Ladies and Gentlemen (9 page)

“You’re
here
,” she yelled over the music. She elbowed the girl next to her, nodding her head toward Thane.

“Indeed I am,” he confirmed.

She indicated the band. “What do you think?”

“They’re good.”

“My cousin’s the drummer.”

Whenever Ramelle leaned toward him to talk, she squeezed his wrist lightly. There was a sweet, citrus smell on her breath. Thane had to put his ear close to her mouth to hear her over the music, and he could feel her words on his face.

“I’ve never seen you out before,” she said.

“That’s because I lead the life of a monk.”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m serious. Nothing but evenings of deep study, grading, and meditation.”

“It sounds lonely.”

“Profoundly.”

She smiled at him. “Here, hold my beer.”

Ramelle took the blond ringlets hanging loose around her face, pulled them back, and tied them off, watching him as she moved, and before Thane realized what he was doing, he took a sip from her bottle.

“Come with me while I smoke,” she said.

The bouncer at the back door let them out into the parking lot. Thane lit her cigarette, then draped his jacket over her shoulders and put his scarf around her neck. Perhaps it was the comparative silence out there, or the awareness that they were completely alone now, but she abruptly became more formal with him, having lost her confidence, he guessed. She talked about his Gothic Lit seminar so self-consciously that he was enfeebled by regret. He wanted to talk about regular things, to forget he was a professor for a while, to leave this safe middle ground and get to the place where they were headed.

“Have you ever seen the star?” she asked.

“What star?”

“On Mill Mountain. The big star they light up every night.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s only, like,
fifty feet tall.
”

“Oh,
that
star. I’ve always wondered about that thing.” He was standing closer to her now. “Why’s it up there?”

“Because
duh
,” she said. “This is the
Star City.
”

“Right, but did they put the star up there because this is the Star City? Or is it the Star City because of the star?”

“You know, I have no idea.”

She laughed at this. He laughed with her, relieved. She stepped
closer. Then she reached a hand out from under his blazer, took hold of his belt buckle, and gently pulled him toward her.

“So,” she murmured, “how about I go inside and get my coat and things. And in the meantime you wait here like a good little monk, and then the two of us take a drive up there to see it.”

Thane laughed once, his mouth dry, and leaned back. She pulled him toward her again. “You want to see the star, right?”

“Yes.” He couldn’t help it, he was whispering.

“Good. I
want
you to see it.” She took off his blazer and handed it back to him, but left the scarf around her neck. “Don’t go anywhere.”

She tapped on the door and the bouncer opened it. With the red lights shining off the stage, the noise, and the smoky air wafting out, Thane felt like he was standing before a dragon’s maw. The bouncer nodded at him, then let the metal door slam, muffling the sound coming from inside the club almost completely.

He stood in the parking lot, blowing smoke rings. A few minutes passed. He imagined the star on the mountain as clearly as if he’d spent many cold evenings bathed in its light. He closed his eyes and imagined himself lowering his mouth onto Ramelle’s. He thought about what that might taste like, and everything that came afterward. Then he stamped out his cigarette and left.

Elliott Doyle, another professor in the English department, and his wife, Marcie, who taught at a nearby college in Lynchburg, owned the house Thane was living in. They were on sabbatical for the year, in Ireland until spring. Back in August, Doyle had been one of the
few faculty members to make a sustained effort to welcome him on board, he and Marcie taking him out to dinner a few times, showing him around downtown Roanoke. They had him out to the house for brunch one Sunday afternoon—another in a series of magnanimous gestures that in suspicious moments Thane had come to believe were part of a setup. It was a spectacular day, and the drive from campus to Troutville was splendid. It was late August and still hot, but the leaves were just beginning to turn; and as Thane took in the beauty of the rural Virginia farmland, he thought about Ashley. The road leading to this house wound through hundreds of acres of cow pasture bordered on the horizon by mountains. When Thane pulled into the drive and saw Doyle and Marcie sitting on their porch swing, he mourned that he and Ashley hadn’t made it to this point together. She had always loved such country.

“This is a beautiful place,” he said as he got out of his car. The house was gigantic, a three-story redbrick foursquare situated on a hill. Several cats were lazing on the porch, and a fat English setter came bounding happily toward him, Elliott following behind. “If I lived here, I don’t think I’d ever leave.”

“Then don’t,” Doyle said, taking the bottle of wine Thane had brought and looking at the label.

“Oh, Elliott, for crying out loud,” Marcie said. “At least let the man have a drink first.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “Stay while we’re gone. Save your money and enjoy the place. Just pay the utilities and don’t let any of our pets die.”

With Ashley very much on his mind, Thane accepted the offer on the spot. He’d imagined her seeing the house someday—which
was ridiculous, of course. But after a few months, he’d come to hate the place. He hadn’t accounted for the isolation. Though Troutville was only thirty miles from campus, the drive was all on winding two-lane roads, poorly lit and treacherous in bad weather. Once he got home, there was no leaving again for the night. The cows in the nearby fields made the most remarkable sounds—an eerie slogging as they walked the pastures, followed by throaty, prehistoric groans. The setter, Seamus, didn’t like Thane, or at least he didn’t respond to his commands, didn’t sit or stay or come, and he spent his days roaming outside—which Elliott and Marcie had strictly forbidden. Sometimes he showed up at the door covered in shit or mud or both, streaking the panes with slime as he scratched at the glass to be let in. Once he appeared on the porch with a cow’s skull in his mouth, the prize still webbed with purple muscle and blood, and when Thane tried to take it away, the dog bit him on the hand. Thane went berserk, kicking Seamus right off the porch. He grabbed a log off the nearby pile and hurled it at the fleeing beast, cursing him insanely. Since that afternoon, he never once let him inside.

In the mornings, the mountains in the distance were beautiful, but in the evening, the pitch-black nights, trucks rumbled through them with gargling engines as loud as propeller planes. Their headlights winked on and off between the trees, their red and yellow marker lights running from tractor to semitrailer, outlining the rigs’ twisting length as they hugged the dark curves, making it seem as if the vehicles themselves were in flight. He had underestimated, he realized, the difficulty of living in another person’s home. But now he was committed. Trapped.

Sitting on the porch swing in Doyle’s parka, with Doyle’s
whiskey poured into one of Doyle’s highball glasses, Thane shook his head and covered his eyes with his hand. Give him a million chances and he would never have guessed that he would end up here, in Nowhere, Virginia, living under another man’s roof—though Ashley certainly wouldn’t have been surprised.
Do you know what I hate about your profession?
she’d say.
The lack of control. You don’t control where you work. You work wherever someone will take you. So you live in whatever place you can find. And once you find out where
that
is, you don’t even get to choose if you stay. You get to wait six or seven years to find out if this place you never picked to begin with is where you’re going to spend the rest of your life—or not. It’s like your life’s a big spin of the wheel. It’s like you’ve chosen never to have a choice
.

Drunk and cold, Thane moved into the living room and turned on the television, idly surfing the channels with the sound muted and thinking about Ramelle, feeling the cold air of another near miss wash over him. The university had a strict policy about sexual relations with students, and he easily could’ve gotten himself fired. As it was, he felt embarrassed by his behavior and dreaded seeing the girl on Monday, fearing her reaction. Police strobes flashed on the screen, and mug shots of a male suspect, in profile and front view, with a phone number below them, to which Thane paid no mind. Images of a wreck on I-81, a minivan’s entire front end accordioned, an indentation on the windshield where the driver’s forehead must have hit the glass.

Thane turned off the set and picked up from the coffee table a stack of the Doyles’ letters to each other. He’d discovered them in Elliott’s study, idly snooping around one afternoon. The letters
were dated and written in longhand, and once Thane started looking, he found them scattered in piles all over the house. It had taken him a few weeks to piece together their story, as he’d picked up somewhere in the middle: the purpose of Elliott’s leave wasn’t study or travel, but saving his marriage. He’d found more than a hundred pages so far. Which of them had initiated this correspondence? Did they actually mail these letters, or simply slide them under each other’s door? With a scholar’s attention to detail, Thane had catalogued the piles and mapped out a floor plan of the house, marking their location in each room, so he could return them to their original places come spring. But sometime last week he’d managed to lose the map.