Attach ments(100)

Full-time. Tuition + benefits.”





EVE TEASED HIM about working on campus and taking almost a full load of classes. “It’s like you went back to school through a loophole,” she said after his first semester. “What is it with you and school?

Are you addicted to the smell of musty auditoriums?”

Maybe he was. Musty auditoriums. Creaky library chairs. Wide green lawns.

Lincoln had his own desk in the Dean of Nursing’s Office. He was the only man on the administrative staff and the only person younger than forty-five. His computer skills awed the office ladies. They treated him like Gandalf. He had a desk, but he didn’t have to sit there. He could go to class or do whatever he needed to do to keep everything humming.

Part of his job was Internet security—but it was little more than updating antiviral programs and reminding people not to open suspicious attachments. His supervisor in the central IT office said that there had never been a pornography incident in the Nursing College and that, besides porn and gambling, people were free to go and do whatever they wanted online.

“Is there an e-mail filter?” Lincoln asked.

“Are you kidding?” the guy said. “The faculty senate would flip.”

LINCOLN STILL THOUGHT about Beth. All the time, at first.

He subscribed to the newspaper so that he could read her reviews at breakfast and again at lunch. He tried to figure out how she was doing through her writing. Did she seem happy? Was she being too hard on romantic comedies? Or too generous?

Reading her reviews kept his memory of her alive in a way he probably shouldn’t want. Like a pilot light inside of him. It made him ache sometimes, when she was especially funny or insightful, or when he could read past her words to something true that he knew about her. But the aching faded, too.

Things get better—hurt less—over time. If you let them.

When fall classes started, Lincoln developed a crush on his medieval literature professor, a flammably intelligent woman in her mid-thirties. She had full hips and bluntly cut bangs, and she got rhapsodic when she talked about Beowulf. She’d underline phrases in his papers with bright green ink and write notes in the margins. “Exactly!” or “Ironic, isn’t it?” He thought he might ask her out when the term ended. Or he might sign up for her advanced seminar.

One of the women in his office kept trying to fix him up with her daughter, Neveen, an advertising copywriter who smoked organic cigarettes. They went out a few times, and Lincoln liked Neveen well enough to take her to Justin and Dena’s wedding.

It was held at a giant Catholic church in the suburbs. (Who knew that Justin was Catholic? And devout enough that he made Dena convert. “My kids aren’t growing up Unitarian,” he told Lincoln at the rehearsal dinner. “Those cocksuckers just barely believe in Jesus.”)

The reception was at a nice hotel a few miles away. There was a Polish-themed buffet and a string quartet that played during dinner. Lincoln felt anxious about seeing Sacajawea play. He ate way too many pirogi.

The band took the stage after the bride and groom’s dance (“My Heart Will Go On”), the wedding party dance (“Leather and Lace”), and the father-daughter dance (“Butterfly Kisses”). Justin made an announcement while they set up, warning his elderly aunts and uncles that they better take advantage of the open bar or get packing “cuz it’s about to get fucking twisted in here.”

The sting Lincoln expected to feel when he saw Chris never came. Chris was still a beautiful specimen. A few of Dena’s adolescent cousins clustered at Chris’s end of the stage and fiddled with their necklaces. An older girl, college-aged, had come with the band. She had long blond hair and luminous skin, and she handed Chris beer and bottled water between songs.

There was no sting. Even when Chris seemed to recognize Lincoln and waved. Now—to Lincoln, anyway—Chris was just another guy who wasn’t with Beth.

It’s hard to dance to music that sounds like Zeppelin dragged in Radiohead, but most of Justin and Dena’s friends were drunk enough to try. Including Lincoln’s date. Lincoln wasn’t drunk, but he still felt like jumping and shouting and singing too loud. He caught stage divers. He spun Neveen until she was dizzy. He shamelessly made devil horns at the sky.





IT WAS COLD for October. The kids would have to wear puffy coats over their Halloween costumes, and they’d get asked at every door who they were supposed to be.

October, Lincoln thought to himself. Callooh, callay.

He stood at his open bedroom window, just for a moment, to let the memory pass through him.

Merry October.

One of the nicer things about his apartment was that there was a movie theater in walking distance.