“I guess Elizabeth got her partner-hire and doesn’t need him anymore,” Colin said.
“That’s kind of sexist, don’t you think?” Priya said.
Colin’s face flushed. “My apologies,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. “Anyway, I don’t know why Elizabeth left. But I haven’t heard any rumors about Hal and a student.” Colin turned to me. “Have you?”
“Me? I don’t know anything.” I picked at the label on my beer, my thumbnail getting gummed up from the tape. “I’m just here for the drinks.”
“It’s so obvious—sex with students. What a cliché,” said Safie. “Are you so unimaginative that you can’t see a world beyond this?”
Colin smirked. “I don’t remember you talking about clichés last year with the Annabelle debacle.”
“That was different.”
“How so? Because she’s a woman?”
“Yes,” Safie said. “Of course.”
The year before, Annabelle Cleremont, assistant professor of French, had been unceremoniously let go when it came to light that she was sleeping with not one but two students, both from her Intro course. (As Safie said, “Comme c’est audacieux.”) When the first student found out about the second via a thinly veiled Facebook post in the middle of lecture, he went nuclear and brought the entire thing crashing down on all three of their heads. (This struck me as somehow appropriate to the language, and something that would never happen in German.) Naturally, Annabelle was the only one to suffer consequences. In fact, she was the first case of a Sawyer professor getting fired over sex with a student;administration cited “creating a hostile learning environment” as cause for termination.
“I don’t know why that matters,” Colin said. “There’s the same power differential.”
“Not exactly,” Priya said. “I’m with Safie. Not that it’s some radical feminist act for a woman to sleep with a student. But there’s power at play in terms of gender as well.”
“If there’s sex, there’s power,” Safie said. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
I finished my beer and set down the bottle; I’d ribboned the label to shreds.
“I should look for Stephen. I haven’t seen him since we arrived.”
“Maybe he met someone else,” Safie said, smiling.
“Here?”
I found Stephen coming down the stairs and climbed to meet him at a landing where the wide planks turned, the golden finish rubbed down. A stained-glass window cast an aqueous blue light across him. Robert had taken Stephen to the upstairs study to show him an album of photos from the lake house in Michigan. While that seemed like torture—photos of somebody else’s vacations—Stephen didn’t mind. “That place is special to me,” he said. He picked something from my sleeve, a bit of leaf from the orangery. (On my way to look for Stephen, I’d passed Elaine and that’s what she’d called it. “I’m so pleased you’ve enjoyed theorangery. It’s absolutely vital in winter.”)
“I’m glad you had a good time with Robert.” I meant it—it was nice seeing him happy.
Stephen seemed to consider his next words. “We should go out to the lake some time. Maybe at the end of spring term, when the weather warms up.”
The end of spring seemed impossibly far away. “I don’t know, I’m not much of a fisherman. Fisherperson.”
“There’s a lot more to do than fish.”
“Like what?”
Stephen’s eyes narrowed, and I could hear how I sounded. “If you don’t want to go, you can just say so.”
From below, Elaine appeared. “Come, come,” she called, fingers spread, hands waving across the yawning space at the foot of the stairs. “Robert is going to make his toast.”
She whisked away and I touched a hand to Stephen’s arm. “I’m just stressed about this stupid lecture. A trip to the lake sounds great. We should do it.”
“Really?”
“Of course.” I kissed him, a light brush on his lips. “Let’s go downstairs.”
The guests, numbering forty-odd, had crowded together, forming a dense, lopsided horseshoe in the sitting room. (Again, Elaine’s designation—“Everyone into the sitting room,” she’d cooed, ushering us like baby chicks back into the pen.) I knew from Safie this signaled the beginning of what would be a long and meandering speech by Robert, reflecting on the year and imparting some nonconsensual pearls of wisdom. Elaine squeezed Robert’s arm and shook back her hair. She wore it long and loose, white streaks against carbon. I caught Safie’s eye and she braced herself: a slight dip of her lip, a sly commiseration just for me.
Around us, the catering staff swooped, clearing away half-full glasses and greasy paper napkins folded around final, discarded bites. Something in their silent labor brought back a memory from when I was twelve, the summer before seventh grade. My parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. My father had recently switchedjobs, hired into a promotion. Cassie and I understood it was a big step up, although we were never clear on exactly what he did. Something about accounting and global shipping—the mysteries of fathers and their lifetimes spent at the office. My mother once joked she wouldn’t mind living in a nunnery, if they would take a Jew, because then you wouldn’t have to decide what to wear every day. With my father’s new position, she became a woman concerned with her appearance: taking a standing appointment to color her hair at the chrome and white salon in the fancy new mall; fretting about repeating a dress for one of the weekend functions that increasingly took them away from us. We had no nearby relatives and though a few old friends attended, the invited guests were mostly new acquaintances from the company, my father’s coworkers and their wives. When I asked why they would celebrate something that seemed so personal with a bunch of strangers, my mother replied, “We have to put on a good show,” and I couldn’t imagine what she meant. They hired a company to manage the party, stressing about the cost but feeling they had no choice. The staff arrived in two white vans early in the morning and swarmed through the house, getting it ready. A crew set up a large tent in the backyard. The summer sweltered and I felt bad for the workers, in their heavy pants and long sleeves.
