Rawlins had come to the lecture after all. He had arrived late and was standing at the back of the room with an untouched cup of white wine balanced in his hand. Graying bags sagged beneath his eyes. His lips were colorless. Even his hair looked fairer, as if some vital life had been drained from him.
She stared as she made her way out the back of the lecture hall, trying to catch his eye. When he finally looked at her, it was a blank expression, flat and listless as a lake on a windless day. Still, when Ellsbeth made it into the hallway, Rawlins followed her out of the Library, holding the door as it closed to soften the sound.
“You studied under Lennox,” Ellsbeth said.
Rawlins’s mouth opened and then shut again. “We should talk in my office,” he said.
They walked there in silence, steps softly echoing on the carpeted floor.
“So. You studied under Lennox,” Ellsbeth repeated when they were inside.
“I did.”
“And you had an affair with her. When you were an undergraduate.”
Rawlins blinked. He ran one hand through his hair and put the other in his pocket before he thought better and withdrew it. He looked at Ellsbeth as if he was waiting for her to say something else, but she didn’t. “Yes,” Rawlins said finally.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Why would I tell you that?” he said, and a stone settled deep inside Ellsbeth’s chest. She felt hot tears tingling her sinuses, even though she wasn’t entirely sure why she would be crying.
“Maxwell Keene was paroled, did you hear?” she said.
“I did.” Rawlins looked behind her at the door, and tried to move past her. Ellsbeth tried to close the space between them. “Excuse me,” he said. Rawlins’s eyes became vacant. He looked right through her. Ellsbeth took a step closer.
“He’s your son, isn’t he?” Ellsbeth said. “Tell me.He’s your son.I can see it. He looks like you.”
“Of course not,” he hissed. “What a ridiculous thing to say.”
Rawlins’s face flushed, and he turned to Ellsbeth with a shocking flash of rage that she glimpsed for only a moment before his face became a blank, waxen mask again. “I think we should go back to the lecture.”
“Doesheknow?” Ellsbeth said.
Rawlins walked past her, leaving his office door ajar and leaving Ellsbeth standing dumbfounded and alone.
She didn’t go back to the lecture. She walked down the stairs of the department building, out through the double doors, and into the chilly blast of December air. The grass of the courtyard was stiff with frost and crunched under Ellsbeth’s shoes with a satisfying squeak.Of course Rawlins didn’t owe her anything. He didn’t need to tell her about his past. He didn’t need to reveal any of his secrets. She was the one who had told him that all she wanted was sex. But maybe she hadn’t quite believed that herself. Because now, as she warmed her hands in the pockets of her too-thin coat, passing students with their faces hidden in oversized scarves, she realized it was entirely possible that Rawlins was a stranger.
Rawlins
The first time Rawlins set eyes on Margaret Lennox, he was nineteen years old, overdressed even among his Yale classmates, with a leather satchel slung across his torso; with his weighty mechanicals textbooks, the bag was uncomfortable to carry, but he treasured the way it set him apart from his fellow undergraduates with their ergonomically superior backpacks.
Lennox was drawing a ritual circle on a whiteboard while her students filed into class. His eyes remained glued to her as he walked up the steps of the aisle and slid into a desk in the third row. When she turned around, Rawlins felt like he had been struck a physical blow. Her beauty was not conventionally feminine; it was severe and austere, like he imagined a Nordic goddess might look, descending from the icy steppe.
Rawlins hung on every word of her lecture, and when she briefly fixed him with her gaze, he went dizzy with exhilaration. He was so enraptured by the poise with which she spoke that at the end of class, he looked down at his notebook and discovered that he hadn’t made a single note.
He stopped by her office hours the first week, eager to show off his mastery of the material and his hunger for additional reading. She watched him across her desk, fingers steepled, laughing generously at his attempts at wit. She probed him for gaps in his knowledge, and then for personal information, testing his willingness to open up to herwhile giving away nothing of herself. They talked for an hour and Rawlins considered, on his walk home, that it might have been the most enjoyable hour of his life.
The affair took some time to materialize, but in hindsight, Rawlins could see that it was on both their minds the entire time; he made no secret of his desire, and Lennox only slow-played the development as she assessed his ability to be discreet. From office-hours conversations, they moved up to late-night drinks at a bar a few miles from campus. He kept pace with her through two martinis, conscious of flirting, but unsure how far they were from escalating things—until she rather abruptly signaled for the check and told him there was a decent hotel at the end of the block.
In the bedroom, Lennox took charge of teaching Rawlins to take charge. She was uninterested in a single night of passion; she was cultivating a lover, making a project of him. She instructed him in what to do, not shying away from giving detailed instruction on how she liked to be undressed, touched, licked, fucked, and spoken to afterward. He was an eager pupil, soaking up every command, fixated on her completely. They met weekly; she initiated every encounter and kept control of their schedule.
Rawlins knew she was married, of course, and wondered about Lennox’s life with her husband. It was not guilt that he felt, he was simplycurious—about her domestic life, and how she rationalized and compartmentalized their affair. But she remained steadfast in her refusal to divulge any details about her marriage; there was no hint that it was abusive, or neglectful, or lacking in any way that would typically suggest a need for something on the side. The one time Rawlins met the man, at a holiday party hosted by the department, he seemed perfectly nice, albeit boring.
Lennox kept careful control of the entire affair. Around anyone else, she was disciplined in her refusal to even meet his gaze. There were no sudden, passionate hookups in empty classrooms or offices; every meeting was prearranged, always at the same hotel, and they would arrive and leave separately. Lennox paid for the rooms but put them under Rawlins’s name, and she always encouraged him to stay the night while she headed home. He often did, savoring a bed farmore luxurious than the one in his dormitory, though her departures left him lonely and seething with a sense of jealousy, which revealed that he was not nearly as content with the arrangement as he leton.
In the cocoon of post-coital bliss, Rawlins sometimes became talkative, expansively revealing himself while Lennox listened, touching his arm or his hair, occasionally offering wise perspective on his stories, his memories of his family, his dreams and insecurities. She seemed to genuinely enjoy his thoughts on arcane mechanicals, and delighted in his unchecked ambition.
But she rarely shared much of her own life, and the few times his feelings bubbled up, she was indulgent but dismissive. When he told her at one point, “Ireallylike you”—avoiding but clearly intending the wordlove—she merely gave a wistful smile and replied, “I like you, too, Tad, but let’s not get carried away.” He tried to content himself with the belief that her amorous feelings echoed his, but they were merely being sophisticated and adult by holding back from speaking the truth.
