Unlovely (23 page)

For years Claudia had been rushing
forward on a stream of adrenalin. Once she'd settled in at the Jameson School
and the newness of her employment had worn off, once the basic lesson plans
were in place and her routine established, Claudia was left with an abundance
of time on her hands. Like it or not, Claudia found herself free to simply
think her own thoughts and examine her life.

This was an exceedingly uncomfortable
business. She'd spent most of her days, certainly her time as a student, basing
her self-worth on her sense of superiority to the people who surrounded her. As
long as she was in class, writing papers and sitting for exams, she had
quantifiable proof of being at least as good as, if not better, than her peers.
After getting hired, the grades for which she'd labored all those years became
an utterly irrelevant record of past accomplishments. Since she was the only
German instructor at Jameson, she didn't even have a colleague against whom her
skills could be measured and over whom she could triumph. If she couldn't
compete and claim victory, she had no means to measure her value, no way to
prove she was best. And if she wasn't the best, what was she?

She was just Fraulein Milford, German
instructor. Even her students, who, in her imagination, were supposed to admire
and seek to emulate her, saw her not as a superior intellect, but as a person
whose job was to help them along with their own goals. This left Claudia cold
and resentful. She enjoyed the challenge of teaching, she liked drilling the
girls until they were able to respond with military precision, but in fact, she
had very little interest in her students' ambitions.

Claudia began to feel like somewhere
along the way she had lost control of her life. How had she ended up at
Jameson, really? Had this been a plan? She had applied for the job, obviously, and
it had been exciting to get a position at a prestigious private school. It had
been a goal achieved. But now what?

Now she taught.

Okay, but then what? What was there
besides the teaching? What was there to live for? Language competitions for her
students? The occasional course at the local college in art history or
comparative theology? What was the point of it? Claudia's life was busy, even
hectic at times, but it was like an anthill. All hustle and bustle, but if you
kicked it over, it would just start up again – some of the players changed, but
always the same boring, predictable goals and boring, predictable outcomes.
There wasn't anything particularly special about her life, and she wasn't
anything special now, either, at least not to anyone but her parents, and she
wondered how special she really was to them.

Claudia told herself that what she was
experiencing was the inevitable crisis of an overachieving personality finding
itself left with no new challenge – Alexander wept after he conquered the
world, didn't he? Maybe this was the same thing on a smaller scale. A temporary
situational depression was to be expected. However, for Claudia the depression
did not lift, but deepened into something more ominous. An undefined darkness
played around the edges of her mind, and threatened to push its way in.

She started having trouble sleeping and
was tormented by dreams soaked with blood. One recurrent nightmare was
especially bizarre and disturbing: she dreamed that a pregnant hog, panting and
struggling, was lashed to a wooden workbench in the basement of the house on
410 Smith Street. It was dark and damp, and her father was there, standing in
the shadows, beyond the glow of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. He
handed her a pike and ordered her to slaughter the hog. She balked and begged
him not to make her do it, but Tony hectored her and scared her so much that
she finally complied, stabbing the pig over and over as it screamed. In her
dream she could feel the resistance of the stick as she thrust it in, the
sucking resistance as she drew it out again. It never ended – the hog never
died, no matter how many times she stabbed it with the pike, no matter how much
she begged it to.

The next day she would carry the
physical sensations of the dream with her and the scene would force its way
into her imagination with disturbing clarity.

"Are you all right?" Linda
Bauer would ask, noting the circles beneath Claudia's eyes. "You seem
distracted."

"I'm fine, only sleepy. I have to
have more self-discipline and go to bed at a regular hour. I just get so caught
up in my novel."

It got to the point where Claudia was
afraid to go to bed at night, and once there, dreaded slipping into
unconsciousness. She began to take one or two Benadryl tablets in the evenings
to help her relax. She woke in the morning feeling sluggish, but the medication
gave her a deep, dreamless sleep.

Claudia suspected that she wasn't all
right at all, but she couldn't bring herself to go to a doctor. She couldn't
allow herself to consider the possibility that she might be mentally ill. It
was unthinkable. It mustn't be allowed to be true. It would be too humiliating,
it would ruin her reputation and career. Intelligent, successful people don't
go nuts. What kind of a person can't control her own brain?

"So what happened to you?" Billy asked,
glancing down at Claudia's hands. They were on a smoking break on the back
patio, sitting side by side on the concrete steps. Billy smoked. Claudia
didn't, but she liked to be outside in the sunshine, so when the smokers went
out she accompanied them.

"You mean my hands?" She laced
her fingers together, concealing her palms self-consciously.

"Yeah. And why are you here?"
He took a drag and indicated the building with a gesture of his head. "Are
you a cutter?"

That was one bad thing about this place.
Every time a new person came in you had to give the story of your downfall
again. It was tedious.

"I'm here for pretty much the same
reason everyone else is, I guess. Depression and anxiety. It got out of
control. I checked myself in."

"How long do you think you'll be
here?"

"They told me to plan on thirty
days. I think that's as much as my insurance covers."

"I don't know how long I'm in
for," Billy said. He paused a moment, realizing she hadn't fully answered
his question. "So what about your hands?"

"I'm not a cutter," Claudia
snapped. Cutters were teenage girls with boy trouble whose parents didn't
understand them.

"Okay, whatever you say," Billy
hastened to respond, but then muttered under his breath, "You seem like
one."

"I'm not a cutter." Claudia
was affronted. "Seriously."

"Okay. I believe you." Geez,
she was touchy. "Lots of girls are cutters, though. It's not that big a
deal," Billy placated, sure that she was trying to hide it. "Girls
always hurt themselves when they get upset. It's kind of stupid. I'd rather
hurt someone else."

Claudia lifted a brow. "So I've
heard." There was a trace of a smile.

Billy grinned with relief then took another
drag. She had forgiven him for overstepping. Billy wasn't good at social
situations, particularly when they involved educated older women. Someone had
told him that Claudia was a teacher, and he didn't have much experience
shooting the breeze with teachers. He was way out of his comfort zone.

He searched his store of limited
conversation topics for something else to say. "So. You married?"

Claudia looked at the slender blond
sitting beside her, saw his open expression and his bruised cheekbone, and felt
a rush of warmth. He hadn't meant to offend with the remark about the cutting.
He was just an awkward kid, trying to make friends. Why was she being so hard
on him? She'd been too defensive. She was always too defensive. She should
relax a little.

"No, never married. Why? Are you
asking?" she joked, and then she winked at him. Half a second after her
lid was raised again, she realized she'd made a mistake.

Billy's revulsion was displayed all over
his face – he knew it was, and he knew it was rude – but damn! What could he
do? It was beyond disturbing. Claudia was the sort of woman who might possibly
be married – through some weird circumstance, like an arranged marriage with
some old guy, maybe, so she could cash in when he died – but she did not seem
like a woman who would flirt. It was just wrong, coming out of her mouth, like
if your great-great aunt was flirting with you. And winking? Damn! Was she
serious? Was she interested in him? He had to be half her age; surely she would
see that any relationship between them would be creepy. He regretted trying to
be friendly with a woman in a mental hospital. Crazy chicks might be good in
bed, but not all of them, right? To hide his discomfort he thrust his cigarette
back into his mouth.

Claudia saw the disgust pass like a
cloud across Billy's face before the cigarette went in. Some things never
change. They can't medicate everything away.

Claudia cleared her throat and gave
Billy a cursory smile, feeling the heat of humiliation crawl up her neck. Then
she excused herself, stood up, and asked Rich to let her back in to the common
area.

The semester wore on, the smell of winter was in the
air, and the darkness that enveloped the buildings on Jameson's campus
encroached even further into Claudia's psyche. Soon she wasn't only tormented
by nightmares, but by daytime anxieties as well. She found herself unable to
eat anything but the lightest meals or her stomach would cramp. She was so
nervous in the morning that she was frequently five minutes late to her first
class, having to steel her will in order to leave the faculty lavatory. Claudia
started drinking nutritional supplements in the evenings to maintain her
weight; they helped some, but she still struggled with anything but the
blandest solid food. It got to the point where she wouldn't go anywhere without
a pack of Imodium in her purse, and wouldn't sit anywhere but at the end of an
aisle in case she had to beat a hasty retreat. Misery.

And then, like a miracle, into the
sturm
und
drang
strode a savior in tassel
loafers and steel rimmed glasses.

Peter Tomlinson was Jameson's chemistry and physics
teacher, having served on the faculty for twelve years by the time Claudia
arrived. Almost forty years old, with hair just beginning to silver, Peter
moved about campus with an athletic grace derived from years spent dashing
about tennis courts. In addition to being an accomplished sailor and the campus
authority on the Civil War, he was well-traveled and fluent in French. He even
sang tenor in the faculty Christmas choir – his voice was awful, to be sure,
but he was a good sport about it. The women in the faculty lounge loved him. He
smelled like Lagerfeld. He was perfect. He was a catch.

Claudia had seen Peter from a distance
at faculty functions over the years, but hadn't paid him much notice. The
chemistry and foreign language departments were at opposite ends of the school,
so day-to-day activities did not thrust her into his proximity. Every now and
again his name popped up in conversation, but that was the extent of her
knowledge of him, until the fateful day Peter Tomlinson popped into the
second-floor teacher's lounge to return a book to Madame
Janson
.

Cheerfully greeting Claudia and the
three other teachers who happened to be in the room, he spied Madame
Janson
sitting at the end of the common table and
approached her with a devastating smile. Peter spoke to the brittle French
instructor so charmingly in her native tongue that he actually had her
giggling. Claudia, Linda Bauer and the women from the English and history
departments stared transfixed. They were spellbound.

Peter was standing about two yards from
Claudia at the time. Listening to his easy French, admiring his accent and the
timbre of his voice, she studied his movements and his clothing: every piece
was quality, nothing appeared new, but there was not a visible stain or loose
thread in sight. He was sophisticated and intelligent, confident. Claudia
suddenly understood the lure of Lagerfeld and tweeds.

She knew then, as she returned his goodbye
and watched him head out the door, that this most desirable of men would love
her. This was what she'd been longing for, without even knowing it. This was
what had been missing. Once again, Claudia had a goal to pursue, and its name
was Peter.

The first thing Claudia had to do was make sure that
Peter wasn't gay; after all, he was a forty-year old, never-married bachelor.
Discreet inquiries revealed that he was just exceedingly selective. Rumor held
that he dated around some – although he'd dated no one on the faculty – but
hadn't committed to any woman yet. There may have been someone in the picture
several years ago, but it didn't pan out. He was looking for a total package,
and would settle for nothing less than someone very attractive and very smart
and witty.

This was encouraging news. Claudia
believed she came close to fitting the bill. Clearly, she was intelligent. Her
sense of humor was unique. She wasn't actually funny, but she had the sort of
dry wit that a mature man would appreciate. While it was true she wasn't
conventionally beautiful, she did have a fresh, unsullied appearance; she
wasn't one to hide her features beneath a layer of cosmetics. Plus, Peter was a
man of discriminating tastes. He wasn't the type to chase a swimsuit model.