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Wendy got up and walked across the dim interior of the room, the only light coming from the yellow sodium glow of an outside lamp. Thom gazed at her body, her graceful lines as she fiddled with the thermostat. Something about the heat and the yellow light and the distant sound of thunder made Thom think that for a moment he’d gone to some tempting version of hell, a version he hoped never to leave. He briefly pictured his girlfriend, Maggie, in New Haven. She would be curled up on the couch, legs tucked under her, a book on her lap. He put her out of his mind as Wendy returned to the bed.
Later, they made two rules for the remainder of the weekend. The first was that they wouldn’t talk about their lives back home, at least not right away. The second was that, since they were cheating on their respective partners, they shouldn’t make it obvious. In public they should only act like acquaintances. It was Wendy who made this particular suggestion, and throughout the coming years, Thom would often think about that. They also decided that they would only meet privately in Benchley Hall, the brutalist dormitory on the south edge of Kokosing College that Wendy had been assigned. Her room was cold and utilitarian, but it was large for a single, with its own bathroom. Thom’s room, in Robinson Hall, had character—it was high-ceilinged and had two lead-paned windows that overlooked Kokosing’s quadrangle—but there were multiple attendees on the same hall and there was a shared bathroom.
Over the course of the weekend Thom called home to Maggieonly once—Saturday after his workshop, using the public phones in the union. She was spending the weekend working on a baby quilt; her older, married sister was expecting a girl in September. He also knew that she’d make an enormous batch of soup for the week ahead, and that she’d spend at least an hour every day talking to her mother. And he knew that at least a couple of her friends would have reached out to her to see if she wanted to grab a drink, and that she would have turned them down. Since college, Maggie had seemed to lose all interest in friends. She only wanted to spend time with Thom.
In bed together on Saturday night, Thom asked Wendy how often she was checking in with Bryce. Despite not having talked much about him, Wendy had explained his name. It was Cooper Bryson Barrington, but he went by his middle name, Bryce. It was family tradition. His father’s name was Bryson Cooper but he went by Cooper. His father’s father’s name was Cooper Bryson, called Bryson. And so on.
“That’s the whitest, richest thing I’ve ever heard,” Thom said.
“Theyarerich, and theyarewhite.”
It turned out that Wendy, like Thom, had spoken to her partner only once, as well. “He’s not much for phone calls” was all she said.
On Sunday afternoon, after their final meetings with their respective workshop groups, and two hours before she was getting a ride from one of the local organizers back to the airport, she’d said more about him. “We met at Rice our senior year. Well, we’d already met, but we started dating. He was a rich party kid and I guess I was a scholarship party kid. I took him home from a party while he was having a bad mushroom trip and talked him through it. And that was that. I think I was the first girl he’d seen as an actual human being and not just someone for him to try and fuck. We got married right after college.”
“Why didyoumarry him?”
Wendy thought for a moment before saying, “What attracted meto him at first was what attracted him to me. I saw the human underneath his party-kid exterior and I thought that I could bring that fully out. But it didn’t take me too long to figure out that he wasn’t really going to change. People don’t, you know.”
“But you stuck with him.”
“He proposed to me. It was a shock, but he’d told me once that all the Barrington men met their wives at college and he was all about tradition. I was going to say no, but if I’m honest, I saw his money. That’s all there is to it. He’s filthy rich and I think you know I grew up filthy poor, and I was sick of it. So a rich boy wants to marry me, and I knew he wasn’t the best person in the world, and that I didn’t really love him, but...”
Wendy paused, her eyes not on Thom but on her suitcase waiting by the dorm-room door. “I hope this won’t scare you off, but it didn’t matter that I didn’t love him, because I still loved you. After we lost touch, I told myself that I might not find you again but that I would never find someone to replace you. That you were my one true love. I think that’s why I fell in love with poetry, because that is the great theme of poetry, isn’t it? Lost love. So it didn’t matter that I didn’t love Bryce or his stupid family. I would be rich, and I could do what I wanted. And I could protect my mom. Not protect her but provide for her. I send her money every month to cover her rent, so she can live with her dogs and not have to worry about winding up on the street. Sometimes I think that fact alone made it worth marrying Bryce.”
“You’re not happy,” Thom said.
“Maybe a week ago I might have said that I was happy. My life isn’t hard, but Bryce is a worthless human being. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Name a bad trait and he has it. Laziness, egotism, stupidity, gluttony, lust. He’s got them all.”
“Does he want kids?”
“Someday, of course. A boy he can name Bryson Cooper.”
“If you’re going to leave him, you should do it before you have kids.”
“You think?” Wendy said, but she was smiling. “Ishouldleave him, of course. I will leave him. Thing is, it’s going to be a logistical nightmare for one, just dealing with his family. And here’s the rub: there’s a prenup. If I divorce him, I get nothing. Even if I divorce him for a good reason. His family is rich for a reason.”
“What do they do?”
“They were cattlemen, and they still dabble in that. But the last three Cooper-Bryson-Coopers have been financial advisors for bigger cattlemen. I live in one of those ranch houses with a big gate with the family name on it, like inDallas. Actually, we live in the pool house.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s abigpool house. And we have the run of the actual house. Bryce’s father, Cooper, lives there but he spends most of his time at his girlfriend’s condo downtown.”
“How does Bryce feel about you?”
“I’m his wife. That’s all he feels about me. He cheats.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, of course he does. Thank God for that. It keeps him out of the house.”
“But you won’t divorce him?”
Wendy put a hand on Thom’s leg. “Of course I’ll divorce him. Now that I have a reason. But should we really have this conversation now? What about Maggie?”
“She’s a good person,” Thom said.