? ? ?
Loud music blared from inside the union, an indecipherable clash of bass thumps and slurred hip-hop lyrics. DeMarco emerged onto the patio carrying two paper cups of coffee, set the hazelnut latte in front of her, kept the black dark roast Columbian for himself as he took a seat beside her at the scarred picnic table. She sat with her legs beneath the tabletop and faced the Union’s smoked-glass wall. He straddled the bench and faced her.
“That music in there gives me a headache,” he said.
She nodded.
He sipped his coffee.
She said, “How do you know he’s still sleeping with his wife?”
“He told me they were dating.”
“Really?” she asked. Then, “But just dating, right?”
He looked out across the campus. The lawns and sidewalks were mostly empty now, students in their classes, in their dorms, maybe two or three in the library. He said, “After I saw you this morning, before I came here, I made some inquiries about your poetry professor. This last one was his third marriage, did you know that? He’s got four kids to the first two wives.”
“He told me all that.”
“Did he tell you he’s still sleeping with the last one?”
“You’re just saying that. You don’t know.”
“I do know that the dean has spoken to him twice, unofficially, because of complaints from the parents of previous students. Officially the university can’t do anything because the girls, like you, were all at least eighteen. He’s been at the university now for, what, nine years? My guess is he averages one or two coeds a year.”
Her tears left small black circles on the weathered tabletop. “He says I’m special.”
DeMarco laid his hand atop hers. “You are,” he told her. “But not to him.”
Twenty-Two
Thomas Huston awoke shivering. An hour or so after midnight, he had curled into a tight ball in a small room on the second floor of the university president’s new mansion. The ten-thousand-square-foot building had been under construction since March and the ribbon-cutting ceremony was not scheduled until May of next year. All four stories had been framed in, but there were no windows installed anywhere, no wiring or plumbing except beneath the concrete of the basement and garage floors.
Just inside the basement entrance at the rear of the mansion, workers had stored some of their materials: boxes of floor tiles, rolls of electrical wire, a cardboard box full of electrical wall boxes and plugs, a stack of two-by-fours, and, taking up at least a third of the spacious room, a dozen or more rolls of Tyvek insulation. Slung over the stack of two-by-fours was a dirty chambray shirt, stiff with dried perspiration. Huston pulled the work shirt over his short-sleeved knit shirt, buttoned it to the neck, rolled down the sleeves, and buttoned them too. The shirt, like the dirty quilted jacket he pulled over top of it, was an extra large, but he did not mind how it looked on him, and the odor it gave off was no more offensive than his own.
Then Huston crept upstairs to look around, wincing at every creak of the subflooring. Illumination from the sodium vapor streetlights flooded in through the open windows at the front of the house, so he kept to the rear, tried always to keep a wall between himself and the front windows, and ducked quickly past open doorways.
On the second floor, he found a small interior room with only one opening, a door that faced the center of a much larger room. A walk-in closet, he told himself. Off the master bedroom. He huddled up in a corner of this room, pulled his bags of groceries close, and tried to sleep. But all he could think about were the evenings he and Claire had spent in unfinished buildings like this one.
During his last two summers in college, he had worked on a construction crew but had lived with his parents. Claire O’Patchen lived with hers in a village six miles away. The young couple had tired quickly of making love twisted and cramped in the backseat of Huston’s battered Volvo parked along the side of a dirt lane, of pulling apart with every flash of headlights. Then one night, in search of a more secluded place to park, he drove past the construction site where he and the crew were building a two-story colonial.