We Do What We Do in the Dark: A Novel

by Michelle Hart

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Hart’s novel does something exceptional that few pieces of fiction have done successfully….[H]as flashes of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends." – New York Times

“An unforgettable account of a forbidden romance.” – Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy

“Moving and memorable.” – Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion

“Sensual and wise.” – Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

A novel about a young woman’s life-altering affair with a much older, married woman.

Mallory is a freshman in college when she meets the woman. She sees her for the first time at the university’s gym, immediately entranced by this elegant, older person, whom she later learns is married and works at the school. Before long, they begin a clandestine affair. Self-possessed, successful, brilliant, and aloof, the woman absolutely consumes Mallory, who is still reeling from her mother’s death a few months earlier. Mallory retreats from the rest of the world and into a relationship with this melancholy, elusive woman she admires so much yet who can never be fully hers, solidifying a sense of solitude that has both haunted and soothed her as long as she can remember.
 
Years after the affair has ended, Mallory must decide whether to stay safely in this isolation, this constructed loneliness, or to step fully into the world and confront what the woman meant to her, for better or worse. This simmering, unsettling debut novel reveals the consequences of desire and influence, portraying two women whose lives have been transformed by love, loss, and secrecy.

Release date: May 3, 2022

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Print pages: 222

Sample

When Mallory was in college, she had an affair with a woman twice her age. When the woman was seventeen, she herself had had an affair with a man in his forties. Mallory admired the woman so much that, for many years, any similarity between them flattered her.

Mallory had run on the treadmill behind the woman at the university’s gym for weeks before they actually met. It was September of her freshman year. Mallory, whose mother had died months before, had become haunted by the prospect of poor health. Also, she was a first-year student and worried about letting something free, like a gym membership, go to waste.

The school’s main gym was in the midst of renovations; a crude, makeshift workout area now occupied one half of the intramural basketball court. This was separated from the other half by a large mesh curtain. The treadmills and weight-lifting equipment were laid atop a foundation of cardboard flooring so as not to scuff the hardwood underneath. It was a squalid, airless space, almost like a hospital, with nowhere pleasing to look.

Mallory felt drawn to the woman the first time she saw her. The woman had walked into the gym wearing a loose-fitting tank top so slack it billowed as she moved. She carried an alluring sadness about her, with dark pouches under her eyes that seemed to hold a lot of weariness and wisdom. The woman’s facial expression dramatized the solitude Mallory herself felt inside. The woman wore it well, and as her shirt lifted from her body, Mallory saw the woman’s melancholy as an invitation, a shared space for the two of them.

Tied to the woman’s wrist was a small, folded towel, and when the woman stepped onto the treadmill, she unwound it, draping it over the machine’s control panel so the buttons and the time were hidden. She worked out on her own internal clock, without headphones, intensely focused and free of distraction. As the woman ran, Mallory looked from her shoulder blades, which Mallory’s mother had called “wings,” to her ass. The woman had a body that was taut and muscular. It was the kind of body that seemed like it would never be stricken by illness.

The woman, Mallory learned, went to the gym at the same time every other day. She ran three miles in twenty-four minutes. In that period, Mallory could hardly run two, but she found watching the woman made the time tick heedlessly.

Seeing how fit the woman was, Mallory began to eat healthier. Instead of a bagel at breakfast, she had a banana or some yogurt. Instead of a sandwich for lunch, she ate a salad. By the end of her first month away at school, she’d burned off most of the baby fat she still carried with her. After eighteen years of avoiding her reflection, or else being preoccupied by its abject homeliness, she now stood for long, surreptitious spells in front of the mirror in the communal bathroom with her shirt hiked up.

The university Mallory attended was on Long Island. The campus, a forty-five-minute train ride from Manhattan, lay between two towns—one said to be seedy, the other considered posh. The bad part had the bars, where some of the students went on weekends, since they were within walking distance; the good, which was harder to access without a car, had the manicured lawns of the professors’ homes.

The college was mostly a commuter school, and on nights and weekends it was as if two-thirds of the students simply vanished, like the Rapture. Lacking both a car and an interest in bars, Mallory felt at once claustrophobic and isolated, a feeling with which she had been familiar for most of her life. She’d hoped college would be different. Her body vibrated with potential energy. But walking to and from her classes, she saw the sprawling campus as indifferent to her. She had the perpetual feeling of sneezing without being blessed.

Other than her roommate, whose name was Joy, Mallory hadn’t made any new friends. Together their dorm room was a pair of Greek theater masks: Joy on one side, Mallory on the other. Joy had come to the college to study drama. She had the looks and the disposition for acting. Many things she did seemed dramatic: When she spoke or ate, she obscured her mouth with the back of her hand. When she read, she sometimes shut the book and bit into its jacket. When she watched shows on her laptop, she blinked rapidly and forcefully as if she was wincing, or willing something into happening like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie.

Joy had spent much of their first few weeks at school preparing to audition for the school’s play. She rehearsed monologues from Shakespeare and her favorite films. Some of these she performed for Mallory. But she didn’t get a part. This devastated her, and for days after her audition, she became withdrawn. During this time, Mallory felt embarrassed on both of their behalf; the humiliation of a ruined dream was too acute, and Mallory felt incapable of consoling her. Time passed, however, and Joy declared that the following semester she would study prelaw. The courtroom was a different kind of theater, she said, and one that paid much better. Her tossing aside an old life so easily brought Mallory comfort; a new one might be waiting for her, too.

On a Tuesday night at the end of September, Mallory spoke to the woman for the first time. The university was hosting a visiting writer. Because she was studying literature, and because the writer’s book jacket had “bestseller” emblazoned on it, Mallory thought she ought to go.

There were cookies by the entrance of the small auditorium where the visiting writer read. Mallory put one on a clear plastic dish and filled a paper cup with black coffee. She sat by herself in the last row. She broke the cookie in half and broke the half in half before sliding it daintily between her lips. As she chewed, she held a hand in front of her mouth, ladylike, the way Joy ate.

She saw the woman sitting in the second row. The woman’s head was bowed as if reading a book in her lap. Her blond hair had been pulled loose from the ponytail she wore at the gym and hung down to her shoulders. Mallory had run on the treadmill behind her so often by then that she could make out the woman from many rows back.

An older man, the chair of the English department, called the small crowd to attention. This prompted the woman to look back and survey the room. In doing so, she found Mallory. Mallory looked away, but when she looked back, the woman’s eyes were still on her. The woman’s hair was parted down the middle such that both sides appeared as the arches of a lowercase “m.” Mallory fingered the tips of her own hair, the way her mother had worried the ends of her wig when meeting someone new.

Before she began reading, the visiting writer, who possessed a free-spirited frumpiness that made her appear as a soothsayer, told a story about riding the subway in New York City weeks earlier. On the train, she said, she had sat across from a man reading a newspaper. He was bald and had bags under his eyes. The newspaper was from September 12, 2001. The writer had done a double take to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. The man was reading over the news in a distressed daze, as if the disaster had happened the previous day, though it was now seven years later. Watching him made the writer’s heart sink. She wondered whether the man was a writer himself, a trauma survivor, or a time traveler. Getting off at her stop, she thought, Those might all be the same thing.

Uneasy, fragmented laughter scattered throughout the auditorium. No one knew whether the anecdote was meant as a joke.

The writer then read from her most recent novel, which was set sometime in the sixties, when the author herself had been a young girl. It involved sexual abuse. As the writer read, Mallory drifted off. She fantasized about her own future fame, or at least what it might feel like to be seen and revered for her experiences and ideas. She had plenty of the latter but few of the former.

After the reading was over, and after a short Q&A, the woman slid herself from her seat and made for the auditorium’s exit. Mallory, feeling bold, fled after her.

She followed the woman into the bathroom. The woman went into one of the stalls, and Mallory stood in front of the wide mirror above the sinks, rocking back and forth on her heels. The woman’s urination echoed in the empty restroom. Thinking the woman might be embarrassed by the sound, Mallory turned on the sink, which was automatic; this meant she had to constantly wave her hand underneath the tap to keep the water on. She pumped soap into her hand and washed it off. All possible vestiges of the soap had been scrubbed away when, finally, the woman emerged from the stall.

Watching the woman move in the mirror, Mallory pulled a paper towel from the ream. She pulled too many and offered the surplus to the woman.

“Thank you,” the woman said, once she was done washing her hands. She spoke with a slight German lilt; what she said sounded more like “Sank you.” “Where are the breath mints? The lotion?”

“Shoot,” said Mallory. She patted herself down as if those things might appear.

They smiled at each other as if they’d been seated together on a once-turbulent plane now out of peril. Mallory was charmed and disarmed by the woman standing before her and could not think of anything else to say. Fantasies of meeting the woman had occurred so frequently she found the reality baffling. She opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, tasting the simple sweetness of the cookie she had eaten and the bitterness of the black coffee.

The woman balled up the paper towel and threw it out. She offered her name and asked Mallory’s. Mallory did not like her name, but when the woman repeated it aloud—Mallory Green—it sounded somehow mellifluous, like it belonged in a storybook.

The woman pulled open the door. “Are you going back in?”

“I don’t think I’m going to buy a book,” said Mallory, “so it seems like I shouldn’t.”

“The book is not very good anyway,” said the woman. “I was more interested in that man on the train.” By themselves in the bathroom, in public but out of view, the woman’s scorn gave Mallory a conspiratorial thrill.

They left the restroom and went their separate ways, peeling away from one another, Mallory felt, with reluctance.

She found the woman’s email address in the employee directory online. It was nice meeting you the other night, she wrote. The woman said back the same.

Over the next several days, they exchanged messages. Each email the woman returned felt like a gift. She asked which classes Mallory was taking, which books she was reading, which books she liked. Mallory could not remember any of them and asked her father to send a picture of her bookshelf back home. The photo he sent featured all her Goosebumps books and a Chronicles of Narnia boxed set.

Wanting to sound both fun and sophisticated, Mallory wrote to her about Nikolai Gogol and “The Nose,” a story her high school English teacher had recommended to her the previous year, which she’d read over and over and even tried making into a comic. She told the woman she found the story both absurd and sort of sad; the body does what it wants.

According to the faculty directory, the woman was an adjunct and taught courses on children’s literature. Through Google, Mallory learned the woman was also an author of picture books.

Mallory was sure she had misread this. She could not square the woman’s weariness with the glee of stories for kids. But the books had won awards.

There was a video on YouTube of an interview the woman had given to PBS. As a young girl from Germany, she’d found America confounding and took comfort in the pleasingly static nature of picture books. She had started making her own when she was in grade school; she would sit in the corner of the classroom or under a tree on the playground and draw herself talking and playing with the other children, whom she was too afraid to speak to in real life. On paper, the woman said, everything could be safely contained.

With some of the money she’d saved up before college, Mallory ordered all the woman’s books. When they arrived a few days later, she brought them to the quiet floor of the college library. The seclusion of the private study room and the faint musk of old books made reading the woman’s work feel furtive, as if she was uncovering the woman’s secret life. A soft, white light emanated from each page. There was something about the woman’s books that beckoned Mallory into them. They said, There is room enough for you here.

With her own tracing paper, Mallory began copying the woman’s art. The woman had lettered the books in her own handwriting; Mallory copied that, too.

She went to see the woman at her office on campus. The office, which the woman occupied only twice a week, contained two desks facing away from one another against opposite walls. The woman kept the overhead light off; instead the room was lit solely by the sun soaking through a single window along the back wall. It felt like a monk’s cell. The window overlooked a little courtyard with marble tables. Mallory could see and hear the other students outside. Visiting the woman, she felt her life was far away from theirs.

She went under the pretense of asking the woman what she should read. Doing this, she thought, would make her appear smart; also, if the woman gave her a book, she would have to bring it back, an excuse to see and talk to her again.

Mallory sat on a plastic chair beside the woman’s desk. The woman asked her if she wanted to be a writer. Mallory looked at her hands in her lap. Her instinct was to say yes, but knowing the woman was an author, she wasn’t sure she could say it.

“I used to draw,” she said. Upon revealing this part of herself to the woman, her voice squeaked. “I mean, I still do. I used to think I was going to make comic books. But I’m worried I’m a better reader than I am a writer. Maybe I should have gone to art school.”

Underneath the desk, the woman cracked each knuckle of her right hand. Before moving on to the left, she said, “Bad habit.”

“I do that, too,” Mallory said.

As if to keep her hand busy, the woman picked up a pen from her desk. She twiddled it between her index finger and thumb. “I had a boyfriend in graduate school whom people pleaded with to read and edit their work. He was very smart. We could talk for hours about stories, movies and books, and I learned a lot from him. He was always writing, but because we were dating, I never wanted to read his work. If it was good, I would be jealous. ...