The Consequences’ Banquet

by Telaina Eriksen

Will stood on Shepler’s Ferry, headed to Mackinac Island to meet Corinna for the weekend. He looked out over the water at the receding Mackinac Bridge, and illicitly inhaled on his vape pen. The kids were on to something with these things. They were an excellent delivery system for weed.

It was a light crowd on the ferry, even for a Friday in October. The ferry would close soon because hopefully the island would be surrounded by thick ice this winter. That was the natural order of things, but here, two decades into the 21st century, there might only be chunks of ice in the straits and the surrounding waters, a new development that wasn’t good for any living thing.

He tugged again at his pen and then zipped his Columbia jacket up more securely and lowered his Carhart stocking cap over his ears. The wind was brutal, but the sun was out. It would be warmer on the island. He finished smoking and felt calmer. He tucked his pen away and admired the intense fall colors along the shores of the straits, where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan met, and even Lake Superior tried to get in on the action. There was no describing the Great Lakes to people who hadn’t seen them. You could tell someone that Lake Superior was the same size as Maine, or Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut combined, but until they set eyes on the deep, dark, blue-green beauty that was just as happy to kill you as any ocean, no one really understood.

Will could see the dock and took a deep breath. Corinna said she would meet his ferry and they could either walk to Mission Point, where they were staying, or take the “shuttle.” The shuttle consisted of a wagon pulled behind four enormous Clydesdale horses. No automobiles, except for emergency vehicles like firetrucks, were allowed on Mackinac Island. Everyone got around by walking, biking, or some form of literal horsepower.

It wasn’t really “safe” to meet Corinna anywhere. At any time, pretty much anywhere, he and Corinna might see one of his cousins, Corinna’s fourth grade teacher, a neighbor, a colleague, a fellow parent, one of his (now adult) children’s friends. Chaos theory was real. No matter how well they planned, no matter how well that plan was executed, there were so many variables, that he and Corinna had just given up taking anything but the most ordinary precautions.

They were going to spend the whole weekend together because Corinna wanted to, and they hadn’t spent the weekend together since…since…Will tipped his head back in bittersweet pain at the memory. He’d been 30. Corinna had been 20. His wife Jennifer had been pregnant with their second son, Zachary, and Dean, their oldest, had been two. Jennifer had taken two weeks off work to visit her parents in Denver before she got too pregnant to be on an airplane safely, and she’d taken Dean with her. She kissed Will deeply, with so much love, and told him to work on his novel between teaching his classes, and to enjoy his solitude because she knew he missed it. What a gift she was. He had never deserved her. And he had worked on his novel! He had also spent much of the time in Corinna’s apartment, in her bed, her head on his shoulder, reading to her, and then fucking her, and all the while thinking this might be the last time.

He was a walking cliché. An English professor who had fallen in love with a student. But how often did these things last for 25 years? They had had their moments of on-again, off-again. Even once almost a year of not seeing each other, and not talking, texting, or emailing.

The worst break-up had been after Corinna had gotten engaged to Christopher. Will knew his pain and jealousy made no sense. He couldn’t leave Jennifer. He couldn’t leave his children 50 percent of the time. He couldn’t admit to being involved with even a former student. He might never be hired anywhere again. He could have gotten away with it if his novels had sold well, or if he had grants or prizes, or other noteworthy publications. But he knew how replaceable he was. Within a few weeks of Corinna telling him she was marrying Christopher, he had to make a special appointment with his psychiatrist for a medication change so he didn’t check himself into a hotel away from his children and Jennifer and shoot himself in the head. The Lamictal and Lexapro, which had kept the worst symptoms of his bipolar disorder II in check for years, were not up to the challenge of Corinna leaving him and committing herself fully to another man.

Will knew now at 53 years old, that there were moments in your life when you couldn’t delude yourself about who you were any more. He could no longer pretend that he was a good person who made mistakes. He must reckon with the fact that he was weak, flawed, dishonest, and manipulative. A good person would have never done this for 25 years.

The ferry pulled alongside the dock and Will slung his bag over his shoulder and walked quickly to the stairs so he could be among the first to disembark. He did so, bouncing down the stairs as quickly as his arthritic left knee would let him. As he crossed under the pavilion, he saw Corinna waiting for him on the sidewalk. He heard the familiar clop clop clop of the Clydesdales’ horseshoes knocking against the asphalt as they carried heavy loads of food, luggage, and passengers from the docks. Then everything seemed to go quiet when he stood in front of her. They hadn’t seen each other for three months.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey.”

She looked beautiful. Pixie-cut, brown-blond hair tucked under a tan stocking cap with pompom on top. Big blue eyes, now with crows’ feet at the edges, a nose a touch too long, a crooked smile, with her lips on the left side tilting up slightly more. She was average height, slender, maybe a bit thicker in the middle now that she was over 40, but no one who hadn’t known her at 18 would know that. Her outfit was eclectic as usual—a sweatshirt with a fleece lining under a jean jacket, black fingerless gloves, black leggings, hiking boots also lined with fleece, and red snowflake-patterned Smartwool socks peeking out of them.

“Hey,” she said, and threw herself into his arms. He lifted her off the ground and she wrapped her legs around him, and he held her there, off the ground, and time seemed to stop.

*

She had already checked in to Mission Point using her credit card, the one where the statement came to an app on her phone and she paid it on her phone too, sometimes with money Will had Venmoed her. They had, well he had, cheated for over 25 years now and they both agreed it was both easier and harder to hide things now. They both had Tracfones and emailed once a day via those phones to email addresses that only existed for each other. There were phone calls sometimes, on long car rides when they were alone, at lunches at work. They both had each other’s “real” number as well, in case of dire emergency.

Corinna was a well-known poet at this point in her career, but she would only be recognizable at literary conferences and readings. They tried to avoid attending those events at the same time. They couldn’t pretend they didn’t know each other because Corinna had taken five classes with him during her undergrad years, and she always thanked him in the acknowledgements of her books. But sometimes they both had to attend the larger conferences, and sometimes their spouses were even with them, and it was a special kind of hell.

Will threw his bag on the chair next to their king-sized bed. Mission Point was basically a big lodge and this room was piney and quilty, with views of the straits and the bridge.

Corinna took her boots off and climbed onto the bed and patted for him to sit next to her. He took off his own boots and crawled up next to her. Even ten years ago, they would have been tearing at each other’s clothes right now. But tonight, he would have to take a little blue pill to do all he wanted to do to her. All the years on Lexapro and Lamictal had not been kind to his sexual functioning. Corinna understood. She too had cyclothymia, or Bipolar III, depending on what decade they were in, and 10 years ago, after Corinna’s father had died, her psychiatric nurse practitioner had put Corinna on Abilify and Celexa, she’d been unable to have an orgasm at all. Now she managed her brain disorder (they both hated the phrase “mental illness”) with a strict regime of sleep, nutrition, exercise, therapy, meditation, stress management, and supplements. (Part of her stress management included choosing not to have children.)

“So,” he said. “We needed a weekend?”

She nodded. “Will, I want to leave Christopher.”

He sat up straighter.

“And I want you to leave Jennifer. I know I’ve given you these ultimatums before, but I mean this one. I can’t do this anymore. I never should have married Chris. He’s so good. He fucking worships the ground I walk on. And he deserves someone who loves him the way he loves me.”

Will leaned back against the headboard. They had had some version of this conversation so many times, but Corinna sounded different this time. Calm and sure.

He remembered the first time he’d seen her. It was his third semester teaching as an assistant professor in the tenure track position where he was now a full professor. The class had been English 201: Foundations of Literature. He had never forgotten the outfit she was wearing the first time he saw her—a jean skirt, an oversized fall sweater, chunky Doc Martens, and the thing that had undone him, a daisy pin in her short hair. He remembered their first time in his office. Another cliché. Pressing her against the wall, her slight exhalation of “oh” as he kissed her. The feeling of her teenage breasts pressed against his chest. He’d been so rough with her. He hadn’t known she was a virgin. He should have known.

“I thought this weekend could either be a celebration of a new chapter of our lives together, or a goodbye,” Corinna said.

Hadn’t he known this was coming? He thought of Jennifer. They had been together since they were 19 years old. They had met in college, and she had stayed with him through his bipolar diagnosis, through years of diapers and sleeplessness, through mortgages, deaths of friends and relatives, career ups and downs, and personal health scares. Did Jennifer deserve to be left after all of that?

He looked down at Corinna, her lovely face, yes, but more than that, her pure, tragic poet’s heart which had dropped him to his metaphorical knees from the moment he had read her writing. I see you, Corinna’s writing had said to him. I see all of your darkness and weakness and I accept it all because I was made the same way. Jennifer, with all of her love and support, never had. Jennifer was a data analyst, for Christ’s sake.

How could he bear to lose Corinna? He knew he had taken advantage of her. The decade between them was nothing now but then it had been everything. Corinna had been raised in rural Michigan by devout Catholic parents. She had never met anyone like him before. She hadn’t really met anyone before. He didn’t want to use the word groom, but he had groomed her, hadn’t he? Long talks that went past his posted office hours, coffee dates that they walked to and from together, special books loaned to her that he thought she would like.

“Corinna, have you ever forgiven me?” he asked.

“For not leaving Jennifer?” she said, leaning against his shoulder.

“No. For… for taking advantage…when you were so young.”

She tipped her head up to look at him.

“I threw myself at you. I wanted you so badly. You were… you still are.. insanely handsome. Funny. Dark. Smart. You were… everything I thought I wanted,” she said.

“I had a responsibility,” he said.

She tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth. “I suppose you did. We probably should have talked about it more. I feel like today if it were to happen you would have talked about it with me.”

He nodded. “I feel like I know a lot more. I don’t think I would have touched you if I saw you today. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part.”

She leaned back against him again. “I don’t want you to choose me out of some sense of guilt that you should have been a better person then. I want you to choose me because you love me and you feel we belong together. If you want to stay with Jennifer, I understand. She takes good care of you and I’m not capable of that. I’m not going to cook for you, or clean for you. Or do your laundry. But I love you, and understand you, and can push you to do the writing that I know you’re capable of. The writing that’s been trapped inside you because of your guilt and whatever bullshit it is you tell yourself every day.”

He was quiet. There was an old quote from Robert Louis Stevenson that had gained Internet popularity after Stephen King tweeted it a half dozen years ago, “Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”

“You don’t have to give me an answer right now, Will, but I just want to say one more thing, and then we should walk around, go have dinner at the Pink Pony, and eat some fudge. You need to apply some of your excellent critical thinking skills to your personal life. Can you accept the fact that relationships just end sometimes? That it doesn’t mean you morally failed. It doesn’t mean you never loved the person or there aren’t good parts still, it just means that relationship has had its season.” She paused and then pulled his head down to kiss his cheek. “And I’m saying that about both your relationship with Jennifer and with me. You’re going to have to decide which relationship has run its course and I’m going to say it again because I’m deadly serious. You will never see me again alone if you choose Jennifer.”

She got up from the bed and shrugged her sweatshirt off. She lifted her suitcase to put it on the provided luggage rack and opened it. He knew she was looking for a sweater to put on for dinner.

He saw her in the fading October light of the rustic hotel room. The air still snapped and popped around her just as it had all these years. Seeing her at readings, when he allowed himself to go and watch her, was electric, magical. She seemed to pull something up from within herself and offer it to the audience. He had heard this quality of hers called different things—charm, personal charisma, magnetism. Corinna had an abundance of it. But she was also such a private, introverted person. After a reading or a signing, she needed a full day of rest, walking around her house in slippers and a sweatshirt, absorbing the quiet, drinking tea.

He knew he had helped her career at the beginning. He’d made phone calls, written letters of recommendation, nudged her about contests and internships, helped her select poems for submissions. He hadn’t done that because he was sleeping with her, but because he believed in her talent, her work ethic, and that charisma.

He understood, with deep sadness, that he loved her, yes. But he had wanted to have her because he did not have what she had. Corinna walked into his classroom as an 18-year-old who had already worked her way through Yeats and had read not only all of Edna St. Millay’s work, but the biography of her as well. Corinna sparked and burned, and while he watched Netflix with his wife and took a walk, she paced in her country home and wrote and wrote and read and read. He’d wanted to possess Corinna because she was the only way he would ever have… that… whatever it was. He knew he was a good writer and a fair teacher. But he was certain a couple years from now Corinna would be the poet laureate of the United States.

He saw then what he needed to do. What he should have done, or not done, 25 years ago. He was going to let Corinna go. The color and meaning of his life would leave with her, but he had to do the right thing now, because he had failed too many times to do the right thing where Corinna was concerned.

Maybe he’d let himself go, too. That might be another right thing. He’d been fighting that a large portion of his life, too. Depression, self-hatred, suicidal ideation, all the ruinous thoughts of his disordered brain. He would never be more than he was, at this moment. He knew that for sure. And his kids were grown. He had loved. He had written. What more was there, really?

He rose off the bed just as Corinna found a colorful striped sweater and pulled it over her “Edit or Regret it” t-shirt. She looked up at him and smiled.

“Ready for dinner?” she asked. He could tell she was at peace, whatever he decided. She was remarkable.

He walked over to her and held out his hand. He would make the most of this weekend. His last ever with Corinna. Maybe his last ever? He would think about it.

“Yes, and cocktails, too,” he said.

She grabbed his hand and squeezed it, and together they walked out the door.