It Will Come to Me (13 page)

T
wenty minutes after the hour, Ricia Spottiswoode made a hurried entrance. Charles Johns was right behind her, moving faster than Ruth would have thought he could, carrying a small shopping bag of items which he efficiently unloaded onto the podium—a bottle of water, a packet of Kleenex, a number of smaller objects that Ruth couldn't make out. He reached over to lower the microphone and backed away to take a seat in the front row.

The acting English chair—the department was so contentious that Ruth couldn't remember a permanent one—gave a brief introduction. She was a tense, prim woman who always wore a triple strand of pearls. As she spoke, Ricia waited, poised like a Degas dancer in repose, head lowered, fingers loosely interwoven. She was wearing gladiator sandals and a very short gauzy dress in various shades of green with a ragged hemline. Ruth was reminded of the costumes for a production of Jean Giraudoux's
Ondine
that her progressive high school had put on in the late sixties. Her hair had been bundled loosely into a mesh snood. It wasn't easy to see her clearly from this distance—Ruth wished for a pair of opera glasses—but even so she was able to confirm that Ben had been telling the truth. Ricia was not beautiful: her
lantern jaw disqualified her. But Ruth had known more than one case of a woman with a near-disfiguring physical flaw that had the paradoxical effect of making her exponentially more rather than less attractive to men.

Ricia made her opening remarks, something about the generous people here in Spangler and how touched she'd been by the reception she and Charles had received. What she said was conventional and unremarkable, but her soft voice had the effect of hushing the crowd and imposing a charmed intimacy. “We've just come from living in the Northeast,” she went on, “in Providence, Rhode Island, and I can tell you that folks there aren't nearly so warm and welcoming as you are here.” The audience rumbled contentedly at this. Over the years Ruth had noticed that many of the New York—based writers who came through town on publicity tours seemed to arrive with a ready-made Texas twang. The locals, unfailingly polite to a stranger's face, sniggered privately because these celebrities had gotten the accent wrong: it was the sound of the western part of the state they were mimicking. Ricia was the only literary visitor so far to have picked up the knack of producing the big round Spanglish “r,” which one did by retracting the tongue and forming the shape of a rose with one's lips.

The interim chair sidled over and whispered something in Ricia's ear. “Oh yes,” she said, clapping her hands together under her chin, “I forgot. Questions. Please.”

Two dozen arms shot up. The chair pointed to a youngish woman who held up a copy of
The Divining Rod.
“Are you going to be signing these later?”

The chair leaned in once again to the microphone. “Ms. Spottiswoode will be signing for half an hour after this session out in the hall. You?” She gestured at another waving hand.

“I wanted to ask,” called out a heavy woman wearing a turned-around Spangler Spitfires baseball cap, “what eventually happened to Danny?” Danny Dewitt was the molesting uncle in
I'm Nobody.

“Not much, actually,” said Ricia. “He did some community service. You see, everybody protected him. That's the way it works in small-town courthouses where everyone's in everyone else's pocket.”

The audience reacted like a crowd of theatrical extras expressing outrage, muttering
rhubarb
and
garbage.

As the din diminished, other hands shot up. Had Ricia considered filing a civil suit? Yes, but she'd decided against it. Did Ricia believe—this from a lecturer in early childhood education named Leah Lapin—that there was therapeutic value in writing a memoir? Had she found it healing to write
I'm Nobody?
Did she have anything to say about the uses of narrative in psychotherapy?

Ricia seemed to be listening intently. She waited for a beat before answering. “No,” she said. “I don't know about narrative therapy. I assume that means telling stories about your life?” This response got one loud, barking-seal laugh from someone in the first row. Ricia paused again, for a good thirty seconds; by the time she spoke the audience was silent and riveted. “I can tell you that yes, I did find it therapeutic to write my memoir. But then I've found it therapeutic to write poems too, and plays and novels that never saw anything but the inside of a bureau drawer. I think writing is therapeutic in exactly the way that crocheting is therapeutic, or basket weaving, I suppose. That's the usual example. Or baking bread or throwing pots.” She paused, turned, took a pull on her water bottle, returned to the microphone. Her voice,
Ruth noticed, had gained volume and taken on clarity. Ricia Spottiswoode was not at all, she realized, the person she'd been billed as. She was shrewd, thoughtful, grounded. The Ophelia act was a marketing strategy. “I guess what I think is that writing is therapeutic in the occupational therapy kind of way, not so much in the psychoanalytic way. Does that make sense?”

Crowds, Ruth had always believed, are stupid beasts, capable only of fawning or roaring, but Ricia seemed to have coaxed a new trick from this one. She could feel the audience considering Ricia's response: thought was passing over it like a breeze ruffling a lake. But in a moment it had forgotten, and a new field of hands sprang up. The chair moved to one corner of the stage and pointed toward the back of the room. Ruth turned to see that a boy with a gel-spiked forelock was standing in the aisle, grinning brilliantly and waving his arms as if signaling a plane onto a runway. “Benj Bradley?” he called out. “Ricia? We're all thrilled to have you here?”

Ruth had heard his name, or rather read it, in “Notes on New Faculty” in the
Lola Lantern;
he was a recently hired poet in the writing program. New, yes, but so young? She squinted to bring him into better focus. He was wearing flip-flops, for heaven's sake, and a sleeveless camouflage tank top and a pair of those grotesquely baggy cropped khakis that once would have betokened impotence and now meant—what? How old could he be? Twenty-two? Seventeen? Thirty? She could no longer judge the ages of the young. It was coming back to her now that this same Benj Bradley—this mall rat, this beardless ephebe—was the holder of the Belinda Peters Twombly Chair in Rhetoric and Poetic Composition.

Benj Bradley talked fast, bounced on the balls of his feet,
gulped frequently, ended every sentence with an interrogative lilt. “I've got a question? I've got a bunch of questions, actually? I'll limit myself to one?”

“That'd be good,” Ricia said, flattening her voice just enough to let the audience know she was playing straight man to Benj Bradley's clown. Indulgent laughter followed, and Ruth was visited by the suspicion that these two actually knew each other. They all did, didn't they? But by the time Benj Bradley had opened his laptop and begun to read his prepared statement—it was more an extended disquisition than an inquiry—he was all gravity and earnestness. The words “trope” and “meme” and “precedent” were repeated several times: beyond this Ruth failed to register much. She was too inflamed with irritation at Benj Bradley's youth and calculated goofiness to follow him.

But what really agitated her was that suddenly she, Ruth, wanted to ask a question. The desire had come over her just as Benj Bradley was preparing to deliver his remarks. She recognized the feeling; in graduate school it used to overwhelm her like a wave of nausea. She hadn't spoken in public for many years, but now she was struggling to keep her arm from shooting into the air. She wanted—needed—to speak, but what to say? Something about memoir and therapy? Redundant: Ricia had already disposed of the subject. Truth in memoir? Too challenging, possibly insulting. Books that had influenced her? Leave that to the Women. Daily writing routine? That too. She hadn't read
The Divining Rod
and what could she say about
I'm Nobody?
There was the olive-green enamel watch, of course. That had left an impression. Might it form the nub of a question, an observation? She tried it out: Why was the olive-green enamel watch memorable? Because it carried the real emotional substance of the childhood
that
I'm Nobody
was about, the lost childhood. It might seem incidental or peripheral, but wouldn't Ricia agree that the true heart of a memoir might be found in details like that? Don't memoirs in fact exist in order to frame living relics of memory like the olive-green enamel watch?

That might work, and it would give her more to go on than the wordless jaculatory impulse that used to shoot through her arm in graduate-school seminars. In those days she'd actually made a point of raising her hand before she had any idea what she was going to say. That was the risky pleasure of the thing: she put herself in a position where she was forced to improvise, and under the pressure of panic, ideas extruded themselves. She wouldn't try that now. She knew her limitations. She knew her motives as well. (The older she grew, the harder she found it to hide them from herself.) What moved her was a straightforwardly primitive desire for attention, for recognition, especially from Ricia.

And even more especially—she had to admit—from Charles. There he was in the front row, his pageboy glowing dully. How she longed to make him crane his neck and acknowledge her. She'd developed a small crush on him, the pleasant kind that marriage keeps in check. Nothing powerful, just a little polished stone she liked to finger. To date, she'd had no explicitly sexual fantasies about him, or rather she'd tried, but he was just too fat and it hadn't worked. But ever since the night of the potluck dinner, he'd been hovering benignly around her. His consoling spirit had stayed with her, accompanying her on her walks, at the bank, in the car. She thought about him as she lay drowsily in bed in the mornings, when Ben was already up and moving around downstairs. Charles is elemental, she said to herself. Charles is an
earth father. She pictured him besporting himself in surf on some deserted beach, blowing like a zephyr, spouting like a whale.

More and more, these days, Ruth found that when she was thinking hard or retrieving a memory or lost in some fantasy, the channels to the outside world closed completely. Her ears sealed, her eyes glazed over; she simply didn't hear or see. (Was this dementia?) Apparently it had happened again just now. She had missed Ricia's reply to Benj Bradley—she could only hope it had been brief—because the sound that brought her back into the room was an explosion of laughter. Benj was clutching his chest as though he'd been shot. Ricia had crossed her arms over her bosom and was looking smugly delighted.

Ruth raised her hand, but the laughter had yet to die down. The chair, normally without humor, had covered her mouth with three fingers and was shaking delicately. Hoping to catch her eye, Ruth stood. The laughter faded; now the crowd was gathering itself, rustling and shifting and producing scattered coughs. Ruth sat down again. The chair looked out into the auditorium unseeingly. Ruth stood. The chair looked away. Ruth sat. The chair turned. Ruth stood once again. The chair saw her this time and pointed in her direction. “I was thinking …” Ruth began. All the heads in the auditorium turned toward her, like sunflowers toward the sun. (There was something about Ruth's voice that had this effect, some nakedness in its timbre, some wobble in its inflection.) “I was thinking …” she repeated, but now she saw that all the heads had swiveled once again. Some small disturbance was taking place in the upper right quadrant of the auditorium. It was Lee Odom, still seated but waving his cane aloft. The chair wheeled away from Ruth and pointed in his direction.
It took him a good fifteen seconds to struggle to his feet, supporting himself with his cane and the chairback in front of him.
“Miz
Spottiswoode,” he began, puffing a little from the exertion. “Ah'd lahk to preface mah remahks bah say'n how much wih
pray
-shate y'all comin’ down heah from those
civ’
lahzd pahts yawler ac
customed
to …”

B
en found Dolores at her desk. She turned to smile up at him enigmatically, then returned to her task of wrapping family photographs in newspaper. He stood for a few moments looking over her shoulder. She used four sheets per picture, he noticed, and four pieces of tape, cut to a uniform length. If the job could be done more efficiently, he couldn't imagine how. But soon it began to seem odd to stand there kibitzing, as if watching her assemble a model airplane or dissect a small animal. “You heard?” he finally managed to say. Stupid. Of course she'd heard. She turned again and looked up at him with an expression of puzzled dismay that made him feel ashamed for having broached the subject. “When did you find out?” she asked.

“Just now. I just came from her office. When did you?” “Last night. She called me at home. I tried to reach you this morning, but you'd already left.”

Ben walked around the desk and sat down on the love seat facing it. This was where she put students taking retests, so that she could keep an eye on them, and where her friend Yvette Staples, the loud, hale South African secretary of the Classics Department, sat when she and Dolores ate their brown-bag lunches together. Ben himself had almost never sat here, in this small space between the great fan-shaped window and her desk. It was
Dolores's domain, and therefore inviolate. She kept her things here, such as they were—she was not one to clutter up her workspace. Only her photographs and her barely audible radio and a flourishing wandering Jew and a few paperbacks that she read on quiet summer afternoons. And on the side table an open box of Almond Roca, which she insisted had actual medicinal properties. These things and her other belongings had been packed away in two cardboard boxes, he saw. The few words they'd already exchanged had had the effect of blocking further talk. What could he say to Dolores? What could she say to him? She wouldn't be a party to angry words about Mitten-Kurz, and it was quite beyond him to tell her how much he'd miss her.

The photograph-wrapping was the final job, and she was coming to the end of it. He got up and backed away into his office. “I'll just …” he said. She nodded. He closed the door behind him, thought better of it, opened it a crack. Sitting at his desk, he flipped unseeingly through the day's mail. In a moment, Dolores was tapping on his door and then opening it, her usual practice. “Come,” she said, with a small, uncharacteristically acid smile. “Come let me introduce you to my replacement.” Ben followed her out into the hall. She was clicking along rapidly in her sensible heels, keeping a few feet ahead of him. As they entered the stairwell, Ben once again felt an impulse to say something, but the purposefully bobbing back of her head told him that the moment had passed.