29
The night before he posted his final grades, Ed didn’t even grunt when she asked what he wanted for dinner, or lift his head; he just put his hand up in an imperious dismissal.
She retreated and pounded her frustration into some hamburger meat. She chopped the carrots with savage thwacks, relishing the sound of the knife crashing into the cutting board.
After dinner, as she was cleaning up, he brought all his papers into the kitchen.
“Sit with me until I’m ready for you to enter the numbers,” he said.
“I’ll be reading in the living room,” she said. “Come get me when you’re ready.”
“No,” he said. “I want you here. I want you ready. I’ll give you the signal.”
He was acting like the head of an ER team waiting for an ambulance to arrive. It was absurd that she had to be on such high alert. She didn’t raise a fuss, though. She made tea and got her book and sat at the table with him.
“No,” he said, looking up. “No.”
“What?”
“No reading,” he said. “I need you ready.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said, and returned to the book.
“No!” He grabbed the book out of her hands.
The testy ER doctors who took their nerves out on the nurses sometimes apologized later; with the ones who didn’t, you learned not to take it personally. But these men were saving lives. Whose life was Ed trying to save?
“Honey,” she said. “Is it really hurting anything if I just read here next to you while you work? What’s the harm in it?”
He slammed his pen down on the stack of papers. “We have a system!” he shouted. “We have a system that works! We need to follow it! Just follow the system!”
She had already figured out that they had a “system,” one of his doing whatever he wanted as she looked on his work silently, benignly, unblinkingly.
“Okay.” She closed her book and looked at him. His hair was graying at the temples, but otherwise it retained its deep-black hue. His lashes were still long enough to be the envy of any woman, and his crystal-blue eyes softened the sharp impression his nose and strong jaw made. It still took her by surprise how handsome he was.
She sat and waited, sipped her tea slowly. It seemed that tea drinking was something he could tolerate as in-system. She reached for a pile he’d finished with, thinking to get a head start on it. He stopped her hand and told her to wait. She stood up, just to stand, and walked over to the sink. He told her to sit down. She could feel herself messing with him. She peppered him with questions at short intervals. He ignored them and kept his head down. Eventually he looked up at her, breathing through his teeth, his eyes flashing with hate.
“Be quiet,” he growled. “Sit there and be quiet and wait till I’m done.”
She wanted to say something acid, to humiliate him the way he’d humiliated her. The only thing that stopped her was the vague sensation that this was not the man she’d married, that some metempsychotic transfer had occurred. She sat in the chair with one hand on the table and one embracing the mug.
When he was done he slapped the pen down and took a deep breath, rubbing his eyes. He sat back in the chair pointedly, with as much presence as if he were studying her for the first time. She was surprised by his suddenly intense look and blushed. She wanted to touch him, to dispel her nerves. She took the pile of essays and began entering the grades in the book. She made short work of it. When she was done, he produced another sheet, with numbers on it and blanks next to them.
“Now this,” he said.
“What is it?”
“The final grade sheet.”
“What do I do?”
“You find the student number next to the names on this other sheet.”
He had everything ready for her. Considering how organized he was about all the papers, how much he seemed to have the situation in hand, it was a wonder he was asking her to do this at all.
When she was done she closed the book with a thump. Ed clapped his hands together and raised them above his head exultantly. The gesture embarrassed her—seeing him celebrate so quotidian an accomplishment. She looked for signs of irony, but there were none.
They had another bout of lovemaking. He went at her purposefully, giving her deep kisses and holding her down by the wrists. It reminded her of the way he had made love to her during their brief attempts to conceive a second child: both of their bodies moving as one; the thrust of his hips compact, rhythmic, and deliberate. The only thing that kept it from feeling perfect was her nagging worry that Connell would hear the headboard knocking against the wall.
In the middle of the night—a groggy check of the clock revealed it to be four in the morning—Ed was shaking her awake. It took some effort to figure out what he was saying, but eventually she understood that he wanted her to follow him to the kitchen.
The sheet from earlier was laid out before her, along with another that appeared identical. She looked at him, confused. Her eyes were adjusting to the kitchen light, but she could see that the grades she’d written next to the numbers had been crossed out, with new grades written in their place.
“I need you to make these changes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I made some changes. I need you to transfer them to this clean sheet. I have to tape it to the wall outside my classroom.”
“Why are you making changes? We were done.”
She wanted to put her head down on the table. She felt that if she did, he would be standing there in the same position waiting when she woke up.
“Changes!” he barked. “I made some changes! I need you to transfer them.”
She couldn’t make sense of it. She would simply have to submit to the logic of this inquisition. The pattern in the grades became obvious quickly: Ed had taken every grade and kicked it up a full letter, irrespective of pluses and minuses. A C– became a B; a C+ became a B; a B became an A. Ed had long held the line against rising grades. He gave out As sparingly; getting an A from Ed still meant something.
“What’s this about?”
“There were other things I had to factor in. Participation. Et cetera.”
“You were very generous,” she said sardonically.
“There’s nothing wrong with being generous.”
“Not at all.” She smiled. “But you were very generous.”
“I reconsidered a few grades. It’s not your concern.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’m tired. I don’t know why I said anything.” She filled in the grades next to the corresponding numbers in the new sheet and put the pen down. “There. I’m going back to sleep.”
In the morning she found him on the couch. On his desk the grade sheet had been revised upward again. Now there were only two categories, A and B. Below it was another blank grade sheet. She saw that it was her duty to transcribe these trumped-up scores to the final grade sheet. Or could there be another one in store, with all As?
Standing there, she remembered how, in the years after her father retired, when she was still living at home, she would slip cash in his pants pocket for him to find when he was out at the bar, to spare him the embarrassment of not having money to buy other people’s drinks. If she did this, it would be to spare Ed embarrassment.
He was curled on the couch, which was too small for his frame. It was hard to be worried about him when he was sleeping. He looked like a child, like a larger version of Connell. His hands were folded up near his face, as though he had been arrested in the act of praying. It seemed that all men were the same in the few vulnerable instants after they’d been awakened, as though they’d been called back from some universal state into the particulars of their lives. For a moment she stepped out of time and all of existence made sense; then the moment passed, and Ed returned to being her husband.