He hands me a cup of tar-black coffee, takes a blanket from the bed, and heads out to the veranda. My wine glass from the night before is lying beside my chair, but the shards from his smashed glass are gone. I sit next to him as he wraps the blanket around his bare shoulders.
“Don’t you regret anything?” I ask.
“Not at all.”
“Not even a little?
“I don’t regret anything about last night. It was the best night I’ve had in years.”
“I suppose that was your mating dance. You’re like the blue-footed booby.”
“That doesn’t sound very flattering.”
“A bird of paradise, maybe?”
I sip the coffee—unlike the first morning here, I don’t wince with disgust. It’s funny how quickly I’ve become used to this place, which has no electricity, no hot water, and none of the comforts I thought I needed. People can get used to anything, I guess. Even the strangest events can become perfectly normal.
“It can’t happen again,” I say. “I mean it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Well, I do. It’s not right. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I wasn’t raised to go around having affairs with married men. Besides, I’ve just come out of something serious. I don’t want to get in the middle of anything.”
“You’re not?—”
“I don’t want you to try to convince me, OK? We need to forget it ever happened.”
We sit in silence, and I suddenly feel the full implication of what we’ve done. My time at Pine Ridge is over.
“Brie, what am I going to do with my life?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Please don’t.” He stands up and tosses his coffee into the garden. “You know, college kids always ask my advice about their lives. About grad school. About what careers to go into. Gap years. Travel. Even their love lives! What a joke.”
“They must really trust you.”
“It’s all a great magic trick. You stand in front of the classroom, and everyone assumes you must belong there, that you must be smarter than them and have it all figured out. But what on earth have I figured out? I’ve read Kant in German. I’ve read every obscure English poet there is. I’ve read theAeneidin Latin, for Christ’s sake. But what do I know about how to live?”
“As much as anyone else,” I say. “Truth and beauty. You must know a bit about that.”
He turns to me, surprised, almost offended, like an actor who finished a monologue to complete and utter silence.
“Your life is great,” I continue. “You live in a beautiful house. Your wife is hot and interesting. You got to teach poetry for a job for nearly twenty years. You work hard, but so does everyone else, and most of them are paid a lot less for doing so. People miss out on promotions every day and have to go back to their cubicles. You get to be a teacher! What an absolute goddamn privilege.”
He sits down and wraps the blanket around his shoulders again. He doesn’t speak for a moment, and I wonder if I’ve offended him. I wouldn’t be surprised. The guy just suffered the greatest disappointment of his life, and I’m effectively telling him to suck eggs.
“And you got to have sex with me,” I add. “Probably the greatest privilege known to man.”
He cracks a smile, but his expression quickly turns serious again. “You’re an extraordinary person. Really.”
“And you give too many compliments.”
“I mean them all. But tell me, what would you do if you were me?”
The first thing that comes to mind isget a divorce, but I hold my tongue. Who am I to tell Bradley about his life? I feel like I’m walking into a dark field littered with bear traps. How long before I lose a limb?
“Take a break,” I say eventually. “Take some time to figure it all out.”
