A Selfish Woman

By Christopher Brookhouse

The waters are roiled in a small New England college when a part-time professor takes up with her teaching assistant. In succinct, often somberly beautiful language, Brookhouse (Running Out, etc.) writes about a breast cancer survivor, Caroline, and her yearlong relationship with Gabe, a much younger man. Caroline, an adjunct English professor at a small college, has just recovered from a mastectomy when Gabe is assigned to be her assistant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504012362

Christopher Brookhouse

Christopher Brookhouse is the author of numerous short stories, works of fiction, and poetry. His early novel Running Out was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, Fog: The Jeffrey Stories won New Hampshire’s biennial fiction award. Brookhouse lives in Asheville, NC.

Book preview

ONE

SEPTEMBER

The river runs shallow. Dragonflies hover and dart above the silver water. Bees hum at the yellow centers of the asters. Fallen apples darken softly in the grass. Ironweed sways along the lane that ascends the hill to her house. She glories in the days, bares herself to the sun, walks undressed. I have no shame, she says to the light, to the dust, to the black snake stretched across the warm slate of the terrace. Well, almost none, for she can see anyone approaching the house, anyone driving up the lane, can quickly pull on her shirt and jeans. She loosens a tomato from its stem. She feels the buzz of pollen, the prickle of the tiny hairs of the vine. She bites into the warm, red flesh, juice trickling over her lips. She works her tongue into the crevices, pushing the fruit against her teeth, the juice running down her chin, down her throat, between her breasts, her new one and her old one. The new better than the old, her surgeon says.

Deer emerge in the bottomland on this side of the road along the river, browsing the stubble of the hay field. In the slant of light, the little farmhouse along the river, the one she rents to the visiting music professor, changes from white to rose, and she thinks she can hear him playing his piano. She hoped he might be interested in her. The day he signed the lease she wore a top revealing the tattoo on her shoulder, a tiny purple lyre. The man with his inks and needles and decorated all over like an islander she might meet in a Melville book had never heard of a lyre, other than the human kind. She showed him a picture. When he finished, he dabbed her skin with alcohol. You have easy skin to work with, he said. The surgeon had said the same thing.

She planned to invite the music professor to the house for drinks and supper, but she lost her nerve and was brusque and almost unfriendly until she learned to her relief that the man’s companion was on his way west with the rest of their furniture.

Lights come on in the farmhouse and in the towers of the college on the hill on the other side of the river. Wearing a silk blouse, white, and a skirt, orange, the summer color of the fox whose den is in the bank by the locust trees, and silk as well, brushing her thighs, feeling like someone’s breath on her skin, she strolls across the grass. She pauses to watch a car turn into the lane and begin to climb the hill and knows from the two yellow headlamps, one flickering on and off as the wheels bounce over the stones, that Julian Bristol in his ancient Beetle is paying her a visit.

The door slams. A tinny sound. She stands on the front steps. Julian wears a jacket over his white T-shirt, this department chair who idealizes James Dean, whose eyes glistened as he leaned forward attentive to the screen, the narrator’s voice summing up Dean’s thoughts just before his car collided with another on the gray California highway in the flat glare of late-afternoon sun. The other driver’s name, spoken by the highway patrolman solemnly reading from his notes, was Donald Turnipseed. The students tried not to laugh. This generation has no soul, Julian said.

Caroline, you’re looking extremely well.

Julian kisses her cheek. His fingers drift across her back.

Come inside, Julian, and have a glass of wine.

She holds open the door. He follows her into the kitchen. "Danke," he says when she hands him a glass, his eyes scanning the room, scanning her blouse.

It’s my night for leftovers, she says, answering his curiosity about her tidy kitchen. Naomi, Julian’s wife, is surely at home with her sleeves rolled up chopping and dicing.

He follows her again, into the living room to the couch. Their reflections and one of the lamp behind them appear on the glass, imposed on the hillside beyond. It reminds her of a playful perspective in an Altman movie.

Cheers, Julian says. He tings the rim of his glass against hers. Is that the house down the hill you didn’t rent to Gerald Hanks?

What do you mean, ‘didn’t rent’?

I mean someone else, not Hanks, resides there.

He didn’t file a complaint, did he?

Does he have reason to?

Absolutely not. The remodeling wasn’t finished. I told him if he waited a couple of weeks, I’d rent to him.

I suppose you’re so well off with rents you haven’t given a thought to teaching again.

Yes, Julian, I am, or think, or hope, I am well off. Rents have nothing to do with it. No one asked me to teach.

Do you want to?

Not particularly.

Julian swallows more wine. Hanks is sensitive, you know. People in Connecticut gave him all sorts of reasons not to rent to him. He doesn’t understand how different we are out here. How much he’s wanted.

Wanted? ‘Dead or alive’?

How much we need him. Better?

I’m sure he knows why.

Filling our need for minority faculty isn’t demeaning, not in my opinion. I hired him and I’m glad of it. Julian crosses his leg over his knee and tries to see out the window, past his own reflection and Caroline’s. I suppose the rumors have started already. Tell me what you’ve heard.

Julian, if I did I’d be back in a person I don’t want to be in anymore.

I’m here to ask if you would join us again, Caroline. We’re overenrolled in freshman comp and understaffed.

She bends forward as if hiding from Julian’s words.

Julian, I don’t know. If you were offering the film course, that might be different.

Caroline, are you bargaining with me?

That time at his party, walking her to her car, asking her if she was all right to drive home, offering to take her himself. Naomi would want me to, he said, slipping his hand into her trousers, sliding his palm across her hip and breathing warmly against her cheek, that time he had offered her the film course.

We’ve been down this road before.

Interesting choice of words. I would have said ‘up this road before.’

Julian, you’re not helping your cause.

Julian raises his hand, opens his fingers, a peace sign.

Think about it. Two sections, no more than thirty students, I can offer you five thousand.

All those papers, Julian.

Five tops.

It’s not the money, Julian.

I suppose Bob is paying you something.

Bob doesn’t pay me anything he doesn’t want to or can’t afford to.

It’s none of my business. By the way, how’s Ellen?

She’s working in Los Angeles. Doing well.

I remember her fondly. Cheerful student.

You liked the short skirts she wore.

Of course I did. I’m not ashamed to admit it. See. Admire. Don’t touch.

Can we turn this conversation in a different direction?

Caroline, what are you going to do with yourself?

Besides continuing to get well, besides getting up every day and not having any plans except to delight in being alive?

All by yourself, up here on your hilltop.

Julian, being by myself isn’t a problem.

He sets his glass on the table. Such a waste, he says.

His hand is warm. She takes pleasure from it.

You mean I was a good teacher?

That’s part of what I mean. He stands up. Consider my offer, will you?

Julian …

His finger presses against her lips. She can’t remember the last time a man kissed her.

I will, she says.

And soon.

How many sections does Hanks have?

One.

Let him take one more.

He’s got two lit courses.

I suppose you can’t hire a minority and dump two comps on him.

Not and keep him.

I notice the film course isn’t being offered this year.

The department is debating it.

Movies are too popular, I suppose?

Historically, we’re a literature department. That’s our mission. However, we may find a compromise.

Are you bargaining with me now?