Faculty Lounge

The faculty lounge at Walnut Grove Community College smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, and I was sitting in it alone at nine-fifteen on a Thursday night, which is not where a commercial airline pilot expects to find himself on his one night home in eleven days. I had parked the car by the science building and walked across a campus that was nearly empty, just a few lights in the classroom windows and one security guy doing a slow lap in a golf cart, and I had thought, not for the first time, that Natalie's new teaching job was doing something to her that I liked but did not fully understand.

We have been married seven years. She was twenty-seven when we met, a graduate student flying home from a conference, and I was a twenty-nine-year-old pilot who met her in the terminal after a flight and somehow never left. I'm thirty-six now and she's thirty-four, and for most of those years things were good in the way that good can become furniture, solid and useful and easy to stop noticing. Then she took the adjunct position at the community college last August, teaching English comp twice a week to adults who were mostly older than she was, and something in her lit back up. She came home with stories. She argued with the parking system. She bought three new sweaters in one month, which for Natalie is a shopping spree of historic scale.

So I sat there in a lumpy armchair with a vending machine coffee and waited, because she had texted me to come a little early, and I was happy to. The truth is I am gone half the month and when I am home I am often asleep at hours that would confuse a bat, and she has built a whole life at this college that I only visit, the way I visit everything. I have learned to be okay with that. Mostly.

When she came through the door at nine twenty she was flushed in a way I recognized and had not seen in a while, cheeks pink, hair slightly wrecked on one side like she had been running her hand through it, and she was carrying her bag wrong, clutched in front of her with both hands. She runs her own classroom, my wife, and she looked like she had been caught doing something, except there was nobody there to catch her but me.

"Hey," she said, and then she stood there.

"Hey yourself," I said. "You okay? You look warm."

"Doesn't matter," she said, too fast, and then she laughed at herself and set the bag down. "Okay, it matters. One of my students hung back after class. The older guy, the one who's retaking comp."

"The one with the boat stories," I said, because she had mentioned him, weeks ago, in the way you mention someone whose name you have noticed.

"The one with the boat stories. He did the whole slow pack-up thing and then he was standing by my desk telling me my comments on his essay were the first useful feedback anyone had ever given him, and Aldo, he was not looking at my eyes. He was looking at the sweater." She said it flat and quick, a confession delivered with the same matter-of-fact tone as a weather report, and then she sat down on the arm of the chair across from me and pulled at a loose thread on her cuff. "And the bad part is I let him. I even leaned back a little. I liked it."

I want to be accurate about what happened in my chest, because it was two things at once and they both showed up on time. There was the jealousy, the dumb old animal one, the one that wanted to know the guy's name and how many credits he needed to graduate. And underneath it, arriving faster than I expected, was a heat that went straight down my spine, because my wife, my careful, competent wife who grades papers in her pajamas, had stood at a lectern and been wanted by some stranger with boat stories and had chosen to be wanted instead of shutting it down, and she was telling me about it in a dim lounge with nobody around.

"You liked it," I said.

"I liked it." She was looking at the thread on her cuff. "Is that a terrible thing to say to you?"

"No," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to. "It's the opposite of a terrible thing."

She looked up then, and we did that married-people thing where a whole conversation happens in about two seconds without a word. I got up out of the lumpy chair and crossed the little room and she stood up to meet me, and I asked her, plainly, out loud, because that is how we do it and always have, "Can I kiss you right now, in this sad lounge, with the flickering light?"

"Oh, shut up and yes," she said, and she was already smiling.

So I kissed her, there in the doorway of the faculty lounge with the hallway dark and echoing behind us, and she kissed me back with more hunger than I have felt from her in a couple of years, her hand flat on my chest and then sliding up to the back of my neck. The hallway was empty in both directions and somehow that made it better, the faint risk of it, the echo of our own building at night around us, and when I pulled back she kept her eyes closed for a second and then opened them and did not step away.

"There's something else," she said, and her voice had gone quiet and a little unsteady, the way it does when she is about to say something she has been carrying around. "The whole time he was looking at me, this is so stupid, the whole time I was thinking about you. About you watching me. About being seen." She stopped and pressed her forehead briefly against my shoulder. "Not by him. By you. I wanted you to be standing there watching me be looked at. I've been thinking about that for weeks and I've never said it out loud in my life."

I felt myself go hard against her thigh, immediate and undeniable, the kind of reaction the body gives without consulting anyone first, and she felt it too, and her breath caught, and that little catch did more for me than most things I could describe. Seven years of marriage and apparently there were still floors of the house we had never opened the door to.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. So let's not say it's stupid. Let's say it's interesting." I had her hand now, and I was half laughing and half not, because some ancient part of my brain was yelling and the rest of me was very calm. "What did you have in mind, exactly? We can't exactly hire your student."

"God, no, not him." She actually shuddered. "No. I don't want him. I want the feeling. I want to be somewhere I shouldn't be doing things we shouldn't do, with the chance of being seen, and you there, watching, knowing you're the only one who gets to touch me." She said it all in one breath and then looked almost alarmed at herself. "Sorry. That came out rehearsed."

"It came out rehearsed because you've been rehearsing it," I said, "and I would like to hear the full rehearsal, but maybe not in the lounge where anyone could walk in on the planning committee."

She laughed then, the real one, and the spell bent a little and held, and we stood there in the dark hallway outside the lounge, her back against the wall by the trophy case, me close enough that my thigh was still pressed against her, and I was doing the arithmetic that husbands do, which is how late is it, how empty is this campus, what is the actual downside, and the answers kept coming back favorable. There was a security guy somewhere doing slow laps. There were maybe forty people in the whole grid of buildings. My wife was looking up at me with an expression I have not seen since our second honeymoon, and my pulse was doing something heroic about it.

"Let's just walk," she said finally, grabbing my hand. "Let's walk the long way to the car and see how we feel, and if we're still insane when we get there, we'll figure out the rest." She paused at the light switch. "And Aldo, thank you for not making a face about the whole thing. I was so sure you'd make a face."

"No face," I said. "Look at this face. Completely neutral."

We went out into the cold late-autumn dark of the quad, her arm threaded through mine, and I remember thinking that eleven days in a hotel in another time zone had never once felt as awake as that walk across an empty campus, past the science building with its one lit window, past the golf cart parked by the flagpole, my wife's hand warm in mine and both of us grinning at the pavement like idiots, with no idea at all where the night was headed.

We did not make it to the car. That is the short version, and the long version starts about forty yards later, when we came around the corner of the humanities building and the headlights of the golf cart swept across the path ahead of us and a man in a dark blue jacket stepped out from behind the map kiosk with a flashlight held low against his thigh. Natalie's grip tightened on my hand and I felt her whole arm go stiff, and then, strangely, it went loose again, and I realized she had decided something in the space of about two seconds, which is more decisiveness than she shows when ordering lunch.

"Evening," the man said. He was younger than I expected, maybe early thirties, with a clipboard under one arm and a name tag that said KASEY BATEMAN in block letters, and he had the unhurried manner of someone who has walked the same loop five thousand times and knows exactly how boring it is going to be tonight. "Campus closes at ten. You folks with the evening classes?"

"I teach English comp," Natalie said, and her voice was almost level. "Natalie Middleton. This is my husband, Aldo. He's a pilot, he just got in, we were walking to the car." All true, delivered in the exact order a person rehearses facts, and the guard looked at me, and I nodded like someone who had definitely just landed a regional jet and not spent the last hour discovering his wife's secret interior life in a faculty lounge.

"Well, Ms. Middleton, you're fine then. I do a walkthrough of the buildings every night anyway, make sure nobody's taped a door or fallen asleep in a stairwell." He said it easily, professionally, and then his eyes came back to her, just for a beat longer than the clipboard required, and I watched my wife register that beat the way a person registers a compliment from a stranger; she stood a little straighter and did not look away. "Cold night for it. You two should get to your car."

We walked on, and about twenty feet past him Natalie leaned into me and whispered, "He looked at me," and I said, "He's paid to look at people," and she said, "No, he looked at me," with the same pleased certainty she'd had about the boat-stories student, and I understood that the night had just acquired a direction, the way weather acquires a direction, quietly and then all at once.

Here is what I should probably confess about myself, since it matters. I have flown through microbursts. I have flown an engine-out approach into a crosswind that the manual described, in the manual's bloodless way, as nonstandard. None of it compared to the sensation of turning to my wife on that dark path and saying, "Do you want to give him something to look at?" and watching her face go through three separate expressions in about a second and a half, alarm and disbelief and then a bright, hungry yes that she did not even try to hide.

"He's going to come back around on his loop," she said. "The humanities hallway has those big windows facing the quad. You can see in from the walkway."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I've taught night classes in that building since August, Aldo, I know which windows face what." She was already walking faster, pulling me, with something almost giddy in her step, the walk of a woman who has just gotten away with something and intends to get away with considerably more. We went in through the side door of the humanities building, which she opened with her staff key card, and the hallway inside was long and dim and lit by about a third of its ceiling panels, the rest dark in that institutional way, and the big windows at the far end faced the walkway where the golf cart would eventually roll past, plainly visible to anyone out there who bothered to look, which, as it turned out, someone would.

She stopped about halfway down, in the stretch between two doorways where the lockers run, old green metal lockers from some decade when community colleges had money, and she turned and faced me and said, "Okay. If I lose my nerve in the next four minutes, you have to swear this stays a funny story we never tell anyone." I swore. I would have sworn anything at that point, including things about the aircraft I don't believe.