Wordy Weekend

"We drove up the snowy, winding road towards the cozy A-frame cabin."

Frank glanced away from the road to Michelle in the seat beside him just at the very moment that she read that line, the very first sentence in the first chapter of the novel he had worked on feverishly the last several weeks. The sun dappled across her long fingers holding the manuscript, and danced just under her eyebrows, knit in concentration, and upon her pretty, upturned nose. His gaze shifted over the wheel again, but soon drifted back, taking all of her in at that sharp angle, lingering perhaps too long for safety’s sake but yet unable to resist observing her. There was something about watching her reading the words he had written that unusually aroused him.

Dorothy used to read his work too, but it wasn’t the same as this. And Dorothy could not read anything at all in a vehicle in motion, be it car, train, plane, or boat. She said it made her sick to her stomach. In this Michelle was very different, but then she was different in so many ways: she was taller, had smaller breasts and much lighter hair. She was also twenty-five years younger than Dorothy, who these days would occasionally reply to his texts but almost never take his phone calls.

He sneaked another peak at Michelle just as she flipped a page, her gaze intent, her face otherwise expressionless. For a brief moment, he saw her naked, dripping, just out of the shower, strands of hair pasted to her forehead, her nipples—comically—almost as upturned as her nose. Sometimes he would juxtapose that image with Dorothy’s in similar circumstances, but there were so many Dorothys to choose from: there was Dorothy at 20, Dorothy at 35, Dorothy at 50. Also, he had memorized Dorothy in entirety: the shape of her ear lobes, the placement of moles on her back, the vein patterns on her hands. Michelle was still new: so much was, if not entirely vague, still not nearly as sharply etched in his consciousness. But all the Dorothys were beautiful, as was Michelle. It was a point of pride for him that he had been intimate with each and every one.

The car swerved ever so slightly, but he corrected it just as she looked up. They exchanged brief glances, Michelle offering a thin-lipped smile before she returned to the manuscript. It looked as if she was about a dozen pages in or so. He was dying to get her reaction, but he would say nothing, he promised himself, until she was done, and she had offered it up on her own. And maybe not even until after they trundled the bags into the Airbnb, had a beer or two, perhaps smoked a little weed. The view from the deck over the water looked spectacular in the online listing.

Marty and Tanya, the characters in his novel, were on their way to a spartan cabin in the woods in the dead of winter when the action broke, but today the author and his hot little companion were, in stark contrast, headed to a magnificent lakefront on this late summer day. And Marty and Tanya had serious relationship issues that manifested most prominently in sexual dysfunction. For Frank and Michelle, on the other hand, the most likely conflict in this arena—if there was to be one—was over who was going to be on top, and whatever the resolution in that regard it was never unpleasant.

He tried not to dwell on it, but he knew that this coupling of an aging professor of literature and a stunning grad student that had grown to be more of a muse than a protégé was the height of cliché, and that others—within the department and outside of it—found it both humorous and objectionable at the same time. There were no bears involved, but otherwise there were elements to the affair that might have been lifted from a John Irving novel, with just the right mix of the comic and the deplorable. In that, the final breakup with Dorothy was as much a punctuation as an underscore. Poor Dorothy, the way he saw it, desperately tried not to suspect what was so very obvious to everyone. And he had imagined for them a finale to their thirty some odd years together that was a kind of replay of the scene from the film "Network," when William Holden walks away from his wife to go off with Faye Dunaway. But rather than histrionics, Dorothy had just laughed at him.

You just can’t let things alone, can you Frank?

For once, he had nothing to say.

You think I didn’t know you were banging that baby girl? You know, I might have just let it be, let it run its course, as long as you finally gave me some space. But you’re always so dramatic, even more dramatic than the books you go on endlessly about in your lectures, putting half your students to sleep! Well you didn’t put her to sleep, did you?

He had started to interrupt but the laugh that followed was loud, bitter, and menacing all at once. It was all those things, and it was also final. She was gone in an hour and she didn’t even take her things, not for months. And it was also months before they spoke again, and by then the attorneys were involved.

Part of him still loved her, and part of him missed her from time to time. But even after all the decades together, after houses and children and lovemaking and tears and lengths of quotidian monotony, he knew that the break—whether it came from him or from her—was the best thing. Something in her stymied him, and now that he had moved on (and she had moved on), he felt liberated. And as he considered that, he was also aware that that too was cliché. And yet … and yet, it also remarkably smacked of truth. Since he had replaced Dorothy with Michelle, the writer’s block had vanished. Finally, he could write not only paragraphs but pages and chapters and there was actually almost unbelievably a novel that had taken shape, a novel that he was convinced was very, very good. His best work ever. Perhaps something with enough merit that some other literature professor, long after he was gone, would lecture about to his or her own grad students some twenty or thirty years hence.

The GPS on the dash predicted an ETA of fourteen minutes, but he noticed that Michelle had dozed off. Her hands, larger than Dorothy’s but accentuated by thinner wrists, were stacked on the manuscript, which based on the way the pages were folded suggested that she had read it to completion. Her chin lolled just above her breasts, braless against a red tee decorated with a sketch of the Olympic pantheon. One of her nipples found what looked to be Athena, who grimaced above it.

Frank waited to wake her until he had pulled into the driveway of the Airbnb and turned the engine off, but when he turned to do so he found her already up, glowering at him. The nap had clearly been a ruse. The rage in her face was palpable, her cheeks red, her green eyes blazing. He actually felt himself wince in confusion.

Take me home!

But …

Take me the fuck home, right now!

But Michelle I—

Do you think I’m some silly little bitch? That you could ridicule me like this?

I don’t understand … What did I—

C’mon. What kind of game are you playing? What do you take me for?

Listen I—

A dark and stormy night …

What? What did you—

A dark and stormy night … you know, like: We drove up the snowy, winding road towards the cozy A-frame cabin …

But …

You know what that is? Do you know what the fuck that is?

It’s my novel, Michelle … it’s what I have worked on—

Bullshit. It’s a trap. All those hours in the class listening to your lectures that go on and on and on. All those sweaty nights fumbling in the sheets with you. And all your words. All those fucking words. All those books we read and dissected. Mark Twain. Melville. Hemingway. Faulkner. Updike. Murakami. And then you try to trick me by handing me some pile of garbage that starts off with a snowy, winding road towards a cozy A-frame and try to pass that shit off as something that you wrote? You know what that is: it’s worse than a fucking dark and stormy night, isn’t it?

His mouth formed an “O” but he could not get a word out, not even a syllable.

This was a big fucking joke to you, right? Impressionable young grad student doing the professor so he could poke fun at her? You suck! When were going to tell me? Were we gonna have a few drinks first, a few laughs? Was I supposed to tell you oh Dr. Hawley that was such great literature I wanna spend time talking about in detail after maybe we fuck a couple of times? Ha! Then you were gonna break it to me, right? Sorry Michelle—it’s just a little joke: I didn’t write that trash; I just lifted it from some English textbook on what never ever fucking ever to submit to a creative writing class!

But Michelle—

Fuck you. Just fuck you. When you broke the truth to me about your little game, was I supposed to blush and giggle? And then were we supposed to get naked and do it again? You patronizing dickhead!

She jumped out of the car, popped the hatch to grab her bag and started to walk away. She was tapping on her phone as she went.

Listen you don’t—

Nevermind, I don’t need a ride. I can’t spend another ten minutes in the car with you, nevermind an hour. I’ll call an Uber.

He followed and put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it away violently.

Touch me again I will fucking call 911 and tell them you tried to rape me. Never. Contact me. Again.

Once she was out of sight, he took a beer from the ice chest and leaned on the back bumper. He didn’t know what to make of it. Of any of it. Maybe he would call Dorothy. Maybe she would pick up. The beer, a hoppy craft IPA he and Michelle had picked up from a brewery the other day, was cold and delicious going down. He savored it and wondered what would come next. The Airbnb was paid for the weekend. Change of plan: maybe he would just work on the novel instead. And perhaps there was something to what Michelle had said, even if it stung a bit. Like aspects of his life, perhaps that first line in the chapter was a bit cliché … Maybe he should re-work it?