Scandalous

Chapter 8

The faculty parking lot on a Friday afternoon had its own particular energy — the collective exhale of a building full of people who had been professionally composed all week and were now, incrementally, allowing themselves to stop. Nathan crossed the lot with his bag over one shoulder and his thermos in his hand, the late afternoon sun hitting the rows of cars at an angle that turned the windshields into mirrors, the whole lot briefly, blinding gold.

He had his keys out and was two steps from his car when he heard the footsteps.

"Kingston."

He turned. Daniel Holt was crossing the lot at a pace that suggested he'd been watching for Nathan to leave and had timed his exit accordingly — unhurried but deliberate, the walk of a man with something specific to say.

"Holt," Nathan said.

Daniel fell into step beside him, then stopped when Nathan stopped at his car, leaning against the neighboring vehicle with the comfortable ease of a man who had never once in his life considered whether leaning on something was appropriate. "So," he said. "Dinner."

Nathan set his bag in the trunk. "What about it."

"I've been asking you about it for a week and a half and you've been doing the thing where you say you'll check the schedule and then you don't check the schedule because you don't need to check the schedule, you just don't want to say no outright."

Nathan looked at him. "That's a very accurate description."

"I know." Daniel crossed his arms. "So — Maryanne. Is she coming? Ellen's been asking. She wants to do a proper dinner, not just food, the whole thing. She's already decided on the menu."

Nathan closed the trunk. He thought about Maryanne in the study, the phone against her ear, the closed door, the way she'd looked at him for half a second when he appeared in the doorway and then looked away. He thought about the dinner that would involve sitting across a table from two people who were happy in the quiet, functional way that people are happy when they have chosen correctly and maintained it, and the particular discomfort of performing a version of his marriage that would require more energy than he had available on a weekend.

"She's deep in a deadline at the moment," he said, which was true. "Probably not this weekend. I'll let you know when things ease up on her end."

Daniel looked at him for a moment with the expression of a man who had known Nathan long enough to hear what wasn't being said and had decided, for now, not to say so. He nodded. "Fair enough."

He uncrossed his arms. "What about you, though? If she's working all weekend — what are you doing?"

Nathan opened the car door. "Reading, probably."

"Right." Daniel reached into his jacket pocket and produced a folded piece of paper — actual paper, handwritten, which was so thoroughly Daniel that Nathan almost smiled. "There's a thing tomorrow night. A gathering, more than a party — you know Mike Delaney? Teaches philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona? Does this monthly thing at his house, about fifteen people, everybody talks. Topics change every time." He held out the paper. "This month's agenda — you want to see what you'd be walking into?"

Nathan took it. Unfolded it. Scanned the list.

Social media and the commodification of identity. Political polarization in institutional spaces. The relevance of nineteenth-century literature in contemporary discourse.

He stopped at the last one.

Daniel, who was watching him, said, "Yeah. I thought that one might get you."

Nathan folded the paper. He stood by the open car door and thought about the weekend as it currently existed in his mind — two days shaped around Maryanne's closed study door and his own devices and the Thai place two miles away and the particular texture of a house that didn't quite feel like his yet. He thought about fifteen people in a room talking about things worth talking about. He thought about the last time he'd had a conversation that required him to actually think rather than simply respond.

He looked at Daniel.

"What time?" he said.

Daniel's expression did not change, but something in it settled — the quiet satisfaction of a man whose plan has worked. "Seven. I'll text you the address." He pushed off the car he'd been leaning on. "Bring something to drink. Mike's taste in wine is genuinely criminal."

He walked back toward the building. Nathan watched him go, then got in the car and sat for a moment with the folded piece of paper on the passenger seat.

The relevance of nineteenth-century literature in contemporary discourse.

He started the engine.

The house was quiet when he got home.

Not the phone-call quiet of the night before — a different quiet, the settled kind, the kind that meant Maryanne had graduated from working to whatever came after working on a Friday, which usually involved the sofa and the wine and something on her laptop that wasn't the manuscript. He found her there when he came in — silk robe, bare feet, a glass of red this time rather than white, which was a Friday-night escalation he had learned to read as a signal that the workweek was, in her own assessment, over.

She looked up when he came in. "You're late."

"Talked to Daniel in the parking lot." He set his bag down. "He's having people over tomorrow night. A social gathering — literature, philosophy, that kind of thing. I told him I'd go."

She looked at him with the expression of a woman doing a rapid calculation of whether this required her to have an opinion. "Fine," she said, and looked back at her laptop.

He went to the kitchen. Made himself a sandwich with bread, ham, and cheese he'd bought on Thursday, which represented the most substantive grocery shop either of them had managed since arriving, ate it standing at the counter, and went upstairs to read.

Later — later being the imprecise hour that existed after Maryanne came to bed, after the wine and whatever she'd been watching had run their course and she had moved with the unsentimental practicality of the reliably drunk through the stages of undressing and climbing in — she reached for him in the dark.

He recognized the reach. He had learned its specific quality — the reach that wasn't toward him but at him, the distinction being whether the other person was present in the reaching or simply in motion. He lay still for a moment. Then he turned toward her because that was what he did, because the body has a logic the mind sometimes cannot override.

She pulled herself on top of him with the slow, wine-heavy ease of a woman who had decided this was what the evening required and had no particular interest in whether the decision had been mutual. She moved the way she always moved — with the focused, slightly glassy attention of someone operating entirely within their own experience, adjusting and settling for her own comfort, her breath coming in the patterns that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with herself. He kept his hands at her hips, not because it felt like anything, but because the alternative was keeping them at his sides, which felt worse somehow — more honest than he was prepared to be about what this had become.

He looked at the ceiling.

She finished with the same abbreviated efficiency as before — a sharp sound, a release, a long exhale. Then she rolled off him, pulled the sheet up, and was asleep within ten minutes with the uncomplicated speed of someone who had done exactly what they came for and had no outstanding business.

He lay in the dark.

He didn't move for a long time.

The ceiling of the bedroom was smooth plaster, pale in the dark, offering nothing. Nathan stared at it with the particular focus of a person whose mind is too loud to sleep and too tired to do anything productive with the noise.

He thought about his life.

Not in the dramatic sense — not with the sweeping, cinematic self-pity he would have found embarrassing and that Maryanne would have found contemptible. In the quiet, practical sense of a man doing an accounting. Thirty-five years. One marriage. One city traded for another. One career abandoned for one he had not planned for. The sum of a series of choices that had seemed reasonable at the time and that had produced, in aggregate, this: a house he didn't know yet, a bed that felt borrowed, a woman asleep beside him who had used him and was now, by all available evidence, satisfied.

He thought about Maryanne's third novel.

It had been her second that had broken her — not in any public sense, not in any way that anyone outside their apartment in Cambridge would have seen. But he had seen it. He had watched her sit at her desk for four months producing nothing, watched the silence behind her study door go from productive to punishing, watched her drink earlier and earlier in the evenings and talk less and less until the talking had essentially stopped. And he had done — what he had done. He had sat across from her at the kitchen table and asked questions, not gentle questions but real ones, the kind that required her to think out loud rather than retreat further in. He had read her drafts at two in the morning and told her what was working and, more usefully, what wasn't, and why, in the specific language of someone who understood the construction of a sentence and its relationship to the sentences around it. He had given her — without being asked, without expecting anything back — the thing that had been blocking her. The structural insight that had unlocked the third act. The realization that the problem wasn't the writing but the ending she'd been aiming for, which was false, and that she knew it was false, and that fixing it required her to be braver than she was currently being.

She had fixed it. She had finished the book. It had debuted at number four on the Times list and she had thanked her editor and her agent and her readers in the acknowledgments and had not mentioned him.

He had told himself, at the time, that this was fine. That he hadn't done it for credit. That love — or what he'd understood love to be, at that point in his life — didn't operate on a ledger system, and that keeping score was a smallness he didn't want to participate in.

He still believed that, technically.

What he also believed, now, in the dark, with the specific clarity that comes at one in the morning when you are lying in the bed of a marriage you no longer recognize — was that he had given her the best thing he had and she had used it and moved on, and that somewhere in the process of doing that, she had also moved on from him, and that he had not realized this until significantly after the fact.

No point dwelling on the past, mate, he thought, in the voice he used when he was being genuinely short with himself — clipped, no sentiment. Can't change any of it.

He exhaled.

He shifted in the bed, careful not to disturb the sleeping figure beside him, and looked at the window. The curtains were thin and the Pasadena night pressed through them in a pale blue wash, the ambient light of a city that never fully stopped.

He let his mind go where it went.

It went, without particular permission, to the stack of essays he'd marked on Thursday night. To the one he'd read last, deliberately, because he'd known from the first page that it was going to be the one that required the most time — not because it was difficult to evaluate but because it was genuinely good, the kind of good that required a different quality of attention. The kind of essay that made reading it feel like a conversation rather than an assessment.

He had read it twice.

He thought about that. He had read it twice because the first time through he'd been looking for where it would lose the thread, the way even strong student essays tend to lose the thread somewhere in the middle, and it hadn't. It had held from the opening argument all the way through to the final paragraph, which was precise and original and ended on a note that he had sat with for a moment before moving on.

He doesn't want Daisy. He wants the feeling he had before he knew what Daisy actually was.

She had said it in class and she had written it more fully and she had been right both times, and there was a particular pleasure in encountering a mind that had arrived at a correct thing independently and without assistance, the pleasure of a craftsman recognizing good work.

He had been tempted — genuinely tempted, in the most professionally straightforward sense of the word — to ask her to stay after class. Not for any reason that required examination. Simply because it had been a very long time since he'd had an intellectual conversation that matched his own level of engagement, and because the essay had suggested that she was capable of that conversation, and because he missed it, the specific quality of talking about a book with someone who had actually read it.

He hadn't asked. He had made the small, sensible decision not to, because singling out a student for extended individual attention in an after-school context was the kind of thing that required a clear and legitimate pedagogical justification, and I enjoyed your essay and would like to discuss it was not, in the current professional climate, a sufficient one. Not without raising questions he had no interest in raising.

He had given her the nod. He had said what he'd said at her desk — quietly, correctly, briefly — and he had moved on.

That was appropriate. That was exactly what it should have been.

He turned onto his side.

Beside him, Maryanne breathed with the even rhythm of the genuinely asleep — no performance in it, no awareness of him, simply a body doing what bodies do when they are finished with the day.

He closed his eyes.

He thought about Wuthering Heights. About what he was going to do with it in the next few weeks — how far he was going to push the class on Heathcliff, on whether obsession was a form of love or its corruption, on what Brontë was actually saying about the thing we call devotion and the violence it can carry.

He thought about who in the room would find that question genuinely interesting and pursue it honestly rather than performing an answer.

He already knew.

He stopped thinking about it.

He slept.