A Watershed Year (11 page)

Paul had called her right after her meeting with Yulia to tell her he had taken the job at T.G.I. Friday’s. His client had fallen through.

“This could be worse,” she said, putting an arm around his shoulder as he stood at the bar. “It could be Taco Bell.”

Paul laughed, but she regretted the joke. She hated to see him in a place so clichéd, with its dim interior lighting and its unnecessarily large hamburgers. Even the name, with its partial acronym, seemed to mock his situation. It couldn’t always be Friday.

“I still haven’t told Cokie,” he said, suddenly serious. “She thinks I’m working late to nail a new client.”

“But Paul, you have to tell her.”

Paul’s head slumped forward, and she could see that the bald spot on the crown of his head had grown in a matter of weeks. The skin looked slightly pink.

“It’s such a colossal mess. We don’t even talk about it anymore, and I’ve been sleeping on the couch for months because she says I’ve been tossing and turning too much. I feel like she despises me for letting the business go down the toilet.”

“She doesn’t despise you, and you didn’t cause the entire country’s economic downturn.”

“You don’t see her face before she’s had coffee in the morning. But I have to tell her about the job before someone rats me out. Sean’s lacrosse coach came in yesterday, and I had to hide in the bathroom.”

“If you need a little money, I could come up with something.”

“Absolutely not. I know you need it for the adoption. And this will tide us over for a little while. I just don’t want to lose the house.”

“What about Mom and Dad?”

“You didn’t tell them, did you?”

“No, but…”

“I can’t have them finding out. They’ll be driving over with casseroles every day like somebody died.”

Lucy saw his point. Their parents had been nervous about Paul starting his own company. Their sympathy, in lasagna form, could be too much to bear. Paul tore the paper off a roll of wintergreen Life Savers and stuck three in his mouth, crunching them with his back teeth.

“I can’t take the food here; it’s killing me,” he said, burping. “Thanks for coming up.”

“It’ll all work out, Paul,” she said, though she sounded unconvincing even to herself. “This is temporary.”

“It better be, or Cokie will wring my neck. Luckily,” he said, looking around, “our friends wouldn’t be caught dead in this place.”

She gave Paul a hug and paid her bill, stopping on the way out to examine an old-fashioned bicycle hung on the wall. It had an enormous front wheel with a tiny one in back and appeared physically impossible to ride.

Wow
, she thought.
What a long way down
.

LUCY GRABBED THE STACK of graded essays on the dining-room table and brought them to her Friday-morning philosophy class, during which twelve of her best students sat around a table arguing in voices made thin by sucking in too much stale library air. She wasn’t trained as a philosopher, but few universities had need for a full-time hagiographer. She had developed a course based on the teachings of some of the greats—Aristotle, Socrates, Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant—and threw out ethical dilemmas the class had to solve using one or several of their arguments.

“I don’t get all this ‘God is dead’ stuff,” said her youngest student, a nineteen-year-old from St. Louis. “I mean, who or what killed him off?”

A senior girl with a nose ring and greasy hair spoke up. “Nietzsche said, ‘God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.’” She was scribbling stars on her notebook. “I think that says it all right there.”

Lucy intervened. “You don’t need to agree with it, Peter; you just have to remember it. Maybe you’ll like Euripides better. He said, ‘The way of God is complex, He is hard for us to predict. He moves the pieces and they come somehow into a kind of order.’”

Peter wrote down the Euripides quote, nodding. Nietzsche never appealed to the Midwestern students, Lucy thought. They hated to think that God was dead or even under the weather.

After class, she saw Angela walking down the hallway from the admissions office. She had an enviable walk, a way of holding her shoulders that implied confidence and training in dance.

“You’re all scrunched up,” Angela said. “You look like a hobbit.”

“Thanks, and yes, I’m fine,” Lucy said, pulling her shoulders down and back. “I’m actually feeling marginally good today.”

“How’s the adoption going?”

“A few bumps in the road, but it’s progressing. Did I tell you I picked out some wallpaper for Mat’s bathroom?”

“Yuh-huh, some kind of fish,” Angela said, looking at her nails. “Why don’t you start coming to the single mothers’ group? I try to go once a month before we get into the admissions crush. Lets out all those toxins.”

Lucy imagined the single mothers in a circle around a life-size voodoo doll in the shape of an ex-husband. Each had a frozen daiquiri in one hand and a large pin in the other.

“I’m not even a mother yet,” Lucy said. “I’ve still got forms to fill out.”

“We’ll be there when you need us. And you will need us,” Angela said, continuing down the hall. “Good luck with that wallpaper.”

As Angela left, Lucy suddenly remembered Louis’s Aquinas lecture. She had never gotten back to him. The class had started at noon, so she knew she could probably get there in time to hear the second half of the lecture and provide a friendly face. She hurried across the quad, dodging clumps of students, her book bag walloping her thighs with every stride. She burst through the double doors of Wyman Hall and ran down the main corridor to the lecture room on the first floor, sliding a bit along the high-schoolish gray and white floor tiles before taking a breath and opening the door. Louis’s voice emerged, then surrounded her.

“That brings us to Aquinas’s fourth way to prove the existence of God, the argument from degrees and perfection,” Louis said. “Aquinas argued that two objects may be compared in terms of beauty; for example, two paintings. One can be said to be more beautiful than the other, possessing, then, a greater degree of beauty. Aquinas reasoned that there must be a standard of perfection from which we measure degrees of beauty or goodness or kindness. And that standard, that perfection, he said, is contained in God.”

About thirty students sat in the middle of the sloping lecture hall. Some scribbled down every word or typed on laptops; others nodded along as though they knew where to find the information online. Louis was standing at a lectern to the left of a broad screen,
which, at the moment, showed a Renaissance painting of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Lucy entered the room and sat down in the back, though Louis didn’t appear to see her. She noticed that he was wearing a shirt and tie with khaki pants and a leather belt, which she would have assumed he didn’t own. He looked quite comfortable up there, changing slides with a remote control.

“The fifth, and final, way to prove the existence of God, Aquinas said, was the argument from intelligent design. It’s just common sense, according to Aquinas, to believe that the universe was created by an ‘intelligent designer’; in other words, God. The order of nature, the beauty of the stars, the clever way it all fits together had to be arranged by such a designer and not by chance. Just look around you, Aquinas was saying; examine the perfection of a tree or an insect or a child and tell me there isn’t a God.”

As Louis continued, Lucy directed her attention to Ellen Frist, who sat off to one side in a chair, watching Louis give his lecture. Lucy noted that Ellen was wearing a shortish skirt and high heels, not her usual teaching attire.

When Louis finished, the class applauded as Ellen took the lectern to remind them of their reading assignments. Lucy waved her hand to catch Louis’s eye as the students gathered their things to leave. Her cheeks felt slightly warm. She was forced to admit, if only to her most inner self, that it made her happy just to see him. He smiled and motioned for her to wait.

“No one applauded my first lecture,” she said as he came up the aisle. “You’re surprisingly good.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, tugging on his tie. “Wait a minute. Why ‘surprisingly’?”

“Because you’re what, twenty-nine, thirty? Most people need a few years to get the hang of it. You looked like an old pro up there,” Lucy said.

“I had a tree stump in my backyard growing up. I practiced by lecturing to squirrels.”

“Which have notoriously short attention spans,” Lucy said.

“Not if you talk about acorns… I’m almost thirty-two, by the way.”

She smiled and shouldered her book bag. Louis stepped aside to let her pass in front of him, and they both walked out through the doors of the lecture hall.

“I’m so sorry I was late,” she said. “This week turned out to be insane, and then I completely forgot until…”

A student came up to Louis and stood nearby, waiting for her to finish. She was about twenty, evenly browned as though just back from a week in Cancún, with buoyant breasts that couldn’t be ignored. Lucy stopped talking and pretended to look for something in her book bag.

“Professor Beauchamp?” the student said, with a distinctly Maryland accent that flattened the long “o” sound. “I just wanted to ask a quick question.”

“I’m not really a professor yet, so it’s just Louis. What can I do for you?” Louis said, his voice rising slightly.

Lucy waved and slipped out the front door of Wyman Hall. She started back across the quad, deciding to pick up a sandwich in the faculty cafeteria and eat it at her desk. But a minute into her walk, Louis came running up behind her.

“I thought…” he said, panting slightly. “Maybe lunch?”

“What did she want?”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“Oh,” Louis said, flushing. “She just wanted to know if I taught any courses she could take.”

“Your first devoted follower.”

“Right,” he said. “Hey, let’s go to the grill. I’m starving. I was too nervous to eat breakfast.”

“Sorry, I can’t,” she said, running ahead, her book bag hitting her thighs for the second time that day. “I’ve got too much work. And Mat’s wallpaper is coming in today.”

“Okay,” he yelled toward her. “Maybe some other—”

She looked back as a student trying to catch a Frisbee ran between the two of them and hit Louis in the shoulder. But she turned away again. She didn’t want to see Louis’s face because it might confirm that she, Lucy McVie—scholar of useless information, unmarried thirty-something, failed vegetarian, pseudo-Catholic—embodied the standard by which disappointment was measured.

HARLAN OPENS his second beer and drains half of it. He doesn’t usually drink much. He told her once that alcohol makes him feel disoriented, bringing back memories of a childhood bout with vertigo. Her worry multiplies.

“I still need to ask you a question.”

She nods, but he remains silent. She tries to wait as he finishes the beer, but she’s compelled to fill the void.

“I fainted once. In high school. I was giving blood for the first time. When they brought me over to the cookie table, I slipped out of the chair and slid right underneath the feet of my trigonometry teacher.”

She smiles at the memory, though she suddenly wonders if it ever happened. It sounds like the story of a friend or something she saw on an after-school TV special. She doesn’t like to doubt her own recollections. It makes her feel old and unsafe.

For unknown reasons, her story brings Harlan back to the planes.

“Have you noticed, with the planes,” he says, “how quickly the disbelief evaporates? Just a few weeks later, and now it seems ridiculous that we never anticipated this—”

“I know,” she says, nodding.

“Because we should have seen it coming. Why didn’t we understand the threat?”

“Fanaticism is a great motivator,” Lucy says. Harlan looks restless, as though this can’t be the answer.

“I’m sick,” he says. “The doctor says I’m sick.”