He moved his hips up and down. I could see the little tent his penis made in the sheet. Clearly he was not squirming from fear. Just as I realized what was happening he arched his back and the sheet turned translucent. I’d never watched it before, not clinically like that. It wasn’t especially interesting and certainly not erotic. All I could think of was the mess. I could smell it now, like water left standing in an orange juice jar.
I lay down, facing away from him. The bed jolted as he woke up. “Jesus,” he whispered. I pretended to be asleep while he mopped up the bed with some Kleenex. In a minute or two he was asleep again.
I got up to check on Emily. She was face down in her crib, arms and legs stretched out like a tiny pink bearskin rug. I touched her hair, bent over to smell her neck. One tiny, perfect hand clutched at the blanket under her.
“You missed it, Tater,” I whispered. “You could have seen what you’ve got to look forward to.”
I might have forgotten about it if Sally Keeler hadn’t called that Friday. Her husband had the office next to Richard’s in the English department.
“Listen,” Sally said. “It’s probably nothing at all.”
“Pardon?”
“I thought somebody should let you know.”
“Know what?”
“Has Richard been, I don’t know, acting a little weird lately?”
For some reason I remembered his wet dream. “What do you mean weird?”
Sally sighed dramatically. “It’s just something Tony said last night. Now Ann, I know you and Richard are having a few problems—that’s okay, you don’t have to say anything—and I thought, well, a real friend would come to you with this.”
Sally was not a friend. Sally was someone who had been over to dinner two or three times. I hadn’t realized my marital problems were such common knowledge. “Sally, will you get to the point?”
“Richard’s been talking to Tony about this new grad student. She’s supposed to be from Israel or something.”
“So?”
“So Richard was apparently just drooling over this girl. That doesn’t sound like him. I mean Richard doesn’t even
“Is that all?”
“Well, no. Tony asked him what was the big deal and
“Does this mystery woman have a name?”
“Lili, I think he said it was.”
I tried to picture Richard, with his thinning hair and stubby little mustache, with his glasses and pot belly, sweeping some foreign sexpot off her feet.
Sally said, “It may not be anything at all.”
One new associate professorship would open up next year. Richard and Tony were both in the running. Richard was generally thought to have the edge. “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “I’m sure it’s nothing at all.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t want to cause any problems.”
“No,” I said, “I’m sure you wouldn’t.”
The next Wednesday Richard called to say he’d be home late. There was a visiting poet on campus for a reading. I looked it up in the paper. The reading was scheduled for eight.
At 8:30 I put Emily in the station wagon and we drove over to the Fine Arts Center. We didn’t find his car.
“Well, Tater,” I said. “What do you think? Do we go across Central and check the hot sheet motels?”
She stared at me with huge, colorless eyes.
“You’re right,” I said. “We have too much pride for that. We’ll just go home.”
There was a cookout that weekend at Dr. Taylor’s. He was department chairman largely on the strength of having edited a Major American Writer in his youth. Now he had a drinking problem. His wife had learned that having parties at home meant keeping him off the roads.
The morning of the party I told Richard I wanted to go. By now he was used to my staying home from these things. I watched for signs of disappointment. He only shrugged.
“You’d better start trying to find a sitter,” he said.
After dinner we began the slow, seemingly random movements that would inevitably end with the women in one part of the house and the men in another. Already most of the wives were downstairs, clearing up the soggy paper plates and empty beer bottles. I was upstairs with Jane Lang, the medievalist, and most of the husbands. Taylor had made a pejorative remark about women writers and everyone had jumped on him for it. Then Tony said, “Okay, I want to see everybody come up with a sexist remark they believe is true.”
Taylor said, a little drunkenly, “Men have bigger penises than women.”
Jane said, “Usually.” Everyone laughed.
Robbie Shappard, who was believed to sleep with his students, said, “I read something the other day. There’s this lizard in South America that’s extinct now. What happened was another species of lizard came along that could perform the mating rituals better than the real females. The males all fucked the impostors. The chromosomes didn’t match, of course, so no baby lizards. The whole species went toes up.”
“Is that true?”
“I read it in the
