Scandalous

Chapter 2

The morning arrived the way all first days do — with the particular cruelty of an alarm set earlier than the body is ready for.

Nathan was up at six, showered and dressed by six-forty, standing in the kitchen with a coffee he was drinking too fast while the house around him made the subtle sounds of a house that doesn't know you yet. The pipes. The refrigerator's low hum. The way the morning light came through the kitchen window at an angle that was going to take some getting used to.

Maryanne was still asleep. He didn't wake her.

He drove to Crestwood through the early Pasadena streets with the radio off and the windows cracked, the September air already carrying that particular California warmth that felt like a promise the day hadn't earned yet. He arrived twenty minutes early, parked in the faculty lot, and sat in the car for a moment looking at the school's main building — the ivy, the flagpole, the immaculate geometry of it all — with the expression of a man who has made a decision he intends to see through, whatever it costs.

He got out of the car and went inside.

Room 214 was exactly as he'd left it on Thursday.

Nathan set his leather bag on the desk, took out his copy of The Great Gatsby — their first text, eight weeks, he had plans for it — and set it on the corner where he could reach it without looking. He uncapped his thermos, poured a coffee, and stood at the window for a moment looking down at the quad while the school filled gradually with the sound of students arriving.

He heard them before he saw them. That specific frequency of adolescent noise — the sharp laughter, the sneaker-squeak on polished floors, the rolling tide of conversations that mattered enormously to the people having them and would be entirely forgotten by Thursday. He had been around classrooms long enough not to find it grating. There was something almost honest about it. These were people who hadn't learned yet to pretend their feelings were smaller than they were.

He turned from the window when the first students began appearing in the doorway.

They filed in the way students always filed in on the first day — assessing the room, assessing him, choosing seats with the strategic instincts of people who understood that where you sat determined what kind of year you were going to have. The front rows filled with the ambitious ones, the hand-raisers, the students who had already decided this class would be useful to them. The middle rows absorbed the comfortable majority who would do the work and cause him no particular trouble. He appreciated them for this.

He watched the back of the room.

A broad-shouldered boy arrived talking loudly about something that had happened over the summer and sat in the center like he owned it. A girl near the window had already opened a different book — something with a library sticker on the spine — and was reading it with the focused calm of someone who had decided this class was not currently her problem.

The door opened again.

Two girls came in together — one of them laughing at something, bright and immediate, curly-haired, the kind of person who arrived in a room like she'd already decided she liked it. The other behind her, quieter — not withdrawn exactly, but contained. The way certain people are contained, like they've chosen how much of themselves to bring into a given space and chosen not very much.

She was wearing the Crestwood uniform. White blouse, dark skirt, black tights. She had dark hair pushed back without much investment in the result, green eyes that moved across the room with the unimpressed efficiency of someone doing a quick inventory, and a mouth set in a neutral line that wasn't unfriendly so much as uncommitted. Dark eyeliner. A copy of The Great Gatsby already in her hand, the pages visibly annotated.

She sat in the back left corner.

Her friend dropped into the seat beside her and immediately started saying something that made the dark-haired girl's mouth twitch at the corner. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one, maybe, if you were paying attention.

Nathan looked away and checked the clock. Thirty seconds to the bell.

He stood up from his desk.

"My name is Mr. Kingston," he said, when the room had settled. "I'm going to spare you the speech about how this year will challenge and reward you in equal measure. You've heard it. I've given it. Neither of us needs to do that today."

A few people in the front row laughed. He didn't.

"What we're going to do instead is find out what you know." He held up his copy of Gatsby. "Some of you have read this. Some of you read the SparkNotes. Some of you looked at the cover and formed a vague opinion. All of that is fine. I want to know where you actually are." He set the book down. "So. Tell me what this book is about."

Silence. The front-row students shifted in their seats, running the familiar calculation of whether answering first made you look eager or competent.

"Anyone."

"It's about the American Dream," said the boy in the center of the room, with the authority of someone who had heard this in a previous class and filed it away for exactly this situation.

"Is it," Nathan said. Not a question. He waited.

More silence.

"It's about wanting something you've already lost."

The voice came from the back left corner. Not loud. Not performing. Just there, the way a fact is just there.

Nathan looked at her. She was looking at her copy of the book, one finger resting on an open page.

"Go on," he said.

She looked up then, met his gaze with that direct, unhurried quality, and said, "The American Dream reading is correct but it's also the least interesting thing about the novel. What Fitzgerald is actually writing about is the impossibility of recovering something the moment you reach for it. Gatsby doesn't want Daisy. He wants the feeling he had before he knew what Daisy actually was. The green light works because you can only want it from a distance. The moment you reach it, it moves."

The room was quiet.

Nathan held her gaze for a moment. "What's your name?"

"Shae Madison."

"Have you read this before, Miss Madison?"

"Twice," she said. "Once in eighth grade and once last summer because I wanted to see if I'd read it wrong the first time."

"Had you?"

She considered this with the seriousness of someone who had actually thought about it. "Partially."

He almost said something further — almost, because there was something in the precision of her thinking that deserved more than a first-day passing remark — but he caught himself, nodded once, and turned back to the board. "That's the direction we'll be going," he said to the room. "Not the surface reading. The one underneath it."

He heard, from the back of the room, the very faint sound of her friend whispering something. He didn't catch the words. He didn't need to.

The rest of the day passed the way first days do — the same essential performance repeated across six class periods, adjusted slightly for each room's specific energy. By the time his last class cleared out at three-fifteen, Nathan was doing the quiet arithmetic of the truly tired, calculating the distance between where he was and his coffee thermos and whether it was worth it.

He was erasing the board when the knock came.

"Still alive?"

Nathan turned. Leaning in the doorway was a man around his own age — sandy-haired, affable, with the relaxed confidence of someone who had found his place and settled into it without too much drama. Daniel Holt. History teacher. The reason Nathan was standing in Room 214 at all.

They had met during Nathan's third year at Harvard, in a seminar on twentieth-century political rhetoric that neither of them had taken for any reason except a scheduling conflict. Daniel was American, Massachusetts-born, with a family that had been sending children to Harvard the way other families sent children to soccer practice — automatically, without much discussion. He had the easy warmth of someone who had never had to try very hard to be liked and had therefore never developed the faint defensiveness that sometimes came with it. Nathan had, against all initial expectation, found him entirely tolerable.

"Survived," Nathan said.

Daniel came in, dropped into a student desk with the casual ease of a man who had been doing exactly this for years, and looked at Nathan with the expression of someone who has successfully pulled off a project and is enjoying the results. "I told you it'd be fine."

"You told me a lot of things."

"And I was right about all of them." Daniel crossed his arms. "Room's good?"

"Room's fine."

"Students?"

Nathan considered. "One of them might actually be worth talking to."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. "First day and you've already found your favorite."

"Don't do that," Nathan said, without particular heat. "She knew Gatsby better than most graduate students I've taught. That's all."

"She?" Daniel's expression was somewhere between amused and carefully neutral.

"She's a student, Daniel. Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

Daniel held up both hands in a gesture of surrender, grinning. "All I was going to say is that it's good. When you find a student like that, it makes the whole year easier." He stood, stretching. "Dinner sometime this week? Bring Maryanne. Ellen's been asking about her."

Nathan said he'd check the schedule. He said it the way people say things they have no intention of following through on, but Daniel either didn't notice or chose not to.

He heard Maryanne before he saw her.

The music was audible from the driveway — something European, something with a lot of piano — and when he opened the front door, he found her on the living room sofa in the particular arrangement of someone who had been there for a while and organized their comfort around a wine glass. She had changed into a silk robe she'd brought from Hartford, her auburn hair loose, reading something on her tablet with the concentrated expression she wore when she was already several glasses in but not ready to acknowledge it.

"How was the first day of school?" she said, without looking up. The question landed with the faint edge she gave most questions — not quite sarcastic, but with the ghost of it, the implication that whatever his answer was, it wouldn't be particularly interesting.

"Fine." Nathan set his bag by the door and moved to the kitchen. "Have you eaten?"

"I had lunch."

"It's seven o'clock, Maryanne."

"And I had a very large lunch." She turned a page. "There's wine open."

"I can see that." He opened the refrigerator, surveyed its limited inventory — they hadn't done a proper shop yet, another thing for the list — and settled for the remnants of takeout from two nights ago. He leaned against the counter and ate it cold.

"Fascinating first day at Crestwood Academy," Maryanne called from the living room.

"I didn't say it was fascinating."

"You didn't say anything. That's my point."

He came to the kitchen doorway. She was looking at him now, the tablet face-down on the cushion beside her, the wine glass held with the practiced looseness of a woman who had made herself comfortable and was prepared to be difficult about it.

"One of the students knew her material," he said. "The rest were typical. The faculty seems competent enough. Daniel says hello."

"Lovely Daniel," she said, in a tone that suggested Daniel was not actually lovely. She brought the wine glass to her lips. "So this is our life now. Pasadena. Crestwood Academy. Lovely Daniel and his lovely wife." She looked at him over the rim. "How the Harvard years serve us."

"Don't start."

"I'm not starting anything. I'm observing."

"There's a difference?"

Her eyes narrowed, just slightly. "There is, actually. Though I understand why you'd struggle to identify it." She set the wine glass down with the precise care of someone who has had enough to be less careful than she's trying to appear. "I have a deadline at the end of the month. I told you this before we moved. I need quiet and I need a desk that doesn't wobble and I need not to be talked to about the faculty seeming competent enough like I'm supposed to find that comforting."

"I wasn't trying to comfort you."

"Good. You're not very good at it."

Nathan said nothing. He went back to the kitchen, washed his plate, dried it, put it away. The music from the living room continued its slow, indifferent progression. He stood at the sink for a moment looking at the window above it, his own faint reflection looking back at him from the dark glass.

He heard her get up. The soft sound of bare feet on tile, the whisper of silk.

She appeared beside him — close, closer than they'd been in a while, her body carrying the warm, wine-soft looseness of the evening. She reached past him to set her glass in the sink, and the silk of the robe shifted against him as she did.

He didn't move.

She didn't move away.

Her hand came to his arm — not soft, not apologetic, the grip of a woman who knows what she wants and has decided to take it without the formality of asking. She turned him with it, and when he looked at her she had that expression she got sometimes — sharp beneath the haze, wanting but not warm, the look of someone claiming something rather than asking for it.

She kissed him without preamble. Sloppy and wine-loose, her lips carrying the sour-sweet heat of the bottle she'd been working through since before he got home. She tasted of Sauvignon Blanc and something sharper underneath — the chemical edge of a woman who had been drinking steadily for hours rather than enjoying herself. She smelled of it too, that particular sweetness that had curdled over the course of an evening, wrapped around her perfume like something trying to cover what it couldn't quite reach. He turned his face slightly and she chased him with it, one hand fisting in the front of his shirt.

He kissed her back, because the body remembers what the mind is trying to forget, because eleven years is a long architecture and instinct doesn't wait for feeling to catch up.

She pulled him toward the bedroom with the grip of someone collecting something they own.

She shed the robe without looking at him, let it pool on the floor, and climbed onto the bed. She reached for him, pulled him down, and then — with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had already decided how this was going to go — pushed him onto his back and swung herself on top of him. She settled her weight with the proprietary ease of someone arranging furniture to their liking. Not sensual. Practical. She adjusted the angle of things to suit herself, braced her hands against his chest, and began to move.

She directed the entire thing from above — correcting, adjusting, taking — her eyes closed, her breath sharpening at intervals that had everything to do with her own mechanics and nothing to do with Nathan at all. He lay beneath her and stared at the ceiling and understood, somewhere around the midpoint, that it wasn't going to go anywhere for him. The wine was on her breath every time she exhaled above him. Her nails pressed into his chest not out of passion but because she had braced herself and he happened to be the surface available. He said her name once — not with wanting, just to see if she was still somewhere in the room with him.

She didn't respond.

She finished with a sharp, clipped sound, her whole body tensing and then releasing at once, her breath coming out in a long, satisfied exhale. She stilled. A moment passed.

Then she looked down at him with the heavy-lidded, already-retreating expression of someone on the other side of it and losing interest in the logistics. Her gaze moved over him briefly — the glance of someone checking whether a task required anything further.

"You can finish yourself," she said. Flat. No cruelty in it. No warmth either. The simple indifference of a woman who has already gotten what she came for.

She climbed off him, reached down for the robe, wrapped it around herself. She picked up her wine glass from the nightstand — she had brought it with her, of course she had — and walked out of the bedroom without looking back.

Nathan lay on his back in the dark.

He stared at the ceiling. The piano music had stopped somewhere during all of it. The house had settled into the kind of quiet that wasn't peaceful so much as simply empty — the quiet of rooms that don't care what happens in them.

He didn't finish himself. He didn't do anything for a long time. He just lay there in a bed that still didn't feel like his, in a house still learning his name, in a city that owed him nothing, while the night pressed against the windows and asked nothing of him at all.

He thought, without meaning to, about a back left corner. About the way someone could look at a book they'd already read twice and still find something worth returning to.

He stopped thinking about it.

Or he tried.