“Did you see this?” Cath said Monday morning, holding up the “Living” section. “You give a drug addict all the drugs he needs to be satisfied, and he is not satisfied. You give an alcoholic access to all the alcohol he wants, and he is not satisfied.”

“And… what conclusions do they draw?” He had slept poorly this weekend. He sipped his coffee slowly, savoring the flavor, savoring his wife who sat in a patch of sun at the table.

“Same thing with chocolate,” she continued, “even in unlimited quantities.”

“So…”

“So the point is, people who crave a substance can never get enough.”

He found it hard to come up with the right thing to say. Absorbed by guilt, he wasn't really following. “This is not news,” he said.

“No, wait. Nothing satiates the craving. A lot of crank doesn't do any better than a little. There's no satiety. Anticipation is what drives them on. Hope.”

“Always chasing the high.”

“But the chase keeps 'em going, get it?”

“Uh huh.”

“That's you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You feel stuck in your job. Sometimes you feel stuck with me.”

“Cath…”

“You've always been the seeker. Like Emerson's traveler, who is never happy. The spot you are in is never quite good enough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something's wrong, isn't it?”

He stood and tried to put his arms around her but while accepting his embrace, she sighed deeply.

“Nothing's wrong. It's the last day of school before finals. I'm distracted,” he said.

“That's not it.”

“Nothing's wrong, goddammit!”

The look she turned on him proclaimed exquisitely the depths of her understanding and grief. He had done nothing different than he did any other weekend, but his wife was already mourning over some unknown catastrophe. That's what a real marriage was, understanding too deep for deception. Well, he had a real one, didn't he, and now he had blown it, along with everything else.

He knew he should tell her before word leaked back, as it surely would, and soon, but he couldn't. He knew that he would try to explain, and he knew he couldn't. Cath's simple values were admirable, but there were things in his world that could not survive such astringency-delicate, complex things. Nothing could make her understand how wrapped up in that moment he had been, how obliterated he had been. How impersonal it had been. He had wandered outside her framework, and was lost to her comprehension.

He kissed her good-bye, lingering, wrapped in the smell of her shampoo, doing his own mourning in advance of the news.

In the car he tuned the radio to an all-news station all the way to school. Pasting a composed look on his face, he greeted the other teachers in the hallway with the usual salutations. They greeted him back.

So Roo hadn't said anything yet. There was still time.

Once in his classroom, he opened up the briefcase he was carrying, removed his gun, and tucked it into the bottom drawer.

“Final projects are due this morning,” he started off in first period, second period, third period. “You had the weekend to finish up,” he said while he flitted between heaven and hell.

At lunch, he sat under a tree, itching in a patch of cut grass, his paper sack untouched beside him. The gardener came unpleasantly close with his rake a few times. The teachers would not tolerate the noise of leaf blowers, so disruptive to the calm of academe. Mr. Cahill thought their position made his life harder and made his opinion known however possible. A horde of little children skating, followed by a troupe of mothers, screamed by on the sidewalk.

Another bell rang in fourth period and then there was the senior class parody, which was witty enough to shake a few nervous laughs out of him.

Fifth period. Roo.

She walked into the classroom with her friend Jayne, and sat in the back row until class started, chatting quietly.

“Stories to the front, please,” he said, amazed at his own cool. How did he do it? How could he function in the middle of the worst crisis of his life? Cath would leave him, if she knew. She would never trust him again.

He watched to see if Roo had something ready. She did.

“I need to see you after class, Miss Fielding.”

She nodded, and her eyes returned to her book.

“Now read this Katherine Anne Porter, the last story in your lit book, and answer the questions at the end. As you are reading, I want you to be thinking about how she generates a theme. What are the elements? What role do characters, plot, and detail play? Pay attention to the ending and the beginning. Look for parallels in the structure. Oh yes. We've talked a lot about point of view. We'll be talking about that again at the end of the period.”

The class groaned.

“Thought you could take it easy just because it's the last day, huh?” How normal he sounded! How pathetic and irrelevant everything he said sounded!

He had staved off the inevitable over the weekend, because he was afraid. He had justified his hesitation by telling himself he had to see Roo one last time to apologize, and that's what he would do, wasn't it, even though something sharp and nasty in him wanted to take her down with him.

He tried to write to Cath, but ended up throwing the pages away. He could not face her with this. He could not face the pain of her humiliation, and his own public downfall.

The world sucked. Everything was bound to appear so sordid, when it had been nothing but a spring day, the sunshine, the trees in an ocean breeze. Ah, how the world sucked.

Blurry in his thoughts, looking for something to get himself through to the end of the class when he would get Roo alone, or himself alone, or both of them, he hadn't decided, he picked up Roo's story and began to read.

“The Young Lady,” a new title, headlined the page. She hadn't used her synopsis at all. Roo wrote well; he usually enjoyed her assignments.

A clutching at his heart reminded him, and his moist fingers left marks as they traveled down the side of her paper. His time was up. He had done something others would see as deplorable, selfish, vile… the respect of his colleagues, the admiration of his pupils, all that would be lost along with Cath, as soon as they knew.

Was Roo's time up, too? Did he have to decide this minute, or was the decision made the moment he pulled off the road that day with her? His heart began to thump. He worried someone might hear it, might find him out before he could escape.

A squirrel ran down a tree outside. A few of his students turned to watch.

The gun in his drawer made that side of the desk feel warmer, like a hearth, so he leaned that way as if its comfort could pamper him through the last few minutes of class. But as he read, he forgot the desk; he forgot the gun. His fear continued to sit in his stomach, indigestible as coal, but he gave it no attention.

He found himself driving along in a car, a young girl, feeling the pressure of an older man's eyes on her skin as she feigned sleep. He took in the fine sensory details of her clothing, her perception of this man, his handsomeness, his strength, his intelligence. She had such a crush.

And slowly, he began to understand.

Roo's story was the story of his seduction.

Way back at the beginning of the year, Roo had decided to go after him. But Carl, well-schooled in how to handle students with crushes, had not taken her bait. He threw out his arsenal of defenses to frustrate her. Nothing she did caused even a flicker of interest in his eyes. Nothing she wore made him look any closer than he looked at all the other girls.

So, she had developed a plan. She would seduce Newell. She reasoned that would draw Carl's attention. She didn't care what kind of attention she got. Negative was okay for a start. She just needed a way to rise above what she called the “herd of anonymous cattle” in the classroom. If necessary, she would sacrifice her grade, but that direction had not come until later, when Carl continued to ignore her.