Day Twenty-Six
Jesse pulled into the COD parking lot two hours early and found his usual spot.
Take that, Lally, he thought. The passenger in his own relationship?
He was fully behind the wheel now. But he also knew his sister-in-law had a point, or days later the criticism would not still sting.
Slowly, he made his way to the faculty lounge, where he hoped to do some work.
The coffee was, as expected, terrible—somehow both bitter and weak, with a slightly fishy taste (but he may have just had COD on the brain).
He reached for the sweetener only to graze the hand of another professor.
“Oh, sorry,” he said before looking up to see the most handsome man, late twenties maybe, with a whisper of premature gray. He looked not unlike Norman when he was young.
“No problem,” the man said with a smile. He had dark brown eyes, and perfect scruff that was just shy of a beard. “You go ahead.” He gestured at Jesse’s coffee. “You’re going to need it.” His own cup of coffee was from somewhere off campus.
“So that’s the secret,” Jesse said, pointing at the other man’s cup. He then offered his free hand to shake. “Jesse.”
“Orson,” the man said, and held the handshake longer than Jesse might have expected. “And there are many secrets when it comes to survival,” he said with a wry smile. Jesse caught himself staring at the ample chest hair visible behind the two open buttons of Orson’s shirt.
“I think I’m learning,” Jesse said.
Orson replied, “Ironic, since you’re here to teach. But yeah, for starters you’re going to want coffee from off campus.” He then reached for the sweetener and added some to his cup. “Off to class. See you around, Jesse.”
Jesse smiled and watched him go. As far as collisions went, it didn’t have the same impact as his initial meeting with Norman. But it also was not nothing.
The lounge was blessedly quiet and he found an empty round table where he could work, offering polite nods to the room’s few other occupants, not one of whom held a candle to the mysterious Orson.
Faculty lounges were the same from campus to campus—at least at the schools where he taught—and he was comforted by familiarity.
The exhausted looks of teachers, wearing clothes from whatever era they had felt most in their prime.
The slight smell of wet, mimeographed exams, although no one understood why—technology like that had not been in use since he was in grammar school.
Reams of paper stored on shelving that sagged in the middle under the weight.
He held his paper coffee cup by the rim, as at least it was blessedly hot, and before he sat down he perused a few posts on a bulletin board.
Someone was selling a Volkswagen Tiguan with only twenty thousand miles.
There was a flyer for a poetry club with an illustration of cows, moos in place of muse.
But what caught his eye most was the word Missing in bold red lettering, above a photocopied image of a woman with blond streaks in her hair who looked like she played the tambourine.
“Sad story there,” said a deep voice behind him. Jesse spun around to see a man who looked like Wallace Shawn. “She went hiking in the Monument and poof, disappeared. Never heard from again.”
“Just disappeared?” Jesse asked, appalled.
The man waved to another faculty member he knew, then poured himself coffee. “It happens.”
Shaken, Jesse wandered back to his table and sat down.
These things didn’t just happen. How could one be so cavalier?
Or maybe they did. Maybe what happened to Norman (and thus to him) was not all that special?
To vanquish the thought, he reached for an abandoned newspaper, an old copy of the Desert Sun.
The hot topic was the new surface of the tennis courts at Indian Wells, home of the Paribas Open—Laykold over the previous brand Plexipave; the new surface was already in use at the US Open and the Miami Open, the other two largest tournaments in the United States, giving Laykold the triumvirate.
Jesse doodled on his pad—Sorry, Plexipave!
—before tearing off the page, crumpling it, and dropping it on the floor.
He turned his attention to the assignment he’d given to his students—to write about a time when they felt abandoned—and after several false starts, and wads of crumpled yellow paper joining the one by his feet, he started to write in earnest.
I was six years old when my mother got me a dog, a rescue shepherd mix; at that point I had been begging her for a pet for months.
I didn’t have a father, and there were only so many things she wanted her son to miss out on.
In that regard I was able to play her like a fiddle.
At the pound I had picked out a cat, but my mother said cats killed too many things she was fond of like chipmunks and birds.
That may have been a lie, as I heard her curse a bird once for flying into a window with a thud, making her drop her cigarette.
She probably thought a canine would get her sensitive kid to toughen up—and a shepherd was a lot of dog.
But my friend Petey had a pet tabby who brought home dead mice to lay at their doorstep—oftentimes just the heads—so who knows.
I named the dog Snowball, which is what I was planning to name a cat.
“There he is! Our newest teacher, back in the saddle.” It was Luisa Flores, his department chair, hovering over him, arms full as ever as she awkwardly tried to eat an apple.
Her curls were not as pronounced today; her hair had more of a wave and it softened her face as a whole.
She leaned forward to take a bite of her snack, stealing a look at Jesse’s notepad.
“A dog named Snowball,” she observed. “What are you working on?”
Jesse self-consciously covered his work with his arms. “The assignment that’s due today. I thought I would do it alongside the kids.”
Luisa laughed. “Kids? Nathan is forty-five.”
“Who’s Nathan?” Jesse asked without thinking.
Luisa set her books on the table and plunked herself down in a chair.
“Oh, Nathan!” Jesse said, reading the look on her face.
Nathan Treadwell. Non-Trad. “Yeah, I guess ‘kids’ isn’t exactly the right word.
” And then, as if reading her thoughts, he glanced at his work and added, “I haven’t arrived at the funny part yet.
And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to select any books for the syllabus. ”
Luisa shrugged. “It’s your class.” She went on to say the course was a late addition to the fall schedule and she was only trying to help.
“Say, speaking of new additions, do you know a faculty member named Orson? He was just in here. He looked on the young side, so I thought maybe he was new, too.”
“You could try the faculty directory. How many Orsons could there be?” She took another bite of her apple and returned her attention to Jesse’s notepad. “What was the assignment? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“To write a humorous account of a time you felt abandoned.”
Luisa raised a finger in the air and pointed at the sky. “Aliens,” she said while gnawing an obnoxious piece of apple skin.
Jesse shuddered. “Excuse me?”
“Abandonment. When I asked about your summer, you said your husband was abducted by aliens.”
Had he? Jesse supposed he could have let that slip in an attempt to be flippant; he was only now snapping out of a haze since Lally’s visit. As Luisa still seemed to be charmed by the idea, he agreed. “Oh yes, my husband was abducted by aliens.”
Luisa tossed her apple core into a nearby rubbish bin with surprising dexterity, and the resulting sound made the other faculty in the room flinch.
She brushed her hands clean and then looked Jesse deep in the eyes.
“I still say you’re lucky. I would give anything if aliens just swooped down and took my husband. Honestly, they can have him!”
Jesse gritted his teeth and held up crossed fingers on both hands. Here’s hoping. Since this was all a joke to Luisa, he took the opportunity to ask a serious question. “But how would you move on with your life? One day he’s gone, and then what. What do you do with the next day?”
Luisa considered this, as if she, too, were completing the assignment.
“Burn his Barcalounger?” she mused. A wistful smile made Jesse think she was imagining dragging it onto the lawn and doing just that.
“Honestly, marriages were not supposed to last this long. The Pilgrims had the right idea dying at forty.”
Jesse laughed politely. “Okay, but after you burn his chair. Do you have him declared…dead?”
Luisa’s expression drooped; this from a man she had hired to teach humor. Jesse recognized the change in demeanor. He needed to keep this light.
“It’s for something I’m writing,” he lied. And then covered his work again. “Not this.”
“Oh, well. I would divorce the bastard.”
You’re the passenger in your relationship. “Yeah, but how. He’s missing.”
Luisa chewed on this for a moment. Then she called to another professor reading a book over by the window.
He had sort of Ben Franklin hair, a style Jesse had previously heard called a skullet.
“Larry.” Larry looked up from his book. Luisa pointed at the Missing flyer on the wall.
“What did Donna’s husband do when she didn’t come back.
After a year, didn’t he say he was initiating divorce? ”
Larry chewed on his thumbnail while thinking. “Yes. I think he said as much at Charles’s retirement thing. Her family refused to have her declared dead, so instead he pursued divorce.”
“Did he say how he went about it? Given that she was…you know.”
Larry did know. “He had to advertise for her in the paper.”
Good lord. The newspaper? Jesse glanced at the discarded Desert Sun and immediately imagined someone seeing his ad and doodling, Sorry, Jesse! the way he had written, Sorry, Plexipave!