“Well, you’re an excellent resource. Only child with an only child. You know it from both sides.”
“I guess so,” Jennifer says. In truth Milo is not an only child. Even if she wanted to explain this—which she doesn’t—she wouldn’t, because she doesn’t want to say Zoe’s name aloud. She has a superstitious feeling that to say her name would conjure her. “I think I agree with . . . Sebastian? It’s about whether you want another.”
“Sebastian’s my husband.”
“I figured that.”
“I don’t plan children with other men.” Megan grins. “Actually this whole place is a free-love commune. That’s why you came here, right?”
Jennifer doesn’t know what to say. She isn’t good at banter. She musters an uncertain smile.
Megan sighs. “Really the opposite is true. It’s kind of a traditional place. Coats and ties. Nuclear families. Guardian angels.”
“Angels?”
“Yes, the Sewanee angels. You tap the roof of your car when you leave the Domain to take your angel with you, then when you go back through the gates you tap the roof again to release it.”
“What’s the Domain?”
“All the land the university owns. I thought it was a funny name when I got here—so dramatic—but now I don’t think twice.” She cocks her head. “Is it the right pronoun for an angel?”
“I don’t know much about angels.”
“What did people do before cars? Tap the roof of their carriages? Smack their horse?” Megan touches her lightly on the shoulder. “But I’m making it sound like I don’t like it here and I do.”
Jennifer nods. She sips her tea and Megan does, too, and now Jennifer really should think of something to say. She comes up with: “What does your husband do?”
“He’s a photographer. Weddings and babies, mostly. He has a studio in Chattanooga.”
Jennifer points at a framed picture on the side table, Megan with baby Ben. “Did he take that?”
Megan turns to look. “He did. He’s so good at portraiture. But he also does art photography. Not so much lately, which is a shame.” She jumps to her feet. “Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”
Sebastian’s photos are of city streets—startling in the nature-centric context of Sewanee. They’re black-and-white images of urban blight, hand-tinted in incongruous bright colors, an ancient neon sign on a closed-up theater rendered a bright salmon pink, the boarded window below it turned new-leaf green. Megan walks her down a hallway hung with his work, pointing out this and that. Jennifer makes murmuring sounds of interest and praise, but at the end of the tour Megan looks at her with a clear expectation of something more, and asks, “Isn’t he good? He was going to stack these in the attic but I insisted we hang them here.”
“They’re great,” Jennifer says, though what does she know about art? She doesn’t know if they’re good; she’s not even sure she likes them. They make a garish beauty of the ugly. Maybe sometimes you should just let ugly be.
“I know,” Megan says, studying the one at the end of the hall like she’s never seen it before. “He’s still taking them, but he doesn’t really show me. He says it’s just a hobby now.” She leads Jennifer back to the living room. Over her shoulder she says, “I think once you’re a photographer you never leave your camera at home. Even if you leave your camera at home. You can’t help seeing the world in shots. If you don’t take the picture when you see it you abandoned something.”
“Is that something you study?” Jennifer asks.
Megan turns, looking puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“What people’s jobs say about them.” Why is Jennifer asking for details? As if Megan were someone she’s trying to get to know.
Megan gives her a surprised, appreciative smile, like Jennifer’s smarter than she thought. “You’re right, I talk about that a lot. No, I write about sports and gender, or at least that’s the book I’m writing now. My tenure book, I hope. What do you do? I haven’t asked.”
“I’m a massage therapist.”
“Oh!” Megan’s eyebrows shoot up with interest. “And what does that say about you?”
“I—”
“Or maybe that’s a hard question to answer.”
“I’m not good at talking about myself.”
“Well, that’s a kind of answer,” Megan says. “You don’t have to talk to give a massage.”
“No,” Jennifer says. “Though sometimes the client wants to talk.”
“Really? Whenever I’ve gotten a massage I’ve just tranced out.”
“Some people are like that. But some people—” She hesitates, sorry to have turned the conversation toward herself. “Sometimes when you work a knot, you trigger something.”
“What do you mean?”
“Emotion lives in the body,” Jennifer says. “A sore place can be anger or grief.”
“And you can intuit that?”