me, and the illusion is always a sweet one. But I also dream of Logan Williams bringing a box of condoms to class and laying them out on the table in front of him. When I ask him what he thinks he is doing, he says Professor Hornberger told him to bring these, and was I crazy, fucking a strange man without using any protection? Then there’s a faculty meeting. Elizabeth Mayfield takes my hand and leads me over to a small side table, and I realize that with her other hand she is pulling Nick Hornberger. He and I have to sit apart from the others, and at some point he reaches over, takes my arm and gives me a Chinese burn.
I drift into and out of sleep, drink gallons of water and all my fruit juice, and pretend that I’m not there. Once, the telephone rings. I rear up from a deep and druggy sleep, but by the time I’ve made it out of bed and picked up the receiver, all I hear is the bleeping noise of someone’s impatience.
“Mom, it’s me. Listen, did you just try to call me?”
“No, I didn’t. Dad and I are about to leave the house. Mary and Phil have invited us to the movies, although your father would prefer to stay at home in front of the television, as usual.”
In the background I hear my father protest that he loves going to the movies, but not with Mary and Phil, and not in the afternoon.
“Okay, you go and have fun. Oh, Mom—when I was a kid and I used to get those fevers, how long did they usually last?”
“Your fevers? Heavens, child, how should I remember that?”
“What about her fevers?” My father’s voice is closer to the mouthpiece now.
“Here, Sam, you speak to her.”
“Hi, Dad, it’s only—you know I got those fevers when I was a kid—”
“You have a temperature? How high?”
“Um…I don’t know, I was asleep. Last time I checked, around lunchtime, it was one hundred point eight. But yesterday it went up to one-oh-two point four.”
“Measured rectally?”
“Yes.” I hate these conversations with my father.
“Any other symptoms? Gastric? Respiratory?”
“No, Dad. I’m not ill! I’m pretty sure it’s just…stress. I’m run down, that’s all. It never went on longer than a couple of days, right?”
“Listen, at the clinic they were saying there’s a professor at your school who molests female students? Is that so?”
“Looks that way, yes. It’s an epic story. I’ll tell you when I come home for the holidays.”
Some of it, anyway.
“Keep out of harm’s way, kid!”
“I’ll see what I can do, Dad. It’s…it is hard.”
It is only the fever that makes me add this confession, and I wish I hadn’t. But then my father floors me.
“Well, you’re all alone down there,” he says. “You have no one to look after you.”
I rush back into sleep. Hide in unconsciousness. I will wait. I will not return to life until this craving for Giles has subsided. I will wait till my body has absorbed this drug, this illicit, damaging desire, and flushed it out of its system. I will wait till I feel nothing.
On Monday morning, a minor breakthrough: I am finally able to take a shower, the first since Giles and I—I close my eyes and lean back so that the beams of hot water massage my breasts.
Turning you inside out is the most exciting thing I have done in my entire life.
Chapter 31
I’M NOT DONE HIDING. But on Tuesday morning I have to give an exam, so I crawl out of my quilted cave, breakfast on ice-cream, and switch on my PC. Plenty of emails, but none from the sender I hope-and-dread to see. What if it was him, on the phone? And what could he possibly want to say? Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.
When I arrive on E-4—weak-kneed and sweaty from the mild exertion of driving here and getting to the elevator—Andrew Corvin’s office door is open. Like the door to a cage in the zoo.
Tessa, Martha Borlind, and a couple of grad assistants are hovering in front of my office, conferring in low voices. Now and then one of them advances a step or two so she can peek into the hoarder’s den, carrying back information like a bee carries honey to the hive. I hear Corvin’s voice before I hear theirs.
“…damned insolence! Fifty years I’ve worked here…kicked like a dog…I won’t have it! I will not have it!”
“Good grief, what’s with him?”
“Rage,”