woman who got you fired from Harvard.”
“I didn’t get fired,” Jack said; this made him really angry.
“She was the reason.” Olive said this, still quietly. And then, turning her face toward him, she said, and it seemed her voice almost trembled, “I have to tell you, Jack. The only thing that upsets me about her is your taste in women, I think she is a dreadful, dreadful woman.”
When Jack did not answer, Olive continued, “At least that foolish Thibodeau girl that Henry was in love with way back when, she was mousy, but she was decent. An innocent girl. And that fellow, Jim O’Casey, that I had my almost-affair with a hundred years ago, at least he was a lovely man.”
Jack drove past the sign for the credit union; the whole town was dark except for the gas station, which seemed eerily alone with its lights.
“Oh, stop it,” Jack said. “Honest to God, Olive. Some man with six kids and a wife who says to his fellow schoolteacher, Will you leave Henry and go off with me?, then ends up drunk and wrapped around a tree, is not a lovely man, Olive. Jesus Christ.”
“You have no idea,” Olive said. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I would appreciate it if you left your stupid—stupid—opinions to yourself. He was a lovely man, and that snot-wot is a creep. That dreadful woman you bedded down all those years.”
“That’s enough, Olive.”
“No, I’m not through. She was supercilious. She was just crap, Jack.”
“Olive, I’m asking you to stop this. Okay, she was crap. Who cares?”
“I care,” Olive said. “I care because it says something about you. When you’re attracted to crap, it says something about you.”
“It was many years ago, Olive.” He thought the ride was unbelievably long; he was aware of the miles to go before they got home. He drove around a curve too quickly.
“And so was my almost-affair with that man who was lovely. You never met him, you don’t know. But he was a lovely man, Jack, and you telling me that he wasn’t, it’s just horrible of you. And now I know why you would say that. Because of this woman you were so drawn to yourself.” She paused, then said, “It makes me sick.”
He almost yelled at her. He almost shouted at her to shut up, to stop it; he came so close he could feel the words in his mouth; in a way, he almost thought he had yelled these things, but he had not. And she said no more. When they got home, she got out of the car and slammed the door.
“Enjoy your whiskey,” Olive said to him as she went up the stairs; he heard her go into their bedroom. He hated her then.
* * *
Jack drank his whiskey quickly, sitting in his chair, because he was so frightened. What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself.
He got up to get more whiskey, pouring it into the tumbler he had just emptied, and then he went into the bathroom, where he splashed his pee like an old man. Turning to leave, he saw his face in the mirror. He was an old man: He was half-bald, his nose seemed to have become bigger, there was no connecting this man in the mirror to who he had been when he knew Elaine. He went back and sat in his chair and sipped his whiskey. But who had he been back then? A person much older than she was, someone who thought she was beautiful, who loved her intelligence, who loved her youth, but how in the world did that make it different from any other stupid sordid story of its kind? It didn’t. There was nothing different about the story—except that it was his. And that it ended the way it did. It still amazed him, that Elaine had managed that. She