The Latex Professor

I got to the Duncan estate a little after two on Friday, and the GPS had tried to kill me twice on the gravel road before I finally saw the big stone pillars and the banner strung between them. WELCOME DUNCAN FAMILY AND FRIENDS. Someone had spelled friends with an exclamation point on a separate poster board, which I thought was sweet.

I'm Lauren Jones, I'm sixty-two, and I teach English at the same small college as about half the people at this party. Celeste Duncan teaches music there, and every few years her enormous family throws one of these reunions and the whole faculty gets invited because her clan apparently cannot count past two hundred guests.

So I parked under an oak, grabbed my overnight bag, and walked out onto the lawn.

It was a gorgeous setup, honestly. String lights already up even though it was afternoon. A long buffet table under a white tent. A makeshift bar staffed by two of Celeste's nephews-in-law, both in their forties and both wearing aprons that said ASK ME ABOUT THE PUNCH. A converted barn off to one side with a DJ inside doing sound checks. And everywhere, Duncans. Old Duncans, young Duncans, a whole clan of them in matching khaki hats.

And there, near the croquet court, was Roberto Meyer.

He's the art history professor, fifty-eight, silver at the temples, and he was laughing. Not polite laughing. Real head-back laughing, at whatever Celeste was saying, and Celeste had her hand on his forearm while she said it.

I stopped walking. Actually stopped, bag still on my shoulder, and stood there like an idiot in the middle of a lawn full of strangers.

Now. I have known Roberto for eleven years. We've sat on the same curriculum committee, we've shared a parking lot, we've eaten approximately nine hundred lunches in the faculty dining room. I have never once felt anything when Celeste touched his arm. She dated him briefly thirty-some years ago, back when they were both young and stupid, and they've been friends ever since. It's famous. Everyone knows.

But this time my stomach did a thing. A hot, sour, completely unwelcome thing. Jealousy. Actual jealousy, at a family reunion, in front of two hundred Duncans.

Well. That's going to be a problem, I thought.

I adjusted my bag and kept walking like I hadn't just had a small internal crisis over a man I'd never even had lunch alone with.

"Lauren! You made it!" Celeste spotted me and waved both arms, which is very her. She's fifty-five, short, loud, and wears jewelry you can hear coming. "Come here, come meet my cousin Britney, she teaches high school English and she doesn't believe me that you exist!"

"I exist," I said, and let myself be dragged over and introduced to approximately four Duncans whose names I lost immediately. Roberto drifted over too, hands in his pockets, smiling that way he does.

"Professor Jones," he said. "You found the place. I got lost twice."

"The GPS tried to kill me," I said. "There's a road out there that's basically a rumor."

Celeste laughed and looped her arm through mine, and I caught Roberto's eye over her shoulder for maybe half a second, and then we all got pulled apart by the general gravity of a party.

The buffet line opened around five. I ended up in it behind Roberto, which I swear was an accident, and then I stayed in it behind Roberto, which absolutely was not.

"Are you following me?" he asked, glancing back with a grin. He was holding a plate already loaded with what looked like three kinds of potato salad.

"Celeste said the deviled eggs are up front and I believe her about food the way I believe her about music," I said. "So yes. I'm following you. Deviled eggs."

"Smart woman." He stepped aside and waved me past him to the eggs. "I've been telling people that for four years and nobody on the hiring committee ever listened."

"Oh, don't start with the hiring committee," I said, scooping eggs onto my plate. "It's been four years. Let it go."

"Never. They hired a man who thinks Caravaggio was Dutch." He picked up a fork and stabbed it gently into a watermelon cube, like he was disciplining it. "Anyway. Are you staying the weekend? Celeste said the guest rooms fill up fast."

"Cottage by the garden. She gave me the one with the desk, because she knows me."

"Good. Because I brought a surprise for tonight, and I'd hate for you to have already left."

I looked at him. He was completely straight-faced, loading his fork with melon, calm as a lake.

"A surprise," I said.

"Mm-hm."

"At a family reunion."

"Those are exactly the places surprises belong," he said. "Statistically speaking."

"Roberto, you say that like there's statistics on it."

"There might be. I'm an academic. I make things up with confidence." He smiled and walked off toward a table, and I stood there with my deviled eggs thinking, okay, he's joking, it's a joke, it's probably a bottle of wine or an ugly sweater or some PowerPoint about Caravaggio.

I decided it was a joke and moved on. Mostly moved on. Maybe eighty percent moved on.

Saturday morning there was croquet. The Duncans take their croquet very seriously, which I learned the hard way when a man of about seventy named Chandler gave me a fifteen-minute lecture on wicket etiquette before I'd even held a mallet.

They play doubles. Partners get drawn from a hat, or that's the official story, but Celeste ran the drawing and I have known Celeste for twenty years and she has never once let anything important happen by actual chance. My name came out paired with Roberto's. Shocking. Stunning. Nobody saw it coming except everyone.

"Were those cards even shuffled?" I asked her quietly.

"Shuffling is a suggestion," she said, patting my cheek. "Play nice."

So we teamed up against Chandler and a woman named Mia who turned out to be ruthlessly good. Roberto and I lost the first two wickets immediately. The problem, he informed me, was my grip.

"May I?" he asked, standing behind me, one hand lifted. "Your wrist is locking. It's why you keep sending the ball into the hydrangeas."

"The hydrangeas started it," I said. But I said yes, and he stepped in close and put his hand over mine on the mallet handle.

And okay. His hand was warm. His chest was about two inches from my back. He adjusted my fingers one at a time, murmuring little things like "there" and "looser, looser, you're strangling it," and my entire nervous system apparently relocated to my right hand. I could smell the sunscreen on him and something else underneath, some clean soap smell, and I was fifty-five percent listening to the mallet advice and forty-five percent thinking about nothing useful at all.

"Swing from the shoulder, not the wrist," he said. "Try it."

I swung. The ball went dead straight through the wicket. The small crowd of Duncans who had gathered to watch applauded, because apparently they applaud everything.

"Ha." I turned around and he was grinning at me, closer than I expected, and neither of us stepped back for a second. Two seconds. Then Chandler cleared his throat meaningfully and we both moved.

We lost the match. Badly. Mia was a shark. But I couldn't tell you the final score, because I spent most of it aware of exactly where Roberto was standing on the lawn.

Dinner was long and loud and wonderful, roast pork and about nine casseroles and toasts from three separate generations of Duncans. Afterward the DJ started up in the barn and the young ones migrated toward it, and the old ones migrated toward the porch rockers, and I went looking for a bathroom and instead found Roberto alone on the veranda at the back of the main house, standing at the railing with a beer he clearly wasn't drinking.

Great escape plan, Jones, I thought. Followed him right to it.

"Hey," I said from the doorway. "Everything okay? You've got the face you make during budget meetings."

He turned and laughed a little. "Am I that obvious?"

"To me, yes. I've watched you sit through years of budget meetings."

"Then you're the only one." He gestured at the railing next to him. "Want to hide from the party for a minute?"

I walked over and stood beside him. Below us the garden went dark and green, and from the barn came some song neither of us would ever admit to knowing.

"Can I tell you something?" he said after a while.

"You usually do."

"This is a real one, though." He turned the beer bottle slowly in his hands. "I've been coming to these reunions for a few years, and I've never told anyone at work this. Celeste doesn't even know, and she's known me since we were young, practically."

That got my attention. "Now I'm scared."

"Don't be. It's not bad. It's just..." He exhaled. "I collect latex clothing. Have since I was in my thirties. Shirts, gloves, that kind of thing. I had a partner for eighteen years who loved it as much as I do, and when that ended I just sort of folded it up and put it away. Pardon the pun."

I'll be honest. My first reaction was not scandal. My first reaction was a picture, immediate and vivid, of Roberto in something shiny and black, and my face went warm in the dark.

"Latex," I said. Carefully. Like a person handling glass.

"Latex. The shiny rubber stuff. I know how it sounds." He shrugged. "It's not a joke, and it's not a phase, and it's been sitting in boxes in my closet for ten years. I brought a bag of it this weekend, actually. That was my surprise. And now that I've said it out loud I would like to jump off this veranda."

"Don't you dare," I said. "There are Duncans down there. They'd make it a memorial wicket."

He laughed, and it broke the tension enough that we could both breathe, and then he looked at me with something new in his face. Something careful.

"You're not laughing," he said.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

We stood there in the dark with the music going, and I was already thinking of about six questions, and all of them started with can I.

I did not sleep well, and I want to be accurate about why, so here goes. I slept terribly. Every time I closed my eyes my brain served up the same image, over and over, like a restaurant that only serves one dish. Roberto, standing in some dim room, wearing a black latex shirt that fit him like a second skin. Shiny. Tight. Completely unreal and completely vivid at the same time.

In the dream he asked me how I felt about it, calm as anything, and in the dream I said something clever, and then I woke up at two in the morning with my heart pounding and absolutely zero cleverness available. I lay there in the cottage by the garden, staring at the ceiling, fanning myself with the corner of the sheet like some overheated heroine in a novel I would never assign to students.

"Get a grip, Jones," I told the ceiling. The ceiling did not respond.