Chemistry and Other Stories

Honesty

I met Lee Ann McIntyre on a date suggested by my wife. Kelly always read the personals as she drank her morning coffee. “Better than the comics,” she said and would read aloud the ads she found most amusing.

“Why not an article about what it’s like to meet your soul partner through a newspaper ad,” she said one June morning as we sat at the kitchen table. “You go out on the date and write about it. That could be amusing.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

I looked out the wide bay window where our cat stalked a chipmunk.

“I think it’s a very good idea,” Kelly said, and trailing her words like a shadow was the fact that my book The Myth of Robert Frost was stillborn at thirty-eight pages. I looked at her, dressed administratively in her dark blue blazer and skirt while I was barefoot, clothed in jeans and a T-shirt. Unlike me, she had somewhere to go, something to do.

“I’ve even got a woman picked out for you,” she said, holding up the paper between us. “Let’s deconstruct this, darling. ‘Hopelessly Lonely.’ Now would that be the signifier or the signified? No matter. ‘DWF, 32, brown/green, 5–6, 140.’ No mention of whether she still has any teeth. ‘Likes mountains, quiet evenings, and reading.’ See, you all are a perfect match, though you better bone up on Harlequin romances. ‘Seeks WM, 25–40.’ What did I tell you? That’s you exactly, it’s fate. ‘A knight in shining armor.’ We’ll have to work on that. ‘Who likes children.’ You like children, don’t you? How about three or four. This woman probably has them. ‘And understands the hardships of life.’ You understand the hardships of life, don’t you?”

Kelly took a pen from her briefcase.

“Here,” she said, circling the ad. “Call Carolina Tempo. I guarantee they’ll go for this idea. Then call Hopelessly Lonely. Leave a message that you want to take her to dinner at the Grey Pheasant. Tell her knights in shining armor don’t take their dates to Wendy’s or the Waffle House. That will put you ahead of the rest of the guys who call.”

“You’re not worried I might fall in love and leave you?” I said.

“No,” Kelly said, her smile much larger than mine. “I’m not worried about that at all.”

After Kelly left I took the newspaper into the den, what Kelly called my “writing room.” Like taking a year’s leave from teaching to write full-time, the room had been her idea. She’d been the one who picked out the bookcases, the huge oak desk, the new computer and printer. I sat down where I sat every morning, sipping coffee, sharpening pencils, looking out the window, doing everything a writer does but write.

I reread the first chapter of my book, thirty-eight pages of jargon and endnotes, just as tedious and silly as they were nine months earlier, when I wrote them. I pushed the manuscript to the table’s far edge as if it were some dead creature beginning to smell. I looked at a notebook page filled with ideas for articles, trying to find one that Larry Kendrick might like better than Kelly’s.

“I like the newspaper date idea,” Larry said when I called him an hour later.

“What about the old poverty in the New South article?”

“Look,” Larry said. “This isn’t The Daily Worker.”

“Okay,” I said.

A year earlier I wouldn’t have done it, but I had only three more months to come up with something to justify my year off. At least the article would be some sort of publication, even if in a magazine no one outside North Carolina had ever heard of.

By now I knew Kelly expected me to fail, had set up the room, the free time as a way of showing me that I was nothing more than what she’d known me to be all along, an actor who mouthed the clichés and jargon of others because he had no words of his own. That was the way she saw me, and that was the way she wanted me to see myself, stripped bare of props and pretense.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number in the newspaper, then the four digits after the circled ad. I heard the same message Kelly had read, but this time g’s left off endings, words stretched into extra syllables. I left my first name and phone number and said that I hadn’t ridden a horse in years, but I’d try to be a knight in shining armor. I told her I’d like to take her to the Grey Pheasant, a restaurant worthy of a princess. I played my role well.

I sat back down at the desk with no idea when, or if, my message would be returned. In the distance the college’s clock tower rose stern and gray above late May green. Three more months and I’d be back there, disabused of any notions of what I had to offer the world.

Kelly was home when Lee Ann McIntyre called.

“You get it,” Kelly said. “It might be your princess.”

“Is this Richard?” a woman asked, her voice doubtful, though whether about the number or about this whole venture was unclear. Kelly was in the other room, but I knew she listened.

“Yes,” I said.

“I liked your message,” Lee Ann McIntyre said. “I liked what you said, how you said it.”

“So you want to go out?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice soft, still a little doubtful. “I think that would be nice.”

“So what did you arrange?” Kelly asked when I hung up.

“She works Friday and Saturday, so we’re going out Sunday night.”

“What else?” Kelly asked.

“Her name is Lee Ann McIntyre.”

“And she lives where?”

“Out on Highway Eight.”

“In a trailer, of course. No one named Lee Ann lives in a house.”

“Yes,” I said. “What of it?”

“The knight defends his princess,” Kelly said.

“This is a bad idea,” I said. “It could be cruel too.”

“You have an exaggerated sense of your charisma,” Kelly said. “She’ll be just as bored with you as you are with her. You’re giving her a free meal at a restaurant where they wouldn’t even let her waitress. That’s a good deal if you ask me.”

“This woman’s got enough problems without my adding to them,” I said.

“You mean ‘the hard considerations of the poor,’” Kelly said. “Though of course you argued Wharton was upholding the power structure even as she made that statement.” Kelly smiled. “See, I remember something from your class.”

I got up to go into my office.

“Why is it writers sentimentalize the poor?” Kelly asked. “And I mean a real answer, not some Marxist cliché.”

“Maybe because a lot of them didn’t grow up as privileged as you.”

“Or you, Mr. Prep School,” Kelly said. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how people used to be ashamed of being born poor and now they’re ashamed of coming from wealth.”

“I don’t sense it ever bothered you,” I said.

“Why should it? I’m glad my parents were wealthy. I’m glad I am too.”

I met her eyes.

“Why did you marry me?”

“Because you needed me, silly,” Kelly said and smiled the same tight smile I remembered from the evening three years earlier when she’d sat in on my class.

The college had instituted a “Knowing Each Other Better” program that year for faculty and administration, an effort, as our president put it, to narrow the divide between the two. There had been several receptions as well as visits of administrators to faculty classes. Kelly, who was associate dean of academic affairs, had attended my American literature class.

She was ten minutes late, her plaid skirt and black blazer a sharp contrast to the proletariat uniform of jeans and work shirts I and most of the class wore. She sat on the front row, a supercilious smile on her face. I continued with my lecture, trying not to be distracted by the presence of a woman who might be involved in deciding which faculty were let go during the college’s next budget crisis.

I was talking about Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” explaining how the poem’s seeming sympathy for the downtrodden ultimately reinforced the hegemonic structure of society. The students had been responsive, good questions and comments. Kelly said nothing, her lips pursed in a tight smile I found more and more disconcerting as the period passed.

She did not leave her seat until the rest of the class had gone.

“Did I pass the audition?” I asked, an ironic smile on my face to match hers.

“Maybe,” she said. “That’s not the kind of thing we discussed in my lit classes at Bennington. There it was all scanning lines and looking for archetypes.”

“That’s the problem with small liberal arts colleges,” I said. “It wasn’t until grad school at Duke that I saw literature had some connection to the real world.”

I’d realize later Kelly sensed I was about to launch into a lengthy anecdote about my conversion at Duke, so she cut me off in midsentence.

“Do you have plans for the evening, Professor?” she asked.

“Just a few student essays to grade.”

“Well, how about I buy you a drink at the Grey Pheasant? Let the essays wait a while.”

“That would be nice,” I said.

I followed her taillights to the restaurant. We parked and then walked into the bar the college’s employees shared with the town’s other professionals.

“I picked your class to attend for a reason,” Kelly said, handing me my drink. “We met at the dean’s party last fall. You don’t remember me there, of course.”

I didn’t. Kelly is an attractive woman but there’s not that one feature — lush lips, high cheekbones — that makes an immediate impression.

“You were holding forth about the rigors of academic life. It sounded pretty pretentious, especially to someone who sees how empty the faculty parking lot is by midafternoon. But I could see you had potential. Nice eyes too.”

Kelly placed her hand on top of mine and I did not withdraw it. She was, after all, my superior. I wasn’t tenured and didn’t need any enemies in administration. But it was more than that. I liked her cynicism, the mockery in her voice and eyes, how she viewed everything the way I viewed literature. I wanted to match her cynicism, and I did. I matched it enough to marry her.

ON SUNDAY EVENING I bumped up the washed-out driveway to Lee Ann McIntyre’s trailer, parking behind a decade-old Ford Escort with a smashed rear fender. A couple of leafless saplings wilted in the front yard, no more alive than sticks jabbed in the ground. An orange and blue plastic tricycle was wedged under the trailer, a saggy beach ball beside the concrete steps.

I knocked on the screen door, and the voice I’d heard on the phone told me to come in.

“I’ll be out in a second,” Lee Ann McIntyre said. “Have a seat.”

I sat on the couch. Across from me a playpen bulged with bright, cheap toys, above it a picture of three kids sitting at a picnic table, in the corner a TV and a plastic bookshelf filled with paperbacks, books with “Desire” and “Passion” in their titles.

“I’m ready,” she said, and I looked away from the books.

Lee Ann McIntyre stood in the doorway that led to the rest of her trailer. She wore black high heels, a dark blue dress, probably what she’d worn that morning if she’d gone to church. Her hair was blond, too long for a face that had aged quickly — maybe from too much sun, maybe from too many kids too soon. But there had been a time when she was pretty, I could see that.

“Where are your kids?” I asked. “I’d like to meet them.”

She blushed, as if they’d been a secret she’d hoped to keep from me.

“They’re at my sister’s.”

I waited a few seconds, but she offered no drink, no small talk. She had her pocketbook in her hand as if she couldn’t wait to get out of the trailer.

We didn’t say much in the car. I asked about her children, but she didn’t warm to the subject. Maybe she thought I was prying, or maybe she was so exhausted from raising three kids alone she wanted a few minutes without having to think about them. I asked who she liked to read and that got us to town without too many more long pauses.

Inside the Grey Pheasant, the maître d’ led us past the bar where Kelly and I had come three years ago after my class. He seated us in the corner opposite the bar, and it made me a little nervous, because sometimes faculty members came in for an evening drink. I sat facing away from the bar and the mirror that filled the wall behind it.

I ordered a gin and tonic and Lee Ann said she’d take the same. I drank mine and ordered another, while she stirred her drink with the red straw as if searching for something in it, only occasionally taking a sip. She was nervous and seemed suspicious as well.

We both ordered filet mignon, and when she’d finished her drink she opened up a little more, telling me about the upper part of the county where’d she had grown up, where I went trout fishing some days when I tired of pretending to be a writer. She knew the places I fished, and that seemed to make me more credible. Our salads came and she ate with more relish than I did. She asked if I had kids, and when I said no she seemed to assume that meant I’d never been married. She talked more about her children, how the oldest, who was only ten, was already boy crazy and how that bothered her.

“I married at eighteen,” she said. “I don’t want her making the same mistake.”

“How long have you been divorced?” I asked.

“Two years.”

“Does your ex-husband help with the children?”

Lee Ann laughed humorlessly.

“No.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“He’s in prison.”

She didn’t look down at her drink when she said it or act embarrassed. Her tone was matter-of-fact.

“He’s in prison?” I said. “Prison?”

“At least until next February.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

Lee Ann hesitated. “He tried to kill me.”

She must have thought I didn’t believe that either, because she pulled back her hair. A welt long and thick as a cigarette purpled her neck. But it wasn’t a welt. It was a scar, a scar that hadn’t healed right, or maybe covered a wound so deep and ragged it could never heal right. As I stared at the scar the restaurant became bright and strange, as if, until that moment, I had been someplace else, someplace far away. I was the one looking at my drink now.

“That’s why I need a knight in shining armor,” she said, her laugh brittle. “To get me away from here, away from North Carolina, someplace where he can’t find me when he’s out.”

Lee Ann paused. Her right hand lay beside the silverware. She moved her thumb and index finger so they touched the knife’s handle.

“He swore he’d kill me when he got out,” she said, looking right at me.

“People say all sorts of things,” I said. “They’re just words.”

I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince.

Lee Ann just shook her head.

“You don’t know him.”

She started to say something more, then decided not to speak. A man wearing a jacket and tie passed our table, but it wasn’t anyone I knew.

“What is it?” I asked. “You can tell me.”

“You know what I pray?” she said, and I shook my head. “I pray he doesn’t do it in front of the children.”

She didn’t say anything else and I didn’t either. In a couple of minutes the waiter brought our main course. He placed two stemmed glasses next to our silverware, then lifted an ice bucket from the cart, in it a bottle of champagne.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t order this.”

“Compliments of the lady,” the waiter said, nodding toward the entrance. “The whole meal is.”

Kelly sat at the far end of the bar. I had no idea how long she’d been there, but I could see her wineglass was almost empty as she raised it in a toast to me, to Lee Ann.

I looked in the bar’s mirror and saw the back of Kelly’s head, saw what she saw — two people who needed a lesson in reality, and she was willing to foot the bill to make that lesson possible.

“Who is she?” Lee Ann asked, suspicion in her voice.

“My wife,” I said.

“I should have known this wasn’t right,” Lee Ann said. Her voice was as soft as when she told me she expected to be killed.

I thought she would start crying. She looked like she might, but she didn’t. She’d probably learned long ago how useless tears were.

Kelly was still at the bar, watching us.

“I want to go home,” Lee Ann said, and I didn’t argue.

I didn’t look Kelly’s way as we went out, and we were almost back to Lee Ann’s trailer before I tried to apologize.

“Was my ad so stupid you thought you could do this to me?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Was it some kind of joke?”

I shook my head.

“Why then?”

“Because I was unhappy with my marriage. I wanted to be with someone else awhile,” I said, and that was a lie, and I didn’t care. I’d had enough truth for a while, and I believed Lee Ann had as well.

She looked out the window at the yards flashing past, some with children playing in the last light.

“He sends me pictures he draws,” she said. “Pictures of me with just my head, no body. My eyes are open in those pictures. My mouth too. I’m screaming. He calls them Valentines.”

She closed her eyes and I said nothing. I didn’t want to know what she was thinking.

When we got back to the trailer Lee Ann unbuckled her seat belt but didn’t get out. I reached for my door handle but she touched my arm.

“Would you hold me?” she asked. “Please, just for a few moments.”

I placed my arm around her, awkward as a high school kid on a first date, but that didn’t seem to matter. She laid her cheek against my chest. We didn’t say anything. We just sat there as the dark deepened around us. After a while her sister drove up with the kids, and I walked her to the trailer’s battered door. I drove back home to a life where all that was required of me was that I look in the mirror from time to time.

I DIDN’T DO the article for Carolina Tempo, and I threw the thirty-eight pages of The Myth of Robert Frost in the trash can Kelly had so thoughtfully made a part of my writing room. The next time Kelly asked what I was working on, I handed her my course syllabi for the fall. She read each one carefully before handing them back.

“You’ve finally found your voice,” she said.

I don’t know what happened to Lee Ann McIntyre. Probably she left North Carolina long before her husband got out of prison, but every time the newspaper has a story about a local murder I quickly turn the page, afraid I’ll see her face staring back at me. But I do think of her quite often. What I remember most about my date with Lee Ann McIntyre was standing with her outside the trailer afterward. The night air was muggy and still, and somewhere back in the woods an owl called.

“Somehow, despite all this, I still think you’re a good person,” she said.

She took my hand, and I felt the warmth of her flesh touching mine, and I could almost believe, for a brief moment, that had we met at a different time and place we might even have fallen in love.

“No, I’m not,” I said finally, and let her hand slip free from mine.