Elaine, wife and mother of two, from the town of Red Bluff seventy miles away, graduate of Humboldt State University, hair straightener, I Ching dabbler, and mystery novel consumer, did her job very well. In addition to teaching twenty-three fourth graders, she supervised the chess club, directed the school production of South Pacific, and ran the Gifted & Talented program. Her husband, Greg, was having an affair with a nurse named Marlene who worked at the hospital where he was an orthopedist. Elaine sometimes left her car beside the grove of old-growth redwoods that bordered the Muir Elementary parking lot and walked home past ranch-style houses painted the primary colors—red, blue, yellow—in rigid, unbroken order. She sang “A Cock-Eyed Optimist” and tried to mean it. In July her father had been discovered to have a meningioma, a tumor growing out of the thin membrane covering his brain called the meninx, for which he underwent an unsuccessful surgery and was currently in radiation therapy and taking a battery of antiseizure medications that often made him forget what he was doing. When Muir experienced budgetary cutbacks—“those pricks in Sacramento,” Giaccone had fumed in a moment of faculty meeting impropriety—Elaine learned that there might be layoffs of the last-hired-first-fired variety. Her husband grew lazy in his excuses for arriving home past midnight— “Honey, Steve might need me for an assist on a motorcycle wreck that just came in, some kid whose femur is sticking out of his kneecap. Don’t wait up. Love you”—which gave her the opportunity to singlehandedly feed, wash, encourage, and console their two children through their five- and nine-year-old growing pains. She ordered an awesome nine-inch dildo from a mail order company in San Francisco called Good Vibrations. South Pacific was a disaster. Two children, siblings who played the French murderer and Bloody Mary with amazing vivacity, were yanked out of school midway through rehearsals by their mother, then seeking a divorce from their father, and the rest of the cast seemed hopelessly far away from memorizing their lines—much less developing the wherewithal to sing in public—in time for the mid-December opening night. She found blood in her stool and was told by a gynecologist that she had an iron deficiency and needed to rest more during menstruation. But she never slept beyond four hours a night these days, reading macabre tales of murder and insurance fraud until her husband came home, at which time she’d feign sleep until his loathsome, sexually sated snore started up, and then she’d rise, fix herself a bologna sandwich, and resume reading in the TV den.
As she was clapping erasers outside, Principal Giaccone poked his head through the window and called down to her, “Elaine! Oh, Miss Perry! Could I see you for a minute?” And she entered the building and climbed the stairs to the first floor and knocked formally on his door and sat in front of him and listened to his spiel about financial constraints and the necessity of letting some top quality people go, and how he’d hate to have to do that to her, but how he might have to unless, well, unless they came to an agreement. Giaccone stared at a blank computer in front of him. Things have been building toward this, he said, concentrating on the empty screen and then turning to smile complicitly at her. His secretary had gone home and there was nobody else who could hear this stab at sexual coercion. This grossest form of blackmail.
“Are you saying,” began Elaine, sliding her gaze from Giaccone to a picture of him in a lineup shaking the governor’s hand, “that the only way I can keep my job is if I fuck you?”
Giaccone exhaled loudly—he’d been holding his breath—“God no,” he lied. “What gave you that? It’s just there are these extenuating circumstances, and certain difficult decisions have to be made—”
But Elaine was already standing up and straightening her skirt before reaching for the zipper along the side. “If that’s all it takes,” she said, pulling down her underwear.
Giaccone got up and stepped forward as though to intervene or help. “Don’t be that way,” he said. “I just thought you and I had this thing.”
Elaine unbuttoned her blouse and untucked Giaccone’s shirt. “We do. Lift up your arms.”
“Look, you’re doing this out of anger or something. There’s nothing erotic about this.”
“Of course there is. This is exactly how it works. Step out of your boxers. And take off your watch. Men should never wear a watch when they have sex. It’s too tempting for women to look at.” Elaine grabbed a tissue from the desk and used it to pull out her tampon, which she dropped in the wastebasket.
“Come on,” said Giaccone, staring with embarrassment at the wastebasket. “I didn’t know.”
“Now you do. Is this how you normally respond to naked women?” Elaine had Giaccone’s flaccid penis in her hand. Massaging it just below its head and then, as it grew and stiffened, stroking it up and down.
“Oh, yeah,” said Giaccone, coughing the words.
“Yeah. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
When Giaccone reached out to hold Elaine’s waist she caught his hand and pushed him back onto the desk, and as he got bigger she climbed up and sat on him and enfolded him.
“Oh, Jesus!” Giaccone cried out, stretching his hands over his head, pushing documents and the phone off the desk, writhing like a merman caught in a fishing net.
“You can’t bring him into it,” Elaine murmured. “He’s got nothing to do with it.”
When it was over she dressed while he lay staring at the ceiling.
“That was—” he said. “You hate me, don’t you?”
Elaine opened the door and said, “I don’t hate anybody,” closing it behind her. Down the hall she passed a wan twenty-something boy with thin blue hair wearing headphones and pushing a mop over scarred linoleum. He smiled at her and she smiled back, unable to gauge the innocence of the transaction, unable to gauge the innocence of anything. Outside, music was playing and she began to sing loudly, “I hear the human race/ Is falling on its face/ And hasn’t very far to go,/ But ev’ry whippoorwill/ Is selling me a bill/ And telling me it just ain’t so!”
“It just ain’t so,” she repeated to the trees and the cars and the houses and herself. “It could be awful and degrading and it could be a conspiracy of evil, but … but …” She let her voice fade to nothing and walked along as though carried by the wind, and when she remembered to look up through the breaks in the canopy of trees, the sky was a bright canary yellow.
Ten days later, at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Street, where Highway 101 hit the middle of its Eureka crawl, the night lights went off at the Pantry. It was seven thirty in the morning, and Silas Carlton had been drinking coffee and eating a Hungry Man Special for half an hour. He’d bought a Eureka Times-Standard on his way to the diner and read about the timber industry’s response to recent environmental activism. Both the article and the response were badly constructed;