The Syllabus

My sixty-third birthday is in November, and I have decided to treat it the way I used to treat manuscript deadlines, with a mixture of dread and an odd comfort that at least something was arriving on schedule. I turned fifty-nine the year my husband died, and the three years since have gone by in a blur I mostly slept through. Grief does that. It hands you a calendar with all the pages torn out and dares you to write something on the blank ones.

So when the community college in town posted a part-time position for someone to copyedit the course catalogs and faculty handbooks, I applied, mostly to have somewhere to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The pay was a joke. The work was soothing, in the way that fixing other people's commas is soothing when you cannot fix your own life. I got a small office in the library annex, a radiator that clanked like a ghost with opinions, and a door with my name on it. Tiff Ellison, Editor. I have to admit that seeing my name in vinyl letters on a door did more for my morale than three years of well-meaning casseroles.

The wall between my office and the next room is thin. I learned this on my second Thursday, when the room next door began producing a steady rhythmic thumping, pause, thumping, pause, like a patient and enormous heartbeat. I assumed it was the boiler. The boiler, I reasoned, might have an office. Then the thumping stopped, there was a distinct metallic clatter, a grunt, and a low word I will not repeat here because this is a respectable establishment.

Naturally I went to investigate. Curiosity has always been my worst quality and my best one, depending on who you ask.

The next room turned out to be the maintenance office, and the person lying on a rubber mat doing push-ups with textbook form turned out to be Gabe Marsh, sixty-three years old, whom I had not seen since our college reunion five years ago, when we were fifty-seven and fifty-eight and had a brief, passionate affair that ended the way reunion affairs do, with an exchange of email addresses that neither of us ever used. He was on the fortieth push-up, which I counted out of spite, and when he saw me standing in his doorway he lost his rhythm and nearly put his nose through the mat.

"Tiff Ellison," he said, from the floor, sounding like someone who had just seen a ghost with better hair.

"Gabe Marsh," I said. "You owe me a coffee from five years ago."

He laughed and got up, and we did the awkward hug thing where two people who have seen each other naked once cannot figure out where their hands go. He looked good. Silver at the temples, forearms that suggested three decades of hauling boilers up three flights of stairs, and the same crooked grin he had at twenty-two when we were both in Professor Halloway's survey course, back when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-two and I spent the entire semester pretending I had not noticed him.

We caught up standing among mops. He had worked maintenance at the college for thirty years, which frankly is longer than some marriages I could name. He had never married. I told him about Walter, about the three empty years, about the vinyl letters on my door. He listened the way some men listen, which is actually listening, and then he said the thing that turned the whole afternoon sideways.

"I knew it was you," he said. "The name on the door. I saw it my first week back after summer session. I've been doing my lunch workout in there ever since, and every single time I wonder if you can hear me through the wall."

"You knew I could hear you through the wall?"

"Well. I hoped," he said, and had the decency to look slightly embarrassed about it.

The next Tuesday there was a note under the wall. It had been slid through the gap where the carpet ends, folded into a neat triangle, and it read: Tenth floor of the science building has a floorboard that squeaks. Do NOT fix it. It is the only thing keeping me humble. I laughed out loud alone in my office, which I believe is one of the healthier things a person can do at work, and slid back a note pointing out that his comma usage in the note was, technically, fine, but that his thump-to-rest ratio was inconsistent and I had started timing it.

From there it became a correspondence. A funny note under the wall every Tuesday and Thursday. He told me about a plumbing incident in the women's locker room that he described as the worst day of his professional life, in three paragraphs, with a punchline. I told him about the fiction submissions I moonlight on, and how every amateur writer in the Midwest uses the word "suddenly" at least nine times per chapter. He wrote back that he had read one of my edits, by accident, a facilities memo, and that I had made a sentence about gutter replacement feel like poetry.

I want to explain what was happening to me, because it surprised me. Somewhere in those three blank years I had stopped being a person who started things. I answered things. I reacted to things. I let the days happen at me. But writing that fourth note, the bold one, I felt the old machinery turn over. The one that decides, instead of waits. Widowhood had made me into an editor of my own life in the worst way, red pen in hand, never authoring.

So the fourth note said: Your form on the push-ups is good but your rest intervals are sloppy. What you need is a supervisor.

I folded it into the same neat triangle he used, because mockery is a love language, and slid it under the wall, and then I sat there with my heart doing an unprofessional amount of work while the radiator clanked and the clock crawled. I had, in one sentence, offered a sixty-three-year-old maintenance supervisor a domination arrangement over his exercise routine, in writing, through a wall, on college property. My legal counsel would have advised against it. My legal counsel has been dead three years and I have been making do with my own judgment, which is a terrifying sentence to type.

The reply came back in under two minutes, which told me he had been sitting there the whole time, and it was written in careful block letters, the kind a nervous man uses when he is trying not to smudge anything.

I would like that very much. I should tell you I have some history with this sort of arrangement, from a while back, and I know how it's supposed to work. Safewords and such. If that sounds like a lot, we can just be two people who drink the coffee you're still owed.

Under it, in smaller letters, almost squeezed against the bottom edge of the page, he had added: I'm free Thursday after five. The library closes at six. The maintenance office has a lock on the inside and no cameras, I checked, which sounds worse written down than it did in my head.

I sat with it for a while. Then I took out a fresh sheet of paper, the good cream stock I keep for rejection letters, and wrote one line.

Thursday. Bring your own water bottle. The supervisor does not share.

Thursday came slow. I worked my real shift, red-penned a manuscript about a haunted barn, and at four forty-five I packed up my bag and told myself I was locking up early because the radiator noise gave me a headache. Nobody bought it, least of all me.

Gabe was waiting near the library entrance at five sharp, and I want to note here that he was early, which told me something about the kind of man I was dealing with. Sixty-three years old, hair gone white at the temples, forearms that thirty years of wrenches and boilers had built for him, and he stood there holding a water bottle like a boy outside the principal's office. He is sixty-three, I should say plainly, and I am sixty-two, and neither of us has any business being nervous at those ages, and yet.

"I brought the bottle," he said, holding it up.

"I can see that. Walk with me."

I led him into the library stacks, back where the oversized art books live, because nobody has wanted an oversized art book since about 1998 and the college knows it. There is a study carrel back there with a chair, and I took the chair, and I let him stand. That part was deliberate. I had thought about it all Wednesday night, lying awake in the house Walter and I bought together, and what I decided was this: if we were going to do it, we were going to do it honestly, with the terms laid out in plain English before anybody touched anybody.

So I laid them out. "Here's how I understand it. You have done this before, I have done this before, and the failure mode in both cases is assuming the other person can read your mind. So we don't assume. We talk. You tell me what you want, I tell you what I want, and anything either of us can't say out loud doesn't happen."

He nodded. Then he surprised me, because instead of launching into his own list he asked me a question first. "Can I ask what you did before? You said on the note you knew how this works."

"I was married to Walter for thirty-one years. He died three years ago. And Walter was a very capable man, a take-charge man, everyone's rock, and what almost nobody knew, and what I will deny knowing if you ever bring it up at a faculty mixer, is that behind our closed door he liked being told what to do. By me. He'd had a brutal mother and a brutal career and he wanted one hour a week where somebody else held the wheel.