“Do you need to pick up any bags?” she asked, her voice uneven.
I shook my head and reluctantly dropped my arms. Everything I needed was in the Army rucksack I’d carried on the plane. So I followed her out of the airport to the parking deck in an awkward silence, feeling almost as if I’d tossed back two or three drinks. We finally got to her car, a stretched, beautifully maintained Mercedes 280S. It looked like a ’77 or ’78 model, but it was in perfect condition.
“Beautiful car,” I said.
“A gift from my sister Julia,” she replied. Some gift. Julia must be the one married to Crank Wilson. I guess if you were the lead singer of Morbid Obesity you could afford to buy nice gifts.
“It must cost a fortune to maintain.”
“Not really ... an old friend of ours rebuilt it last year. It might as well be a new car.”
She opened the door and said, “Get in.”
I threw my rucksack in the back seat and got in. I was itching to drive this baby. She got behind the wheel and said, “Do you always kiss like that?”
I grinned. “I’ll do a survey and get back with you, okay?”
She gave me a wry look. “I’m sorry I asked.”
I chuckled and looked around the car. Leather seats, new carpet. The dash was highly polished wood. It was an antique, but whoever rebuilt it hadn’t stayed true to the period. It had a top of the line stereo and a dash mounted GPS. I barely heard it when she started the engine, and the car rolled out in glorious silence as we got on the highway.
“It’s official,” I said. “I am so jealous of your car it makes me want to cry. You have to let me drive it while I’m in town.”
She looked over at me for just a second, then said, “Don’t make me choose between you and my car. You won’t like the answer.”
I didn’t want to know if she was serious.
“Talk to me,” I said. “How did it go?”
Her fists clenched slightly on the wheel. I don’t know if she was conscious of it, but something had pissed her off. “It went okay. I did a good job. But ... my thesis advisor made a pass at me. At least I think it was.”
“Are you serious?”
She nodded. “He’s always been such a nice guy. It blindsided me and I can’t figure out if he was just genuinely asking me over for dinner, or if it was something else.”
“Like?”
“Like ... the way he said it, it was like he was telling me the vote would go my way if I slept with him.”
I grimaced. “You think that was it?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Just to set the record straight, I’d vote for you if you slept with me.”
She snickered. “You don’t get a vote.”
“I’ll keep trying anyway. You want me to beat the guy up?”
“No! It was kind of sad, really. He’s married, but I don’t think they’ve been happy together in a long time. Now that I’m getting some perspective on it, I mostly just feel sorry for him. I mean, he’s a great guy in some ways.”
“I know we haven’t known each other long, but you’re making me crazy jealous when you say that.”
“Not like that,” she responded. “Like a big brother. He’s been a real mentor.”
I knew what it felt like to have a mentor, a friend, disappoint you. Boy, did I.
I looked over at her and said, “I get it. You feel like someone you looked up to has blown your trust.”
“Yes!” she replied. “That’s exactly it. I’ve known Bill for two years. We’ve been up in the mountains together for days at a time. You have to trust somebody under those circumstances. And I ... this just really disappointed me. But I don’t even know if that’s what he meant.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“It was after my presentation. I asked him how I’d done, and he said, ‘Tell you what. Why don’t you come over to my place for dinner and a drink to celebrate, and we’ll talk about it.’ And I put him off, told him I had plans, but he was really insistent. So finally I said I was picking up my boyfriend who had just gotten back from Afghanistan. That shut him up.”
I looked at her and answered slowly.
“Sometimes, I think ... people we put on pedestals ... they’ve just got that much further to fall when you realize they’re human.”
“I guess,” she said. “I’m usually not one to put unrealistic expectations on people. I mean ... everybody screws up sometimes. But this felt ... wrong. I mean, how am I supposed to know exactly what he intended? Under other circumstances I would have thought it was just what it seemed, an invitation to dinner and drinks from a guy I respect. But combined with the fact that he’s one of the people who votes on my future? Ugggh.”
As she talked, I watched her, my eyes focusing on the darkness in the curve of her chin, the occasional flash of light against her face and neck. I thought about her question. How would you know? I’d seen pictures on her Facebook page, dozens of them, of Carrie hiking in the mountains, many of them with Bill Ayers, her thesis advisor. A bookish guy, bearded, but fit, probably about five-ten next to her six foot two. Pictures of them laughing together. She didn’t see what I saw, which was that in most of the pictures, Bill Ayers’ eyes were on her. He had it bad. I wondered if she even realized.
“Did you guys ever….” I trailed off, not finishing the question.
“No. I mean ... you spend that much time alone with someone, there’s bound
