A BRIEF AND MELANCHOLY HISTORY

Colton Huelle 

FUCKBOY

In black bubble letters on the crème beige hood of my ‘85 Mercedes, somebody had spray-painted the word FUCKBOY. It could only have been the work of Phoebe Starling, and I went at once to confront her. 

She held a Graduate Assistantship in the Wentworth College Archives, which was where I found her, feeding a handwritten manuscript into a document scanner. 

She denied nothing and refused to foot the bill.

“Do you know what a new paint job on a classic car costs?” I demanded. 

“You should have thought of that before you went and fucked around with someone’s feelings,” she replied calmly. 

“Did I ever lie to you?” I asked her. “Did I ever tell you that I wasn’t with anyone else?” 

“When I asked you if you wanted us to be exclusive, you said, ‘what do you think?’ and then asked when you could meet my parents.”

Well, she had me there. The thing is, if she had written ASSHOLE or CHEATER or even GASLIGHTER, I’d have had little to object to. But FUCKBOY? That was unjust. Per Urban Dictionary, a fuckboy is “a guy who lies to girls to pull as much ass as possible.” That didn’t even begin to describe me. Only a person with ZERO capacity for nuance would think so.

My father bailed on my mom when I was three months old. “Don’t even ask me about him,” my mother would say to me. “Your father’s a bum, and that’s all you need to know.” But then, a few years ago, she somehow came across the word “fuckboy.” After that, she never missed a chance to remind me what a fuckboy my father was, even though I hadn’t asked about him in years.

In consequence, I’m inclined to find fuckboys despicable. No better than the beasts in the field. Me? I’ll admit to being a little reckless with my passions. Sometimes people get hurt.

For example, the way that Phoebe found out that I was sleeping with her boss, Dr. Astrid Bergeron, was by showing up at the Archives after hours, looking for her laptop charger but instead finding Astrid sitting at her desk, muffling come-cries with her bright blue ascot while I pleasured her with a vibrating pinky-ring.

I never claimed I was a good boy, but that didn’t make me a fuckboy. 

The subtlety of this distinction appeared to be beyond Phoebe’s comprehension. At a certain point, she started interrupting all attempts to explain myself by plugging her ears and repeating the word fuckboy in rapid-fire monotone. Finally, I threw up my hands and walked away.

She was a little inexperienced, sexually speaking, and she must have thought that I was some kind of sex maniac with an insatiable libido. Not so. I didn’t seduce poor Phoebe out of a surplus of lust, but simply because my mentor, Virgil Cutting, told me to.   

SAINT HELENA

A few weeks earlier, I was walking home from the library, where I was busy with the preliminary research for my master’s thesis, “Sexuality and Redemption in Hardboiled Detective Fiction,” when Virgil pulled up beside me in his cherry red ‘72 Chevy Nova and told me to hop in.

Strictly speaking, he wasn’t allowed on campus, but when I told him so, he blew a raspberry and asked me just who I imagined would have the stones to stop him.

The year before, he had been forced to resign as President of Wentworth College following allegations of sexual misconduct. He disappeared to Miami for a while, and this was the first time I had seen him since his ousting. “A smear campaign if ever there was one,” he assured me now. 

We drove out to his waterfront palace on Rye Beach, where he was living in exile from his beloved alma mater. 

“Welcome to my very own Saint Helena,” he sighed.

Born the son of a Wentworth College groundskeeper, raised in a two-room cabin on the southern margins of the campus, Virgil grew up to become, at forty-four, the youngest president in the history of the college. Wentworth was his world, and he fancied himself a kind of hometown Napoleon, a mighty conqueror in exile. 

At the end of the academic year, he would have the opportunity to appeal his dismissal with the Board of Regents. But there was no hope of success, he explained to me over bourbon rickeys and a rack of ribs. The evidence against him, though fabricated, had already damned him. He was doomed to live out his twilight years in infamy. 

“Napoleon only lived for six years on Saint Helena,” he continued. “I figure that’s about as long as I have left on this earth.”

It pained me to see him so deflated. He had done so much for my mother and me over the years. He and my mother had become friends simply because they frequented the same Dunkin’ Donuts at the same time each morning for about ten years. When she was laid off from the gun range, he found a position for her in some provost’s office that paid twice what she was making before.

He took an interest in me as well. Although I was a mediocre student in high school, he found me wise beyond my years and often said I reminded him of himself at a young age. “It’s never too late to become extraordinary,” he told me whenever I saw him and then proceeded to shower me in MacBooks, Red Sox tickets, and––on my 16th birthday––my 1985 Mercedes 300TD wagon with a 5-cylinder turbo diesel engine and a crème beige finish. 

“Your fuckboy father would cream his shorts if he saw you driving that beauty,” my mother said proudly. 

But even more importantly, Virgil secured me a full-ride scholarship to Wentworth, though neither my grades nor my SAT scores warranted it. 

THE ORDER OF THE CORMORANT 

After dinner, Virgil offered me a cigar, and we took our conversation out onto his wrap-around patio. Over the endless Atlantic, a congregation of storm clouds were assembling.  

“I suppose you’ve heard about Gerald G. Wentworth’s signet ring?” Virgil said as he lit his cigar. 

I had. At the beginning of the summer, there had been a heist at the Currier Art Museum in Manchester. The only item that was taken was a gold signet ring bearing the emblem of the Order of the Cormorant, an obscure fraternal organization started by the founder of Wentworth College in his final years, which were marred by intermittent bouts of brain fever. At its height, the Order of the Cormorant boasted twelve members, mostly sycophants from the college attempting to ride the coattails of a dying madman. 

Into my open palm, Virgil deposited Gerald G. Wentworth’s missing ring. I examined it: on the broad face of the ring, a cormorant head was carved into ruby, beneath which was a banner bearing the words: SUI GENERIS.

“Of his own kind,” Virgil translated. “But forgive me, of course you know Latin.”

I didn’t, and I’m now inclined to think that he knew I didn’t. Because that was the intoxicating thing about Virgil: he never spoke to the person in front of him, but to who that person most wanted to be. 

“Can you imagine why I might have stolen Gerald G. Wentworth’s ring, Donnie?”

“Wentworth was your whole world,” I said. “That ring belongs to you as much as anybody on the planet.”

He pulled my face into his white, velveteen chest, bare beneath his unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. “My dear, dear, boy,” he said, sounding as if on the brink of tears. “It means a great deal to me to hear you say that.” He smelled strongly of Eight & Bob, the same cologne he’d given me when I graduated high school. “You know who wore this stuff?” he asked me at least a dozen times. “JFK, that’s who! Give yourself a spritz when you want to smell like a president. Or a guy that’s made it with Marilyn Monroe, heh!”

A bolt of lightning split the night in half and hung against the black sky for what felt like a supernaturally long time. When I think of Virgil Cutting now, this is how I see him: lording over the raucous waves from the balcony of his palace, licking his lips at the white-hot world stretched out before him. 

THE LIVE MASCOT

In orchestrating the theft of Gerald G. Wentworth’s signet ring, Virgil was only getting started. It was only one of seven Wentworth “relics” that he hoped to acquire. In his library, he showed me a daguerreotype portrait of Chester Newcastle, the first Black professor at Wentworth, which he’d snatched from the Philosophy Department earlier that week. To pull off his next heist, he told me later that night, he would need my help. 

During the season of 1942-1943, Wentworth football matches featured a live mascot––a bobcat who’d been trapped by a local farmer. Her name was Maisie, and during halftime, she was led out onto the field to accompany the cheerleading squad. According to contemporary accounts, Maisie mostly yawned during these performances, and, during the last game of the season, she died right there on the field. Now, her taxidermied remains were on display in the Wentworth College Archives.

“The Archives are currently directed by Dr. Astrid Bergeron,” Virgil told me. “She has a peculiar attachment to Maisie, and has long been campaigning for the university to establish a foundation for conserving bobcat habitats in New Hampshire. The Maisie Project, she wants to call it.” 

“So what do you need from me?”

“Dr. Bergeron has a graduate assistant working for her in the Archives, one Phoebe Starling. Ms. Starling currently possesses the only copy of the key to the room in which Maisie is kept. I need you to get close to her, Donnie––close enough to be able to make me a copy of that key.”

“Why me?” I asked. 

“Because you’re a lady-killer,” he said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the effect you have on women.”

Most directly, he was referring to a widely circulated rumor that I had slept with a Classics professor when I was an undergrad. I hadn’t, but when Virgil asked me about it, I sensed that he did so with pride, and I replied only with a coy shrug. 

“Atta boy,” he said. Of course, he had no choice but to fire her after that.  

“During the last week of September, Dr. Bergeron will be attending her sister’s wedding in Nevada, during which time the Archives will be closed. I’ll need the key before then.” 

I was apprehensive. It seemed like a risky enterprise, and Virgil no longer had the institutional pull to shield me from any consequences that might result from getting caught.

But I had never yet given Virgil cause to doubt whatever it was he saw in me, and I wasn’t about to start now. 

THE HAMMETT LETTERS

I had been planning to make my way to the Archives anyways. I’d recently discovered that a certain obscure poet who once taught at Wentworth happened to have served in the same unit as Dashiell Hammett during World War I, after which the two became lifelong friends and prolific correspondents. A collection of their letters was housed in the Archives, and on this basis, I was granted a weeklong admission to the Archives to conduct research for my thesis. 

On my first day, Phoebe Starling greeted me at the very bottom of the library’s central stairwell, down in the basement where the Archives were housed. She was moon-faced and listless, the sort of girl I had a great deal of experience seducing.

Phoebe explained that the stale smell of paper-mites was the result of her boss’s refusal to allow the basement to be renovated. 

After thirty minutes of perusing the Hammett letters, I began asking Phoebe about herself and her studies. She was sitting behind a cherry wood study carrel over which I could see only her eyebrows, which were thick and darker than her straw-colored hair. She told me she studied history, but fielded my follow up questions brusquely without looking up from her monitor. 

Until I said, “It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.” 

“Herodotus,” she replied, obviously impressed. This was one of seven quotes by the so-called Father of History I’d memorized in preparing to seduce her. She was looking up over the carrel at me now, so I could see her whole face, which appeared rosier than it had been when she met me in the stairwell an hour before.

“I almost majored in History,” I said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I found a greater passion.”

“Detective fiction?” she guessed.

I caught the shade of irony in her voice and saw at once that she lacked any refined notion of beauty and was simply a crusty academic who fed on knowledge generated by dead scholars, who themselves fed on longer dead scholars: a lineage of carrion-feeders spanning all the way back to old Herodotus. 

But scorn has no place in the rites of seduction. “The heart wants what it wants,” I said, compensating for the cliché with a sex-charged smile.

A creaky door behind Phoebe opened, and Dr. Astrid Bergeron entered the room. 

A POIGNANT PHRASE

“Have you gotten to the ones where Hammett talks about meeting Lillian yet?” Dr. Bergeron asked, approaching the study table where I was perusing the packet of letters.  

From Virgil’s account of her, I was anticipating Astrid to be a frumpy old matron. In my experience, Virgil never spoke of an attractive woman without at least a passing reference to something he admired about her physique. And there was certainly much to admire about Dr. Bergeron. The thin, stretchy fabric of her tapered black pants dared me to imagine: legs and legs and legs! Her face was extremely reptilian in a way that I’ve always been a sucker for. 

She offered to give me a tour of the Archives, which in addition to the main study room, included only her office and the annex in which Maisie was kept. 

I was not prepared for the dignity that Maisie had preserved in death. Entombed within a glass display case, she stood on three legs astride a log of birch. Her fourth paw hovered just above the ground, suspended mid-trot. Very regal. She was not at all the pitiful, yawning thing she was reputed to have been in life.

“Hers was a brief and melancholy history,” I read from a plaque fixed to the glass. “What a poignant phrase.”

Dr. Bergeron blushed. As it turned out, she was responsible for the plaque. The display case too. Before her appointment as Head Archivist, Maisie lived on top of a filing cabinet in her predecessor’s office, where she served as his tie rack. 

A POISON TONGUE

In the weeks leading up to Dr. Bergeron’s absence, I successfully (in retrospect, perhaps too successfully) seduced Phoebe, stole and copied her key to the Archives, and even made decent headway on my thesis. 

“You better not hurt me, Donnie O’Shaughnessy,” said Phoebe, standing before me in her apartment on the first night she brought me home. She’d just gotten out of the shower, and now she dropped her towel.

“You have my word,” I answered.

How was I to know then that I wouldn’t have a choice?

The following morning, I was standing on Virgil’s patio, handing him the copy of Phoebe’s key.

“You’ve done marvelously, Donnie,” he told me, cupping my shoulder. “I want you to know that, even in my current disgrace, I still have powerful connections, so don’t think for a second that your loyalty will go unrewarded.”

The hand that cupped my shoulder now pulled me into a bear hug. 

“What is your impression of Dr. Bergeron?” he asked me over dinner. 

“She’s younger than I expected.”

“A prodigy,” Virgil added. “She completed her bachelor’s at nineteen and her doctorate in library science by twenty-four. But her genius is tainted by paranoia and rabid feminist extremism. Since her arrival at Wentworth, she has carried out the most inexplicable vendetta against me. You see, it was Astrid Bergeron who manipulated those women into telling lies about me.”

I found it strange that he hadn’t told me this before, but I refrained from saying so.

“She will not take Maisie’s disappearance lightly,” Virgil continued. “I would like you to promise me that you will avoid engaging with her as much as possible, Donnie. That woman has a poison tongue.”

His pupils seemed to strain and bulge as he spoke. His grasp on my shoulder tightened into a future thumbprint bruise. 

FULL SHERLOCK

When Dr. Bergeron returned from Nevada, Maisie was gone. She filed a report with the campus police, but they were busy, as always, catching kids smoking pot in College Woods. As Virgil had predicted, she took the investigation into her own hands.  

“She’s gone full Sherlock,” Phoebe told me. She had arrived at my apartment exasperated after an hour-long interrogation. “She practically water-boarded me. You know, if I lose this Assistantship, I can’t afford to stay in my program.” 

“Did she ask anything about me?”

“You? Why would she ask about you?”

The next day, Dr. Bergeron cornered me at the coffee shop downtown. I didn’t look up from my biography of Dashiell Hammett when she slid into my booth, but I recognized her by her amaretto perfume. 

She coughed, and I looked up. She wore a thin, orange sweater and a blue houndstooth ascot. 

“How’s your thesis coming?” she asked. “I’d love to read it when you’re done. I’m a huge fan of detective fiction. Even the super pulpy stuff. I don’t know if you heard, but I have a bit of a hard-boiled mystery on my hands myself.”

I tilted my head to the side, soliciting elaboration. “That so?”

“I thought that Phoebe would have told you. Maisie is missing.” 

I pretended not to understand for a beat or two, and then I let my face say, Ah, yes, of course. The stuffed bobcat. And then I raised my eyebrows. That’s terrible, they said. Who would do such a thing?

At last, her gaze let mine go. She was now staring at my empty coffee cup, which I suddenly realized I had been rapping with a metal spoon. I saw at once that she recognized this for what it was: a tell. I placed the spoon gently upon my paper napkin. A micro-squint and a nose-twitch told me: I’m onto you. 

“I was wondering if you might have noticed anything odd the week you were in the Archives,” she said. I blew my Superman curl away from my brow and made like I was thinking it over. 

“I’m sorry, I was preoccupied with the research.”

“Of course. And to be clear, Phoebe hasn’t mentioned anything about this to you? I know you two have been––getting to know each other recently.” Lucky girl, the flutter of her eyelids added. When she left, her perfume lingered and kept me from returning to my reading.

WHAT THE MOMENT REQUIRED OF ME

The news of my interview with Dr. Bergeron rattled Virgil. He was certain that she’d already discovered my relation to him and would soon turn her full attention to proving his involvement in Maisie’s disappearance.

In keeping with our Sunday morning ritual, we were out on his cabin cruiser, slicing through Portsmouth Harbor.

“She’ll try to turn you against me,” he warned me. He waved away my assurances that this was impossible. “No need to say it, my boy. I just want you to be vigilant. She’s a born liar, and a man-eater to boot. Hell, she might even try to seduce you.”

This wounded me: I felt that he was doubting my self-possession. The very quality that separates fuckboys from lady-killers.

Something else bothered me. I found myself resisting his characterization of Dr. Bergeron as a liar. Since learning of her involvement in his sexual misconduct case, Virgil’s determination to convince me that she was a singularly dishonest woman had been raising my hackles. To me, she seemed dangerous precisely because she was so fanatically devoted to the truth. After all, one doesn’t become an Archivist without a peculiar compulsion for setting the record straight. 

“At any rate,” Virgil continued, “I think it would be best if I disappeared to my condo in Miami until her little investigation peters out. I would like you to avoid her at all costs, but do your best to keep tabs on her progress through Ms. Starling. I’m leaving you a key to Saint Helena. If she gets too close, I want you to move all of the relics into a storage locker.”

I sighed and stared overboard at our wakes rippling across the harbor. It was a bad time for me to have a crisis of faith in Virgil. If I moved the relics out of Saint Helena and put them into a storage locker in my name, there would be absolutely no physical evidence linking him to the robberies at all. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine that Virgil would hang me out to dry, but seeing him so jumpy challenged the image I had always held of him, even in his present exile, of an indomitable conqueror. 

The more I turned it over in my head, the clearer it became that the moment required of me something greater than watching and waiting. Dr. Bergeron wouldn’t be sharing anything pertaining to the case with Phoebe, knowing that we were sleeping together. And the physical charge between us during the interview had left me jittery and sexually restless. I couldn’t imagine that it had been one-sided. My next move was clear. I had to bone Dr. Bergeron…to protect Virgil. To protect him, I had to bone her. 

A KISS THAT COULDN’T LIE

On the pretext of needing another peek into the Hammett letters, I showed up at the Archives the following evening. Phoebe was in class, so I knew I’d find Dr. Bergeron there alone. The glass door was locked, and through it I saw Astrid sitting at one of the study tables, studying some kind of antique map.

“I know you’re closing soon,” I pleaded with her through the door. “I just need to find a quote from one of the Hammet letters.”

It was hard to tell through the pane of smudged glass, but Dr. Bergeron did not seem as responsive to my athletic-fit, v-neck T-shirt as I would have hoped.

“Actually, we closed fifteen minutes ago,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“What if we consider it a social visit?” I asked. “One hardboiled fan to another?” She scoffed and shook her head, like: don’t get fresh with me, but also like: please keep getting fresh with me. 

“What’s the quote?” she asked.

“It’s from the letter where he tells the Wentworth Poet about Lillian. March 27, 1931. He was divorced, drying up creatively, and deteriorating from tuberculosis. He writes something like, ‘before Lillian it was impossible to conceive of redemption in a hard-boiled world,’ but I need the exact quote and the context for it.”

“If it’s so important, why didn’t you get it down while you were here?”

“I didn’t think that his love life was particularly relevant to his worldview.”

At this, she bit her lip. “You think otherwise now?” 

I pressed my hand to the glass and smiled coquettishly. “Call it a change of heart,” I said, slowly drawing out my breath to fog up the glass between us.

She opened the door and wrangled me by the collar into her arms. We stumbled and kissed and stripped all the way to her office, where she pulled me down to the carpeted floor.

Afterwards, we lay on the floor panting, staring up at the mural painted on the wall behind her desk––an array of agrarian vignettes arranged around a familiar crest.

“Of his own kind,” I said.

Dr. Bergeron, who had been dozing off on my chest looked up at me, and the veil of love-drunk fog fell aside. Her eyes narrowed: this ends now. 

“Are you familiar with the Order of the Cormorant?” she asked.  I didn’t answer. “Did you know that the college’s very first archivist was Gerald G. Wentworth’s most loyal disciple? He continued to take orders from him long after brain fever had driven Wentworth to madness. When Wentworth finally died, the archivist was turned out from the college by the new president, who said something along the lines of: ‘to go mad is a tragedy, to willfully follow a madman is irredeemable folly.’” 

“Do you think that’s true?” I asked her. “Shouldn’t loyalty be unconditional?” As soon as the question mark left my mouth, Astrid answered with a smile that said, checkmate. 

“Unconditional loyalty is the cornerstone of fascism. Among the other things that Wentworth tried to accomplish in his brain-fevered twilight years was blocking the admission of Wentworth’s first Black undergraduate student, one Chester Newcastle, who later, of course became––” 

“––the first Black professor at Wentworth.”

We lay in silence for what might have been five minutes or an hour, staring at the giant cormorant head above us. 

A poison tongue, Virgil’s voice hissed in my ear. 

“You don’t owe him anything,” Dr. Bergeron said suddenly. “You’re a better man than he is.”

I fake-laughed like I was confused. “Who, Gerald G. Wentworth? Of course I don’t owe him anything. What do you mean?”

But apparently my half-hearted attempt at playing dumb didn’t even warrant a response. She continued on as if I’d said nothing. “He used his immense wealth to manipulate you into feeling loved and seen. But all he’s ever seen in you and your mother is mercenary loyalty. What did he tell you about the charges against him?”

She went on to explain how she’d compiled evidence, interviews, and surveillance photography against Virgil, which ultimately forced his resignation. She spent a whole year gaining the trust of three women whom he’d propositioned for sex in exchange for various professional favors: promotions, budget manipulation, scholarships for undeserving students.

Something fierce in me raged against Astrid’s words. How could I believe that my benefactor, my idol, my life’s determinant was…a fuckboy? But the truth was that I’d been hanging on by a thread to my belief in Virgil’s innocence. I’d grown up hearing him call waitresses “toots” and salivating at the sight of undergrads jogging in sports bras. 

“I know where Maisie is,” I blurted out, surprising myself. “I’m going to make everything right, I just need a little time to work it out, and until then I just need you to trust me.”

“I don’t give out my trust on credit,” she said. “How do I–––”

I silenced her with a kiss that couldn’t lie, solemn as a pinky promise. 

“Okay then,” she said, burrowing her head into my armpit. “I trust you.” 

Pretty soon we were fooling around again. I took out a silicone ring from its silk pouch, which I always kept in the pocket of my jean jacket. I pushed a button on the ring, and it began to vibrate and purr. “Would you like me to use this?” I panted, slipping the ring onto my pinky. 

She looked confused, but whispered, “Yes, yes.” 

“Go sit down at your desk,” I told her.

She grinned deliciously, leapt to her feet, and crossed the room to her desk. Once she was settled in her chair, she rolled back from the desk and then fixed me in a hungry gaze, as if waiting for my next command. But then something in her face hardened, something in the particular slant of her smile. She clicked her tongue and pointed to recess beneath her desk. I crawled toward her.

A few minutes later, Phoebe walked in.  

A LOVE TOKEN 

As it turned out, vandalizing my Mercedes was not enough to satiate Phoebe’s rage. She tried to extort us, the poor thing. She threatened to expose our little tryst and get Astrid canned. She wanted to continue receiving a paycheck and tuition waiver without ever stepping foot in the Archives or seeing Astrid’s “whore face” again.

It was the night after Phoebe came to us with the terms of her blackmail. Astrid and I were sitting in my Mercedes in the parking lot of her apartment complex. She said she had been praying for a sinkhole to gobble her up. I smiled and told her that was my job. 

There was no use in hiding from it: I was falling for her, fast, as she was with me. The trouble was, she said, that nobody in the larger Wentworth community would understand that. And with Virgil’s final hearing with the Board of Regents just months away, Astrid was petrified to think what such a scandal would do to her credibility as the primary advocate for his victims. 

“Those women deserve justice,” she pleaded with me. “It took me a year to convince them to come forward, and who knows how many more are out there!”

I kissed her. “I understand,” I told her. “I’ve taken care of it already.”

I explained to her how, following our last meeting with Phoebe, I had:

• procured a silver Prius identical to Phoebe’s

• driven it over to Saint Helena and loaded it up with all of the Wentworth relics

• stolen Phoebe’s license plates out of her driveway

• hired a Cumberland Farms cashier who bore a passing resemblance to Phoebe to rent a unit at Papa Duke’s Self-Storage on Route 55 in Phoebe’s name

• confronted Phoebe with glad tidings of my conspiracy to frame her and strong-armed her into not only resigning from the Archives but leaving the university all together.

“And then, when all that was done,” I continued, beaming into Astrid’s bewildered eyes, “I swung by here and delivered a little token of my endless love.”

I jumped out of the car and frantically led her up the three flights of stairs, two at a time. Our hearts were both racing, and we were out of breath when we got to her door. I made her close her eyes and guided her two steps inside before whispering “open them” into her ears. And there was Maisie––suspended mid-prowl, waiting for her on the kitchen counter. 

“It’s time that we give Maisie the loving home she deserves,” I told her. 

L’HOMME FATALE

When he returned in March, Virgil was furious to discover that his room of relics had been sacked. Over FaceTime, he threatened to have my mom fired. He was holding the camera too close to his face, and I was distracted by a small black seed caught between his two front teeth. When I pointed out that he no longer had the power to fire anyone, he changed his tact. “Think of all I’ve done for you. All of your high school teachers thought you were just the hick son of a deadbeat father and a semi-literate, gun-toting mother. You know what I saw? A man of letters. An intellectual giant, a scholar, a Wentworth Man. And that’s exactly what you’ve become.”

“You know what I see when I look at you, Virgil? A fuckboy.”

And with that, I ended the call. 

With Maisie safely installed in our love nest, the three of us spent the spring semester lost in the haze of domestic bliss. We counted down the days until the day of Virgil’s appeal with the Board of Regents, after which, I’d graduate and our love would no longer need to live in the shadows. 

The weekend before the hearing, I talked Astrid into getting out of town with me. We would head up I-95 all the way to Acadia and up to the peak of Cadillac Mountain––the first spot from which it is possible to view the sunrise in North America. And from the summit, I would scream, “I LOVE ASTRID BERGERON,” and she would answer with, “I LOVE DONNIE O’SHAUGHNESSY,” and our echoes would soar through the air in a cacophony of sweet nothings.

But that isn’t what happened. In the words of an obscure Wentworth Poet, “nothing gold stays.”

We were supposed to leave at midnight to make it to Acadia by sunrise. At 11, Astrid knocked on my door. I had just woken from a catnap, and I knuckled some crust from my eye. I went to pull her towards me, but she drew away. 

She took a step back and lit a cigarette. She didn’t ordinarily smoke, she simply knew what the scene called for––my God, did that woman have a genius for mise-en-scène! She started coughing something awful.

Then she said, “You’re not a fuckboy, Donnie, but you’re still bad news.”

She gave up on smoking after one drag, but kept the cigarette lit, and as she broke the news, ribbons of blue smoke circled her wrist whenever she gesticulated. Cool and clinical, she explained that, over the last five months, she had been recording our conversations when I spoke of Virgil, his conspiracy to steal the Wentworth relics, his general misogyny. In this way, she had compiled hours’ worth of evidence for his hearing, which was set to take place in a few days. “It’s time to cut you loose, babe,” she said. I thought I heard her voice thicken with true sorrow, but in hindsight, who knows? I guess I started to cry or something because next she said, “Hey, hey, it wasn’t all a sham, you know that.”

“Don’t,” I said. “You played me and won, let’s leave it at that, okay?”

“I played you, Donnie O’Shaughnessy? And just what was on your mind when you came sniffing around the Archives talking of love and redemption? What we had, neither of us planned. It was true and shiny and dangerous. You were trying to compromise me, and I almost let you.”

“What about Maisie?”

“She’s already back in the Archives.”

“This is bullshit. She belongs with you. I belong with you.”

She kissed me on the cheek and flicked the cigarette over her shoulder. “I don’t have religion, Donnie,” she said. “What I have, all I have, is truth. And not just telling it, but living true, even when living true means letting go of what the heart wants. Or the body.” She took both of my hands in hers and I squeezed them. I tried to talk but had nothing to say. “If you want to bill me for the car, I’ll be happy to pay. But I have a feeling you won’t.”

“The car?” 

“Goodbye, Donnie.”

I didn’t worry about what she meant. For fifteen minutes, I didn’t worry about anything. I watched her disappear around the corner of my building and heard her car start. Then I collapsed onto the couch without bothering to shut the front door. 

I thought somehow that in loving Astrid, I was absolved of all that came before. A clean slate. But maybe I was just a fuckboy after all. It had been bothering me that, when Virgil had appealed to his fatherly love for me, I still believed him. I guess you can be a bad dude, even a fuckboy, and still be capable of genuinely loving someone. Who knew? 

I went on brooding like that for a while longer, and then the alarm on my phone went off. It was midnight: if I was still going to make it to Acadia for sunrise, I had to leave now. Outside, the old Mercedes was loaded to capacity with camping gear: frame packs, cooler, air mattress, tent. Just as I had left it, except––

In black, bubble letters on the crème beige hood were the words L’HOMME FATALE. Yes, that rang true.

I took out my phone and started typing up a text to Astrid: “Thank you for seeing me. I will love you forever.” But I didn’t send it. Instead, I got in and started the car, and soon I found myself turning onto 95 North, speeding towards the first dawn.