She waits for me to catch on. “When they found out, they went straight to Howard. I don’t blame them! You will, too, and I don’t blame you, either! But I can’t stop her. I have no control over her.” Karen’s lips tremble, but she won’t cry in front of me. “You can’t imagine the row we had over it. But she can’t resist the pickers. They make her feel important and…grown up, I guess.”
“But, Karen, at this rate she’ll end up pregnant before she’s finished school! You don’t want her to end up—”
“Like me?” she says bitterly. “It seems inevitable. I’ll get her on the pill, now that she’s sixteen. I don’t know what else to do.”
Her defeatist attitude makes me angry, but I have no solution ready, and the longer I reflect on her situation, the more I see how complicated it is.
“There must be something you can do!” I finally say, lamely.
“Take her and move out?” Karen’s smile is twisted with suppressed tears.
A day later and twelve weeks early, Howard Walsh III is delivered by emergency caesarean section. Grandma Shirley, whom I meet on my way to the car, is unable to give me any details beyond the fact that he is expected to live and that he weighed eight hundred sixty-five grams at birth. Karen is also being kept in for observation, and she—Shirley—feels it would probably be too much for Karen if they all went to visit her all the time.
“She’ll want some peace and quiet now. We’ll see her when she gets back home.”
The only silver lining on all these black clouds is that my course evaluations were not as disastrous as I had feared. The graduate students were very sweet and generous, and the remaining undergraduates in my Comedy class also liked me. Ma Mayfield informs me in an email that the complaints about me have been shelved for the time being, but I should prepare myself for spot checks of my teaching next semester. Fair enough. English Lit doesn’t get more hardcore than Paradise Lost, and whatever groans and grumbles it will provoke, they won’t be about sex. Maybe I have had enough of sex for the time being.
On Saturday afternoon the phone rings, but I surprise myself by not answering. I’m busy. I’m prepping my semester, sorting out clothes, cleaning the cottage. Leave me be. I’m in a mood. Resentful. Irritable. Isn’t it downright childish, this desire to give yourself up to another, to relinquish all agency and responsibility and just let your body take over? Honestly, I think that is what this whole sex thing is all about. Hormones. Like a computer with data overload, my body has shut down. Too much stimulation, too much sex. Silly. We all have jobs to do, don’t we?
I only realize how angry I am when I arrive at the Observatory on the first Monday of the spring semester and the whole place is in an uproar because Nick Hornberger has been arrested for sexually assaulting a fellow student thirty years ago.
“Do you know what really pisses me off?” I snap at Steve Howell, whose morning seems to be spent loitering on the fourth-floor corridor to greet every new arrival with the news. “That this guy is absorbing so much of our time and attention! I’m here to teach literature, not to gossip about dirty old men!”
“Anna, I don’t think—”
“For heaven’s sake, Steve, would you scan the supermarket tabloids for stories like this? No, you wouldn’t! I bet you feel superior to the housewives who buy them, don’t you? Well, be superior, then!”
He stares at me, a twisted smile on his face, half incredulous that I said what he heard me say. Poor Steve. But I really can’t stand him.
So Louise Randall, née Mary-Lou Tandy, decided after all that vengeance may be the Lord’s, but justice can at least try to kick Nicholas Hornberger, née Eagleson, in the balls. My first instinct is to phone Giles to talk this development of events over with him, but—no. I’m here to work.
The noises coming from Andrew Corvin’s office convince me, if there was any doubt, that he must have been away for most of the winter semester, because the walls are so thin that I hear him clomping around, pushing furniture from one corner of the cramped room to the other, and occasionally even talking to himself. The noise is less eerie than the silence that I interpreted as evidence of vigilante malignancy, but after a