Vintage Attraction (17 page)

Ishiguro scuttled back to me. He looked particularly apologetic. He seemed truly sorry for not having done a better job intervening last night—or this morning. “It's not your fault,” I told him. “If I'd managed to get myself home any earlier, I probably would have gone upstairs to sleep at the Laheys', too.” I fed the pug. Five seconds later, he finished eating. He was long overdue a morning nap and I ushered him into his crate. Then I went to the Starbucks a few blocks away for a grande cappuccino. The barista gave me a sympathetic once-over when she took my order. She offered to add a third mercy shot at no additional charge. I gave mute, but heartfelt, appreciation.

Back in the loft, the oaky, putrescent effluvium of oxidizing wine was heavier in the air than I'd first noticed. The stale smoke on the furniture was newly asphyxiating. Could Izzy really have led this tasting and then fucked this ridiculous Pacer Rosengrant in our own home? The beers, the cigarettes. Had they busted a few rails? He was probably one of those lucky twelve-inch bastards who could screw on coke. (I'd tried to do it, and failed, once in college.) I didn't want to believe this, to see this, to smell this. And I dreaded tonight, when Izzy would turn up. I tried to imagine her lying on the rumpled couch, where she'd purportedly slept. I had conveniently avoided saying anything after I discovered his apartment a few blocks from here. But now, now that I'd met Pacer Rosengrant, could I still get away without confronting her?

I found a box of American Spirits on the couch with one cigarette left. I lit it. The last time I'd smoked was with Talia, on the porch of my old sublet. It had followed the last time we'd ever sleep together. After that night, she stopped returning my calls. I heard from other former students that she'd begun sleeping with a fellow twenty-year-old with whom she could listen to indie rock. I'd also later find out she'd gotten into grad school. She hadn't told me about either development when we were involved. Instead, she started building a series of distances between us. And I'd built my own share of distances. I said it wasn't serious. All along, part of me had hoped to find someone else—and I met Izzy shortly thereafter. Was my ambivalence the weakness that had not only drawn Talia to me but also driven her away? Was it having the same effect on Izzy? Still, there was no way I could confront her about last night. This was no buried pile of laundry. This was my fault. I'd led her to believe I was fun and confident. I'd referred to myself as a swashbuckler, in the e-mail that started it all. I wanted her to think I was easygoing when we were first getting to know each other. I wanted to be those things, be the person she seemed to see that night we first looked at each other. And for a while, with her help, I'd become that person. Somehow along the way, though, I'd devolved. What if the confrontation's outcome was that she'd decide to leave me? We'd obviously have to sell this place. She'd probably move back into Chris's, or take up residence with Pacer Rosengrant. With no real savings in the bank, no significant income, where would I go? There were no professors with apartments to sublet or ex-girlfriends to whom I could present myself left. My first and last cigarette had burned down to the filter, and I stubbed it out.

I still hadn't showered or changed out of last night's clothes. But the wrinkled shirt and blazer comprised the uniform in which, playing the role of taciturn domestic, I'd begin to restore order—a superficial order, but a sense of order nonetheless—to our flyblown domestic life. I started by cleaning up the mess in the living room. I threw every bottle and butt and food container into the garbage. I hung up all of Izzy's castoff and crumpled garments. I vacuumed the rug and floor. I emptied the dishwasher and stowed all of the glassware. Then my Timex beeped. I had thirty minutes until the office hours slot I couldn't seem to commit to memory this semester. I was fairly certain I'd have no visitors for the duration of my sentence. It would have been a better use of my time to take a nap. Further incentive to blow it off: the pug had set up rawhide-decimating camp atop my socked right foot as I stood at the sink. Still, I raced away.

When I got back from school and reclaiming the pony car that had been clipped from me the night before, Izzy was home. I followed a newly laid trail of her shoes and stockings and skirt and underwear and blue sommelier coat and blouse and bra down the hall to our bedroom. I hadn't been in here since my unsettling ante meridiem discovery. She was in the bathroom, wearing only a towel, blow-drying her hair. She suspended work once she saw me standing in the door frame. Her eyes cast a disbelieving glare in the mirror. “That must have been some party.”

I looked down at my white Oxford and the skinny jeans into which I barely fit. The whole of my outfit was disheveled. I pressed together my empty palms. “Yeah, about that.”

“You could have called me,” she said.

“I know. I'm sorry. I had too much to drink.”

“You've never not come home before. I was really scared something awful was happening.”

I thought about Talia, how easily I could have ended up in her hotel room. “So was I,” I whispered to my shoes.

“Where did you sleep?”

“Berkal's couch.”

“Lovely.”

“I'm sorry,” I repeated. I looked at our bed and remembered the dismay that smacked me when I found Pacer Rosengrant in it. It was unlikely my absence had genuinely given her much cause for concern last night. My compunction about my own misadventure and embarrassment over passing out before anything could even come to pass with Talia receded. My residual regret was quietly fermenting into low-voltage anger. “You could have called me, too, you know. If you were so concerned. It's not like you don't know how to send a text.”

Her forehead became a noteless staff. “I didn't want to make you feel like I don't trust you. I never really pictured myself becoming a nagging wife hounding you while you're out with your friends.”

“What kind of wife did you picture yourself becoming?” My hands were restless and too cumbersome for my squeezed Italian pockets. I turned my wedding band around my ring finger.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Look, I made a mistake. I don't see why you're making such a big deal of it. I've never given you any reason not to trust me, Izzy.”

“What did you mean, ‘what kind of wife'? I'd like to know what you're getting at.”

Though it would have been a perfect opportunity to do so, I just couldn't bring myself to tell her that this wasn't actually the first time I'd been home today. It was easier to let Izzy think I'd stayed out all night. It was easier for me to let her believe that Pacer Rosengrant had risen on his own sometime after she'd left for work. I was almost starting to believe it myself. He could have been the one to rid the apartment of the incriminating party artifacts and hang up all the clothes. If he'd gotten up earlier—if he didn't run on restaurant time—he would have disappeared long before I came around.

She returned to the business of her hair. I stood there, watching her. It was a two-handed operation with a brush and hair dryer. She ran the brush through section after section as the hot air blew down on it. The curls, though reluctant initially, eventually complied with her wishes and straightened out. After she finished, her hair was long and dark and shone brilliantly. She set aside her tools and asked, “When did you first fall in love with me?”

“When I first saw you,” I said.

“That's not possible,” she said. “It must have been later, like on our first real date. At Osteria Via Stato. When I had my hair down.”

“Then, too,” I said. “Also the first time I heard you laugh.”

I went to check on Ishiguro. Izzy emerged some time after in a robe. She hugged me. I had to steady myself so as not to lose my footing. She pressed her face to my cheek and inhaled. She took my head to do the same thing in a wavy copse of hair.

“You smell like perfume,” she said after she released me.

“What?”

“Yeah, like the nineties.” She took in another quantity of the air between us. “It's Exclamation.”

My heart began to thump a gangster rap bass line. I flashed on the scene when Talia came to see me on campus. I could tell she had on her old scent when she sat in my office. How could it possibly have clung to me this long, throughout all the places and fragrances I'd passed between the previous afternoon and now? It seemed so impossible. Then again, with Izzy and her preternatural powers of olfaction, the impossible wasn't only probable but inevitable. From her earliest days sneaking tastes in the liquor store, to her first restaurant waitressing job serving Denny's patrons who ordered White Zinfandel when they wanted to drink something “exotic,” to her inaugural tours of cellar inventory duty in the basement at the Cattle Company, to the bistro and beyond, she'd been amassing and cataloguing scent memories. She could recall any of them instantly. Trying to refute her would have been tautological. I almost confessed to save myself from escalating heartache.

“The party,” I said then, practically blurting it out. I cleared my throat to try to cover over my panic. I feared it was too late to go unperceived.

Izzy, surprisingly, looked at me as though acknowledging this were a plausible scenario. It prompted me, like a caught criminal, to continue bolstering my alibi with details to make what I said sound more convincing, even though it would accomplish anything but. “All the girls were overdressed and over-scented. Grad students. So considered in matters of their diction, yet always so mannered in their aspect. Their idea of style is Edith Wharton's.”

“Were you dancing?” she asked, though not in an accusatory way.

“No,” I said tentatively. “But these sorts of fetes are attended by a lot of mawkish hugging and hand-talking.”

“It smells like it was close to you.”

“What was?”

“I don't know. Temptation.”

“I thought you said it was Exclamation.”

She looked at me searchingly. Her mouth was poised like she wanted to say something. I barraged her with more unnecessary details. “We had a heated debate.”

“About what?”

I prefaced with a simper. “Marisha Pessl.”

“Well,” she said, almost sounding playful, “it must have been pretty serious.”

“I don't think it was,” I said. “Only in the moment, fueled by alcohol and departmental party anxiety. But not after.”

She smiled a white flag. It was evidence that her momentary apprehension had relaxed. “As long as you got it out of your system.”

My mind breathed a sigh. “I did. I definitely did.”

She smelled me again. “Yeah,” she said, “it's definitely fading.”

“You want to get some dinner or something?” I asked.

“Nah,” she said. “I don't want to stay up too late.”

“I'll walk Ishiguro, then,” I said, and reached into my back pocket to check for a sandwich bag. There I felt the index card Berkal had given me. “Shit. I shouldn't stay up too late, either. I forgot I have to be on campus early in the morning.”

“Why? You're not teaching tomorrow, are you?”

“No,” I said. “Stupid meeting with Schultz. I guess I'll find out if I'm getting any summer classes.”

“I hope you do,” she said.

“Why's that?”

“Because . . . I don't know. It's what you do.”

“Yeah,” I said, with low-slung bitterness.

I found the statement mildly insulting, despite its veracity. It was what I did. That was true. But had it been a foregone vocational conclusion? What if I hadn't become an academic? I wondered then. What if my training had come from a wine cellar instead of a lecture hall? If I'd spent my salad days brunoising turnips and chiffonading basil instead of sitting in a dusty booth at the C-Shop explicating Hemingway and Fitzgerald in spiral notebooks, where would we be now? Izzy might have stayed out of trouble if I'd grown up to be a guy who swaggered, who took women as if they were wine, without asking and drinking directly from the bottle. I could have ended up a ballsier version of myself, someone more like Pacer Rosengrant, minus the inarticulateness, I hoped. What if I had been the one who did what he wanted without any guilt or fear? What if I'd been a real restaurant person, instead of just someone who imagined them?

“It would be like me not being able to . . . taste wine,” Izzy said.

“Heaven forbid,” I muttered.

She looked at me like she didn't hear what I'd said, but avoided asking me to repeat it. Instead Izzy just flashed some bright teeth, as though happiness—feigned or otherwise—was really the panacea everyone pretended it to be.

I let myself into Shelley Schultz's office. “Is there a problem,
Peter?” the adjunct coordinator asked. The sternness in her voice was patently theatrical. She scowled at me. She attempted, I supposed, to look authoritative. Sadly, her
Stella Got Her Clothes Back
dark-blue, clingy turtleneck and short skirt life-affirming costume of the recently divorced didn't imbue her improvisation with much verisimilitude. Her curly-bordering-intractably-frizzy shoulder-length hair kept me from feeling too threatened. I imagined she had a similar failure to affect the affable, veneered, pacemaker-equipped widowers and scheming financiers she sat across from on eHarmony dates at Highland Park restaurants. I also suspected these dates ended before nine o'clock as an anticlimactic result.

“I thought you wanted to speak with me,” I answered.

She stood up and retrieved a sheet of paper from the top of her gray filing cabinet. She pressed the document to the table. With three fingers, she pushed it a measure closer to me.

“Thanks,” I said. It was an agenda for another new hire orientation. Ostensibly the meaningless, hour-long meander I'd just missed. The border she chose from clip art was suitably incongruous. Her design was more appropriate for a homemade wedding save-the-date reminder flyer than it was for outlining the proceedings of a serious pedagogical discussion.

“Sorry you couldn't make the event. I thought it would be useful for you to meet the new teachers.”

“Useful for me? How?”

“To get some perspective on teaching methods.”

“I have my own methods, and they're fine, but thanks.”

“Well, I'm not so sure about that. I think you might want to have a look at this.” She slid over another piece of paper. This one was tattered and wrinkled. It appeared to have been folded and refolded multiple times. Ink bled through from one side to the other. A grease stain adorning a corner called to mind a middle school election nomination petition.

I opened the note. It was the multiple-choice midterm evaluation form I'd handed out a week or two earlier. On the back was an anonymous complaint letter from one of my students. The handwriting looked familiar, yet I'd been so disengaged this semester, I couldn't attribute it to a source.

An absolute waste of time. Hapworth simply goes through the motions of teaching, recycling the same curriculum over and over again, regardless of who his students are. His grading system benefits the young and inexperienced and the class material is too similar to topics previously studied. The only A's he gives out are to those that he deems morally worthy. Any challenge to readings or thinking outside of the box will put you in the “trouble” corner. He seems to only like good, quiet, female students. The years of negative feedback on RateMyProfessors.com have gone nowhere. Bummer of a course.

I folded the note and slid it back across the desk.

“Do you know who wrote this?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Not really. To be honest, I'm not terribly concerned.”

“You're not?”

“No,” I said. “I'm not.”

“And why's that?”

“Shelley, I've been here a long time. I've come to expect that one or two students every midterm evaluation will, for whatever reason, express dismay with my—what did she call them?—‘curriculum' and ‘grading system.'”

“How do you know the student is a she?”

It was pretty obvious by the penmanship. The thugs' cursive didn't tend to prance through a garden of curlicues and I-dotting circles. Not to mention, who else besides a female would accuse me of favoring the girls? But I refrained from answering. I didn't really give a shit. The complaints had no bearing on me. And if Schultz was this oblivious to the bigger issue of campus ethos at the end of the leader decade of the twenty-first century, whatever it was called, in which education had become commodified and students felt that entitled them to the right to consumer-driven expectations about the “service” the instructors provided, for which they'd paid, and to voice their perceptions on the quality of it in ungrammatical Yelp-restaurant-review-like performance evaluations twice a semester, I couldn't really do much to help her.

“And that's all you have to say about this?”

“I think the student should be sent to the ‘trouble corner' for failing to realize that ‘good,' ‘quiet,' and ‘female' are not coordinating adjectives.”

Shelley Schultz looked at me blankly. I highly doubted that she knew what a coordinating adjective was. I was fairly certain she would have taken a
Longman Handbook
from her window ledge of unread complimentary desk copies—essential for decorating the set of an educator's office—and searched for the definition, had I not been sitting before her.

I was aware I had two choices here of how to proceed. I could apologize and throw myself at the mercy of the coordinator. This would require fabricating a story about a stressful semester. If I added details about finding my famous spouse's ex-boyfriend in our bed yesterday to portray myself as a pathetic cuckold, she'd have sympathy. It wouldn't even be that difficult of a method-acting exercise. The encounter, in short retrospect, regardless of Pacer Rosengrant's protestations, made me feel like Izzy had cheated on me. I could do that and protect my job. Or I could take a completely different approach.

I thought about Izzy. We'd been to so many places together: the wine festivals, the seminars, the speaking engagements. She made speeches I always listened to intently, no matter how many times I'd heard her deliver them, in Kohler or South Beach or Seattle or Jacksonville. Audiences wanted to pay attention to her. They were compelled by her knowledge and her charm—and her ability to fuse the two made her a true commodity. And I didn't mind being there to support her, with nothing to offer except my presence. It was what she wanted. It was what she needed. She asked for little in return now, but eventually she'd have to want me to be something more than just a travel companion who genuinely laughed at jokes she told rooms over and over and gazed at her lovingly from a seat in the front rows. What if by then it was too late for me to achieve anything of significance? It hit me that toiling away like this, semester after semester, had gotten me nowhere. It was also turning me incredibly dull and unimaginative. It was astonishing that it had taken this long for me to realize I was going to have to take a stand, once and for all. Do something that couldn't be undone. That's what my life with Izzy was, since the moment we first met. What we'd done together had been—and would always be—consequential for that very reason. None of it could be taken back. Not easily, anyway. All this time here, all this shiftlessness, all this buffoonery, I'd been doing nothing more than decathecting from a job that was never truly meant for me. I didn't really want to teach. I never had. What I needed to do was
learn
! My adjunct comp instructor sentence had come to a syntactic full stop.

And Schultz confirmed it with what she told me. I'd asked about the summer classes. Her tiny, hard eyes bulged. Then her face flooded with heat.

“We have nothing for you, Peter, I'm sorry.”

“What about the fall?” I asked.

“Those course assignments, as you know, have yet to be made, to be approved of, there are budgetary constraints, grad students who need to have teaching assistantships as part of their tuition waivers . . .”

The equanimity I'd been convincing myself I was experiencing throughout this meeting all at once fell away. “When were you going to tell me?” I asked, half angry, half brokenhearted.

“We were going to distribute memos at the end of the semester.” She paused. “Peter, it wasn't—it isn't—personal. The economy has been going through some rough times. This is a temporary situation. Maybe the best thing for everyone is if you took a furlough.”

She pressed her thin lips together. Her eyes decamped for the back of the office door. I wondered if she'd arranged to have someone escort me out. But nobody came. It was just the two of us, employer, so to speak, and employee, so to speak.

“You are such a piece of shit, Shelley.”

“Don't you dare—I still am—”

“You only care about yourself, about making sure your stupid sections are covered. Admit it. You weren't going to say anything because you knew I'd walk out of here and you didn't want to have to trouble yourself with finding a sub for the rest of the semester.”

“You're right about one thing,” she said evenly. She now looked at the computer screen, as though reading lines she'd prepared ahead of time for a situation exactly like this. “I'm going to have to find a substitute to cover your sections for the remainder of the term. And you're right about something else: You're walking out of here, and, if I can have anything to do with it, you'll never be back. You're fired, Peter.”

I didn't even bother to clear out my desk. Berkal could keep all the tchotchkes masquerading as instruments of education. I'd never again have any use for the dry erase markers, pens, and pencils. The campus organization–sponsored mouse pads, the
UIC Flame
articles that had turned from newsprint to parchment that I'd clipped and had hanging, they were just disparate and hollow relics of my meaningless tenure here. I didn't even want to retrieve my Apple Holler mug, the one I got with Izzy on the way back from Kohler. It had been irreclaimably tainted by its employment here. Just like I was. I took the elevator down nineteen floors without it stopping to pick up anyone else. I revolved through the University Hall door, exiting the Waffle for the last time. As I bounded away from the lecture centers on the quad, I felt like I was reclaiming essential, lost pieces of myself. The more distance I got between the blurry academic persona I'd been freed of and the bon vivant I was now, the more it seemed liked the future was coming into focus—though I had no idea yet where I was headed. To trumpet my “furlough,” I dropped my Orwellian laminated identification badge and the unduly cheerful lanyard to which it was clamped into a garbage can at the corner of Harrison and Morgan.

I stopped in a Greek diner. Nobody was at the host stand to greet me. I slid into the first of a long row of empty booths. After receiving a cup of black coffee I hadn't yet ordered, I took out my cell phone to ring Izzy. I had to tell her, right? I dialed. But before the call connected, I hit END three times in rapid succession.