Commencement (20 page)

She knocked at the open door.

He turned his eyes upward without moving his head, and when he saw her there, he grinned. “Well, aren’t you a vision,” he said.

Sally suddenly realized what she was wearing, and she felt embarrassed in spite of herself. “I was in a rush,” she mumbled.

“I’m serious,” he said, putting down the paper and beckoning her to him. “You look radiant. Have you been running?”

“Are you married?” she interrupted.

“What?” he said with a chuckle.

Rage was coming over her now. He had made her the kind of woman she despised without so much as letting her know. She thought of her own father’s affairs, how she had overheard her mother weeping into the phone one night in high school, something about business trips and the credit card statements and how had she possibly not realized before?

“Are. You. Married.” Sally said it more sternly than she’d ever said anything in her life.

“You know I’m married,” Bill said. “Darling, come in. What is this about?”

She wanted to be immune to the power of that
darling
, yet already she felt herself slipping. She did not want to hate him, or for this to end. She just wanted it all to be a big misunderstanding.

She tried again. “The poem about the tomb. I thought you said it reminded you of your wife.”

“It does,” he said, not seeming to understand her point.

“Oh,” Sally said. “I guess I just assumed that …”

“What?” he said, looking genuinely confused. Then a grin spread over his face, and he began to laugh, a deep belly laugh as if she had said the most hilarious thing in the world. “You thought Janice was dead.”

“Well, yes,” Sally said, her heart beating quickly as she took this information in fully. His wife was alive. She was someone’s mistress.

“It’s a poem about dead lovers, isn’t it?” she said finally.

He looked to the ceiling, his way of telling her he was giving this some thought. Then he said, “To me, it’s a poem about pure feeling, pure love that is lost, and a sad shell that remains.”

“Your wife is alive,” Sally said. She immediately wished she hadn’t. Obviously she was alive; he had just said so.

“Sally,” he said, pulling her to him and running his palm over her scalp as if she were a cocker spaniel. She had an incredible urge to punch him in the jaw. “Janice and I are separated. Have been for a year now.”

“Separated,” she said. She felt slightly relieved, though she knew separated could mean a great many things. “Separated, as in—”

“Separated as in we’re about to get divorced. Separated as in a poem about a tomb reminds me of her. Separated as in I’m in love with you.”

It was the first time he had ever said it.

“I love you, too,” she said, and then borrowing a favorite phrase of her mother’s, she whispered, “I love you to the moon and back.”

That night they slept together, curled into each other on the carpeted office floor. When she woke alone the next morning, Bill had left a Post-it stuck to her purse:
Went swimming. Love you
.

Seeing the words written out that way startled her. She threw on her coat and headed to the Quad, her breath forming tiny clouds in the frigid February air. It was still early, the middle of the night by college sophomore standards.

When she got to her room, another note was waiting, this one from April:
Where did you go, Lady Chatterley? Come see me when you get home. I’m worried about you
.

She crept into April’s room. The shades were drawn, and the heavy smell of sleeping breath hung in the air. Sally slipped off her flip-flops and crawled under the covers. A moment later, she felt April roll over and nestle in beside her.

“What time is it?” she whispered.

“Seven-thirty,” Sally said.

“And are you still in love, even at this early hour?” April asked.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said.

“Have you been out having a big lovers’ quarrel and amazing makeup sex?”

“Yes.”

“Fabulous,” April said, pressing her face into Sally’s hair. “Can we discuss it after ten-thirty?”

“We don’t need to discuss it at all,” Sally said.

“Like hell we’re not gonna discuss it,” April said. “I suspect we’ll discuss nothing but for some time.”

She reached over and wrapped her arm around Sally.

“Do you think Celia hates me now?” Sally asked.

“She’ll get over it,” April said. Soon after, her breathing grew steady, and Sally knew she had fallen back to sleep.

Sally closed her eyes, but she couldn’t help saying one more thing. “They’re separated,” she whispered. “It’s not what Celia thinks.”

The morning before her wedding day, Sally awoke from a dream covered in sweat. Jake’s arms were wrapped around her, his chest pressed to her back, and something in this sweet, unknowing gesture made her want to cry. How on earth could she let herself dream about Bill with Jake lying right there beside her? She closed her eyes and tried to think about tomorrow—she was marrying Jake, at last. The wedding itself seemed less exciting than what would come after, and Sally took this as a good sign. One more day and they’d be in the car on their way to Maine, holding hands and singing songs like they did on any road trip, but this time would be different. This time they would check into the bed-and-breakfast as Mr. and Mrs. Jake Brown.

Sally had always known she would take her husband’s last name. She couldn’t stand it when women made their children walk around using clunky hyphenates just out of some misguided nod to feminism. She considered herself a feminist, but why did it matter to anyone—how did it further the cause?—for her to distance herself from the person to whom she felt the closest? A few of the older women she volunteered with at NOW had even told her that trying to keep your maiden name was more trouble than it was worth-people were always going to call you Mrs. So-and-So anyway, so why not just make it official? Everyone had to have some man’s last name, and Sally reasoned that she would far prefer to have Jake’s over her father’s.

She knew April would be mortified by the thought of her taking
Jake’s name. But then, April had never really agreed with Sally’s brand of feminism. “That’s great, but you need to think bigger!” she said, when Sally told her that she was volunteering at NOW and, more recently, in a domestic violence shelter. “Those sorts of solutions are just Band-Aids. We have to attack this thing from the roots up.”

Sally said she realized this, but in the meantime women needed a safe place to call home. They needed warm meals and clean blankets and someone to talk to late at night. The women’s movement couldn’t be all about radical action and immediate change. That just wasn’t how the world worked.

Her ultimate hero was Gloria Steinem. She had improved countless lives, with actions as simple as setting up networks of women who would have otherwise never found one another and starting a magazine devoted to feminism. She always stood up for what was right and never compromised her principles, but she also didn’t offend the average person’s sensibilities and wasn’t afraid to highlight her hair. She liked men! She dated. She got married, though it ended tragically. She was a real woman who believed in equality. Wasn’t that a hundred times more powerful than the contributions of someone divisive and scary like Ronnie Munro?

Sally sat on the edge of the bed now, her clammy palms facing upward in her lap. She wasn’t going to be able to fall back to sleep. She walked quietly to the bathroom and turned on the shower, stepping into the stream of water before it even had a chance to warm up.

The problem with her memory was that it was always too sharp, too clear. It seemed proper to recall an old lover’s scent, maybe, or the sound of his laugh. But Sally could not stop thinking about the precision of Bill’s teeth, two perfectly even rows tinged gray from tobacco. She remembered his penis, the exact width of it, and the long blue vein that rose above the pink flesh when she stroked it with her tongue. It wasn’t that she missed him exactly, only that she could not forget.

She had known for a long while what the other girls were just beginning to find out—that ideologies were nice, but they didn’t serve you very well when it came to having a real life. Perhaps when
a person found lasting love, she was supposed to forget all about the men who had come before. But being engaged had only made Sally think more about Bill, and now, being here at the Autumn Inn, she remembered the nights they had spent together under this roof, making love in secret while her housemates were watching
The Real World
across the street.

After her shower, Sally blew her hair out straight and applied a coat of red lipstick and some mascara. She slid into the red sundress and sandals she had gotten for the rehearsal dinner later that night, knowing that it was far too early to be primping for dinner, and that she was really doing all this in case she ran into him.

As she picked up her purse from the nightstand, Jake stirred.

“Where you going?” he said, his eyes still closed.

“To take a walk around campus,” she said, suddenly feeling guilty.

“I’ll come if you want company,” Jake said. He rolled over so he was facedown in the pillow.

“No, no, you sleep,” she said.

Finally, Jake turned his head and opened his eyes. He whistled, taking her in. “You’re a knockout. I can’t believe I get to marry you tomorrow.”

Sally went to him and kissed his cheek. He tried to pull her down into the bed, but she resisted. “I’ll be back in a bit,” she said with a laugh.

“I love you,” she said as she opened the door to the hall.

“To the moon and back?” Jake mumbled, his smile audible.

“You know it, babe,” she said.

Outside, the air was just turning warm, and clouds were giving way to clear blue sky. Sally crossed the street toward King House and thought of all the students still asleep in their twin beds.

In college, half of what they had talked about was what came next—what would they do for work, where would they live, whom would they fall in love with? They recognized that they were the first generation of women whose struggle with choice had nothing to do with getting it and everything to do with having too much of it—there were so many options that it felt impossible and exhausting to pick the right ones. She almost wanted to rouse those new
King House girls from sleep and let them know that, most of the time, the choices just made themselves. She had gone back to Boston because of the offer of work in a cancer research lab at Harvard. And so she had met Jake, standing in line for a tuna sandwich at Au Bon Pain.

She always brought her lunch from home, but that morning on the bus she had been reading a sign above the heads of other passengers:
SICK OF THE BAY STATE DATING SCENE? WANT TO MEET FABULOUS MEN WHO ARE LOOKING FOR A COMMITMENT? THEN LOOK NO FURTHER THAN
dateboston.com
. Sally was considering this, thinking of how Celia had met a couple of guys on
Match.com
, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try something new and get her mind off Bill. She fished for a pen in her purse and wrote the name of the site on her palm. Then she looked up and saw two high school kids snickering at her. She felt her cheeks grow red. She was officially pathetic and would most definitely die alone. When the bus pulled over, she quickly got off, even though they were still three stops away from her office. Later, after e-mailing the girls about the whole mortifying ordeal, she realized that she must have left her salad on the seat beside her. She decided to treat herself to a big fattening sandwich and a lemonade, and because of that, she had found Jake.

The Smith campus had not changed a bit since Sally had last been there. The grass was neatly trimmed, the pond sparkled, the ivy-covered brick buildings stood proud and tall. Making her way toward the library, she wondered whether she would see him.

The affair had lasted three years. Since they couldn’t be together every night, Sally filled her free time with parties and concerts, growing wilder than she ever had been, or might have otherwise become. She streaked across the Quad in the snow with a group of King House first years, she danced until dawn at every campus party, flirting with the townies and the Hampshire boys without consequence—now that she had someone, it was all just for fun and didn’t seem half as bleak as it had when she was looking for love.

“It’s called the Absentee Boyfriend Theory,” April said. “Having
a guy in your life at a distance allows you to be free to explore who you are without the fear or the stigma of being alone.”

“But Bill’s not at a distance,” Sally said.

“Well, you know—a
distance,”
April said, as if that cleared things up.

In the beginning, their hours together were exhilarating. They’d make love in his office, at the Autumn Inn, and once, recklessly, in her dorm room. They would go for beers at a dark, smoke-filled bar out by the car dealerships in Florence and play darts, his hand up under her dress as she aimed for the bull’s-eye.

But Bill was also prone to long, dark periods of sadness, during which he would ignore Sally altogether or tell her that she was just a foolish, twitty little girl who couldn’t understand his pain. Sometimes he said that he wanted his wife back more than anything, that Jan was brilliant and beautiful, and that someone like Sally could never compare with her. He attempted three or four times during their relationship to reconcile with his wife, and each time Jan refused him, leading him to call Sally sobbing in the middle of the night, begging her to meet him at the Autumn Inn. (When she did, he would apologize over and over, holding her close to his chest until she promised to forgive him.)

When she set their time together against the years she had spent with Jake, it seemed absurd. Three years of sneaking around like criminals. She never met Bill’s friends, and when they ran into his oldest son walking home from high school one day, Bill introduced her as “Sally, one of my students.” She searched the kid’s face for some sign that he had heard her name before, but of course he had not, and he only said, “Hey.”

Their relationship ended just before graduation. Bill handed her a fat envelope as she left his office one day during finals. Inside was a letter, written in that self-important tone he took whenever she asked anything of him. He wrote about how he would remember her forever—the young beauty who had captured his heart. It hurt him to have to release her into the world, which was sometimes cruel and cold.