Gray Cardigan And Black Panties

Disclaimer:

This story works as a standalone story. It is the third story involving Noora Afshar. Paul, whose encounters with Noora appear in 'Blue Dress with Yellow Flowers' and 'Black Skirt, Red Lights,' is not present in this story.

By the blue January light campus felt deathly. Thin snow covered the patchy lawns; streaks of sand and salt coated the pavement.

I was early.

At home over winter break my world shrank until it was me and my brother and my dad and the shifts I picked up at the bookstore. And when Paul came in, not long after new years, to look for me, I hid in the back.

So Virginia beckoned, though the endless dreary gray of its winter is so much worse than the clean, honest cold of a good northern snow.

I felt the same suffocating closeness when I got off the train and walked through town and saw the empty lawns behind the frat houses and the glittering lights in the desolate bars where the sad, early drunks talked to the ageless bartenders. There was no air. No movement.

I needed help.

The co-pay for therapy on campus would eat up a third of my work study check. I'd need a second job.

Two days before classes resumed, I went down to the job board where departments and offices posted their hourly needs. There was the usual mix of administrative assistants, laboratory technician, and library associates--all work study positions for which I was ineligible. I took the number down for plasma donation, then noticed a handwritten ad half-hidden by a big dining services poster.

Variable hours; negotiable wages (minimum $20/hr); off-campus; car not required.

Professor J. Vaughan seeks childcare worker for occasional babysitting (two children).

JVaughan@Longlea.edu, (434) 555-1866

I was the first to take a tab. I was in Vaughan's class in the coming semester. No one would take me for a babysitter, at least not by credentials, but maybe I could bullshit about taking care of my brother after my mother died. $20 an hour was worth that lie.

Not that I wanted to babysit. Nothing in it really appealed to me. Plasma donation would stretch my money until I could beg my way into a non-work study dining hall job.

That changed when I stepped on the balance at the blood donation suite in health service's craftsman mansion.

The nurse weighing me almost gasped.

"What?"

"You're nine pounds too light to donate plasma safely." She looked at me over her squared off reading glasses, our faces level as I stood on the scale. She spoke in the overly warm accent deep Virginians love to adopt around outsiders.

"I'm sorry?"

"You need to be 110 pounds. It's the Red Cross guidelines. And if I weigh you with your clothes off it'd probably be eleven or even thirteen."

"Look," I said. "I really need the money. Can you weigh me with my boots and coat on?"

"No," she said. "Honey, you need food, not money. Says on your chart you were one twenty last spring. What happened that you dropped almost twenty pounds?"

"I started working out."

"You really need money and you're losing weight," she said, pausing. "That's worrisome. Ms. Afshar, do you partake in illicit substances?"

"I'm Muslim," I said. "It's forbidden."

"So's whiskey," she said. "But you've seen the freshmen."

"I came here to give blood, not to be the subject of insinuation."

"Then go," she said. "If you won't answer questions about your health."

"Fine," I said. It took all my self-control not to spit 'bitch' at her. Off the scale, she stood a good three inches taller than me, and she carried herself with the confident air of someone whose peripheral exposure to the suffering of others has convinced her that she knows the outer limits of the human heart; I had no doubt she filled her family groupchats with the sort of pieties only American protestants are capable of thinking secular.

Back in my dorm, I checked my bank account. All my savings from my summer job gone. I could see the semester before me in all its gray unreality: rice and beans for every meal when my meal plan ran out (I had 75 swipes), vitamin supplements and discounted produce. The bitter, attritional meals of a long foothills winter, declining every invite save those which included free food and drink.

And who would invite me around anyways?

No one likes a damaged girl, a girl who cries after sex, who can't fuck sometimes, but who needs to be needed. Just like no one likes a secular muslim or a god-fearing atheist, or an acquaintance who feeds herself at one's expense. People want to fuck something weak; they want to be friends with themselves.

What would I weigh when it was over? I'd be sick, surely. Such a bland existence leant itself to prostration; when there's no money it's a lot easier to lay on the floor and wait to die.

I took the tab out of my pocket, emailed Professor J. Vaughan.

Vaughan lived in the western hills that marked the end of the Virginia plains. The slopes here lay thick with pine at the tops, still green above the barren, black deciduous groves.

His house was a handsome brick colonial, two stories, with an attached garage and a powder blue door and a proper mud room.

The city bus stopped at the base of his hill. In the falling darkness I checked the number thrice, then rang the bell.

Mrs. Vaughan answered. She was tall with blonde hair just clinging to the last of its youth. Once she'd been beautiful, in the shortlived way common to Anglo-American women. But childbirth and age and the competing demands of career and fitness had left her face lined and strained, even as her figure remained slim and powerful. These people, I thought, did not know how to age gracefully, did not know a source of beauty beyond youth.

"You must be Ms. Afshar." She spoke without an accent. Only those who really try to hide their regional origins can manage that, everyone else, high class New Yorkers, washed out Californians, downwardly mobile New Englanders, retains some vestigial fragment of their homes. I'd tried to purge the shortened Rs and butchered vowels from my own vocabulary, only to find myself asking a friend which "draw" held their silverware.

"Noora, please," I said. "Nice to meet you Mrs. Vaughan."

"Call me Elizabeth, darling. My husband had a surprise meeting, so I'll be doing the interview myself."

She gave me coffee, read my resume, asked me about myself. I told her all about my hometown, my double major in Sociology and English, my experience caring for my brother after our mom died, how I'd often been a babysitter for the children of our not-related relatives among the recent immigrants at the Masjid. How I valued my religious community but was myself irreligious, the general low level of academic achievement among Longlea's undergraduates. She told me about the kids, one seven (boy, Mark) one nine (girl, Lily), their previous babysitters, how she wanted me to help with their homework if I watched them.

"In light of your expertise," she started.

"I'd hardly call it expertise--"

"Would $25 an hour be fair?"

I could've laughed.

"We'll pay for the commute," she said. "We're civilized. And Jack or I can give you rides, occasionally. Depending on our work schedules. I think we'd need you only a few times a month, once a week at most. And that would probably be for four or five hours."

Four hundred dollars a month. A queen's purse in my current state. How could they afford it? What did she do for work that they could spend thousands of dollars on babysitters and presumably far more on schools?

"Yes," I said. "That's all very fair."

"Good," she said. "On occasion I have to travel for my work. So I'll be gone at the end of the month, two week nights. Do you think you can manage?"

"Which ones?"

"The thirty first and the first, I'll be traveling on Tuesday night, but Jack will be home for that. He has department meetings on Wednesdays and late office hours at the writing center thursdays. So it would go from about four thirty to about nine, nine thirty. You can walk the kids from their friends' house, they go there after school for an hour or two to do homework." She looked embarrassed to admit that they depended for so much free childcare on friends. "Of course, Jack takes them all in the mornings."

"And when you have to travel for work, what do you do? Conferences."

"Sometimes," she said. "I'm a lawyer for a mid-sized firm here in Virginia. We do boutique work for government contractors. It takes me all over. Other than that, we might need you for an occasional date night. You know it's so important for a married couple to spend time together, intentionally."

I nodded. "My parents did the same sort of thing, when I was a kid."

We exchanged relevant information. She watched me write down the date and time. Then she took me to meet her children, but they have little bearing on this story. Much less than her husband.

Jack Vaughan was on the taller side of average height, his hair a dark, ageless gray. His face was large, but not fat, dark with heavy-lidded eyes over broad cheeks and a big mouth with red, rounded lips. Not a beautiful face, but not ugly either. And when he spoke he had a faint tidewater accent that leant him an air of aristocratic command. But he had his fair northern pedigree too, all tweed and no seersucker in his dress, a Columbia, not a UVA man.

Better still, he was literate, as I discovered on the first day of classes when he quoted from the Shahnameh and from Polybius in his opening speech. From another professor the whole thing would ring false, but Jack Vaughan had the personal charisma to carry it off and he kept the class well in hand through an hour and forty five minutes on the origins of the American novel.

"Readings," he said at the end of class, "are the Fiedler essay and a selection from Clarissa and from Brockden Brown. Come prepared to discuss on Wednesday. I do cold call."

The rest of the class dispersed with a great shuffling of papers and stuffing of phones into pockets, laptops into sleeves and books into bags. I'd kept myself to a single notebook--syllabus week never requires more--and went up to the front of the class.

"Professor." I extended my hand.

"Ms. Afshar?" He took my hand in his own, and only now did I realize how large his hands were for his body, as if this part of him belonged to some vigorous forefather.

And I thought of Paul's fingers, which worked so much cruelty.

An image flashed in my head of his fingers in my mouth, and I imagined the taste of them. I don't think I blushed, but I certainly broke eye contact.

"You like reading ahead, don't you?"

"Sorry?" I said.

"The one pager you submitted for the class introductory assignment; there was a lot of Fiedler in there."

"Well it's a classic," I protested.

"Don't tell me you read him on your own time," he said. "I won't believe you." He grinned and leaned back, sitting on the edge of the table at the front of the room. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I thought I'd come and introduce myself, seeing as I'll be working for you."

"Only in the classroom, Ms. Afshar," he said. "Elizabeth will handle all the necessary details. As long as you are my student you won't be my employee."

"Well thank you."

"I don't need to confirm Elizabeth's judgement; if she found you good then you must be. After all, she saw the good heart in a sinner such as myself."

I said nothing, he turned to pack his bag, speaking in allusion of the healing nature of Love and Redemption. He was testing me, subtly, to see if I would engage with him further.

"Isn't there some inadequacy," I said. "An emasculation that comes with being so redeemed? What of the dream of the frontier?"

He looked up at me. "Astute," he said. "Very astute. No, I'm Tom Sawyer, not Huck, and I've no Jim to call me back to the raft again. This is a civilized age."

His face took such a grave bearing that I had to laugh.

My first evening in the service of the Vaughans passed easily. I met the children at the appointed place. I escorted them home and made a good impression on them. I checked that they'd finished their homework--Elizabeth and I agreed to leave strenuous intervention until I'd won their trust--and I ordered pizza for them with a giftcard left for that purpose.

They were nice kids, and convinced that I was a full adult as sophisticated and worldly as their parents but less strict, they saw me as a collaborator to enlist. Lily particularly liked me, but the boy was seven and largely immune to reason or to the dread which most young boys feel in the presence of an older girl.

They slept, or at least went to bed, without overt resistance. And I found myself alone in the big house with the remains of the pizza before me and the light coursework characteristic of the early semester.

Soon the field research for sociology would start in earnest and my free moments would be absorbed in books and papers and taped interviews with my subjects. So I tried to savor this moment, alone, in the big kitchen with the polished stone countertops and the recessed lights.

I'd not made a full circuit of the house since the first tour and now I walked it. To the front a stately entrance with an umbrella stand and a tasteful lithograph of Sheridan's triumph over Ewell at Saylor's Creek. Flanking this entry hall lay to one hand a formal parlor room and on the other Elizabeth's study, decorated in scandinavian fashion. Then the stairs, carpeted in claret. But there were more rooms on the first floor; Jack's office and library lay on the left, behind the parlor, all heavy shelves and dim lights; right lay a playroom for the children.

Behind these rooms, in a modish extension, the kitchen, dining room and informal living room, each closed in with vast windows that let onto the small, square yard beyond. It was a comfortable, cleanly house. Here the dirt of life was kept to a minimum.

The leather bindings of great folios and antique books gave Jack's study a heavy, somnolent smell, and his desk was pushed back against the windows with a high-backed leather chair. On the desk, photographs: family; heroes; himself and Elizabeth as youths, standing before a cottage on the Provincetown shore, all white cotton and smiles and taut, sunbaked bodies ready for use in surf or sheets. There was a typewriter beside an inbox.

Deliberate anachronism disgusted me. And I saw Jack Vaughan as little more than an overgrown high schooler, trapped in the first flush of love for TS Eliot and enamored of all which would never be his.

But it

was

his: Life, woman, house, replete with their moderate imperfections--a bottle of vyvanse beside the typewriter in place of a whisky decanter. Whoever can aspire to more than the attainment of the practical imitation of our ideals? By the dim light of the desk lamp, I examined the spines of his library. The usual suspects and more, many I did not recognize. A tasteful contingent of modern genre fiction.

Then a white light raked across the room; his car swung into the driveway and I lunged to shut off the desk lamp. I stood for a moment with my heart pounding in my ears as I waited for him to get out of the car, feeling that I'd been caught in some sacrilegious act, like a schoolboy with the Eucharist secreted in his backpack caught by some stern Monsignor.

Car door opened. Jack sighed. Car door closed. Lock beeped. Key at the kitchen door. I backed out into the hall, turned into the kitchen. I'd shut the lights off and when he opened the side door, Jack stood silhouetted by the faint glow of the streetlight, while I was bathed in the soft light coming from the hall.

"They're asleep," he said, his voice real quiet. "Aren't they?"

"Yes," I said, still nervous.

He shut the door and crossed the room without turning the lights on. "What were you looking for in the study?"

His voice was so similar now to Paul's when he sodomized me in the bathroom the day after christmas. I shuddered.

"Just admiring."

"You seem nervous. Is there something wrong?"

"No, I just thought. Well, it's like, your personal study."

He nodded. "Personal. Well, admire." Then he went up the stairs to check on his children and I returned to his study. The minutes ticked by. Then, almost without a sound, he was in the doorway.

I'd smelled his cologne when he passed me: low and murky, with high notes of cinnamon and something else, rum maybe, like the smell of the docks of a spice port in some long-dead epoch, redolent almost of sun and sex and death.

But now, I picked up the smell from him again and it seemed to redouble, as if echoing from the walls, closing in round me. So different from the cheap mall cologne Paul wore. But why was I thinking about Paul when Jack was my employer, my teacher. A man I had to trust.

He put one hand in the middle of my upper back and I nearly jumped.

"You okay, Noora?"

I nodded. His hand felt huge and heavy there, on my shoulder, the one I'd carried weird since the first day Paul raped me, right where the muscle ran up into the neck, the very center of tension. He didn't know, couldn't know, that he was touching something hard and tensed.

"I'm fine, yes," I said.

"That's good," he rubbed my shoulder. "Glad it was an easy night."

Was it my imagination, or did his hand creep ever lower, his body shift ever forward, imperceptibly, a glacial advance. And here I was, a patch of snow, a slick of ice ready to be added to that montane vastness. That voice, that smell, the warmth of his hand. I'd fucked people for less. I'd swallowed men's cum just because they stood 5'10. I knew if he pushed me, I would bend. If he pulled, I would spread my legs. If he was hard, I would take him. All this I knew in a touch. I didn't know if it'd be any different than Paul, in the bathroom or the empty lot.

Instead Jack said "Let's get you home."

I counted the money alone in my room, the crisp twenties. That smell of money, similar to well-worn denim. The promise of value congealed and stored, undevoured by moths, waiting to be used. There is nothing alive in money and those who worship it. Theirs' is an insatiable, endless want.

I wanted yet.

Not money. Jack's touch has been a stray spark and I mere kindling. That feeling of being in the power of another. At the moment, I'd dreaded Jack might touch me; now I loathed that he hadn't.

I considered, briefly, masturbating. But since the second time with Paul, I'd found that insufficient and emotionally painful.

My watch read 10:07. Late to start looking on a Wednesday, but not a hopeless task. So I opened one of the apps and swiped. Anything would do, short-haired girls with M-65s, femme girls with tights and dresses, soft men with wool sweaters, pliant boys in sweats and hoodies. Anything, anything to quench this burning want inside me.

A couple quick matches, I sent some introductory messages. The best went to a soccer boy who'd been in my Urban Sociology class the previous semester, some half-remembered reference to his end-of-semester presentation. Then I went downstairs.

My roommates sat in the darkened living room, re-watching one of those cartoons that's supposed to be for children but is really for adults with the emotional literacy of children. I made myself a cup of tea and while the water boiled. My phone buzzed.

Lol Noora I didn't even remember that I'd done my presentation on like clubs and dating hahaha.

I answered back:

Call me a teacher's pet if you want, Seamus, but I'm not paying for school just to fuck around.

Seamus:

But you're paying to fuck around?

Me:

IDK. But I'm certainly not studying. HBU?

Seamus:

I could use a study break

I sent him my address and my phone number and locked the phone, half-expecting him never to say anything.