Judith felt confused. When she sat up here, working on the book, she sometimes let her mind wander, and she didn’t always like where it led her.
Below her, in the sunlight, the young man bent and picked up a backpack, swinging it easily onto his shoulder. He said something, and Judith could see another flash of teeth from the smiling girl. When was the last time I smiled, Judith wondered. Well, she reminded herself, I’ve always been a serious girl.
And theirs had been a very serious affair. After all, Judith had been a student and Daniel was her teacher. Not only that, he was married. Of course, his marriage had already been troubled for some time. Daniel was an honorable person, so he told her right from the beginning, and he had told her that he was deeply attracted to her. He thought she had talent—real talent—and that someday she could be a successful writer.
No grown man had ever paid that kind of attention to her. She had blushed with pleasure and confusion. And she had accepted his praise and his offer to go out for a cup of coffee. “You’ll be a successful writer,” he’d repeated, and there, under the table in the coffee shop, he’d taken her hand and squeezed it. Writing was her dream, her secret ambition. She’d never told anyone, much less a college professor, that she wanted to be a writer. They would laugh at her. But Daniel hadn’t laughed. He knew her secret, and he encouraged her.
She’d believed him, and here she was, actually married to him and working away, 279 pages into the manuscript. It wasn’t exactly the book she had planned to write. Not art. Not even close. It was a book they were sort of doing together. Not exactly for the art of it, and not exactly together, but … well, they needed the money now.
Her parents had been furious about Daniel, about his religious background, his marital status. They had threatened to sue the school and had cut her off without a penny. Not that Judith really cared. They’d always been well-off, and her father had always used money to control them all. That was probably why she’d gone to a state college in the first place. He’d been livid that she hadn’t applied to one of the Seven Sisters schools. But Judith, in her serious way, had told him she was sick of exclusivity and didn’t care about money.
Daniel didn’t care about money either. It was one of the reasons she loved him. At first she’d even been afraid to tell him that she was one of the Elmira Hunts. Daniel hated capitalism and inherited wealth. He told her that straight out. Like her, he believed in a meritocracy.
But now they were short of money. Really short. Daniel had to pay alimony and child support. So they were writing this book for their future, a book that could be commercial, that could make them some money and free Daniel from teaching so he could get to do some serious writing. Then she’d have time to get back to her first novel, the one that Daniel had praised so highly.
Judith heard the apartment door slam. Flaubert jumped up.
“I don’t hear you!” Daniel’s accusatory voice floated up the stairs from the kitchen. He often came home between classes for a sandwich and a quickie. Judith sighed. It just all seemed different now, when sex wasn’t forbidden but expected. Somehow the romance was—well, not gone exactly, but lessened.
“I don’t hear you,” Daniel called again. He loved to hear the sound of her old typewriter. He thought it was quaint that she refused to use a word processor. He called her his little Luddite. Judith wasn’t sure what that meant, but she’d never asked.
Now she gave Flaubert a settling pat and shouted out to her husband, “I’m thinking. Sometimes I’m allowed to think.” She immediately regretted the snappish tone in her voice.
Daniel hopped the three steps up to the little room in the turret that Judith used as an office. He wasn’t exactly handsome. He was a little too small, a little too tight-featured. But with his steel-rimmed glasses, his curling black hair, and his grin, he had an insouciance that always affected her. He was so different from her cold, controlling father. Even now, she couldn’t believe that she had attracted him. He’d graduated from Yale! And he’d been on scholarship. He’d spent a year at the Sorbonne. Daniel Gross was really educated, and Judith knew that her mediocre grades at the Elmira Academy did not measure up to Daniel’s prep-school education. He’d already read everything, and he’d even met some of the writers who wrote the great books he taught. His two courses on contemporary American literature were always overregistered. In her first semester Judith had actually been shut out of it. She almost smiled. Imagine that! And now she didn’t just get to admire his pepper-and-salt tweed jackets and his hand-knitted sweaters and his perfectly rumpled corduroys, she got to live with him and make love to him. I am happy, she told herself, looking up at him. I am very lucky and very happy.
Daniel approached her and put a hand on either shoulder. Flaubert growled, as he always did when Daniel touched Judith, but she told him to hush. Daniel’s hands were small, but his fingers were powerful, and he gently gripped the tense muscles in her neck and shoulders. “So, how’s it coming? Daydreaming, or have you got a junior case of writer’s block?”
She smiled at the little pun. Judith hadn’t graduated. She left last year, her junior year. Somehow, after Daniel, the degree didn’t seem important anymore. And as Daniel pointed out, what the hell use was a B.A. in English from a SUNY school? It was, he joked “as good as a one-way ticket to Palookaville.” Judith knew there were few teaching jobs anyway, and she had no interest in reading Silas Mamer with a class of hormonally challenged seventh-graders. No; she wanted to write, and she wanted to be taken seriously, and Daniel was helping her to do both.
“Have you made the changes to chapter eleven?” Daniel asked. Although the plot was basically her idea, Daniel had worked it into an outline, and it was that outline she was working from. He’d given her a schedule and insisted she produce six pages a day. Each evening he read and reread the pages she worked on and corrected them, edited them, and made suggestions. She spent the following day making his changes and getting on with the new stuff.
“No, but I finished chapter twenty-four. Only two to go!” She looked up at him, hoping for a smile of surprise at her industriousness. But he only reached for the pages and started to read. Silently, his eyes devoured the first page, then the next one and the one after that. She tried not to squirm while she Waited for his reaction.
“Okay,” he said. She colored. From Daniel, that was praise. “This looks okay. I’ll take it with me, back to class.” He stopped and looked at his watch. “In fact, I better go. I need some prep time.”
Judith stood up, trying not to let her disappointment show. A quickie was better than nothing at all. “Are you sure?” she asked. And tentatively she snaked her hand around his back, letting it rest on the tweed of his jacket just above his buttocks. She moved her hand lower. Through the scratchy fabric she could feel his round little behind. But Daniel kept his eyes on the chapter, then folded it in half, and—giving her a quick peck on her cheek—turned to go. No quickie today.
He ran down the three little steps and into the kitchen. She followed him, as lonely as a kid in a grammar school hallway, watching as he grabbed his beat-up leather briefcase and stuffed the new chapter into it. Flaubert stood beside her, his tail wagging as Daniel rebuckled the case, put it under his arm, and then—just as Judith felt completely let down—reached over and hugged her. “You did good,” he said and gave her a big kiss on her forehead-just as if she were a little girl. She smiled with pleasure. “See if you can get to those chapter eleven corrections this afternoon,” he told her, and Judith silently nodded her head.
Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.
