Cold Rain

Chapter 12

I met Molly at a cafe about a week after my suspension. The talk was money and the best way out of some rather complicated property holdings, if it came to divorce. That was my position. As far as Molly was concerned divorce was the only reasonable response to my infidelity.

We added things up, subtracted mortgages, and talked through the most intelligent ways to dissolve our holdings. The problem was the farm. It was Molly’s but she had leveraged a number of loans with it. If my income suddenly stopped, as it was very likely to, we could be caught short. The option was to dip into our retirement accounts or sell off enough at fire sale rates that we could limp along with the other properties until we got our price on the apartment houses.

The best way to handle it really came down to my prospects at the university.

I told Molly I had filed an appeal to my suspension.

That was immediately rejected by the VP, based on what he called ‘accumulating evidence of inappropriate behaviour.’ I had pushed another appeal forward, but it amounted to nothing more than symbolic defiance.

I was getting paid. I had been replaced. No one was going to bring me back into the classroom again until the following semester.

The real issue was the main investigation against me, the charges filed by Denise Conway and Johnna Masterson. The VP had scheduled a hearing to review Affirmative Action’s recommendation for disciplinary action. Comprised of faculty from across campus, the committee would review the evidence and make its recommendation. The VP would then forward this along with his own opinion to the president. While I would have the opportunity to appeal the VP’s finding and even the president’s decision, my best chance, short of court, was at the initial hearing.

How did that look? Molly asked. I ran through a few of the names on the committee. Molly understood what I was saying. I was looking at a stacked deck.

Settling both arms on the table, I told my wife, ‘Gail thinks the best approach is to admit wrongdoing. Given the circumstances, I’d probably get away with nothing more than a letter of censure.’

Molly’s eyes flashed. She was suddenly very interested. ‘What are the circumstances?’

‘They have a copy of Denise Conway’s diary,’ I said.

‘According to it, the affair started before she was a student of mine. Gail thinks if I grovel, really do it up right, talk about the problems in our marriage-’

‘We didn’t have problems in our marriage, David.’

‘And I didn’t have an affair. We’re talking about strategy.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I know you don’t. What I’m saying is if I tell the committee we were having problems and that I started an affair last summer this entire investigation becomes something they can understand. Plus, it ceases to be part of a pattern of behaviour. I get counselling and I’m back in the classroom in January.’

‘What kind of problems are you going to tell them we had?’

‘I don’t know. Problems. It doesn’t matter. If I don’t admit to doing something wrong and give them a convincing reason for it, Gail thinks the committee will be, in her words, “less than sympathetic”.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning the suspension will continue without pay.’

‘Do what your lawyer tells you, David.’

‘It’s a lie, Molly. Everything in that diary.’

Molly shook her head, tears brimming. ‘Don’t do this to me. I don’t want to hear it.’ She tossed her napkin on her plate and reached for her purse. ‘This was a bad idea.’ She stood up and stared down at me with nearly the same ferocity as the night she had pointed her. 22 at me. ‘If we had been having troubles, problems, I could understand what you did. I wouldn’t like it, I might still leave you, but it would be different! I wouldn’t feel so stupid! I wouldn’t stay up nights asking myself why you thought you needed her!’

Up to this point, other than sorrow, my emotions had been in check. I did not consciously decide to let go. I just snapped. She wasn’t the only one losing sleep and asking why, I said.

Molly bristled the moment I raised my voice.

‘Goodbye, David.’

With that, she turned and walked away with absolutely nothing between us resolved. I did not try to stop her. There was no point really.

After the first few days of isolation, I had been able to call Lucy. With her mother’s permission, she had met me for dinner a couple of times. I had gone out to her school to watch a football game with her. We talked about the fall races, the people who had asked about me, and all the usual stuff that comes with belonging to a tightly knit group, such as the people she raced against every weekend.

Lucy was her mother’s daughter, but she was trying not to play favourites. She knew by now I had been charged with sexual harassment by two women and that I was allegedly having an affair with one of them.

She also knew I was denying it. Molly had not given her the details. Lucy had not asked me about any of it. My guilt was too generally accepted, I suppose.

Her real fear was that I would lie to her as she assumed I was already lying to her mother and the people at school. As long as we didn’t talk about it, I wasn’t lying to her. Avoidance was her mother’s game.

My methods were more complex and certainly more devious. Blame it on the blood. I did not think it wise to proclaim my innocence to Lucy directly. It hadn’t worked with Molly or Walt or my lawyer. I had no reason to think it would work with Lucy. That did not mean I had nothing to say.

‘Have you ever wondered,’ I said during our third dinner together, ‘why I never asked you if you smoke marijuana?’

We were in a public restaurant, safely tucked away from other people. Lucy had none of the easy exits available to her at the farm, such as something urgent to do in the barn. We were halfway through our meal, an unseemly time to depart for the restroom. But she did her best. ‘Because you know I don’t.’

I did not remark on this statement. There was nothing untruthful about it, as such. She believed that I believed she had nothing to do with drugs, alcohol, or sex. She was seventeen, sure, but not one of those girls trying to be twenty-two. There had been three boys out to the farm to take her on a formal date, a total of eight or nine times: hayrides, parties, dances, a movie, a football game. She was pretty, but she was headstrong and smart and had no patience for compromise. I had no doubt she had been kissed, kissed plenty, maybe, but there was something so forthright about her that I never doubted her choices. When Lucy fell in love Molly and I would know it. Until then, we were free to delude ourselves with nineteenth century notions of chastity and goodness, if that made us feel better. And why not? Lucy was a good girl, whatever that means in the new millennium. Her reward for that was our silence. Even when it became clear she was getting high we didn’t say anything. We just watched and waited and hoped she was careful. Because she was seventeen, Lucy misunderstood our silence. She imagined we were stupid.

‘Not at all,’ I answered. ‘I don’t ask you about it because I’m afraid of your answer.’

‘You don’t have to worry about me, Dave.’

Still no lie. ‘I don’t worry, because I won’t ask.’ Lucy did not quite understand this. She imagined after she thought about it that I was telling her life as an ostrich has its advantages. I let her work through things to that point before I continued. ‘You see, my greatest fear isn’t grass. It’s that you would lie to me about it if I asked you. That would hurt.’

I am an evil man. I know how to manipulate a situation. Tubs taught me all too well. Lucy is an innocent. She cannot imagine I have anticipated her next two moves and already have the roadblocks set, that soon she will be lying to me and hating herself for it.

‘I’m not smoking grass.’

Technically, because she did not understand grammar, Lucy thought this was true. She was not smoking it at this moment. I tried not to react. Even among loved ones my observations about grammar were not well received.

I had put her here by my wickedness, and now it was time to twist the blade a little.

‘I’m not asking you!’

‘But I’m telling you.’

‘What are you telling me?’

She retreated to silence. One of the first lessons I got in the wastelands was when you asked a question you needed to wait for an answer. I once watched Tubs sit for thirty minutes in front of an older couple. After five seconds the average salesperson will nervously blunder into the silence and ruin a perfectly good closing question. I had seen good salespeople hold out for thirty seconds. I never saw anyone but Tubs Albo last five minutes, but on that day Tubs waited five minutes and nobody spoke, so he just kept waiting.

Do you want it? That was Tubs’s favourite question, and until he heard an answer he would not talk again.

Thirty minutes later they were still thinking about it!

And not a soul in that dealership was foolish enough to blunder into that closing booth and let them off the hook. Finally, seeing that Tubs would wait all day, the old man said, ‘Maybe. If the price was right.’ Five minutes later he owned a car. They were, Tubs explained in the post-mortem, the kind of people who liked to keep a car for seventeen years. Trouble was they had met a real salesman!

What are you telling me? I asked my stepdaughter, and then I waited.

Now Lucy was cornered by her own words as I had intended, and I was not about to let her off. She tried to eat, but when she saw that I was waiting for an answer, she set her fork down. Three minutes. The waitress came toward us. I held my hand out imperiously, ‘We’re fine,’ I snapped, and she faded. I kept my eyes on Lucy. What are you telling me? I would not repeat the words, nor would I change my expression. I waited to see if she would lie again, something she couldn’t wriggle out of with a faulty understanding of the present continuous.

‘I’ve been around it. Kids do it. Everyone does it.’

This amounted to as much of a confession as she was willing to make: a syllogism for her step-papa.

Everyone does it. I am part of the class of everyone.

Therefore: I do it, too. That was the logic. The emotion was something else: I see it, but I don’t partake. I’d never do something like that! Now put your head back in the sand!

But I am a stupid man. I do not understand syllogisms or emotional appeals. I waited for her to answer the question. No one should have such a stepfather.

‘Sometimes,’ she said finally. ‘Not much. If you don’t… you feel like-’

She stopped, expecting the lecture. I didn’t give it.

After providing me with more than enough time to preach on the folly of peer pressure, Lucy had to finish her thought. ‘You’re mad.’

I shook my head. ‘Not at all.’

‘I thought you would be really pissed off. You more than Mom.’

‘I’m concerned. On the other hand, I’m pretty much concerned all the time about you, even when you’re doing everything right.’

‘Did you ever smoke grass?’

‘Sure. The other kids made me. I mean I hated it, but to be popular… you know how it is.’

Lucy had found an ally and laughed at my confession. She could even forgive me for mocking her.

‘You’re not going to tell Mom?’

Point of the entire conversation: ‘I don’t keep anything from your mother, Lucy.’

Lucy’s eyes frosted over, ‘Right.’

‘Is there something you want to ask me?’

‘What’s the point? You’ll just lie to me.’

‘That’s worse than adultery, isn’t it? The worst thing I could do?’

Lucy was not confident about the answer to this.

‘Tell me something,’ I said. ‘If I told you I had an affair last summer would you think any less of me?’

Lucy considered this solemnly. She wanted to be honest and she was eager for me to be honest, because, whether she realized it or not, my telling a lie to her was worse than anything else. We didn’t play that game, not about the important things. When I lied to Lucy she knew it was a lie. Even Ahab and Jezebel knew it!

‘No,’ she said, ‘not if you were honest with me.’

I smiled at her. ‘That’s because you already believe it. You think I had an affair, so you’ve already adjusted your opinion.’

Lucy worked through this as if calculating the possibility for the first time. ‘It isn’t true?’

I smiled. ‘It’s a frightening thing to ask that, isn’t it?’

She got angry because I had finally gotten her to ask the question and now I wouldn’t answer it.

‘Is it true or not, Dave?’

‘I’m going to give you some time to tell your mother what’s going on with the grass. If you don’t, she and I are going to have a little talk.’

‘She’ll ground me.’

I kicked one shoulder up, dismissing the consequences. ‘Would you rather lie to her?’

‘I’m not lying!’

‘Silence is the biggest lie of all, kid.’

I called for the waitress. I made a fuss over the fact that I had been rude. I said we had been having a heart-to-heart. I gave her a wink. You know how those can be? She understood. She had a couple of daughters herself! Lucy corrected her. Stepdaughter. The waitress didn’t miss a beat. She had a couple of them too.

I said we would like to have the check. Anything wrong? I smiled. Nothing at all.

In the car I told Lucy I’d like a Baskin-Robbins.

‘How about you?’

She thought that sounded good. We were about halfway across town when she said, ‘You never answered my question, Dave.’

‘You’re right. That’s because it’s not your place to ask it. It has nothing to do with the two of us.’

Long silence and then, ‘You did.’

‘What if I didn’t?’

‘I don’t understand. Did you sleep with that woman or not?’

‘I don’t want you to take sides, Lucy. What’s going on isn’t about your trusting me or believing your mother. It’s not about you. Believe me, you can be happy about one thing no matter how it ends between your mother and me. You’re not a part of the fight and you’re not a part of the solution. I came into your life twelve years ago. I’ll be there as long as you’ll have me. I hope that means forever.’

Over ice cream, Lucy asked, ‘What do you think Mom will do about the grass?’

‘Depends on which of us tells her about it.’

‘You’re going to tell her if I don’t?’

‘I sure am.’

She looked at me craftily. ‘Because you never keep anything from her?’

‘Never,’ I said.

This time she didn’t answer wise.