Pamela Dean (40 page)

Janet found the Augustans more of a struggle in the exam than in the original reading, but she thought she had retained enough of that bustling, rigorous place to make Professor Evans happy.

For History 12, she happily reread all the Balzac and wrote a paper on his treatment of the conflict between sexual and creative energy: he thought they had the same source, and if you expended what vital force you had in one activity, you would find the other closed to you. Janet wondered if this was true, and was at the root of her inability to write Nick any poetry. But Nick was writing quite a lot, and nobody could say he wasn't expending sexual energy, either. She also thought long and hard over the choice: it didn't matter now, college left time for very little poetry writing anyway. But if she had to make the choice, which road would she travel?

Commencement came and went. Rob Benfield, who was graduating on schedule despite his part in
The Revenger's Tragedy,
carried the battered bust of Schiller under his arm when he went up to get his diploma, and President Phelps, who still held the record for longest possession of Schiller from his own days as a Blackstock undergraduate, gravely produced a cap for the bust's head. Rob consigned the bust to Nick once he got off the platform, and Nick narrowly escaped having it wrenched from him by a mixed group of History and Fine Arts majors who lived on his floor. Janet, Tina, Molly, and Robin were instrumental in thwarting this plot; Thomas had already gone home for the summer.

Janet had attended the ceremony mostly on Schiller's account, but she stayed to see Nora graduate, which Nora did magna cum laude. Janet wondered if it might have been summa cum laude without the effect of Odile and her roommates. Nora, approached with this theory, laughed and said it had a great deal more to do with almost failing all her French courses. She hugged Janet good-bye, said she would certainly write, climbed into her family's old Buick, and was driven away.

Janet was suddenly unutterably depressed, though she was luckier than most students.

She lived in town and could visit the campus whenever she liked; and Nick was staying there for the summer and helping Professor Medeous catalog the Classics Library. There had apparently been a great argument over whether it should remain the Classics Library or be subsumed by the Main Library; and Medeous had won. Nick said this victory probably accounted for her unusual good nature this term.

In any case, Nick would be around all summer; and Janet, half of whose college fees were waived because her father taught there, had secured a part-time job at Griegs's Greenhouse that would take care of her financial needs for the next year and give her plenty of time to catch up on her sleep and her extracurricular reading, as well as to see Nick.

June was in fact quite pleasing. The weather continued to behave in an astonishing, Camelot-like fashion; working in a greenhouse afforded a lot of unexpected insight into a number of poets, especially the minor Elizabethans; and she and Nick, released from the constraints of college and the Minnesota winter, had time to do ordinary things like picnicking, learning to play tennis, attending movies, eating in restaurants, going up to the city to hear the Minnesota Orchestra, and bicycling to neighboring towns to rifle their used-book stores.

Janet still felt that something was wrong. She put it down to a natural fear that nothing this good could possibly last; but what finally made her stop and examine the situation carefully was her reading, at long last, of Christopher Fry's
The
Lady's Not for Burning.

She picked it up one afternoon at the end of June. Nick was working all afternoon and evening; she was done with her work at the greenhouse until the day after tomorrow; and she had just today during her lunch break polished off the last of the new science-fiction novels that had been piling up while she was reading dead authors instead. She had a letter from Molly to answer, and thought it would be nice to be able to tell her that she had read

The Lady's Not for Burning.
She began on it after supper, and put it down very soberly at eleven-thirty.

Everybody had gone to bed, though a tinny sound as of music played far too loudly through headphones could be discerned from Lily's room. It was a fine mellow night with a light breeze, and the cicadas were singing like crazy. Janet rubbed her fingers over the library markings on the spine of the book. This pleasant and convoluted work contained two sets of lovers. If you were eighteen and had never been in love before, you could be excused for not saying or thinking or feeling the sorts of things that Thomas Mendip and Jennet Jourdemayne said and thought and felt: Thomas and Jennet were entirely grown-up and had, so far as Janet could see, been through two separate versions of hell; no comfortable eighteen-year-old could expect to be as they were when they fell in love.

But the young lovers, Richard and Alizon, so silly and inexperienced that even Janet could smile at them and feel mildly superior—they, too, seemed to inhabit a country she had never visited. "Whenever my thoughts are cold and I lay them against Richard's name, They seem to rest On the warm ground where summer sits, As golden as a bumblebee."

When Janet's thoughts were cold, they stayed so. Nick was bright, but he wasn't warm.

Good grief, she thought, falling back against her wadded pillows and gaping at the cracked, familiar ceiling. Neither of us has ever even said I love you. What
are
we doing?

The lady is for burning, she thought, and swallowed a half-hysterical giggle. She turned off the lamp and watched the shadows of the leaves move in a mingling of moon- and street-light also familiar to her from childhood. I'm sleeping with a friend of mine, she decided. That's all right, no doubt; but you'd think, if it wasn't love, it wouldn't take such a lot of time and thought. Maybe it is love. How would I know? What does Christopher Fry know, anyway?

No, that wasn't the way to go about it. Christopher Fry knew a great deal besides how to write poetry. Janet sat up suddenly, turned the light back on, opened the book, and looked at the date. Then she read the back flap. Christopher Fry wasn't dead. Christopher Fry was a modern poet. "Well, I will be go to hell," said Janet; thought that over, and decided it was not so pleasing an expression as she had thought when she heard Professor Wallace say it.

She pulled her journal out from under the bed and wrote a long letter to Molly.

She did not discuss the matter with Nick, though they did talk about the play quite a lot. It occurred to her that the whole atmosphere of their times together was unfriendly to personal conversation. She spent a few disconcerting afternoons and evenings with Nick trying to watch herself and him as through a plate-glass window, and succeeded only in losing two arguments about Keats and one about how exactly you were supposed to scan the verse of Fry's plays. It was like trying to think about the Fourth Ericson ghost while you were in Ericson, or about Melinda Wolfe when you were anywhere at Blackstock.

She devoted a little time to discussing the ghost with Nick, who seemed taken aback that she should question for a moment the existence of spirits. She tried to discuss Melinda Wolfe with him, but he simply launched into a rambling story of how Wolfe had taught Herodotus when Nick's brother was at Blackstock. He was conveniently interrupted by a thunderstorm, and they had to pack up their belongings in a hurry and flee from the Arboretum to Taylor, where there were better things to do than talk about Blackstock's instructors in the Classics.

When she got home that night, Janet thought of introducing Nick to Danny Chin and letting them argue matters out. So far as she could tell, the main difference in her intellect produced by one quarter of a liberal-arts education was the eruption of a mad ability to see several sides to every question. Nick and Danny were both quite sure of their opinions, and were on opposite sides of this one. She sat in her hot bedroom, waiting for the storm-cooled air to make its way through the open windows, and tried to imagine their meeting. She had in her time been able to imagine in vivid color and detail, complete with dialogue, a variety of far less likely events, including, to pick several of the more embarrassing, that she had managed to finish Keats's
Hyperion
to universal critical and popular acclaim, or that Robert Frost had praised her poetry and invited her to tea. But Nick and Danny, though an infinitely more probable combination than Janet Carter and Robert Frost, would not fit into the same scene in her mind. It was like writing a really bad poem, one whose central metaphor was flawed or whose basic emotion shallow. You could struggle all you liked; you could put down a lot of lines on paper; but you could not force these dried-up bulbs to blossom.

She did call Danny the next day. He had managed, through one of his older brothers, to get a construction job with the state, and was spending twelve or more hours a day doing strenuous things with bridges and ditches in the blazing sun. The money was very good. He said he wished there were a locker he could check his brain into, since it wouldn't work for him anyway, and he was afraid the heat would ruin it forever. Janet told him that any brain capable of coming up with that metaphor might be delirious, but was not dull, and asked when they might meet. Danny said he had a week off at the end of August, and if he remembered to call her they would know his brain had suffered no permanent damage.

Molly's letter answering hers was a long time coming. Tina, on the other hand, wrote every week, scented letters on pink stationery with pictures of teddy bears. She wrote straightforwardly of her job as a secretary for a small firm that sold large cardboard barrels, mournfully of the fact that she and her high-school friends seemed to be drifting apart, and rather frantically of her inability to respond to Thomas's long and poetic letters in the manner she felt they deserved. Janet answered in terms as reassuring as she could manage.

She suggested that if Tina just wrote to Thomas about what really interested her, Thomas would be bound to catch the interest and be pleased with her letters.

Molly wrote less regularly, but very long and entertaining letters. She was washing glassware and taking apart dogfish sharks for a laboratory on an island off the coast of Maine. Maine was a childhood love of hers, and she was wildly happy to be back there, except for missing Robin, who apparently wrote short, opaque letters and an occasional sonnet, but would not give her the kind of detail about his daily life that would have made her happy. Janet tried to find out if he wrote to Nick; he apparentl y sent a postcard now and again about something that amused him, but that was all.

Molly's letter on being in love, when it finally arrived, comprised eight lined sheets of yellow legal paper, written small on both sides, and was not of a sort to reassure Janet at all.

Molly was having precisely the same problem with her relations to Robin—exacerbated by Robin's secretive and undemonstrative nature. She had thought she was in love with him, having felt far more strongly about him than about any of the people she had gone out with in high school. But one of them was also working at the lab, and she was feeling about him quite as she had felt about Robin, if not more so, since he was willing to talk about himself and was not always falling into silly moods and having to be chaffed out of them.

"So I don't know," she concluded, "if I should just become abandoned and have a good time, or reconsider that Spanish convent. Or I could set up some new experiments to discover what being in love really does feel like—except they're all irreproducible, of course. What do you suppose Robin would say if I went to bed with somebody else? I think he'd shrug and say it was time to go to lunch. But what if I'm wrong?"

Janet wrote back urging caution. It was with the greatest of difficulty that she refrained from asking Nick what
he
thought Robin would do if Molly went to bed with somebody else. She did pass on Molly's complaints about the paucity of communication from Robin, who was doing community theater in Omaha, Nebraska, and ought to have enough time to write. She was still intermittently tempted to burst out with the real question.

Mercifully, Molly wrote back in a few weeks to say she had thought better of it, having finally received a ten-page letter from Robin in which he explained in considerable detail what a difficult person he was, and thanked Molly for putting up with him. At around the same time Janet got a despondent letter from Tina saying that when she was interested in something, she just did it, what was the use of talking about it, and all the letters she had tried to write Thomas about her interests had sounded so stupid she had torn them up. Janet tried to find out if Nick knew anything of Thomas's state of mind, but it seemed that the two of them did not correspond. Janet finally, near the end of a clear, dry, warm July utterly at odds with the normal habits of Minnesota summers, wrote to Thomas herself, in fairly general terms. If he answered civilly, she might bring up the matter of Tina.

He did not, however, answer at all; and as August sulked in in a halo of thunderstorms and danced out in a blaze of sunshine, and September came on as hot as summer, Janet relegated all these problems to the time when school should start again, and gave herself up meantime to enjoying the last of her vacation.

It turned out that she would have to enjoy the final week of it without Nick. Professor Medeous was taking a little group of her students to a cabin in Wisconsin for a week before classes began. Janet was unable to determine, from the various things Nick said, if this was a tutoring session for people who were behind in their work, an advanced class for those who were ahead, or just a sort of prolonged party for favorites of either persuasion.

Nick came over for dinner the night before he was to leave, and departed rather early, since he had to pack. He did not invite Janet back to Taylor to help him, which didn't disturb her particularly but did seem to affront her mother.

"You just don't like him," said Janet. "Why?"