The Shyster's Daughter, page 15
In her husband’s class I want to prove myself and go well beyond what’s required, like when I drag Lucia with me and together we track down author Robert Stone, pinning him at the podium after a talk he gives at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival on the UCLA campus. Without the mic on, I get him to admit that his mother who’d been in and out of insane asylums was the inspiration behind the beautiful and disturbed actress in one of his novels, which I’m giving an oral report on. Shortly after filming a scene in Mexico, the actress theatrically walks out into the rough waters of the Pacific, drowning herself in front of her lover and costar. The quote impresses Professor Brown like I know it would.
It is not the typical affair, not in the physical sense. There is no sex, at least not right away, while I’m still his student. But it’s emotional, which proves far more dangerous. He is outraged when he hears about how my mother only gave me forty-five minutes to leave with her for Tennessee. That she took my baby brother and he’s grown up this long with only sporadic visits from his father. He’s outraged that my father went home to his mother and pedophile brother and expects me to break out the feta cheese and ring bread with them as if nothing happened.
“Your father doesn’t deserve such a smart, talented daughter like you. Brother or no brother, he should’ve beat the hell out of that sick fucker.” Already Professor Brown sounds entirely too protective of me, and I like this about him, his tough talk, the masculinity in his voice, the inappropriateness of him passing such unrelenting judgment on my father after only hearing my side. He’s nothing like the younger guys I’ve dated who cowered in my father’s presence or dashed like a mouse off the front porch when he turned on the lights. Professor Brown is no boy. He could go toe to toe with a mugger off the streets and odds are I’d get to keep my purse.
“I’d tell you about my family,” he says. “But most of them are already dead. My brother took his own life. My father died of cancer. Oh, yeah,” he adds like a joke, minus the punch line, “my mother went to prison when I was five for setting fire to her family’s apartment building and an old woman died.” Arson and murder are no laughing matters, and he knows it. His story is sobering, which explains why he’s a drinker. The past is too painful to reconcile clear-eyed, and therefore the most upsetting parts are relived over and over again, muted and then magnified by the consumption of the bottle the way I watched my father torture himself at the kitchen table with the family slides, the projector and his tumbler of ouzo.
“Your life story kind of sounds like the lyrics to a country song,” I say, teasing him, flirting badly, the only way I know how. We’re alone in the classroom after I’ve given my report. The fluorescents are turned off because bright lights hurt his eyes. The quarter is officially now over and Professor Brown lets me see the A in red ink next to my name in his grade book.
Out of nowhere I kiss his prickly cheek. He just stands there as stunned as if I’d just slapped him. This is my first and only move on him, one I instantly retreat from. Never have I been so forward with any guy, and I’m embarrassed. I’m an idiot and with books in hand, I reach as casually as I can for the door with the other, a student just a little too grateful for her high grade.
In the hall he catches up with me and invites me back to his office. He shuts the door, he boots up his computer, focusing on the lit screen. One hand trembles. It’s a little after four, his drinking hour, and he steadies it on the mouse.
“I’m not happy in my marriage, Paula,” he says. “Neither one of us are. We haven’t been for some time.”
I don’t need my father or Uncle Dimitri to tell me these words are the battle cry for practically every married man who’s about to stray from his wife and family. They are the words that are supposed to give me hope. They are my opening. Professor Brown scrolls down on the screen and if I didn’t know any better I’d think he was ignoring me so I’d leave.
“There’s a writer’s conference coming up at the end of the month in Reno,” he says. “You could come as my guest.”
Professor Brown and I are scheduled to take separate planes, separate airlines, which is all my idea. Already I’m thinking ahead to the painful return flight home, the intimate moments I’ll relive in the solitary confinement of my window seat—the empty room I’ll be coming back to, his house in the San Bernardino Mountains, full of family—a wife, three sons.
I’m at my gate and there’s less than five minutes until boarding when the Southwest employee announces that the flight will be delayed at least an hour, maybe longer. The affair I’m having reservations about might not even happen. I’ll miss my connecting flight from San Jose to Reno. I’ll miss my first of only two nights with him because of thunderstorms in Amarillo.
The plastic boarding pass in my hand reminds me of a Do Not Disturb sign. I’m traveling light, just a duffel bag, a purse, and Morrison’s Beloved. In my wallet is enough cash to get me on another plane, his plane. I set down my plastic pass. He’ll probably pay for my meals anyway.
As I rush through the airport toward the American Airlines ticket counter, my chest is heavy with guilt, with anticipation. I’m already cheating in every part of my body that matters, my mind, my heart. The rest of me just needs to catch up and it will tonight in the hotel room.
After I pay for my ticket and request the seat next to his, I hide out at another gate until it’s time to board. From where I’m standing, I watch him come out of the restroom in an ill fitting sports coat I’ve never seen him wear before with elbow patches. His face is pasty like he isn’t feeling well and wet from splashing it at the sink. He turns a couple of times like somebody might be following him. But nobody is, only me with my eyes.
He has an aisle seat and his eyes change, surprised, in a good way when I push duffel first toward him.
“I thought you were on a different flight,” he says, already out of his seat, and stowing my bag in the compartment above.
“I changed my mind,” I say. “But my return flight is the same.”
His sports coat is off and as I take the center seat, my hand drifts across the density of his back. Besides the cursory kiss on the cheek that afternoon in the classroom, this is the first time I’ve felt him, felt the muscle and mass of him. He is not lanky and light with his fingers like my guitarist ex-boyfriend Erick. He is a man with a bulky sports coat, a wife, kids, and a mortgage, and it’s hard not to panic when the captain turns on the red seat belt sign, a warning of sorts that there’s no getting out now. The flight attendants pull up on the doors before pulling down on their seats, preparing for takeoff.
During the flight we make up for lost time. He touches and touches my forearm, discovering his fingers between mine, then letting go, running his fingers up and down the length of my arm, tapping a beat in my palm. I can’t keep up. His movements are so rapid that I don’t know how to react. Instead I just stay still.
The flight attendant smiles politely. She wants to hand Professor Brown his second beer with a tiny bottle of vodka. If it’s not the considerable gap in our ages it must be the lack of space between us that gives us away. She’s probably seen our kind of couple one too many times. The weekend getaway. The affair to remember.
Later in our room at the hotel and casino he will throw a shirt over the lampshade, dimming the light. He will be paranoid and not only chains the door but looks around the room for something heavy. He finds it in the dresser and instead of pushing the piece of furniture across the room with both hands the way most people might, he turns it upside down, balancing it casually above his head like a native with a canoe.
“What are you doing?” I say.
“Ensuring our safety.”
The Bible inside one of the empty drawers slides around as I watch the weightlifter in him heave once loudly before slowly setting the dresser down as if it were a bench press, right in front of the door. The floor thunders, then reverberates, and there is no telling what the people in the room below us must think is about to fall through the ceiling. Having my former professor essentially barricade us inside our hotel room is not how I imagined our first night together to go. I’m claustrophobic, not to mention a little freaked out.
“Nobody’s going to barge in on us. The chain’s on and I already hung the Do Not Disturb sign.”
“Housekeeping isn’t who I’m worried about,” he says. “This is Reno. We’re in a Holiday Inn. Any low life thief or drug addict could try and get in here.”
Any drug addict is already in here. He claims it’s only recreational use. He was nervous about going away with me and was under the assumption being unpredictably high would somehow make for better company. The drug is making him do strange things. He’s not so much locking out others as he’s locking us in. If, for whatever reason, I were to have to try and get away from him I couldn’t. As if the heaviest piece of furniture in the room isn’t enough protection, he stacks his suitcase, my duffel, plus my purse the size of a doctor’s bag on top.
In bed when he reaches out for me, he instantly loses more than the desire to be sexually intimate. He loses all motor skills, including the use of his hands, which start to tremble uncontrollably like the rest of him as if he’s gone into shock or a seizure. I thought he was just an alcoholic. Whatever this other substance may be, cocaine or meth, the high is winding down into flu-like symptoms—cold sweats and fever. I treat him like the sick man he is and wrap him in a blanket. Then I run a washcloth under the tap in the bathroom and cover his forehead with the cool compress.
“Sorry,” he says. He is embarrassed at the tremors he can’t stop, half of his face under the cuff of the covers. “I should’ve warned you what you were getting into. My wallet’s in the back pocket of my Levis. If you want to get your own room.”
His arms are impossible to lock mine around, so I square them at the tips of his shoulders. I hold him as if by my sheer will I will drive out all the toxins he’s ingested, his demons too.
“No.” There is no way I’m abandoning him to suffer alone through the ugliness of the drug wearing off. This moment is not so different from the day I found my father lying face down, lovesick and destroyed, on the floor of his office after my mother left. I don’t care how naive or co-dependent or selfishly noble I sound. I don’t leave men who need me. “I want to be here with you,” I say.
This forty-year-old man, my professor, who I still can’t seem to call by his first name, curls up into me. He shivers, the drug sweating out from his pores. His skin smells of plastic, of the various detergents and under the counter kitchen cleansers that are mixed together and heated up to be smoked. Weathering his withdrawal might bring us closer in a way that the best sex never could.
“I love you.” He says this clearly as if there is no mistake, then his eyelids flutter as if he’s exhausted enough for sleep.
The proof that I love him is right here in the way I hold him, in the way I haven’t run. But I have to protect myself.
Saying he loves me has come out at the wrong time like gratitude, a thank you, and I pull away some. I close my eyes, closing myself off from what I didn’t want to hear.
The next morning he’s feeling better, less frantic, which only makes me more tense. Saying he loved me might’ve been an accident, an unspoken symptom of withdrawal, words meant for his wife, not me. Color, only too much of it now, comes back into his face. After breakfast we sit out by the pool—me in a tank and shorts, him dressed for higher altitudes in his mountain wear of work boots, Levis and a long-sleeved t-shirt. He’s finishing off an essay that he’s going to read in less than a half hour. It’s about getting clean in South Dakota when he was a writer-in-residence a couple years back. Eventually this experience will become the final chapter in The Los Angeles Diaries, a memoir he’ll publish years later.
Jim straddles the chaise lounge. In all those clothes, in his condition, the rising desert heat is getting to him. He wipes at his forehead with his sleeve. A pad of paper and a pencil are between his legs. For nearly an hour he’s been writing and rewriting the same first lines of his essay, getting nowhere. The drug has left him too focused to see things clearly. I don’t see how he’ll make it in time for the reading.
“Maybe you should read something from Luckytown.” The story is about a con man and his teenage son who steal a car and take it across the desert to cheat the tables in Vegas, the law in hot pursuit.
Jim shakes his head. Tiny wet hairs stick to the back of his neck. He keeps his hair cut short which makes me think he’s afraid he’s losing some.
“Holly hates that book. She calls it the great American white trash novel.”
“Holly isn’t here.”
The way I say her name sounds as insulting as her comment.
His wife is with us now and when Jim glances up from the pages, he can’t hold my stare and looks away toward some kids splashing in the pool.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“She shouldn’t have said that.”
“She was just angry,” he trails off, running short on reasons to defend her, running even shorter on time. “I just need your help,” he frets. “The rest will come out fine if I can just nail this line about my detoxing.”
I roll over on to my stomach. I can’t believe he doesn’t see it.
“Like what you’re doing now?”
Jim nods, scratching at his arms.
“It feels like ants. Ants keep crawling and crawling right beneath the surface of my skin. They won’t goddamn stop.”
“That’s your line,” I say. “About the ants.”
“Nobody wants to read about insects, Paula.”
“Why not?” I shade my eyes with my hand so I may better see him. With the other I press down on his knee reflexively bouncing at the heel like a wind-up toy. “You always say to write it like it is.”
He smiles, the writer and professor part flattered at being quoted back to him. I want to ask how many female co-eds have taken this trip with him before me, but if men lie to their wives about having an affair, the last thing they’ll do is tell the truth to their lovers. Jealousy burns in me like the fever I helped him break last night, and I take my hand off his knee.
The writer’s conference is at this hotel, and in front of everybody poolside he leans across the space between us, he reaches out for me.
“Hey,” he says, “you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Well, I am.”
“You do realize I meant what I said last night. I love you.”
“I love you too.” I say this before I can think of all it’s opened me up to, before my father and Uncle Dimitri have a chance to creep back into my head the way I realize they did last night.
Jim slides his hand gently behind my neck, pulling me in for an unapologetic kiss he will be sorry for later. There are too many others around us, other writers, agents, editors who are fully aware of his life back in Southern California. Obviously the drug has yet to wear off. Professor Brown is still delusional.
Our affair doesn’t let up once we return. We only grow closer. We sneak in “I love you’s” in the front seat of his red BMW as he circles the parking lot, pretending to look for my car. Or with the office door closed, curled up on his love seat, we talk, really talk, about the complicated possibilities of a future together. Sometimes I simply lighten up the mood by lapsing into raunchy jokes my father and Uncle Dimitri have told over the years and Jim laughs, surprised I know such men’s locker room humor. We laugh together until the phone rings or I have to leave to work my shift at Bath & Body Works. As for any physical affection, it’s strictly over the clothes. With a nosy female professor next door and heavy foot traffic outside in the hall, our couch time has certain restrictions. We even sneak in a quick lunch of hamburgers and chocolate shakes at Red Robin with my little brother who comes out for a visit, unafraid of how it looks to Nicholas that Professor Brown is taking us out for a meal.
Though this is my first and only affair with a married man, it’s hard not to notice, it’s hard not to feel that he’s flirting with something more lasting with me. Weeks later when my landlady invites her problem son and his pregnant girlfriend to move in, Jim helps me find an affordable little one room cabin in Crestline, the same mountain town where he lives. Out in the front yard while he’s helping me move, he puts his arm around my shoulders, a risky gesture considering it’s a small community and his wife knows just about every woman in it but me. He even unloads an old mattress used by one of his kids and pushes my single in with the other, making a queen—big enough for the both of us should he ever decide to leave his wife.
WEIGHT AND MATTER
The night before I’m to leave for Tennessee to meet my sister’s new baby girl, Annabelle, I find myself sitting beside Uncle Dimitri’s latest girlfriend, a big breasted Cuban bombshell who breaks open a dinner roll and announces to the table that it smells like dirty feet. Vintage wines and lobster tail are served on table linens here in this restaurant, and I glance at the other diners to see if they overheard. We’re at a window table in the clubhouse at Los Alamitos racetrack near Long Beach. Of all the major tracks in Southern California it’s the most convenient, with a lesser amount of foot traffic than Santa Anita, Del Mar, or Hollywood Park. The VIP section overlooking the prime position of the finish line is Uncle Dimitri’s second office, his second home. Although he is the one who called, it is my father who wants to see me. He doesn’t like knowing I’ll be spending time with my mother when the two of us are on the outs.
“Lo, Lo, Lo,” Uncle Dimitri says. Her nickname alone elevates her one step above the average fling. He smiles with a toothpick in his mouth. “My niece would like to eat the rest of her shrimp cocktail here.”
But I’m no longer hungry. I never was. I’ve lost nine pounds since I began the affair with Jim.
