And How the Hell Have You Been?
Later Rana thought of the line from Casablanca “out of all the gin joints.” But when it first happened she was too shocked to register much of any-thing, except “Wait? What?” She’d been sitting on the deck at a friend’s house in a rattan chair next to Harold, a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in her hand. They were discussing her journalism students’ prospects in a world without local newspapers.
“They all want to go into broadcasting anyway,” she said. And who knew how long that would last in the coming fascist dystopia?
A stocky man with brown hair and a graying beard stood a few feet away. He was the only person at the party whom she didn’t recognize. He’d come with Maureen, and it crossed Rana’s mind that he was …Maureen’s date? She didn’t think Maureen was looking for a romantic liaison these days, and he looked quite a bit younger. Rana wondered who he was. She knew everyone else at the party and had known some of them since the dawn of time.
A lull came in her conversation with Harold, and the un-known man turned toward her.
“Hello,” she said, still seated, and held out her hand, “I’m Rana.”
“I’m Dan,” he said as he took her hand. “Rana and Dan. Should be easy to remember.”
She smiled and returned to her conversation with Harold while Dan found a chair a few feet away, next to the deck rail, overlooking the pond. He was still within conversation’s distance when he leaned forward and said, “Wait a minute. Are you Rana Manning?”
“Yes,” Rana said.
“I’m Dan Thompson.”
He didn’t look remotely familiar and the name didn’t ring a bell.
“Help me out,” she said, also leaning forward.
“I was your student….,” he said.
One moment she’d been sitting in blissful ignorance and the next a curtain had been yanked open and behold: her sordid past in all its glory.
“You’re that Dan?” she said.
“I’m that Dan,” he answered with a little nod. Then he added. “We went to a stock car race.”
She searched his face for the devastatingly cute boy he’d once been, and finally found him in the eyes. Azure blue eyes. Stupidly, she wondered if he was remembering the same thing she remembered. Obviously, he did. They both remembered the one and only time she’d ever slept with a student. To be fair, she was the teaching assistant not the pro-fessor. And he was 20 or 21, not a baby. She must have been … 29?
She rose and walked closer. Now he was sitting and she was standing.
“How have you been?” she asked.
He proceeded to tell her — as men will — his life story. It sounded like a satisfactory enough life. He’d gone to work for a software company first in one city, then in California, then back to the south, and now he was here back “home.” His chief point of pride was his two kids, who it seemed were doing quite well in life. One of them was pregnant with her first child.
“So you’ll be a grandfather!” Rana said.
He nodded and shrugged — at once proud and diffident. The darling boy was going to be a granddad. He was divorced now and his parents were dead, he said, so he’d been back in town for the past couple of years, repairing their house to sell it. Two years seemed like a long time to repair a house.
“Are you living in the house?” she asked.
“No, I have my own place,” he said.
He hadn’t mentioned a job, so she figured he wasn’t em-ployed, but he seemed to be surviving well enough. An inheritance of some sort? Or maybe he’d handled his money well when he’d had a job.
At this point Maureen joined the conversation.
“Dan’s father and my father went to elementary school to-gether,” she said. “I like to say I knew Dan before he was born.”
Not a date then, Rana realized. A family friend. But why bring him to the party? She was tempted to say to Maureen, “Well, you may have known him be-fore he was born, but you didn’t rob the cradle, now, did you?”
She noticed her husband leaning against the railing, talking to Glenn, the host of the party. Glenn laughed at something her husband said. Glenn was an affable fellow; his wife had been Rana’s first and closest friend when they started graduate school in the mid-80s. Now that Rana had moved back to the college town where they’d all come of age, so to speak, the friendship had resumed course.
“What about you?” Dan asked her.
She wasn’t as good at summing up the years. She mentioned moving away, working at a university out west, marrying and having a son who owned a success-ful organic farm.
“He’s married but they’ve decided not to have children.”
She mentioned taking care of her husband after he broke his neck, became paralyzed and required 24-hour care for three years before he finally, mer-cifully died.
“It wasn’t an easy marriage before the accident. After the accident …” She trailed off and thought, really? Why even bring this up? No one needs to hear the details of how she’d already seen a lawyer about a divorce when she got a call from the hospital.
A sympathetic moue from Dan. But she didn’t want sympa-thy because frankly, things were great now.
“Right before the pandemic, I moved back here and married John,” she said, “who I knew back in grad school.” Smiling, she indicated her husband at the end of the deck with a glass of club soda, now in conversation with an artist friend of theirs. John kept in shape by playing tennis a couple of times a week. He was not as gregarious as many of the other men but he had a sharper wit. She was mad for him. Her late-in-life marriage a coup, she thought. Finally, the woman who “sure knew how to pick ’em” had final-ly picked a good one.
Their respective stories having been shared — yay, we both survived. We’ve done okay in spite of that one drunken and hugely embarrassing night. Okay meaning they’d had children who were good and smart and probably didn’t behave like they had. She said she was glad he was doing well and then did the party shuffle, mov-ing to another cluster of people.
But she was dying to tell someone, and obviously only one person would fully appreciate the bizarreness of this situation. She went inside and found her old friend, and former partner in various crimes of their youth, piling hamburgers and hotdogs onto a platter.
“There are some veggie dogs, right?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Okay, so you know that guy Maureen brought?” Rana asked.
“Yeah. Dan.”
“He was my student back when I was a teaching assistant for Dr. Blankenship,” she said.
“Wait. I gotta pee.” She put down the platter.
They went into the bathroom and while her friend peed, Ra-na told her, “I slept with him!”
“Well, that’s awkward.”
“Why do you think Maureen brought him?” Rana asked.
“He’s divorced. Parents dead. Kids moved away. I guess he’s a little depressed.”
Ah. That made her a little sad, but not too sad. She was, after all, on her fourth glass of wine.
The twenty or so people at the party gradually made their way inside and piled their plates from the offerings on the side table. Rana went for the ambrosia fruit salad. The vegan cook had brought a mushroom casserole, which turned out to be the best thing on the table. The widowed history professor, who’d recently bought an expensive old Victo-rian house to keep him busy, brought delicious biscuits with homemade pepper jam.
Two tables had been crammed onto the screened in porch and pushed together. John tried to sit across from her but the chair was wobbly.
“Sit by me,” she said. He made his way to her side of the table, where they’d be trapped by the wall behind them.
“You’ll get me dessert, won’t you?” he said.
“I’ll limbo right under the table to get it for you,” she said.
Conversations ensued and she found herself pulled into a conversation toward the end of the table with the retired journalists. Dan was also sitting in that direction, not saying much.
“I dream sometimes that I’ve got a layout in front of me, but I’ve no idea how to do it,” one of the women said. “Where do the stories go? What the hell am I doing?”
“Newspaper dreams,” Harold, the former newspaper editor, said. “I’ll never stop having them.”
And somehow they got on the topic of Willie Loman and the man to her left, a retired surgeon, mentioned playing the role of Willie Loman in high school. He went on a bit about his brief life as a thespian. Rana rarely told stories about her past. They never showed her in a good light. If she shared a story, it was often something about her god-awful father or having to wipe her former husband’s ass after his accident. Conversation stop-pers, both of those topics. She fared better when asking other people about their own lives or talk-ing about movies or books or some stupid stunt pulled by the idiotic governor of the state. But she rarely told stories from her youth because most things she’d just rather forget. But the topic of teenaged acting dredged up a story in her mind that wasn’t too terrible, so she piped up.
“I did some acting when I was a teenager,” she said. “Do you know the play ‘The Children’s Hour’ by Lillian Hellman? I was Mary, the evil little girl.”
She had to explain the story for those who hadn’t ever seen the movie. A girl about twelve casts aspersion on one of her female teachers, implying a sexual relationship with another female teacher. In the 1930s.
“Seems like strong subject matter for a high school play,” someone said.
“It was community theatre. My mother tried to ex-plain to me that I didn’t have to stay in character for the bows at the end,” she said and then mimed her 14-year-old self scowling as she bowed. “I was quite good in the role of a horrible child.” And so, of course, it was yet another story in which she didn’t smell so sweet.
“Did you ever think of playing ‘The Bad Seed’?” one of the retired journalists asked.
The question caught her off guard.
“Hmm. Well, I didn’t get to choose the plays,” she answered.
The conversations meandered as they do, and then the table thinned a bit as people finished their meals. She remembered what Dan had said. They had been to a stock car race that night!? She couldn’t remember going to a stock car race in her life. They must have been absolutely shit-faced because she should have remembered that.
He was standing now and stretching his back.
“Did you say we went to a stock car race?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said, “we went with my roommate, who told me later we were totally out of control.”
Oh god, she thought. Had they been making out in public? Was that her Lauren Boebert moment?
He mimed throwing his arms around, and she realized they must have been excitedly responding to the race. Then it occurred to her. That’s why she had liked him. He had invited her to do something fun and different. He had taken her to see something she’d never seen before.
The question answered, she turned back to John.
“How are you going to get me some blueberry pie?” he asked.
She laughed and let her hand fall on his thigh. The table slowly emptied enough for them to go outside to the dessert table.
The “conversating,” as one of her students had said, contin-ued as darkness seeped over the deck.
She talked about cats with the youngest couple at the party. She realized with a touch of sadness that the lovely young woman who said she adored the Maine Coon cat they’d found at the shelter would never have children. Rana had resigned herself to never being a grandparent. This generation poured all their love into their dogs and cats, and so she poured love onto her granddog, an enormous Rottweiler who was allergic to everything including protein. She also had a border collie mix of her own to soak up her left over maternalism.
“Time for fireworks!” the host bellowed, and everyone gath-ered on the deck to watch. Boom, boom, boom. Rana thought of a wedding she’d been to years and years ago where the bride and her little brothers set off fireworks to celebrate the nuptials. That had been John’s first wedding. She wrapped her hand around his arm.
Afterwards, people slowly began to peel away. Lately, she’d gotten appallingly adept at telling people she loved them. Because for fuck’s sake, they were (ex-cept for the young couple with the Maine coon cat) all edging closer to the finish line. Better to say it while she still could.
Inside, she packed up her dishes and helped put the lemon cookies into containers for people to take home. She put the leftover pie, which she had brought, back in the white box and then into her bag along with a few pieces of ham in a baggie for her dog.
She woke up at four in the morning. If she woke at three, she could easily fall back asleep. If she woke at five, she’d at least have enough sleep to function and still could probably go back to sleep, but four was the death knell. It meant there were things she needed to feel bad about.
What she felt bad about was this: was she Dan’s #metoo moment? Had she taken advantage of his youthful infatuation with her? Jesus. Should she have apologized to him instead of marveling at the outright weirdness of the universe. She had never, ever met a former student at one of these gatherings. And after forty years of teaching there must be thousands. No, she’d only encountered the one student she’d ever had sex with.
She thought of other times she had behaved inappropriately in her late 20s and found a litany of drunken or coked-up blunders, but there’d always been a line between her and her students. Except for that one time. Damn it, she thought, am I Brett Cavanaugh in academic clothing? At least she hoped that if confronted, she wouldn’t become a sniveling baby who refused to apologize. She wasn’t sure why she’d had such difficulty evolving into a decent adult. One could only use the shitty dad excuse for so long. Thank God, her thirtieth year had arrived and kissed her on the forehead like a benediction — and not a moment too soon. The next year she was married and pregnant though not in that order.
Maybe the night in question had been one of her own #me-too moments. After all, she’d been so drunk that she had no memory of the actual sex. She knew it had happened, but that was all. But she was the older one. And the power differential, such as it was, was on her side.
Or maybe they’d just been two lost, drunk people who’d wound up in bed together without the niceties of getting to know each other first. And they’d dis-covered that it wasn’t much fun. When she thought about it, casual sex had never been fun. It was something she had done in the hope of erasing herself. And it never worked. She just felt kind of gross when it was over.
But she had learned a valuable lesson the next morning: Just because someone is cute, that doesn’t mean you have to fuck them. This lesson would have saved many a famous man from infamy in recent memory. Because you can quite possibly injure the per-son who has been the object of attraction for you. The effect can be like when a bird flies into a window. The rudeness of the awakening, the stunned after-effect. Most likely the bird will survive, but not always. Or maybe it was like thoughtlessly crushing a flower under your heel as you strode along your way.
The thing is, she had liked the young Dan. He was not only cute, he was fun and wholesome. She had always been attracted to wholesomeness, so foreign was it to her. And when he had said, we should probably not see each other anymore, it had stung with the barb of shame. How much better this all would have been, she realized, if she’d made a friend of him instead of doing whatever the hell they had done.
Over the years, she’d encountered dozens of adorable young men. She might shower them with attention, the way older men had showered attention on her when she was young, but she could do that without making a fool of herself, without wandering into the land of ick. She could just be a friend.
She’d gone on with her life, but she’d never forgotten him. Just tucked the memory away.
On the way home from the party, she’d said to her husband, “There’s something I want to tell you.”
Silence.
“I guess I don’t have to tell you.”
“Now you do have to tell me,” he said, but his voice was gentle.
“That guy that Maureen brought? I had sex with him when he was my student.”
“Oh,” he said. “I remember having students that I would have slept with. I never did, but I would have.” He’d only taught for a few years, before discover-ing that his Ph.D. could land him a comfortable spot in corporate America and he would never have to hear a student whine about getting a B again in his life.
“I don’t remember the sex, just remember waking up and there he was.” That was the truth, but it didn’t exactly make it less cringe-worthy.
They went home and each had a slice of blueberry pie while they watched TV, her feet in his lap.
Now in her four a.m. hour of recrimination, she remembered the moment when she had hugged Dan goodnight, as the party ended, how fragile he’d seemed. He made a self-deprecating remark about being socially inept. She thought his ineptness may simply have been that he didn’t know this group of people well and/or he was lost without his wife and kids. Men didn’t do as well on their own as women did.
“I’m going home to my poodle,” he said with a shrug. “I got him in the divorce.”
Rana looked into his blue eyes and saw the ghost of the boy she almost knew.
“You’ll be fine, honey,” she told him, as if she were the good mother figure she should have been nearly forty years ago. “You’ll be fine.”
Trish MacEnulty is the author of the award-winning novel, Cinnamon Girl (Livingston Press, 2023). A former university professor in Charlotte, NC, she now lives in Tallahassee. She has also published a historical fiction series, memoirs, and short stories.