Jennifer Haigh (17 page)

What is there to do?
Scott wondered. His days were genuinely full. He slept late, attended a class here and there, lingered after meals at the Kap Sig table, watching the girls at the salad bar. Occasionally, in the evening, he went to the library, where the Kap Sigs controlled several tables in the basement study room. If an exam were impending, he made halfhearted attempts at studying, borrowing the notes of some anal-retentive classmate who'd attended the lectures. Most nights he played pong or pool, smoked weed, and drank beer. He liked the taste of beer, the metallic tang. He could drink beer all night.

Each weekend Kappa Sigma threw a party, which meant more people and different music, the kind that made girls get up and dance.

At first Scott had enjoyed these gatherings, the wall-to-wall bodies, the certainty of hooking up with a girl he'd had his eye on—if not his first choice, then his second. But recently parties had come to depress him: the bathrooms redolent of beer-induced puking, the feverish pursuit happening all around him, of which he, shackled to a girlfriend, could no longer partake. Once, twice, when Jane was tied up in rehearsal, he'd succumbed to temptation. He hadn't gone looking; in both cases, the girls had pursued him. He had simply taken what they offered.

Afterward, dread consumed him. He weighed the odds that Jane would find out, and rehearsed what he'd say if she did.
I was drunk.

I barely remember it.
This fear was not unlike the buried panic that sometimes woke him at night, a humming anxiety that mounted as the semester progressed. He'd ended his freshman year on academic probation and spent the summer eating shit from his father, who threatened him with the army if he didn't get his act together. He got some play out of that story—the Kap Sig brothers found it hilarious—but Scott understood that a crisis was brewing. (It was a feeling that would dog him for the rest of his life, in dreams. Even as an old man he would sometimes return to Stirling during a late-afternoon nap, again a delinquent sophomore, a drunken Kap Sig with an econ paper due.)

He started his sophomore year with lofty intentions: to attend classes, to smoke less pot. To focus his full attention on Jane, whose discipline and academic success—last semester she'd brought down a perfect 4.0—would surely be contagious.

It struck him, now, as one of the great mysteries of the natural world that she had tolerated him at all. Beautiful Jane, her drive and intellect; Jane with enough energy to power a small city. What did she see in that inebriated joker with his struts and feints and loud opinions? He had loved her; more than that, he'd wanted to
be
her. (Still a dude, though.) To be the male version of Jane, humming with plans that would actually amount to something, alive and hopeful and destined for great things.

In the end the worst had happened: back early from rehearsal, Jane had stopped by the Kap Sig house and found him in a corner of the social floor, feeling up a drunken freshman. In retrospect, he saw that it could have been worse. He and the girl were still standing. In another ten minutes he would have taken her down to the basement.

Then Jane would have had something to scream about.

Scott stopped periodically as Jackie O. nosed at drainage ditches, mailboxes, looking for a place to crap. In her old age she'd become particular about where she'd loose her bowels, evaluating each potential site against a mysterious checklist in her tiny brain. She seemed to prefer defecating at Loch Lomond Acres, an impulse Scott could understand. Its massive houses offended him, mainly because he felt invisible pressure to covet them: they were thirty years newer than his and Penny's little bunker, and three times the size. Each was built on an eighth of an acre, leaving a backyard the size of a pool table. The low-end model—it had doubled in price since Misty Sanderson tried to sell it to them—had five bedrooms and four baths, a cathedral ceiling in the entryway and a showy spiral staircase. If you had money to burn, you could add Jacuzzi tubs, extra fireplaces, a stained-glass window in the entryway. The builders would pile on as many gewgaws as you could pay for. No design principles, or questions of taste, seemed to apply. The owners of one house had actually added a widow's walk, high enough to offer a view of downtown Gatwick, with its glowing miles of chain restaurants and strip malls.

Scott had been inside a Loch Lomond house only once, for a barbecue hosted by Penny's friend Noelle Moss, who'd won the place in her divorce settlement. When he closed the front door with medium force, he felt the whole house shudder. Scott had worked, for a time, on union construction sites in La Jolla and Sacramento; he knew plenty about the shortcuts builders took. Walking home, fueled by gin, he found himself disparaging the house to Penny, and learned that it was impossible to explain why something was vulgar. You either saw it or you didn't. Penny loved the oversize bathtub with its gold-plated fixtures, the cavernous sitting room, fatuously called a Great Room, with the hollow acoustics of a squash court. "You could get lost in there," she said delightedly."There's so much
space.
"

"The rooms are big," he allowed."I'll grant you that." Their own house was a close fit; and as the kids got older the problem worsened.

That year, with the whole family at home for the endless midyear break, Scott had nearly lost his mind. But there were ways—there had to be—to create a feeling of space without ostentation, without excess.

Scott knew what a well-built house felt like. His childhood home in Concord was two hundred years old, still solid and handsome. Scott knew without anyone ever having explained it to him why plaster walls were superior to drywall, carved moldings to the cheap massproduced stuff sold at Builder's Depot. But Penny's childhood had been spent in various sorts of Californian substandard housing: the shoddy duplex, the long series of apartment complexes. From ages fourteen to fifteen she'd actually lived in a roadside motel in Pasadena, where the second of her stepfathers worked as a night manager. For a brief time, early in their history, these facts had struck Scott as exotic, even romantic. Against this gritty western landscape, he imagined Penny as a little girl, a nubile teenager, never suspecting that somewhere in her future, Scott was waiting to rescue her. Years would pass before he met any of her scattered family, visited their grim habitats.

Her crazy sister lived in a halfway house in Portland. For six months of the year, her mother and current stepfather rented a campsite in Nowhere, Arizona. The rest of the time, they crisscrossed the country in an enormous Winnebago.

Understandable, then, that Penny could be impressed by a vinylsided tract house with paper walls and heated towel racks in the bathrooms. She simply didn't know any better. In the spirit of a field trip, Scott walked her through his mother's house in Concord, pointing out the high ceilings, the original oak floors; he wanted—and truly needed—her to see the difference. She agreed that the house was lovely, but when Scott went a step further and compared it to the monstrosities of Loch Lomond Acres, Penny simply smiled.

"I know you don't like them," she said, as though it were merely a matter of preference, as neutral as liking blue over green.

"It's not a question of
liking
," he said with deliberate calm. He couldn't seem to make her understand that the houses—from their grotesque proportions all the way down to their reproduction light fixtures ("Reproductions of what? There was no electricity at Versailles! None at all!")—were simply
wrong.

At such moments he felt as though they were separated by a language barrier. Years ago, in med school, his brother had befriended a stunning Italian classmate named Lucia Bari. The
friendship
(Billy's word) had provided him with years of comic material: Billy's efforts to explain American social behavior, Lucia's amusing attempts at American slang. To Scott, visiting New York on a weekend trip with Jane Frayne, such misunderstandings had seemed trivial. When they met Billy and his
friend
for dinner, Scott was hypnotized by Lucia's heavy breasts, her succulent mouth. Who cared what that mouth was saying?

Now he saw how those differences might have mattered. Penny, in her way, was as foreign as Lucia. There were things his wife would simply never understand.

When Scott returned to the house, his daughter was in the living room with her friend Paige Moss. The girls wore tights and leotards.

They lay sprawled on the dirty carpet, staring at the television. Penny was in the kitchen with Paige's mother, Noelle, who lived in Loch Lomond Acres but spent, by his calculations, two-thirds of her waking hours at his house. In that time she had never consumed anything but black coffee with Equal. She was a hungry-looking woman, a platinum blonde, excessively fond of the tanning booth; she reminded Scott dimly of his aunt Anne.

"Noelle brought her video camera," Penny informed him."We're going to tape the girls doing their dance. Want to watch?"

Scott hesitated. His daughter's dance routines caused him paroxysms of discomfort. Last spring, during the annual recital, he'd been forced to watch her cavort around the stage with a handful of friends, dressed and gyrating like ten-year-old strippers. He had nearly swallowed his tongue.

"I have papers to grade," he said.

"That's okay, Dad," Sabrina said helpfully. "You can watch the tape later."

Scott picked up his stack of manila folders and headed downstairs to his
study.
He used the term ironically. Penny referred to it the same way, but without the irony, and this made him cringe. Shortly after they bought the place, he'd come back from Builder's Depot with a hatchback full of two-by-fours, and squared off a corner of what the realtor had called (ironically too, it turned out) the finished basement.

The prior owner had hid the wiring with a suspended ceiling, covered the walls with paneling and the cement floor with thin carpet, but had done nothing to address the persistent dampness that bled through the foundation. Even with two dehumidifiers running, the room smelled of mushrooms, old socks, the dank imported cheeses Scott loved but Penny called revolting. They had arranged their old furniture there, a plaid armchair and stained sofa, in an approximation of what was called a family room; but even the huge new television—number four!—wasn't enough to lure Ian and Sabrina downstairs. The house had eighteen hundred square feet of living space, but it might as well have been a one-room hut in Calcutta. Penny and the kids lived their entire lives in the kitchen.

Scott stepped into his
study.
The room was eight by ten, with one high window that looked out on a corrugated tin window well and let in a thin slice of light. He dumped the manila folders on the desk—a hefty stack, one for each of the hundred and twenty juniors whose literacy he was to further that semester. Inside were sheets of looseleaf notebook paper, blue books and—shamefully—weekly quizzes, to which he had recently resorted. The quizzes had seemed to him a capitulation, but he'd found no other way to coerce the students into reading the assigned number of pages from
Great Expectations.
He spent an unspeakable number of hours composing these quizzes. He found himself looking forward to quiz making, the Sunday-night ritual of sipping a glass of wine while reading Cliff 's Notes and scouring the Internet for pirated study guides, the same strategies his students used. He sometimes stayed up half the night devising questions that couldn't be answered by these illicit means. It became a game to him, the imagined battle of wits with his students, the satisfaction of ferreting out the malingerers. It was the most rewarding aspect of his job.

As he booted up the computer he heard music overhead, the sort of cloying dance tune his daughter favored. The flimsy ceiling groaned, shaken by the romping of two little girls who weighed maybe sixty pounds apiece.

He turned his attention to the computer screen, called up the Lycos search page and typed
Jane Frayne.

He had always planned to see her again, to finish what was unfinished between them. He felt certain that Jane knew this, expected it even, that she had known it all along. And recent technology had made the world smaller. She could easily be found.

They were adults now, wiser, sophisticated. They would laugh at the mishap that had divided them.

I overreacted
, Jane would say.
I couldn't help it. I was crazy about you.

I was an idiot
, he would protest.
I made a terrible mistake.

He imagined her still in New York, a couple hours' drive away.

He could easily slip away to see her. On weekends Penny scheduled his every waking moment, but a weeknight would be easy. He could leave straight from school. When Penny asked, he could invoke Parents' Night, a quarterly ordeal that lasted late into the evening.

He had never cheated on Penny, though he'd had chances: flirty barmaids, a coworker in a video store in La Jolla, the addled college girls and lonely single moms who'd bought his pot in San Berdoo. He was flattered by their interest, but something had always stopped him.

There was the memory of his father, the hell of his parents' divorce.

Mostly, though, he hadn't seen the point. Chronic exhaustion had tamed his libido. And the women who wanted him were lost souls, floundering in their own lives, unlikely to fix what was broken in his.