Something Fierce (10 page)

“Of course, he does,” Gail said. “I’m surprised he didn’t break out the crystal glasses.”

“I only had two,” Seth said, refilling his cup. “Didn’t want to leave anyone out.”

“You’re such a bachelor.” Gail held out her cup to be refilled. “Speaking of, how was your ‘tour of Cleveland’ with Lolita?”

“It was…great.” Kerri had been in his thoughts off and on all day, most especially when he’d walked out of the funeral during Wells’ fire and brimstone speech. He had walked out of that dark, depressing room and into the bright briskness of the day and his mind went straight to Kerri. He’d remembered her beautiful, young body, naked in the moonlight, and how tremendous it felt to kiss her, to hold her in his arms, to talk to her about who she was in the world and who she wanted to be. He’d imagined jumping into his Escape and running straight to her. He was glad for the opportunity now to talk about her. “I was supposed to take her to dinner Friday night, but obviously had to cancel. I told her I’d call and reschedule this evening after I got back to Cleveland.”

“You’re seeing her again?” Gail sounded concerned.

“Well, yeah. We had a great day together.”

The sisters gave each other the look. “You can’t seriously be considering dating a girl that young,” Gail said.

“I know it sounds like BS, but she is very mature for her age.”

“At twenty,” Gail said, “that’s not saying a lot. And it doesn’t sound like BS, it sounds like sex.”

“It’s not sex,” he said.

Both sets of eyebrows went up.

“I mean,” Seth said, “it is sex…but not
just
sex.”

“Well, it’s never
just
sex with you,” Gail said, “but what else could you possibly have in common with her?”

“Books. She’s read a lot of my favorite books. Even some of the obscure ones. And independent films. And…”

“Sex.”

Seth threw up his hands.

“But even sexually,” Tina asked, “how
good
could she be at twenty? No one knows what they’re doing at that age, male or female.”

This wasn’t a discussion he wanted to be having with his sisters, but he considered their questions. It wasn’t what he and Kerri had in common or her skills as a lover that captivated him throughout their night together and kept bringing her back into his mind ever since; it wasn’t the art of making love, but the madness of the passion. Irresistible. Insatiable. Ageless. Timeless. The only moment that existed when he was with her was the one they were in.

“Just be careful,” Tina said, holding out her cup for Seth to refill. “She may not be your student anymore, but she’s still
a
student at the school.”

“I’m only there one more semester.”

“Still,” Gail said. “You really like teaching and you don’t want to screw up opportunities that you might get somewhere else. With a girl that young, you’re asking for trouble. Why risk it?”

That was a question that he didn’t know the answer to, one that he wasn’t going to discover by talking with his sisters who had clearly made up their minds on the subject which left him no recourse but to agree with them or continue defending himself. He wasn’t ready to do either. Not yet, anyway.

Seth called to reschedule the dinner date with Kerri as promised. Her voicemail kicked in after four rings and he left a message, suggesting dinner the following Friday. He spent the rest of the evening doctoring up his handouts for the first day of class and making final changes to the syllabus. Last semester had been a huge success, but he wanted to make this one better. Over the Christmas break he had carefully gone through his notes and lectures, writing exercises and reading assignments, scrapping things that didn’t work or didn’t work as well as he’d hoped, and replacing them with new ones that he deemed more accessible but no less challenging.

All three of his sections were filled to capacity and as he worked, he tried to conjure some of the seventy-five new faces, wondering if he were leaving enough leeway in the course outlines for the strange dynamics that were a given at a community college: widely varying levels of ability and background, and though it wasn’t an issue for him last semester, generation gaps between the students. He wouldn’t know until they were underway. When he finally went to bed, he was unable to sleep but had to admit that it was not the first day jitters keeping him awake.

It was the fact that Kerri hadn’t called back. Surely, she’d gotten the message. There was no rule saying that she had to call back that night and it wouldn’t have bothered him if their last conversation hadn’t been so awkward. At least the first part of it. Something in her voice, her initial lack of compassion gave him the feeling that…she didn’t believe he was going to Pennsylvania for a funeral. When he was about to question her on this, her response changed and became more conventional—empathizing with his loss, wishing him a safe journey, looking forward to rescheduling—and he’d decided that what he’d originally read as suspicion was just disappointment, which he’d understood because he’d been disappointed too.

And that was probably all it was. He was over-thinking it. She would call tomorrow. He turned on to his side and wrapped his arms around the pillow where her head had been. The smell of her hair and the scent of her perfume still lingered there though both were fading.

Seth’s first class was a diverse crowd. Looking nervous about their induction to College English courses, they ranged in age from eighteen to forty-six and represented most of the colors of the human spectrum. Seth had the sudden urge to improvise. He skipped the lackadaisical introductions and syllabus discussion typical of the first day of class and went straight to the text. “If you don’t have your book yet,” he said, “introduce yourself to someone who has one and ask them if they will share.”

He started with a poem by Tess Gallagher called “The Hug.” Their diversity didn’t keep them from the quick consensus that there wasn’t much to say about the piece. It was about some woman giving a homeless man a hug and liking it more than she should have. So what? This was more confirmation that poetry was either too obscure to understand or in this case, too trivial to care about. Seth broke it down, line by line, and threw it right back at them, forcing them to either sit there in agonizing silence or talk. After squirming for a while, one person spoke up and then another and another, and it soon became clear that this hug was more than a hug and the guy wasn’t homeless in the way they had first assumed.

Someone brought up the experience of having a connection with someone you weren’t supposed to have a connection with: catching the eye of a stranger or maybe the spouse of a close friend, someone wrong for you (like a student half your age, Seth thought) and wondering about them, feeling the butterflies in your stomach. What did you do? You couldn’t ignore it. Did you dare indulge it? What did it mean? And if you were already in a relationship, what did that say about that? Was there someone for everyone? Or could we fall in love with many people? Do we fall in love with a person or what they represent to us, how they fill our needs? Monogamy? Marriage?

By the time they got to Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” nearly every student in the room had something to say about wearing a mask that “grins and lies.” Seth kept directing them back to the text. The words, the images, what was going on in the lines and rhythms, what was said and unsaid. Class ran over by almost five minutes and Seth had to shout their assignment to them as they rushed to their next class.

The next two sections—less varied than the first—also went well. A total of six additional students approached him with hopeful smiles and special permission slips requiring his signature, telling him how much they needed the class and offering sad stories of how they were prevented from signing up before it had closed. Even the cutoff point of twenty-five students was really too many with all the writing that was required and therefore, all the grading he had to do. Extra students just meant extra work with no added compensation. However, he was feeling invincible and knew if they were still persisting on the second day of class, he would let them all in.

The only blemish on the day was that Kerri had never returned his call.

Nor did he hear from her on Tuesday. That evening, he decided to treat himself to Sammy’s Steakhouse—the best restaurant in the area—and waste no more thought on the subject of Kerri Engel. He took a seat at the mahogany bar, telling himself that he would never know why she didn’t call back and that it really didn’t matter. He didn’t need the distraction anyway. He got to enjoy an erotic adventure and now he could focus his attention on teaching his classes, finding a job to replace this one when it ended in four months, and maybe even get that damned second novel moving again. He didn’t need a woman right now and certainly not a girl. Everything was as it should be.

He held firm to that perspective until he was halfway through his third martini. Then the truth serum worked its dark magic. The longing for her welled up inside of him and his mind was full of unanswered questions. Why the hell hadn’t she returned his call? It made no sense. She had been looking forward to seeing him again. She’d dropped the L-Bomb for God’s sake. He took out his cell phone and contemplated it. Calling again would be pathetic. But would it be less so than wondering for days? At least he would be taking action. And why put on the façade of Mr. Cool if that wasn’t the truth? He wanted to know, damn it. Then he found himself texting her:
So are we on 4 Friday or what? Let me know. Take care.

“You should take away our phones after the second drink,” he said to the bartender who was passing by.

The kid broke into a grin. He didn’t look old enough to partake of the liquor he was selling. “Oh man,” he said, “tell me you didn’t drink and dial?”

“No. No, I sent her a text.”

The bartender put his hand over his face.

“Yep,” Seth said, “I’m…textarded.”

He woke up the next morning with a bit of a headache, but managed to be in good form for Wednesday’s classes. Four of the six students wanting to add returned with permission slips in hand. “Don’t make me regret this,” he said with a wink and signed all of them.

After his last class, he was planning to go home and make revisions to the lecture he’d just given when he nearly collided with Kerri Engel in front of the bookstore. He got close enough to smell her hair and the spicy apple perfume she wore on their one and only day together. The desire to kiss her was almost uncontrollable. Her eyes were wide, her face turning red…like his own.

“Hey, Seth!”

It wasn’t Kerri’s voice, but the person beside her. A freckled-faced girl with a mouthful of braces that he knew from last semester, Katharine. Kat. He wasn’t breathing. His face assumed a smile too big for the occasion and he managed to say, “Hey.”

“I thought you were only teaching one semester?”

“Two.”

They all smiled at each other. Did Kerri, he wondered, tell her friend about their little fling? All three of them were blushing. He felt ridiculous.

“That’s
awe
-some!” Kat said.

“Yeah,” he answered. He recovered then, asked about her classes, when she planned to transfer and where. He nodded, purposely not looking at Kerri, focusing on Kat the entire time, working hard to hear what the girl was saying. “That’s good,” he said, “Very good.” Then he turned his head, deliberately. “How about you, Kerri?”

“Still doing my penance.” She was stylishly dressed, no glasses this semester, her hair down, light make up. Then, she swallowed and said, “Waiting for calls that never come.”

“Aren’t we all,” he said. Their eyes locked. Angry and sad. The space between them was charged with an almost unbearable carnality. Neither of them was breathing. Kat didn’t seem to notice. She was gazing at Seth like some love-sick girl from a black and white movie. He wrapped it up, wished them well, told them it was great to see them again and continued on to the faculty parking lot.

What the hell did she mean by that?
He did call, damn it! He called right when he said he would. And he followed that up with a text. He knew it was the right number. It was her on the voicemail, wasn’t it? He thought back. Yes. Definitely. No doubt. He didn’t know what that remark was supposed to mean and he wished to God he didn’t care. He replayed the conversation in his mind the whole way home.

For the next week, it seemed that Kerri was everywhere. He saw her two and three times a day at school. They never spoke, but their eyes always met, suggesting some emotion: annoyance, confusion, longing. Mostly longing. Snippets of past discussions broke his concentration in the evenings when he was searching the Internet for work or working on lesson plans. Images of her—one especially, of her on top of him looking down, her hair falling over her face, half smiling—were always there when he tried to sleep at night. When he wasn’t seeing her at school, he was unconsciously looking for her, distracted, double checking every time a tall blonde entered his periphery. It felt like his head was on a swivel. It got so bad that he stopped eating in the cafeteria and took his lunch back to Dr. Jarrell’s office—also on loan until May—to get some peace.

The office was another very nice and generous perk. No part-timers had an office and some full-timers had to share, but Seth had Dr. Jarrell’s all to himself. It was great, but it was strange too. While Seth had taken over much of the house, made it seem like his own, he hadn’t done anything with the office. The walls were covered with posters of another man’s favorite plays and photographs of unfamiliar relatives. Being there made him aware of how lonely he’d been lately, not just for Kerri but for companionship of any kind. Being the new guy in town, school was the only opportunity he really had to interact with people and there wasn’t a lot of socializing among the other professors. They always seemed to be scurrying to a class or a meeting and then rushing home to fulfill some family obligation, flashing quick hellos and sometimes throwing out vague, noncommittal offers to “get together.” He’d pressed the issue on a few occasions last semester, and while he’d managed to get one guy to actually meet him for a beer after school one night, neither pursued a second outing.