Michael called it Black Thursday—the day I nearly murdered for love. We were teaching high school at the time, along with Barb, a willowy brunette in the Math Department. I had already had close calls with two other married women on that faculty, but Michael was kind enough never to ask for details. He would later serve as best man at my wedding (not to Barb or those others). We were much younger then—when Barb left her husband for me.
I actually helped her move out, following her home from school one autumn afternoon to load my big Impala and her little VW with furniture, clothes, and whatnot, so when her husband returned to their apartment that night he’d finally realize that something was wrong with his marriage. They had married right out of Ohio State, and Barb told me she didn’t love him when she married him. It had just taken her a few years to come to terms with her mistake. Her husband was a couch potato, obsessed with sports on television, and I suppose I provided her with an excuse for leaving him, although I hadn’t done a single thing to deserve it. She had simply overheard me say in the cafeteria one noon-hour that I was driving up to Columbus for the weekend to attend the ballet at the Performing Arts Center. Something her husband never would have thought of.
We were planning to get married after her divorce, but then winter came and Barb went off with the ski club, which she served as faculty adviser. I didn’t know how to ski, so I tried to learn, of course, but my amateurish snowplow was no match for the tight parallel arcs Barb could carve so effortlessly right down the fall line of the gentle slopes at Mad River Mountain or the expert slopes over at Snowshoe in West Virginia. It was on one of those high school ski trips that she met the man I almost murdered.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. A week after the ballet at the Performing Arts Center my roommate Delbert and I threw a TGIF at Old Lady Bailey’s. Delbert taught in the History Department with Michael. He was engaged to Mary Lou, who had been in the English Department with me until taking a job back in Scranton. Delbert and I were sharing a basement apartment in Old Lady Bailey’s split-level home right around the corner from the high school where we taught. Which made it handy for TGIFs.
Friday afternoon at three-thirty is the perfect time to hand a bunch of harried high school teachers a drink, put on some music, and see what happens. What happened was that Barb strolled in with a look of availability.
I was surprised, yet delighted, to see her. We had issued a blanket invitation to the entire faculty and had no idea who would show up, but suddenly thirty or forty people were parking their cars along the curb out front, slipping around the side yard, and pouring in through the laundry room. To facilitate the crowd, I threw open the sliding glass doors to the patio, allowing ingress to our basement family room, complete with fireplace. But no fire would be needed on that warm October afternoon. Things were heating up on their own.
“He has others,” Barb said cryptically, when I asked if her husband wouldn’t be expecting her for supper. The high school was in the suburbs south of Columbus, but Barb and her husband lived much farther out, so it would take her quite a while to get home. “He has others,” she said, which I misinterpreted to mean other women. But as she would confess when we hashed it out months later, she’d merely meant that he’d be meeting his couch potato friends at a sports bar after work to watch the World Series, which started at eight. Which meant he wouldn’t be home until after midnight. So what’s a girl to do?
Well, I had a few ideas, and the possibilities went racing through my head as Barb squeezed by to accept a drink from Delbert, who was handing out beer and screwdrivers and scotch-and-sodas hand over fist. Someone had put on the “Sergeant Pepper” CD and was singing along with the Beatles: “She’s leaving home, bye bye…”
Delbert was short and pudgy, with freckled skin and bright red curly hair that ballooned like an Afro. He was sui generis, wearing bowties that he tied himself. Nothing bothered Delbert. A good Irish Catholic, he had considered the priesthood, then thought better of it and left the seminary to teach (and marry Mary Lou, a good Catholic herself), all with such infectious good humor that life itself seemed a TGIF. He was planning to head for Scranton as soon as everyone left.
“The World Series should start the exodus,” he said before the first guests arrived, “since we don’t have a TV.” And so the place, later on, would be all mine.
Michael arrived on Barb’s heels, oblivious to the brief but ominous exchange about “others”. He was tall and thin, with Medusa-like black hair that shot out from his head at all angles. A student had once described him as “freaky but nice.” I think it fit.
Trucks Farber came next. He was the basketball coach, an elderly ex-Army sergeant who looked like a bulldog with a crew cut. Ironically, the bulldog was the high school’s mascot. Trucks had been a truck driver before enlisting in the Army. Then he went to college on the GI Bill. But all he ever really wanted to do was coach basketball. I was his assistant, in charge of the JVs, and I was glad he had come, because Trucks, kind and generous soul that he was, had thrown a TGIF of his own several years earlier when Delbert and Michael and I were rookies on the faculty. So we were happy to return the favor.
Trucks grabbed a beer and tried to engage Michael in conversation, but Michael, of course, new nothing about basketball. Trucks had built a full-length court in his back yard several decades earlier, when his alcoholic wife was younger and they were hoping for sons, not the two girls that showed up, one of which got pregnant in her teens, turning Trucks Farber’s crew cut prematurely gray. The other daughter, prim and proper, had married a minister.
Brinlee entered soon after, as if needing a drink. He was older than Michael and Delbert and I, with three or four kids, and his advice was always the same: “Don’t get married!” He had a farm out in the sticks where he raised llamas, some sort of exotic enterprise that he was sure would make him rich so he could quit teaching. The only problem with Brinlee, really, was that he let the kids get to him—not his own, the kids at the high school. He was eventually forced into early retirement after taking a swing at a particularly obnoxious one. It was something, of course, we all felt like doing from time to time, but Brinlee actually went ahead and did it, laying out one of the gawky pimply assholes with a right to the chin.
“You guys got it made,” Brinlee said, grabbing a beer from Delbert as his eyes surveyed our basement retreat. “You guys got it made. Don’t ever get married!”
“What’s wrong with marriage?” Trucks Farber wanted to know. He was trying to end his conversation with Michael, which obviously wasn’t going anywhere.
“Geez, Trucks,” Brinlee said. “You should know. Of all people.”
At the mention of marriage, Barb looked up from dipping a potato chip into the stuff that Delbert had hastily poured into a dipping dish. I caught her eye—on purpose—then looked away. And when I looked back again—on purpose—she looked again too, confirming what we both knew we’d be doing later instead of trying to find a TV to watch the World Series. But first I had to fish Louis out of the brook.
Louis lived next door. He was a very serious middle-aged gentleman who never lost his serious air, even when mowing the lawn on his riding mower. His back yard— like Old Lady Bailey’s—sloped down gently for fifty yards or so to a brook that traversed the rear of both properties. Old Lady Bailey’s organic garden lay on the far side, as if the brook would somehow keep away the stench of the raw sludge she had hauled in every year to enrich the soil. A little bridge arched across that brook—the kind trolls live under—and as I looked away from Barb I saw Louis trundling across it on his riding mower to cut the bank along the far side. He was wearing a straw hat, flannel shirt, and overalls, his standard out-in-the-yard outfit, as opposed to the blue suits he wore to work.
I think Louis was a lawyer, and I think it was the beer in my empty belly that made what happened next take place in slow motion—Louis rolled his riding mower into the brook. Miraculously, he was unhurt. The mower was upside down, wheels spinning, blade whirring, and Louis was sitting in the water with a bewildered look on his face, his straw hat on the green bank behind him. I saw this happen above the heads on the patio, where everyone was singing along with the Beatles, munching potato chips, and enjoying the late afternoon sun. The crowd had swelled to fifty or more, with several couples dancing.
“Hey,” I said, “Louis fell in the brook. Let’s go get Louis!”
Then the slow motion turned into overdrive and I was elbowing my way out through the sliding glass doors and sprinting down the slope to Louis, who by this time was standing up, looking around, and patting the soaked seat of his overalls. Hopping the bank, I grabbed his straw hat and stuck it back on his head.
“Enough mowing, Louis,” I said, out of breath. “Come have a drink. I want you to meet some people.”
Louis was still a bit shaken, just staring at the mower, but then it seemed to occur to him that a stiff drink was a good alternative to waiting for the mower to run out of gas. And so we returned, triumphant, to the patio, where everyone cheered and patted Louis on the back.
When his wife came looking for him later, frantic at finding the mower upside down in the brook (it had run out of gas by then), Louis was pontificating about a case he’d just argued in court. His wife shot me a look that said: I know why you’re having this wild party, young man. It’s because Dora Bailey isn’t here. Just wait ’til she gets home! And what have you done to my husband?
“Hey,” Louis shouted suddenly, recognizing his better half, “thash my wife! Wanna innerduce all good people my wife!”
Brinlee shook his head at the mention of wife. He had Delbert pinned against the fireplace, trying to convince him not to marry Mary Lou, but the family room was so crowded Delbert couldn’t escape. “Don’t get married, Delbert,” he kept saying. “For Chrissakes, don’t get married. You guys got it made!”
Michael later referred to this particular TGIF as The Day Louis Fell In The Brook. Michael had a label for everything. Like Black Thursday, the day I arrived unannounced at the efficiency apartment to which I helped Barb move after the TGIF—so she could separate from her coach potato husband—only to catch her in bed with that guy she’d met on the ski slopes. But this was Friday, months before Black Thursday, and as I steered Louis gently in the direction of his wife, Barb caught my eye again, laughed, and applauded.
+ + +
And suddenly I was alone downstairs with Barb. As Delbert had predicted, everyone had cleared out in good spirits to watch the World Series, and only Barb’s VW remained out front along the curb. Delbert was on his way to Scranton, while Barb bided her time, pretending to help me clean up as I scurried about picking up beer cans, napkins, and plastic cups, then vacuuming the crumbs of potato chips from the threadbare oriental carpet in front of the fireplace. It was absolutely black out back, making the sliding glass doors an enormous mirror, and so Barb drew the drapes shut across them, to lessen our self-consciousness in the face of our own reflections. She shut the door to the laundry room as well, and locked it behind her. The only light came from a lamp behind an old leather sofa in the corner.
I yanked the vacuum cleaner cord from the wall and wound it clumsily around the two thingies on the long handle, then pushed the machine into the bedroom, returning it to the closet behind my desk. Delbert and I slept in twin beds along opposite walls of that narrow room, my desk crammed to the right just inside the door, where I sat for a few minutes, wondering if Barb would join me. When she didn’t, I returned to the family room. With the drapes drawn and only one light on, Barb’s brunette hair looked darker, almost black. She was wearing a dark turtleneck to match, its sleeves pushed back on her forearms, under a grey-checked jumper that buttoned down the front. For such a slender young woman, she had large breasts that floated high on her chest. And as I stood there I had an epiphany—a rare occurrence for me. I realized that, in a very few minutes, those large breasts would be in my hands and in my mouth, and the very thought of it paralyzed me. There was nothing to do but wait. And Barb seemed to have all the time in the world.
Kicking off her loafers, she went over to the drapes again and peeked out, as if to make sure it was dark (it was dark, all right), and when she turned around, the top button of her jumper was undone. Then she walked towards me, methodically unbuttoning the others. I was no longer paralyzed—merely shivering—and I thrust my hands into the pockets of my khakis to keep them from shaking. Sexually, I was rather inexperienced compared to Barb, who was a married woman, after all. (“Don’t get married,” I could hear Brinlee saying. “For Chrissakes, don’t get married! You guys got it made!”)
I think we kissed for a few minutes, standing up, arms around each other, until she slid the jumper from her shoulders and stepped out of it. Then she crossed her arms at her waist and pulled the turtleneck over her head, shaking out her hair the way women do in shampoo commercials. This left her in her bra and panties, her white flesh gleaming. Thankfully for me, she unsnapped her bra herself (I never could have managed it) and let it fall to the threadbare oriental carpet. Her breasts—firm and floating—made me want to cry. They were tipped by large nipples that reminded me of the oatmeal cookies my mother used to make, with a single M&M in the center.
“Your turn,” Barb whispered, stepping out of her panties. I had no idea what she meant until she put her hand on my crotch, whereupon I groaned, a funny sound that might have been a squeal. But instead of undressing I pulled her to me and kissed her again, then dropped my face to her breasts, which she seemed to tolerate patiently. Then she said she wanted to show me a trick that all of her married girlfriends were trying, in search of the elusive female orgasm. To be honest, I didn’t exactly know what a female orgasm was supposed to be, let alone that they were proving elusive.
Taking me by the hand, Barb led me to the old leather sofa, pulled it away from the wall, and bent forward over the back of it, her head in the cushions, ass in the air. According to the theory of her married girlfriends, as she explained while basically standing on her head, this difficult position was supposed to improve the angle of the penis so that it—“You know,” she said. “Nudges the clitoris.”
Well, it all seemed a bit awkward and technical but I dropped my pants and plunged on in, exhausting myself in a matter of seconds. So this is adultery? I was thinking. Did I have to be married myself for this to be adultery, or could it be adultery if just one of the consenting parties was married? I couldn’t remember all the Catch-22s of my catechism. Anyway, unlike Delbert and Mary Lou, I was only half-Catholic, and it definitely wasn’t my better half. Was I supposed to feel sinful, or what?
“Thank God it’s finished,” Barb said finally.
What’s finished?” I said. I feared she was mocking my performance.
“My marriage.”
“Ah,” I said with the air of another epiphany. “TGIF.”
+ + +
By the time Delbert and Mary Lou were married in early December, Barb was ensconced in a small efficiency apartment and separated from her husband. She hadn’t attended the wedding with me in Scranton (it would have proved scandalous) but I filled her in on it later, how the families on both sides of the aisle—good Irish Catholics, all—had reverted to form at the reception, getting raucous and snockered. Then Delbert and Mary Lou flew off to Quebec, to the Chateau Frontenac, where Delbert’s credit card, which he plunked down after a big meal later that night, was discreetly rejected. Otherwise, the honeymoon was a success, and at the end of February Delbert proudly announced that Mary Lou was pregnant.
I didn’t ask if Mary Lou had experienced the elusive orgasm, although I’m sure it would have interested Barb. I was too busy adjusting to a new life with a—what’s the proper term for a married woman who has left her husband for you, when you’re not sure what to do next? It wasn’t as easy as you might think. We had to be careful at school, and we had to be careful after school. I remember one Friday afternoon when we sought out a local pub on the north side of Columbus, at what we thought was a safe distance from the high school, only to find one of our students strumming a guitar at the microphone, singing sweet love songs in a lilting Judy Collins voice, her long hair swaying, her dark eyes sparkling in our direction as if to say: This one’s for you.
Then winter came in earnest and I convinced Michael to take up skiing with me in order to accompany the ski club (faculty were always welcome as chaperones) on Sunday daytrips to Mad River Mountain. We avoided the weekend trips to Snowshoe in West Virginia because I coached basketball on Saturday nights. But we did sign up for the big spring-break trip to Breckenridge in March, at the end of the basketball season. Michael wanted to see Colorado, and I wanted to be with Barb.
But Breckenridge proved a disaster for Michael. Then me. You have to be loose to ski, but Michael was rigid, analyzing every move even as he tried to make it, painfully traversing the bunny slope in a hyper-stiff snowplow, collapsing in the snow when he was unable to turn. In contrast, I took a lesson, learned a technique or two, and moved from snowplow to stem christie within a matter of hours. My goal was to master the parallel christie, so I could begin to keep up with Barb, whose pure parallel turns, as I have said, were a thing of beauty. But we rarely got to ski together. She was always hampered by a hundred minor details in her role as faculty advisor—collecting money, issuing lift tickets, counting heads. I had Michael for company, but he was no Bode Miller.
First thing in the morning after the night we arrived, I persuaded Michael to take the chair lift with me to the very top, for a view of Colorado from the Rocky Mountains. As it turned out, we had to take several lifts, and then a poma, which scaled a narrow peak as sharp as an Alp. The drop area was the size of a welcome mat, and from there it was a sheer descent of thirty yards to the top of the trail, on a path barely wide enough for a single skier. You had to schuss it straight down.
When I disembarked, Michael was behind me, clinging to the pole of his poma, and when I looked over my shoulder he was in powder snow up to his waist, trying to take off his skis. Petrified of the sudden drop, which demanded more than a snowplow, he had stepped to the side to make room for the skier behind him. It was the last I would see of him for two days, because at that very moment my name came over the loud speaker—I was being paged to the ski patrol hut at the mid-station, where I found Barb with one of our students who was in obvious pain. I would have to accompany him by ambulance to the hospital. Barb was all business—an attractive moment in her transition to an independent woman—and since I was the chaperone with the least seniority (given that Michael was stuck in a snowdrift), off I went.
Disgusted, I hit the bar when I returned in late afternoon, recognizing another teacher who had come along as a chaperone. Lisa Wilson was in the Biology Department. Originally from California, she was always rabble-rousing about preservatives in canned goods and frozen foods (both staples of my bachelor kitchen) and cars that pollute the atmosphere (like my big Impala). She was new at the high school, and Michael had pointed her out to me on the plane, noting that her breasts were even bigger than Barb’s. Her husband John was with her, a happy-go-lucky law student at the University of Virginia, who intended to make his fortune in corporate law. Avid skiers, the Wilsons were laughing over a pitcher of Coors when I came into the lounge, interrupting them to ask if they’d seen Michael. Or Barb.
They hadn’t, so there was nothing to do but quaff some Coors to be sociable, and after several rounds I was convinced that Michael was right. Lisa’s breasts—fashionably braless beneath her turtleneck and sweater—were, in fact, larger than Barb’s. I was beginning to hate this happy couple. And that, plus the lost day with Barb, made me overwhelmingly sad, a feeling that deepened when Barb walked into the lounge, laughing loudly, with a guy she introduced as Rob Heller. He looked exactly like the kind of guy you see in those Playboy ads. Or the kind of guy you see in soap operas, the kind of guy for whom I bear an unaffected scorn. He had met Barb on the chair lift and—“Can you believe it?” she said. “He’s from Columbus, of all places! He manages a bank.”
Well, I could tell immediately that Rob Heller was planning to manage more than his bank. And later that evening, after the three of us had dined with the Wilsons, I made that clear to Barb. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s shorter than me.” That killed me. Just consider the assumption. Were he taller, would she be interested? [She would later tell me that Rob Heller’s height was something she was “working on.”] But it had been a long day and Barb went off to her room for a shower.
Ironically, the Wilsons’ room was right next to mine, and later that night I thought I heard muffled arguing from the happy couple through the wall. In the morning, as I went down for breakfast, John Wilson stepped into the hallway in a cloud of marijuana smoke, slamming the door behind him. But their apparent marital difficulties concerned me less than the “friendship” card I found on Barb’s desk in her efficiency apartment a week after the trip to Breckenridge. I had swung by unexpectedly on some pretext, but she was out, so I let myself in. The card was from Rob, of course. He was glad to have met her (etc. etc.) and hoped to see her again around Columbus.
Then Rob Heller turned up at Mad River Mountain for the last ski club outing of the season, a day of spring skiing during a cold snap in mid-April. “What a surprise!” Barb cooed when he ran into us in the lift line. And the bastard had the effrontery to point out that I was holding the straps of my ski poles incorrectly. “You could break your thumbs that way,” he said. He was right, of course, and like an ass I re-gripped as he instructed. Rob Heller was a terrific skier, but he was a bastard nonetheless.
In early May I taught The Great Gatsby, a novel that, in retrospect, strikes me as a highly subconscious choice, for what is that book but a dream that turns into a nightmare and ends with murder? Gatsby wanted Daisy, who was married to another man, and when he tried to have her all to himself, tragedy ensued. Barb, like Daisy, was walking the fence. Since leaving her husband she’d been clinging to me like the leeches Lisa Wilson invited me to see one afternoon in her biology lab down in the science annex. But now there was Rob Heller, the interloper. I hadn’t invested eight months in emancipating Barb from her marriage for this bank manager to foreclose on my mortgage.
Black Thursday began like any other day at the high school, with me checking my pigeon-hole mailbox for memos and whatnot. I had had enough of Rob Heller. Barb was absent from school. Checking her mailbox, which was just above mine, I saw a pink slip from the secretary with a phone message from “RH.” Which meant Barb was—at that very moment—in her efficiency apartment with her very efficient bank manager “friend.” It was something I simply couldn’t tolerate.
As luck would have it, on Thursdays, due to a double-period schedule, I was free after first period until noon—more than enough time to get to Barb’s, murder Rob Heller, and return for lunch. Of course I had no intention of murdering him. I had no idea what I was going to do. I only knew that I was furious and humiliated.
“Be careful,” Michael said, when he caught me in the hall on my way out. I’d never seen him looking so worried.
It was a short drive to Barb’s apartment, but it seemed like a hundred miles because everything about me was moving in slow motion, as on The Day Louis Fell in the Brook. My Impala seemed to be driving itself. Then I watched myself park in an empty space out front, and take the stairs two at a time. I kept a rubber mallet beneath the front seat of my Impala, a souvenir from an old beater I’d traded in on it, a car that was forever losing its wheel covers, which I’d knock back on with that rubber mallet. My foot had nudged it as I sprang from the car. I’d picked it up, thought better of it, then left it behind. It wasn’t part of the plan. I had no plan.
Inside and upstairs, I listened at the door, hearing muffled, mid-morning bed-talk within. Then I knocked and stepped aside, where I couldn’t be seen through the fish eye. No one came to the door, but the bed-talk ceased. So I waited patiently—it might have been a full half hour—until the bed-talk began again, cautiously at first, then louder, as if the bed-talkers were convinced that whoever knocked had gone away.
But he hadn’t gone away. He was still out there listening. Then he looked at his right hand, which held a large metal ring with keys of all sorts—keys to Old Lady Bailey’s basement, to his classroom at the high school, to all the doors in the gym, to his Impala, to this efficiency apartment. Then laughter broke out in that apartment, and his fingers worked themselves around that key ring like a set of brass knuckles, the keys protruding like spikes. Blood oozed from his fingernails.
When the laughter subsided, he inserted the key in the lock. It was a simple deadbolt that unlocked with a flip of the wrist. There was no chain on the wall within. And at the scratching of the key he heard Barb say, “It’s him…”
+ + +
Later that afternoon, when Barb suddenly appeared in my room at the high school to ask for her key back, she admitted that they’d been petrified.
“You changed the lock,” I said, but she swore she hadn’t. I had simply been shaking too much, as on that night at Old Lady Bailey’s back in October. “I would have killed him,” I said.
“Please give me your key,” she said. And I did. But as she turned to leave, I said something cruel. In the anxiety and stress of the last few months, she’d been eating too much. And sugar always settles to the bottom.
“Your ass is getting fat,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I’m working on that. Along with Rob’s height.”
I waited for a few minutes after the door slammed behind her, then went down to the science annex to see what Lisa Wilson was doing.
