The Altruists Page 7
* * *
• • •
The Two-Years’ Guilt began with Ulrike, at the faculty mixer where they met. She was beguiling in all the old terrible ways: caustic, young, German. A recent hire. A medievalist in the history department.
“A medievalist,” Arthur repeated. He tossed back his pinot grigio and made a fist around the empty Dixie cup. “I thought we only funded the digital humanities now.”
“Well,” she said, her W something of a V, the German language idling on her breath like an after-dinner mint, “I must be the exception that is proof to the rule.” Arthur was intrigued enough not to question her use of the idiom.
The evening was hosted and organized by the Committee for Interdisciplinary Progress. An outgrowth of the cancerous mass that was the university’s endowment, the CIP threw mandatory social functions for professors of differing specialties. Attendees were chosen at random, like jury duty. They hated it, like jury duty. But failure to attend was met with the vague threat of “professional probation,” which untenured faculty like Arthur couldn’t chance. The committee’s hope, he could only assume, was that placing tipsy pedants with competing worldviews in a room together would result in some kind of profitable invention for which the university could take credit. Mostly the profs stood around, self-segregated by discipline, humanities congregating by the snack table while STEM clustered closer to the pews. Ulrike had wandered over to the wooden bench where Arthur stood.
Ever since his fortieth birthday, a quarter century ago, Arthur had been coming to terms with the fact that women no longer regarded him sexually. His solution, since he and Francine were rarely intimate, was to ignore sex as best he could. To disregard women as they’d done him. (This was an ambitious self-denial, even for Arthur, but he managed it, thanks in part to a strict regimen of early-morning masturbation, which kept him thinking clearly until at least the afternoon.) But he couldn’t help register the lithe medievalist. And she, miraculously, seemed to register him.
“Speaking of digital humanity,” she said, raising her phone. On the screen, an image of a flannelled hipster, boxed by the heart-shaped frame of a popular dating app. “I’m thirty-five years old. This is the kind of man they match me with. Do you agree that I deserve better?”
He did.
“Let’s have a look,” he said.
Arthur put himself behind her, chin hovering above his colleague’s sloping collarbone. He watched her swipe left through the pictures. The jersey-wearing, toasted-ravioli-eating beer bellies that filled her phone made him feel overqualified. Confident. Though Arthur was objectively out of his league with Ulrike, who was tall enough to observe the yarmulke-sized crop circle on his head, the two of them laughed their way through suitor after suitor. God, he thought, technology could be beautiful: vanquishing paramours with the swipe of a finger while a German woman’s thighs brushed against his.
“I will never understand the men here,” she said, tucking the phone into her back pocket.
“Men here?” Arthur asked. “Or men in general?”
Ulrike laughed. “Here, I think.”
“American men take a long time to grow up.”
“Is this true?”
“‘Prolonged adolescence.’ I read a Times article about it last week. Which means it’ll get a write-up in the Post-Dispatch, oh, I don’t know, about a year from now.”
She laughed. Arthur’s heart quickened. “I have had bad experiences with the men here,” she said.
Arthur bowed. “Then you and I will get along. Provided you don’t mind another bad experience.”
“Did you know,” she said, “that before this I had never heard of a St. Louis, Missouri.” She pronounced it misery.
Arthur smiled. “Say that again.”
“Missouri?”
“Yes.”
He was surprised at his enchantment with her, at his capacity for desire. Ulrike was unlike any woman he had ever been attracted to. Though Arthur knew the wanton truth behind the Ass Man vs. Tits Man debate—the answer was always “both”—he made note that this intriguing woman looked absolutely nothing like his wife. Francine was spheroid, orbicular: ample breasted, round faced, curly haired. The medievalist had a stylishly flat chest, braless under her blazer, with less of a butt than the humble culmination of two powerful legs. She was Francine’s opposite, in physical terms. No, he thought—more than that. More than an opposite: a repudiation.
Three paper cups of wine later they returned to her dorm apartment and consummated their flirtation.
The night of November 10. A date iron-branded on his brain. He’d been forced to dredge it up, to return to the scene of the crime in his calendar, when his daughter, some months later, accused him of “lining up a mistress as soon as Mom got sick.” Which wasn’t true in the slightest. The news of Francine’s breast cancer had come, fatefully, the following day.
And with it, the guilt.
That first night with Ulrike did not even inch the needle of his moral compass. Things had become so antagonistic with Francine that an affair felt more like an evolution than a betrayal. Their marriage had grown stagnant in St. Louis together, she resentful of the move, he resentful of her resentment, and that he had nothing to show for himself at sixty-five, while his contemporaries were retiring to rest deservedly on their laurels. Which is not to say he didn’t love his wife in some deep, irrefutable way. But it was the love one has for a colleague, a professional rival with whom one has shared office space for decades. He depended on her, banked on her, needed her to remind him who he was and where he fit. But they did not make each other happy.
As he let himself tip backward onto Ulrike’s bed for the first time—as his body bent from y-axis to x and Ulrike positioned her knees at (1,0) and (-1,0)—Arthur, for whom temptation had always been manageable, his lust powerful if easily quenched by a few quick minutes in a faculty bathroom stall, allowed himself, for once, some pleasure. Arthur, he of the hereditary thrift, who denied himself everything, who spent decades flouting material culture, allowed himself the most material pleasure there was. You couldn’t think your way out of sex. You couldn’t outsmart it. You could only give in or try in vain to spurn it.
He gave in.
They fucked most often at Ulrike’s apartment. They did it, occasionally, in his office, twice spilling the real dirt at the base of his plastic dieffenbachia. In these impassioned fits, far away from chemo and head wraps and pills, Arthur reacquainted himself with his tumescence—hot, crimson, spiteful, happy; the unambiguous dumb thrill of a woman whispering cock and meaning his. In the surplus minutes of his day, in order to ward off thoughts of death, he imagined Ulrike straddling his face, her nub growing into his mouth like a seedling sprouting in accelerated time.
Doing it at her place had its perks. Down on the basement level of the freshman dorm, there osmosed a youthful energy, his sexual stamina feeding off the eighteen-year-olds upstairs—kids shedding their virginities, honing their skills. And he, too, a little out of practice, honed his.
Ulrike Blau was no mere mistress. For one thing, she was almost certainly brilliant. (Arthur had no way of being sure, lacking as he did any knowledge of medieval history or literature, but her CV, which he downloaded from her faculty profile page, was extensive. Though her credentials were European and meant nothing to Arthur, he could only assume a journal like Mittelalterliche Geschichte possessed a high level of prestige.) She was certainly well liked by students and administrators, who wished her a guten Morgen as they passed her on the quad. Her intelligence, her likability—these were crucial. It made her more than a fling. She was a woman of substance.
So what was she doing with Arthur?
It had crossed his mind. Her intellectual prowess, his bald spot. The thirty years between them. One night, feeling guilty about Francine’s health and drunk on the schnapps Ulrike kept in her cabinet, he asked her. “Why
me?” he said. “Why me, when you could’ve had any young adjunct on campus?”
“Do not go on a fishing trip for compliments,” she said. “I am not attracted to this.”
“But you’re attracted to me. I want to know why.”
“It is personal.”
“Please.”
She sighed. “I can tell you a story about a young German girl who grew up in a subdivision outside of Frankfurt.”
Arthur stirred. His penis pushed against the fabric of his briefs. “Tell me.”
Ulrike nodded. She began to tell him how it happened. How she was a shy girl, a studious teenage outcast; how she used to bike through Sachsenhausen Süd to visit her only friend, Karin, who lived in a small house near Metzlerpark; how Karin grew breasts and became suddenly popular one spring, leaving Ulrike to sulk outside her house each afternoon, waiting for Karin to part from her new friends and come home; how one night Karin’s father found her there, on the stoop, and invited her inside; how she told him everything, the trouble between her and his daughter; how he listened carefully; how he was handsome, with large hands and a sturdy barrel chest—
“Enough, enough!” Arthur’s arousal curdled into jealousy. He shook off her story like a dog wicking water off its fur. “Fine,” he said. “You’re right. I don’t need to know.”
* * *
• • •
Considering his wife had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, the fall of 2012 could have been worse. (Arthur was deeply concerned for Francine. But he was just as concerned with being left alone if she didn’t make it. He wouldn’t survive one empty hour as a widower, he knew that much. Ulrike was his backup, a need as much as a want.) And the affair itself was so invigorating, so energizing, that his life improved in unintended, unexpected ways. He careened off script during lectures, mocking the scholarly establishment to the delight of his students. Gossip, conflict, backstabbing—it turned out these were all more interesting than torque and the geometry of motion, even to the die-hard kinematics geeks who showed up to his lectures in person even though the talks were live-streamed throughout the university’s Wi-Fi radius. He stayed in closer touch with his children, texting them as he walked to and from Ulrike’s, full of good cheer.
As a husband he became a model caregiver, a veritable hospice nurse. No longer terrified of being left alone after her death, he devoted himself to caring for his wife.
But Francine had twenty-five years of administering therapy under her belt and had cohabitated with Arthur a decade longer than that. She was wary of his sudden concern for how she was feeling, the long hours logged by her side at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, the tact with which he communicated her condition to the kids. Friends said they’d never seen him so attentive.
She knew something was wrong.
She skipped the accusations and jumped right to the conclusion. “I don’t want to know her name and I do not want to know her age,” she said, half-conscious from her bed in Oncology, before her husband could reply. Tubes joined her to IV sacs, rigged piggyback to a metal hanger. “And I don’t want you fawning over me either. Get Maggie in here.”
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “Maybe I’m being nice. Can’t I be nice?”
“No,” she said. “No, Arthur, I don’t think you can.”
The most stinging part of her accusation was not that she was right. It was that she knew him well enough to be right in the first place. It bespoke the longevity of their relationship. That thing he’d tossed away.
He felt bad about it. Terrible. Especially now that she knew. Especially now that he couldn’t mitigate the guilt of sleeping with Ulrike by smothering his wife with care. Every hour he spent at Barnes-Jewish, every page of Stand by Her and So Your Wife Has Breast Cancer he read had helped dull the shame itch. Well, now the itch was spreading. As the affair continued, Arthur failing time and time again to end it, he realized that he was not the kind of man who cheated on his dying wife—he was the kind who couldn’t stop.
* * *
• • •
After the funeral, Arthur, who’d grown up middle-class when such a thing existed, and whose congenital frugality had always been balanced by Francine’s willingness to spend, expected that without his wife’s income he’d have to make some adjustments. Some changes in his way of life. What he didn’t expect was the catastrophe.
It troubled him to think about it.
The execution of Francine’s will brought to light a secret that was to Arthur’s mind vastly more consequential than his promiscuous extracurricular. During the grueling, bureaucratic nightmare that followed, it was revealed that for the past three decades Francine had quietly attended to a private stock portfolio in her name only, an account that narrowly predated her marriage to Arthur. It was worth a small fortune.
Somehow, though Francine had never expressed any skill or knowledge of the stock market, with its balance sheets and dividends and averages (she wasn’t a “numbers person”), she had managed to predict the rise of a tech giant while possessing the foresight to invest in less conspicuous areas like whole-grain food conglomerates, including the very recession-proof company that manufactured the Cocoa Scabs that Arthur was presently failing to enjoy.
All of this would have been a miracle, a windfall, had he not been involved with the medievalist. But he had, and Francine knew.
In her final days she’d rewritten the will.
The money was funneled to their children.
Arthur didn’t see a cent.
The family home resided in Chouteau Place, an enclosed high-end precinct between Forest Park and the Delmar Loop in University City. Its curvilinear streets were stacked, one behind the next, arranged in a concentric horseshoe and legally owned by the residents, who were tasked with maintaining the roads, sidewalks, and Easter egg hunts held beneath its dense canopy of trees. “Private places,” as they were known, were a local phenomenon from a time before zoning, invented by a Prussian-born land surveyor who’d married into city government. They were a suburban dream of quiet walkways and regulated means of egress. Intimidating gateways turreted the Alters’ miniature neighborhood at the center of each of its four walls. The walls were high and difficult to scale, originally intended to keep out poor people, black people, and Jews. Now, in 2015, progress: the gates and their turrets had been razed—though the thick stone posts at the corners still remained—and people had come around to Jews.
Their first year in St. Louis, the Alters had rented a two-bedroom in the Central West End. Arthur preferred the academic life to that of a working stiff, and was confident in his ability to stick around. As soon as his visiting professorship was renewed for a second year, he put a down payment on the place, assuring Francine that the job wasn’t going anywhere. He’d hustled in those early years, ingratiating himself with the department and even coaxing a few smiles out of Sahil Gupta, the indomitable dean who’d been talked into recruiting him. He volunteered to teach the courses no one else wanted to teach, an ungodly number of courses, and made himself indispensable. He was still nominally visiting but no one ever told him to leave, and each year Arthur’s dream of a permanent faculty position swelled in inverse proportion to its likelihood. But fifteen years had passed since his request to be considered for tenure was denied, and each year he was called on to teach fewer and fewer classes, his pay scaled down to the adjunct rate, his contract always renewed last-minute. He grew bitter. He’d begun to see himself for what he was: cheated and underpaid, with a cramp in his neck from all its time on the chopping block. There were twelve long years left on his mortgage. He would have to work at least that much longer.
The house had always been a little too expensive. An inch outside their price range. But it was no grander than Francine’s vision of her family, and Arthur’s of himself. It was a beautiful wood-and-brick colonial, modest for its surroundings, and, to Arthur’s mind, an engineering
marvel: the room that would become Francine’s home office had a street-facing wall made of glass panes supported by thin iron rods, like a greenhouse, which, on account of its ingenious construction, could withstand winter winds and pummeling hail. The office had been his gift to her, a consolation for moving her family into the heart of the heart of the country.
They sacrificed. The kids saved on college by staying local. All so they could continue living in the gated enclave. So long as it furnished their life.
But the mortgage, given the present circumstances, was not sustainable. Without Francine’s income, payments on the house fell to Arthur and his tenure-allergic professorship. He was teaching two courses this semester, earning $5,000 for each. It pained him to think about the extent to which Francine had been carrying the family, financially, though they had moved for Arthur’s career. He was falling behind on his mortgage payments. This fact was not lost on his bank, which was currently toying with his credit score like a ten-year-old toys with his penis: inquisitively, and for pleasure.
Not a day passed that Arthur didn’t wonder how, and why, his wife had squirreled all that money away. How she got it was beyond him. But why had she kept it secret from him? And what did she need it for? An emergency fund? Had she planned to leave him? He’d blazed every path of possibility. None of it made sense.
The Alter family had been lucky enough to come out of the 2008 crisis relatively unscathed. But seven years later housing prices hadn’t rebounded, and Arthur couldn’t unload the house without losing good money, not even if he wanted to.
And that was the other thing: he didn’t want to. He couldn’t take another failure, couldn’t eat another loss. He was living at Ulrike’s while the house that would soon be taken from him sat unoccupied, a monument to defeat, a reminder of both his late wife and his impending eviction in precisely equal measure.