Perfect Fifths (26 page)

Greta's career had shown early promise but had been quickly waylaid by marriage and motherhood.

Greta had divorced twelve years ago and had worked hard,

researched hard, published hard to make up for lost time. Her son was a graduate student on the opposite coast, at the same university where her ex-husband, also an anthropologist, has served as the glorified cornerstone of the department for over two decades. The husband, in fact, was once Greta's professor. But she didn't talk much about the husband, and especially not the son.

"Natty says I was an Oedipal surrogate, and he's probably right."

Marcus preempts this joke, too. He strenuously ignores his resilient erection by working his armpits into a lather.

Greta taught ANT201 Introduction to Anthropology. Such entry-level classes are often the purgatorial bane of the untenured assistant professor's existence, even at a prestigious school like Princeton. But Greta liked the assignment, liked "getting them early," as she would explain to Marcus later, because she truly believed that the right teacher could turn curious interest into a lifetime calling. Her own husband had done that for her
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when she was eighteen, she said. The ex's influence on her intellectual life had—with the obvious exception of the genetic contribution to the creation of her twenty-three-year-old son—long outlasted his influence on her emotional life.

Marcus had enjoyed the class about as much as he enjoyed most of his classes, which was to say a lot.

As his professor, Greta hadn't treated him differently from anyone else, hadn't acted inappropriately toward him in any way. He showed up every Monday and Wednesday at 10 A.M. and did the readings, took the exams, wrote the papers, learned more about anthropology than he had known before. He got an A and considered taking another, higher-level anthropology class—Human

Adaptation, perhaps?—the following semester, that is, if he could find room in his schedule. There were so many classes to take and so little time. Of course, knowing what he knows now, he wishes he had taken another class instead of taking Greta up on her offer to go back to her apartment and see a certain self-portrait of a nineteenth-century painter whom she claimed he resembled in both appearance and raison d'etre.

"Natty says he's surprised she didn't offer to show me her etchings."

Another joke remembered and rejected. Marcus swivels this way and that, his hard-on cutting like a rudder through the arctic water. It's like my cock's been winterized, Marcus thinks. He nudges the nozzle toward H.

All the years in academia had turned Greta into a relentless questioner. Even the simplest answers were too straightforward for Greta to blindly accept without a

debate. Her inquisitiveness and refusal to accept face-value truths were the qualities that first attracted Marcus to Greta; at least, that was what he told her when she asked. (Of course, this response just begged for obvious follow-up questions, to which Marcus replied

"Your breasts" and "You don't need a lift" and finally "Greta, you've got better breasts than any eighteen-year-old on campus, now come over here and let me show you how much I enjoy them.") These are also traits he appreciated—still appreciates—about Jessica. Greta appealed to Marcus not only for the challenging similarities she shared with the woman he had wanted to marry, but because those qualities contributed to making Greta the very opposite of the simple, unchallenging girl (emphasis on "girl") Jessica had assumed Marcus would fuck in the effort to get over her. Marcus was Greta's subordinate. Both knew it and preferred it that way.

Their relationship, such as it was, depended on that imbalance of power.

He squirts liquid soap into one hand and takes a firm grasp of his hard-on with the other, pulling back at the base, near his balls.

In all those years with Jessica Darling, she never pressed him to try to explain what had drawn him to her. He never offered such an explanation, not even in the form of cryptic postcards or elliptical lyrics, always believing that such analysis was needy, unnecessary, and impossible. He loved her because she was Jessica Darling,

that's why What better explanation could there be? And he would hope that if asked why she stayed with him as long as she did—had she been asked in the years

since the breakup?—she would respond in kind: because he was Marcus Flutie, that's why.

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He closes his eyes, taking slow, soapy-smooth strokes up and down and up and down and up and down ...

Not that he would have, but Marcus never had to ask Greta what attracted her to him. She had told him straightaway.

"You look like Gustave Courbet."

"Who?"

"A brilliant nineteenth-century French painter," she replied. "Equally famous for his art—which rejected romanticism for realism—as he was for his scandalous

reputation."

That was the first time Greta made the comparison, an offhand remark as he got up from his seat and went out of the lecture hall. The second time was a few months later, carnally, as she got up and off his naked lap. Only the second time did Greta provide photographic evidence in the form of the print of the self-portrait that ostensibly—but not really—lured him to her apartment in the first place.

"This is called The Desperate Man," Greta said in a tone not unlike that which she used to address her students. "This is what you looked like every day when you came to my class. Your beard is thicker, but otherwise, he could be you."

Greta handed him a heavy art book split to reveal a wild-eyed man tearing at his uncombed hair in a mad panic, his mouth half-open as if he's about to beg for help.

Marcus saw only a vague physical resemblance but couldn't argue the titular comparison. He was a desperate man, had been a desperate man for quite some time, but never more desperate than in the moments leading up to his spontaneous marriage proposal. Proposing to Jessica had been the most desperate act of a most

desperate man, a last-chance effort to hold on to something—someone—he knew in his heart was already lost to him.

Greta then pointed out the pull quote accompanying the portrait. "'When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important,1" she read. "Sounds like someone I know."

Marcus's gut twisted as he looked into the face of this long-dead artist whom he resembled just enough to provide a necrophilic thrill. It was in that moment Marcus realized that Greta, for all her advanced degrees, was no better than any of the high school or college girls who had drawn similar comparisons to other tragically sexy antiheroes—Jim Morrison, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger—all damaged madmen who could have been saved, according to the mythology, if the right woman had come along to fix him, make him whole. Marcus was profoundly disappointed in this discovery, having masochistically hoped that Greta's innate intellectual superiority, combined with a worldly lifetime of wisdom through experience, would trump his meager offerings to the relationship. And yet that disillusionment didn't stop Marcus from playing the passive role and letting Greta dominate him for several more months.

It was supposed to be just a fling. After she broke it off, he tried to win her back with phone and text
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sex. Once, after too much wine, he stalked the entrance to her apartment to make a libidinous proposition in person. It was foolish behavior, one that put her reputation in far more jeopardy than his own. But Greta had not, as Natty claimed, lost tenure as a result of the affair. To Marcus's consternation, however, Greta did take an abrupt leave of absence, from which she has never returned. In the years since, she has contacted him only once—via e-mail—to tell him that she had just sold a nonfiction proposal to a major publishing house. Older Women, Younger Men: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Cougars Through the Ages.

It turns out that Marcus had been more ingeniously played than he ever could have imagined.

Firmer, harder, shorter strokes now. Marcus moans in self-pleasure, yes, but also because part of him wants Jessica to be awakened by the sounds of his arousal.

He wants her to know. / want you to know ...

In a defenseless postcoital languor, Marcus had almost made the error of telling Greta about Jessica.

Jessica was, after all, the answer to the question "Why did you come to my class looking so desperate?" But Marcus had simply replied "A girl" and left the rest to Greta's imagination. Marcus didn't want Greta to know about Jessica, because Jessica had really mattered to him, and so the inverse is true about Greta. He wants to tell Jessica everything because Greta didn't matter to him. The only significant aspect of that relationship was how it ended: She broke up with him after he made the mistake of rebuffing the watch that didn't tell time. She thought he would love the watch as he had loved the decadent cashmere sweater that matched his eyes. But unlike the indulgent sweater, which at least served a purpose, he hated that watch for its pointlessness and pretentiousness. Later, Marcus couldn't believe he had sunk so low as to willingly subjugate himself to someone who could think otherwise.

Marcus wants to shake Jessica awake and explain himself. / wear the dumbass watch to remind me that there will never be another Jessica, but there cannot be another Greta.

Greta had enjoyed joining Marcus in the shower. In truth, the practice had always made him uncomfortable; the act of being washed by this older woman seemed more than a little ceremonial, even maternal, which reminded Marcus—inappropriately so, especially when he was going down on Greta in the shower—of the son his age whom she never saw. It had once occurred to Marcus—again, when he was on his knees, licking, sucking, servicing—that he had never showered with Jessica.

That first thought quickly became an essential aspect of the whole erotic co-showering ritual, during which he would find himself making a list of things he had done with Greta that he had never done with Jessica. The list would start off innocently—I've never slow-danced with Jessica, I've never shared a bottle of wine with Jessica, I've never sipped espresso with Jessica, I've never gone to the opera with Jessica—before turning pornographic—I've never rubbed a washcloth over Jessica's breasts, I've never tasted soap between Jessica's legs, I've never pressed Jessica up against the tiles and taken her from behind—until the culmination of all these nevers made him come between another woman's legs (Oh, Jessica) in a passionless, masturbatory way not at all dissimilar to the manner in which Marcus has just—alone in this hotel shower, with Jessica still asleep on the other side of the door—jerked himself into ejaculatory release.

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Marcus shuts off the water, reaches for a towel. He drowsily rubs his head, arms, chest, legs, his shrinking penis, dry. He's calm for the first time since this morning, when he heard Jessica Darling's name being called over the Clear Sky public address system. He cracks open the door to take a look at her on the bed. She hasn't changed positions, but he can see the duvet cover rise and fall with every breath.

He steps toward the mirror and uses the same towel to wipe off the obfuscating fog. Marcus rolls his right bicep toward the glass. If you look closely enough, and know what to look for, you might notice that the skin is darker in certain spots than it is in others. He gently traces his fingertip along shadowy hatch marks and

squiggles that could be mistaken for naturally occurring freckles or accidental bruises but are neither. A shiver runs through him; even the tiniest arm hairs stand up on end. It's a response to his own touch, the delicate caresses paying respect to the ghostly remains of what was once a badly translated tattoo. Marcus pays more

reverence to these near-invisible Chinese characters than he ever did when they were legible. The original needlework never meant as much to Marcus as his decision

to have it erased, from his arm if not his memory.

Forever, he thinks. Whatever.

e ght

essica is walking across a field of green. Under her arm, she carries a laptop. She's wearing her only suit, the dark, well-tailored, and too expensive one she bought

with one of her first Do Better paychecks, the one she wears when she needs to look her most competent and professional, the one she wears when Cinthia has persuaded her to meet with potential big-money donors for the Do Better High School Storytellers project and she gives her passionate, heartfelt PowerPoint presentation about how much the program has forever changed the lives of so many young people all over the country This is her power suit. She feels powerful in it.

She's trying to get somewhere fast. The laptop is getting heavier with every step, weighing one arm down to the point that she's lurching like a humpback across the field. She'll never make it if she has to hold on to this laptop. When did she allow herself to be so burdened by technology? When did she stop using black-and-white composition notebooks and start relying on a laptop? Before she realizes what's she's doing, she sets the laptop down on the grass and keeps on walking. She feels so much lighter now, but her slingbacks are still sinking into the soft earth, slowing her down. She takes off the heels and flings them aside. Barefoot, she pushes off from her tiptoes and breaks into a run. The sky is cloudless and the sun is hot. Jessica feels the streams of sweat forming at her temples and racing down her torso. She unbuttons her jacket, slips it off her arms, and lets it fall to the ground. Picking up the pace, she tries to find a racing rhyme but gets too distracted by the zzzp-zzzp of fabric rubbing between her legs. She grabs at her thighs and—whoosh!—the tear-away bottoms come off with the professional swiftness of a b-baller or a stripper. Now she can concentrate on her mantra—you yes you—but not for long, because her camisole is chafing her shoulders. She clutches the offending straps and whisks that garment away as well. You yes you. With each item of discarded clothing, she is lighter, fleeter of foot.