Another You Read Free

article he had been reading, Sonja saying, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought the light was still on on your side.” Her quizzical look: Could he really have taken offense at such a simple, sleepy mistake? The room suddenly lit up again. He had gotten out of bed and gone into the bathroom, where more things had displeased him: a copy of International Wildlife magazine tossed on the bathroom floor, curl-edged from humidity; the towel thrown over one side of the bathtub instead of draped over the towel rack so it would dry. Lately, Sonja kept house the way Paul Delario ran the curriculum meetings: the inconsequential quickly overwhelmed anything of importance. The theorists were allowed to engage in endless rhetorical debates. But what did it really matter? The students were accepting of anything, while the faculty wanted to do as little as possible to keep their jobs. Everybody lived for sports and any new restaurant reported to be good, where they could deconstruct their broasted chicken. Frowning in consternation, he looked at Cheryl and was startled to see her young face superimposed on his wife’s—this face that looked back at him with Sonja’s narrowed eyes.
    He took Cheryl’s hand. As he had taken Sonja’s hand when he returned to the bedroom, sliding into bed beside her, the night-light burning in an outlet just above the baseboards: a three-inch-high visageof Donald Duck, his big, protuberant lips glowing yellow, plastic hat jauntily tilted atop his head.
    You need a vacation , Sonja had said, going limp-wristed as he slid into bed beside her, took her hand, and tried to nuzzle his way to a reconciliation. Now, through Sonja’s limp hand, rose the slight pressure of Cheryl Lanier’s smaller, gloved hand, returning nothing of his strengthening grip, but not withdrawing, either.
    Well past the college now, he turned onto a smaller, winding road, knowing there was a tavern near the end, before the road looped back past the dairy farm onto the highway.
    “I appreciate your concern,” Cheryl was saying to him.
    “Ms. Lanier,” he said. In his head, he was mocking youth, in general, as if he had things figured out, as if he had things under control, when really his inadequacies could make him feel slightly faint, when he focused on them. Which was what he was doing at the moment, and no wonder: Did he think Sonja might be out riding in someone’s car, with her hand in another man’s? Any possibility that Sonja would be off having a drink with some handsome client? Possibly there were advances she warded off that she never told him about, but what he really thought was that since she gave out no signals of availability, most men simply got the message. At the tavern, he would call Sonja and tell her he’d be late—maybe even say he was giving a student a ride home. It was turning into a bad night, with rain falling on already slick roads. He wondered whether the tavern would be empty or crowded and decided it would be crowded; by this point in the winter, everybody was woods crazy. A beagle wandered onto the road, and he braked, thinking it a raccoon, at first, later realizing it was someone’s dog that had a high-hipped swagger. He kept his eyes on the dog, transfixed by the animal though he couldn’t say why. It was a fat beagle, old, probably used to crossing this road, because it was suddenly gone, disappearing through a hole in the fence and vanishing into the darkness.
    “I don’t think I should,” Cheryl Lanier said.
    “You don’t think you should what?” he said, playing it cool about the meaning of his hand holding hers.
    “Tell you,” she said. “I mean, Livan made me promise.”
    “Well, you don’t have to,” he said. “But if you want to, the secret’s safe with me.”
    “Secrets never stay safe,” she said.
    A cliché, but it gave him a moment’s pause. “You mean,” he said, “you’ve never confided anything that has stayed confidential?”
    “I’m not sure,” she said.