It's Always the Husband

The three of them made it through exams, and the new term began. The weather was icy and bleak. Jenny trudged on, fighting a cold and the winter doldrums, while Kate and Aubrey gave in to the gloom. Jenny watched with dismay as they partied every night and slept through classes, ate mounds of junk food for days on end, then ate nothing at all. Their hair looked greasy and their sheets smelled of sweat, and it seemed to Jenny that they would fail out of school if somebody didn’t intervene. So she took to scolding them, which accomplished nothing except to make them close the door to Kate’s room and ram a towel in the crack when they smoked weed. At least it was an improvement over smoking in the living room. Jenny tried not to care about their decline. If they couldn’t be bothered to help themselves, why should she knock herself out trying to help them, when she was so crazy busy?

In addition to five classes and four extracurriculars, Jenny worked fifteen hours a week in the provost’s office. It wasn’t one of those mindless work-study jobs, like checking IDs at the gym or signing out books in Ogden Library, where you sat on your butt in your sweatpants, schmoozing cute guys. It was clerical work, and demanding. The bosses noticed every typo. You had to wear office attire. You couldn’t be late or trade hours with other students even if you had a big paper due. But the job gave her access to inside information and face time with important people in the administration. It would be killer on her résumé and hopefully earn her a letter of recommendation. So she stuck with it. No question, though, it added pressure, and contributed to how fed-up she felt with her roommates lately.

On a dark afternoon at the beginning of March, Jenny was called in to the provost’s office unexpectedly because both secretaries were out with the flu and the trustees were in town. The gray sky spit snow as Jenny hurried over the icy paths toward Founders’ Hall, her legs freezing in thin nylons. She rode up in the creaky elevator to the dark-paneled provost’s office, where she found Gloria Meyers—the provost herself—waiting for her with her fingers tapping impatiently. The provost was a sturdy woman with steel-gray hair, whose wardrobe tended toward jewel tones and bold earrings. She looked as if she should be nice, like somebody’s artsy grandma, but in actuality she was brusque and intimidating. Before Jenny even had her parka off, the provost was rattling off a complicated series of instructions for assembling the meeting binders. The board of trustees’ meeting began in fifteen minutes. Assembling the binders in time was not humanly possible, but Jenny was afraid to open her mouth and say so, so she simply nodded and walked over to the Xerox machine. The next forty minutes of her life was spent furiously copying documents and inserting them into three-ring binders.

Jenny loaded the binders onto a cart and headed down the hall to the large conference room feeling like she was going to the firing squad.

Byron Ogletree, the president of Carlisle, was standing at a lectern at the head of a long table when Jenny struggled through the heavy wooden door, pushing the binders on the cart. Ogletree was a famous economist, and looked every bit the academic with his mane of white hair, goatee, and bow tie. He paused in midsentence and looked at Jenny, which made her freeze like a deer caught in headlights. Gloria Meyers came to her rescue.

“You hand them out to this side of the table and I’ll do the other,” Gloria whispered, grabbing an armful of binders. “Then take a seat in the back in case I need you.”

Inside the cavernous room, weak light filtered through ancient leaded windows. Gray-haired, gray-suited men sat around the long mahogany conference table. Jenny was frazzled, and too timid to make eye contact. She didn’t realize she was handing a binder to Keniston Eastman until he thanked her by name.

At the break, she was put in charge of overseeing the coffee station. The trustees milled about, chatting and laughing. Some left the room to make phone calls or use the bathroom. She was mopping up a spill with paper towels when Mr. Eastman came over to her. He glanced over his shoulder before speaking.

“Jenny, I need to talk to you, privately,” he said in a low tone, with an urgent air.

She was too surprised to reply, so she nodded, and kept cleaning.

“I’m staying at the College Inn. When the meeting ends, I’ll wait for you in the bar there. Come as soon as you can, all right?”

She said nothing, but he seemed to take that as a yes. The meeting resumed. Jenny spent the second half of it staring at her hands, too self-conscious to look in Eastman’s direction, not hearing a word that was uttered. What did Keniston Eastman want with her? What could he possibly mean by asking her to meet him in a bar? He must know she was underage; she was the same age as his daughter. If an older man invites a girl who’s not of drinking age to a bar, does that signal an improper advance? If Keniston was making an improper advance, what should she do about it? He seemed to her too old and intimidating to be physically attractive, but maybe physical attractiveness wasn’t relevant here. What would be the benefits to her if she said yes to a proposition from Keniston Eastman, or the repercussions if she said no? It wasn’t like Jenny never thought about him. She fantasized about him regularly, but these fantasies were not the same kind she had about Lucas. In her daydreams, Keniston was her mentor. He offered her a job, made introductions, took an interest in her career. She wanted that from him, badly. What if he offered her such things in exchange for an occasional assignation? Would she really turn him down? Or would she say yes? That was a horrifying thought and an exhilarating one at the same time.

It was four thirty and getting dark by the time Jenny walked through Briggs Gate. Trading the quiet of the Quad for the bustle of College Street, she felt on the verge of something big. The wheels of passing cars had melted the day’s snow into a gray slush that soaked through the soles of her shoes, but she ignored the chill on her toes. The College Inn had pride of place at the corner of College and Main, its elegant brick and limestone fa?ade designed to mimic the look of the dormitories lining the world-famous Quad. In her years growing up in Belle River, Jenny had never set foot in the Inn. It was the hotel of choice for the Carlisle power crowd—parents with fat wallets, Carlisle class of this-or-that returning for reunions or tailgates, visiting scholars on expense accounts. The lobby was old-school. Persian rugs and a brass chandelier, deep leather armchairs. The man behind the reception desk wore an orange-and-white striped tie—Carlisle’s colors—and looked at Jenny expectantly. She felt conspicuous in the down parka she wore over her office clothes, but she squared her shoulders and tried to look confident. After all, she belonged here as much as anybody. Keniston Eastman had invited her.

Before the desk clerk could speak, Jenny saw the entrance to the restaurant on her right, and ducked inside. The room was dimly lit and mostly deserted, with rich wood paneling, and a faint tang of cigar smoke in the air. Keniston waved at her from a booth near the back. She took a deep breath and went to join him.

“Jenny, hello,” he said, with forced heartiness, and shook her hand. She saw again how much he looked like the portrait of his ancestor that hung over the grand staircase in Founders’—the same forbidding profile and heavy eyebrows.

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