“And your tux is being delivered this afternoon, so don’t forget to bring it inside,” Poppy was saying.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes and yawning. It was still dark, but Poppy’s heels clicked across the hardwood floor as she leaned down to give me a quick kiss. Even in the dark I could see her red lipstick.
I grabbed her elbows as she came closer, pulling her onto my lap. “C’mere,” I said sleepily.
“I have to go,” she protested faintly, but my hand was already between her legs, slipping past that red thong.
“Mmm-hmm?”
“I’m going to be late and…Oh. Mmm.”
My fingers were inside her now, probing gently. “You were saying about my tux?” I asked huskily, feeling her getting slippery for me.
“It’s for the gala on Saturday,” she breathed. “For the opening of the flagship studio. Want you…oh. Oh my God.”
“I know you want me,” I assured her, pushing her thong farther to the side and then hiking up her dress.
“I mean—want you there. Means a lot to me.”
Her voice had changed, and I looked up at her, meeting her gaze in the low light spilling in from the bathroom. “Please, Tyler. I want you by my side at the gala. I’ve worked so hard and I want you there to see it and tell me you’re proud of me.”
Her voice was almost shy as she admitted it, and through my sleep and lust-filled fog, my chest squeezed. “Of course, lamb. I’ll be there. And you do know that I’m proud of you, right? Of everything you’ve done with The Danforth Studio?”
She bit her lip and nodded, and I took that opportunity to rock my groin against her. “I’m also so fucking proud of this pussy. I want to tell everyone I know about it. I want it on the front page of every society paper.”
She laughed, but the laughing turned to moans as I finally sank inside of her, and those moans turned to cries, and my poor wife ended up being late to work.
I cultivate guilt the way a farmer cultivates land.
Long furrows of regret here, heaped mounds of shame there. I weed away the excuses and the rationalizations, I water the sprouts of self-loathing with more self-loathing, I harvest it all and store it away—silos of contrition and self-condemnation and the knowledge I can’t ever atone for all the things I’ve done wrong.
The sister I didn’t save.
The vocation I abandoned.
The wife I’m neglecting.
Of course, I know—cerebrally—that life isn’t atonement. That sin and redemption aren’t an exchange economy where you can pay x amount of guilt or service or sacrifice for y amount of sin.
But it sure feels that way sometimes.
I read somewhere that shame and guilt activate the reward centers in your brain, that indulging in these negative feelings actually gives your brain a small dopamine-fueled boost. And maybe that’s all my guilt amounts to—an almost instinctive prodding of my limbic system, an addict unscrewing the cap on another swig because I can’t help myself.
But I’ve lived with my guilt so long, I don’t know how to let it go.
I don’t know if I want to.
All of this stormed and circled in my mind that morning as I did my usual Tuesday morning routine. I went to the gym for a couple hours, drowning out my thoughts with loud music and sweat. And then I drove down to Trenton to help out a local soup kitchen, bundling hygiene items and sorting through old clothes.
And then I called Millie around lunchtime, like I did every Tuesday. Millie had been my first friend when I moved to Weston to become a priest, and she had also been one of my most stalwart allies as I left the priesthood. It had almost been more difficult to leave her than my own family when I moved to New England.
“Tyler,” she croaked when she answered the phone. “How are you, my boy?”
Drowning in this stupid dissertation. Worried about alienating my wife. Unsure what happens after I get this degree. “Busy,” I answered neutrally as I guided my truck onto I-295.
“Don’t lie to me,” she chided. “I hear all your thoughts in that voice of yours. You never were any good at hiding your feelings.”
No, I supposed I wasn’t.
“How’s Pinewoods Village?” I asked, changing the subject so we didn’t have to talk about the hurricane of stress that was my life right now.
“Terrible,” she complained. “It’s full of old people here.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that. Millie had just turned ninety-two years old and still considered herself apart from “those geezers,” as she often called them. She’d lived independently (and very actively) in Weston, Missouri until just last year, when a vicious bout with pneumonia and a broken hip made it impossible to live on her own. Her children had decided to move her to a nursing home in Kansas City, and after a life being the woman who got shit done—first in her job as one of the first female engineers hired by the state of Missouri—and then later in her church and her community, Millie now had to let people do things for her. Personal things, like helping her brush her hair or tie her shoes.
She was frustrated and miserable and I couldn’t blame her. I would be, too. Which made me all the more determined not to unload my problems on her.
As if she could sense what I was thinking, she said, “You might as well tell me, Tyler. Please. It will distract me from this place. They keep trying to feed me prune juice. Do you know how many years I’ve managed not to drink that stuff?”
I snorted. “I suppose they won’t let you add some gin to that juice?”
“The Baptists run this place and they’re fucking teetotalers,” the ninety-two year old woman said. “Now tell me what’s going on.”
I flicked on my wipers as a light drizzle began to fall. “It’s really nothing, Millie. My dissertation defense is ten days away, and once that’s over, everything will be good again.”
“So you admit it’s not good now?”
I sighed. “I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have. What is it? Too much studying? Is The Danforth Studio taking too much of Poppy’s time?”
“Both,” I admitted. “It’s both. And Poppy hasn’t said anything about how busy I am, but I feel so guilty…”
“But you love the research and writing, right?”
“Of course I do. I love it so much, which is why this is so hard. And she loves The Danforth Studio and all the work she’s doing. Still…I can’t help but feel like we’re slipping away from each other.”
Millie took a minute to answer. “Has she done anything to make you feel that way? Or are you just inventing doom?”
I almost sputtered at that. “I don’t invent doom—”
“My dear boy, you most certainly do. Look back and really think—is there anything she’s said or done to indicate she’s angry with you? Or frustrated with your absence? Or are you simply projecting your own guilt onto her?”
I hit my turn signal as I crossed lanes to get to the exit ramp for Princeton. “Well. When you put it that way, I guess…maybe I have been letting my guilt take the reins there.”
She coughed—a wet, hacking noise that made the back of my neck prickle. It was the kind of cough that meant hospitals and doctors and tests. It was the kind of cough that, at Millie’s age, couldn’t be ignored.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked quietly. I didn’t want to contribute to her feeling infirm or helpless, but at the same time, I worried about her. She was part of my family now, as close to my mother and my brothers as either of my grandmothers had been when they were alive. And suddenly, I felt very, very aware of the geographical distance between us.
“I’m fine,” she said after she finished her coughing fit. She was trying to hide it, but I could tell she was having trouble catching her breath. “Just a little cold.”
“Please tell a nurse. They can give you something.”
She made a scoffing dismissive noise. “They can give me prune juice and more bedrest. And if I spend another day in bed, I will starting digging an escape tunnel with the spoon they send in with my Jell-O.”
That made me laugh. “Okay, Millie. I believe you. Just feel better and have a good Thanksgiving, okay? I know Mom is planning on stopping by.”
“I hope she stops by with some real food,” Millie muttered. “Goodbye, Tyler.”
“Goodbye, Millie.”
I parked my truck in front of the townhouse, the wipers still squeaking in slow, disconsolate arcs, thinking about what Millie had said. My guilt was my language, my sustenance, my pulse. And maybe Millie was right—I was letting it bleed into parts of my life where it didn’t belong.
I leaned my head against the steering wheel, not sure what to pray for. It felt wrong to pray for my guilt to disappear, just as it felt wrong to pray that Poppy would indulge this ridiculous degree of mine for just a couple weeks longer.
Help, I prayed instead. Help me.
Today was not a magic day. There was no well-timed song on the radio with lyrics that fit my life just so. There was no bright chink in the steel-gray clouds above me. There wasn’t even that feeling I sometimes I had that at least my prayer had been heard, had been logged away in some heavenly messaging system.
Today there was just more drizzle and the eternal November cold and the whirr and squeak of the windshield wipers.
Today there was just me and my guilt, and God was nowhere to be found.
I called Poppy after the undergraduate lecture I taught and before my advisor meeting, and when she picked up, her voice was sunny and polished and breathy all at once.
“Tyler,” she said, her voice half smile, half murmur. I got hard just hearing it, casually crossing my legs as I waited outside my advisor’s office.
“Lamb,” I murmured back, relishing the way her breathing increased, wishing I could see if a flush was creeping up her chest and neck. “I wanted to see how your day was going.”
“It’s been busy, but very good,” she said. “Just trying to get everything together for Thanksgiving and then the gala right after that, but things have just been falling into place. People here have been supporting this whole event so much…supporting me so much. I really have the best staff imaginable. And the best job. And I love it. And I love you.”
A glow settled somewhere in the middle of my chest. Poppy was honest and elegant and thoughtful, but she was rarely this overtly cheery, and hearing that husky voice I loved so much filled with happiness…well, it made me happy just to hear it. A bubble of hope floated in my mind: Millie was right, of course. I had been projecting. Poppy was fine. My marriage was fine. It would all be okay—better than okay even.
Buoyed by this thought, I teased, “You’re in a good mood for only having gotten a few hours of sleep.”
She laughed and I had to reach down to adjust my slacks. Fuck, that laugh got me so hot for her. “Maybe I’m in a good mood because of the reason I missed so much sleep,” she teased back.
“I love hearing you like this,” I said. “I love hearing you happy.”
“You better get used to it,” she said, a little coyly, and that glow in my chest intensified. So she realized that this trial of my PhD was almost at an end. That things would be back to the way they should be soon.
“Trust me, lamb, the minute my defense is finished, I’m dragging you off to bed and I’m not letting you leave for a month. I’m going to be yours, body and mind and soul, for as long as it takes to prove to you—”
Her laugh echoed in the earpiece again and I stopped, a smile on my face, to ask her what she thought was so funny about my plans to make up for lost time, and then I heard muffled chattering, as if she were talking with her mouth pointed away from the phone.
And then I heard a male voice.
Anton Rees.
The smile slowly slid off my face as I listened to their indistinguishable back-and-forth, the warm and friendly cadence of their words, the earnest tone he used with her. And suddenly it occurred to me that all of the things she said about having a great staff, about having so much support—she meant Anton. Anton was there, being great and supportive, and here I was, a thirty-three year old PhD candidate with an erection in a fluorescent-lit hallway.
Jealousy stabbed at me. Stabbed and stabbed, until finally Poppy said, in that merry kind of voice that meant she’d been laughing, “Sorry, Tyler. Anton came in with some news.”
“I want you this evening,” I cut in, without bothering to transition from one subject to another. “I want you ass up with your hands clawing at the bed while you come around my cock.”
I didn’t care that only a door separated me from my advisor or that another student could walk by at any moment. I only cared about staking my claim. About showing her how supportive Tyler Bell could be while he gave his wife back-to-back anal orgasms.
Her breath hitched. “Jesus Christ.”
“So that’s a yes?”
There was a pause, a pause where I could feel her palpable want even through the phone, as if it were pulsing through whatever satellite waves made phones work. But when she answered, she was regretful. “You know I want to, but there’s still so much to do for the gala…”
Rejection scraped its serrated blade along the skin of my heart. “Oh. Right. Of course.”
“And you’ll get me all day tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that,” she added hurriedly. “And I’ll be all yours then. It’s just right now, Anton and I are still scrambling to lock everything into place for Saturday night.”
Anton and I.
Anton and I.
“Of course, Poppy,” I said again, hoping she couldn’t hear how hurt and ashamed and angry I was. Not angry with her, but angry with myself. Why had I come on to her like a horny teenager, like me fucking her was the most important thing that she could possibly have on her mind? What kind of selfish prick was I?
Anton would probably never come on to her like that.
He’s not coming on to her, I told myself firmly. Every time you’ve met him, he’s been perfectly nice. Perfectly polite. You’re letting jealousy invent scenarios that aren’t happening.
Except what if those scenarios were happening?
Dammit, Tyler. Stop it.
“And I’ll probably be late tonight, but I know that you’ll be working late at the library anyway, so I still may get home before you.” More muffled chatter, Anton again.
“Okay,” I said, as evenly as I could. “I’ll definitely see you tomorrow then. For our trip to your parents’.”
“It’s a date,” she affirmed, but despite the upward inflection of her tone and the sweet goodbye she added after it, I could tell that her mind was already back on her work. Back to Anton.
“Goodbye, lamb,” I said softly and pressed end.
She was right. I’d probably be working late anyway, so it didn’t matter that she would be doing the same. And we’d have Thanksgiving together.
But as the student scheduled before me left my advisor’s office and I stood to gather my things, I felt that small bubble of hope pop, the space where it had been filling with the leaden weight of guilt and suspicion.