather, rolling desk chair and shuffled through a stack of files. Eventually he produced a folder and flipped through it. He was white-haired, red-faced, and barrel-chested, more like a retired football player than a college dean. Nathaniel watched as his thick fingers turned the pages in the folder. He pulled out a sheet of paper and set it atop the folder. Then he folded his hands and leaned forward.
“I imagine you know why you’re here,” he said.
“Not exactly,” Nathaniel said.
“Now, Mr. Harte, I’m not going to ask you any questions that I don’t want to know the answer to. Let’s just put it this way: You and I both know why you’re here.”
Julie. That was not what Nathaniel expected. Bad evaluations, program funding cuts, low enrollment—any of those seemed more likely than Julie reporting him. For God’s sake, she had started it. She had been a more than willing participant. And he was giving her an A. What did she have to complain about?
The dean slid the piece of paper across the desk to Nathaniel. It was on college letterhead, a generic letter of recommendation attesting that Nathaniel was a well-qualified professor who had taught at Old Colony as an adjunct for two years. It was basically a letter that said Nathaniel existed. It did not say he was a bad professor, but it also did not say he was a good one. It did not offer the recipient an invitation to call the dean if he or she had questions. Nathaniel studied it a moment and then set it back on the desk and looked up at the dean.
“We expect our faculty to behave ethically,” he said. “Maybe some more liberal institutions tolerate certain kinds of relationships between faculty and students, but I assure you, we do not.”
“Is there some specific accusation against me?” he asked, amazed by his composure. He wanted to find Julie and throttle her.
The dean cleared his throat and reopened Nathaniel’s file. He pulled out several pages. “We have had a number of complaints,” he said, fanning the pages out but not letting Nathaniel see them.
A number of complaints? He waited to see if the dean would be more clear, but all he did was push the papers back into a pile and look at Nathaniel.
“We don’t need any scandals here. I’ve spoken to the students, and they will be satisfied if you are dismissed from your position.”
Nathaniel wondered if he was bluffing when he said multiple complaints and students. Julie was the only one he’d ever don
e anything like that with. “May I ask what students?”
“No.”
“Julie Daniels?”
“The students’ identities are none of your concern.”
None of his concern? He was losing the income of three course per semester. He was losing the toe-hold at school where, until today, he thought he had the best shot at getting a full-time faculty position, benefits and all.
“So I don’t get to defend myself?”
“Officially, we’re letting you go for reasons unrelated to these complaints. Your evaluations have been, let’s say, underwhelming. We will omit these complaints from your record, and you can take that letter and seek employment elsewhere. That said, I wanted you to be aware that I am aware of your behavior. A man should know better than to let his baser impulses jeopardize his career.”
Nathaniel hated him. He hated people who would go to any lengths to keep up appearances, and then fault him for his ethics or morals or whatever they might call it.
“Anything else?” Nathaniel asked.
“Be honest,” the dean said, sitting back in his chair and lacing his hands behind his head. “You don’t want to be here. With your qualifications, you should be at a liberal arts college. You should be teaching upper level seminars and publishing in journals.”
Of course that was what he wanted. That was what every PhD in the country wanted.
“You need to think beyond Boston, beyond the East Coast. Get a position at some decent school in an out-of-the-way place, somewhere where you can work on getting published and making a name for yourself. Then doors will open for you.”
Too late, Nathaniel thought. “I wish we’d had this little chat last year,” he said, standing up and taking the letter of recommendation off the desk.
The dean looked at him quizzically.
“Congratulate me,” Nathaniel said. “I’m going to be a father.”
The Latecomers Fan Club Page 19