* * *
The next day, I have a fever, but no puking, so I take three Advil, stashing the bottle in my backpack, and I go into work because I only have three remaining sick days and I have to teach my night class anyway. I split my high school students into groups and ask them to close read different parts of the text I assigned the night before and present them, but at my night class, there is no group work, so I lead a three-hour conversation on Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator, a suddenly wealthy man without a memory, doubting the solidity of his status as a person, seeks to construct a perfectly controlled representation of what he thinks might be authentic in order to feel real.
During the break, one of my students sees me splashing water on my face and swallowing more Advil and when she asks if I’m okay I hold on hard to the cold sink and nod and smile at her, fever spiking, my head cloudy, and don’t say anything.
* * *
That weekend, we go to some too-big, close-to-the-water Long Island house in which my husband built two months’ rent’s worth of walk-in closets.
* * *
We get invited to these things after he builds someone a custom closet or redoes their cabinets. The men who own these houses like to open a beer and sit with him as he works on weekends or in the evenings after they come home. They open beers and offer him one; often, he says yes and sticks around.
He went to the same type of college they did, studied the same types of grown-up good-job things. He hated going to the same place every day, had always, secretly, wanted to work with his hands. He’d go after work to a shop he rented and build for hours, just to calm his nerves, to make things, after hours of vagaries. He’d gone to college when no one before him in his family had gone to college and he felt at first that he had to prove something. Once the markets crashed, he had a reason, but also, he had an excuse. He could leave and not just not feel guilty but feel good.
Those greedy fucks, he’d mutter, listening to NPR, as the markets kept tumbling and then the banks were bailed out. He stood close to me—we’d just moved in together—rubbing his thumb along the fresh wear forming on his hands, his suits all dropped at Housing Works, so obviously relieved.
* * *
It’s a shorter ride on the Long Island Rail Road than my commute to work and we bring the children. My husband’s hoping to find his next job. We make small talk, sip too-sweet wine, and he flirts, is charming. I spend long stretches of time sitting fully clothed on the lids of toilets, or searching for or playing with the children, desperate for when he says we can go home.
He’s fitter than these other men, a little younger. He’s cooler; I never understood the purpose of words like “cool” until I met him. He makes their wives reach up too often to touch their faces or their hair when he is close to them. These men perform for him, say “fuck” too much and unbutton the top buttons of their dress shirts and pick at the labels of their beer bottles and make adolescent jokes.
Their wives linger in adjacent rooms, offering food and calling to the children. I imagine they have better sex the weeks or months he’s in their houses, the smell of him lingering in their halls and closets, a monkey wrench or small piece of wood left out.
They are, always, shocked to meet me—my short hair, my mussed-up, too-big clothes. My glasses and the way I use my hands too much when I talk. They look past me sometimes, thinking, maybe, This can’t be right; they must think: Her? She’s a professor, they mutter to one another, once we start talking, eyebrows raised and smiling, like the word “alleged” sits lodged in the backs of their throats. I nod and redden, try to explain the word “adjunct,” which is, perhaps, a cousin of “alleged.” I slip, quickly, from making jokes to making everyone uncomfortable. Except no health insurance, I say. Professor, I say, of failing to find a way to make a living wage.
* * *
Once, one of the husbands at one of these parties mistook me for the nanny, slipping me a twenty, saying, Thanks so much for taking such good care of the little ones. I did not give the money back.
I don’t tell them that, as of recently, I also teach high school. I don’t know why I don’t tell them. I don’t want to talk to them about what good, important work I’m doing. I think this might be even more demeaning than “alleged adjunct.”
They nudge their preadolescent children toward me as if proximity to an Ivy-League adjunct will result, five years from now, in stellar SAT scores. His teacher says, they whisper, that he might be gifted. She loves to write, they say, but the teacher resents her spirit, holds her back. I’m nice to them because I know I have to be and hate them for this, because, if I don’t say exactly what I know I should, they might decide they don’t want those cabinets or that walk-in closet or whatever other bullshit thing and we might not pay our rent.
* * *
I nurse our two-year-old on the couch because I know that they don’t like it, would prefer I go to one of the children’s rooms where it’s quiet, where I have some privacy. A nice woman comes to me with a blanket; I leave it in a pile on the couch.
I watch my husband, swarmed now by both men and women. I hear him laugh from far away. I see his perfect posture, the easy way he holds his beer, his hand wrapped around the label, his thumb flipped over the lip, the slight stubble on his chin and cheeks. Our girl stares up at me, suckling. Another woman sits next to me on the couch. She’s our age, a corporate lawyer. It’s always more jarring when they’re not older, they’re just rich.
You okay? she says. I’m fine, I say. I watch our four-year-old flit through the room with a pack of older kids.
They’re so beautiful, she says.
I nod.
She places her hand on her stomach and I wonder briefly if she’s pregnant.
We’ve been trying, she says.
I try to decide whether to ask more questions, whether to lean toward her like I would lean toward her had I not already decided to dislike her, to let her hold the two-year-old once she’s done nursing, just to have the memory of the weight of her in all the months until she has one of her own.
She says: You want some wine? I shake my head.
She grabs hold of my girl’s feet. Okay, she says. She looks at me a second time. Let me know, she says.
* * *
On the train ride home, both girls fall asleep and I start crying.
We’re in public, so he’s quiet. What I imagine he might be thinking is always worse than the thing he finally says out loud. We watch a drunk man slap his wife as she stumbles off the train.
He runs his fingers through his hair and rubs his hand down his neck and whispers at me. What the fuck, he says, is wrong?
I don’t know, I say. I rub a thumb over our daughters’ wrists and refuse to look at him.
He has hold of the handle of the stroller and I watch his knuckles tighten, his arm beneath his shirt get hard.
Those women, I say.
You just listen, he says. You just smile.
Don’t you hate them? I say. It’s all so …
They’re not really what I hate.
I’m just tired, I say.
You’re always tired.