One More Time (5 page)

The simple fact was that if he wanted Sharan, this was the role he had to play. He was representative of the ignorant bourgeois masses, a decoy positioned to coax his conservative (if not ignorant) fellows inside, so they could sip of the cup of artistic enlightenment.

Something like that.

He didn’t even see Leslie that first time, beyond the fact that a student with a ton of books in her arms was crossing the courtyard. He just shoved the flyer between her nose and the top book and started his spiel.

“‘Piercing the Veil’,” he said, thinking for the umpteenth time that the title of the show made no sense. “It’s a student art show in the common room, the first one in years, and you’ve got to come and see it.”

She looked at the flyer then at him, adjusted the weight of the books, then took the flyer in her right hand to study it. There was a color photograph of one of the paintings in the show, one done by Sharan in fact. It was red, as red as blood, with a jagged black line running from top to bottom just slightly to the right of center. It was called ‘Pandora’s Redemption’.

“Is this the kind of art in the show?” she asked, clearly referring to the photograph on the flyer.

“What do you mean?” Matt bristled at a potential criticism of Sharan’s work.

“Is it all modern art?”

“Well, it is all abstract, though much of it is post-modern. You should come...”

“I don’t like abstract art,” she said, then handed him back the flyer. “Save this for someone who’s interested.”

Surprise made Matt look at her. Her hair was a brown so rich that it was almost black, dark and thick and glossy, tied back in a ponytail. Hers wasn’t a cheerleader ponytail, caught up high on the back of her head and dancing in the breeze, but a low one, clasped demurely at the back of her neck. She wore no make-up, though she was pretty in a bookish way. She held his gaze for a moment, unapologetic about her view, and he saw that her eyes were as blue as the autumn sky. She then shrugged a little as if aware she might be hurting his feelings and made to step past him.

“But why not?” he asked, not quite ready to let her slip away.

She glanced back, studying him for a moment as if hesitant to reply.

“I’d like to know. Really.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said with another of those little shrugs. “At least not to me.” She smiled a bit then, and he braced himself for another candid confession. “It doesn’t seem to me to be about what people say it’s about, like maybe they’re just making up stories to make it seem more meaningful than it is. And that’s just not interesting to me.”

“This show is different,” Matt insisted, struck that she’d expressed what had been bothering him in a more vague and general way. “It might change your mind.”

She studied him steadily for a moment then nodded at the flyer he still held out to her. “What does that mean, then? Pandora’s Redemption? Why is it called that?”

Matt looked at the flyer, hating that he didn’t really know. He struggled to remember something Sharan had said about blood, but knew he couldn’t express it coherently.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Does the artist even know who Pandora was? Pandora opened the box that released all evil into the world, then closed it just in time to keep hope inside. What does that have to do with red and a line of black? I don’t get it.”

Matt smiled, caught. “Neither, actually, do I. But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless, or that there’s no point in seeing it.”

“Why are you doing this, if you don’t like this art either?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it!”

“No, but I saw the look on your face when you were looking at it. You didn’t have to say it.” She smiled then, really smiled, and he couldn’t help staring at her. She was much prettier than he’d realized. She tilted her head, eyes sparkling. “So, why do this?”

It seemed inappropriate—or ignoble—to admit that he was doing it for sex.

“Hey, Matt!” Sharan called from behind him at exactly the wrong time. “You’re doing a great job!” He turned to see her leaping down the steps, all long legs and loose hair, slender and sexy and headed straight for him.

“Oh!” Book Girl said, and Matt didn’t miss that she sounded disappointed in him. “I get it.” She ducked over her books, letting her bangs cover her eyes shyly, and started to turn.

“No, you really should come and see the show,” Matt insisted, not wanted her to walk away.

She glanced over her shoulder, her gaze darting to Sharan. Her smile was gone. “I don’t think so,” she said then, with the surety that would become so familiar to him. Then she smiled again, polite to a fault, but this smile was a pale imitation of her earlier one. He wanted the first one back. “But good luck with it.” She paused, her gaze flicking to Sharan and back to him. “Good luck with everything.”

Then she was gone, leaving Matt Coxwell staring after the one person in his experience who had the nerve to tell the truth. In a short conversation, Book Girl had been unafraid to speak her thoughts honestly.

Sharan fussed over him and kissed him, apparently thinking that he needed sexual encouragement to persevere, but he kept thinking about the other girl’s smile. He kept thinking about how she had nailed exactly what had been bothering him, that she had dared to say the unspeakable. She was right: there was so much of the art game that was bullshit, just fancy talk covering a lot of emptiness.

It was more than unworthy of interest: it was dishonest.

Even his own involvement was dishonest in a way, because he wasn’t involved for any passion of his own. He just wanted to keep Sharan happy, to keep Art from wiggling in between them in bed. Sex with Sharan was his passion, not the art itself. And that made him wonder whether his passion was enough.

He would never tell Sharan that truth, never be honest with her, because he instinctively knew that such a confession would cost him everything. But that other girl had been honest, honest as if she couldn’t imagine being anything else.

What would it be like to be able to be so open with someone else? Matt could barely imagine such a thing, given his own family history, but was tantalized by the possibility. What would it be like to say what you thought, with no prevarication or gilding? Were there people who had relationships with no secrets, no hidden objectives and goals?

Some twenty years later, Matt Coxwell watched as his plane sliced through cloud cover over Chicago and remembered how desperately—and how suddenly—he had wanted to find out. Leslie had shone a bright light into his life the first time he had met her, compelling him to assess his motives. She’d called him on his principles. He hadn’t even known her name and she had changed everything with a chance two-minute conversation.

Icy rain enveloped the aircraft as they descended, turning the world below to grey as it pounded on the wings. But Matt was lost in the past. He had turned to Leslie as the Laforini verdict was pronounced the day before, turned to her with a smile of triumph. He’d been sure that she would see that the truth had prevailed, that he had ensured justice had been served, that they were still fighting the good fight together. He had been sure that she would be proud of him and that whatever obstacles had erupted between them recently would be swept aside.

But Leslie had caught her breath and averted her gaze, her disappointment in him as cutting as a knife. How could she have forgotten the first lesson she ever taught him? How could she have lost the value of the first gift she had ever shared?

He decided that it was time he found out.

He decided that the least he could do after eighteen years of marriage was to remind her of the valuable gift she’d given him that first day.

* * *

Leslie was late for her staff meeting, which shouldn’t have surprised her and, given the circumstances, shouldn’t have bothered her as much as it did. Annette had slouched down to the kitchen so impossibly late that Leslie had had to drive her to school, and had been forced to tell her about her grandfather while doing so.

After all, people at school might well have read the paper and figured out the connection.

She wasn’t sure that ultimately she did any better a job than the newspaper might have done. Annette didn’t respond, just stared straight out the windshield as if she hadn’t heard Leslie at all.

She didn’t talk about Matt any more than they already had.

For once, Leslie didn’t fight for some sign of life from her daughter. She was tired of trying to find the elusive right answer, of trying to discern whether Annette was having a mood or a nervous breakdown. She told herself that it was because she was too late, but the truth was that she was afraid of what Annette might ask. She’d never lied to her daughter and didn’t want to start now.

At work, she took five minutes in her office to call and leave a condolence message for her mother-in-law. She wasn’t really surprised to get Beverly’s answering machine instead of Beverly live, and left a standard polite message of the “if there’s anything I can do” variety. She didn’t expect Beverly to be more than shocked by Robert’s demise: the couple was estranged, after all, and their divorce had taken a nasty turn at Robert’s instigation.

Still, there were things you had to do, and leaving messages of condolence was one of them.

Even if they did make you even more late.

Leslie charged into the departmental meeting, aware that she had never been less than prompt before. She was probably out of breath for the first time ever, too. Dr. Dinkelmann granted her a glare, clearly disappointed that one of his stars was slipping, then looked pointedly at his watch. Leslie forced a smile of apology, sat down, and noticed the murmur of her fellows.

She took a deep breath, felt the under wire press against her ribs and was reassured.

Dinkelmann cleared his throat portentously. “As I was saying...”

Leslie had never been able to pinpoint what had made her despise Dr. William Dinkelmann, the new department head, on sight. She had felt an instinctive dislike of him the very first time he offered his sweaty little hand to her—but why?

He was clever, but that’s not so special in a group of historical scholars. He was passionate about his opinions, which also wasn’t much of a surprise, but he had a slick persuasiveness about him that Leslie distrusted. He was smooth, possessed of the kind of charismatic charm more typical of politicians than academics. He had a way of marketing his plans, of choosing words that made terrible ideas sound better than they were, of tricking people into endorsing something that they fundamentally disagreed with—and that without them realizing what they’d done.

In a room full of smart people, that was quite a trick.

And, this was petty, but he wore pink shirts. Someone must have told him once that wearing pink made his eyes look more blue, which was true, but Leslie found it very hard to take a man seriously who was wearing a bright pink shirt.

So, she was conservative. Don’t shoot.

In fact, she had a sneaky feeling that maybe that was the reason Dinkelmann wore them: so that everyone underestimated him. His accomplishments were hard to belittle: he had to be ten years younger than Leslie and he was already department head, brought in from Duke for big money. He was confident and handsome in his way, which made it likely he’d soon be lured off to another deserving institution.

That couldn’t happen soon enough for Leslie.

She kept all of this neatly to herself, of course, and sat demurely in the staff meeting as if she were fully supportive of Dr. Dinkelmann and his schemes.

Let him think she was on his side. Favorites were watched less closely than those in his sights.

He beamed at the assembled group and adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses. Leslie wondered whether they really had lenses in them or just plain glass, whether they were just a prop to make him look older and more distinguished.

See? There was something about the man that made lots of nasty little suspicions start whispering in one’s thoughts.

Dinkelmann checked his notes with elaborate care, ensuring that everyone had time to understand that they were waiting on him. “And so the reason for this meeting is to discuss with you the impending policy changes in this department, and truly, in the institution at large.”

As the group stirred in early consternation—there is, after all, no single group more resistant to change than academics—Dinkelmann held up a hand and smiled benignly. “Now, there’s no cause for concern, but the university has targeted some areas for improvement in the ongoing pursuit of academic excellence.”

“Here it comes,” Naomi Tucker muttered, earning a castigating glare from Dinkelmann. Everyone else present developed a sudden fascination with their shoes.

“The university has become aware of an issue with our image in the marketplace,” Dinkelmann said with a salesman’s polish. “High school students apparently perceive this institution to be a “tough” school, and this preconception is affecting our rate of applications from prospective students. Compared to other schools of our size offering a similar curriculum, we have experienced a net drop in real applications, adjusted over time, of five per cent per year. If this dangerous trend continues, the financial foundation of the university will be at risk.”

It was impossible to look around this chunk of prime real estate and ever imagine that the university’s financial health could be at risk. And Leslie knew first hand how aggressively the alumni society pursued donations and bequests, because they phoned her constantly. She looked down at the pad of paper she had brought and scribbled something, as if taking notes like a good camper.

Defiance, meanwhile, boiled beneath her fabulous bra. Leslie didn’t say anything, didn’t even look up from her lap. You really can’t argue with (or at least can’t win against) an historian who has a specialty in Napoleon’s battle strategies. Leslie had realized very quickly that she wasn’t Dinkelmann’s Waterloo, and never would be.

He, as was typical of him, assumed that silence meant assent, so continued with merry confidence. “The university board of governors have decided to address this false perception by improving upon our already excellent grading standards. Beginning with this semester, 50% of all students registered in a given class must receive a grade of B-plus or better. In addition, the former policy of 80% of all students achieving a passing grade still stands. I’m sure that you can see—”