“Listen, why don’t you come by for dinner on Thursday?” His hand was back by his side, and Cleo told herself that she must have misread the squeeze. It was a compassionate touch, nothing more. He was her professor, and he wore a ring, and he told cute stories about teaching his kids how to ride bikes! God, what was wrong with her?
“Oh!” Cleo said again. “Um, OK?”
“Can you get a babysitter? I don’t want to put you out.”
Cleo nodded enthusiastically. The benefit of going to law school with a child (perhaps the only benefit) was that there were babysitters aplenty all over the college campus. It was odd to be handing Lucas off to a girl only a few years younger, but having unprotected sex your senior year in college did that to you. So. She learned not to explain herself to the sitters whenever they showed up, and frankly most of them didn’t give it a second thought. They were there for the money, not to consider all the ways Cleo’s life would be different if she’d used a condom.
“I have a list of sitters,” she said. “I’d love to.”
“I always like to make myself available to standout students,” he said. “Guide you through your time here. Send you on your way with counsel and recommendations.”
“That would be amazing,” Cleo replied. She couldn’t believe it. She could, of course; she deserved it, her work merited it, but still, she couldn’t believe it.
“Great, it’s settled. My address is in the directory. Let’s say six-ish?”
Cleo nodded.
“I make an excellent chicken.” He grinned. “I know, I know. I teach law by day and cook by night. A modern man if you’ve ever seen one.”
“Your wife is very lucky,” Cleo said, for no reason other than it sounded like she was.
Cleo clicked her pen, circled NOBELLS on her yellow pad, then quickly typed his name into her Google bar. She was not the type to google-stalk her past. She barely knew how to work Facebook, for God’s sake. She didn’t know that Matty had gone on to become a Microsoft genius; she didn’t know that MaryAnne had gone on to leave the majority of her lofty dreams unfulfilled. Gaby’s campaign motto, “Only Forward,” was an accurate representation of Cleo’s general mind-set. She didn’t see much use in skulking around her history, which was ironic, she realized, as she scanned the first page of internet hits on Alexander Nobells, given that her father encouraged her to put that history down for more permanent posterity.
Just as she clicked on a recent Washington Post article in which Nobells was quoted, Lucas opened her office door. He never bothered knocking, which she didn’t really mind, but she also knew that if she repaid him with the same discourtesy, he’d stop speaking to her for at minimum several hours. (Until he needed something from her. Teens were unpredictable but predictable in their demands, at the very least.)
“I need you to sign these,” he said, dropping a stack of forms on her desk.
“What are they for?”
He shrugged, like it was a nuisance for her to ask. “I don’t know.”
“School? Soccer? Can you give me a general sense?” Cleo reached for them, realizing it was probably just going to be more expeditious to figure it out herself.
“School,” he said. “Permission slips for our retreat.”
“You have a retreat?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes. They said they sent the parents emails. The end-of-year retreat before graduation? In two weeks, when you go to Syria or . . . wherever?”
“Oh, OK, sure.” Cleo had definitely not read those emails, nor had she even seen them. But she must have discussed this with Lucas at some point, since he knew about her Middle East trip with the Senate Intelligence Committee. She wasn’t even sure why they were holding a graduation in the first place, since the students just rolled over to the high school within the same school, but she didn’t want to sound like a grinch. “Hang on. I’ll sign them now.”
She grabbed a pen while Lucas scowled at the floor.
“Actually, can I ask you something?” She peered up at him, her handsome prodigy, dark hair, broody eyes. He grimaced in reply. “What do you think of Benjamin’s dad?”
Lucas flopped his shoulders. “I don’t know. He’s a dad.”
Something hung in the air between them, or maybe Cleo was imagining it. The emphasis on dad, like, did it really matter if he was a great human being, a hero of some sort? He was a male and he had spawned Benjamin and at least Benjamin was lucky enough to have one. She held her breath, wondering if they were going to get into it again.
Then she pressed on. “Is he nice, though? Home a lot?”
“God, how would I know?”
“Because you spend most of your free time there?” Cleo signed his forms distractedly. She realized she had put her signature where she was supposed to print her name and vice versa. She drew two haphazard arrows, indicating that they should be switched, and assumed this was good enough. If any of her staffers had turned in such an error-riddled form, she’d have insisted that it be redone. Cleo exhaled, debating asking Lucas for a new form—she didn’t like making mistakes, much less stupid ones. She worried that the administrative staff at school would judge her, find her sloppy. Which she never used to be until MaryAnne Newman showed up in her life again. Now she felt like she was making all sorts of mistakes—maybe mistakes was too strong; missteps felt better, but she didn’t like making those either. She thought of the folded newspaper in her bag with a giant ad about her presidential fitness. Goddamn you, MaryAnne Newman!
Lucas was speaking again. “I don’t know, Mom, OK? He’s . . . fine. I don’t, like, talk to him a lot.”
“Is he nice to Emily?”
Lucas grabbed the forms, headed back toward his bedroom. “Hey, Mom, not everything has to be turned into some feminist manifesto.”
Cleo jumped to her feet. “What does that mean?”
She thought of the two girls he might be juggling—Marley and Esme—and realized she really, really needed to sit him down and make him choose, not just dance around it as she had the other night. She needed to explain why he was being a dick and what a terrible precedent this set. Not just for him but for those girls too. Making them feel as if it were one or the other, making them wonder if they needed to be something more than they were for him, making them morph themselves into something they weren’t.
Or maybe teen girls these days would just shove a middle finger in his face and recognize that he was the problem, not them. That actually seemed more like it.
Lucas stopped, turned back. “Sorry, that came out harsher than I meant it to. I just meant that not all men are the enemy. And I doubt Ben’s dad is.” He swiped his hair from his face and disappeared into his room for what would be the rest of the night. Like it was that simple. Men and women. How people make you believe that what you see is who they are.
Cleo slunk back into her chair. Of course all men aren’t the enemy! She noticed her search results still in her tab. Alexander Nobells. But sometimes, it’s just a fact that they are.
Cleo had arrived at Professor Nobells’s apartment on the Upper West Side with a bottle of wine that she hoped was good. No one had really taught her how to buy wine—her parents were dead by the time she realized that she should know about it, and her sister was across the country now, working and therapizing and doing a good job being an adult (surprising), and Cleo wasn’t going to bother her to ask about vintages and grapes, especially after she’d screamed at her when she came to help just after Lucas’s birth. Besides, Cleo was busy raising a baby on her own, and thus the long and the short of it was that she hadn’t been drinking much wine anyway.