THE RIDE

Diane laughed.  “When I step in close to him, he takes two steps back.”

     “So, don’t do that,” Patsy replied, smiling.

     They were going through the lunch line in the dining room.  They had both taken the soup and sandwich.  When they came off the line with tray in hand, they began to scan the large room for a table. 

     Walking side by side Diane responded, “I like him.  He’s nice.”

     “It doesn’t hurt that he’s good looking, too.”

     They found a table on the window aisle where they could look across campus as they ate and also see who was entering the commons.  She wanted to look out for Pauley, the man about whom they were speaking.

     “I can’t seem to connect with him.  It’s not for lack of trying,” Diane said, the frustration evident in both her face and tone.

     “You gotta change your strategy.  Make him come to you,” Patsy said, as though she was much practiced in the art.

     “How do you do that?”

     “Flirt.  How else?”

     They both laughed.  Patricia Klinkhammer, in her second year on campus, taught political science.  Diane Bonner taught American literature and was in her first year.  The two women had become fast friends because they had so much in common.  Only a year apart in age, they were both local, had gone to the State U., and wound up by design teaching in their hometown college.  They had never had much to do with each other before becoming colleagues on the college’s faculty.  But both being single and unattached, they sought each other out for society and lunched together every day. 

     “Ever notice how when you step in close to some guy, his eyes go all open and he becomes alert, how he looks at you?”

     “I don’t do those sorts of things.  You’re terrible.”

     “With Pauley, when I do that, you know, step in close, his eyes become narrow and intense, like he’s drilling holes in me.  Makes me feel creepy.  He backs away.  And then he talks a mile a minute, like he’s on a timer.”

     “I don’t get you,” Patsy said chastisingly, dropping the spoon into the little bowl on her tray.  “Why do you play him like that?  If you make him nervous, find another way.  Or leave him alone!”

     “I think he likes me,” Diane said, ignoring the tone in her friend’s voice. 

     She took a small bite of her sandwich, looking out the window. 

     “That’s him now,” Patsy said, gesturing by a glance out the window.  “He is gorgeous.  You think he’ll notice us when he comes in?”

     “He’s always looking my way at meetings or in the dining room here.  Haven’t you noticed?  When I catch him looking at me, he gets all red and tries to make it look like it was just a chance glance in my direction.  It happens all the time.  But when I try to show interest in him, he gets all goofy and spooky.”

     “Romance!  I hate it,” Patsy said intensely.  “I’d much rather it was a lottery, you know?  Save all that effort.  You know, you get his ticket, he has no choice!  Done.  Life would be so easy.”

     “Blah, what an idea!” Diane replied, sticking out her tongue.  “With my luck, I’d get the ticket of some guy who has that five o’clock shadow right after he shaves.  Fat, too.  Size fourteen shoes.  Big ears.”

     They both laughed.  As they nibbled their sandwiches, Pauley came into the dining room, shot a glance at them which shyly played upon Diane, then turned to the line and picked up a tray.

     “You’re right,” Patsy said.  “He lingered on you, Diane.  I can confirm.  Pauley’s got a thing for you.  Too bad.”

     “Why do you say that?  You got a thing for him, too?”

     “No.  I mean too bad because you’re hooked.  Poor kid.  If I were you, I’d go join a singles club.  Saturday nights out with different guys.  That’d help.”

     “Your such a cynic, Patsy.”

     “Me?  A cynic?  What about you!  You’re hopeless.  If some guy took two steps back from me when I got close, I’d get out my eraser.  Take my advice, girl, leave that guy alone.  He’s got problems.”

She didn’t leave him alone.  She got more aggressive.  A week later, she marched up to his office during office hours when he had students with him, poked her head in and said, “Pauley, can we talk a minute?”

     He excused himself to the two students and stepped into the hall.

     “I need help,” she said.  “You leave campus around four, don’t you?”

     “I do,” he said, a look of concern on his face.

     “I need a ride to pick up my car from Myer’s service station.  They close at five.  I have no way to get there.”

     He looked at his watch.  She could tell he was vacillating and decided to give him a push.

     “Thanks, Pauley.  I’ll be here at five till.  See you then.”

     Not to give him a chance to respond, she tapped his upper arm and turned, walking toward the staircase.  As she reached the top step, she glanced back to see if he was watching her.  He was.  But more, he was smiling.  She nodded and smiled back, feeling triumphant. 

     Her office in the English Department was in the building across the quad from his.  They were both first-year faculty, she in English, he in biology.  The fall semester had passed quickly, what with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas.  The spring semester had only the one-week break, and so it lingered, the persistent cold and frequent snowfalls adding to the slowness of time passing.  But spring was breaking out, and after so many months of confinement, she felt expansive.  Finally, she thought, the ice is breaking.

     When she left the science building, the air was balmy, almost warm.  The dogwoods and crabapples shone their brilliant whites and reds, and the fountain in the middle of the quad cheerily bubbled, its spray swaying back and forth in the light breeze.  She had about an hour before having to return, and she didn’t want to go back to her office.  She had no appointments and no grading to do and had gotten her preps for the next day done earlier in the afternoon.  Feeling free, she decided to go to the library and pull a journal from the rack, find herself a comfortable chair, and spend the hour reading.

     She had wandered aimlessly toward the fountain as she contemplated going to the library.  Four students, two guys and two girls, were tossing a frisbee on the lawn behind the women’s dorm, and three women, already wearing shorts, were crossing from the dorm to the campus center.  As she stopped in front of the fountain, feeling the spray’s mist on her face, she folded her arms across her chest and stared into the water.  That’s when she noticed the two students who had been in Pauley’s office pass by.  She didn’t know why, but she felt seized with alarm, as though the two had been cut off and sent away by Pauley.  She turned toward the quad entrance of the Rippley Science Building expecting to see Pauley come out and make off somewhere, as though escaping.  She felt awful.

     Deciding that if he wasn’t there when she returned she would just take Patsy’s advice and go join a single’s club, she hurried back to his office.  It was 3:20 when she reached the hall at the top of the stairs.  She had been there at this hour before.  Pauley was the only one on the top floor of the building after three, everyone else either doing late afternoon labs or gone for the day.  That’s why she went there when she did. 

     As she neared his office, she heard him talking and paused, keeping back from the door.  He sounded both frustrated and angry.

     “I don’t give a damn….  I don’t care….  Just leave it….  Just let it go….  I’m not and I won’t.  Don’t call me here.  Call in the evening, at home.  Goodbye….  Goodbye!”

     She heard him slam the phone into its cradle, and the sound made her feel like she had had a sudden glimpse into a dark secret.  She was frozen between turning and fleeing down the stairs so as not to be caught eavesdropping and boldly walking into the office and asking him if he was all right and if he wanted to talk.  Then she heard him breathe a loud moaning sigh.  The feeling of inadvertently learning something about him that he would resent her knowing overcame her.  Clearly, he thought he was alone, so she decided not to intrude and left. 

Pauley was not a dutiful son, but then his mother, upon whom he had just slammed the phone, had not earned his affection.  When she divorced his father and moved out of the house, she left him, too, and for several years was too much involved in getting herself established again to have anything to do with him.  The divorce was ugly, and his father bled emotionally, so much so that Pauley bled too and resented his mother for it and was thankful that she didn’t fight his father’s demand for custody.  When she remarried, she did attempt to reach out to him, but by then he was sixteen, old enough to see his mother with a critical eye. 

     Sensing that, she adopted strategies to keep lines of communication open with him but also to keep him at a comfortable distance.  What turned him finally against her  was her denunciation of his father, which was vicious.  After all, his father raised him, loved him, never put himself selfishly first in their lives together.  Pauley knew the difference between his mother and his father and wouldn’t tolerate her viciousness toward him.  He did not, in spite of that, turn his back on her.  He kept a proper respect—after all, she was his mother—but he also kept himself from feeling anything for her. 

     Now that her life had taken a sudden turn for the worse, according to her, she reached out to him for consolation and emotional support.  After getting to know her second husband, Pauley rather liked him.  He was an honest and sincere person, someone with whom he could talk.  He was, unfortunately, also compassionating and pliant and allowed himself to be manipulated by his wife, so when she finally divorced him, too, she walked away with almost everything he owned.  Observing this devastation, which occurred when Pauley was a freshman in college, with a certain knowingness, having his father’s pain as a primer for understanding such betrayals, Pauley resented his mother more than ever. 

     After the divorce, she had to face the prospect of living alone, and because her second ex was well known and beloved in his community, she could no longer live in the house she had contrived to take from him as part of the settlement.  She spent years moving around in search of another man until, returning to Des Moines from a trip to Fort Lauderdale, she encountered the man who became her third ex.  They were seated together on the plane.  By the time they landed, she had filled him with a story of heroic survival in the face of harsh abuse and heartless abandonment.  He was taken by her stoicism, kept in touch with her, began seeing her, and finally put the question.  When she added his resources to those of her first two exes, she realized she was pretty much fit for life.  No longer needing a man, she wanted now only to dote on her son.  Her move to Pauley’s neighborhood came as a surprise to him.  He had resolved not to let it change his life.

     His life had its tensions and its ups and downs.  He had finished his graduate work in biology and taken a position in a small college which he believed was the ideal situation for him.  The one thing he had never imagined would trouble him did, however, become a major source of trouble and anxiety: women.  Pauley was a fine-looking man, both athletic and gregarious, but he had the one serious shortcoming in his everyday life, an aversion to women. 

     He had no problems professionally with women.  He worked well with the two women in his department, both of whom were married, and had no problems with his female students, nor with the woman who served as his dean.  These kinds of relationships, the ones in the professional domain, were no problem for him.  It was when someone attempted intimacy that the problems emerged. 

     He spoke to his father once about it, but all his father said was that he’d get over it when the right person came along.  Pauley was skeptical.  He was attracted to women, enjoyed the casual banter that took place before and after meetings on campus or in the dining room during the noon hour, but when someone like Diane came close to him, came close with the obvious intention of starting something between them, he felt suddenly struck dumb, and the anticipation of that inability to talk always provoked intense anxiety, which revealed itself in a compensating chatter, which he could neither stop nor control. 

     When Diane left him after asking for a ride, he felt something new inside, something warm.  He liked her, and she seemed to know it and to feel the same about him, at least, that’s how he interpreted her constant glancing at him, her smiles, and her unending efforts to make conversation with him.  He both dreaded and looked forward to her approaches.  On this occasion, he felt something very different.  Comfortable?  At ease?  He couldn’t explain it. 

     When he returned to his office, he apologetically dismissed the two students who were waiting, sat at his desk, and replayed in his mind everything he could recall of Diane Bonner’s appearance—her dark hair, the sweater over her shoulders, the tan slacks, the gold chain around her neck, the color in her cheeks, her voice, the tap she gave him on the arm.  It all made him feel at ease somehow, like there was something right about his getting to know her.  That she came to him for a ride pleased him immensely, and he sat back in his chair and couldn’t help the smile that broke out on his face.

     That’s when the phone rang.  Anticipating her, he reached eagerly for the handset.  But it was his mother’s voice he heard, not Diane’s.  He listened uncomprehendingly for a moment, then came to his senses.

     Now, as he sat back in his chair, the emotional turmoil that commonly exploded in him at the approach of a woman made his hands shake.  He tried to suppress the anxiety, but that only made it worse.  He looked at his wrist watch and saw that he had half an hour before Diane would return.  Good, he thought.  I should calm down by then.  He tried again to recall her smile as she stood at the top of the stairs, and he felt himself calming.  He kept his eyes closed.  He wanted to do this with her.  Why the hell did she have to call at this very moment!

     He was sitting like this when Diane gently knocked on his door.  He opened his eyes and looked at her.  She came to him in that moment, when he had been half awake, as someone he had long known, someone familiar, someone with whom he had had a longtime relationship.  He realized he felt that way because he had been daydreaming about her and then there she was. 

     She looked at him curiously, smiling.  She thought he had been napping.  How weird!  For a moment, as each looked at the other, she tried to untangle the implications of his sleeping at his desk while awaiting her return.  She came to no conclusion, but she felt it was truly weird.

     He got up, reached for a stack of his students’ lab reports, shoved them into his backpack, shoved his grade book in behind it, threw the pack over his shoulder, and said, “All ready?”

     “Ready,” she responded.

     He closed and locked the door.  She noticed that his hand shook as he put his keys back in his pocket and then recalled his anger on the phone.

     “Something the matter?” she asked.  “You look upset.”

     He just shrugged and walked down the steps beside her.

     She decided not to pursue it, though she felt very much in the midst of whatever it was that made him so odd.  As they reached the door onto the quad, he stopped and she stood beside him.  She could feel his paralysis, as though something she could not see prevented him from going any further.

     “What’s the matter, Pauley,” she finally said, after standing for what seemed forever in front of the door.

     She pushed it open, holding it for him, and she could sense that he couldn’t move through, that it wasn’t a matter of will for him, of wanting.  She could see that he wanted to.  So she reached out, took his arm, and pulled him through.  He let himself go with the tug and pass through the door.  Once outside, he could walk again.

     They walked in silence to his old Camry in the faculty parking lot across the street.  He threw his backpack onto the back seat, unlocked the door for her, and then walked round to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel.  The seat belt slid with a whir into place at the top of the door, and he buckled it around his waist.  The whole of this experience, what he had been daydreaming for half an hour, he knew was not going to last ten more minutes.  Already he had been with her for almost that long, and they had so far said nothing meaningful to each other.  His spirits flagged.  He wanted desperately to say something, but he knew what kind of dopey chatter would come out if he tried to start a conversation, so he bit his tongue.

     Feeling odd also, Diane didn’t trust herself to start a conversation, either.  So they drove in silence out of the campus area to the highway.  At Myer’s garage, she got out, thanked him before shutting the door, stood beside it for the briefest of moments, and then turned and walked away.  At the sight of her back, he felt a kind of absolute emptiness.  It was the last time she would attempt to get to know him.  He knew this with a certainty he felt about nothing else in life.  He watched her walk into the office on the far side of the garage.  She was gone.  She’d have her own car, now.  There was no reason for him to stay.

As he drove home, he replayed every moment of those scarce few minutes he had spent with her.  They were awkward moments, each one an individuated pain, the whole of them adding up to what he felt was a defining portent, and what they defined hurt him beyond enduring—his future.

     It was after four thirty when he pulled onto his drive and reached for the remote to open the garage door.  The afternoon was bright and still warm, the trees in front of his house were budding, and he could see the rolled-up newspaper on the step in front of the door.  Ordinarily, he would have stayed in his office to read and grade his students’ lab reports before coming home.  He looked at his wristwatch and thought he would have an hour of peace before his mother called.  What he needed now was to work off the anxiety that still caused his hands to shake and decided to go in, change into his jogging clothes, and go out for a run.  He would get those reports done after supper.  They would be a good excuse to tell his mother he couldn’t see her tonight.

     The thought of her call earlier in the afternoon filled him with dismay.  It was almost as though she knew.  When he had spoken with his father about his mother moving into his neighborhood, his father advised him to get on with his life and not let her interfere in it.  But that proved impossible.  She called or visited every evening.  Something was always going on in her life that she wanted, needed she claimed, to talk about.  His sometimes dramatic lack of interest in her affairs had no affect.  She showered him with gifts, things he would never use and which he made a point of stashing in a closet, often in the boxes they came in, and then she used her generosity to accuse him of ungratefulness when he was cold towards her.

     As he jogged, he called her image up in his mind.  She kept herself trim and attractive, having her hair done once a week and wearing expensive clothes.  She kept a wide circle of women friends in the area, to whom, he knew, she bragged about him.  What filled him with anger, however,  as he conjured her up in his mind was the subtle way she tried to diminish his love for his father.  When she first moved into his neighborhood, he thought she felt a need to compete with his father for his affections, and so he tried to overlook the odd things she said about him.  But he came in time to realize the malevolence of her remarks.  

     He jogged at a moderate pace, keeping to the side of the road, which was made of gravel and along one side of which was a strip of woods and the other a newly ploughed field.  The road ran east and west along the north side of the neighborhood where he lived, and he had to walk only two blocks to get to it.  The railroad tracks crossed this road two and a half miles west, and it was there that he turned back.  Once he reached the asphalt again, the two-block walk back to his house was just enough to cool him off.  He had taken a towel which he hung around his neck as he jogged, and he rubbed his face on it as he walked up the drive. 

     He heard a car slowing as it came up the street, and as he neared the garage door he knew it was his mother.  She pulled up behind him.  He didn’t turn around, though he had stopped. 

     “Hello, Pauley,” she said in her mellifluous, sing-songy manner. 

     As she approached he stood with his back to her and his eyes closed, rooted to the concrete.  He felt a stabbing pain in his upper abdomen.  Then he continued wiping his face on the towel and rubbing the back of his neck with it.

     “I called a little while ago because I saw you pull in and I thought, how lucky, Pauley’s home early!” 

     “Sorry to disappoint you, mother, but I have a lot of work to do tonight, that’s why I came home early.”

     She reached out and tapped his cheek, smiling.

     “You can always spare a little time for your lonely mother, I know you can.  Now go on in and take your shower.  I’ll wait for you.  Go on now, go, go,” she sweetly urged, gesturing with her hand like she was shooing a wayward animal.

     He went in through the garage door, and she followed. 

As he showered, he thought of Diane and wondered why what had happened, or failed to happen, during the short ride he gave her had happened.  He wanted a different outcome.  He wanted what he knew she wanted.  But the woman in the living room now, most likely thumbing through one of his journals or newsweeklies, made that impossible.  As his thoughts shifted from Diane to his mother, he felt again that stabbing pain in his upper abdomen.  He must find some way to cope, some way to live, he thought, some way around her.  He decided he would call Diane while his mother was there and ask her out to dinner.  As he thought the idea, the pain in his abdomen began to subside.  He turned off the shower and stepped out.

     He didn’t want to call Diane from his bedroom, where his mother wouldn’t hear, and not wanting to look up her number in the city directory in front of his mother, he dialed information and got Diane’s number that way.  Memorizing it, he went out to face her.

     “Ah, now you feel good and smell sweet,” she said, rising from the couch and reaching both hands out to him.  He didn’t’ take her hands as he usually did.  It was such an affectation reaching out both hands the way she did, and he always in the past let her do it. 

     “Thanks, mother,” he said, passing her outstretched hands and going into the kitchen. 

     She followed, as he expected her to.

     “What are you doing, Pauley?  Can you spare your mother a few minutes,” she asked as he grasped the receiver off the wall phone hanging by the door to the garage.

     He pointed the receiver at her and said, “Wait, mother, I have to make a call.”  Then he began to dial.

     Diane was home and was surprised it was Pauley calling.  No, she would not like to go out to dinner with him.  She was sorry, she said, mentioning something about a singles club, which he didn’t understand, and then said goodbye.  Pauley kept enough presence of mind in the face of her rejection to carry on a fake conversation after she hung up.

     As he spoke with Diane, though, he glanced at his mother.  The sight of her didn’t cause him to stammer, to lose his train of thought, go dumb, as he feared would happen.  So he deliberately transformed his glance into a stare as he faked his conversation with Diane.  He didn’t know what he was going to do with himself for the next few hours.  He supposed he’d go out to dinner by himself, then maybe go to a movie afterward, just to console himself.  He would have to try again with Diane, and then again if he needed to. 

     “I don’t want to argue with you, Pauley,” she said, “but is what you just did fair to your mother who loves you?”

     “What does fairness have to do with anything, mother,” he replied. 

     “I thought you said you had a lot of work to do tonight?” she reminded him.

     “I do,” he said and explained no further.

     She contrived an expression of sorrow and pain, which Pauley could now, for the first time, read as a contrivance. 

     “I can spare you fifteen minutes, mother, then I have to leave.”