Fate. The toss of a coin, the color of a child’s eyes, the track of a hurricane. So often we’re guided by fate, saved or destroyed by it. Whom should Alan Polk choose for today, Nicole Newman or Brigitte Chaisson? A home-cooked meal with Brigitte, and soft sex afterwards, it would be soothing; preying on, feasting on, devouring Miss Newman might be more satisfying. What to do? Alan fishes for a quarter in his pocket, willing to give himself over to a ceremonial coin-flip, but he nets no coin, no two-bits, no nickel or dime, not even a copper-coated penny. Well, that’s fate, too, isn’t it? Maybe Miss Newman should have a say in this, shouldn’t she? If she meets Alan beneath the red poinciana by the library parking lot five minutes earlier than she’s said she would, then she’s eager, and she’ll be the catch-of-the day. If not, he’ll get in his little car and drive the few short miles to Brigitte’s. At 10:55 Polk leaves campus, without the Leisel surrogate.
“You’re not eating, honey,” says Brigitte to him, as he sits at her kitchen table. “You liked my gumbo before; you ate three bowls of it. If you’re not feeling well, why don’t you go lay down? Take a nap before your night class.”
“Maybe I will . . . if you’ll come lie down with me.”
She smiles, a rather wicked smile, suggesting that she’s only tempted, not persuaded. Alan likes to work fast, doesn’t he? And she’s often receptive. The first time he’d come to her house, for instance, a year ago, to her tiny treeless house, her sun-scorched house, white as bleached bones, and so small inside, painfully small—low ceiling, slim walkways, cramped bedrooms, clutter everywhere, a piano, and the antique furniture, unpolished, and the lace curtains, yellowed, and so little light filtering in that Alan’s first impression of the place then had been that he’d entered a tomb, a living monument to a dead life; and Brigitte herself, the slightest woman he’s ever known, seemed like a phantom, a literal ghost, and so his initial instinct when he’d first set foot into her private little world, invited, was to reach for her, make sure she was real, corporeal, his right hand finding her face, his thumb grazing her mouth, and she’d kissed it, and led him to her bed, and hastened him in to her, on top of her frayed quilt, her grandmother’s quilt, on her four-poster bed, where her poodle watched them, panting. Brigitte’s bed, and her piano, are the only large things in her small house.
“You want a beer or something, Allie? I bought you some Coronas.” She’d made the purchase yesterday, even though she can’t really afford them, given her fixed income, the constraints of her budget. Brigitte, too, is an adjunct, and has been for years, many years, never having been hired full-time permanent anywhere, only twice getting a coveted one-year replacement position—it’s been difficult, but it’s made her tough, resilient. No, she can’t survive on her adjunct pay, or the piano lessons she gives, so lives pretty much off her ex-husband’s diminishing alimony installments (they had no children), but she doesn’t complain; Brigitte makes do. When things get tight, and they always do, well, she tightens up, survives, subsisting off canned beans, vegetables from her little garden, the kindness of friends. She clips a lot of coupons. “Alan, lemme get you a beer.”
“Wine would be better.”
“It would?”
“Yeah,” he laughs, thinking about how wine affects her, and where. “That merlot, from last weekend, any of that left?”
She checks her kitchen cabinet; there is.
“You know, while I was coming over here,” he says, “I heard this song on the radio, this reggae tune, a love song to a bottle of red wine. ‘Red, red wine . . . come stay with me . . . don’t let me be . . . alone.’ You know the song?”
She doesn’t.
“Drink two glasses of wine with me,” he says, “and then we’ll take that nap together. Whatcha say?”
She brings the green jug and blotched glasses over to him, and when she feels his forehead for fever with the inside of her wrist, he seizes the moment, grabs her by both arms, pulls her to him. Her hair smells clean. He likes the way it’s always so clean, her hair so long and straight, always brushed a hundred strokes. He tells her he likes her dress, that she’s looks real good in it; the dress is vintage, a simple brown print, and he starts to unbutton it . . . but Brigitte pulls away.
“Allie, you’re warm, honey. Lemme get you some aspirin or something. And a cool rag.”
“No thanks.”
“You’re not feeling well, I can tell. What’s wrong with you?”
“Adjunctivitis.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I’ll get some pills.”
He doesn’t follow her into the bedroom, although he could have. No, Alan just sits there, and sips at the wine, and wonders about her, about what he’s going to do about Brigitte Chaisson. She wants him to move into this house with her—that’s clear; she mentioned it, twice. And why shouldn’t he move in? She’s an odd woman, yes, guileless and quirky, and she’s got the wild eyes, adjunct eyes, blistered and blistering, like those you’d see in Confederate-era portraits, yet she’s pretty enough, in her way, and often he dreams about her. What more needs a man?
Bringing him a handful of tablets, both aspirin and acetaminophen, Brigitte isn’t particularly amused when Alan quips that he’d prefer Valium, OxyContin, liquid Demerol.
“That isn’t funny,” she says.
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
“No?” She slurps down some stew; Alan still isn’t eating. “Honey, what is bothering you today? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Something happened today, something at school. You don’t wanna tell me?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Alan?”
He holds up the wine-jug, offers it to her. “Girl, why aren’t you drinking this stuff? ‘Red, red wine.’”
“Allie, what happened today?”
Sometimes, girl, you sound just like Leisel. Truly. You reek of her, you know that? Why is it that with women all problems must be talked out? Sometimes the body should do the telling; let the arms and legs and groins do the verbalizing. Don’t you get it? Well, if Alan has to talk her clothes off her, then he’ll talk them off . . . although he soon finds he actually has very little to say to this woman. That’s discouraging. No matter . . . he’ll talk to her, or get her to talk. He shares his sharecropping analogy with her, to see if she concurs—and she instead gives him her own, likening adjuncts to mistresses, the tenured faculty to wives; the college has a love affair with the adjunct, Brigitte explains, but refuses to marry her, stringing her along, making her wait for a marriage proposal that often never comes, until the adjunct realizes she was nothing more to him than a cheap whore. Brigitte asks Alan if her likes her comparison: he does, very much. A woman’s perspective, so unlike his own. So unfamiliar. Why am I here? he wonders, almost aloud. Oh, yes, that’s why I’m here.
“I saw this show on the Discovery Channel,” she remarks, “where this lioness, in Kenya, I think it was, this lioness would adopt and nurture baby antelopes, instead of eating them. It was the most amazing thing. She’d even try to protect them, the antelopes, from other lions.”
“Damnit, I’m not getting the full-time temp job,” Alan confesses, at last. “That’s what’s wrong! Charlie Blanco won’t give it to me. He has it to give, he held it under my nose, and now he won’t give it to me . . . because I won’t lick his goddamned spittle. It’s freaking infuriating.”
“You thought the job was yours,” she says, gently, “because you’re the most qualified, the most popular with the students, because he said he would.”
“Blanco should give it to me because I asked him for it . . . no other reason than that.”
“You talked to him today? What’d he say?”
“He said, ‘I think I’ve changed my mind; it’ll go to someone else.’”
“Did he say why? You talked to him?”
“Talk to him? Honey, what good is talk?” The lava-streams, the fissures, flow red-orange on Alan’s face; a total eruption seems imminent. “You mean, did I go beg him, humiliate myself, debase myself by asking for an explanation? No! Blanco teased me with it, and then took it away! What else should be said?”
“Nothing.”
“No, you think I should go chat with him, go reason and negotiate with that pompous bastard, right?”
“I didn’t say—”
“We can’t talk to those people, Brigitte!” Alan says this calmly, almost whispering, a rustle of leaf before the blast of hot wind. “Does it ever help for any adjunct to talk to any administrator? Does it? No! Because they don’t give a goddamn about us, okay? They’ve got theirs, and they don’t give a shit about anyone or anything else, all right? Tenured professors, deans and provosts, idiot department chairs, they’ve got theirs. They’ve got theirs. They don’t care.”
“Allie, not all of them are—”
“Good God, girl, what planet you been livin’ on! It’s us against them, okay? They aren’t with us; they use us; they yank us around on monkey-chains and expect us to dance for peanuts, okay? And it’s wrong, so very wrong . . . something’s gotta be done about it!”
“I don’t know what you expect to—”
“This use and abuse of adjuncts, honey, it’s gotta stop—that’s what I expect. It’s gonna stop! And we could stop it, yes. Today. There’s enough of us to stop it, to start a revolution, if we’d just do it! We adjuncts could shut these schools down, if we had a mind and a will to, if we really decide to.”
She sighs, unconvinced. “Most adjuncts don’t think that way, Alan. I don’t.”
“Don’t you?” His fierce eyes cut through her, his pinched brow, and smoke bellows from his nostrils . . . but Alan won’t not avenge himself on his fellow adjunct, not with her sitting there smiling at him, sweetly, that coquette’s grin, that you’re-sexy-when-you’re-angry simper, the tip of her tongue wetting her lower lip. He checks himself, inhales deeply. “Well, you’re right. You’re right that nobody thinks like me.”
“You are an original.”
“Thanks.” He isn’t so sure he appreciates the tone and spirit of her assessment. “But I will tell you one thing more, girl. There’s a Turkish proverb, and it goes like this: I don’t own a mill; I don’t have a house beneath a willow tree; I have a camel and a tent. I’ll kill you and go hide in the mountains.”
She laughs. “Please don’t kill me, Allie.”
“I’m serious, Brigitte. These people best stop freaking with me . . . ‘cause I got nothing left to lose anymore. Nothing left. Nothing left.” He scowls now, and he smooths his hair back, and growls: “I could do violence.”
“No, you couldn’t.”
“Violence,” he repeats.
“You’re not feeling well, honey, that’s all.”
He shakes his head. “I could do serious violence.”
