A bite to eat

Weldon Flowers peered into the big aquarium where exotic fish swam listlessly through faux coral. One garishly bright blue fish turned and looked at him as if he recognized him. Maybe he did. Weldon had been coming to the psychiatrist’s office once a week for the past two and a half months as part of the agreement with the college.

He wondered what it was it like to be a waiting room fish, watching depressed people parade in and out all day. The fish looked like they could’ve used a little Prozac themselves.  

He sat across from the only other people there, a mother and her teenage son. The boy must’ve been about sixteen. At one point the mother said, “Don’t mash on your face. You’ll make it worse.” The boy glared at his mother then in a low tone of suppressed fury said, “I feel like throwing you out the window!” and stormed off to the men’s bathroom, probably to slit his wrist. 

The mother picked up a copy of House Beautiful and began to flip through it.  Several minutes passed, and the boy didn’t return from the bathroom.  

“Would you like me to check on him?” Weldon asked.

The mother looked up from her magazine.  

“Would you like me to check on your son?”

She gazed off toward the men’s bathroom like she was trying to recall having a son.  The men’s bathroom door opened, and the boy sat down one chair away from his mother. He had red splotches all over his face.  

“Thanks anyway,” the mother said to Weldon. The boy scowled like he knew his mother had been saying all kinds of random stuff about him to this tall, balding geek with wire-rim glasses.  

“I teach at the college,” Weldon said to the boy.

The boy yawned fiercely.  

Weldon leaned forward in his chair and in a stage whisper said, “I held a gun to one of my students.”  

The boy sat up, watching him warily now and cutting his eyes to his mother who, deep into her House Beautiful, didn’t so much as glance up.  

A pretty therapist in a short skirt appeared in the doorway. “Hi Sam,” she said to the boy. “Come on back.”  

The boy’s face softened, and he got up as if in a trance and followed the young woman down the long hallway. A moment later Weldon’s therapist, Dr. Sluder, a jowly, red-faced man and a dead ringer for W.C. Fields, appeared.  

Without a word, Weldon followed the sweatered psychiatrist down the long hall, which purred with white noise machines outside the office doors. They passed the closed door of the pretty therapist’s office. Weldon didn’t know why he’d said that to the boy. He’d just looked so miserable, and it had been Weldon’s experience that nothing was so distracting as the truth.  

Dr. Sluder shut the door and, after motioning him to sit, settled himself in the chair opposite Weldon’s. The psychiatrist’s diplomas were arranged in such a way on the wall behind Sluder’s chair that from the patient’s chair the doctor appeared to radiate degrees.         

“How’s your mood today?” Dr. Sluder asked. 

“Sufficient.”  

“Sufficient?” 

“Yes. My mood is … adequate.”

“Just adequate?”

In the first month after “the incident” as Sluder referred to it, Weldon’s mood had swung from anger (at himself for doing something so stupid) to despair (that by doing what he’d done, he’d put the final nails in the coffin that had been his marriage). But after two and a half months of Prozac, his mood, like a pendulum losing momentum, had been less emphatic. He felt once removed from himself, as if the Prozac had shifted his point of view to the third person. A welcomed respite, except that lately he’d found himself longing to feel much of anything. Lately, he’d gotten a little nostalgic for the old Weldon, who, one week after Jey had walked out on him, decided, even if he couldn’t control his life, he could damn well control his classroom.

Mitch Crandall, a senior lit major, had been sabotaging discussions in Weldon’s American Lit survey class all semester. Mitch believed he was a better writer than the entire American Literary Canon put together. Weldon hadn’t been able to hold a single class discussion without the boy weighing in with a snotty comment, and because the boy Mitch was also editor of eRazor, the school literary magazine, none of the other students dared contradict him. By mid-semester, Mitch had effectively sucked the life out of the class.    

One week before the end of the semester, Weldon had bought a cap gun in the CVS toy aisle. He carefully applied black electrical tape over the orange barrel tip and tucked the gun securely in his pants pocket before leaving for campus. 

Just as Mitch was launching into one of his diatribes, this one about Whitman’s poems being “nothing but masturbatory scribblings” and ‘Song of Myself’ should be entitled ‘Song of My Member,’ Weldon slid the cap gun out of his pocket and pressed it against the boy’s temple. Blessedly, Mitch stopped talking. His lip began quivering. There were gasps around the room.  

“Repeat after me,” Weldon said. “Benjamin Franklin is not an egomaniacal, kite-flying fraud.”

“Sir?” Mitch asked. It was the first time the boy had addressed Weldon as “sir” all semester.  

Weldon pressed the barrel against the boy’s temple and pulled the hammer back.  “Benjamin Franklin is NOT an egomaniacal kite-flying fraud!”

“Benjamin Franklin is not an egomaniacal kite-flying fraud,” the boy repeated, his voice quaking.

“Thoreau is NOT a transcendentalist pantywaist,” Weldon said. 

“Thoreau is not a transcendentalist pantywaist.”

“Emerson is NOT a navel-gazing zealot.” Weldon sat there with the gun, while he flipped through the Norton Anthology and had Mitch recant his literary insults one by one, from William Bradford, “a self-righteous, xenophobic Puritan,” to Ernest Hemingway, “a homophobic hack.”     

After they’d gone through the Norton, which took a good half hour, Weldon said, “Repeat after me, ‘I am an immature, self-absorbed snob who couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag.” 

“I am an immature, self-absorbed snob who couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag.”

“Nor do I deserve to lick the boot heels of the great writers we’ve studied this semester.”

“I don’t deserve to lick the boot heels of the great writers we’ve studied.”

Weldon lowered the gun and said, “Class dismissed.” 

No one moved. Then everyone tore out of there, including Mitch, as Weldon collapsed into his chair. That’s where the campus security found him, at his desk, spinning his cap gun.    

Weldon loped through downtown Asheville. He was meeting Jey for the first time since she’d moved out 83 days ago today. Not that he was counting. It was a humid, late August morning, and he patted the sweat from his bald pate with the signature red bandana that he often pulled out in the middle of a class lecture.

This morning’s session with the psychiatrist had ended as their sessions always ended—with a handshake and Sluder saying, “Have a nice day.” What kind of psychiatrist told his patients to “have a nice day?” Weldon tolerated these sessions because of the arrangement with the college. He was on a year’s suspension without pay, and after that time, if Sluder deemed him fit, he could return to teaching. Weldon had a suspicion that Sluder would ultimately deem him unfit. He was 99 percent sure he’d never be allowed to teach at the college or anywhere again.  

As he neared the City Bakery Café, the butterflies he’d felt when he’d gotten up this morning returned. Jey had called and asked if they could meet. Not just meet, but meet with him.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist, or in Weldon’s case a very minor Whitman scholar, to figure out what she wanted to meet about. Immediately after her call, he hadn’t felt much of anything. He’d expected Jey to ask for a divorce. He and the Prozac had become calmly resigned to it. So waking up to butterflies this morning had caught him off guard. He’d been on the verge of mentioning this to Sluder today, but the psychiatrist’s eyes had shifted to the clock on the wall.  

When Weldon arrived at the café, a cheery hostess seated him next to the window where he watched for Jey. As he waited, he remembered one of his early sessions with Sluder when the good doctor had said he’d wondered if holding a gun on his student wasn’t on some level Weldon’s rather dramatic way of forcing himself to pay attention to his emotional needs.    

“What are you saying?” Weldon had asked. Sluder spoke a cloudy language of psychological abstractions.  

Sluder sat back, tapping his fingers together. “Oftentimes we overreact when there’s something deeper going on.”

“Lucky for you,” Weldon said, “or else you’d be out of work.”

Sluder’s jaw flexed and his tone was impatient when he said,  “Do you honestly believe it was a coincidence that you did what you did just one week after your wife of eleven years walked out?”

Weldon couldn’t point to any one thing that had gone wrong with their marriage.  They hadn’t had kids, but they’d been happy anyway. They’d been self-contained. But somewhere along the way, that container had sprung an imperceptible leak.  

He almost didn’t recognize Jey when she hurried in. She’d cut her hair, which accentuated the curve of her cheekbones and made her look ten years younger. She wore a tight skirt and a scoop-necked purple blouse that showed her tanned chest. Not the way one would dress to discuss divorce. But what had he expected? Mourning clothes? A black veil?

“There you are!” She hugged him as if she’d just gotten back from a long trip.  She was wearing a scent he recognized but couldn’t place. As he sat down across from her, he felt ambushed by desire. They’d stopped having sex a good two months before she’d left.      

“How are you?” she asked.    

“Just had another close encounter of the shrink kind,” Weldon said.

“They have you seeing Sluder. I’ve heard he’s good.”  

“He’s a pompous ass.”  

“I’ve heard that too.” She looked down at her hands which she’d laid flat on the table. She was still wearing her wedding ring, a silver ring with a purple amethyst they’d bought at a little shop called Over the Moon on Ocracoke Island.          

“I like your hair,” he said.  

“You don’t think it’s too short?” Jey said, tugging on the ends.  

“It’s the best haircut you’ve ever had.” 

“Really? You look good too.”   

“Oh right.”    

“Much more relaxed, much more like your old self. Maybe Sluder’s better than you give him credit for.”  

“That credit would go to the pharmacist,” he said.

“Oh, really?” She leaned toward him. 

He recognized the scent as Egyptian Musk. He’d bought it for her.  

“I came off my meds last month,” she said brightly. Jey’s giddy mood, and their ability to fall right back into conversation as if these 83 days had never happened, gave Weldon a case of emotional vertigo.      

Their waitress, a thin dark girl with startling green eyes and a disarming smile, looked familiar. A former student, he was sure. He tried to place her as she wrote down Jey’s order of the arugula salad with beets and goat cheese. 

“And for you, Professor Flowers?” the waitress said.  

“Betsy,” he said, her name coming to him as names usually did, at the very last possible moment. She’d been in the Mitch class. A quiet, intense girl who didn’t talk in class unless called on but who wrote killer papers.  

“How’s it going?” he asked, never knowing what to say to former students, with which Asheville overflowed. “This is my wife, Jey.” The words “my wife” hovered over the table like a shimmering bubble. “This is Betsy Whitaker,” he said to Jey. “She was in my class … the class.”  

“Your husband is one of my favorite professors,” Betsy said.

This caught Weldon off guard. He hadn’t talked to any students since the incident and assumed that after that stunt they all hated his guts.  

Betsy took his order, a BLT on whole wheat toast. As she headed back to the kitchen, Jey frowned.  

“Betsy!” Weldon motioned the waitress back to the table.  

Jey was always changing her mind at the last minute.  

“Yes, Professor Flowers?” The girl smiled at him.

“I’d like the BLT too,” Jey said.

As the waitress disappeared into the kitchen, Jey leaned over and whispered, “I think you have an admirer, Professor Flowers.”   

“She’s just nice.”

“She’s cute,” Jey said, raising her eyebrows.  

“Don’t be ridiculous.”  

The awkwardness that had been standing politely off to the side finally pulled up a chair.  

“So…” Jey pressed her hands flat on the table.  

 “I know why you asked me here.” 

She looked up at him.  

“I don’t blame you,” he said.

“Is it what you want, too?”

“Sluder’s convinced it’s the reason I pulled that stunt at school,” he said. “You leaving me, I mean. As much as I hate to admit Cardigan Man might be right about anything other than the precise Eastern Standard Time, maybe he has a point.”   

She smiled a little sadly. “Why didn’t you ever call?” 

“I assumed that after my performance you’d want to be as far away from me as possible.”  

“I did,” she said and sighed again.  

She did. Past tense, he thought. What about present tense? Was there still hope?

She looked up at him, reached for his hand and then after a moment let go. She was quiet, staring out the window. But when she turned back she was blushing. “I asked you here for two reasons,” she said.  

“To discuss the Big D,” he said. “What else?” 

“I was wondering if after lunch you might want to… help me rearrange my office furniture.”

 “I’m lost,” he said.

“You don’t remember? When we were first dating, we’d go up to my office…?”

“Oh,” he said. When they were first dating, they’d go up to her office several flights up in an old building. She’d lock the door, and they’d make wild love on the couch, in the big stuffed chair, even on her desk.   

“Ever since I went off the Lexapro…” She leaned closer toward him, showing her chest.  “I’ve been incredibly, incredibly …”   

“Excuse me.” The waitress set their plates down in front of them, then turned quickly to leave.      

They tore into their BLT’s. Weldon couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so hungry. They didn’t talk. Just ate, occasionally glancing up at each other between bites, a couple of lions devouring their kill.   

Then Jey’s cell phone rang. As she dug it out of her purse, her face shifted into work mode. She gave Weldon an apologetic smile. “I have to take this call.” 

She walked outside, and paced in front of the window. She kept her head bowed in conversation. As he watched his wife through the window, Weldon knew, for the first time since she’d left him, maybe for the first time in their marriage, just who he was losing.  

“Can I clear your plates, Professor Flowers?” Betsy asked. She looked out the window at Jey. “Your wife is very beautiful.”   

“Thanks.” Weird, he thought, like he was responsible for her beauty. 

“Would you care for anything else, Professor Flowers?” She put her hand on his arm. “We have some tiramisu to die for.” He flashed back to a conference he’d once had with Betsy in his office. She’d caught him glancing at her legs. He’d been embarrassed but, to his surprise, she’d smiled. 

“Just the check,” he said.     

Betsy carried the plates to the kitchen, and Jey walked back inside.  “I have to go,” she said, grabbing her purse. Weldon stood.  

“But what about the furniture?”

“Going back to my office would’ve been a bad idea,” she said, touching his cheek. “Let me give you some money for the check.”  She started digging through her purse.  

“It’s on me,” he said.  

“Thanks.”

He watched her walk out, and sank back into his chair.  

“Everything okay?” Betsy appeared beside him, placing the check on the table. She stood watching Jey climb into her car and drive off.  

Betsy sat down in the chair next to him. 

“I don’t blame you for what you did,” she said. “I’ve been in classes with Mitch for years.  He ruins every class he’s in. He had it coming. Don’t be so hard on yourself, Weldon.”  

At the sound of his name, he turned to the generous girl, whose hand he couldn’t believe now rested on his thigh. He looked past her, hoping to see Jey’s car come back around the corner. 

The day after divorce papers were served, Weldon went to his usual appointment. The boy was in the waiting room alone. He seemed more relaxed without his mother. Weldon got up and walked over to the aquarium, bending down to look at the fish. He slipped his hand into his pants pocket, took out a medicine bottle of Prozac and tapped a few, little blue pills into the tank.

“Hey, what are you doing?” the boy asked, coming over to the aquarium.  

“Lifting their spirits,” Weldon said.   

The boy narrowed his eyes. “You really did pull a gun on a student, didn’t you?”

“A cap gun.” Weldon poured in the rest of the pills. After a few trial nibbles, the fish wanted nothing more to do with it. They swam away in jerky circles. 

“Mr. Flowers?” a receptionist called out from behind him. “The doctor will see you now.”

A word from Tommy Hays

A Bite to Eat was inspired by the disappointment I think all English teachers inevitably feel when their students aren’t moved by works that move them. I have often assigned books or stories I loved and then been almost hurt that my students didn’t feel the same way about them. Which I know is ridiculous. Literature, like so many things, is in the end a matter of personal taste. Anyway, it wasn’t hard to imagine an English professor, who, after 15 years of this particular frustration, found his life spiraling out of his control.

Editor’s Note: Tommy Hays’ latest novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, was chosen for the One City, One Book program in Greensboro and for the Amazing Read — Greenville, S.C.’s first community read. Read on NPR’s Radio Reader, it was also a Finalist for the SIBA 2006 Fiction Award. His other novels are Sam’s Crossing and In the Family Way.  He is executive director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and a lecturer in the Master of Liberal Arts Program at UNC-Asheville.