day today—at the airport, at the conference—but now that he is lavishing his whole attention on me, my heart swells.
The waiter is leading us to a booth with a window at the back of the room when a hot, painful rush of panic sets my skin on fire, and it takes me a paralyzed eternity to register the cause.
“I say, Cleveland! Over here!”
Paul French. At a big round table, with Kathleen, Pete, his wife, and several other people from the conference.
“Varkackt,” I mutter next to Giles’s shoulder, and he, lifting an arm to acknowledge Paul’s salute, mutters back, “If that means what I think it means, I’ll say oy to that.”
He turns round to look at me. “I don’t want them!” he pleads, with the pitiful but helpless frown of a thwarted boy. “I want you!”
“Let’s run!” I whisper. We stare at each other, and I am so in love with him, all my resolutions have evaporated into thin air; if he grabbed my hand to run, I’d run with him. But we are both too responsible, or too cowardly, and we both know we won’t run.
“Good, so you got my message! I wasn’t sure it would reach you!” Paul pulls out the chair next to his, and his voice and behavior tell me—and I hope no one else—that he is covering Giles’s ass. And mine. Giles glances over at him, too annoyed to play the game, and I greet the others far more enthusiastically than I would in any other circumstance, except possibly on a mountain top in the Himalayas. All I can do is prevent the ultimate frustration of having Giles sit next to Kathleen.
“Here, Paul, Giles—you haven’t seen each other in yonks—” I push Giles into the chair offered by Paul and slip in next to Kathleen myself.
“I’m so glad your headache is better, Anna!” she trills sourly. “How boring it would have been for you to spend the evening all alone in your room!”
When Paul fills our glasses with wine, I drink.
“Anna? Anna, would you say you had a fair impression of your college after you’d been to your campus interview?” Vicky, one of the conference organizers, has to raise her voice to alert me.
“Oh, I—I don’t know. How can I—” I gesture toward Giles.
“How can she answer that in front of a colleague?” one of the other women scolds Vicky. “Is Giles on your P&T committee, Anna?”
We glance at each other, and I hope my embarrassment is taken for the defensiveness of a junior professor. “That hasn’t been settled yet,” I say.
“Probably not,” Giles says.
At first I am relieved when someone starts asking about the Hornberger scandal. Only a few of them had not heard of it, and so a censored version of life at the Ardrossan Observatory becomes a safe topic to pass the evening.
Once embarked on this salacious topic, each of them has a similar story to relate: of the eminent professor who got up in a faculty meeting to announce what she wrongly assumed was an open secret—her affair with an adjunct lecturer; of the female professor who married her much younger teaching assistant, who ten years later threw himself off a bridge; of the bright young female student who serially dated three professors during college, only to end up taking a job as secretary in a firm of car dealers.
Be quiet! I want to shout them down. Does nobody know any stories with a happy ending?
“I’m on the third floor—you, Anna?” Kathleen asks me as we are walking up the stairs back at the hotel together at the end of this fucked-up evening.
“Um, yup.”
“Giles?”
“I think so.” He rummages in his coat pocket and produces his keycard. “Three twenty-one. That’s sort of round the corner and behind the sofa, underneath a potted plant.”
Why doesn’t he draw her a freaking map?
I am seething. Seething. It makes no difference that her room is near the elevator, while both Giles and I are further along the hallway and round a corner.
“See you in the morning,” I mutter, slam my keycard into the slit on the door and throw myself against it.
“This is—” he says, as if he had suddenly remembered something important.
“Good night.”
“This is the moment Grace Kelly turns round to kiss Cary Grant.”
“Look, Giles, don’t even—go there—” I shake my head, so distraught and disappointed I could cry.
“I know. Scandal-mongering is awful. Poisonous.”
“It is! And I don’t want to become the object of—”