later. If it wasn’t in there, maybe I could find a more complete obituary online.
Then again, why would I want to learn more? What difference did it make?
Best to stay away from this.
Either way it would have to wait for office hours to end. I finished up with Barry and kept going. I tried to push thoughts of the obituary aside and focus on my remaining students. I was off my game, but the students were oblivious. Students cannot imagine that professors have real lives in the same way they can’t imagine their parents having sex. On one level, that was fine. On another, I constantly remind them to look past themselves. Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy.
My mind drifted. I watched the clock trudge slowly forward as if I were the most bored student in the most boring class. When five o’clock came I headed back to the computer monitor. I brought up Todd Sanderson’s obituary in full.
Nope, no cause of death was given.
Curious. Sometimes there was a hint in the suggested donation area. It will say in lieu of flowers please make a donation to the American Cancer Society or something like that. But nothing was listed. There was also no mention of Todd’s occupation, but again, so what?
My office door flew open, and Benedict Edwards, a professor in the humanities department and my closest friend, entered. He didn’t bother knocking, but he never had or felt the need to. We often met on Fridays at five o’clock and visited a bar where as a student I worked as a bouncer. Back then it was new and shiny and hip and trendy. Now it was old and broken-down and about as hip and trendy as Betamax.
Benedict was pretty much my physical opposite—tiny, small-boned, and African American. His eyes were magnified by giant Ant-Man glasses that looked like the safety goggles in the chemistry department. Apollo Creed had to be the inspiration behind his too big mustache and too poufy Afro. He had the slender fingers of a female pianist, feet that a ballerina would envy, and he wouldn’t be mistaken for a lumberjack by a blind man.
Despite this—or maybe because of it—Benedict was also a total “playah” and picked up more women than a rapper with a radio hit.
“What’s wrong?” Benedict asked.
I skipped the “Nothing” or “How do you know something’s wrong?” and went straight to it: “Have you ever heard of a guy named Todd Sanderson?”
“Don’t think so. Who is he?”
“An alum. His obituary is online.”
I turned the screen toward him. Benedict adjusted the goggle-glasses. “Don’t recognize him. Why?”
“Remember Natalie?”
A shadow crossed his face. “I haven’t heard you say her name in—”
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, this is—or was—her husband.”
“The guy she dumped you for?”
“Yes.”
“And now he’s dead.”
“Apparently.”
“So,” Benedict said, arching an eyebrow, “she’s single again.”
“Sensitive.”
“I’m worried. You’re my best wingman. I have the rap the ladies love, sure, but you have the good looks. I don’t want to lose you.”
“Sensitive,” I said again.
“You going to call her?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Condoleezza Rice. Who do you think I mean? Natalie.”
“Yeah, sure. Say something like ‘Hey, the guy you dumped me for is dead. Want to catch a movie?’”
Benedict was reading the obituary. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Says here she has two kids.”
“So?”
“That makes it more complicated.”
“Will you stop?”
“I mean two kids. She could be fat now.” Benedict looked over at me with his magnified eyes. “So what does Natalie look like now? I mean, two kids. She’s probably chunky, right?”
“How would I know?”
“Uh, the same way everyone would—Google, Facebook, that kinda thing.”
I shook my head. “Haven’t done that.”
“What? Everyone does that. Heck, I do that with all my former loves.”
“And the Internet can handle that kind of traffic?”
Benedict grinned. “I do need my own server.”
“Man, I hope that’s not a euphemism.”
But I saw something sad behind his grin. I remembered one time at a bar when Benedict had gotten particularly wasted, I caught him staring at a well-worn photograph he kept hidden in his wallet. I asked him who it was. “The only girl I’ll ever love,” he told me in a slurry voice. Then Benedict tucked the photograph back behind his credit card and despite hints from me, he has never said another word about it.
He’d had that same sad grin on then.
“I promised Natalie,” I said.
“Promised her what?”
“That I’d leave them alone. That I’d never look them up or bother them.”
Benedict considered that. “It seems you kept that promise, Jake.”
I said nothing. Benedict had lied earlier. He didn’t check the Facebook page of old girlfriends or if he did, he didn’t do it with much enthusiasm. But once when I burst into his office—like him, I never knocked—I saw him using Facebook. I caught a quick glance and saw that the page he had up belonged to that same woman whose picture he carried in his wallet. Benedict quickly shut the browser down, but I bet that he checked that page a lot. Every day, even. I bet that he looked at every new photograph of the only woman he ever loved. I bet that he looked at her life now, her family maybe, the man who shared her bed, and that he stared at them the same way he stared at the photograph in his wallet. I don’t have proof of any of this, just a feeling, but I don’t think I’m too far off.
Like I said before, we all have our own brand of crazy.
“What are you trying to say?” I asked him.
“I’m just telling you that that whole ‘them’ stuff is over now.”
“Natalie hasn’t been a part of my life in a long time.”
“You really believe that?” Benedict asked. “Did she make you promise to forget how you felt too?”
“I thought you were afraid of losing your best wingman.”
“You’re not that good-looking.”
“Cruel bastard.”
He rose. “We humanities professors know all.”
Benedict left me alone then. I stood and walked over to the window. I looked out on the commons. I watched the students walk by and, as I often did when confronted with a life situation, I wondered what I’d advise one of them if they were in my shoes. Suddenly, without warning, it all came rushing in at once—that white chapel, the way she wore her hair, the way she held up her ring finger, all the pain, the want, the emotions, the love, the hurt. My knees buckled. I thought that I had stopped carrying a torch for her. She had crushed me, but I had picked up the pieces, put myself back together, and moved on with my life.
How stupid to have such thoughts now. How selfish. How inappropriate. The woman had just lost her husband, and prick that I am, I was worried about the ramifications for me. Let it go, I told myself. Forget it and her. Move on.
