The Englishman

chapter 25

“ABOUT TOMORROW—”

Giles Cleveland materializes by my elbow, watching Dancey and Dolph caught up in some conspiratorial exchange as our colleagues file out of the Sperm Room. It is so like Dancey to schedule a faculty meeting one day before we break up for Thanksgiving. Nobody is concentrating, everyone is mulling over holiday menus or travel arrangements, eager to get away.

“Tomorrow. You’re not—” Giles hesitates, and for a wild moment I expect him to announce that I cannot go because there will be a departmental putsch and we all have to be present. “Are you flying to South Bend or to Chicago?”

“South Bend. Why?”

An emotion flickers across his face, but I still think that it must be in reaction to the two men standing by the windows. Giles barely acknowledged me during the meeting; I assumed that is what happens when you kiss colleagues after drunken parties. In the cold light of day, they ignore you.

“I could take you to the airport, if you’re on the eight-twenty flight.” As if he was offering to lend me some books or get a marker for me from his office.

“Why?” I realize I am repeating myself, but in my confusion I value precision over variation.

“I’m going, too.”

“To the airport?”

“To Notre Dame.”

I cannot help myself.

“But why?”

“Er…” He avoids my eyes and makes a show of fumbling to come up with a good reason. “I gotta see a horse about a man.”





“Barton, Scherer and Nussbaum Legal Associates, Irene Roshner speaking.”

“Help, Irene! Help!”

“Banana! What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“Yeah…no…can you call me back later tonight? I know you’re busy, but—can you?”

“Sure, but tell me now! I’m alone in the office. I can talk. Tell me—what’s—”

“He’s coming to the conference!” I wail into the receiver, crouching on the sofa in my woolen pants even though I know that will make them go baggy at the knees.

“Who? What conference? Anna, no one has died, right? No one is about to die?”

“No! Well, my career.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Irene is using her resolute voice with me, so I settle down, straighten my legs, and try to be coherent.

“Tomorrow I’m going to present at a conference at Notre Dame. I bought the plane tickets months ago when—”

“Hey, I thought you were coming home for Thanksgiving!”

“I am coming home for Thanksgiving! Except I’m coming via South Bend. Anyway, today after a faculty meeting Giles Cleveland wanders up to me and offers me a ride to the airport. Tomorrow. Because he’s coming to the conference. It’s on iconography in early modern Europe, for Chrissakes! He isn’t even interested in that!”

“Seems he has unfinished business to attend to.”

“Shut up!”

“Why? You know where your priorities lie! It’s okay to flirt a little. Might do some good, when you’re up for your review.”

“I don’t want to—flirt—with him! I want to suck his brains out! And not by the shortest way!”

Irene groans into the phone. “Are you sure no one can hear you? You’ll be fired for sexual harassment! You and Horny Horn!”

“I’m not calling from my office, you nebbish. And I am absolutely not planning on being part of Ardrossan’s next little sex scandal.”

“You only wanna suck the Englishman’s schlong.”

“I want to do everything with him.”

“Well, you can’t. Way too messy, an affair with a senior colleague while you’re on tenure track. Question is, how will he take a brush-off?”

I am trying to assess how Giles will react when I reject him, but my system jams at a point of grammar. If. How would Giles react if I rejected him?

“Much virtue in ‘if’…”

“Huh? Oh, you’re quoting again.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

“Of course you’re going! What’s he going to do, fling himself on you in a dark corner of a Catholic campus? If you don’t encourage him, he won’t try anything. He’d be mad to!”

“Well, in view of the fact that I kissed him…”

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.

“Reenie?”

“Yes, hello. Could I speak to Anna Lieberman, please?”

“It was after a party, and—”

“That kiss—what are we talking about here, anyway? When you say ‘kiss,’ do I hear ‘blow job’?”

“No!”

“That kiss may have cost you and your parents tens of thousands of dollars. You realize that, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Because a fling with a member of your tenure-and-promotion committee will cost you exactly that: tenure and promotion. And if you think word won’t get round why that promising young scholar didn’t get tenure at Ardrossan, you know a lot less about academia than I do! If all you wanted was a teaching job at a third-rate school somewhere in flyover country, why bother with an Ivy League education?”

This is the heavy artillery. I am impressed that Irene would get genuinely upset with me. Irene Roshner. The arch-player.

“Anna, I gotta go. Ed Barton is giving me the evil eye. But one more thing. I’ve known you practically forever, and I’m going to tell you this truth about yourself: you could not handle an affair with Cleveland. I’m not saying that because I don’t want you to have great sex again—I do. But Cleveland’s not the one. You’re hardly tough enough for academia as it is. You’re way not tough enough to brazen out an affair with one of the shooting stars in your field. You said he is going to be big.”

“For sure he is.”

“Then picture it. All you’ll ever be is the little girl Cleveland f*cked when she was new on tenure track at Ardrossan. There are bitches who could handle shit like this, but you’re not one of them!”

“Thanks, Reenie. You’re making your point very clear.”

“Love you, too. Bye!”

In a depressing kind of way I was more at peace when I still thought that Giles was married and that he disliked me. I bore the deep, blind yearning of my body for his like I bore Andrew Corvin’s garbage in my office. A time of tribulation that I will always connect with my first months at Ardrossan. Eventually the situation would have resolved itself and become a hazy, even amusing memory: the crush I had on Giles Cleveland during my first semester. It is much, much harder to muster stoic self-denial now that I know what his lips feel like on mine. Now that I have heard him admit that in another world he would come to my bed. Does Indiana count as “another world?”

He won’t try to seduce me. He could have had me on a platter the other night, and he refused. Politely, regretfully, but he refused, and he was right.





In the morning there is little time to brood, partly because—improbably—I oversleep. I scold myself out of bed and into the shower, where the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question presents itself. To shave, or not to shave? I do my armpits and shins, carefully, can’t be doing with any cuts today. Trimming is allowed. I always trim. Nothing to do with the prospect of sex tonight.

Did I say “prospect?”

Tomorrow evening I will be sitting in my parents’ living room. It seems surreal, and yet it will happen, and it will feel completely normal. There is just time to send a text to Gloria: Wd love to go to Edelstein’s. Will u book? When I am in the middle of brushing my teeth, the phone rings.

“Anna, this is Mom. If I can still book a table for Saturday evening, I will, but they may be full. In that case I’ll go for Sunday lunch—or do you have plans?”

“No, that’s fine. Irene and I will work around that.”

“Only you needn’t think Nat and Jessica will join us.”

Orange alert. Gloria is peevish.

“I hadn’t thought of Nat and Jessy. Why?”

“Jessica announced to me yesterday that she and Nathan have decided not to go on their winter holiday together.”

“What does that mean?”

“You may believe that those were my very words to her!”

“Mom—I’m sorry, but I’m about to leave for the airport, literally this minute. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? Don’t worry too much!”

It is still dark, and cold enough for gloves. Karen and the girls are letting the dogs out as I wheel my suitcase past.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” she shouts over. “Going home for the holidays?”

“Yeah, ain’t it great? Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Have fun! Is that your taxi?”

As I approach the car Giles gets out, and I am relieved to see that he has the same kind of idiotic half-smile on his face as I feel on mine. Karen will never believe that he is a taxi driver.

“I do know, of course, that clothes are more of a challenge for women than they are for men, but—” He takes the suitcase and lifts it onto the back seat with an exaggerated expression of effort. The trunk is fenced off and lined with old rugs, for the dogs.

“I’m flying home afterward. To New York.” Since “good morning” has apparently gone out of fashion. He checks my face when he hears this, but he doesn’t comment.

“In.”

Slightly disgruntled, I climb into the passenger seat, and he slams the door behind me. As I watch him walk round the front, I see Karen and the girls lurking by the chestnut tree. Well, that’ll give them food for talk.

Giles accelerates down the lane toward the main road, and I cannot help feeling that he is not quite his usual sweet self.

“Are we late?”

“There’ll be traffic on the road and queues at the airport.”

Maybe he is not at his best in the mornings. I decide that I have too much on my plate today to start fretting about Giles Cleveland’s mood, especially since this whole thing was his own idea. So I keep quiet and settle into enjoying the view. His Barbour is on the backseat, and he is wearing a dress shirt underneath a rust-colored pullover. I would say he looks particularly handsome in it, but I suspect he would look handsome to me in polka dots and purple flares. There is a slight scent of soap in the air, and I indulge myself with a fantasy of Giles stepping out of the shower this morning. As far as I am concerned we could drive to Indiana in this car. I would watch his hands on the wheel, and his long thighs, and dream the journey away.

Last time we sat together in his car, he kissed me. And then I kissed him.

“Are you nervous?” he suddenly asks.

“Huh? Oh, about the conference. No, not really. Well, a little. Yeah, you know what? I am. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?”

He glances across, and for the first time today smiles at me. Thank God—I thought he didn’t like me anymore. But he does. He still likes me.

“Giles?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re not going to make me pretend I won’t mind if you come in, right?”

“Come in where? Ah.” I can see that he knew this subject would rear its anxious head sooner or later. “But I’ve been delegated to assess how well you carry yourself as an Ardrossan representative.”

I must have looked absolutely appalled, because he searches my face longer than the speed at which he is driving allows.

“I’m kidding. Anna—hey! Joke!”

“Oh, you horrible man! If I weren’t afraid you’d land us in a ditch, I’d hit you! Horrible man!”

“Yes, I know.” He grins.

I exhale noisily, still in shock. “Why are you coming, anyway?”

I would never have had the courage to ask if he had not wrong-footed me like this. But now the question hangs between us like a piece of lacy underwear pulled out from under the sofa cushions.

“To take you out to dinner tonight.”

Again he looks over, and I can see in the tension of the muscles around his mouth that some of his nonchalance is fake.

“All right,” I say quietly.

He looks straight ahead, and I really think that is all he will say on the subject.

“So your flight to New York is tomorrow.” This comes a full minute later.

“Yes, of course. Tomorrow afternoon.”

That has been eating him. I don’t believe it. He has been sulking.

“To be honest, there’s another reason I’m going,” he says, and I hold my breath. “A friend of mine—we go way back, he was my tutor at Cambridge—recently got a job at Notre Dame. I haven’t seen him for ten years.”

“At the English department?” I ask. “Who is it?”

“Paul French. He was at UCL before. I don’t suppose you know him?”

“We were never introduced, no, but I remember seeing him at various Shakespeare-related events. Ginger-haired, roly-poly. Exuberant.”

“That’s Paul. Anyway, how do you think your paper will go over?”

The butterflies in my stomach rise and flutter hectically, like a flock of pigeons flushed from the side of a building.

“I hope I’ve made it watertight enough to stand up under scrutiny, but there’ll be a number of historians there, you know, proper historians, not lame-ass cultural historians like me. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a go at it. Or at me.”

“You should have presented it in the graduate seminar, or better still, given it to me to read.” He casts me a quick glance but looks away when I look back.

“You’re very busy.”

“I would have read it, if you’d asked me. I’m supposed to, as your mentor!”

“Thanks,” I mutter, not very graciously. “Of course I discussed it with various people. I’m not that much of a frosh!” He raises his eyebrows to express skepticism, and out rushes the truth. “If I must be panned, I’d rather be panned by a bunch of strangers than by you!”

“But that’s silly. Just silly.” He deliberates for a moment. “Did Tim say I’ve been thrown off his tenure committee?”

“No! Why? And what does that mean?”

“I’m too close, personally and professionally. To be fair, I probably am. It’s just that Elizabeth would not have objected, and Dancey has.”

“But Tim’ll be all right, won’t he?”

Again he considers his reply carefully.

“I think so. His portfolio is too solid to deny him tenure, even if some people wouldn’t claim that he’s…their favorite person.”

“Nobody can be everybody’s favorite person.”

He grins. “That’s a wise thing to say. But everybody can and should make sure that their mentor approves their conference papers!”

I get the distinct feeling that I have just been officially reprimanded.

“Well, if they thrash me, you’ll tell me that you would have told me so if I’d given you the chance!”

“At great length, and with plenty of footnotes!”

“Keep your eyes on the road.” I nod toward the windshield, biting on a laugh. “We’ll never find out if you wrap us round a tree.”

“I just—” he starts, then stops. Relaxes his hold on the steering wheel as if he had been clasping it too hard. “I just don’t want any of those arseholes—and there are bound to be some, there always are—I just think that you should have taken all possible precautions to shield yourself against boorish attacks, that’s all.”

“The more enemies, the more honor.”

He casts me another exasperated glance. “You’re very cool.”

“I won’t be cool if you come in to listen.”

“Think of me as a claque,” he says. “It’s nice to have a friend in the audience, isn’t it?”

Yes. It’s nice to have a friend.

I disentangle myself from our dispute and force myself to watch the forest by the highway flying past. There was a road sign to the airport; shouldn’t be longer than ten minutes till we’re there.

“You don’t care what people think,” I say slowly. A harmless remark, like a pebble into the pond of our…friendship.

He glances over, with a snort and a lopsided smile. “It’s hard for a young lion not to care what the alpha males say about him.”

Giles doesn’t care. That is so not true.

“My father was a soldier,” he goes on. “An officer, during the war. He was fifty-one years old when I was born, and although he had an artistic side and was, I think, more naturally warm-hearted than my mother, he never quite reconciled himself to the fact that his younger son was a…a wuss.”

“Wuss he?” I ask, and he laughs. I love that. I love that I can make him laugh.

“I felt like one, anyway. With a father who fought in Italy and Germany and was present at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and an older brother who had made his first million on the stock market by the time he was twenty-six, a First in English literature doesn’t really cut it.”

He would never be telling me this if he didn’t have to concentrate on the road and couldn’t pretend that we are only chatting.

“Are you sorry you didn’t go into the City?”

“Lord, no.” He scowls. “I would have made a complete hash of it.”

“A nice house in Buckinghamshire, a cottage in Sussex, a sailing boat, tickets to all the fancy London premieres…sorry, premieres.”

“No, that’s your fantasy,” he says, a little riled. “I emigrated to another continent to get away from all that.”

“Well, if I had wanted all that so very badly, I could have stuck with the Etonian.”

“Maybe you should have.”

We are almost fighting.

“Do you know what is so depressing?” I ask when we have parked the car and are walking toward the terminal. I need to say this out loud, because I need to see how he will react. “That sooner or later a girl realizes that her good opinion means very little to a man. A woman can’t boost a man’s ego, not if he feels inferior to the big boys out there. Women don’t count. They can undermine a man, sure, and he might take it out on her if he had a bad day at the office, but it’s the boys’ admiration that he craves, not hers.”

“If you believe that, you’re crazy!”

Whatever this is, it is not the notorious English reticence.

Our fellow travelers are all on their way south or northeast, so the departure lounge in which we wait for our flight is only half-full and quiet. Giles, ambling along the window front, both hands dug deep into his pockets, bag slung over his shoulder, seems to contemplate the airfield bathed in the pinkish-gray light of the rising sun. Seeing him there, out of his natural habitat, my face softens, my whole body softens.

I know in my head that making love with him tonight would be a really stupid idea, but my heart and my belly know not from reason.

His seat is on the other side of the plane, a few rows behind mine, but when I look up after extracting gum, pen, and manuscript from my bag and stowing it under the seat in front of me, he is standing above me, elbows propped against the overhead locker.

“I hope you wouldn’t have preferred sitting next to that nice lady who changed seats with me.”

I raise myself to look across the rows of seats and see a middle-aged woman in colored knitwear wave at me. I wave back and mouth a thank you.

“What did you tell her?”

His grin deepens and he slumps into his seat, suddenly no more than a few inches away from me, closer even than in the car. So much for the nap I had hoped to take during the flight.

“Oh, never mind.” He pretends to be interested in my manuscript. “I can be very persuasive if I want to be.”

I decide to let that one pass and go for small talk. “Have you ever been to Notre Dame?”

“‘South Bend! That sounds like dancing, doesn’t it?’” he says in a falsetto voice.

“Katherine Hepburn. In The Philadelphia Story.”

“Well done.” He crosses his long legs and squirms in his seat so that his back is half turned toward the aisle and his body creates a little cocoon of privacy for us. “If you can tell me who she says it to, I’ll buy you a cocktail before dinner.” He leans the side of his head against the head rest and watches me expectantly.

“Gin and tonic, please. She says it to James Stewart’s character, the journalist. Mike. She asks Mike where he’s from, he says South Bend, Indiana, and she repeats it in that high, affected voice.”

I turn away from the window, ever so slightly, turn toward him, lean the side of my head against my headrest and smile. I am allowed to smile at him. The plane starts backing out of its berth, and suddenly the whole cabin is flooded with sunlight.

I am dancing on the edge of an abyss.

“Aren’t you a little too young for screwball comedy?” he teases me.

“Are you kidding me? I had a whole shelf full of MGMs from the thirties and forties. Cary Grant, mainly. But I’ve never seen Die Hard 17, or The Return of the Killer Terminator, or Saddles on Fire, or any of those.”

“You’re a nostalgic soul.”

“Yes, I know.” Nostalgic for a time when the world watched as six million of my people were murdered. We all have contradictions in our lives.

“James Stewart or Cary Grant?” he asks.

The moment the plane accelerates to take us out of our rigidly circumscribed social roles, we turn into teenagers, lying on a beach or hanging out in the park, comparing lists. Bands, films, actors, writers. I know what this is. We are curious about each other, and we are talking as if we were going to have sex tonight, as if we needed to find out whether we would work. We are getting personal with each other although we have decided that there is no point in getting personal, because we can’t get physical. This is like eating an irresistibly delicious piece of cake knowing that there is a bitter nut in there somewhere, so you go on eating but you chew very, very carefully.

“Cary Grant.” I sigh like a foolish teenager, and he laughs.

“Thought so! Top three Cary Grant films?”

“No, no, my turn! Which Hepburn?”

He takes his time gazing at my face and smiles when I blush.

“Audrey,” he says. “With Katherine’s mouth on her. Now you. Top three Cary Grant films.”

“Well, Philadelphia Story is high up there, and Holiday is a lovely movie. Most of the Hitchcocks, of course, except I think he shouldn’t have fallen for Eva Marie Saint. He’s very sexy in To Catch a Thief. Oh, my very favorite one is Cha—no.”

“What?”

“I’m not sayin’.”

Charade is my favorite Cary Grant movie. But he’s so much older than Audrey Hepburn in that one, with his gray head of hair and his crow’s feet, that I am ashamed to admit I have adored it ever since I first saw it when I was eleven years old.

“So you like Cary Grant but not Clark Gable. Not sure I get that.”

“Dude! You totally underestimate the sex appeal of Ashley Wilkes!”

“Ashley Wilkes is a girl’s insipid dream!” he exclaims. “The romantic hero of an adolescent! Reassuringly asexual, and when he does knock on Melanie’s bedroom door, once a fortnight, you can be sure he’ll take his weight on his elbows. Like a true gentleman!”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir, but—would you like tea or coffee? Water?”

“Right, what do you think—” He peers at the name on her lapel. “Oh, come on—you’re never called Melanie!”

The flight attendant, a slinky young woman with a tattoo peeking out of her blouse, grins. “My mom was a huge fan of the movie, and she liked Ashley Wilkes! For my money, I’d take Rhett Butler any time—if he’s available without the cigar-and-brandy breath!”

I’m laughing so hard, I can hardly hold my plastic cup of tea without spilling it all over my manuscript.

“Of course a man with an English accent is always very sexy.” Melanie smiles, pushing herself through the narrow gap between the drinks cart and Giles’s seat.

“I know, right?” I agree a shade too heartily and rest one hand on his thigh in order to pass her two dollars. She narrows her eyes at me and turns to the other side of the plane.

“Oooh, I say.” Giles flutters his eyelashes and sighs.

“Giles, what have you done with Hornberger’s file?” I ask on an impulse.

“Boring!”

“It’s not boring at all! It is nail-bitingly exciting, and you are an old meanie for not letting me be part of the adventure!”

“That’s me. Ol’ Meanie Cleveland. And you’re a good little assistant professor working on her spotless, sparkling tenure file. End of adventure.”

“You’re talking through your hat, Cleveland.” I’m genuinely annoyed with him. “And you’re a hypocrite!”

“I’m what?”

“Well!” I look around me in the cabin of the plane.

“What do you—oh, I see what you mean.” He grins. “But I said dinner. What did you have in mind?”

For the first time since he offered me a ride to the airport it occurs to me that I would be disappointed if he didn’t try to seduce me. Talk about hypocrisy!

I make another attempt. “Did you, for example, try to find Mary-Lou Tandy?”

“I had a look in the Shaftsboro phonebook. She isn’t there.”

“That hardly counts as trying to find. Have you handed the file in to the police? Or to the chair of the Sexual Misconduct Hearing Panel?”

“No…”

“But, Giles! That’s—” I instinctively lower my voice. “That’s withholding salient information in ongoing legal proceedings!”

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t even a case. Had Mary-Lou ever filed charges with the police, yes, but she didn’t have the mental or emotional stamina to do so. I don’t blame her. But she didn’t, and having raped her doesn’t make it more likely that he also raped Natalie.”

“Yes, it does!”

“No, it doesn’t!”

“But you think he did!”

“I do, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“Cleveland, you’re really starting to upset me!” I inform him, in case he hadn’t noticed. “Don’t you want to see him behind bars?”

“That’s a very complicated question.”

“It is? Guy rapes women, guy ought to go to jail. What’s complicated?”

“Revenge.” He shakes his head, gazing out the window behind me. “So difficult, that. You’ve read the plays. You know how revenge invariably returns to stab the revenger in the back.”

“Yes, for plotting and scheming against his adversaries! You’re not setting a trap for Hornberger; you’d only be exposing what should have been exposed long ago! And talking of revenge—never mind.” I cut myself off, but he raises his eyebrows at me, demanding to hear. “Well, Giles, I don’t know, but threatening to tell Holly Ortega and Elizabeth Mayfield about Nick’s affair with Amanda—that was revenge, too, wasn’t it?”

“The revenge element was incidental. I had another reason.”

And more he will not tell me, so I try another tack.

“Why do you think Corvin hid the file?”

“Blackmail? We’ve all wondered how Corvin gets away with…what he gets away with. Maybe this is why.”

“I hate to think Hornberger is getting away with it all!”

“There is that,” Giles agrees. “That is in the balance. Justice and revenge. If he hadn’t f*cked my wife, I’d be the first to blow the whistle on him. But the fact that I hate his guts and would love to see him—how did Tim put it?—see him strung up by his testicles makes it more complicated. You think I’m mad, don’t you?”

Madly fascinating. I want to crawl into his brain and find out how it works, and I am convinced I would not be bored for a second. Impatient—that, yes!

“Do you always dissect your emotions with a long-handled scalpel?”

He looks at me, and suddenly his face is English again, guarded and impersonal, his eyes like green glass in the sun shining in through the window.

“Always,” he says.

I find it difficult to switch from playing at pillow talk with Giles on the plane to the effusive but superficial manner required at conferences. Mere acquaintances fall around each other’s necks as if they had last seen each other in the previous century. People who have dissed each other in reviews since they last saw each other struggle to adjust their behavior. Having a paper to present means you walk around with a leaden weight in your stomach till it’s over, and then you either start enjoying yourself or you get bored.

I am a little piqued when I arrive at the conference venue and Giles suddenly doesn’t seem to know me anymore. But I have my own people to greet, and it occurs to me that Giles may simply be giving me space to do my own thing. After the first half hour of coffee, it is almost as if I were at Notre Dame by myself, my main objective being to sell my paper. In fact, this is the first conference that I am attending without also having to sell myself, Ph.D-for-hire. For the first time I am an assistant professor on tenure track. The world is my oyster.

We hear a keynote and two papers. Interaction is concentrated and critical, but collegial. My chest is getting tighter.

When we are being herded back into the conference room after the break, I crane my neck to spot Giles in the small crowd, sidle up to him, and push my hand inside the crook of his arm.

“Giles—wait!”

Through the cotton of his shirt I can feel the hard muscles of his arm and how warm his skin is. It is a good thing that I am flushed already. “Now would be a good time to go and have that chat with Paul French. Have a cup of coffee with him!”

“But I just had coffee. Besides, Paul wants to hear your paper.”

“Giles! Not fair! You said you wouldn’t do this!”

“Wrong. You said. If you think I’m going to miss this, think again, ducky.”

We are standing very close while the audience is murmuring its way past us. I peer into the room and see Pete Kirkpatrick, who is going to give the response to my paper. Giles is watching me with unholy amusement, and I can tell that my plea is making no impression at all.

“Courage, ma chère.”

I feel the gentle pressure of his hand in the small of my back. It’s nice to have a friend.

Paul French comes bouncing up to us. “Come on, Anna. Don’t be nervous!”

“Heavens, I’m not…yes, I’m coming.”

Of course the anatomy illustrations have an immediate appeal; they make an audience sit up automatically, unlike broadside woodcuts, pewter pilgrim badges or city seals. There are giggles and groans when I start my PowerPoint presentation, as well as the inevitable “Eeeew!”

“As you can see, I am cheating a little today. I am trying to sell you my car with a hot, half-naked blonde sitting on the hood. Except in these cases, the blonde is pregnant and half-dissected, but I hope you won’t be choosy.”

Make ’em laugh.

“I would like to convince you, over the course of the next twenty minutes, that these illustrations are the Protestant answer to Maria gravida, images of the pregnant Mother of Jesus Christ.”

Make ’em doubt you. And then reel ’em in.

I don’t manage to catch all of them in my net; there are two or three historians who shake their heads and roll their eyes. I am too whimsical, too impressionistic for their taste. But I flatter myself that the discussion after my paper was the liveliest yet, and most questions were genuine, most comments helpful.

Yes. I can do this! I am good at this! Team Lieberman!

Giles, having insisted that he hear me, sat at an oblique angle to the panel so that I did not have to look at him during my talk. I force myself, afterward, not to check his face, and once, when my eyes flit over, I see that he seems hunched over. Reading something, possibly.

“I’m glad to see that at Ardrossan they continue their tradition of hiring bright young things.” An elderly gentleman has come up to me, and because I saw him nodding and smiling during my paper, I don’t take offense at being called a “bright young thing.”

“Uh, thank you—” I peek at his lapel “—Dr. Prewitt.”

“That was a very clever little talk, and I mean that in a good way. I expect great things from you, Anna Lieberman. I’ll be watching you!”

Boosted by my success, I walk over to greet Kathleen Murray. We were in grad school together long enough to develop a deep dislike of each other, but personal animosities with colleagues in your field are never a good idea. Kathleen and I will periodically meet at conferences for the rest of our lives; we have to get on with each other.

“I see you’re here with Giles Cleveland,” she says crossly.

“Actually, no, I’m not here with Giles Cleveland. We left the same town this morning and came to the same town this afternoon, that’s all.”

The one positive thing I can say about Kathleen is that she is fully alive to Giles’s brand of attractiveness.

“Anna, you have to introduce me! Come on, he’s standing by himself!”

Groaning inwardly, I allow her to pull me across the room to where Giles is leafing through one of the new publications on the book table.

“Giles, meet Kathleen Murray. She and I were at Columbia together before I went to London.”

“Professor Cleveland!” She beams at him. “I’m so excited to meet you! Your biography of Raleigh is wonderful! I’m going to use it to teach next semester!”

“Kathleen got the job at Brandeis that I also applied for.”

“Did you? I’m so glad!” He gives her his blandest smile, and I have to hide in my coffee cup not to burst out laughing.

“Why do you never tell me things like that?” he murmurs when we file back in again for the third panel. I cast a speaking glance up at him, and he laughs quietly.

“So, are you happy?” He means my paper.

“Whatever,” I grumble. “It’s not as if you paid me any attention!”

“I did!” he protests. “You were very…sexy.”

“Giles, you rotter.”

He laughs, and his eyes are very warm and very bright.

He has come to Indiana to seduce me.

Paul French has a lot of fun with “my pupil, Cleveland, my creature, my single success story as a tutor!” He is a charming, buoyant Botticelli angel of a man, impossible to dislike, but by the time we adjourn to get changed for dinner, he has turned into a rival.

“Actually, Giles, I was hoping to abduct you tonight! I know a quiet little place downtown—we have such a lot to catch up on!”

No! Tonight he’s mine!

Giles accepts. Smiles, accepts, and explains to the bystanders that he and Paul last saw each other in nineteen ninety-five, when they got vilely drunk on Sangria at a conference in Barcelona.

“Sorry—I’m sure you understand—older rights, and all that!” This is not addressed to me but to Kathleen, and I feel as if someone had hit me over the head with a Riverside Shakespeare. Worried that shock and disappointment are written all over my face, I turn away from the group, mutter something about the effect of the coffee on my bladder, and flee into the restroom.

What the hell did I say to make him change his mind about me? I wanted him!

To have dinner with, at any rate, since sex is…should be…out of the question. I’m so disappointed I could cry. Scream. Kick in the door of the cubicle in which I am hiding my humiliation from the world.

Rationally, I understand what is going on. The moment he becomes unavailable, I want him. I wanted him before, I’ve been wanting him—oh, who am I kidding?

But my career…

I want my career more than I want a man. Naysayers, detractors, even haters I can deal with. The more enemies, the more honor. This afternoon I convinced a roomful of scholars of my intricately woven analysis of Renaissance images of dissected bodies. Like a barber-surgeon’s knife through the dead flesh of a criminal, my intellect cut through conflicting layers of discourse, isolated the semiotic codes by which these images hang together, and carved a coherent argument out of a mass of material. But the sense of triumph this gave me was short-lived. Now I am tired. And frustrated. And so lonely.

What is wrong with me?

Since I cannot run away, and since I do not trust myself alone in my hotel room tonight, there is nothing for it but to team up with Kathleen and a couple of delegates I know from other conferences. Project the successful young tenure-track professor. Wear the high-heeled boots.

“Anna!” Giles is hurrying down the hallway with long strides, Barbour still open, scarf hanging around his neck. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Out.” I hitch my purse up on my shoulder and pull the door shut.

“But you’re my date!”

“Well, that’s what I thought until you blithely agreed to have dinner with Paul French!”

“Smokescreen, darling. I was sure you’d get that.”

“No, I didn’t get that,” I mutter defensively.

“Do you have Kathleen’s number? Tell her that you have a headache. Ask for the name of the place they’re going to and say you’ll follow on later. If you’re feeling better.”

“What did you tell Paul?”

“Headache.” He grins.

On our way downstairs and across the lobby, I am still so overwhelmed by confusion, relief, joy, suspicion, and resentment that I am dumb, but outside on the sidewalk I snap.

“I don’t know that lying was such a bright idea, Giles! If anyone sees us now, we’re toast!”

“We’re not going to be seen. They’ve all gone to South Bend, and we’re going to Mishawaka.” He hails a cab from the stand down the street. “Unless you’d rather stay in and order room service…”

He says it like something he didn’t think he would have the guts to say, and then it slipped out at the first opportunity. The taxi draws up, and Giles and I are still gazing at each other, teetering on the brink.

“Get ’n the car.”

I make my voice sound extra gruff, and the quick nod of my head would have done any mobster proud. He holds the door for me and exchanges a few words with the driver while I sort out my coat, then he climbs in after me. We drive along the southern edge of the campus and turn right.

“I’m—I’m sorry.” He has to clear his throat before he can speak. “I can’t believe I said that. It was crass and—God, I can’t believe I’m such a…klutz!”

“Giles.” I reach over and slip my hand into his; he claps it firmly, without hesitation. “You’re not a klutz for spelling out what we both know is in the cards. I’m glad you did.”

It’s too dark to see his face properly, but he doesn’t let go of my hand.

“You’re much better at plain-speaking than I am.”

“Well, I am still a New Yorker while you are a freakin’ Englishman.”

This clears the air a little, and I give in to the innocent—I hope—pleasure of linking my fingers with his and leaning a little closer when he lays our hands on his thigh. I am sinking back into my fantasy of being with Giles—of being allowed to be with Giles—like I would sink into a hot, foamy, scented bath. It is a drive of some fifteen minutes, during which we hold hands but do not speak. We pull up in front of a country club-style building, brightly lit, in what appear to be quiet, park-like surroundings. While he is paying, another taxi draws up, and I hold my breath for fear it might be conference delegates, but it’s an elderly couple with what I take to be their college-aged granddaughter. They are chatting quietly and walk in before us. Giles is about to follow them when I grab his arm.

“Giles!”

“Hmm?” Immediately he swings round, stands very close to me and reaches for my hands. I love that he likes holding hands. I love everything about him.

“Giles, I’m…very tired and…and emotional, and I don’t want to end up having sex with you tonight merely because it is something I can do horizontally.”

He smiles and lets me go. Three nimble steps and he is up the front porch of the restaurant—light-footed, happy.

This is so dangerous.

The restaurant is generously laid out but feels cozy because the space has been compartmentalized by big potted plants and painted paravents. Giles hangs up my coat and takes off his Barbour, and although I am ashamed to admit it, the warm glow in my belly is fanned by the pride of possession. I managed to suppress this feeling all day today—at the airport, at the conference—but now that he is lavishing his whole attention on me, my heart swells.

The waiter is leading us to a booth with a window at the back of the room when a hot, painful rush of panic sets my skin on fire, and it takes me a paralyzed eternity to register the cause.

“I say, Cleveland! Over here!”

Paul French. At a big round table, with Kathleen, Pete, his wife, and several other people from the conference.

“Varkackt,” I mutter next to Giles’s shoulder, and he, lifting an arm to acknowledge Paul’s salute, mutters back, “If that means what I think it means, I’ll say oy to that.”

He turns round to look at me. “I don’t want them!” he pleads, with the pitiful but helpless frown of a thwarted boy. “I want you!”

“Let’s run!” I whisper. We stare at each other, and I am so in love with him, all my resolutions have evaporated into thin air; if he grabbed my hand to run, I’d run with him. But we are both too responsible, or too cowardly, and we both know we won’t run.

“Good, so you got my message! I wasn’t sure it would reach you!” Paul pulls out the chair next to his, and his voice and behavior tell me—and I hope no one else—that he is covering Giles’s ass. And mine. Giles glances over at him, too annoyed to play the game, and I greet the others far more enthusiastically than I would in any other circumstance, except possibly on a mountain top in the Himalayas. All I can do is prevent the ultimate frustration of having Giles sit next to Kathleen.

“Here, Paul, Giles—you haven’t seen each other in yonks—” I push Giles into the chair offered by Paul and slip in next to Kathleen myself.

“I’m so glad your headache is better, Anna!” she trills sourly. “How boring it would have been for you to spend the evening all alone in your room!”

When Paul fills our glasses with wine, I drink.

“Anna? Anna, would you say you had a fair impression of your college after you’d been to your campus interview?” Vicky, one of the conference organizers, has to raise her voice to alert me.

“Oh, I—I don’t know. How can I—” I gesture toward Giles.

“How can she answer that in front of a colleague?” one of the other women scolds Vicky. “Is Giles on your P&T committee, Anna?”

We glance at each other, and I hope my embarrassment is taken for the defensiveness of a junior professor. “That hasn’t been settled yet,” I say.

“Probably not,” Giles says.

At first I am relieved when someone starts asking about the Hornberger scandal. Only a few of them had not heard of it, and so a censored version of life at the Ardrossan Observatory becomes a safe topic to pass the evening.

Once embarked on this salacious topic, each of them has a similar story to relate: of the eminent professor who got up in a faculty meeting to announce what she wrongly assumed was an open secret—her affair with an adjunct lecturer; of the female professor who married her much younger teaching assistant, who ten years later threw himself off a bridge; of the bright young female student who serially dated three professors during college, only to end up taking a job as secretary in a firm of car dealers.

Be quiet! I want to shout them down. Does nobody know any stories with a happy ending?

“I’m on the third floor—you, Anna?” Kathleen asks me as we are walking up the stairs back at the hotel together at the end of this f*cked-up evening.

“Um, yup.”

“Giles?”

“I think so.” He rummages in his coat pocket and produces his keycard. “Three twenty-one. That’s sort of round the corner and behind the sofa, underneath a potted plant.”

Why doesn’t he draw her a freaking map?

I am seething. Seething. It makes no difference that her room is near the elevator, while both Giles and I are further along the hallway and round a corner.

“See you in the morning,” I mutter, slam my keycard into the slit on the door and throw myself against it.

“This is—” he says, as if he had suddenly remembered something important.

“Good night.”

“This is the moment Grace Kelly turns round to kiss Cary Grant.”

“Look, Giles, don’t even—go there—” I shake my head, so distraught and disappointed I could cry.

“I know. Scandal-mongering is awful. Poisonous.”

“It is! And I don’t want to become the object of—”

“I wouldn’t let them.”

“You couldn’t stop them!”

The tension leaves his body, his shoulders slump. He gazes down at the floor.

“I would do my best.”

“Giles, I—I’m really sorry we didn’t get the chance to have dinner together. I am. But I asked you not to do this. Hit on me.”

“Not hitting,” he says softly, looking up. “I just want a kiss.”

He is very still, all flippancy gone. So handsome, in his suit and Barbour, melted snow glistening on his sleeves and in his hair. And at the same time—shy. He is shy, and neither smooth nor masterful.

That, or he is playing me.

“Hit me again,” I say softly, mockingly. “Only this time, choose a better quotation.”

He hears my softness, but he also hears the mockery. The tension around his mouth relaxes, and he smiles.

“‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that I’m having a tough time keeping my hands off you?’”

The sentence echoes in my memory and I have to laugh. “Much better.”

I step up to him, glad of the high heels that have been pinching me all afternoon, because they make me tall enough to wrap one arm around his shoulders while I kiss him. On the mouth, and just deliberately enough, I hope, to send a spark into his belly.

You play me, I play you.

“More,” he murmurs when I try to pull away.

“Giles, somebody might—”

He is not interested at all.

Very fuzzily I make a deal with myself: the second he begins to push me through the half open door of my room, I will push him away. Only he does not. He slips his hands underneath my coat and draws me firmly against himself, and although I could hazard a guess that it is not his phone that is hard below my navel, he is very still, as our lips and tongues slow down, find their pace. How much you can learn about someone by kissing him! I already had an idea that Giles Cleveland is a man who enjoys kissing, and enjoys it for the intimacy it allows. He is kissing me now to get to know me: my mouth, my tongue, my body and their responses to his. My courage. I want to do everything with him, I told Irene, and it is absolutely true.

“He said what? Noooo! And then what did she say back?”

“What did she say? What did she do!”

Loud, cheerful voices cut into my consciousness like a blade into skin. I jerk my head back and gasp for air, now listening hard. Voices approaching along the hallway. Voices about to turn the corner.

“Go!” I push him away frantically, push him into the direction of his room. “Go, go, quickly!”

“Anna…”

He could easily overpower me. I feel it in his body’s resistance, in the way he clasps my upper arms, glances along the hallway and into my room.

“No, Giles! Go, now!”

And I tear myself away from him, dive into my room and slam the door.

The moment I hear the latch on my bedroom door, my rejection impulse is overcome by remorse. What have I done? What the hell have I just done? But I cannot be seen French kissing Giles Cleveland in a conference hotel hallway! I might as well fingerpaint it onto my forehead!

I slammed a door in his face.

Shame, as keen-edged as the panic before, rushes through my body like hard liquor.

Why did he give up so easily? Is Giles Cleveland a quitter? He certainly didn’t stand by his woman, just now, and I am furious he didn’t! He might have propelled me into my room, out of sight, easily! Why didn’t he?

Maybe because I told him that I wouldn’t enjoy this evening if it was all about getting me into bed.

Maybe because he doesn’t want to have sex with a woman who has to be dominated and coerced into it, like a bashful virgin.

Damn!

Damn caution! Damn my career! Damn this constant, constant anxiety!

Do something.

Get drunk. Find a night club, drown in the noise. Dance your way through this need to stop thinking. I need to be part of something simple again.

My heart is beating hard and fast in my throat. I can’t. I shouldn’t.

I should take another shower. Flush the anger and the need out of my body.

It’s a good shower, this. A big showerhead, a full, yet soft spray of water, hot, as hot as I can bear it.

I can’t bear it.

I’ve never felt it so keenly, the two-edged sword of temptation. It cuts both ways. Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. I never knew that. Supposing I had an affair with Giles Cleveland. My career would crash and burn like a Japanese plane on the flight deck of a US destroyer. But what if my plane from South Bend to New York crashes tomorrow, and I die without ever having been naked with him? What if my plane doesn’t crash, and I die in my bed at the ripe old age of eighty-three, like my grandmother, without ever having been naked with Giles Cleveland?