In the Middle of Somewhere (10 page)

“Paulie!” Her voice is shrill and I’m struck with the sense that I’m somehow in trouble. “Paulie, was that my car?”

Across the street, the door of a white Honda Accord opens slowly and a thin man slinks out of the car.

I can’t decide whether to stay down, out of the fray, or make a break for it. I’m doing something ill-advisedly in the middle—a kind of pretend-I-dropped-something slash tying-my-shoe maneuver—when Marjorie notices me.

“Daniel? What’s wrong? Why are you on the ground?”

“Oh, well,” I say. “Um, just—in my shoe—or….”

That went well.

“Ah, yes, dear,” she says, then turns her attention to the man walking toward us.

“Sorry, Mother,” the man says. “I don’t know what happened. I just tried to start the car and it… exploded.”

“I said you could borrow my car, not break it, Paul,” Marjorie says tartly, and the man winces. Wow, I guess even adults can still get told off by their mothers. I wouldn’t know.

The man—Paul—sighs in irritation. “Well, Mark’s closed for the evening, so I guess I’ll have to take the car in tomorrow.”

“Well, I should hope so, since you’re the one who broke it.”

“I didn’t
break
it, Mother. Cars just do things. No one knows why. Except Mark,” he says resentfully. “And god knows whether he’s even telling the truth about the cars. I swear, every time I take mine in it costs me three hundred dollars.” I take in his khaki pants and polo shirt and figure that he’s not particularly comfortable in a garage.

“Um, hi,” I say, stepping toward them. “I can take a look at it, if you want. From the sound of it, though, it’s probably your spark plugs, or maybe the catalytic converter.”

They’re both staring at me.

“I’m Daniel,” I say, offering my hand to Paul. That’s what you’re supposed to do in a small town, right? Be friendly and, like, tell people things about yourself?

“You’re the new professor over at the college?” Paul says, trying for casual, but peering at me intently.

“I told you about him, Paul,” Marjorie says, elbowing Paul, and my stomach clenches. “And I wish you would get over this tiff with Mark, dear. You’re not in high school anymore.”

“And you know about cars, do you?” Paul says, clearly desperate for a change of subject even though he looks skeptical.

“A bit. You want to pop the hood?”

While Paul fumbles to pop the hood, I take off my button-down shirt so I don’t get it dirty and untuck my T-shirt so I don’t look like an idiot.

Staring down into the guts of the Accord makes me feel like I’m ten years old again, when my dad would open up a car and line up me, Brian, Colin, and Sam in front of it to see which of us could guess the problem first. Colin, who’s extremely competitive, almost always won. You wouldn’t guess it, since he tends to act like a yahoo much of the time, but Colin’s actually really smart. He could spot the problem before the rest of us had even started to narrow it down. Of course, later, after I’d stopped pretending that I cared about the cars, I wondered if Brian and Sam didn’t sometimes let Colin win because he got so angry when he didn’t.

Marjorie appears at my elbow, holding out a bundle of paper towel when I start to unconsciously wipe my hands on my pants.

“Thanks.”

She just shakes her head at me and I can practically hear the word “hoodlum” rattling around in her head as she takes in my tattoos and my now-dirty hands.

“Um, it’s not the cat, so that’s good. The catalytic converter,” I correct myself, when Marjorie and Paul exchange a look that clearly says I’ve confirmed their suspicion that I don’t know anything about cars. “I think it’s probably a spark plug wire. If it sparks too early or too late, it messes up your ignition timing. I can’t test the wires here, but if that’s what it is, it shouldn’t be that expensive to fix.”

Marjorie’s smiling and Paul’s looking at me blankly. Two Sludge customers holding iced coffee concoctions have found their way over and are standing next to Marjorie, staring at me.

“Hey,” I say to them. “Um, so, yeah. It’s not hard to replace them,” I say to Paul. “Mark—is it?—will just need to run a diagnostic to see which wire’s the problem and then replace that one. I mean, if that’s what’s wrong,” I say, not wanting to sound like a know-it-all. I could offer to try and fix it for them, but in a town with only one mechanic, it doesn’t seem wise to step on his toes.

“Thank you,” says Paul, holding out his hand.

“Aren’t you the new professor?” one of the coffee-drinkers—a thirtysomething woman with badly bleached hair—asks confusedly.

“Yeah, hi,” I say, holding out my hand to her. “I’m Daniel.” She seems confused by the gesture, but then gives a limp, lingering shake.

“Wow,” she says. “I’m Ellen. So you fix cars too, huh? I wonder what other tricks you’ve got up your sleeve.”

“Oh, no, not really,” I say. “My dad owns a shop in Philly, so I’ve just picked up some stuff.”

They’re all looking at me like they expect me to give them more information, but I don’t have anything else to say. I can’t tell if they’re thinking that knowing about cars disrupts the gay stereotype or the academic stereotype more. I gather up my stuff and try to extricate myself before they can ask any more questions.

“You,” Marjorie says, pointing at me. “Free coffee tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I didn’t really do anything.”

“Don’t argue; just accept it,” Marjorie says, and I smile.

“See you tomorrow!” Marjorie calls after me.

October

F
OR
THE
last twenty minutes, Guy Beckenham, a skinny, mousy man with a gray mustache who specializes in medieval literature, has been flipping through what appears to be some kind of illustrated manuscript. It’s either in Middle English or my upside-down reading skills have really deteriorated. Every so often he’ll lean back in his chair, hands over his stomach, and grin as if whatever is going on in this medieval tome is just tickling the hell out of him.

It’s Friday afternoon and I am in the last place that any academic ever wants to be, most especially on a Friday afternoon: a faculty meeting. As a graduate student, I heard faculty complain about them all the time, but I was so curious about who these people really were that I imagined there could be nothing more interesting than getting to see the inner workings of the English department—who is friends with whom, who is actually a pompous asshole and who has people’s best interests at heart, what’s the real reason so-and-so took a semester off, etc.

Wrong. Faculty meetings feel like some form of psychological water torture, each inconsequential point of order boring more deeply into my skull than the last. For people who are so smart about books and history and philosophy, my colleagues do not seem to understand the whole listen and then speak thing.

Certain I’m missing absolutely nothing, I let my tired mind wander to the two high points of an otherwise draining week. Number one. I was pretty sure that Rex was blowing me off on Saturday when he took my phone number instead of giving me his, but the next evening, when I was at the grocery store, he called me. It was awkward, but I was so glad he hadn’t thrown my number out the window of his truck while laughing at how pathetic I am that I was willing to overlook that. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello?

Rex: Daniel?

Me: Yeah.

Rex: Oh, hello, good, hi. This is Rex. From, um, from—

Me: I know who you are, Rex. Hi.

Rex: Right, of course. Well, I was wondering if you’re free on Saturday night?

Me (trying not to yell “yes” into the phone instantaneously): Yeah, I think so. Why?

Rex (his suave somewhat back in place): Great. I thought, if you weren’t doing anything, that maybe you’d like to come over and we could watch
Gaslight
. The 1940 version that your library didn’t have?

Me (trying not to yell “yes” into the phone instantaneously, again): That sounds great, sure.

Rex: Great, great. How about eight on Saturday?

Me (determined to use any word but “great”): Great! That works.

Rex: Oh, I just wanted to let you know that I put that work order in for a new lamp. I ran into Phil—ah, the guy in charge of that—at the hardware store, so I just went ahead and let him know.

Me: Wow, that’s some service. Thanks.

Rex: My pleasure. Um, okay, then. Have a good night, Daniel.

Me: Good night. Oh! Wait, um, I don’t know how to get to your house.

Rex: Of course. Do you have a pen?

Me: Can you just e-mail me directions if I give you my address?

Rex: Oh. I don’t have e-mail.

Me (impressed): Wow. Okay. Um….

Rex: Why don’t I call you on Saturday before you come and I’ll give them to you then. Okay?

Me: Yeah, sure, great.

Rex (in a ridiculously low and growly voice): Good night.

T
HAT
’
S
IT
. If you edit out the “okays,” “greats,” “ums,” and “ohs,” it’s really only a few sentences, but I hung up the phone and wandered through the produce section with a humiliating grin on my face. I even bought apples because it seemed like something someone who got asked on a date might do. Then, of course, I told myself that it wasn’t necessarily a date. That Rex might just be doing me a favor, since the Free Library of Philadelphia had failed me and the library here wasn’t likely to be of more help. Or that he just wanted to hang out, as friends, and share his love of classic cinema with someone.

Still, I allowed myself. If nothing else, it made Sunday not so depressing.

On Monday, as promised, there was a floor lamp in my office. It seemed to only take 25-watt bulbs, one of which flickered with an eerie irregularity that made me constantly jerk my head around to see if someone was behind me, but at least it lent the place atmosphere.

Tuesday and Wednesday were nightmares. Like a total idiot, I’d prepped the wrong readings for my classes (I blame Rex’s delectable ass in those worn blue jeans for distracting me during course planning), so I was scrambling around all day Tuesday, didn’t sleep Tuesday night, and cocked up class on Wednesday as a result, proof that I was getting old, since staying up all night never used to faze me. To add insult to injury, Peggy Lasher, a very well-meaning but extremely irritating colleague of mine, decided to be buddies with me.

Peggy is the kind of person I avoided all throughout grad school. She’s nice enough if she likes you, but she’s incapable of letting anyone be right or achieve anything unless she’s more right or has achieved something better. She’s snobby and passive-aggressive—a quality I cannot abide—and just when you think she’s leaving, she sees something in your office that reminds her of a story she simply
must
tell you.

She stuck her head in my door twice on Tuesday and three times on Wednesday, and when I finally told her that I really needed to concentrate she looked so offended that I found myself admitting to her that I’d done the wrong preps for class. Rather than leaving me alone, she told me a very long story about her own first year teaching here. It seemed, for a while, like it would be about a similar incident, but it quickly became clear that this wasn’t an I’ve-done-stupid-things-too story; this was an it-seems-like-I’m-commiserating-but-I’m-actually-bragging story that ended with Peggy having
almost
made a mistake similar to mine but catching herself in time because she pays attention to detail. I wanted to take her by her unfortunate bowl-cut and use her head to open another crack in the ceiling.

Needless to say, by Thursday all I wanted was for the week to be over, especially after I spilled coffee on my stomach walking to campus and had to go around all day with a shirt that made me look like I worked in a prison cafeteria. I got to my office already out of sorts, threw my stuff on my desk, and checked my e-mail, only to find that the afternoon’s faculty meeting, which I was going to have been able to miss because I had to supervise a lecture across campus, had been moved to Friday afternoon, so everyone was delighted that I’d be able to make it after all.

Which brings me to high point number two. Hands on my desk, I pushed myself back onto the two back legs of my chair in frustration, without thinking about it, then immediately froze, remembering that the last time I’d done so, the desk had scudded off its literary magazine stack and almost taken my computer to the floor with it. That time, though, all four of the desk’s legs stayed firmly on the floor. Confused, I looked at it more closely and realized that the literary magazines I’d shimmed the legs with were gone, and it was resting solidly on new legs.

And I knew it could only have come from one place.

I called Rex.

“This is Rex Vale.”

“Rex, this is Daniel.”

“Daniel, hi.” His voice warmed when he said my name.

“I, um, I—did you fix my desk?”

“Yeah, well. Couldn’t have your whole office collapsing.” He paused. “And you said you didn’t want me to put in a work order, so….”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “It’s great. I just… you didn’t have to do that. I wasn’t expecting….” I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever done anything like that for me before. “Thank you,” I said, pleased to hear that I sounded genuine and not pathetically emotional. “Really, thank you. I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve started with that.”

“Okay, now, don’t worry. You’re welcome.”

There was a pause, but it didn’t feel nearly as awkward as the ones during our last conversation, which was heartening.

“Listen,” Rex said. “They say it’s going to get real cold on Saturday, maybe storm, so I just want to make sure you still want to come. To my place, I mean.”

“Yeah, of course I do,” I say. “I mean, this is Michigan, right? I knew it had to get cold at some point.”

“All right, then,” Rex said. “Good-bye.”

Then he hung up before I could ask for directions.

“A
ND
YOU
’
RE
all right with that, Daniel?” Bernard Ness is saying.