The Englishman

chapter 30

THE MOMENT HORNBERGER PULLS THE DOOR shut behind him, I realize that Giles and I are no longer on the same side.

“You better get dressed,” he says and throws me my bra and my blouse, turning his back to gaze out the dark window while I wriggle back into my crumpled clothes. I am so cold now, with shock and with the December air howling in through the roof, that my fingers are numb and useless.

And where do we go from here?

I don’t even know where “here” is. The moment Giles traded in the truth about Hornberger’s past for the preservation of my good name? The moment Giles managed to rise above his humiliation at the hands of another man to stay true to his woman? The moment he began to thrust into me again, after holding off so bravely for my pleasure? The moment he came into the observatory and, without so much as a by-your-leave, started to undress me? The moment I realized that Selena is our mysterious graffiti artist and vandal? The moment Ma Mayfield told me that my students have accused me of sexual harassment?

Where do I pick up the thread?

“Don’t worry,” Giles says. “He won’t tell the Provost.”

“No, I-I know. I’m not worried.” I hand him back his jacket, and he casts me a glance full of ironic disbelief.

There is so much to talk about. I just want to be quiet.

Giles has himself perfectly in hand. Polite, suave. Avoids eye contact. As if he has lost interest in me already.

“I’m not going to apologize, if that’s what you think.”

“What about?” I stare at him, stupidly. My crotch is wet and cold. It’s a good thing I came by car this morning.

He gives one of his sarcastic spurts of laughter.

“I swore to myself that I wouldn’t touch you again, since you are obviously, upon reflection, not interested. And I know that you are wise to keep away from me. But the moment I catch you alone, unaware, I pounce on you, like a—” He breaks off in complete disgust. “Like a Hornberger!”

“Giles, please—” I reach for his hand, but he is too upset to be touched. “Don’t shout at me! You’ve turned me inside out. I can’t cover up so fast…not enough to fight.”

“That! That’s exactly the problem!” he explodes, and I flinch. “I want to turn you inside out! It’s the most exciting thing I have done in my entire life! There—pathetic, isn’t it? Whenever I touch you, you come all over me, and you’re not even faking it, are you? Or have you been faking?”

He frowns at me as if this was a thought to horrible to contemplate. I shake my head.

“I understand scruples,” he goes on, a little calmer. “I have them myself, and to spare! This thing, whatever it is, frightens the hell out of me! But I’m English, so I’m the hypocrite!”

“Giles—I didn’t say that.”

“I waited for your call all week, after that night at Notre Dame! I’m such a goddamn idiot!”

“I wanted to call you, I almost did! But—”

“You got cold feet. I gathered that.”

“No! Well, yes, that too, but it’s also a question of—well, of priorities! I can’t just—just because we—this is all new to me!” Another ironic snort, and I blush but persevere. “No, I mean being here, the place, the work, and it’s hard, well, you know that. But I love what I do, and I want…I have to make it work! So how can I start f*cking a professor in my department? You heard what Hornberger said, and I’m sorry, but he’s right! ‘New hire accused of sexual harassment and caught having sex with a colleague on campus!’ I’d be finished! You said I must have a clean slate or I won’t get tenure!”

Saying the words confronts me with the enormity of my actions, and my voice becomes shrill with panic.

“Is it the danger that does it for you?” he suddenly wonders. “Do you get off on the risk that someone might walk in and catch us at it? Never time for tenderness. When we have time, a whole night, you hold me off and run away, but when I jump you, you hurl yourself toward me as if your life depended on it. I can’t figure you out, Anna. Not at all.”

“There’s nothing to figure out! I do not want this!” I’m scared, and so I shout. I’m scared I’ll be fired. I’m scared Giles is right about me. I am scared of tenderness.

“Right. Well, I’ll remember that from now on.”

And then he storms out. His footsteps echo down the stairs and then the corridor; he’s walking fast, almost running.

A passionate man, this Englishman. What a lovely, wonderful, unbelievably sexy, passionate man he is, this man I’ve just rejected. Again. Sensitive, too. Touchy.

When I finally get home, I am shivering with cold and nerves so badly that I can hardly fit the key into the lock of the cottage door. The living room is strewn with the evidence of my preparation for the day, including shoe polish and brush. Would he have pounced on me if I had been wearing slacks and loafers, instead of a skirt and Mountie boots? A moot point, now. He did pounce, and I hurled myself at him as if my life depended on it.

Maybe it does.

I’ve never heard that love-sickness can be cured by hot water bottles, but I definitely need one. And a drink. While the water is heating up I rifle my extremely modest liquor cabinet, which offers me a choice of Bordeaux and a complimentary box of mini-bottles of liqueur that was left by the previous tenants: cherry, apricot, peach, and plum. I opt for the red wine and drink it straight from the bottle in large gulps. I thought the bottle was almost full; I opened it the other day to take a few spoonfuls to cook with. Maybe I have started tippling in my sleep, because now it is little more than half full. That’ll do me, though.

Ten minutes later I am sitting in my bed, under the covers—still in my tweed skirt and blouse, though I have discarded the damp panties and the boots—with a bottle of hot water in my lap and a bottle of Bordeaux in my hand. The shivering appears to ease up a little. But the longing doesn’t. I know in a corner of my head somewhere that what I said to Giles was just and reasonable. Heartrendingly painful, but reasonable and necessary. But my head stops at my throat, which is tight with tears, and below that there is only heartache and desire.

I fall asleep. It feels like three minutes, but it is really three hours; my watch on the nightstand says it is ten o’clock. The shivering has almost stopped, but I feel very peculiar. Woozy, yes, after half a bottle of red wine and some apricot cordial, and little nauseous, but that isn’t it. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I feel very woozy, and when I pull on my pajama pants, my skin feels very odd. I run my hands along my naked stomach, and it clicks. My skin is burning because I have a fever.

I used to get fevers regularly when I was a kid. Whenever something was too exciting or upsetting, I was sure to start shaking and my temperature would climb very fast. “She’s too thin-skinned,” my father would tell my mother.

The weekend passes in a daze of memories, dreams, and nightmares. I still feel Giles’s hands and mouth on my body so vividly that I wake up several times thinking he is in bed with me, and the illusion is always a sweet one. But I also dream of Logan Williams bringing a box of condoms to class and laying them out on the table in front of him. When I ask him what he thinks he is doing, he says Professor Hornberger told him to bring these, and was I crazy, f*cking a strange man without using any protection? Then there’s a faculty meeting. Elizabeth Mayfield takes my hand and leads me over to a small side table, and I realize that with her other hand she is pulling Nick Hornberger. He and I have to sit apart from the others, and at some point he reaches over, takes my arm and gives me a Chinese burn.

I drift into and out of sleep, drink gallons of water and all my fruit juice, and pretend that I’m not there. Once, the telephone rings. I rear up from a deep and druggy sleep, but by the time I’ve made it out of bed and picked up the receiver, all I hear is the bleeping noise of someone’s impatience.

“Mom, it’s me. Listen, did you just try to call me?”

“No, I didn’t. Dad and I are about to leave the house. Mary and Phil have invited us to the movies, although your father would prefer to stay at home in front of the television, as usual.”

In the background I hear my father protest that he loves going to the movies, but not with Mary and Phil, and not in the afternoon.

“Okay, you go and have fun. Oh, Mom—when I was a kid and I used to get those fevers, how long did they usually last?”

“Your fevers? Heavens, child, how should I remember that?”

“What about her fevers?” My father’s voice is closer to the mouthpiece now.

“Here, Sam, you speak to her.”

“Hi, Dad, it’s only—you know I got those fevers when I was a kid—”

“You have a temperature? How high?”

“Um…I don’t know, I was asleep. Last time I checked, around lunchtime, it was one hundred point eight. But yesterday it went up to one-oh-two point four.”

“Measured rectally?”

“Yes.” I hate these conversations with my father.

“Any other symptoms? Gastric? Respiratory?”

“No, Dad. I’m not ill! I’m pretty sure it’s just…stress. I’m run down, that’s all. It never went on longer than a couple of days, right?”

“Listen, at the clinic they were saying there’s a professor at your school who molests female students? Is that so?”

“Looks that way, yes. It’s an epic story. I’ll tell you when I come home for the holidays.”

Some of it, anyway.

“Keep out of harm’s way, kid!”

“I’ll see what I can do, Dad. It’s…it is hard.”

It is only the fever that makes me add this confession, and I wish I hadn’t. But then my father floors me.

“Well, you’re all alone down there,” he says. “You have no one to look after you.”

I rush back into sleep. Hide in unconsciousness. I will wait. I will not return to life until this craving for Giles has subsided. I will wait till my body has absorbed this drug, this illicit, damaging desire, and flushed it out of its system. I will wait till I feel nothing.

On Monday morning, a minor breakthrough: I am finally able to take a shower, the first since Giles and I—I close my eyes and lean back so that the beams of hot water massage my breasts.

Turning you inside out is the most exciting thing I have done in my entire life.