Authors: Sandra Novack
Dobbin says nothing. He knows it’s unfair to hold three degrees, to be well-read and to have two chapbooks in press, only to have that translate to a job teaching composition and rhetoric on a limited-term basis, expendable at a moment’s notice. He knows Julia could have done better in terms of a career, had they not had to negotiate the two-body problem so common in academia. And he knows that in this small, conservative town of only a few thousand people, there is so little for her here, only one or two in the department who dabble in poetry, Poe being one of them. To reach people who share even a remote sense of her interests, she must commute more than an hour and a half to the nearest city. Over the past year, she’s become uncommunicative with many, and Dobbin most of all. She’s buried her head in books, hidden herself away. Though he can’t blame Poe for any of this, he also can’t help but feel that Poe has probably been saving up for this moment for years.
Dobbin places the gas mask on the bed and picks up a sweater that has fallen to the floor. He says: “I’m sorry.”
She pauses, shakes her head, adjusts. She wears an overly
formal expression that she reserves for moments of hurt. He watches as she sorts through a stack of photographs, some old letters—the exquisite line of her hands, the ring she still wears—shaking.
Dobbin gets up, reaches out to comfort her, but she jerks away. It is an act so jarring, so unfamiliar that it makes him cry. “Julia,” he says.
“Don’t,” she warns. “Just don’t.” She carries a box out of their bedroom. Downstairs, in the kitchen, she pauses and looks around as if she has forgotten something. Dobbin wonders if, after she leaves, she misses these still-familiar rooms. But perhaps she doesn’t allow herself to dwell on their home, or their years together, or him. Perhaps she’s already relegated them to the annals of history, closed chapters, done deals. Perhaps she’ll simply return to Poe’s and decide that this entire separation can be the source of inspiration, a reason to write more: sestinas, ghazals, sonnets. Regardless, he knows that soon he will be alone. He will chastise himself for not reaching to touch her again, now, if only he knew what to say.
After Julia leaves, Dobbin mulls over history papers on WWI and anti-German propaganda. One of his criminally smart students writes that the war started over a domestic disturbance. He writes down, in response, yes.
O
F COURSE
by Friday everyone on campus has heard that Julia’s moved out. It is a small college in a small town of southerners who still view outsiders with suspicion, a polite distance, and interest. Both Dobbin and Julia are known, even by strangers. This fact alone has singularly unnerved Julia, who can’t even go so far as the grocery store without bumping into a colleague,
or a parent of a student, or, worse, the students themselves. It is uncomfortable for her when a student takes that moment to ask about his grade on the final paper. “It hardly matters,” Julia once said. She already knew by the end of classes who would pass and who would fail and so instead spent finals week at the kitchen table, not grading but folding research papers into origami shapes of birds and frogs and other woodland animals. If later at the grocery store the well-meaning student would mention that he never received a graded final, Julia, slightly mortified, might nod vaguely and say, “Right, the turtle. Good job.”
Now, of course, there is a new wave of speculation, about Dobbin, about Annie. Almost everyone in Dobbin’s department seems bent on disclosure, though so few publicly acknowledge him or what has happened in any real way. The departmental secretaries exchange knowing looks, their suspicions about Dobbin’s affair finally confirmed. To compensate, Dobbin has avoided prolonged conversations with both the secretaries and his colleagues. He has walked around this week in a strange, comforting haze of denial. He generally operates at a hurried pace, often exchanging quick pleasantries before slipping into class or retreating to his office. Today, though, Clint Barron, the department chair, takes Dobbin aside to ask if his “situation” is going to be a problem. He hints that, if so, Julia is on a limited-term contract and he might be able to speak to the English chair. “Pull some strings,” Clint tells him, nodding affably, though Dobbin knows Clint is concerned and doesn’t want any prolonged scenes. Dobbin stops him before he can go any further. “It’s not a problem,” he assures Clint. “We’ll work it out.”
In the safety of his office, Dobbin unloads his shoulder bag, his laptop and papers, and then walks to the window. His gaze travels across the wave of still-tanned students that descend
from the steps of the Humanities Building and out across the once verdant but now blanched quad. A few students talk idly on cell phones; a group of boys gather for a game of Frisbee. Eventually he catches sight of Poe’s skinny, restless form. Though Dobbin is tall and paunchy, though he has thinning brown hair, he still feels more stately and attractive than Poe. Dobbin feels Poe dresses like an indigent—a wrinkled shirt only half-tucked into shabby-looking pants, no belt, an old leather satchel strapped across his chest, long hair despite the advancement of middle age. Poe stops and extinguishes his cigarette before entering the Humanities Building. There, on the third floor, he and Julia have the benefit of proximity, his office just down the hall from hers. Julia once confessed that she and Poe often mull over scansions at lunch, or discuss Simic’s latest collection, share new work. It seems to him no more right or wrong than things he’s done with Annie.
A wave of bitter jealousy comes over him, and Dobbin calls the adjunct office for what feels like the hundredth time this week. Once again he’s greeted by the palsied voice of one of the female instructors, who tells him Julia is unavailable. She urges him not to come over like he did earlier that week. No one really wants another scene—Dobbin calling down the hall after Julia, her ditching into the bathroom, his shouts to her increasingly urgent. Disgusted, he hangs up the phone. He feels hotly embarrassed at how public his life has suddenly become.
Dobbin knows—he believes—he should be able to place the matter of his marriage into perspective. Given all of history, the fallout of love could only be seen as a small tear in the fabric of American life. Compared to problems experienced by countless others—war, famine, genocide, poverty—his problems are insignificant. Still they are
his
, and as such they are amplified in
his mind and heart to catastrophic proportions. He tells himself that if the world at large can recover from war and terror, if the earth can replenish itself after nuclear fallouts and mass extinction, then surely he, with his personal disasters, can recover, too. But who knows how to decode the covert gestures of love? He feels certain Julia remembered their own complicated history—the accumulation of it, the sheer mass of days and years—in that moment she held up the mask. Her face contorted when she saw it. He wonders: Isn’t contortion practically synonymous with love?
I
T IS CLOSE
to noon when Annie arrives at Dobbin’s office, holding takeout from the sandwich place downtown. She knocks, peers in, and gives Dobbin a friendly, slightly tactical look, as if she’s trying to gauge his mood in the wake of Julia’s leaving, measuring it against her own feelings regarding this development, the new possibilities inherent in it for them. A more recent hire, Annie is twenty-eight and pear-shaped. Her broad, attractive face is framed by a mass of blond curls. Her dark eyes are always alert, probative. Dobbin serves as her faculty mentor, and that is how their friendship, and then affair, began—going out to lunch to discuss teaching and research expectations, questions about student advising, that sort of thing.
She sets the takeout bag on his desk and sits in the chair across from him. Her tone is gentle, teasing, when she says, “I’ve been sent on a reconnaissance mission.”
“Barron?”
“Now what
did
that man say, exactly? Something about a line of demarcation being crossed among the tenured and untenured. He was very concerned about boundaries, so I guess
my three-year review is sunk. Did you ever notice that Barron looks like George C. Scott?”
“Everyone says that.” Dobbin leans back, regards her. “Anyway, I doubt you’re sunk,” he says. He knows that this type of fraternizing with colleagues is generally frowned upon, but it’s also understood that among like-minded people, things frequently can and do, often, happen. It’s only an issue when students are involved—that’s when you have to worry. That’s when your job is really put on the line. He says, “Barron is probably jealous he didn’t think to do it first.”
“A compliment,” she says, and unfolds her napkin. Her silk blouse brushes against the desk. “Well, thanks.”
Dobbin knows she wants to talk about them, but the truth is, he doesn’t quite know what to do with Annie. She’s been his undoing, yes, but he doesn’t, after six months of their affair, actually see them together in any long-term sort of way, either.
He eats in silence, while Annie talks about changes to the curriculum that the provost proposed, the addition of new classes for history majors. She’s spirited, her hands gesturing as she speaks, yet however much she motions, however much her facial expressions change from willful to earnest to amused, her dark eyes never veer from him, as if she were locked and loaded, ready for whatever he might say.
And though he wants to play along now, he finds the situation a bit contrived, too—Annie’s visit, the casual way she talks to him, as if nothing has happened this week at all. It irritates him, really, how she believes she has the upper hand in all this. And she does, in a way: She has nothing to lose.
“You okay?” she asks finally, after she exhausts her small talk. “About Julia?”
“I’m fine.”
“Rumor has it she hasn’t taught her Tuesday or Thursday class.
That’s
not going over well. Maybe she’s been busy with the move?” Annie bites her sandwich and waits for his response. She watches him with an effortless concentration that he finds alarming.
He feels suddenly defensive, angry. Annie has no right, he reasons, to ask about Julia’s state of mind, or emotions. He reclines in his chair. He says, “What is it about southerners and gossip?”
“Southerners?”
she asks, amused. “Everyone talks, Dobbin. Southerners hardly have the corner on the market. Everyone’s entitled to their opinions.”
“Talk, then,” he says. He tosses the remains of his barbeque sandwich in the trash, wipes his hands with a napkin. “What do I care? You should know we’re working on things. Talking things out.”
Her voice becomes falsely appeasing. She smiles in an indecipherable way. “Good,” she says. “That’s all anyone wants.”
He wants to tell Annie not to obfuscate things, not to confuse sex—or the sometimes false sense of intimacy that being naked and next to someone can create—with love. When they started sleeping together they both defined the terms, as well as the situation. They were attracted to each other, plain and simple. They met in parks and at Annie’s apartment, stripped each other bare, took pleasure in those few, stolen moments. Perhaps for a few weeks or a month maybe, Dobbin fancied himself in love, but there was never a time he indulged being without his wife, never a time he thought he wouldn’t in the end stay with Julia. Julia, after all, was substantial in his life, solid. She was there every night when he went to sleep, there in the mornings when he woke up, there at the table eating breakfast or dinner
with him. Though Annie could be spirited, fun, eager in bed, it was still Julia who remained a permanent fixture in his life. He could imagine a time before Annie. He couldn’t imagine a time without Julia. Finally, he says, “What happened between us was a mistake.”
Annie holds his gaze. Her eyes are penetrating. “I know,” she says. “But it did happen, so there’s no point in acting like it didn’t. There’s certainly no point in ignoring me. And anyway, let’s not forget. It
was
fun.”
T
ELLING ANNIE IT
might be fun was an error in judgment; Dobbin realizes this now. But they had spent so much time together and seen each other so regularly that he started to indulge the possibility of an affair. When they first began having lunch a year ago, Annie was so freshly idealistic, so opinionated and comfortable with herself. She was easy to talk to in a way that Julia hadn’t been, and he sensed that Annie found his experience and age refreshing, perhaps even attractive. He’d give her advice on how she might win more departmental favor for tenure, what high-profile committees she might join that would garner notice. If she found his discussion of pedagogy or departmental politics to be too pedantic, she never let on. She’d tilt her head, listening intently as Dobbin discussed what amounted to petty departmental gossip, old stories and rivalries, and she’d give him her undivided attention. They’d talk about the antebellum period—Annie’s area of specialty—and localized regional conflicts, Confederate grave sites that were still, after nearly 150 years, being unearthed in the region. She’d ask him questions about the Great War and Germany. Sometimes when she’d talk she’d absentmindedly touch his hand in a tantalizing, pleasant
way, and she’d let her hand rest there a moment longer than she should.
After a time, their lunch conversations turned into a little window shopping or a walk in the park afterward. He savored those walks, the smell of new leaves, the clouds that stretched thin above them. Annie would speak pleasantly and keep a brisk pace. She confessed that she was trying to shed twenty pounds in time for her old college friend’s summer wedding. Julia knew about the outings, of course, but Dobbin perhaps made light of how often such things occurred. Then, on a drizzly afternoon walk when Annie needed to pick up a textbook she’d forgotten, Dobbin walked her to her apartment near campus. If he was flirting, he wasn’t doing it strenuously. He simply joked that he hadn’t stepped foot in another woman’s place in years, and Annie casually replied that it might be fun to have an affair with a married man. “For the experience of it, only, of course,” she said. How that one statement and his teasing response that
Yes, for the experience of it, it might be fun
turned into a tryst Dobbin scarcely wishes to remember. But she came close to him then, chin upturned, and everything in the moment seemed to reduce itself to her intense look of desire. He’s ashamed when he thinks of how he delighted in Annie’s body—her rounded stomach and breasts, her full bottom dimpled in the dim afternoon light. There was nothing else—not Julia, not his marriage—to consider. Afterward, he considered everything, of course.