Everyone but You (18 page)

“I can’t leave my wife,” he told Annie.

“I didn’t ask you to,” she said, and dressed.

He had crossed a line, but once it was crossed there was no going back. He asked to see Annie again. He needed to see her. And that was how the affair began, and continued.

Dobbin admits that in his insignificantly small life the absolute
worst memory he holds was the ruined expression on Julia’s face when she finally confronted him. There was a frantic tone in her voice that was so uncharacteristic of her when he came home that night, only a few weeks ago—came home, actually, from Annie’s.

“Why are you doing this?” she screamed. “Why are you lying?” He denied it, of course, denied Annie, denied everything. What else could he do? They were rumors, he told Julia, but tears ran down Julia’s face, and she only shook her head. Then she proceeded to smash dish after dish on the kitchen floor, until there was a mosaic of porcelain around him. “I know you,” she said. “Don’t you think I can tell when you’re lying?”

T
HAT AFTERNOON IN CLASS
, Dobbin shows black-and-white slides of aerial attacks, airplanes dropping large cylinders down to the ground, soldiers in the trenches, wind gusts carrying gas in the enemies’ direction. He discusses, how, in those early years before artillery shells were marked with red, green, and yellow crosses, the wind would often shift and send toxic gases back to the very camps from which they came—an act of subterfuge by nature, men choked by the miscalculation of their own actions. He talks about the dangers of excessive force, the isolationism that ensued after the First World War, the implication of that national sentiment when it came to entering into World War II, Nazi Germany. Dobbin teaches because he believes that it gives him the opportunity to transform students into freethinking individuals. But what he sees today is a room half-full of students who are overwhelmingly disinterested. These are young men and women who care little for history and who anxiously await the end of class, or simply slink out from
the lecture hall early and pass—hopefully unnoticed, unscathed—into the world of fast food and tanning salons again. He surveys the future generation. “You all depress me,” he says unexpectedly. “You know, someday your networking grid will collapse, and then where will you be? You might have to actually read a book.”

After the lecture, he drives out past the orange-and-white banners that designate campus grounds, then out to the main road, past the IHOP and the park where lovers meet on weekends. He passes under bridges encrusted with kudzu, drives out five miles from campus. He’s careful to park at some distance from Poe’s house, because he still believes Julia knows him so well she will sense his approach, hear the familiar rattle of his car engine. He gets out. He glances over his shoulder. Then he skulks down the hill, past the still-full trees and the row of bungalows with white, scalloped lattices.

At the bottom of the dead-end street, he sees Julia’s sedan parked next to a compact that Dobbin suspects must be Poe’s. He looks right and left, but sees no one short of an old woman carrying a grocery bag into her house. A black Labrador stalks around a fenced yard, and, as Dobbin passes, the dog barks. He feels foolish, immensely so, but he crouches against Julia’s car and takes cover. His heart races. He waits but hears nothing—no doors opening, no one asking the dog, “What is it, boy?” If he could see himself, he guesses he’d be filled with dread and disgust—his heavy breaths and sagging stomach, his beard grown to compensate for his thinning hair. Not only is his life an abbreviated spectacle, but now he’s a bona fide Peeping Tom. Still, he feels desperate to speak with Julia. He’s certain that being in the same room with her is the only thing that will afford him any solace, and so he continues.

He walks across the cobblestoned garden, ducks behind shrubbery, moves around the side of the house. He peers down through the smudged basement windows. The space below is fully furnished, equipped with a small kitchen.

He doesn’t recognize any of the furniture: a square kitchen table and chairs, a sofa and love seat with broken rattan, a simple glass table with boxes and stacks of books and papers piled on top of it. On the facing wall there is a mirror, positioned to catch light, though now, with the sun going down, the room looks small and darkly comfortable. Dobbin’s eyes adjust. Is Poe here? he wonders, imagining Poe’s scrawny, naked form emerging from the bedroom. Sickened, slightly titillated, he waits, anticipating. He senses disaster, as if he’s released the pin on a grenade and somehow absentmindedly forgotten to throw it.

After a while, when his knees ache from bending and the warmth from his pressed hand has fogged the window, Julia walks out from the bedroom. She is dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater. He pauses momentarily and holds his breath until he’s certain she’s alone. Relieved, he taps on the window, and when she looks up he gestures. “Julia,” he says through the pane of glass. “Hello.”

Julia nears the window. She does not seem alarmed, not really. Didn’t she know he’d come after her? How foolish, how possibly romantic it might seem to her, her husband squatting outside, waiting in a hopeful way just for a moment to see and speak with her. He knocks on the glass again.

“What do you want?” she asks.

He reads her lips. “I already said: To T-A-L-K. Can we please just talk and put this behind us?”

She shakes her head, and, gradually, her look registers a feeling that Dobbin can’t quite decipher. There’s a sudden angularity,
a stiffness that comes over her face and lips. She walks rigidly back to the bedroom, slams the door. Dobbin pulls his jacket tighter. He bangs on the window, yelling at her to open up, to just open up for Christ’s sake.

After a few minutes Poe calls out to him, and Dobbin turns to see Poe rushing toward him, his look serious, his face slack, his ridiculous hair pulled back in a ponytail. “What do you think you’re doing here?” Poe demands.

Dobbin stands up. He’s flushed, he’s breathless. “This isn’t any of your business,” he says. “So just go and let me speak with my wife.”

“It
is
my business,” Poe says. He comes closer to Dobbin, so close that Dobbin can smell Poe’s spicy aftershave. “Your
wife
just called me. Your
wife
asked me to tell you to leave.”

“You fucking presumptuous twit,” Dobbin says. He’s faintly aware of his clenched fist, the rush of adrenaline. He lunges at Poe. He wrestles Poe to the ground. His fist connects with Poe’s jaw, hard, cutting. They writhe around. Dobbin punches Poe again, then hits him once more, in the stomach, before he hears Julia’s screams and feels the grip of her hand on his shoulder. He turns toward her and then feels a sharp blow from Poe, right above his eye. “Stop it, both of you!” Julia yells. “Just leave, Dobbin! Just leave.”

A
T HOME THAT NIGHT
, Dobbin takes two shots of whiskey, to dull the pain from the cut above his eye and to dull the headache that is already forming. He watches television in the living room, commercials that warn against the dangers of soapsuds. The fight ended badly and relatively quickly, with Poe threatening to call the police, a threat issued with such sincerity and
outrage that Dobbin tucked his loosened shirt back into his pants, wiped the dirt from his knees, and left. His marriage and Julia aside, there was his career to consider. An affair might not leave a permanent mark on his record, but an arrest surely would. Now the room spins. He pours another shot of whiskey, then greedily downs it. He sits in the dark room, the glare of the television the only light. He listens to nothing in particular—the voice emanating from the TV, the clock striking the hour, the occasional car that drives by his house—and he feels as though his entire life has been reduced to a state of madness, as if everything he’s spent years building is collapsing, slowly, around him.

The phone rings, and the sound travels through his throbbing head. He picks it up and hears Julia’s unnerved, oddly distant voice. “Why did you do that?” she asks. “Poe almost called the department chair and the provost after you left. It was all I could do to get him not to.”

Dobbin adjusts the phone against the crook of his neck. A new pain cuts through him. He can feel the burn of the whiskey in his throat and a heaviness in his limbs and voice. “Julia,” he says. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she says. “Are you blitzed?”

“Blitzed, bombed, would it matter? Because, yes, all of the above.”

His words are met with silence and he strains to hear Julia breathe. “Look,” she begins finally, her voice shaking. “I’m not saying it’s all because of Annie. Do you understand?” She pauses, and then, in a vague way, she tells him that she knows what it’s like, that new attraction, that wanting someone different, that needing to start over again. “Really, it’s impossible to speak of staying together when so much has changed,” she says. “For both of us.” From her conciliatory tone, from her hesitations,
he understands, implicitly, that Julia has slept with Poe. Dobbin also understands that she’s stopped loving him, that she probably has not loved him for quite some time, though when pressed, she cannot or will not pinpoint when exactly her feelings changed. Nor will she admit that she’s had any part in their undoing. If there is in Julia any sense of failure, any thought that there might be something she’s done to concede or retract, it never seems to occur to her to confess this now, in the moment.

“There was a distance,” he says finally. “Which I regret.”

With that, Julia takes in a sharp pull of air, and Dobbin hears a distant kind of muffle, a click, and the abrupt flatline of the phone. He stares at his large hands, aware that they seem strangely disembodied. He goes to the kitchen for another shot of whiskey. Then he calls Annie and invites her over to the house.

“Finally,” she says. “I was wondering about you.”

“Just come over,” he says.

An hour later, love, his life has gone diffuse again. He thinks of Julia, how he once stood in a room full of people and promised, yes, of course he would treat her right—always. He thinks then on random things: weekends holed up in the house, painting walls; nights lying next to her, that familiar warmth. He thinks of this all, sees it in black and white, as if in a movie. He sees, too, bombs and plumes of smoke and skylines that suddenly collapse. He wants to hide, he wants it all to be over, and he wants—he simply wants—to be new and blameless again.

They—he and Annie—are in the bedroom, the bed rumpled from the night before, from Dobbin’s own restless sleep. He feels tired, heavy. His head throbs under the weight of Annie’s flowery perfume. She’s near him, warm, her look beguiling. She caresses his arms and shoulders. She’s already unbuttoned her
blouse, stepped out of her skirt. He kisses her, feels a subtle thrill, those sensations that aren’t yet diminished, those feelings that are still new.

“Yes,” she says, and she begins to murmur in his ear. He holds up his finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he says. He sways a little as if he is dancing with her now. The room pulsates with white light. Dobbin can almost hear the bombs being set off, one by one, feel the trench he—they—are digging, deeper, deeper, between him and the life he’s known. He hears Annie whisper something about protection, so he staggers to the closet and steadies himself against the doorway. From the shelf he takes down the gas mask and fits it over his face. He breathes and turns to see Annie, half naked, through the collusion of time and yellowed glass. He likes her like this—hazy, distant. “Okay,” he says. “Protection.”

Annie wears a bemused, slightly cryptic expression. “Oh my,” she says. She unhooks her bra, watches him. “You are just a little drunk.”

“Pretend I’m someone else,” he says. “An infantryman.” He salutes her.

Annie moves toward him. “A history fetish,” she says. “Well, then, let’s get those clothes off right quick, soldier, before the next battle begins.”

W
ITH ANNIE
, in the coming months, Dobbin feels a certain measure of emotion, though nothing as strenuously labored as love. It’s more as though he feels the mechanisms of love, the machinery of it, and the slow chug of time. Some nights he still dreams of Julia and he wakes, weeping.

In conversations that happen with greater infrequency, Julia
never mentions reconciliation, and that, too, gradually begins to seem like a dream. She never discusses their past or goes into details about her life apart from him, her time with Poe. She tells him only that she’s writing, and eventually will find a new place to live. On those occasions when he sees Julia and Poe across the quad, she sometimes glances in the direction of his building and office, but never for long. After a while any talk between them peters out, and Julia changes her number at Poe’s, does the usual things. Dobbin sometimes drives by Poe’s house, but he dares not stop. Rumors persist on campus, of course. Julia, he’s told, shows up less and less for classes; she leaves her students waiting on her for inordinate amounts of time. Dobbin listens with interest, though he seldom says anything. Gradually whatever pain he feels turns into a dull ache, not exactly a forgetfulness but something that keeps life moving along at a functional pace.

In June, Julia relocates back east and Dobbin receives paperwork in the mail. He feels almost relieved, as if there is something accomplished in the simple signing and fragile markings of the pen—a forgiveness, an absolution, even a certain amount of generosity. Any regrets he has are eventually tempered with a feeling that everything turned out for the best. He finds comfort in this thought and does not indulge other possibilities, because he’s certain that if he did, he’d be forced to admit that everything, our lives, our love and happiness, only straddles the thin border between here and disaster.