What She Saw... (20 page)

During class time, they'd revert back to teacher and student—well, almost. The visiting professor would do everything in his power to avoid eye contact. But sometimes he'd fail. Sometimes he'd be caught speechless in the middle of his speechifying. Then he'd have to clear his throat and start all over again—as if nothing had happened, even though it clearly had. That's when Phoebe felt the most powerful.

That's when she felt the world was hers, and she was the world. IS IT ANY wonder she almost forgot about the existence of Evelyn Nuñez? The visiting professor rarely mentioned his wife's name except to complain that she stole all his best ideas. (She was a critical theorist herself.) Then the phone rang. It wasn't that early. It wasn't that late. They were still asleep—not for long. Phoebe knew it was Evelyn calling because the voice on the machine said, “Hey, Honey, it's me.” And while the tape rewound, she sat up on her elbows, opened her mouth to speak. She wanted to let Bruce Bledstone know she wasn't half as stupid as she looked. She wanted to tell him that his marriage sounded “pretty convenient.”

She didn't have the nerve.

Somewhere along the way, she'd gotten scared, if not of the visiting professor himself, then of the possibility of losing him. Which is to say, the possibility of saying the one thing that would make him realize that she was more trouble than she was worth. And that he didn't need her the way she thought she needed him. No matter that she'd walked and talked, inhaled and exhaled, before she met him. Without him, she was nothing, no one—that's who she'd become. Or, at least, that's who she thought she'd become—the image of his desire: nothing more, nothing less.

So she just lay there waiting for him to make it better. She waited until she couldn't wait anymore. Then she rolled over onto her side, curled up in a little ball. That's when he called out her name, but she didn't answer. She wasn't that easy. Even shadows have to be cast. He must have understood that. He came toward her then—pressed his nose against her neck, his cock against her ass, and told her she was a very lucky girl, and did she know that—
did she know how lucky she was to have youth
and beauty, among the two most prized commodities in a late-capitalist
economy
? (She wanted to tell him that she didn't know—that she'd rather have had age and experience.)

But that he found her beautiful! It made her sick with pleasure. “You're old and ugly,” she gurgled into her pillow.

But he must have known she was only kidding. (He must have known he had her right where he wanted her.) He ran his hands down the outside of her hips and then across her thighs until they met in the middle and she started to melt. Then he pushed himself back inside. Then she was glad she hadn't said anything stupid. That's how weak she was in the face of sex— not even half as strong as she was at the age of eleven, back when boys were just a side project to be slotted in between scale models and sit-ups.

At the age of twenty, they'd become the centerpiece of her life.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, THEN, when Phoebe did finally broach the subject of Evelyn—one night, one phone call—it was with extreme trepidation. “Shouldn't you tell her about us?” she asked Bruce Bledstone. “I mean, don't you think she deserves to know?”

“Why would I want to punish Evelyn like that,” he asked her back, “when she's not the one who's done anything wrong?”

He had an answer, it seemed, to everything—even “I love you.” That's what she told him in his sweltering arms one freezing, raining day in April. He pushed the hair out of her eyes, told her she was the sweetest thing since brown sugar—even sweeter than saccharine; no contest with NutraSweet. But he couldn't return the sentiment. Not right now. Because “To do so would be to imply a commitment I'm not currently in a position to make,” he said. And he didn't want to mislead her. Not to mention the fact that he wasn't entirely sure what those three words meant, love being, arguably, “the most culturally constructed of all cultural constructs.”

And Phoebe appreciated his concern—his reticence in the face of such lofty matters, his reluctance to make promises he couldn't keep. But it was not okay that she had fallen in love with Bruce Bledstone and that Bruce Bledstone had not fallen in love with her. It didn't seem possible, either. Not while she was the very definition of lovable—never got in his face except when she was,
well, you know.
Then she was a whole lot of face, mouth open wide like a toilet with the seat up. She had that much enthusiasm for life. She was the
joie
in
de vivre.
She left promptly in the morning. She never once insisted on prophylactics. She rarely mentioned the “other woman.” She never even asked if there
were
other women. She was just meek enough to be malleable. But she wasn't so meek that she couldn't take it up the,
well, you know.
She was nice, too.

Then she got mad.

Then she started showing up twenty minutes late for Hegemony 412, if only to make the point that she wasn't just another name on the visiting professor's class list. But the visiting professor would keep lecturing as if she were exactly that— only late for his seminar. It made her so mad that, after class, she'd follow him up the three flights of stairs that led to his office in the colonial mansion so she could ask him if he was planning on giving her an A this semester.
And was that the grade he
thought she deserved for keeping her mouth shut—for not calling his
wife, his friends, the university administration and telling them all he
was a lying piece of shit?

Once upon a time, they'd spoken of politics and art. Sex changed all that; sex turned their gazes inward. Now they talked almost exclusively about themselves and the crimes they had and had not committed at the other's expense.

He'd say, “That's a very hurtful thing to call me.”

He'd say, “I can't understand why you make me out to be so callous.”

Then he'd make a face, clutch his back. (“Excuse me, I was lifting some boxes last night. You know, Phoebe, I'm not as young as I used to be.”)

Then he'd explain his grading policy: “As you know, I'm happy to give all my students A's this semester, provided they complete the necessary course work and contribute regularly to class discussions. I'm not much interested in grades.”

That's when Phoebe hated him the most. She'd hate him so much she'd follow him all the way back to his falling-down house—all the way back to his bed. Because he loved her there if he loved her anywhere. That he loved her nowhere—that their relationship was as much a matter of convenience as his marriage—was a concept she was unwilling to entertain.

“IN LIFE, WE always hurt the people we care the most about.”

That's what Bruce Bledstone told Phoebe one late May afternoon in his bed, in his arms, in his thrall. He was leaving Hoover in a week—returning to the city he always did prefer to the country. And she saw there was no hope. (He'd given her a B+; he said it was less suspicious that way.) And she tried to shut him out. She saw him only three times that summer; wrote him only one accusatory letter; accepted only one plane ticket to the Caribbean resort where he was “interrogating post-colonialism ” while his wife was away in El Salvador visiting family and friends.

She spent the summer waiting tables at Pita Paradise and overidentifying with the torch songs of Patsy Cline.

It was Evelyn Nuñez's arrival on campus the following September of Phoebe's senior year—by strange coincidence, Evelyn had a one-year appointment with Hoover's German studies department—that brought Bruce Bledstone back to life. When Phoebe looked at Evelyn, she saw him. Not that they looked much alike. She was a petite woman with dark eyes and red lips. There was a swoosh of white in her straight black bob. She wasn't what Phoebe was expecting. She seemed way too sexy to get cheated on.

She had no idea who Phoebe was.

Phoebe was hoping she'd find out.

She had this fantasy that the two of them would end up united, if not in love, then at least in revenge. Not that Phoebe had any intentions of confiding in Evelyn Nuñez. She wasn't ready for Bruce Bledstone never to speak to her again. But she didn't see the harm in following his wife around town and around campus, and waiting in the shadows outside her office door. Small talk, sneezes—she was happy for anything. Nothing was fine, too. It was enough to be near her—near the woman Bruce Bledstone “guessed he loved.” (Phoebe guessed she loved her, too.)

She got so far as knocking on Evelyn's office door.

“Come in,” said his wife.

“Professor Nuñez?” Phoebe began. “I was wondering if I could, um, talk to you for a second?”

“Please, sit down,” she said.

So Phoebe sat down. She sat there staring at Evelyn Nuñez, at the crow's feet that flanked the far corners of her eyes, thinking how someday, as impossible as it now seemed, crow's feet would flank her eyes as well. Then she said, “I'm Phoebe Fine, and I just wanted to tell you that I read your article on commodity fetishism in the
Old Left Review—
”

“You mean the
New Left Review.
”

“Right, the
New Left Review.
And I really admired it, and I just wanted to tell you that in person.” She gasped for air.

“Thank you for telling me.” The woman smiled sweetly. And it gave Phoebe hope and made her feel like dirt all at the same time. What if, by virtue of her involvement with her husband, Phoebe was hurting Evelyn every bit as much as Bruce Bledstone was hurting Phoebe? Or was the truth the only culprit amongst them? Phoebe hadn't figured that one out. Bruce Bledstone was of the latter opinion. “Have you seen my new book?” asked Evelyn.

“Not yet,” admitted Phoebe.

“Well, if you're interested in the intersection of Freud and Marx, you might be interested in checking it out. In fact, if you wanted to stop by my house later, I'd be happy to give you a copy. I'm living down on the lake.”

“That's okay, I can buy it in the bookstore,” exclaimed Phoebe, overwhelmed by the inequality of their respective bodies of knowledge.

Because it wasn't merely that she already knew where Evelyn lived; she'd already helped herself to both Evelyn's peppermintflavored toothpaste and Evelyn's henna conditioner. Because it wasn't two weekends before that Bruce Bledstone had arrived in Hoover with the express purpose of visiting them both. He'd spent Thursday and Friday with Evelyn. And then, upon her departure on Saturday for an academic conference, he'd invited Phoebe to spend the remainder of the weekend in Evelyn's house on the lake (he'd told Evelyn he was looking forward to spending a few days by himself in the country unwinding after a stressful week) with the minor proviso that Phoebe bring her own sheets. And Phoebe had accepted the invitation—even consented to bring along her own bedding—though not before ranting and raving for a good half hour about his “complete and utter disregard for other people's feelings.”

Oh, but the truth was more complicated than that. The truth was that Phoebe derived more than a modicum of pleasure from scenes such as those—scenes that made her life seem important, where once it had seemed merely insipid. To think that not-quite-two years ago she'd been sharing a bunk bed with Meredith Bookbinder on the top floor of Delta Nu Sigma, worrying about which baseball hat to escort to the fall formal and what color pumps to wear with her dress! Now she was the student mistress of a renowned professor of hegemony, the subject of graduate students' gossip, the other woman as opposed to
just
some girl.

And what an other woman she was. “I want this,” she'd tell him, and “I want that.” And “Fuck me,” and “Fuck you,” and “Harder,” and “Faster,” and “More.” And she never cried in front of him, never threw up in front of him—not even in the same house as him. She was too busy smoking two cigarettes at once. As if she were not quite human. As if she were made of steel, indurate to barbs and bathos alike.

An iron maiden you got to torture yourself.

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOONS she'd take the Greyhound to the city he always did prefer to the country.

“It's nice to see you,” Bruce Bledstone would greet her at the door of his West Village tenement apartment. But it was increasingly unclear just how nice. “I've got a little work to finish up,” he'd inform her on his way into his study. “There's beer in the fridge.”

“Oh, great, thanks,” she'd say, straining to keep her voice up-beat.

She always looked forward to those weekends.

They were always more romantic in theory than they were in practice.

He'd take his time finishing his work while she sat there flipping through magazines. Then he'd take her out to dinner at one of the fashionable bistros in his neighborhood—one of those places where all the women have long necks and thin noses and toss their heads back when they laugh. And all the men are perfectly unshaven and rest their elbows on the backs of the women's chairs and keep their mouths closed even when they talk. And she'd be sitting there pushing her red snapper filet around its eggplant and bell pepper sauce stifling yawn after yawn born of the grueling, ritualistic workout to which she'd subjected her never thin enough, never hard enough, never invincible enough body in the twenty-four hours preceding such visits. And she'd be trying to think of relevant things to say. And the visiting professor wouldn't be helping out. He'd be sitting there looking like he was just biding time while she dredged up old jokes that had long since lost their punch lines.

He was probably waiting for her to disappear.

In the meantime, he'd take her out for the requisite after-dinner drink. The cigarettes always burned out too quickly. The glasses couldn't be refilled fast enough.