No, that wasn’t quite right. The girls dressed considerably more provocatively. She recalled one of her first days at the school, another teacher—a history teacher named Amy Doud—had asked Kristin to accompany her on crack patrol. Initially, Kristin had been horrified, presuming this was some sort of drug interdiction. She found the very idea that there might be kids doing crack in a suburb this tony a little chilling. But it wasn’t about drugs at all. It was about enforcing the dress code. Kristin had watched as Amy walked softly up behind a pretty, coquettish young thing at her locker, the girl’s navy thong riding an inch or two up on her hips and above the top of her immaculate white jeans. There was the upside-down triangle of fabric at the very small of her back, the girl’s flesh around it shaped into a pair of perfectly formed meringues below the elastic band and a belt-wide strip of skin above it. Amy had deftly—and with preternatural speed—given the girl a wedgie so sudden and so pronounced that the student had been lifted up onto her toes in her flip-flops and squealed. “Dress code,” Amy reminded the girl. “Pull that shirt down and those pants up.” Then she had turned to Kristin and shrugged. “The glamorous life of a schoolteacher on crack patrol,” she said, smirking ever so slightly. “In truth, I do get a little pleasure from this. I really do. Once upon a time, I guess, I was kind of a mean girl.”
Now Richard cleared his throat and began. At first, Kristin found herself occasionally interrupting him with a question or a need for clarification—Was it Eric or this Brandon person who first ran his fingers under the front of the girl’s G-string? Did Spencer know he was buying sex and not stripping? Did Philip?—but soon it was a blur. It was a rush of images, her mind unsure which she found more nightmarish: her husband naked in the guest room with a whore or a pair of dead men in their house. Her composure unraveled. Suddenly she was crying, her shoulders caving in as she hunched over into her sobs, and she was vaguely aware that Richard had risen from the chair and wanted to sit beside her on the bed. To put his arms around her. But before he could, she swatted at his hands and stood, her posture erect and her back flush against the closet door.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, weeping in a way that she hadn’t in years. “Please, Richard, don’t touch me. Not this second.”
“Kris—”
“Just tell me the truth. I don’t think I want to know, but I have to. I have to. Did you fuck that girl in the guest room?”
“No. I swear it: I did not.”
“But she touched you.”
“She tried. I stopped her.”
She took a breath, sniffled. “So you expect me to believe that you went upstairs with her and took off all your clothes, but you didn’t fuck her? Didn’t allow her to…” and the words trailed off. She could bring herself to say the word fuck, a verb in this case of anger and aggression, but somehow she could not verbalize any other act of sexual intimacy. Her mind thought them: Hand job. Blow job. But she could not say such things. It was, pure and simple, too nightmarish for her to bring those visions to life in this room.
“No,” he was saying. “I remembered myself. I love you. I love you and I knew this had crossed a line. So I stopped. I swear to you: I pulled back from that sort of…adultery.”
“Did you kiss her?” she pressed him, her jaw tightening.
He paused and she looked across the room at him. And she knew. Even through her tears, she knew. She could see it in his eyes. Of course he had.
“For God’s sake,” she cried. “I can still smell her on you.”
…
Richard knew she was right, but hoped desperately that she was wrong. His wife probably could smell the girl on him. Had things not ended so badly, he would have showered—two, three, God, maybe four times—before Kristin and Melissa came home on Sunday morning. Obviously. He would have scrubbed from his skin all traces of the sordid debauch. But, of course, that hadn’t happened. On his way to his mother-in-law’s with Cassandra—a man and his cat, how strangely tame he must have appeared to the train conductor and cabbie—he had deluded himself into believing that he stunk only of the random odors of any party. Alcohol. Nachos. Sweat. Cigarette smoke. The pungent aroma of field grass and blueberries just starting to rot that he associated with marijuana. But his wife was right. The perfume and musk of the girl lingered. He carried it on his clothes like pollen.