Joe Hill - Horns

“Ig wouldn’t report him.”

“No. I guess not. But he would’ve wanted me to drop coursework with him. Which I didn’t want to do. However he acts outside the classroom, the guy is one of the best oncologists in the country, and at the time I wanted to see what he could teach me. It seemed important.”

“It doesn’t seem important any more?”

“Hell. I don’t need to graduate first in anyone’s class. I have mornings when I think I’ll be lucky just to graduate at all,” she said.

“Ah, come on. You’re doing great.” Lee paused and said, “How’d the old bastard take it? When you told him to get screwed?”

“With good humor. The wine was nice. Early nineties from a little family vineyard in Italy. I have a feeling he’s bought the exact same bottle for a few other girls. Anyway, I didn’t tell him to get screwed. I told him I was in love with someone and also didn’t think it would be appropriate while I was studying with him, but under other circumstances I would’ve been glad to entertain the idea.”

“That was kind of you.”

“It’s true. If I weren’t his student and if I’d never met Ig? I could imagine going out with him to a foreign film or something.”

“Get the hell out. Didn’t you say he’s old?”

“Old enough to qualify for AARP.”

Lee sank back into his chair, feeling something unfamiliar: disgust. And surprise. “You’re kidding.”

“Sure. He might teach me about wines. And books. And stuff I don’t know about. What life looks like from the other end of the telescope. What it’s like to be in an immoral relationship.”

“It’d be a mistake,” Lee said.

“I think maybe you have to make a few,” Merrin said. “If you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.”

“What about the old dude’s wife and daughter?”

“Yeah. I don’t know about that part. Course, it’s the third wife, so it’s not like she’d be terribly shocked.” Merrin narrowed her eyes and said, “You think every guy gets bored sooner or later?”

“I think most guys fantasize about what they don’t have. I know I’ve never been in a relationship in my life where I wasn’t fantasizing about other girls.”

“At what point? When in a relationship does a guy start thinking about other girls?”

Lee tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, pretended to think. “I dunno. About fifteen minutes into the first date? Depends if the waitress is hot.”

She smirked, then said, “Sometimes I’ll see Ig looking at a girl. Not often. If he knows I’m around, he keeps his eyes in his head. But, like, when we were down to Cape Cod this summer and I went to the car to get the suntan lotion and then remembered I’d stuck it in my windbreaker. He didn’t think I’d be back so soon, and he was looking at this girl on her belly, with the back of her bikini top undone. Pretty girl, maybe nineteen, twenty. When we were in high school, I would’ve raked him up and down for looking, but now I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. He’s never been with anyone except me.”

“Is that right?” Lee asked in an incredulous tone, although he already knew.

“Do you think when he’s thirty-five he’ll feel like I trapped him too young? You think he’ll feel like he was cheated out of fun high-school sex and be fantasizing about the girls he missed out on?”

“I’m sure he fantasizes about other girls now,” said Merrin’s roommate, passing through with a Hot Pocket in one hand, holding the phone to her ear with another. She continued on into her room and slammed her door. Not because she was angry, or even aware of what she was doing. Just because she was the kind of person who slammed doors without noticing.

Merrin sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “True or false. What she said?”

“Not in a serious way. Like him checking out the girl on the beach. He might enjoy thinking about it, but it’s just a thought, so what’s it matter, right?”

Merrin leaned forward and said, “Do you think Ig will do a little sleeping around in England? To get it out of his system? Or do you think he’d feel like he was stepping out in an unforgivable way on me and the kids?”

“What kids?”

“The kids. Harper and Charlie. We’ve been talking about them since I was nineteen.”

“Harper and Charlie?”

“Harper is the girl, after Harper Lee. My favorite one-book novelist. Charlie if it’s a boy. ’Cause Ig likes when I say, ‘Solly, Cholly.’” The way she said it made Lee not like her so much. She looked distracted and happy, and he could tell from the suddenly distant look in her eyes that she was imagining them herself.

“No,” Lee said.

“No what?”

“Ig won’t sleep around on you. Not unless you slept around on him first and made sure he knew it. Then I guess, yeah. Maybe. Reverse this for a minute. Do you ever think maybe you’ll be thirty-five and feel like you missed something?”

“No,” she said with a flat, disinterested certainty. “I don’t think I’ll ever be thirty-five and feeling like I missed out on anything. That’s an awful idea, you know.”

“What is?”

“Screw someone just to tell him about it.” She wasn’t looking at him but staring out the window. “The thought kind of makes me sick.”

The funny thing is, she looked a little sick right then. For the first time, Lee noticed how pale she was, dull pink circles under her eyes, her hair limp. Her hands were doing something with her paper napkin, folding it into smaller and smaller squares.

“Do you feel okay? You look a little off.”

The corners of her mouth twitched in a half smile. “I think I’m coming down with something. Don’t worry about it. As long as we don’t tongue each other, you won’t catch it.”

He was fuming when he drove away, an hour later. That was the way Merrin operated. She had lured him down to Boston, led him to imagine they would be alone together, then answered the door in her sweatpants, looking like warmed-over shit, her roomie wandering around, and they had spent the night talking about Ig. If she hadn’t let him kiss her breast two weeks ago and given him her cross, he would’ve thought she had no interest in him at all. He was sick of being jerked around, and sick of her talk.

But as he crossed the Zakim Bridge, Lee’s pulse began to slow and he began to breathe more normally, and it came to him that Merrin had never once mentioned the ice-queen blonde, not the whole time he was there. This was followed by another notion, that there was no ice queen, there was only Merrin, seeing how much she could get him worked up, keeping him thinking.

He was thinking, all right. He was thinking Ig would be gone soon enough, and so would her roommate, and sometime in the fall, he would knock on her door, and when she opened it, she’d be alone.

LEE HAD HOPED FOR A LATE NIGHT with Merrin, but it was just after ten when he crossed the border into New Hampshire and noticed he had a voice mail from the congressman. The congressman spoke in his slow, tired, migraine voice and said he hoped Lee would stop by tomorrow morning to talk over some news that had come in. The way he said it made Lee think he’d be just as glad to see him tonight, so instead of getting off I-95 to drive west to Gideon, he continued north and took the exit for Rye.

Eleven o’clock, Lee pulled into the congressman’s driveway of crushed white seashells. The house, a vast white Georgian with a columned portico, sat on an acre of immaculately groomed green lawn. The congressman’s twins were playing croquet with their boyfriends, out in the front yard, under the floodlights. Champagne flutes stood on the path next to the girls’ high heels; they were running around in bare feet. Lee got out of the Caddy and stood next to it, watching them play, two limber and brown-legged girls in summer dresses, one of them bent over her mallet and her date reaching around from behind, offering his help as an excuse to spoon against her. The laughter of the girls carried on air that smelled faintly of the sea, and Lee felt himself again in his element.