I
t was one of those October days during which it seemed like the middle of the night all day, and that, Shelly supposed, was why she was waking up so disoriented. That, and the bottle of wine.
Where was she? What time was it? Who was sleeping beside her?
Two
bottles of wine?
They’d started drinking after lunch—some tuna filets in olive oil, some tomato slices. First, they’d split the expensive bottle of white, and then the cheap red stuff Shelly kept on hand for cooking. Had they finished both of them?
Truly, Shelly had no idea how much they’d had to drink, but she could still feel the wonderful muscle exhaustion of the sex. Of the
hours
of sex. Her lips were swollen with it, and she licked them, and there was the taste of it on her lips and tongue—salty, sweet. Her breasts felt heavy. Her nipples were still hard as little nails. Between her legs she felt bruised and wet.
How, exactly, had
she
come to be sleeping in this bed beside Shelly?
How, exactly, had they gotten from
there
to
here
?
A full moon was shining through the window (Shelly hadn’t bothered to pull the shades), and after she finally managed to open her eyes fully and to rub them into focus, she could see clearly and deliciously that Josie Reilly was asleep on her side, the sheet pulled up only to her naked hip, pale and white, her black hair spilling over Shelly’s rosebud pillowcases. In the corner something with green eyes blinked, and it took Shelly a breathless second to realize that it was Jeremy, standing stock-still, as if on high alert or turned to stone. Confused. Disapproving. Displaced. She remembered Josie saying in the sweetest, most apologetic voice, “Can you please get the cat off the bed? I really don’t like cats.”
Now, Josie Reilly sighed and opened her eyes, and smiled when she saw Shelly looking down at her. She reached up one elegant arm—the one with the silver vein of a bracelet around it—and placed her fingertips against Shelly’s throat before propping herself up slowly on one elbow and kissing the place she’d touched as she slid her hand from Shelly’s neck to her breast, and her lips moved up from Shelly’s neck to her lips.
It had been just past noon when Josie had stepped into Shelly’s house bearing two Starbucks cups, shivering in her soaked cashmere hoodie.
“Can I come in?” she’d asked, and Shelly had said, of course, of course, although she was incredibly annoyed to find Josie there, when she was supposed to be minding the office, and to have been woken up from her nap.
Josie’s cheeks were crimson, mottled, and there were tiny raindrops on her forehead. Shelly must not have been able to hide the annoyance on her face, because Josie had bitten her lip and then said, “Oops. Should I not have come over? I thought you might need some cheering up.”
“No,” Shelly said. “It’s fine. It’s . . . nice. Thank you, Josie. How thoughtful.” She took the cup Josie was holding out to her with one hand, and pulled her bathrobe closed around her chest with the other. “Come in. Sit down, and give me your hoodie. I’ll toss it in the dryer—on the delicate cycle.”
Josie blinked, looking pleased, and the raindrops fell from her eyelashes onto her cheeks. She handed her own Starbucks cup to Shelly so that she could unzip her hoodie.
“Thank you. I’m
soaked.
”
The zipper made a sound that made Shelly think of a comet—something traveling at an incredible speed, very far away—and then Josie Reilly was standing before her wearing what she knew girls now called “camis,” or “tanks,” but which, when Shelly was this girl’s age, had been lingerie. The kind of thing you might wear on your wedding night.
It was pale green, raw silk, hemmed with a paler green lace. It was also wet, and it clung to Josie’s breasts, making the perfect outline of them visible, no imagination needed. Her nipples were hard. There were goose bumps on her arms.
“Is it okay, I mean, if I hang out for a bit? I can’t go out like this.” She opened her arms as if to display herself fully in her camisole to Shelly, as if to invite her,
incite
her, to look at her body, and Shelly did—she couldn’t help but look—and then she looked at Josie’s face, and it was impossible not to interpret the expression on it as flirtation.
Flirtation verging on seductive invitation:
Her lips were pressed together. She was batting her eyelashes. A small smirk played at the corners of her lips. Her weight rested on one leg, and the hipbone of the other was bare, a blinding inch of pale exposed flesh.
Shelly’s breath felt ragged when she inhaled, and she raised her eyebrows, opening her mouth before exhaling and saying, holding up the hoodie, trying to sound casual, “I’ll take this downstairs.”
“Thanks, Shelly,” Josie said, and then, “Is it okay if I sit down? I don’t think I’m so wet I’ll ruin your couch or anything.”
“Of course,” Shelly said, and even to herself she sounded like someone in a trance, under a spell, like someone who had just stepped off a treadmill onto unshifting ground. She was almost surprised, when she got to the basement, to find the washer and dryer where they had always been. She pulled out the limp previous load of her own socks and panties, tossed them into the plastic basket waiting in the corner, and then ran her hand through the lint trap before putting Josie’s hoodie on the delicate cycle and turning back toward the stairs.
“I
love
your house,” Josie said.
She’d taken off her shoes and left them by the front door. Her feet were bare. Her toenails were painted silver, like her fingernails. She had one leg crossed over and under the other in a position that was impossibly dexterous and casual at the same time. Her elbow was propped up on the back of the couch, and her fingers were playing through her hair, lifting and pulling and twirling the black strands as, with her other hand, she lifted the Starbucks cup to her lips, sipped, licked them, and then said, looking around, “It’s
so
cool. Do you live alone?”
“Yes,” Shelly said. “Except for my cat.”
“Oh,” Josie said. “What’s its name?” She looked around, as though worried that Jeremy would show himself.
“Jeremy,” Shelly said.
“Why Jeremy?” Josie asked. “Isn’t that a little odd for a cat name?”
“I guess,” Shelly said.
She had, she realized, no clever story to tell about Jeremy’s name. She’d simply wanted to avoid giving the cat the kind of name all of her single, academic, lesbian friends had given theirs: Plato. Sexton. Amadeus. Sappho.
She’d pulled the name Jeremy out of thin air, thinking it had no baggage whatsoever, that she’d never known a single person named Jeremy. It was only months later that she remembered the one Jeremy she’d forgotten: a retarded boy who’d lived in her neighborhood, who’d fallen down a flight of stairs in his house and been killed.
“I’m not wild for cats,” Josie said. “I’m a dog person. Cats seem a little creepy. No offense.”
Shelly sat down in the chair across from Josie, pulling her robe over her knees as she did. She’d forgotten her Starbucks cup on the kitchen table, and by now it was probably cold. She thought she’d just leave it. She had no idea what treacly beverage Josie might have brought her today.
“Wow,” Josie said, looking around again. “I’m so used to living with a ton of other people—it would be weird, but really awesome, to have a whole house to yourself.” There was a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she were actually imagining herself in the rooms of Shelly’s house, ambling between them on her own, considering what it would be like if they were hers.
“Well,” Shelly said. “It’s definitely better than—”
“A fucking sorority,” Josie said, and took another sip of her drink, looking demurely away from Shelly. She’d never said the word
fucking
in front of Shelly before—although, once, when the printer made three times the number of a long document than it was supposed to, Shelly had heard Josie shout, “Shit!”
Shelly cleared her throat. “Well, do you have to live at the sorority?” She hated the sound of her own voice, and the frumpy way she was holding her robe around her.
At the gym, lifting weights, looking at herself in the mirror, Shelly felt physical, powerful, beautiful. She flushed easily, and knew that men were looking at her. But in the presence of Josie Reilly—in the presence of a girl whose body had been through only nineteen, twenty years—she knew that the kind of admiration she got from men at the gym meant nothing. Here before her, in the form of Josie Reilly, was the embodiment of beauty and youth. This girl had just barely emerged from the cocoon of childhood. In fact, Shelly thought she could see a film of something like dew on Josie’s neck, on her chest, and she even thought she could smell something wafting off of her limbs like pond water—rank and sweet at the same time, so potent.
Why, Shelly thought soberly then, was she letting this happen?
Was
this happening?
Never once had she thought of herself as the kind of old dyke who would sleep with a student, a
girl
. The only women she’d ever found herself attracted to in the past had been her own age, or older. She’d disliked the lesbians she knew who kept women half their ages, and paid their rent. It was so obviously nothing but physical—and wasn’t part of the point, the point of being a woman who’d chosen women over men, to reject that kind of objectification? To reject that abuse of power?
She was, after all, Josie Reilly’s
boss.
And the girl was
less
than half her age. But she was also radiating, indisputably, on Shelly’s couch, her own inalienable power:
She’d stretched out. One leg was extended luxuriously on the couch. Her fingers continued to move through her silky black hair. Her short top had made its way higher, and two lovely inches of white, flat stomach had been exposed. Under her arms was the downiest bit of unshaven hair. One of the straps of her tank top had slipped over her shoulder bone, and now the top of her right breast was exposed. It was painful to look at, and impossible not to stare. Josie rested her coffee cup on her crotch, and looked at Shelly and asked, “Do you have anything to eat? Like, a sandwich or something?”
I
t was impossible not to stare at Professor Polson as she cooked. Like Perry’s mother, she cracked the eggs with one hand, and then tossed the shells into the sink. She didn’t measure anything. Two burners were glowing blue on the stove at the same time. She grated cheese straight into the pan of scrambled eggs.
Professor Polson reminded him of his mother, but she was also like a girl Perry’s own age—hair uncombed, falling around her face in a mass of curls and tangles. Her hands were full, so she used her shoulder to push the hair out of the way as she leaned over the stove. In her jeans and Indian-print shirt, she could easily have passed for a college girl. She was thin. Even a little bony. You would not have known she’d given birth to twins. He imagined that she didn’t eat a lot, because she also didn’t look athletic. In Bad Axe the only women he knew who were mothers and weren’t overweight were the athletes: the hikers and bikers and swimmers. Or the smokers. The alcoholics. Professor Polson looked healthy, but she did not look like someone who worked out at a gym or who spent much time outdoors. She looked, Perry supposed, exactly like what she was: a reader, a writer, a teacher. Someone who’d spent her life studying something very particular and obscure, and who’d become an expert on it because she was more interested in it than anyone else had ever been or might ever be again.
And at the same time that Professor Polson reminded him of women like his mother, his aunts, the mothers of his friends—and also girls like Mary, Nicole, Josie Reilly, even Karess Flanagan—she was also nothing like them.
She was neither young nor old, fashionable nor out of touch. Professor Polson existed somewhere in between the worlds of the mothers he knew and the girls he knew, and he could not take his eyes off of her as she peeled slices of ham out of a plastic package and dropped them onto a skillet, where they shriveled up quickly and filled the kitchen with the smell of meat and maple. He was, he realized, ravenous.
They’d talked for hours since he’d come back to the apartment, he guessed. He’d lost track of time. But it was pitch-black night when he’d returned, and now the sun was shining through her apartment windows. Hours had to have passed.
A
fter the interview, when they’d left Professor Polson’s apartment, Perry had walked Lucas back to his place, and then he’d turned around, intending to go back to his own apartment. But he’d found himself instead walking directly toward the Omega Theta Tau house.
The rain had stopped at some point during Lucas’s interview, and now the streets were shining with dampness in the moonlight. The sky was completely clear, looking as if some kind of blue-black satin had been rolled in enormous bolts all through the town. The moon was somewhere close to full, but not quite, and it turned the branches of the trees to a kind of parody of October—spooky, damp. Leaves had blown out of the trees during the storm and lay in tatters in the streets, and on the sidewalk, on the lawns. They caught at the toes of Perry’s shoes.
He couldn’t help himself.
He had to go there.
He had to stand outside the house.
He had a feeling, and when he’d had that feeling before, she had appeared, or
seemed
to appear.
Perry had already known, more or less, the story Lucas was going to tell Professor Polson, but it had terrified him anyway. The matter-of-factness of the account. The mundane details. Lucas’s plainspoken, shamed recounting of events. It had required self-restraint for Perry to keep himself seated, listening. More than once, he’d had the urge to flee. He’d seen himself in his dark suit again, pictured himself in Bad Axe at the funeral, walking with the coffin on his shoulder, the terrible, solid, indisputable shifting of weight inside the coffin when Nicole’s cousin stumbled as they carried her out of the church and into the hearse.
And there were other things he remembered.
Back in his dorm room, in Godwin Hall, just those few weeks before the accident.
Told you, didn’t I?
Nicole had kissed him afterward, and stood up, and, as she was buttoning her shirt, had said, “Told you, didn’t I? I knew you wanted to fuck me, and that you would.” Then, she put on her clothes, closed the door behind her—somehow managing to leave her panties at the foot of the bed for Craig to find (although Craig didn’t recognize them, and instead teased Perry mercilessly, pitifully, about his “mystery slut”). Why had she done that? It could not have been a mistake. He’d known Nicole most of his life. She wasn’t ever sloppy. Even in kindergarten she’d been the first one to throw her empty milk carton away, or fold up her nap mat.
At first, Perry had thought she might have been sending a message for Craig—but, later, he wondered if it had been something else, a way to discredit Perry, cast suspicion on him. Surely she could tell that he and Craig were starting to become friends.
H
e could see the light on the porch of the Omega Theta Tau house, but Perry couldn’t tell, from where he stood on the sidewalk looking up at it, whether anyone was on the porch.
It was a flat town, a flat
state
, so it was that much stranger, eerier, that the sorority house was perched on a hill above the rest of the block.
Behind it, the memorial orchard sloped down to the wall between the sorority property and the smaller yard of the frat house next door. There were no leaves at all left on those cherry trees as far as Perry could tell—two skeletal rows of shiny, wet black branches and moonlight. From inside the house, there seemed to be only one light: a dim flickering in one of the upstairs windows. Perry couldn’t tell if it was a candle doing the flickering or some shadowy figure pacing around by the window. There seemed to be lacy curtains, and they seemed to be closed. He supposed it wasn’t so odd that all the lights were out at this time of night—or morning—in the middle of the week before exams. Omega Theta Tau was supposed to be one of the studious sororities.
Perry stood staring up at the house until he was sure there was no one on the porch, and then he stepped off the sidewalk and onto the grass. He wanted to get closer, but he thought it was a bad idea to go straight up the front walk, which was bathed in porch light. He didn’t know why. He had no idea yet what he thought. Did he think Nicole was
in there
? And, if so, how? And if she wasn’t, what was he afraid of? And if she was, what then?
He stayed in the shadows, and made his way up the side of the lawn. The ground was soggy, slippery, carpeted with fallen leaves. He walked slowly, with no idea what he planned to do when he reached the porch. (Knock on the back door and ask to see Nicole? Peer in the windows to try to catch a glimpse of her?)
He stopped. Looked behind him. Looked in front of him. He looked toward the porch, and just before he saw what he thought was a man in some kind of dark suit or uniform, the light switched off and Perry was left standing on the lawn in the dark, and then he heard what sounded to him (so out of place here that it took him more than a few seconds to recall it from duck hunting with his dad at Lake Durand, or deer hunting in the national forest with his grandfather, from the hundred or so Boy Scout rifle competitions he’d attended at the Bad Axe Rod and Gun Club) like the slide of a shotgun being racked, and he crouched down and, holding his breath, made his way back across the lawn, away from the house, as quickly and as quietly as humanly possible.
It was blocks later that he realized that he’d run all the way back to Professor Polson’s apartment, the outside entrance of which had been propped open so that he didn’t have to buzz her, and that he’d run up to the stairs to her door, and he was knocking on it.
She opened the door as if she’d been expecting him.
Clearly, he hadn’t woken her. She was still in the same top and jeans she’d been wearing during Lucas’s interview. Her eyes looked watery, as if she had been either crying or coughing. Her hair was a little more mussed. (Perhaps she’d been lying down?) But when she saw that Perry was nearly doubled over, out of breath, standing in her doorway, Professor Polson pulled him into the apartment without asking any questions, and led him to the couch.
“I’ll get you some water,” she said. “Try square breathing. You know what square breathing is?”
He knew what square breathing was only because she’d told them about it in class, in preparation for their trip to the morgue—had told them that if they began to feel faint during the visit, or to feel as if they might be sick, or hyperventilate, they should close their eyes and do square breathing.
(“Breathe in through your nose to the count of four. Hold the breath to the count of four. Exhale to the count of four.” She’d had the whole class practice. “I used to lose at least three students to the linoleum every field trip until I taught square breathing.”)
As Perry sat panting on her couch, and Professor Polson went into the kitchen, he tried it:
One. Two.
The apartment looked different in the dark.
Three. Four.
She came back to the living room with a sweater draped over her shoulders and a glass of water for him, three ice cubes bobbing in it. She turned on the light beside the couch and handed him the glass, and then sat down on the chair across from him, perching on the edge of it, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, and asked in a soft, concerned voice, “What is it, Perry? Can you tell me?”
The square breathing, or
something
, had worked. He was calm now. He didn’t even feel winded. He told her what had happened. The darkness. The candle. The man he thought he saw in the shadows, and the sound of a shotgun being racked up, and how he’d run, not realizing he was here again until he was.
Professor Polson had seemed to think for a long time about what she was going to say before she spoke, and then said, “Perry, I think maybe we’ve already taken this too far. I think I’ve encouraged you in some—” she pulled the sweater off her shoulders and onto her lap, and then gathered it in her hands, brought it to her face, seemed to breathe it in for a minute before she continued, “unproductive thinking. When the imagination—and I’m not talking here about
your
imagination per se. I’m talking the collective imagination, the occult imagination—when it’s stimulated, many things that aren’t real can come to seem to be real. Perfectly sane people, people who—”
“No,” Perry said.
Professor Polson nodded as if she’d expected him to object, but she went on:
“Let me tell you something,” she said, and she told him, then, a story about her childhood. Her mother. A kind of transformation in a pantry. A white coffin, and her own realization, staring into it, of what the unconscious was capable of. The imagery that informed this life, this culture.
“You can pretend you aren’t superstitious,” Professor Polson said. “You can imagine that you are not religious. You can be certain that you don’t believe in life after death, if that’s what you want. But, Perry, it doesn’t stop the fact that we are in a very strange position here. We humans. With such a clear knowledge of how it will end, and no idea what will happen afterward—just some symbols, some music, some stories to show us the way.
“Of course you believe your friend is alive. That she lurks around every corner. That her death could be something as alive as her sexuality was, as your own. You’re nineteen years old. Who
dies
, Perry? Who believes in
death
at your age? People with a lot more life experience than you have believed stranger things. Have seen stranger things. Folklore is full of—”
“I’m sorry, Professor Polson, I know what you’re saying. But it isn’t folklore. This. It—it isn’t.”
There was a kind of sad understanding in her eyes, but she was shaking her head at the same time.
“Perry, folklore doesn’t mean something doesn’t make sense. Or doesn’t seem real. Truly, it’s the opposite. Beliefs—traditional and superstitious beliefs—arise and are passed down for coherent, substantial reasons. They’re based on psychological and physical data, real or not. Shared experiences. In the field we call this
elegant rationale
. There’s often an elegant rationality to even the strangest beliefs. But it doesn’t make them real. Being based on fear, inspired by hope, they can be dangerous, Perry, and I think we’re headed in that direction, and that we need to stop what we’re doing now, before it leads to something—”
“Please,” Perry said. “No. Please. I’ll talk about it any way you want me to. We can call it
elegant rationale
and
campus folklore
if you want to. But, please. Don’t stop . . . listening to me. Professor Polson—”
She reached across the coffee table and took his hand. She held it in her own for a few seconds, and he could feel for himself how cold his own hand was. She squeezed it before she let go, and said, “I know. I know. Okay.”
“Thank you. I—”
But she held up a hand to stop him from saying anything more. She stood up then and gestured for him to follow her into the kitchen, where he leaned against the wall as she made him a cup of tea, and they talked about class, about the article on apotropaic magic they had been assigned for the next week and which Perry had already read. She told him about her travels during her Fulbright year, the village in which she’d stayed a few nights, where every house and every inn, every restaurant and church, kept nailed to its door a piece of a broken mirror that had once hung in the ladies’ room of the local cathedral, until the cathedral had been bombed.
There had been only one woman in the cathedral at the time—an old deaf lady who hadn’t heard the air raid sirens. She’d been blown into too many pieces to gather and properly bury. The mirrors were nailed to the doors to keep her from stopping by.
They discussed the section of the essay on the
motif of harmful sensations
. The Sirens. The Lorelei. The Harp of Dagda. The Hungarian Suicide Song—a song, it was believed, that to hear would cause the person who heard it to commit suicide.