rose bouquet with a card that read: I betrayed you. Don’t be mad, OK? He wished he’d stayed in bed instead of cooking up this charade; he wished he could just go back to bed now and sleep the rest of his life away.
Come to Paris with me.
He could hear that annoying dripping again, under the floorboards, and Claudia’s careful breathing as she stared, for far too long, into the oven. His soup had come to a high boil, burping orange droplets of squash goo all over the stovetop.
He walked over and turned the burner off. “Yes,” he said. “I made it for you.”
Claudia
“HELLO, STRANGER!”
Claudia paused, coffee in hand, as Brenda lurched down the length of the teacher’s lounge to catch up with her. Brenda’s hemp tote had swollen over the course of the semester, spilling over into new bags, so that now three amorphous lumps hung from her shoulders, each more distended than the last. Their combined weight forced Brenda to walk with the shuffling gait of a prisoner in full-body chains. Claudia checked her watch impatiently—she had only half an hour before her senior seminar began.
Brenda arrived by Claudia’s side, groaning, and dropped her bags on the floor. “I swear the parents should be paying for my chiropractic bills,” she muttered. She peered into the pastry box that sat on the counter next to the coffee machine and selected a cranberry muffin, taking a bite. “Ew. Vegan. Must have come from the Hoyts.” She glared at the offending lump in her hand and then held the remains out to Claudia. “Want the rest? I’m not going to waste my calories.”
“I’m not hungry.” Claudia squirted a packet of creamer into her coffee and stirred it. She glanced over to the tables, where Jim Phillips (Gym) was mixing protein powder into a thermos of nonfat milk while flipping through a Runner’s World, and quiet Hannah Baumberg (Classic Literature) sat underlining passages in Jude the Obscure. Evelyn Johnson (Political Systems) lay back on a couch with a student essay tented over her face, her orthopedic shoes dangling over the arm of the couch as her feet flexed back and forth.
“I swear you’re the only new teacher to lose weight during her first semester here.” Brenda took another bite of the muffin, made a face, and kept chewing. “You’re looking skinny.”
“Let me guess.” Evelyn lifted the term paper from her face and peered over the back of the couch at them. “The brats have given you an ulcer. My first year here I spent a fortune on Xanax. Would pop two with breakfast every morning, another two for lunch.”
Claudia’s coffee tasted like wet ash. She steeled herself and drank it anyway, desperately in need of the extra caffeine jolt. “It’s not that. I needed to drop a few pounds anyway.” Brenda raised a questioning eyebrow. “Really, I’m fine,” Claudia reiterated, although she didn’t particularly feel fine today. This should have been her day of triumph—the beginning of a promising new chapter in her life, and the end of her brief tenure at Ennis Gates—but she’d been in a foul mood since she woke up that morning. Maybe it had something to do with dinner with Jeremy the night before, which seemed intended as some sort of mutual reconciliation and yet had been dominated by a freighted silence, as if the number of subjects they were afraid to discuss now officially outweighed the safe ones. They’d gulped down Jeremy’s salmon in less than ten minutes, and, rather than talking about the events of the previous twenty-four hours, they rehashed a debate about replacing the damaged bathroom linoleum with subway tile. Finally, they gave up any pretense of romance and ate dessert in front of the television set. Jeremy passed out on the couch by nine, and Claudia let him stay there, while she moved to the air mattress to sleep alone.
She didn’t ask what had happened with Aoki; she didn’t want to know. He’s here, isn’t he? she’d told herself. That’s what’s important. We’ll figure out the rest with time. Or so she tried to convince herself as she lay sleepless on the mattress, in the same room as her husband and yet a world apart.
Brenda had opened the fridge and was peering in. “I also saw a fruit salad in here somewhere, if you’re doing the dieting thing, although I really don’t think you need to be,” she offered.
“That fruit is mine,” called Jim Phillips from across the room. He lifted a