“Just to be clear,” she says, “I’m not brushing off what happened like it was no big deal and I’m so easygoing. It was appalling. It’s just that I worked through my issues about it a long time ago. For me, it’s appalling, but it’s also old news.”
“Fair enough,” he says.
There’s a silence, then, slowly, she says, “Out of curiosity, before our country decided to elect an unhinged narcissist over an intelligent, experienced, qualified woman—before that, had it really never occurred to you that the senior prefect thing was sexist?”
The narrowness of the margin of error here, combined with the high likelihood of his screwing up—it reminds him of marriage counseling. He, too, speaks slowly. “If you’re asking if I was introspective about it at the time, no. I wish I had been, but it’d be a lie.”
“When the tape was released about grabbing women by the pussy and all these men suddenly said, ‘As a father of girls, I object’—was that how you felt? Like, I’m cool with him saying terrible things about Mexican people and Muslims, but this is too much?”
“I was never cool with Trump’s racism.”
“Are you a Republican?” Her accusatory tone, her clear antipathy—he’s simultaneously eager to move himself out of their line of fire and struck by a detached awareness of how different she’s become. He was initially lulled, misled, by her relatively unchanged appearance, but perhaps she’s hardly the same person at all. Because it’s not just that the Bishop version of Sylvia wouldn’t have directed this sort of hostility at him; it’s that he doesn’t believe such hostility existed in her.
“I’ve supported people in both parties,” he says. “I take it you’re a straight-ticket voter?”
“I guess it shouldn’t surprise me,” she says, and she seems less angry than pensive. “If you’re not in the one percent, you must be close. So why wouldn’t you be conservative? If not you, who?”
Is Sylvia McLellan now a social justice warrior? That seems a bit preposterous, in her cocktail dress and her dominatrix shoes, staying in what’s probably a four-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel.
Evenly, he says, “I’d describe myself as an independent. I kind of liked Bernie.”
She raises her eyebrows again, and says, “Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me, either.”
Mercifully, this is when the waitress appears to take their order. He asks for roasted chicken, and she orders braised beef, and when the waitress leaves, he says, “I know I’ll have entrée envy, but another thing about getting older is, I seriously think I get meat hangovers. With red meat, at least. But I salute you.”
And at first, he believes he’s successfully diverted her. They move on to talking about various diets, then about their respective exercise routines (he plays tennis a few times a week, while she tries to hike and ski but usually just works out on an elliptical machine in her basement), and she evinces interest in his Fitbit, which he removes and hands to her. Then they discuss where they’ve traveled over the years. But just after the waitress has cleared their plates, then taken an order for a cappuccino from him and another martini for her, Sylvia says, “I’ll tell you why I really called you. You know, in the spirit of honesty you showed.”
There’s something both rehearsed-seeming and sarcastic in her tone, something not reassuring. But as she continues speaking, she sounds more sincere. “My husband was laid off almost a year ago. Even with Nelson out of work, we’re okay—we can pay our mortgage. But we’re careful about money in a way we never had to be before. We don’t go out for nice dinners anymore, we stop and think before we sign the kids up for activities, even as we’re trying to shield them from the situation, and who knows if that’s a good idea? Grace is too young, but maybe it’d be better if we told the twins. Anyway, Nelson now tries to convince me it’s acceptable to give a ten-dollar Target gift card as a birthday present to their classmates, and it’s definitely not—you’re better off giving some shitty toy where at least the other parents don’t know the price. But I digress.” Sylvia sips from her glass. “Given that Nelson isn’t working, you might think he’d use his time to, like, make healthy family dinners, or exercise, or clean the garage. You know, life gives you lemons. Instead, he spends every day wearing this hideous pair of black track pants with two orange stripes down the side and playing online video games. Maybe I should be grateful he’s not looking at porn, or maybe he is looking at porn and telling me he’s playing video games—at some point, I don’t know if there’s much of a difference.”
“I’m sorry to hear all that,” Clay says.
“We’re about to get to the part that has to do with you,” she says. “If you’re wondering.”
Again, this does not reassure him.
“When we were at Bishop, I had a huge crush on you,” she says. “Which I assume you knew.”
In fact, he is stunned. He says, “On me?”
She laughs and then, perhaps in a parody of a southern belle, tilts her face up and bats her eyelashes. She says, “On little old me?”
But this really isn’t what he was expecting. He was imagining she was about to ask for some sort of job referral for her husband, or for an investment in a business they’re starting. And never at Bishop, not once, did it occur to him that she was interested in him in that way.
In her normal voice, she says, “Of course I liked you. Think about it. You were this good-looking, confident guy, you were nice to me, and we were around each other a lot.” She’s managing to make these remarks feel less like a compliment than a confession, possibly a reprimand. “Sometimes after we had those evening meetings with Dean Boede, I’d go back to my room and lie on my bed and cry because I loved you so much. I wanted to touch you so badly, and I wanted you to touch me, and there was nothing I could do to make it happen. It was like flirting was a language I didn’t speak. Plus, you had your whole harem of girls. Not just Meredith but Jenny, too, right? And I knew I wasn’t in the same league with either of them, I knew that liking you was liking above my station. But here you were, this eighteen-year-old lacrosse player, and your hands and your forearms were so beautiful I almost couldn’t stand it. When I think of Bishop, I probably should think about my well-rounded education or my time rowing on the river, but mostly I just remember feeling desperate with longing.” Although she’s now smiling, he has the impression that the smile is not for him but for her own younger self. And it’s still unclear what her ultimate point is, so he waits, saying nothing.
“I didn’t really have a meeting in Chicago,” she continues. “I came here to go on a date with you. You wouldn’t know it was a date, but I would. I’d dress up, and we’d go to the kind of restaurant that Nelson and I don’t go to anymore, this kind of restaurant.” She gestures with one arm. “I’d drink a little too much, not that I’m three sheets to the wind or anything. I’m maybe one sheet to the wind. But I’d Google-Imaged you, so I knew you were still cute, and I also knew you were divorced.”
Is she finished? He waits a few seconds to make sure before saying, “Just so you know, I’m seeing someone. A woman named Jane.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Sylvia says. “This is a pretend date, a fake date. I wasn’t hoping we’d end up in bed. For one thing, I don’t think I could live with the guilt, and for another, childbirth wrecked my body. I can hide it when my clothes are on, but having the twins ruined my vagina, and having my daughter ruined my butt. Have you ever heard of anal fissures?”
Is this a rhetorical question? After a pause, he says, “Yes, I’ve heard of them.”
“Have you ever had one?” She’s as blasé as if she’s asking if he’s ever tasted coconut water.
He shakes his head.
“The comparison people make is to a paper cut on your asshole,” she says. “As for the rest of my parts down there, I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that other women sometimes tell me they didn’t
know it’s possible to give birth to twins vaginally, and, having done it, I’m not sure it is.” She smirks, then holds her glass aloft. “Live and learn.”
This, to him, is her ugliest moment yet—the purity of her cynicism, the unapologeticness of her vulgarity. Did she change gradually, little by little, or all at once?
“I was in the room when my ex-wife gave birth to our daughter,” Clay says. “I’m not some nineteen-fifties man who’s totally ignorant about the mechanics of the female body.”
She’s still smiling as she says, “Should I congratulate you for that?”
He takes care to keep his voice calm, not to match her antipathy, when he says, “At the same time, here’s a friendly tip for you, if you’re trying to reenter the dating pool. I wouldn’t recommend bringing up the topic of anal fissures.”
She doesn’t seem at all embarrassed; if anything, she remains amused as she says, “I guess I haven’t done a good job of explaining myself. I’m not planning to cheat on Nelson. This—tonight—it was an experiment, but I knew very quickly that it was a failed experiment. You’re still good-looking, I’ll grant you that. But you’re so boring! You probably found me boring, and I was boring tonight, but I was feeding off your boringness. Isn’t it weird how I was tormented as a teenager by a person who grew up into a banker who talks incessantly about his Fitbit?”
Their waitress is nearby, and he catches her eye and makes the check-requesting gesture. Then he extracts a credit card from his wallet and, when the waitress brings over the small leather folder, passes her the card without looking at the bill.
“Did I offend you?” Sylvia asks. “I didn’t mean to. I was trying to be factual.”
He says nothing—what’s the point?—and after a few seconds, she adds, “For all his faults, Nelson does make me laugh. He’s very funny. And I think a sense of humor is the single most endearing quality a person can have. Do you agree?”
Apparently, this isn’t a rhetorical question, either. They look at each other, and he says, “Sure.”
“Sure? That’s it?”
“It seems like we’ve both said what we have to say to each other tonight.”
Another silence ensues, a long silence, while they await the return of the bill, and at last Sylvia says, “So your daughter’s, what, a high school freshman? Or a sophomore?”
“Abby’s a freshman,” he says.
“Is she athletic like you?”
This is how their last moments in the restaurant conclude, with a conversation that in tone and content is the one he’d anticipated having with her in the first place. It’s a reminder that, probably, nothing is wrong with Sylvia, nothing diagnosable. She just turned out weird and bitter.
On the street, under the dark city sky, before they walk in opposite directions, Sylvia says, “Thanks so much for dinner.”
Normally, he’d hug her again, or perhaps kiss her on the cheek. And it feels odd to do nothing—as odd as it would have to split the check, not to pay for her—so he extends his hand, and as they shake, she smirks again. She says, “Farewell to thee in the perilous storm,” which is a line from the Bishop hymn, a song that even now, maybe especially now, he finds deeply moving. Without question, his moral code was molded more by the ideals of Bishop than by those of his parents. This is why he doesn’t care how paternalistic, how sexist, how Republican he sounds to Sylvia when he says, as his parting words, “Is it really necessary for you to poison that, too?”
* * *
—
They’d exchanged phone numbers over email, and she’d texted him around noon, to confirm dinner. Therefore, her number but not her name are in the Contacts of his cellphone, and when his phone rings just after eleven, while he is lying in bed watching television, he has no idea at first who it might be. But, because he is a parent, he answers.
Immediately, Sylvia says, “Do you remember that kid Bruno in the grade below ours? The day after our prefect announcement, he staged a one-person picket outside the headmaster’s house to try to get them to release the final vote tally. And I thought he was a freak.”
Carefully—it’s difficult to discern whether her mood is more ruminative or combative—Clay says, “I do remember Bruno.”
“The truth is that when Dean Boede handed you the election, I didn’t think it was that weird,” Sylvia says. “At the time, I was good at not getting what I wanted. Plus, I was sort of shy. I’d never have run for senior prefect if my crew teammates hadn’t encouraged me. So I thought, Okay, this makes sense. I’ll be the sidekick. When I told my parents, they were confused, and I could tell they thought it was strange I didn’t know the vote tally. But they didn’t push it, and they were proud of me for being assistant prefect. It wasn’t until I described what had happened to my college friends that anyone ever said, What the fuck? They were like, Why did no one protest? Why did no adults intervene?”
Partly to humor her and partly because he believes it, Clay says, “So it was all of us except Bruno who were the freaks.”
“Good old Bruno,” Sylvia says, and her voice sounds warmer than it did at the restaurant, though he’d be foolish to entirely trust her. “The other thing,” she says, “is that even though I made fun of you for not knowing sexism existed before last fall, I was shocked when Hillary lost and Trump won. I’m still shocked. Every single day, every time I see in the news what Trump has said or done, I literally can’t believe it.”
“Me neither.”
“Apparently, that’s very white of us—being shocked by the election. Do you have any black friends?”
“Sure,” he says.
“Who?”
“A guy I play tennis with, a guy in my building. Do you want their names?”
“I don’t have any black friends,” she says. “I know people, obviously, but there’s no one I hang out with. Although, do I have friends, period? I work fifty hours a week, and I have three kids.” They are both quiet, and she adds, “In general, I have no desire to ever have another conversation about Hillary Clinton, to debate the role her gender played. I’m not sure I want to have any conversation about sexism. If someone doesn’t see that gender played a huge role, why would I waste my time trying to convince them?”
“That’s reasonable.”
“But I also can’t help seeing the election as a metaphor. It turns out that democracies aren’t that stable, and neither are marriages. And I’m so fucking confused! I didn’t think I’d be this confused when I was forty-three.”
“Well,” he says, “I’m divorced. It goes without saying that this isn’t exactly what I had planned.”
“I thought I had my act together,” she says. “I have my job, I have my family, we’re all, knock on wood, pretty healthy. There was this story I told myself, that growing up I’d been the awkward good girl, the responsible student, and I’d missed out socially but in the long term I’d come out ahead. So it was all fine, it all comes out in the wash, or whatever it is people say. I thought I was finished being the teenager who lay in her dorm room and felt racked with misery, wanting things she couldn’t have. But something came loose inside me, something got dislodged, and I am still that teenager. In a way, it started even before Nelson got laid off—it started when this dad at my kids’ school was killed in a motorcycle accident. It was awful. His children were in fourth and seventh grade at the time. And you’d think that would make me treasure my own family, make me grateful for what I have, but instead, it made me sort of reckless and crazy. Like, who knows what will happen to any of us, so why shouldn’t I enjoy myself in the way I’ve never been good at? Why shouldn’t I get to have fun, too? I’ve never done drugs, I’ve never even really seen drugs, but recently I’ve wondered, Should I try to find some cocaine? Or Ecstasy? Because I want a hit of something—I want some kind of lift, something to break up the monotony. What’s maybe weirdest about having reverted to my teenage long
ings is that this time around, I don’t know what they’re for. Back then, they were for you, but what am I so desperate for now? What can I get or do that will make me feel better instead of worse? That’s why I came to Chicago and pretended we were on a date. I just wanted something.”
“Before you try street drugs,” Clay says, “have you talked to your husband about any of this? Or to a therapist?”
“I know I sound like a horrible wife, and maybe I am—the part of me that looks at Nelson and thinks, Pull yourself together. But at the same time, I am sympathetic and I recognize how much pain he’s in, and how, as a man, his self-worth is more tied up in providing for our family than mine is. It’s easy to pretend that if I got fired, I’d train for a triathlon and declutter our house, but I’d probably just sit around on my ass, too, being depressed.” She pauses. “I didn’t answer your question, did I? We sort of talk about it. And I went to a therapist a few times, but she wasn’t very smart.”
“This is just my two cents, but you don’t seem like a person who wants out of your marriage,” he says. “Maybe you will eventually, but you don’t now.”
“Really? Why not?” She seems genuinely interested.
He pauses, then says, “The anal fissure stuff—you put it out there that we were on a date, but you immediately followed up with that. It was like you were sex-proofing the situation.”
She laughs. “That’s an intriguing theory. But there’s no version of tonight that would have played out with us hooking up, is there?”
“The possibility of two people becoming physically involved generally hinges on both of them being open to it.”
“Oh, come on. That’s such a cop-out. Would you have slept with me?”
He thinks, Based on your appearance, sure. Based on your behavior, no. Aloud, he says, “I know you’ll think I’m dodging the question, but it’s impossible to say. It’s like the butterfly effect.”
“I’d have been okay with making out, I think,” she says. “I never kissed a Bishop boy, not even once, so I’d be able to cross that off my bucket list at the ripe old age of forty-three. Can you believe I graduated from high school without kissing anyone? It seems like it shouldn’t be possible.”
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