Second Time Around (5 page)

“The high end of
normal
.”

“Then what is it? Why aren’t I pregnant yet?”

He clenched the sides of his head with both hands. “What do I have to do to escape this conversation?”

“Get over here, rip off my panties, and have your way with me!” She knew she sounded more like a drill sergeant than a dominatrix, but she was too exasperated to care.

He paused, then muttered, “I can’t.”

“You can’t or you won’t?”

His face was still buried in his hands. “I can’t. I won’t. I just … I’m sorry.” He abruptly turned back to his gaming and turned the volume way up.

She crossed her arms over her flimsy bra and listened to the juicy
splat
of alien flesh under fire. “You’re not attracted to me anymore.”

“Stop.” His clipped, authoritative tone now matched hers. “We’re tabling this for tonight.”

“NO! I’m ovulating! If we ‘table’ it, that’s one more month wasted. This is only going to get more difficult.”

“I’d say it’s difficult enough right now.”

“Meaning?”

Jonas shoved his chair back from the desk, stood up, and gave her his full attention. “Meaning which would you rather have: a happy marriage with no kids or a crappy marriage and a baby at any cost?”

He stared at her. She stared back.

Finally, she said, “Don’t ask me that unless you want an honest answer.”

He nodded, his expression grim.

“We’ve been planning this for years. We specifically chose
this house because it’s in the best school district in Albany. All the money we’ve spent, all the doctors and the hormone injections and the medications and the time. And you want to just quit.”

“What I want is to start considering other options. We don’t have to keep going through this, month after month.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“Why are you so dead set against adoption?”

“I’m not
against
it. But I want to experience pregnancy and give birth. I want my body to do what it’s supposed to do. I want to stop feeling like such a failure.”

He stared at her, clearly mystified. “At the end of the day, we’ll have a child. The biological details don’t matter. Would it really be so bad to miss out on morning sickness and labor pains?”

Anna threw up her hands. “You’re right. A child is a blessing, no matter what. That’s irrefutable logic.”

“I know. So why are you crying?”

“I’m not,” she lied, turning her face away. “Are you really saying you’ve given up all hope we’ll ever conceive?”

“Yes.” He set his jaw. “It’s time to get real and move on. Look at you, Anna. You’re running on empty.”

She nodded, swiping at her eyes.

He sat back down at the computer. “Both of us need a break. At least, I do.”

Anna froze. “What kind of break?”

Jonas shrugged.

“Physical? Emotional? What kind of break?” Her voice broke.

He hung his head. “I don’t know. But you have to make a choice, because I can’t keep going like this.”

She left him in the den, swapped her lingerie for
sweatpants and a T-shirt, and retreated to the kitchen. She flipped through her cookbooks for the most labor-intensive recipe she could find, some impossibly complex confection that would demand all her concentration.

The next few hours were spent mixing and whisking and doling out ingredients in precisely measured quantities. She was only dimly aware of Jonas’s good night and the closing of the bedroom door. She soaked up the silence with sugar and spice, and before dawn broke, she left a perfectly executed mint parfait filled with chocolate mousse in the refrigerator along with a note on which she’d scribbled a Shakespearean ultimatum:

C
ait found out about the other woman quite by accident. She was sequestered in her office on campus, where she’d intended to spend the afternoon compiling a list of journal articles to put on reserve at the college library, but she’d gotten slightly sidetracked. Her work papers had been pushed aside and her coffee had gone cold while she spent two hours making and breaking promises to indulge in “just one more chapter” of
The Captain of All Pleasures
.

Who needed Internet dating when you could have adventure on the high seas and sizzling Victorian sex at the flip of a page?

She startled when she heard the murmur of approaching
voices outside her door. She shoved the novel into her desk drawer and snatched up an article on literary criticism. No one knew about her secret vice of paperback romances, and no one ever would. Especially not her elitist ex.

Cait recognized the voices in the hall as belonging to professors Helen Nam (Renaissance studies) and Ritu Radhakrishnan (postmodern lit).

“How about that guest lecturer from Cal State?” Helen was saying.

“Well, I’m not sure about her academic credentials,” Ritu replied, “but I can certainly see why the old guard flew her out and gave her the grand tour.”

“Moll Flanders in a pantsuit,” Helen scoffed. “I’m pretty sure her curriculum vitae isn’t the only thing she’s padding!”

They both laughed. “Exactly,” Ritu said. “Since when does a heaving bosom and an affinity for creative corsetry make anyone an expert on the eighteenth-century novel?”

Cait flung open her door and poked out her head. “What guest lecturer? We hosted an eighteenth-century scholar, and I missed it?”

The snickers and smiles vanished and were replaced with blinks and stammers. Helen wouldn’t even make eye contact.

“No, no,” Ritu said hastily. “Nothing like that. Just a very informal, er, I think my office phone’s ringing.”

Both of them escaped down the hall. Cait listened to the clatter of high heels echoing off the empty corridor and tried to reason away a rising swell of panic. Surely her colleagues weren’t deliberately trying to leave her out of the loop. To suspect otherwise would be to suggest department-wide subterfuge and that was just … paranoid.

But, as Jamie was so fond of remarking, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get you.

Cait marched down the stairs toward the all-knowing oracle of truth and wisdom: Penny Powell, the English department secretary.

Penny glanced up from her computer keyboard when she heard Cait approaching, but did not offer her customary wave or chirpy hello. Instead, she ducked her head and resumed typing. Alarm bells clanged in Cait’s head, but she forced herself to remain casual.

“Hey, Penny. Um, I heard that the department had a visitor recently.”

Penny’s gaze slid away from Cait’s and fixed on the jar of consolatory butterscotches she offered to students facing particularly dire circumstances: dismal exam scores, plagiarism charges, revoked graduation eligibility. She tapped her pen against the desktop. “What sort of visitor?”

“Actually, I’m hoping
you
might be able to tell
me
. I just heard Professors Nam and Radhakrishnan discussing an eighteenth-century scholar flown in from California.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Cait’s heartbeat kicked into an uneven gallop. “Is the department planning to hire another early British lit professor?”

Still with the shifty eyes. “I wouldn’t know anything about that, either.”

“Penny, come on. Please!” Desperation won out over dignity, and Cait planted both palms on the secretary’s desk. “You know everything that goes on around here. Why are we flying in scholars from the West Coast?”

Penny pushed her frizzy, honey-colored bangs out of her eyes and regarded Cait with poorly concealed pity. “You’ll have to ask the department chair.” Then she delivered the coup de grâce: She removed the lid from the glass candy jar. “Butterscotch?”

“Oh shit.” Cait raced back up the stairs and rapped on the office door of the department chair.

“Charles. Open up. I know you’re in there.”

She heard the creak of a wooden chair, then the door swung inward to reveal the narrow, ruddy face of her Anglo-fetishist former boyfriend. He did not look happy to see her.

She barged past him and made herself comfy on the battered, corduroy-upholstered armchair next to the overflowing bookcases. “Who, may I ask, is the guest lecturer from Cal State?”

Charles ran his hands back through his thick, dark hair, which he insisted on keeping a few inches too long in the back. “The Arthurian mullet,” Cait had heard Helen Nam call it.

“I suppose you’re referring to Lorelei Alben?” he said.

“I suppose I am.” Cait filed the name away for future cyber-investigation. “What’s her deal and why wasn’t I asked to meet her?”

Charles’s lips thinned into an expression of almost paternal disapproval. From the moment he first met Cait at an academic conference in Chicago, he had adopted an air of authority, and she had gone along with it. He was so confident in his scholarly superiority that she never thought to second-guess him. He was older, he was tenured, and he had his Arthurian mullet and carefully groomed facial hair to bolster his image as a dashing man of letters. At first, it had been refreshing to date a guy who would rather talk about Foucault than football. She’d considered Charles to be her mentor; he had swept her off her feet and helped her land a job at his college.

In retrospect, Cait could see that the problems between them began the day she signed on as his coworker, but things
really got shaky last year, when she initiated the review process for tenure. Suddenly, nothing she did was good enough. He dismissed her research interests as frivolous and lacking in scope. Her class lectures were pronounced “merely adequate.” But she was no longer the impressionable subordinate straight out of grad school. And so, slowly, her view of him changed from worldly and erudite to affected and pedantic. But before she’d worked up the nerve to break things off with him, he’d made his preemptive strike via email.

Cheerio, my ass
.

Charles waited until he had her full attention before he continued speaking. “I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Alben at a symposium in Toronto, and her, ahem,
deal
is that she’s a Ph.D. candidate about to defend her dissertation. She was on campus just before Labor Day weekend; if I recall correctly, you were taking a personal day.”

“I was at a
funeral
.” Cait kicked up her feet and rested them on his bookshelf, watching him flinch as she grazed his treasured French edition of Roland Barthes’s
Criticism and Truth
with the sole of her shoe. “So what exactly are you inviting her out here for?”

“Ms. Alben has authored some groundbreaking articles on feminist themes in Gothic and amatory fiction.”

“It’s interesting that her area of expertise happens to overlap with mine.”

He unfurled his fingers as if tossing a set of imaginary dice. “Yes, well …”

“It’s also interesting that just a few years ago, when I myself was a wide-eyed Ph.D. candidate, you introduced yourself at a similar conference in a similar fashion and suggested I apply for a teaching position here.”

“Are you implying—”

Cait swung her feet back to the floor. “I’m not implying anything, I’m saying it outright: First you dumped me, now you’re trying to replace me with some freshly degreed hottie. You know, I wondered why you ended things so abruptly last semester. I had myself convinced that everything was my fault, that I was too frivolous for someone of your intellectual stature.” She snorted. “But now I see that my
brain
wasn’t the source of your dissatisfaction.”

“I categorically deny and resent that supposition.” Charles pounded his desktop for emphasis. “Please understand, you’ve put the whole department in a difficult position, Professor Johnson.”

“Don’t ‘professor’ me.” Cait rolled her eyes. “We’ve seen each other naked.”

“Very well then, I’ll speak frankly.” He straightened his tie. “We’ve had some concerns about your performance of late.”

“What are you talking about?” She’d received a glowing evaluation at her third-year teaching review in April. “And who’s ‘we’?”

“Well, for one thing, the students feel that you have unrealistic expectations. You do not enjoy a reputation as a generous grader.”

“So what? They complain, but they learn. I’m happy to offer help to anyone who asks, and I’m always trying to innovate fresh new curricula.”

Even the tips of Charles’s ears began to redden. “Yes. About that. I’m afraid we’re going to have to cancel your seminar on the epistolary novel.”

Her jaw dropped. “On what grounds?”

“As of today, only three students have enrolled. But if
you’d like to pick up an extra section of freshman comp, I suppose we could offer you the eight a.m. class.”

“Oh my God.” Cait sat back, reeling. “Let’s cut to the chase here. After everything you’ve put me through, you owe me that much.”

He shuffled a few papers. “Very well. Your fourth-year review is coming up in October, and it’s only fair to warn you that your contract may not be renewed for next year.”