resemblance that struck me when he sat down next to me at the faculty meeting: Dolph looks like Rocky Horror. I wonder whether it is because he’s blond and brawny or also because he is the creature of some scheming mastermind.
“Uh, thanks, Dolph, I can manage.”
He comes a couple of steps closer and peers at the books above my head.
“C’mon, allow a gentleman from the Old South to help a Yankee lady.”
Another step, and he is so close I can smell the fragrance of his aftershave. Too close.
“Don’t be a jerk,” I say pleasantly.
This takes him aback, but not enough to actually step back. As if to support himself, he leans one hand on the shelf next to my shoulder and reaches up; he has, in effect, trapped me. Three or four seconds, then he steps back, a couple of volumes in his hand.
“Was it one of these? Swift’s Essays?”
I don’t believe this guy.
“Don’t think I won’t make a fuss while I’m on probation, Adolph! And don’t kid yourself that just because we have a rape allegation pending, I won’t complain about a colleague crowding me in the library!”
I snatch the book from his hands and make for the downstairs Xerox machines. Dolph comes running after me.
“What do you know about that?”
“Nothing. I’m just a rookie. I know nothing.”
In the afternoon—I am up on the least wobbly of my chairs, wiping the top shelves and hoisting folders with teaching notes onto it—the phone rings. My first thought is that this is the Voice of Doom demanding to know why I consider masturbation to be a suitable topic for a freshman class. The plummeting of guilt into the pit of my stomach is followed by an even guiltier splash of callousness: faced with a rape allegation, Professor Hornberger would hardly be in a position to berate me for my morally turpid syllabus.
“Hi, uh—am I speaking to Professor Lieberman? Anna Lieberman?”
Oy, gevalt!
I know at once who it is, because none of my students or colleagues has so sonorous a baritone with a Queens accent.
“I hope it’s okay I’m calling you at your office. I lost your number—the number your mother gave my aunt?”
A very sonorous baritone that raises the hope that pudgy Bernie has grown up into a broad-shouldered six-footer.
“Yeah, sure, I’m sorry, this is the first time someone’s rung me on my office phone. Weird. Thanks, anyway. For calling, I mean.”
“Well, I figured you probably wouldn’t call me—strange man, strange city. I know I wouldn’t, if I was a woman.”
“Yeah, well, I have been extremely busy. A lot of work, being new at a place—well, you know that, of course.” I hear him laugh. “What’s the joke?”
“God, it’s nice to hear you talk! You sound like home, you know that?”
The muscles in my stomach relax.
“Yeah, so do you…”
He does sound like home, and I am dismayed at how wistful that makes me. He suggests dinner in a Mexican restaurant he knows in Shaftsboro, and I accept with pleasure. Maybe an old adversary could become a new friend.
Chapter 11
“SHOWTIME!” YVONNE MURMURS when we meet at the top of the stairs three days later.
“Oh, poor you—do you have to teach Fridays? Maybe next—”
“No!” She casts her eyes round, but we are alone in the hallway. “The meeting this afternoon! About the—you have heard about it, haven’t you?”
“About the…rape allegation? Is there a meeting? I didn’t check my email.”
Three hours later, and with half an hour to spare before showtime, I rush to the Eatery to grab something to sustain me through the meeting.
“Mind if I join you?” asks an English voice above my head.
I’m tempted to reply that I do not see why he would want to sit with a woman he suspects of making play with wet eyelashes when she is reprimanded by her department chair, but I manage to wave nonchalantly at the seat opposite mine.
“No, of course not.”
Cleveland sets down his mug and a plate with a bagel on it, pulls out the chair and sits. His mug is less than a foot away from mine. When he reaches for it, I must not stare, even though the memory of that moment in his office when I noticed his hands still pierces me with the ache of guilty longing.
The man is married, and to a large-breasted blonde, and thou shalt not covet him.
Cleveland grins at me and bites into his bagel. It would be the most natural thing in