“Where are you?”
“What do you care, Mira? The boys are fine. I’ve just dropped them off at my mother’s. They were ecstatic to see her.”
“Why didn’t you tell where you were going? Why didn’t you call last night to tell me where you were?”
Mira was trying to keep her voice down. She was in her office and had just passed Jeff Blackhawk in the hallway. A few days before, they’d made plans to talk in her office after their Tuesday classes, and now he was waiting for her. She should have told him that something had come up, that they’d have to meet another time, but he was talking to Ramona Cherry out there, Godwin’s only fiction writer and its worst gossip, and Mira couldn’t bring herself to speak as she passed. She knew the expression Ramona would be wearing: that looking-on-the-misfortunes-of-others-from-a-distance-with-amusement look.
Schadenfreude, but Mira’s Serbian grandmother had called it, so much more beautifully, zloradost—“eviljoy.”
Mira couldn’t have stood it. She’d simply held up a hand in greeting and hurried past them, and then the phone rang as soon as she closed the door behind her.
“How was I supposed to know you were home?” Clark asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, I waited for you. You said you’d be early, or at least on time, and then you didn’t show up. For all I knew you were the one who’d taken off.”
“I didn’t take off. I was late. I was in a meeting. I’m trying to make a living here, Clark.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about that Mira, and I’m sorry I’ve been such dead weight, you know, dragging you down the toilet along with your glorious career. In the meantime, everything’s fine, and you can just go about your business, your important business. The twins are being taken good care of by their grandmother. I’ll pick them up in a few days, and then—”
“What? What do you mean you’ll pick them up? Where are you going?”
“I’m taking a little R-and-R. I’ve earned it, Mira. I’ve spent the last two years trapped in a nine-hundred square-foot apartment with two toddlers while you were pursuing your Big Career. Now I’m going to rent a little cottage on the lake, and maybe a boat. Maybe fish for a few days. I’ll let you know—”
“Fish? It’s almost winter.”
“Yeah, well, there are still fish in the lake, Mira. They don’t migrate.”
“For God’s sake, Clark, why did you take the twins with you? Why didn’t you leave them home with—”
“Are you kidding, Mira? Because there’s no one to take care of them at home! They need a mother. I left them with the only mother they have—mine.”
“Fuck you, Clark. Fuck you. Fuck—”
But he’d hung up already, and Mira was holding the receiver in her hand, staring straight ahead at her bulletin board, on which a snapshot of the twins—red Kool-Aid smiles shadowing their real smiles, wearing Chicago Cubs caps and bathing trunks with sharks on them, Lake Michigan frothing in the background—was thumbtacked at a terrible slant so that they appeared to be slipping sideways into a pile of ungraded student papers on her desk.
Mira dropped the receiver and lunged at the photo, tore it off the bulletin board and pressed it to her breasts. She was clinging to it when Jeff Blackhawk pushed open her door, which she’d left unlocked in her hurry to answer the phone, and said, registering the expression on her face, “Mira? Is everything okay?”