Ellis watched from a cushioned window seat across the room,
as yet another grad student managed to push his way into the crowd surrounding
her husband. Amusing, she thought, the way he drew people to him
like metal filings to a magnet. Zzzzzzzzt!
They became attached to him for the evening. Yes, he remained
erudite and charming. Yes, he was still handsome for a man of advancing
years and yes, he continued to radiate an aura of scholarly gravitas that
managed to intimidate them.
She was elderly, the oldest woman in the room and the only
one carrying a handbag. She
kept touching it as if to make sure it hadn’t vanished from the pillow next to
her. She massaged her
temples for a moment - academic social gatherings still tended to give her
migraines.
Her friend, Max Richter, head of the Anthropology
department, had been one of the few people able to resist becoming ensnared in
the net of charisma cast by her husband, the Pulitzer Prize winning author.
That was the single reason Ellis had slept with Max off and on over the
years, until his death ten summers ago.
The rest of them knew her husband, Charles Brinkman, as the
shape-shifting persona he summoned for them. And,
they adored him. Of course,
they didn’t have to share a house with him, bear his children, put up with his
bullying anger -- his “creative angst” as he referred to it --and nurture his
monstrous ego for all these many years.
