Ghouljaw and Other Stories by Clint Smith Page B

acknowledges the success and emotional equalization elicited by the medication, Wayne wants to believe her tenderness is genuine, natural, spontaneous, not some synthetic affection thanks to an amber tube of bi-colored pills in the medicine cabinet. Their therapist had explained that Nancy’s new medication would likely change her perception—not only about herself but about he dualistic dynamic of their marriage.
    How much of Nancy’s depression is biology? How much of it is me? Wayne had posed this Janus-mask pair of questions to himself well before betraying Nancy, and had maintained the detrimental nature-nurture riddle—sometimes insouciantly, often times sincerely—throughout his illicit liaisons with Bridgette.
    He fears tonight will be no different from those in recent months, where he finds himself waking sometime in the dead hours, only to stare at the frail, emotionally emaciated shape of his sleeping wife: the soft, cyclic breathing acting as a reminder of Bridgette.
    On one of those torment-troubled nights, Wayne had slipped from the bed and wandered the dark house—their home echoing with metronomic ticking of the grandfather clock—for a period before surreptitiously removing his wife’s Ouija board (a ridiculous gift from her ridiculously credulous sister) from the hall closet and padding away to his den. Under the small green dome light on his desk, Wayne, feeling foolish and admonishing himself for yielding to this desperate impulse in his self-conscious quest for answers, asked this preposterous device several questions— Will we ever see each other again? Did she truly care for me? —and watched or willed the ivory planchette to reveal its nonsensical responses. In the end, the embarrassment was too much, and he solemnly returned the preposterous toy to its place on the top shelf of the closet before taking to the couch in the study, covering himself with a quilt, and ceding to warm waves of sleep, surrounding himself with vivid images of a young woman sitting in the back of the lecture hall.
    On nights like this Wayne Webber’s mind compels itself to return, again and again, to Bridgette.
    He’d initially noticed Bridgette Harless (difficult not to notice)—a grad student in one of his evening lecture sessions at the university—last August. It was at the conclusion of a class in October, as Wayne was gathering his notes and a few reference paperbacks, when the attentive, ballerina-bodied girl from the back row cautiously approached the podium. As her peers shuffled from the lecture hall, she—the she was in her mid-twenties, Wayne guessed—cleared her throat and spoke. “Excuse me, Professor Webber?”
    Despite having had similar interactions with attractive, ostensibly innocent students, Wayne—in tone, expression, and overall academic affectation—had made his lack of interest in succumbing to cheap charms very clear. Even so, Wayne found that he could not muster the humility to correct the young lady’s presumptive distinction between professor (which he was not) and painfully average lecturer.
    But of course he had noticed her these past few weeks, hadn’t he? This young woman— What was her name . . . Miss Harless? —bore a startling resemblance to his wife as she, Nancy—the poised posture, the delicate fluidity of her gesticulations—had appeared when they had first met two decades earlier. But there was something about the girl that was different, the way she smirked, the almost deceptive gliding gait. Something compelling impish and fundamentally naughty, perhaps.
    Wayne felt an errant, adolescent flutter in his midsection, and had done his very best to honor a level of professional indifference. Their conversation had been awkward. This young lady had submitted two papers thus far—both sincere but pathetically executed—but now Bridgette’s small-town banter moved from class, to art, to her interest in Native American history, due in great part to her grandmother’s