Say You're Sorry (17 page)

“Just pretend that I’m married,” she’d said. “It simply won’t do to have us gossiped about around school. It isn’t appropriate.”

“
Inappropriate,
” he’d teased. Then he’d lowered his voice to that husky register that made her bone marrow vibrate and commanded, “The library.”

The truth was Diana was so lust-struck at that point, she’d have followed Rob if he’d jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he’d added. “I’ll meet you in the parlor. Wait for me there.”

At the appointed time Diana had settled herself onto the parlor’s crimson loveseat. Moments later, an older, elegant couple, in their seventies, had taken chairs to one side of Diana’s perch. They began leafing through travel books, planning a trip to France, obviously not their first.

Then another man entered the parlor. For a moment Diana didn’t recognize Rob. He’d donned serious horn-rims and slicked his hair back with a silvery gel. A baggy jacket made him look older—and heavier.

She had to stifle her hoot of surprise and delight. A disguise! Oh, Clever Rob. She’d said discreet and…

But he warned her into silence with a raised finger and a shake of his head.

“Here’s the book you asked for, miss,” he said, as if he were a librarian, handing her a large-format volume.

The older couple looked up briefly, smiled, then bent their heads back to their research.

“Let me show you what I was talking about.” Rob gestured with an open hand. Could he join her on the loveseat?

The book was a collection of exquisite erotica. Beautifully rendered line drawings of the seduction of a young man by a voluptuous older woman.

“Where did you find this?” she’d whispered.

“Shhhh,” he’d cautioned. Library. No talking.

The older couple smiled once more.

Five minutes later found Diana and her younger paramour locked together in the single-occupancy Ladies’ Room, half naked and crazy, crazy, crazy.

*

“Maybe we’ll come back and see the library tomorrow,” said the permed blond tourist. “Howard wants to go back to the hotel and take a nap before we have dinner.” She paused, then added smugly, “At Antoine’s.”

Of course. Sure, the Oysters Rockefeller were still good, and the
pommes de terre
souffles terrific, but Diana could have told the blonde of a hundred better places both high and low, Bayona to Domilise’s Po-Boys. But tourists always wanted to drop
Our dinner at Antoine’s
into conversation back home.

*

Once again, the girls’ voices. “Shut up!” said Amber. “You did not steal your dad’s car!”

“Oh, yeah. I’d been scheming for this. I was so ready. I’d nabbed a pair of her panties out of the clothes basket—”

“Yewh!”

“And I left them under the driver’s seat with a ripped condom wrapper. So the cops find the car about five minutes after Dad dials nine-one-one, a Beemer emergency, all ranting. And then, when the cops bring it back, he’s going over his ride, inch by inch, and—”

“Hello! Panties! Condom! But how would he know for sure they were hers? Not the girlfriend of the banger who pinched it?”

“’Cuz she always wore this one kind of black panties, really expensive, and REALLY big—”

Diana laughed. So did Howard, the tourist hubby in front of her. The wife elbowed him.

Not funny, Howard.

*

After the Latter, Diana and Rob had fun seeing just how creative (and discreet) they could be.

Let’s Pretend was a good model.

The operating principle was fantasy and role-playing (while hidden in plain sight).

And disguises were an essential part of secrecy, weren’t they? The weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, with its masks and costumes, had been a particularly interesting time.

But there were parades and dress-up balls of one kind or another in New Orleans practically every day.

Not all of their encounters were production numbers, of course. Many nights Rob came visiting, and they made dinner and then love with no games, no frills.

Oh, maybe just a bit of “Let’s pretend I’m the cable guy.” Rob tapping on the sun-porch door, the front doorbell broken for eons. Diana answering his knock in the black silk dressing gown he loved.

Or she’d remind him, “…that time you had me meet you at the bar in the Maple Leaf, and we pretended that we were strangers.”

“Yeah, and you let someone buy you a drink before I got there, and then we almost came to blows over who you were going home with.”

“I loved that,” she sighed.

She loved
him
, too.

*

“I’m crazy in love with him,” cooed Amber.

Passengers up and down the streetcar grinned. Ah, youth.

“He is so much fun. Last weekend we went dancing at the Rock ’n’ Bowl. He’s a mad dancer, and when we rolled out of there, like one a.m., he said, “Wanta go for a drive?’ And the next thing I knew, we were all the way down in Grand Isle. A friend of his has a beach cottage there.”

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go,” said Chloe. “Was it as romantic as Chopin portrayed it?”

Now Diana smiled. Such smart, literary girls, alluding to Kate Chopin’s feminist-novel-before-its-time,
The Awakening
, while talking about boys.

“It was heaven,” sighed Amber. “He was fabulous, sweet as could be the whole time. And we stayed for the sunset the next evening. I’ve never seen such a sunset.”

“Oh, I wish I were in love,” Chloe longed.

“You will be. Any minute now. You’ll see.”

*

Love, oh love, the last thing that Diana had expected. Or wanted.

The affair with Rob was meant to be like all the others. Just for fun, right?

Though unlike her other lovers, Rob wasn’t just a roll in the hay who managed to hold her attention for a candle’s length. He also sported that perfect trifecta of intelligence, imagination, and sweetness.

Rob wasn’t just for laughs.

Rather, he made her laugh.

What a world of difference between those two.

(Though sometimes she asked herself, as their games-playing grew ever more filigreed, Is this love or sexual obsession?)

In any case, how ridiculous that the one who’d finally battered down the gates, bridged the moat, and scaled the steep walls to her heart/whatever was so inappropriate.

An adjunct! A baby adjunct. A man without a full-time job in the very field at whose apex she stood.

Okay, at thirty-seven, Rob wasn’t really a baby, but still…

The moment she’d realized that she could no longer imagine her life without him, she’d begun to fret.

What if he grew tired of her? What if he wandered? Someone at the university uncovered their secret and compromised her position? What? What? What?

Yet losing implied having. She had no claim on Rob. It wasn’t as if they used the L word.

Diana worked herself into a perfect frenzy. Her love-making took on a desperate edge. What new trick to titillate her lover? She spent hours poring over the Good Vibrations catalogue.

“Is something bothering you?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem, what, worried about something. Need more space? Want to see less of me?”

“No!”

He laughed. “More of me?” The question delivered with that cocked eyebrow, a fiddling with his top shirt button. Followed by a sweet tumble.

Get a grip, she told herself. Don’t screw this up. Don’t be a ridiculous older woman. Don’t grasp.

And then, late February, Rob used the L word.

It just wasn’t the one she wanted to hear.

“Livingston,” he said. “It’s a small liberal-arts school in Cambridge, Mass. Great rep. An old friend’s in the English department there. Gave me the heads-up that they’re going to have a full-time slot. He has a lot of pull. You loved Cambridge, right?” Then he’d stopped, seeing her face. “Oh, honey bun, you know I don’t want to leave. I love New Orleans. I love being here with you.” Then, finally, finally, dear Lord, “I love…you.”

And there it was. He loved her, but also he needed a real job. With real tenure. Real benefits. Real pay. Real retirement.

“Have you already applied?”

“Well, yeah. I mean…”

“I know. I know.” She’d hugged him close. And then the question occurred. “Other places, too?”

He shook his head into her shoulder. “Livingston’s the only one where I have some kind of inside chance.”

What was he talking about? Was she not an insider at the university right here? Did she have no influence?

But what she didn’t have, unfortunately, was an opening in her department. No retirements on the horizon. No one on leave who might not return. And no one was ever fired unless—to use the infamous words of ex-governor Edwin Edwards speaking of himself as a shoo-in for a second term—he were “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”

Then lightning struck. Diana had an inspiration. There was one possibility. A little tricky, but possibly doable. Probably. No, definitely. She
would
make it work.

And, oh, what sweet revenge: exchanging Arnold Venable for Rob.

* * *

“I just wish we could spend more time together,” Amber complained. “But he’s so busy. And then there’s—”

Chloe jumped in, “Yeah, but you’re busy, too. Like have you finished your senior thesis for the psych course?”

“No. But he’s helping me with it. I mean, he’s been reading what I’ve got, and he makes such great suggestions.”

“Well, sure, he’s—”

Then Amber interrupted. “Look! The Columns. Ohmygawd! We spent the most incredible night there.”

A heavyset woman across the aisle from Amber and Chloe shook her head. A frown of disapproval rumpled her handsome brown face. A church lady, no doubt.

Diana, however, smiled. The Columns Hotel, once upon a time a family mansion, had starred as Madame Nell’s bordello in the film
Pretty Baby
. In actuality, the late 19th

early 20th century’s red-light district, Storyville, had been downtown, fronting Basin Street.

The Columns did, however, possess an aura of naughtier, bygone times: its bar elegant with chandeliers and fireplaces, the rooms upstairs tricked out in flocked-velvet Victorian finery. Diana and Rob had frolicked there one night in an amazing four-poster bed.

Now she spied their private balcony, right there. That’s where they’d sipped morning-after mimosas.

*

Arnold Venable had been the department chair for eons before Diana took that post, and few were the toes he hadn’t mangled. Even when young, which he certainly wasn’t anymore, Arnold had been imperious, affecting a British accent, grandly furnishing his office with Persian carpets, subdued lighting, and a slender walnut desk. Arnold didn’t hold office hours; he received. He held court. And he’d long ago perfected the art of slipping a silver dagger into one’s soft spots, his targets universal. University president to office cleaner, no one escaped Arnold’s withering blue gaze or razor tongue.

Immediately upon succeeding Arnold as chair, some six years earlier, Diana had been swamped by the English faculty’s campaigning for a piece of the pie of privileges he’d hoarded.

“Not fair that Arnold never takes a lower-division class.”

“Not fair that he’s had a lock on Shakespeare and the Romantic poets from time immemorial.”

Diana couldn’t agree more, having herself suffered from Arnold’s barbs and slights, and drawing up that next term’s class load, she assigned Arnold a section of English 101. Freshman grunt composition. Arnold refused it, sneering as if she’d handed him a bag of manure.

Fine. So be it. And, as was the university policy, Arnold taught less than a full load, though for full pay.

This pattern had continued year after year, with Arnold accruing an ever-growing debt of classes owed.

Just a week after Rob’s announcement of his application to Livingston College, Diana had casually, ever so coolly, brought up The Arnold Situation at lunch with an administrative dean.

He’d jumped. “We absolutely must do something. Just yesterday the president was laying down the law about tightening all financial belts, closing all loopholes. Now.” He’d leaned closer to Diana. “Do you have any ideas?”

Why, yes, she did.

“
Three
sections of 101?” Arnold had slammed through Diana’s office door without knocking. He’d delivered the question as if she were a ridiculous child who’d donned a clown outfit for a wedding.

“Yes. Three. Close the door, Arnold. Come in and sit down.”

Then Diana had the delicious pleasure of explaining to Arnold Venable that he’d reached the end of the line. Administration had done the toting—she handed the figures across her desk to him—and he was in arrears for so many classes untaught but salaried that he must a) teach whatever offered with zero compensation for the next two years, b) pay back the money advanced, or c) take early retirement, effective the end of the term, and the debt would be forgiven.

Within hours Arnold had begun packing the leather-bound tomes that lined the walls of his office.