Page 4 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“They’re girls,” she said. “Why are you going through my desk?”

“Just curious.”

She would have been upset if there were anything interesting in her drawers. If he wanted to examine her graphing calculator with the cracked screen, he could go ahead. He would never find her secrets. She didn’t really have any. Or she did, but they were internal somehow, secret even from herself. For instance, she did not like him, not really, and the secret of her disdain was like a folded promise waiting in a drawer within her.

“Does your wife know you do this?” she asked.

“Uh, no,” he said, and gave himself a little spin in her desk chair.

“But you’ve done this before?”

“With a student? No.”

“With other women?”

He stopped spinning and appeared to be considering his answer. He opened one of the weird beers he had brought. He used the edge of her desk to pry off the bottle cap, and she was astonished by the rudeness of this.

“I’ve never told anyone,” he said.

“What?” she asked, lying down on her bed, aware that even now she was trying to look cute in her underwear, her hip cocked a bit as she lay back on the pillows. From the hallway, she could hear one of her roommates throwing up. Probably Kat the Smaller, who was very much a puker. Things entered and exited her with a whimsy Margo could not imagine.

“I slept with my wife’s sister on our wedding night.”

Margo gasped. “Oh my gosh, you are a bad person!”

He nodded, brow furrowed. “I really am.”

“But then you stopped sleeping with her sister.”

“Yeah. I mean, there were a few more times after we got home from our honeymoon, but after that we stopped, yeah.”

“Did you feel guilty?” she asked. It was hard to tell what men felt, she realized. She’d always wondered how her father could be so totally immune to her need for him, how he could pack a bag and be gone when she woke in the morning without saying goodbye. When she was a child, she assumed he was different with his real children, but as she’d gotten older and come to know him better, she understood he was that way with his wife and kids too. It was the wrestling life. Always getting on a plane. That was where he wanted to be: crammed in a rental car with two men who were both almost three hundred pounds, psychotically violent, and addicted to painkillers. The regular world had perhaps never been entirely real to him.

“This is going to sound so fucked up, but not really,” he said. “I would just pretend I never did it. And since she didn’t know I’d done it, it was like I hadn’t.”

He wrote her poetry, ultimately almost a dozen poems, but she liked this one the most:

The Hungry Ghost

In the dark, we turn to each other

Like deformed doves,

Confused that we have bodies.

I feel nothing,

Keep touching me,

I feel nothing.

I’m a hungry ghost.

We try to eat each other

But it is like trying to run in a dream,

The dark frozen ice of reality splintering around us.

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