Want, стр. 32
Their wives linger in adjacent rooms, offering food and calling to the children. I imagine they have better sex the weeks or months he’s in their houses, the smell of him lingering in their halls and closets, a monkey wrench or small piece of wood left out.
They are, always, shocked to meet me—my short hair, my mussed-up, too-big clothes. My glasses and the way I use my hands too much when I talk. They look past me sometimes, thinking, maybe, This can’t be right; they must think: Her? She’s a professor, they mutter to one another, once we start talking, eyebrows raised and smiling, like the word “alleged” sits lodged in the backs of their throats. I nod and redden, try to explain the word “adjunct,” which is, perhaps, a cousin of “alleged.” I slip, quickly, from making jokes to making everyone uncomfortable. Except no health insurance, I say. Professor, I say, of failing to find a way to make a living wage.
Once, one of the husbands at one of these parties mistook me for the nanny, slipping me a twenty, saying, Thanks so much for taking such good care of the little ones. I did not give the money back.
I don’t tell them that, as of recently, I also teach high school. I don’t know why I don’t tell them. I don’t want to talk to them about what good, important work I’m doing. I think this might be even more demeaning than “alleged adjunct.”
They nudge their preadolescent children toward me as if proximity to an Ivy-League adjunct will result, five years from now, in stellar SAT scores. His teacher says, they whisper, that he might be gifted. She loves to write, they say, but the teacher resents her spirit, holds her back. I’m nice to them because I know I have to be and hate them for this, because, if I don’t say exactly what I know I should, they might decide they don’t want those cabinets or that walk-in closet or whatever other bullshit thing and we might not pay our rent.
I nurse our two-year-old on the couch because I know that they don’t like it, would prefer I go to one of the children’s rooms where it’s quiet, where I have some privacy. A nice woman comes to me with a blanket; I leave it in a pile on the couch.
I watch my husband, swarmed now by both men and women. I hear him laugh from far away. I see his perfect posture, the easy way he holds his beer, his hand wrapped around the label, his thumb flipped over the lip, the slight stubble on his chin and cheeks. Our girl stares up at me, suckling. Another woman sits next to me on the couch. She’s our age, a corporate lawyer. It’s always more jarring when they’re not older, they’re just rich.
You okay? she says. I’m fine, I say. I watch our four-year-old flit through the room with a pack of older kids.
They’re so beautiful, she says.
I nod.
She places her hand on her stomach and I wonder briefly if she’s pregnant.
We’ve been trying, she says.
I try to decide whether to ask more questions, whether to lean toward her like I would lean toward her had I not already decided to dislike her, to let her hold the two-year-old once she’s done nursing, just to have the memory of the weight of her in all the months until she has one of her own.
She says: You want some wine? I shake my head.
She grabs hold of my girl’s feet. Okay, she says. She looks at me a second time. Let me know, she says.
On the train ride home, both girls fall asleep and I start crying.
We’re in public, so he’s quiet. What I imagine he might be thinking is always worse than the thing he finally says out loud. We watch a drunk man slap his wife as she stumbles off the train.
He runs his fingers through his hair and rubs his hand down his neck and whispers at me. What the fuck, he says, is wrong?
I don’t know, I say. I rub a thumb over our daughters’ wrists and refuse to look at him.
He has hold of the handle of the stroller and I watch his knuckles tighten, his arm beneath his shirt get hard.
Those women, I say.
You just listen, he says. You just smile.
Don’t you hate them? I say. It’s all so …
They’re not really what I hate.
I’m just tired, I say.
You’re always tired.
I look down at our girls.
It’s just work, he says.
I look out the window.
The girls sleep.
When we get home they’re still asleep and we slip them somehow into their beds without their waking. My husband pulls me toward him, into the bathroom. He bends me over the cheap black fake-metal shelving unit I bought from Target when I first moved to New York and he enters me slowly, half apologetic, his hands on my shoulders and then on my waist. The top shelf of the shelving unit holds my few beauty products: mascara, witch hazel, lip balm; the glass moisturizer jar—it’s too expensive but my mother buys a jar for me once a year, at Christmas—falls, hard and heavy, on my head, but I stay still and don’t make any noise.
He leans down to kiss me when he’s finished, but I turn my head to grab a piece of toilet paper. I wipe myself and then I find our two-year-old, awake and hungry; she grasps at me, milk leaking from the breast she doesn’t drink from, the curve between my chest and stomach wet and sticky. I listen to him take a shower while she eats.
When you leave me, I say—the baby asleep on