latest issue

archive

about us

author profiles

guidelines

links

email

home

Betrayal
by John Calvin Hughes

Emily stopped short. The chalk still touching the blackboard. Then that’s what epiphany is, isn’t it. A kind of temporary paralysis, suspension of motion and the process of thinking in order to hold just one thought clearly, perfectly.

She had been in the process of writing a word on the board. She was trying to get her students to understand the socially-constructed nature of meaning. She’d taken off her wedding ring and held it up for their consideration: what does this mean? Your love for your husband, your marriage, your commitment. Yes, she said, yes. But look. See that all that stuff is not in the metal. My commitment is not a quality of the gold itself. My love is not the shape of the band. Those meanings I attach to the ring. They’re not in the ring. And though they nodded their heads, they didn’t believe her. Just tell us what the poem means, they always begged. What does Hemingway mean in this story, they pleaded.

All her students had gone to see the new blockbuster Titanic that weekend, and she was determined to have them understand this: what the movie meant to them, individually, was what the movie meant, period, regardless of what the director or the writer or the food service people, for that matter, wanted it to mean.

“So what was the movie about?" she asked.

Love.

Death.

Class.

She was going to tell them that they were only halfway there, that they were listing only topics, that they had to ask now what the film was saying about love and death and class, to move beyond fact to interpretation.

Then somebody said Betrayal. And she stopped short.

She hadn’t thought about James in quite a while. He who’d betrayed her. He of the broad shoulders, of the blond mane. Of the hands, of the strong, callused carpenter’s hands. He had broken up with her over the phone.

And what was it had he said just before he hung up? Something with a long e sound. Leave? We? Please?

She was crying hard by then and didn’t hear him clearly.

But now she wasn’t crying. She was at the blackboard, chalk touching the board still, her back to the class still waiting. She was struck stone still by the notion that James’s betrayal had, in fact, given her everything she had now. Her husband, Tomas, her son, Andrew, her life with them. None of that possible but for his betrayal.

The Jesuits at Loyola had taught her that Adam’s betrayal of God was a substance with two properties. It was first the most audacious act of free will imaginable, a damned and terrible property. And second, it was the most fortunate of actions possible, a substance the quality of which was the beauty of Christ, necessary and sufficient. And likewise, Judas’s betrayal of Christ made the sacrifice possible, made salvation available. The greatest good emerging from the greatest wrong,

What had James had said there at the end? Free, glee? Or see?

James' betrayal had given her Tomas. Tomas worshipped her with his eyes. With James it had been hands. His big rough hands on her all the time. His hands on her upper arms as he rose above her in the dark. His hands on her behind as they walked down the street. He said the universe had designed the curve of her ass to fit perfectly into the curve between his forefinger and thumb, and that his arm falling naturally to his side was the perfect length to find its place on her ass. Waking in the night she would find his hard hand on her, in rough juxtaposition to her soft thigh or belly.

And if James was of hands, then Tomas was of eyes. Not the clichéd windows of the soul, but mirrors in which she saw herself as he saw her. He told her the most beautiful thing a man could ever hope to see was the naked body of the woman he loved, for it was the particular instance of the abstract ideal of beauty he held in his heart. And though Tomas was not the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, their son was. She understood what Tomas saw in her when she herself first laid eyes on Andrew.

And none of this was possible without that most terrible of crimes: betrayal.

What did James say, there at the end: plea, she, weak? Or relief. Or sweet.

In order to get as far away from James as she could, she went back to graduate school in another city. She graduated and got a job teaching, eventually publication and tenure. These good things too, these blessings, these sweet accomplishments, also from betrayal. She lifted the chalk from the board and turned around. But she did not see the class, their blank or puzzled faces, for she was struck with a vision, a vision of Brod, manuscript pages in his hands before his fireplace, his arms drawn back to throw them in, and there behind him in his shadow on the wall, Adam holding the fruit, Judas holding silver. James’s hands.

And what had James said to her at the end, beyond her tears and pleas, whispering softly like wind soughing in the leaves of the trees: grief? Deceit? Flee? Or had he just said Me. Just me. Me.

Though the author of the scholarly book The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme, John Calvin Hughes has had stories, poems, articles, and books rejected by The New Yorker, Georgia Review, Random House, Comparative Literature, Blackbird, Missouri Review, Confrontation, and many, many others.  He took seriously Berryman's advice to Merwin to paper his walls with rejection slips.