Элизабет Страут - Olive, Again

“I see.” Jack almost laughed.

“There’s a Somalian population that lives here,” Elaine said.

“Yes, I am aware of that,” Jack answered.

Olive held up a finger. “Somali.” Olive said this with a thrust of her finger. “Not ‘Somalian.’ People make that mistake all the time. But it’s Somali population, just so you know.”

Elaine’s face got a prissy look, even colder. She said, “Yes, I know that, Mrs. Kennison. And I said ‘Somali.’ ”

“No, I heard you say—” Olive widened her eyes, gave a small shrug, then cut another piece of steak.

Jack said, “And how are you researching clitorectomies, Elaine? Are you knocking on the doors of Somalians and saying, Hello, I’m Elaine Croft, I teach at Smith College, and we’re trying to find out: Do you have women in your household who have had a clitorectomy?”

Elaine looked down at him; on one side of her mouth was a tiny half smile, fury, he knew from the past. “Goodbye, Jack,” she said, and she nodded toward her bozo friend and they walked away and Jack saw her speak to the waitress and they went to a table as far away from Jack and Olive as the space allowed.

“Who was that?” Olive asked, eating her steak, and Jack said she was just a woman he had known years ago at Harvard. He almost said, “She’s a nut,” but he didn’t.

“Well, she didn’t seem very nice. Full of herself, I’d say. What does she mean she’s here to investigate—what did she say?”

“She said clitorectomies, Olive. The woman has apparently come to town to study female circumcision.”

Olive said, “Oh, for God’s sake, oh, for heaven’s sake, I never heard of such a thing, Jack.”

“Well, now you have.” He ate his scallops with no notice of them being anything at all except food that he was eating: fuel. He still had the sensation of falling off his bicycle, but he was not sure that he had landed yet.

“You know, it’s just sad what the Somali population has been accused of—”

“Let’s drop it, Olive,” he said, and Olive said, “Fine with me.” After a few moments she asked how his scallops were, and he said that they were very good. “Well, this steak is just wonderful,” she said; she was halfway through it.

—

From the corner of his eye he could see Elaine and her—whatever he was—leaning across the table and talking, and he understood that she would be telling the fellow who Jack was. Jack wanted to throw his napkin onto the table and go over and say, “But that’s not the story!” He felt that his vision was affected as he looked at his food. In truth, he only wanted to get home. And then in his mind’s eye he saw again what he had thought was astonishment in Elaine’s response to Olive saying she was his wife. Betsy had been a quietly pretty woman, Elaine had met her a few times at faculty parties. And he thought again how her green eyes had gone down his body when he stood up, noticing his large stomach, of course.

It was endless as Olive finished her steak, commenting on it yet again, then saying, “Shall we have dessert?” And Jack said no. He could see her surprise, and he said, “I’m sorry, Olive, I’m just not feeling that well.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Olive demanded. “How long have you not been feeling well?” And he said, Only recently, and she said, Well, this was a waste of money, then, coming to such a restaurant that ends up making you not feel well. And then she was silent. Jack, aware of Elaine, aware that she could very well be watching them, touched Olive’s arm and leaned into her and said, “Oh, Olive, who cares, it’s just money.” Olive only looked at him.

As they left the restaurant, Jack did not glance over at Elaine’s table.

Her feet had been beautiful. They had been the sweetest feet Jack had ever seen in his life, and Elaine had been surprised; she claimed she had not known that about her feet, and perhaps she had not. But she had high arches and small ankles, and her toes—which were always polished a bright red color, or sometimes a tangerine, “I have a pedicure every week,” she laughingly told him their first time—were the loveliest toes Jack felt had ever existed anywhere. “You’re killing me from the feet up,” she would laugh in her bed, and he began to call her Socrates, after the man who had claimed he was dying from the feet up. Jack often started with her feet, once he had discovered them; she would laugh and laugh because she was ticklish, and she asked him if he had a foot fetish, but in fact Jack did not have a foot fetish, only a fetish for her feet. Her stomach had been dimpled, and her backside was not small. She had been a beauty, in the eyes of Jack; he had never seen anyone as beautiful, understanding that it was because he loved her.

God , he had loved her. He had missed a class once because of a fight they’d had, it was too painful for him to leave her, even as he could not now remember what the fight had been about, most likely whether he would stay with Betsy, even though Elaine had always, from the start, said, “I don’t want you leaving your wife, Jack, I don’t want that responsibility.” They were in a hotel in Cambridge, which was risky as they both lived in Cambridge, but it had not felt as risky as being seen coming from her house so many times. And in their hotel room that day, perhaps she said something about Betsy, and he missed his class—the only class he missed his entire teaching career, except when he’d had his gallbladder out many years earlier—to be with her. And this is what he remembered: When they were done, had made up, she said something about having to go meet with Schroeder, the dean, she had been stepping out of the shower, having asked him to hand her the towel, and then she had said she had to get to a meeting with the dean, while Jack had missed his class! And something in Jack had clicked, though he never—even to this day—could have said why. But something in him that day realized: She is a careerist.

And of course she had been. Everyone at that school was a careerist. But it was not until she came up for tenure and Jack voted against her because everyone else on the committee had voted against her—and also, he had privately never thought her work was that strong—that she decided to file a lawsuit against Jack citing sexual harassment. And when Schroeder called him into his office that day, Schroeder told him she had recordings of Jack’s late-night drunken calls to her—calls Jack had made over the course of the last year as he felt her affections slipping—and she had emails from him as well, and Schroeder said to Jack, “Just take a research leave until we get this settled.”

A research leave.

And then Schroeder would not talk to him again. Three years later, Elaine Croft walked away with a settlement of three hundred thousand dollars. By that time Jack had left; he and Betsy had come up to live in Crosby, Maine.

Jack himself had been a careerist. But that had been many years before he met Elaine. By the time he met her, he was sick of being on that faculty; but she was young, and she was out to make it and she did.

Only not at Harvard.

He should never have mentioned Smith tonight. It gave away the fact that he had googled her—which he had a few years ago—and learned that she had gotten a tenured job at Smith and he had thought: Perfect.

Jack unlocked the car from a distance, holding up the key and pressing on it; the lights flickered once and the ping sound occurred, and then as he walked toward the car he saw in the streetlight that someone had run something against the car—most likely a key—and made a long, long scratch along the driver’s-side door. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I just don’t believe this.” Olive stood peering at it as well, and then she said “But who would do such a thing?” and walked around to her side of the car.