‘Shut up, you asshole.’ Greg glanced around. ‘I’m not having the whole campus over.’
Jess shrugged and slumped into one of the red chairs on the end of a row, throwing her green sneakered feet onto the one in front.
‘BEE! WHERE’S BEE?’ hollered Mel and a skinny girl bounced onto the stage, still swallowing the remains of a bag of chips.
Rehearsals lasted another hour and a half, after which Jess and I dawdled in the lobby while the cast said goodnight.
Finally, Greg plodded out of the auditorium.
‘Lucas, how old are you?’ he demanded.
‘Nineteen,’ I replied sheepishly.
‘You creep. I want to go to a bar.’ He paused to look at me. ‘You seem kind of like an adult.’
At that, he stalked past us and headed in the direction of the parking lot.
‘Are you coming?’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘I have an eggplant.’
Jess and I gathered our backpacks and scurried after him, childishly vying for shotgun.
‘I’m reading a lot of Art History at the moment – T. J. Clark on Courbet, Kirk Varnedoe on American art after Pollock, the theorist Michael Fried.’ As usual, Greg had refused to let us help and was crushing garlic with the side of a knife. ‘I think my next play will be an Ionesco. Have you read The Bald Soprano?’
I shook my head dumbly as I always did when he asked me if I’d read something and he muttered what sounded like, ‘Of course you haven’t.’
‘Where do you find time to read all this, Greg?’ Jess was reclined on a dining chair, munching olives. I was still swilling my first stone, unsure what to do with it in the absence of a visible bin.
‘I get up at five and read. It’s the only thing that makes being here bearable.’
‘What about us?’ Jess spluttered. ‘’Twas is good,’ she added.
‘It’s very good only because I’m a very patient and skilful director.’ He winked. ‘No, there are some good actors and I like having you two. I’m not sure about this dramaturg business, but it’s good to have a number of assistants.’
I smiled to myself, remembering Jess and Jackie’s rant in the green room earlier about how Greg just wants a scribe and won’t let you do anything as an assistant director. The two of them were smug that they had dramaturg work to do as well and I was the one stuck making his rehearsal notes. I’d nodded in the appropriate places but felt rather guilty agreeing with them when I was still simply grateful Greg had chosen to give me a chance.
‘Some of the others are a little shy, though,’ Greg continued, adding things to a skillet. ‘They don’t know how to be with adults. There’s something about this campus; it’s very sheltered.’
Jess snorted but Greg ignored her, turning his iguana eyes on me. ‘What are you doing here, Ms Lucas?’
‘I dunno,’ I shrugged, finally placing my olive stone on the edge of the tablecloth. ‘I didn’t know anything about it; I just wanted to get out of England.’
‘You didn’t get to choose where you went?’ asked Jess, startled.
‘No, they just advertised they were doing an exchange and I applied. They said it was going to be rural but that was it.’
‘Ha, rural all right!’ she hooted. I was beginning to piece together Jess’s utter hatred of this place, but despite a nagging feeling that I should maybe hang around with more positive people, I realised I liked her.
‘Is that eyeliner?’ Greg had come over to the table in order to peer into my face.
‘Uh, yeah. It’s the only make-up I know how to apply.’ I felt self-conscious and glanced pleadingly at Jess.
‘It’s a shame.’ Greg’s voice was flat, the same one he used when describing the actors’ abilities. ‘We thought you were exotic, but you’re just plain old English, aren’t you?’
‘Sorry.’
Greg returned to the cooking and to the previous conversation. ‘The faculty keep to themselves too. I ask them to come see a show and they claim they’re working day and night. My roommate is in Gender Studies and they seem more sociable. They hang out here and have long, profound conversations deep into the night. I’d rather discuss art, of course, but I’ll take what I can get.’
‘You go home to New York at the weekends, right?’ I asked.
‘Yes. You girls should come to the city. I spend a lot of time with my children watching very bad and very good movies and reading books and eating at brilliant little restaurants. That’s my pleasure. And, in the summer, I go to my house in the country and hang out with friends.’
Greg was now bringing plates piled with twisting pasta in a steaming purple sauce to the table.
‘Violà, pasta alle melanzane!’
An hour or two later, Jess and I glanced at the empty plates before us, knowing we needed to offer to wash up before we left, but disinclined to hurry that moment. The conversation had moved from theatre to art, then to Rosella gossip and sexuality in general. Greg finished his glass and turned his attention to Jess.
‘So, Ms Hunt. What’s your story? You’re a senior, right? Why haven’t we worked together before?’
Jess’s cheeks were flushed and she was leaning comfortably upon the table.
‘I took a year off to chill out. Basically, I went crazy after dating a professor.’
My eyes widened involuntarily, but Greg sat up casually and laughed.
‘Y’all are so funny!’ Jess swilled the half-mouthful left in her glass.
‘Please expand,’ Greg said eagerly. ‘What did you do? I hope it was something really terrible.’
‘It’s not like that.’ Jess finished her wine, then sighed. ‘Uh, I took an intensive elementary German class and started hanging out with my professor. It was fine and only mildly flirty until the summer. We AIMed all the time and eventually we kind of tried dating, but it was weird.’
‘Go on,’ Greg murmured.
‘I’m kind of messed up about sex. When things started to head that way, my body flipped out and I started throwing up all the time. Eventually I saw a therapist who sent me home when I told her I wanted to die.’ Jess added with a forced laugh, ‘Good times!’
‘That’s terrible.’ Greg was looking angry. ‘This guy should be fired. Is he still here?’
Jess nodded.
‘A professor has way too much power to be messing around with students. I may raise eyebrows by having students over to my house, but I’d never do something like that. How old was this creep?’
‘Thirty-six.’ Jess was not embarrassed. Later, I would ask her about that and she’d say she had spent a year dealing with it and was now going through an ‘honesty phase’.
‘God, that’s really disgusting.’ Greg paused. ‘So you saw a therapist? Did they put you on Prozac?’
‘Yes, actually,’ Jess replied and for the first time Greg looked uncomfortable.
‘Sorry, I won’t make any more jokes about therapy. You could tell us about your therapist. Is that allowed? Male? Female? Mysterious? Helpful? Insane?’
We all laughed and any awkwardness subsided. Jess and I stacked the plates and took them to the sink. Greg disappeared while we washed up to locate a book he wanted to lend me, then walked out with us so he could smoke a menthol cigarette. He thrust the rest of the packet at us and told us he’d given up. Just past the art museum, he uttered, ‘Enough, I’m going to bed,’ and stalked back into the night.
Greg, Jess and I had dinner two or three times a week for the rest of the rehearsal period. Greg and I learnt more about Jess’s scandalous past and I gave carefully censored descriptions of my own relationship history. Greg described growing up abroad, travelling the world, and acting for directors whose names I pretended to recognise, then looked up later. He told me to read his mentors and littered his theatre stories with intense descriptions of following a beautiful girl for thirty blocks only to lose his nerve and turn home, or debauched tales of women climbing through his apartment window so his girlfriend wouldn’t find out.
‘I
’ve never cheated on my wife,’ he said more than once. ‘Marriage and children change everything.’
Jess and I would curl under her duvet and discuss what Greg had said. Jess wasn’t so sure she believed his protestations of fidelity and the rumours circling the theatre department vehemently contradicted his statements, but I trusted him.
Over the coming weeks, I also used our impromptu sleepovers to pry further details about Jess’s past. Her professor had insisted throughout that he’d never done anything like this before and that he was falling in love with her. But one evening, after they’d made out for an hour on his bed and he’d removed her bra, whispering about how they could move to Berlin once she’d graduated and start afresh where no one knew them, Jess had excused herself to the bathroom and burst into tears. When she re-emerged and calmed down enough to be coherent, Atlas had kindly offered to help her with her German homework instead.
Jess was the first person I’d known on anti-depressants and her honesty thrilled me. In return, she’d fish for information from me as I let details slip one by one over many too-tipsy evenings. I was careful to avoid specifics and made her promise not to tell Greg that I may or may not have my own older man waiting for me in England.
17
‘Girls, I want to talk to you.’
Greg had been quiet in rehearsals. The tech was tomorrow and things were busy, but everything seemed pretty much on schedule and, in my humble opinion, the play looked fantastic.
‘I’m not sure I should have you over any more.’
Jess and I sat opposite each other at his dining-room table and now mirrored one another in the confused and somewhat fearful gazes we directed across the room.
‘I do like you and I like being with you in the theatre and having people to chat to afterwards – you both have guts and tenacity and that’s refreshing here – but sometimes it scares me.’
Jess and I sat motionless. I was more shocked than embarrassed and an uncomfortable feeling began to creep from my toes. Greg’s kitchen was one of the few places I felt truly relaxed in this strange country, but now my calves were tense and an acidity on my tongue told me I might be about to lose this safe place.
‘You are such good pals, I am so fond of you, and at times, I admit, I just like being with people so passionate and young. Forgive me if this embarrasses you.’
Stop! Cut! Hold! Freeze! I wanted to shout. I couldn’t form it in words but I knew the area of my mind he was about to force me to acknowledge and I knew I didn’t want to have this conversation. I was certain Jess didn’t either. Sure, we’d had a heavy tipsy chat late one night a while back, wrapped up in comforters in my dorm room, about how we were confused by simultaneously wanting Greg to be our dad and wanting him to find us attractive. And we had contemplated renting from the library the ancient arthouse film the cast kept playing in the green room in which a younger Greg gets naked. But we hadn’t rented the film and we hadn’t beaten up our psyches over possibly inappropriate desires because there were two of us who felt the same, because we trusted Greg never to hurt us and because we loved the friendship as it was.
‘Now, I don’t give a damn what the department heads say about me inviting students round,’ Greg continued, turning to the counter as if he was about to start preparing us a meal. ‘I’d never do anything, you know that.’
There was a pause and Jess shifted her head to her elbow. She seemed calm, perhaps even amused. I held my breath.
‘But I find myself hanging out with the two of you, talking about theatre and bodies and Jess’s creepy older man. And it’s fascinating. But then, when you leave, I feel so alone in this weird place.’
Greg stopped. He fixed his slouch and turned to face us. When he began again, his voice was cold, as if he was suddenly bored by the conversation. I worried he was about to ask us to leave. ‘I’m not sure how appropriate it is, that’s all. It seems like a kind of creepy Nabokovian thing and I can’t excuse myself for it. So I think maybe it’s best, especially if you’re taking my class next semester, that we try to be a little more appropriate.’
I chewed a fingernail and realised with embarrassment that I would not be able to respond without my voice cracking.
Jess broke the silence. ‘Um, not so much.’ She sat up straight so her mint T-shirt unfolded and I could read the ‘Howdy’, which I knew was accompanied by a ‘Dammit’ on the back. She looked brazenly at Greg. ‘Seriously, we appreciate the sentiment, but you don’t creep us out and obviously we like your company, so it would be totally lame for us to stop hanging out.’
Greg seemed taken aback for a moment, but eventually the lines on his face smoothed and he began to reassume his characteristically cocky posture. ‘Oh really, Ms Hunt? You think you can demand my company?’
‘You just need to chill out.’
I looked at Jess in amazement.
‘You don’t think I’m a creepy older professor, luring you into my trap, like all the other girls seem to fear I am?’
‘Whatevs.’ Jess didn’t appear to have experienced any of the things I had in the last ten minutes.
‘And what about you, Ms Lucas? Is this how you feel?’
I looked from Jess to Greg and wondered what to say. I couldn’t play Jess’s game, even if it might have been the best method of dealing with Greg’s little crisis. But I also couldn’t even begin to tell Greg how desperately I wanted to keep coming to his house, keep listening to his and Jess’s tales, keep feeling like I belonged somewhere.
‘Uh, yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t think you’re creepy. And, I kind of really like that we can talk about sex and everything, but that I can also trust you and feel safe here. It’s only awkward now you’ve said it.’
‘Yes, I see that,’ Greg reached for a saucepan. ‘I don’t really understand you two very well, but as long as you don’t mind me perving into your lives a little, I guess I can accept my role as the old goat.’
The conversation that followed was somewhat stilted, but by the end of dinner we were laughing like normal. Jess moaned that she’d never find a boyfriend at Rosella, I told them I was too scared of the militant lesbians to hit on anyone, and Greg told us he thought we were both stupid because Dylan, a boy from the co-ed with a role in ’Twas, was ‘eminently fuckable’.
Shortly after that comment, Jess finished drying the dishes and Greg looked at us pointedly: ‘Enough. Now I sleep.’
Jess and I said our goodbyes and stumbled into the chilly darkness.
The following day, I sat at my desk and carefully typed an email:
From: Natalie Lucas
To: Matthew Wright
Sent: 12 October 2003, 08:36:21
Subject: Us
Dear Matthew,
This is hard to write. I don’t want to cause you pain.
Please know that I never want to regret anything, but I’m in this new place and I want to try living a new life. I’m sorry I have to hurt you in doing this, but please understand I need my space.
You have made me who I am and I owe you everything, but now I need to learn for myself. I hope we can find a way to be friends.
I will always love you.
Nat x
My nineteen-year-old brain told me this was the friendliest way I could end things with the man I had given my soul to. I did not blame him for anything and I truly wanted to stay friends, but I wanted to be close to him like I was to Greg – without the passion, arguments and lies that had dictated our lives for the past three years.
Matthew’s sixty-three-year-old brain, however, told him (and he in turn told me) that I was being an ungrateful, spoiled brat and I was ruining both our lives. My inbox exploded with expletives, curses, begs, threats and flattery.
I stuck to my resolution, though. On a bus back from a party, holding a broken umbrella and tasting sour beer on my breath, I told Jess most of the details, omitting only Matthew’s age. The day ’Twas the Night Before … ope
ned, she and I donated eleven inches of hair to Locks of Love. Two weeks later, I cropped my remaining bob into boyish spikes and marched into the closest tattoo parlour to have my nipple pierced.
Over the coming months, I worked to construct the normal life I’d desired. I shrugged off Jess’s persistent questions about Matthew’s age in the same way that each morning, after I closed my bedroom door behind me and reminded myself of the protective Atlantic Ocean, I could ignore the fact I’d just sobbed for an hour before ten violent and accusatory emails. In overheated classrooms, noisy dining halls and on the snowy walkways of the Rosella campus, I was learning to be my new self: a slightly dorky, very shy but sometimes funny little lesbian without a past, without pain and without a head full of poetry beneath her blunt bangs.
18
That first semester, disinclined to return to Atlas’s German classes, Jess had taken up Spanish. When one day towards the end of term she asked me to come over and help her pick out an outfit for their final conversation group, I wondered who my straight friend was trying to impress on this campus of women. After some prying, she gushed about a flirtation with Angelo, her Mexican-born professor who always dawdled out of the building with her and observed she was a fast learner.
‘It’s okay, he’s married,’ she insisted with her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth as she flecked her eyelashes with mascara. ‘Nothing’s going to happen; it’s just fun to flirt.’
I laughed at Jess, but when Greg found out, he called her an ‘asshole’ and Angelo a ‘creep’.
Angelo was married to a Literature professor from Ireland. A few weeks after ’Twas, while they were having an innocent coffee, Angelo told Jess that he and his wife were separating. He’d found out she’d had a year-long affair with a female PhD student, herself in a civil partnership with one of the librarians.
Within a month, Jess was spending most of her nights at Angelo’s new apartment and Greg was ranting regularly to me about how unethical and idiotic this man must be. Jess began to wear her summer camp ‘Love A Teacher’ T-shirt and complained that every time she spoke to Greg he made her cry. I had to lie to our mutual friends about Jess’s disappearances and began to grow annoyed with the frequency with which I ate in the dining halls alone.
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