Motel

Fridays became the day I drove in the late morning from Aurora to Ithaca to see Bruce. Our relationship was limited to the hours we spent in the church he and his wife were renovating—and when he was my professor in our creative writing class. We never left the church and were never seen together. Bruce had instructed me to park my car at the back of the church where it might not be seen from the road. The arrangement suited me. I tried not to look beyond these hours and anticipate a more complete attachment.

My time as a college student proceeded. I pretended that my life was on course and pushed my semisecret affair off to the side, where it could do no damage. I continued to socialize with my friends at the Fargo, flirting with guys, although I never went home with them or gave them my name. I had a secret I caressed. I had a secret I visited a few hours a week. Only my classmates and best friends Joey and Susan knew about Bruce and me. I was good at keeping secrets. I had been keeping them all my life. I was skilled at erasure, expert at asking for nothing. I never asked about the life Bruce lived with his wife, how they spent their time together, their weekend activities, whether a movie or an art exhibit or having friends over for dinner. I wanted to know as little as possible about the texture of their married life together. I especially didn’t want to know if they were having sex. And he never asked me if I was seeing anyone else. Odd, really. Did he, too, want to know nothing of my life apart from him? Knowing no real details, he was able to imagine I did nothing but wait until I was to see him next. He did not envision me flirting in a bar, though that is part of what I did. He thought I was waiting for him, and I gave him no reason to think otherwise. For my part, I just didn’t let myself think.

Thanksgiving came. I drove home and felt more than ever that I was living a double life, that a whole world of experience I couldn’t mention separated me from my family. Bruce had arranged to call me at a specific time over the holiday. In preparation for the scheduled call I went downstairs to the basement; there was a little room where my mother kept an ironing board and my father had a desk with a phone, with the only window peeking out on dirt. This is where I went in high school when I wanted to have a private call or was too upset to be in my room upstairs. That holiday, I sat in the cold room at the desk, waiting. Bruce did manage the call, but only to say that he couldn’t talk and that he would miss our Friday assignation. Back up the stairs I went, accepting the terms of the relationship that he dictated. If I felt hurt or disappointed, I buried those feelings, believing I deserved nothing better.

In mid-December the students in the creative writing class traveled to Ithaca and the church for our final meeting of the semester and a dinner. Anyone observing my performance when we arrived at the church would have applauded. No one could have detected that I had seen it before, that I knew where the second-floor bathroom was and had an intimate acquaintance with the upstairs loft.

I met his wife, Marilyn, the woman whose photograph presided on the wall in his office. A small woman, intelligent, talented, beautiful, altogether compelling. She had her own career, in the art world, her own artistic enterprises and accomplishments. She was someone I aspired to be. Bruce deferred to her, treated her with consideration and pride. He held her in high regard, as someone he didn’t want to lose. In fact, they made an admirable couple. Neither seemed to hamper the other. They pursued separate tracks and yet, coming together, blended their strengths and energies in joint endeavors: renovating the church, creating a garden, making movies. They were my ideal of what a modern couple could be—that is, if I had an ideal, if I had thoughts about such things. But I hadn’t seriously thought about what one looks for in a partner, how a marriage works.

Bruce also performed well during our visit to the church. He disguised his feelings for me so thoroughly that I wondered if they stayed true or if in the presence of his wife and his more profound love for her, I faded into the background. But I didn’t become jealous and fight for his attention. I understood and accepted my status as secondary. I found it a relief. When I met Marilyn, she became real, what I had been avoiding. Marilyn was flesh and blood before me, not an abstraction called the wife. I didn’t want to break up her marriage. Yet I wondered what was lacking between them and what need I fulfilled. Why would a man turn away from such a woman for a child like me? It made no sense.

There are all kinds of beauty. Marilyn had a sophisticated beauty that grew out of her intelligence and accomplishments. She was just thirty, yet she was launched, a miraculous thing to me. She had become herself, or so I thought, and her beauty was that of someone fully formed. I did not think of myself as beautiful. Whatever I had was the look of a half-made thing, of incompleteness, of a being yet to emerge, a being who could be shaped. A lack of calculation or experience was a part of my appeal. I couldn’t craft a sophisticated appearance or effect. Whoever I was came to the skin unbidden, like a blush. Marilyn was herself, whereas I was becoming. What I would become was still a question, though I believe Bruce wanted a hand in that becoming, that my very incompleteness was my appeal to him. He’d take the naive girl from Pennsylvania and make her into a lover, his lover.

In the weeks before the end of the fall semester, I tried unsuccessfully to avoid deep feelings and reflection. Nevertheless, it was clear that my relations with Bruce were advancing too fast, at least for me. I wanted to view our arrangement as a fling, an affair, with no long-term commitment and no future terrible consequences. Such a thing could not disturb the nested perfection of Bruce with Marilyn. I counted on him only for the moments we were together and wanted him to expect no more from me.

I didn’t care to know what occurred when I left on Friday afternoon and Bruce picked his wife up from the museum and drove her home. There were many questions not to ask: Did he clean, after I left, surveying the church for any telltale sign of my presence? Did he feel guilty and cook a special dinner in penance, stopping on his way to the museum to buy a bottle of wine? Did he have difficulty keeping us straight, being with both of us in the span of a few hours, and slip with a name? Or was his mood altogether plum? Maybe he felt like the king of his world, rich with women. From her to me and back again to her, a sumptuous pairing.

I, on the other hand, was single. There was no going from Bruce to someone and back again. Leaving the church and Bruce behind, I drove to my dorm room, drove back to myself. I could see my friends or not—they weren’t waiting for me. If I traveled home in a daze, no one noticed. I could indulge whatever mood prevailed after my rendezvous. I spent my time studying and doing college things. My flirtations at the bar amounted to nothing. They couldn’t because, though I was single, I was taken. How ironic that I, who wanted to avoid constricting ties, ended up bound by a relationship without enjoying full privileges. When a boy asked if he could see me, I didn’t say, Oh, I’m having an affair with one of my professors, so I’m not interested in dating. But it was true. The college guys I flirted with seemed such boys compared to Bruce, disposable. Being with Bruce was a beautiful and yet lonely thing. He did not call to see if I arrived back at Wells safely, even when the snow fell blindingly on the road, or to tell me he was thinking about me. We did not have lunch together or meet at the Fargo for a beer. We did not talk about our petty cares and irritations, the ups and downs of a day. All our subjects were important, spoken to an intimate stranger who wouldn’t be able to tell anyone else. I waited for Fridays, the day he was free to see me, the day I could become someone else.

I lived like a horse with blinders on a narrow track below two cliffs. If I veered to either side, it would destroy me. I did not want to give up the arrangement with Bruce, but I could not give myself wholeheartedly to him, so I held back, kept something of myself in reserve. I did not complain. I did not ask for more, ask to intensify the relationship. This middle way was not a ploy or calculation. It arose from my own need for self-preservation. I didn’t want more. I wanted what I had.

The best days of a relationship may be the early moments, before it becomes more than it can be, to bear more weight than it can bear, before it becomes treacherous. But the nature of romances is to accelerate or die. It was inevitable that my affair with Bruce would break out of its little box. He shifted gears, and not into reverse.

After Christmas Bruce was going to fly to Chicago for the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, the national organization for professors of English, French, and other languages and literature. More than seven thousand academics would gather to present and listen to talks on their special areas of interest, look for jobs, catch up with old friends, and hook up with old lovers. On the first day of the conference, December 27, Bruce was making a presentation titled “Some Notes on the Introduction of Film to English Courses,” and he suggested we meet in Chicago. We could be together for a few days away from Wells and Ithaca, and I would not have to share him with his wife.

The scheme was simple for him and complicated for me. Bruce had a legitimate reason to attend the conference, and Marilyn, of course, would not travel to Chicago for a gathering of literature professors, so Bruce could book his flight and room without suspicion. I, on the other hand, had to come up with a ruse. I told my parents that I was going to visit Joey and Susan in Rochester, celebrate New Year’s Eve with them, and then head straight back to Wells for the start of the four-week January term. His trip was funded; mine was not.

I drove to Rochester and spent the night at Susan’s house, and she and Joey took me to the airport the next day. I had never purchased an airline ticket, flown alone, or gotten myself to a destination in an unfamiliar city, and I couldn’t have pulled off the deception without my friends’ help. But they weren’t happy about it. They disapproved of my affair with Bruce and were pained by their role in the subterfuge. My lies begot their lies. They wanted their old friend back, someone who didn’t lead a false life they expected to come to a bad end. Truth be told, I was beginning to want her back too.

Bruce did not meet me at the airport in Chicago, and I had to find my own way to the motel where he had booked a room. The conference hotel, where sessions were held and most of the conferees were staying, was the Palmer House, near the Art Institute, Grant Park, and upscale restaurants and shops. Bruce could not risk being recognized by one of the thousands of people swarming the hotel, so he chose the low-end TraveLodge for us, a mile south on Michigan Avenue, where no one attending the conference would stay.

It turned out that being the other woman was not very romantic, not a fantasy honeymoon in a fancy hotel where the couple disappears behind golden doors and reappears days later, having shared passionate love. Although the TraveLodge was just a few years old, it was a generic motel like those in any city, cheap and bland as an old towel. Below our room on the second floor, the parking area was filled with big Oldsmobiles crusted with winter dirt. The door to our room was hollow core, like the walls inside, and the steps of those treading the stairs and the walkway outside our room were unmuted.

Bruce left each day for the conference while I stayed at the motel. When he returned, he often brought me food. I didn’t scout Chicago, a city I had never seen. We did not visit the Art Institute, where we might have been spotted, or catch a movie. I had arranged heaven and hell to be with Bruce in Chicago and spent the entire time in the dreary motel, hidden away, a naughty secret. In the room alone for hours, I slept out of depression and fatigue.

We did emerge late one evening for a meal. The cold wind swept us along the street to a diner, another spot no professors would frequent. We sat beside a window, and I looked out into the dark, my reflection showing a young face with a forlorn and weary expression. Whatever was going on in the motel was not my true fate—I felt this instinctually. This was a false fate, delivered by someone else. I couldn’t tell Bruce that I was disappointed, that I had expected something better. I was angry and trapped, and I knew only to wait it out.

It was my first occasion with any man when the time available for sex was unlimited. Up until this sojourn in Chicago, my sexual encounters were short-lived, occasional. Now, we had lots of sex, more sex than I had ever had. He couldn’t get enough of me. After one of our sessions I fainted in the bathroom.

I wasn’t a flower slowly unfolding. I wasn’t opening, feeling my way along. I couldn’t let go, give myself over, because I was terrified of what would follow. What would happen to me if I really loved Bruce, if I committed myself to him? He wasn’t mine, and he wasn’t going to be mine. I was going to be discarded. I couldn’t abandon myself without thought of consequences.

But I hadn’t waited until a proper mate came along either. I was a half-formed creature in no-man’s-land. I couldn’t tell him that this wasn’t what I wanted. I couldn’t say, Please stop. I was looking for a sexual awakening, but this was not the way. I had to pass out in the bathroom to gain some reprieve, some distance. In the motel, I had lost my purchase of the middle ground.

Bruce sensed my reserve and redoubled his efforts to make me respond. He wanted me to open up to him—those were the words he used. The more I held back, the more he pressed. He was so there, fully, sexually present, overwhelming me with his drive. I felt pressure, ache. I felt ancient and used. I was being blasted open. He wanted me to give up my safety, to give over to him, the very thing I did not want to do.

Above all else he wanted me to come. But I was clenched, refusing to lose control, as if orgasming would give him something I didn’t want him to have. I had to keep something of myself back. It was mine to bestow, originating deep inside me. It was the gift of myself. Not coming kept me on the narrow track through the gorge.

Despite my defenses, he tipped me over and broke me open. He thought my tears were joy and release. He had me now, had me the way no one else had ever had.

Bruce flew home separately from Chicago to Ithaca. Arriving, he might have remembered for a moment seeing the maid changing the sheets on our bed when he went back to the room for his bags, and felt a stab. But he would follow Marilyn up the two flights of stairs into their loft and lie down in their bed with the window behind them where they could watch the snow.

I flew separately from Chicago to Rochester and then drove back to Aurora. I felt a great relief returning to my dorm room, to my single bed and my own sheets. My upper legs, my arms too, were spotted with bruises where Bruce had put his full weight, where I had been squeezed and held and pushed. I couldn’t wait to sink onto my bed and turn my face to the wall.

Read more from Issue 23.1.