One week in November, he went to a conference in Detroit. It was the annual antenna propagation meeting. He found time between panel discussions to visit relatives in the city. Actually, he’d mostly used the conference as an excuse to see them. Back in familiar surroundings, he drank coffee with his aunt and uncle, and they discussed family news, who had married who, how many new additions there were, when the next trip home would be. They asked him if there was anyone special. He told them no, and they laughed together over his prospects, imagining an inferior breed of mountain folk alongside the plain, striving faces of the handful of female engineering students. “Not much to choose from there,” his uncle had said. The night before he left town, they set him up with the cousin of someone. She had style and grace and gorgeous hair that flowed down to the small of her back. He sent her home in a cab after dessert.
Maybe it was the visit with his family that prompted him to do it. When he got back, his department chair had passed out invitations to the faculty, written in his wife’s hand. She organized a holiday party every year. The invitations smacked of pretension or boredom, he thought. He shared this reflection with one of his colleagues over a drink downtown, and they joked about the department chair’s frustrated wife. But he RSPV’d, and when he did, he checked the spot for “plus guest.”
He took her to buy a dress before the party. It was an aqua wrap dress that belted around her waist and cut into a deep V in the front. She thought it looked too simple for a holiday event, but that’s why he liked it.
When he picked her up for the party, she carried a sequined clutch and wore garish costume jewelry that dripped from her ears and poured down between her breasts. He wondered where she had found it. They argued about the jewelry all the way to the chair’s house, and in the end, he won. The inelegant accessories stayed behind in the car. She even put on a more flattering lipstick shade.
The house glowed like a supernova, the windows beaming brightness while twinkle lights hung from every inch of shrubbery. Gaudy didn’t cover it, and he was all the more happy that he’d convinced her to leave the jewelry behind. Her understated beauty would be exaggerated in contrast with the over-embellished surroundings. He began to feel something approaching pride as he watched her walk up the path to the door.
Inside, they mingled with engineers and engineers’ wives. He spotted some of his graduate students and left her for a moment to talk with them. It was a dry party. The department chair was a Protestant and a teetotaler. But the graduate students had smuggled in flasks, and they offered to spike his eggnog. He greedily accepted and spent the rest of the party getting drunk.
The lights got brighter and the room warmer, so he took off his sports coat and unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt. The graduate students mentioned that the chair kept a foosball table in the basement. The promise of a cool basement and a modicum of entertainment made him follow them down. He left her upstairs chatting with someone’s wife.
The basement was as well heated as the rest of the house, and they entered into an energetic foosball tournament that sent currents of sweat down the front and back of his shirt. He stopped wondering, or caring, if everyone above could hear the whoops and hollers emanating from below. He was on fire, spinning his men toward victory again and again. They emptied the flasks and discovered a dusty bottle of Crème de Menthe in a cupboard. Maybe it had been an ill-chosen gift or a vestige of a past life. They broke into it, and the tournament continued. In the end, they all bore little splatters of mint green from the exuberant waving of cups.
Wild-eyed, sweat soaked and spotted, he returned to the party. That’s when he saw her, tucked away in the corner, standing inches away from the department chair, his hand on her shoulder, his eyes trained on her chest.
“What the hell!” he shouted.
The few remaining guests turned to see him standing in the doorway to the basement stairs. His shirt had come untucked on one side, and his hair almost stood on end, as he had pulled his fingers through it in between drops of the ball on the table, the sweat holding it in place.
His yell startled the chair’s wife, who carried a tray of dirty glasses and plates on her way to the kitchen. Everything fell to the floor.
He froze for a moment and then quickly turned and walked toward the front door. In the corner of his eye, he could see her rush to help the chair’s wife pick up the shattered pieces. He continued outside and to his car. But when he got there, he realized he didn’t have his keys. They were in the pocket of his sports coat, and he had left it inside. He couldn’t go back in, so he stamped around in the yard, rubbing his arms and raising his knees.
After a few minutes, she came out with his sports coat and the car keys.
“Let’s go,” she said quietly and let herself into the driver’s side.
He didn’t say anything in return but got into the car and turned on the heat. He used his sports coat like a blanket pulling it up under his chin. They drove in silence, until she turned the car into the Quick-Mart.
“I need to get something,” she said.
She came back out with a pack of cigarettes that she tamped against her hand.
“You smoke?” he asked, as she got back into the car.
“When I need to,” she said.
“Let me have one then.”
“What was that back there?”
“You’re asking me? Turn the car back on. It’s freezing.”
She put the key in the ignition but didn’t start it. “Yeah, you were the lunatic shouting at Mr. Hollinger and frightening his wife.”
“Well, I wasn’t the one coming on to him.”
“That’s not fair. He was telling me about a job.”
“Right. Professor Hollinger has some antenna measurements he wants you to take.”
“Don’t be a jerk. I don’t deserve that. He said there were openings in your building’s custodial staff. He said if I wanted to work there he’d put in a good word for me.”
His head was spinning now, and he could feel the cold air constricting his blood vessels, cutting off the flow. She had provided a perfectly rational explanation for what he had seen, but she hadn’t explained what he had felt. His jealousy surprised him back at the party, but he welcomed it now, that passion surely felt better than this dullness. In a span of a few minutes, she had transformed from an object of desire to his future caretaker with bucket and mop.
“You can’t take that job.”
“I know it would be strange, me working there with you. But we’d probably barely even see each other. And I need that job. I can’t wait tables all my life. I have to think of the future, about taking care of my mom. The university pays well, and they give benefits. It’s a real job.”
“That’s not a job. It’s menial labor. An idiot’s work.”
She started to cry. “It’s a job. And I’m taking it.”
He regretted that night, how he had acted, what he had said. He apologized to her the next day, blaming his behavior on the alcohol. She accepted his apology and asked him to pick up an application for her, which he did. Over the next few months, they continued their routine. She was right about her work at the university; they hardly saw each other. Her day began early and ended early. His schedule shifted later and later into the day. By that summer, he had become nocturnal, arriving at the university in the late afternoon and working into the night. He told himself that he worked best that way, and he told her that he needed to publish more in anticipation of his tenure review, even though it was still four years away. Eventually, he only worked.
During those months they fell apart gradually, their time together more and more limited. She never questioned it or demanded more from him, but instead, let him go. Out of sight, out of mind, he imagined she told her girlfriends.
When the next school year started, she requested a transfer to a different building. Or so a new custodian told him, when he interrupted the man taking out his office trash. And that was that, he thought.
But now, she stood here before him again. Fifteen years later, he remained unmarried. Was she, he wondered? He didn’t see a ring but then she might not wear it when she cleaned. She had come back to his building a few months earlier. He caught glimpses of her from time to time, a familiar figure receding down the hallway, but they had never crossed paths. They simply shared the same space, each leaving tiny residues of their presence, almost imperceptible to one another, until she left the cigarette marked with her coral lipstick. It was too large to ignore. She was reaching out to him, giving him a second chance, he decided.
He lingered for a moment wondering if he should say something more, something more than his cool statement that he no longer needed an ashtray in his office.
The loose hair from her ponytail must have tickled her face, and he watched as she pushed it back behind her ear with her wrist, careful not to get it sticky with glue. The gesture made her earring come free, and the small red bulb fell to the ground bouncing once or twice before she stopped it with her foot.
“Maggie,” he whispered as he left the classroom.
The next day, the ashtray was gone.
Elisabeth Chaves lives in North Bethesda.
