Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (15 page)

What, I ask myself, might love wreak on my life? Somber thoughts occupy me, counseling caution. Then I alight on the words of Adrienne Rich.
I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.

Into the dimming apartment, the sounds from the sidewalk and the aroma of Cambodian spices, I say something I know to be true only as I pronounce the words.

“I have been alone,” I say to him, “as long as I can remember.”

Morning.

“Yet this critical response, you have to remember, was contemporaneous with the emergence of London's Bloomsbury group.”

A sophomore with a long brown ponytail whispers to the girl beside him. Flipping the page of my lecture notes, I glance pointedly at the two, who gaze at me from their back-row seats with the blank expressions of hardened criminals.

“So why this initial resistance to modernism in the American context?”

The two students smirk, still facing forward, their gossip all the more delectable for being interrupted. Surely they were talking about a classmate, a crush, a weekend keg party. Unless, of course, they were snickering about me: their professor who is wearing her bra on the outside of her blouse.

I defy you to find a female professional who, having had this thought, can resist a quick downward glance. With a rapid duck of my chin, I continue: “And what links can we see between this and the reception received by American postmodernism several decades later?” Blouse firmly fastened, bra out of sight; obviously they're laughing about something else.

My next thought makes me blush hard. As I consider the likelihood of my own transparency, I forge ahead with my lecture, continuing steadily if more emphatically. Students have love radar. It's their specialty. I eye the ponytailed kid, whip-thin and wisp-bearded, and his neighbor, a sweet-faced girl with multiple piercings. Their expressions are studies in bland interest. But they,
like most students, are smarter than they act, and possibly they've spotted the signs: Unusual levels of energy. Cheerfulness in the face of literary theory. My tendency, today, to distraction.

Love. If it can happen to me, anything can. The square inch of Brazilian rainforest I bought in a ninth-grade environmental campaign holds the fabled mother lode; the rangers have been searching for me for years. My dental records confirm that I am Princess Anastasia, and my dentist has been waiting until my thirty-fourth birthday to tell me. I have won the office pool; I have been exempted, refunded, recognized; my long-lost sister is entering stage right.
Tracy?
she cries, clutching her gorgeous hands to her supermodel face.
Is it really you?
She is my identical twin.

Until last Saturday I'd never been to a spa. But Yolanda, in need of a post-opening-night debriefing and keen for news of my potentially budding love life, wouldn't hear of me refusing her invitation to Félicité, where two day passes awaited, payment for a recent gig modeling spa wear. After a hard workout, Yolanda led me to a glass-doored room, indicated I should sit on a slatted wooden bench opposite her, and nodded greeting to a trio of shiny-faced women. The door closed behind us and there was a moment's silence, long enough for the heat to make an impression. Then, startling me nearly out of my towel, steam shot up through floor vents. Yolanda, smiling like a giddy yogi, vanished in a thick, rising cloud. The whiteout wreathed me. The steam I inhaled was as hot as the air I exhaled—so hot I couldn't tell where my body ended and it began. I couldn't breathe. In fright I stood to grope my way toward air, but the door, along with Yolanda and the other women, was invisible. Disoriented, I stood trembling, taking the air in small sips. Then bigger.

I sat. The air was strangely full, but breathable. I closed my eyes. And noticed, as I gave the weight of my head to the wooden wall, that I didn't care anymore where my skin ended and where the air began.

That is what sex is like with George. My head tucked beneath his chin, our bodies bearing toward some unknown destination, I'm blind, claustrophobic, certain I won't be able to breathe. And then with a shush of skin my body declares itself: no longer a collection of disparate elements, arms and legs and breasts, but a simple whole. Alive, all breath and want, eager to touch,
meet, fathom. George is impish and soothing, gathering me. The dark room absorbs our greetings, sounds of surprise and assent, the crush of my hair in his hands. An unfamiliar, girlish timbre in my laugh, and George's hands moving with the precision and delicacy of a paring knife slipping under the fruit's skin. Then a long, breathing silence. George, intent, turns my face to his. His eyes stop me. When he says the words I reply with a swiftness that surprises us both. I cling to his shoulders; he doesn't flinch. I roll into his chest, sleep like a baby.

And walk to morning lecture shaken down like a tree, leaves and cones scattered. Leaves and cones, my dear love-besotted students, all over Sixth Avenue.

“Before I conclude,” I say to the sun-blanched lecture hall, “I must emphasize that there is little point studying postmodernism unless you acknowledge what it is the writer truly asks of the reader.” Several students lift their eyes to the clock, whence will come their release in another minute forty-five. With my copy of
The Complete Short Works of Samuel Beckett
in hand, I step back from the lectern and consider the echoing distance to the back row of the hall. “Postmodernists want you to
interact
with the text. Question how it comes to you. Be skeptical. Vigilant. Above all,” I say, “active.” And with a lumbering skip forward, I heave the book into the empty air over the heads of my students. The angel of gravity is merciful and the book, pages roiling, sails straight toward the back row—toward the shocked upturned face of the kid with the ponytail.

“Catch!” I command, and he does, he traps and cradles Beckett in his narrow chest and hugs it with a great grin as the sweet-faced girl with the nose rings utters a quiet “wow” into the silent gallery and I, knowing there are moments whose glory must not be squandered, stride out of the room.

“Hi, Tracy.” Elizabeth greets me in the dim corridor with a trapped expression I recognize from our last encounter. This time she carries a sheaf of student papers under one arm.

“How's it going?”

“Okay, I guess.” Her mouth quavers: a fluttering ribbon of a smile.

Down the hall, Eileen steers her loaded cart majestically into
the photocopy room. I wait until she's out of earshot. “Ever get through that gargantuan stack of books?” I ask.

Elizabeth nods, her laugh tight. She glances at her watch. “I've got another stack, though. Joanne recommended more reading. I guess I'll need to move back my dissertation-defense date a few weeks. I just talked to Eileen about the rescheduling.”

“You're joking.”

She shakes her head, then looks at her watch once more.

From down the corridor a beam shines across the sill of the copy-room door, then sweeps the hallway and walls like the sudden interrogation of a lighthouse. Eileen is copying with the machine's top open. A brief pause; then the light sweeps the hall again and continues in regular rhythm, a long, diagonal bar of brightness swinging across the far wall, up our bodies, across our faces, scaling the walls nearly to the ceiling, where it snaps off. Slide . . . clunk. Slide . . . clunk. The heartbeat of the department. Elizabeth shifts her papers to her other arm, and as she does there is an instant's desperate communication from her wide black eyes.

“You know you don't have to do all that, right?” I offer gently. “Joanne isn't even your adviser.
I
am. And the dissertation draft I've been reading is wonderful. It's going to make some waves in the Dickinson world. Elsewhere too, I'd bet.”

Elizabeth watches me. The light slides up her face, illuminating her mouth; her nose; her eyes; her forehead. As it passes onward and leaves her in darkness, I have a disturbing image of her pale face looking up at me from under water.

“What are the books Joanne recommended?” I ask.

Elizabeth lists them, or starts to; after four titles I've had enough. “That material isn't even relevant, Elizabeth, and we both know it.”

“It might be, if—”

“Look, Elizabeth, I'm sorry to cut you off, I really am, but this truly needs to be examined.” Pausing to listen for movement from the offices down the hall—there is none—I continue with lowered voice. “You could be nearly finished with your dissertation by now. It could be on its way to publication. But you're getting caught in second-guessing, and I think Joanne is having”—I check myself—“a certain amount of trouble keeping in mind the best interests of your project and career.”

Elizabeth says nothing.

“I don't mean to be hard on you. I'm just concerned.”

“I'll think about it,” she promises. She turns on a bright, professor-pleasing smile.

“But why do the reading, Elizabeth?”

“It's okay,” she soothes, stepping backward so the light sails off her shoulder and her face is shadowed. “I'll just skim, in case there's something in there I need.” Her voice is steady now, and carries a clear request to be left alone.

Jeff greets me in the faculty room with a raised glass of seltzer. “I hear you blew them away in Twentieth-Century Lit.”

It takes a moment to figure his meaning. I blink dizzily at Jeff, and at the sofa and the bookshelves and magazine racks of the faculty lounge, as though I've just tried on someone else's glasses and can't yet trust the world's normal proportions.

“I didn't think you had that kind of stunt in you,” Jeff continues.

The world reasserts its proper dimensions. Feeling loose-limbed, I pour myself coffee and stir in half-and-half. “I was possessed by the spirit of Beckett,” I say.

“Bullshit. You were possessed by the spirit of Mr. Tabouli. You didn't throw that book, you levitated it with pure sexual energy.”

A grin steals onto my face, torpedoing any chance for a deadpan comeback. I sip my coffee, the usual coal-and-chalk departmental brew. “What's that, anyway?” On his lapel Jeff wears a small button emblazoned with a picture of a smirking Brad Pitt.

“This,” says Jeff, eyeing his lapel as though a turd has inexplicably appeared on it, “is from Richard. In honor of our seventh anniversary. He worships Brad.”

“You're wearing that to lecture?”

“Richard dared me,” Jeff says dryly.

I find it hard to imagine anyone daring Jeff to do a single thing he hadn't already deemed was in his best interest. “He thinks you need more Brad in your life?”

“No. Not more Brad. Less
dignity.
” He pronounces the word with an expression so baleful it implies this seventh anniversary will be their last. He sets down his seltzer. “On a brighter note,” he says, “maybe it will help Paleozoic get the idea.” He opens his laptop.

“Trolling airfares again?” I ask.

He nods without looking up. “Download them every morning along with my e-mail, and look at them when I have a chance.” Jeff and Richard's commitment to visit every three weeks has hit a stumbling block since fares jumped with fuel prices. “A pointless way of biding my time until the new job listings come out next month and Richard and I can scheme.”

“Again?”

“I'm serious this time. It's not worth it to keep doing things this way. My grad school classmates who couldn't find jobs may tell me what a lucky fuck I am to be tenured in Manhattan, but it's rather irrelevant given my situation.”

“Can't Richard just move to New York?”

“You know how much harder it is to find an academic job here. Plus, in other parts of the country a person can actually live well on an academic salary.”

“But doesn't it—”

The door opens and Jeff hushes me with a tiny slice of his forefinger against his jugular. Victoria steps in, followed by Joanne, who on this warm late-September afternoon looks as sour as any winter-bitten, devil-fearing Hawthorne churchwoman.

Victoria looks displeased to find the faculty lounge occupied. “Good afternoon,” she says vigorously and with the barest of smiles. Crossing to the cupboard, she offers Joanne a coffee mug, but at a sharp shake of Joanne's head returns the mug to its place.

I draw a deep breath. Jeff may disapprove, but it has to be done. “Joanne?”

She turns.

“At some point, when you've got a few moments free, I'd like to speak with you about Elizabeth.”

“What about Elizabeth?” She regards me, pale-lashed eyes unblinking.

“I was hoping you and I could discuss it in private.”

She sets a neat manila folder on the coffee table between us. “I don't have time for secret tête-à-têtes.”

As though the rest of us loafers do.

In a heartbeat, Jeff has turned into a set of green sofa cushions, Victoria into several volumes of
The Collected Works of Dante,
softly sipping coffee.

Joanne lifts her chin. Goodwoman Miller, with the authority of the church behind her. The only thing missing is a bonnet.

I measure my words. “Elizabeth has been working on her dissertation for several years. She knows Dickinson inside and out, and her scholarship is first-rate. I've read her draft and it's phenomenal. I'm sure if you read it you'd agree. I don't think it's necessary for her to do deep background reading on subjects that are tangential. Yet every time I see her she's bent under another stack of books you told her were essential.”

Joanne's reply is swift, spring-loaded. “I thought that was the kind of scholarship we prize in this department.
Rigorous.
”

“I have nothing against
rigor.
” The word is, despite my effort, splashed with sarcasm. “But don't you think Elizabeth has done enough? She knows more about Romantic poetry than all of us combined.”