Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (7 page)

He sits at a large black desk. A single folder is spread before him, and he holds a capped pen. He's looking at the folder's contents, but from the set of his shoulders I guess he's not reading. I step through the door, and stop. The room is large and otherwise deserted, with four cluttered desks arranged conversationally around the sparsely decorated room. Jazz plays from a small radio on George's desk, and before greeting him I pause to listen. The music is a walking bass line, quiet and so low it hardly registers as sound but rather as a shift in the atmosphere—the change your skin or inner ear responds to before you take in its meaning: a rainstorm blowing in from over the next hill.

He flexes his shoulders, stretching. Then, with those just right hands I remember from the reception, turns a page.

The tingle that runs my spine is the stuff of centuries-old romantic literary cliché; it's accompanied by a hit of pure sexual longing that would never have made it into print.

My shoe squeaks on the floor. George startles.

“Hi,” I say softly, an apology for sneaking up.

For a fraction of a second there's a peculiar expression on his face. It's neither sad nor happy, though it's a relative of both. It's something I can't put my finger on, and there's no opportunity to linger over it; as George rises from his seat he's already wearing the bemused smile I recall from last week. He's dressed in a sweater and jeans, and he's just as bright-eyed and lanky as I'd remembered, long-jawed, studious-looking. This time he's wearing a touch of cologne—a faint, warm smell. He greets me with a firm kiss on the cheek.

“Nice office,” I say, the smell of him still in my nose.

“Thanks.” He tilts his head, appraising the room, then gestures toward the nearest window, which faces into a narrow air shaft of soot-stained brick. “I first fell in love with it for the view.”

My laugh comes a second late. I glance at his desktop, which holds a neat pile of well-worn textbooks and thick binders, a notebook filled with sloping script. A crowded-looking desk calendar. A scattering of pens and pencils. Behind his desk a printed sign is taped to the heavily marked chalkboard:
GRAVITY: IT'S NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA. IT'S THE LAW
.

While he bends to load his briefcase with a sheaf of papers, I concentrate on his face. It's a nice face. Honest. A face that seems incapable of dark secrets. Viewed from above, his lashes are thick, feminine, his forehead wide and vulnerable. There is something about seeing a tall man's forehead from above that invites tenderness. Before me, I say to myself, stands a kind man: bending over a briefcase, packing it with care, traveling the city to work with schools in crisis.

A man who looked hopeful when his date walked into the room. Now that it's had time to register, I realize that that was what played across his face when I startled him: hope. As though he were lonelier than he wanted to let on. Something in me says, Remember this.

We step out onto Seventh Avenue. The air is cool but mild. A perfect evening. We slow in unison.
The street is devoid of honking, brightened here and there by yellow-crested trees, lit with that evening glow that sometimes overtakes Manhattan. Every few paces I bump against a vague obligation to speak, but something emboldens me to resist. This silence, unlike those on the telephone, seems to stitch something together. George says nothing. I can imagine us from a vantage point over the avenue: two companionable figures moving unhurriedly downtown. Every now and then I sneak a glance at him.

We reach the restaurant, a cozy affair with green tablecloths and steamed windows. At our table we survey the menu. The waiter arrives with a plate of glistening black olives, takes our order, and leaves.

We both begin to speak, then stop. George lifts an olive in salute, inviting me to go first.

“Tell me what brought you to New York,” I say.

He chews his olive thoughtfully, pats his lips with his napkin, and only then answers. “I came to New York mainly to get away from Toronto. Part of a difficult break from the way I was raised. I was, in my younger days, a fundamentalist Christian. In Canada that's a rare and diminishing breed.”

“I'm Jewish,” I offer, spooning a few olives onto my plate.

He laughs. “I didn't invite you out to talk you into a personal relationship with your savior.” Then he smiles a complicated smile, at once bright and mournful. “Getting out wasn't simple. I had to smash some idols, and I'd have to be a jerk to feel good about that. But I'll spare you that story for tonight.”

“Sounds like your life is quite different these days.”

“Understatement.” He winks. “But you meet me now at the pinnacle of my evolutionary journey: I'm a left-leaning die-hard city dweller.”

The waiter brings a wicker basket of bread and two glasses of red wine. I offer George the bread and sip my wine. “So what brought you to education policy?”

He pushes back his sleeves, takes a piece and butters it, then sets it down. “My first month in New York, before my business job started, I volunteered in a public school. And I couldn't get over how much potential was going wasted. The kids were so obviously cheated.” He rests one wrist on the table. His forearms have lightly visible veins. He rolls open his fingers as he speaks—a
calm gesture. “I didn't forget it, though I didn't get into the field for a few years.”

As I busy myself with buttering my own slice, something flutters from nowhere into my mind: That this man might turn out to be a lover whose presence I'd carry with me all day—saving up my impressions to deposit in his hands. A man I could laugh with. A teammate. A partner with whom I could rest. Suddenly I realize how deeply I want to rest. The notion is shockingly, alarmingly, seductive.

When my train of thought recouples, George is concluding a sentence. “—so I decided policy work was the thing. It's not the easiest line of work, or the most profitable. But at least I feel I'm of some use.”

I sip my wine and nod enthusiastically. I have no idea how he got into education policy but trust in my ability, honed through years of graduate school seminars, to pick this up later.

“So you see, it was either education or the madhouse,” he says.

I laugh. He seems surprised. Maybe I missed something serious.

“Don't know what I was thinking, going straight into stock trading after college. Someone told me that was the only way to make it in New York, and I believed it. Decisions people make in their twenties—later we can't remember what the hell inspired us. Like Stonehenge.”

I nod gravely.

“Like disco,” he says.

I form a miniature smile.

“Like leeches and bloodletting. Like putting mercury in hatbands and other follies of world history. Like invading Russia just before the first snows.” He folds his arms and looks at me. “I'm not going to stop this until you laugh. Because only that will redeem my original bad joke.”

I do. He gives a boyish grin and relaxes back into his chair.

“Tell me about your life,” he says. “For real. Not like on the phone.”

The waiter brings two steaming plates of pasta; I wait for him to leave.

“Yeah,” I say. “That was—”

George shakes his head. “Doesn't matter. Just tell me.”

George's hair is straight and flops over one temple. It's thinning, but doing so peaceably, without sticky hair-product comb furrows, or the tufted look of men who curry every precious strand. He gives off an air of unconcerned cleanliness that's undeniably attractive.

“I love books,” I say.

“Love them how?” He digs into his pasta with fork and spoon.

“I love the escape. Academics aren't supposed to say that, but it's true. I love to dive into somebody else's vision, nightmare, utopia, whatever. I love how books put a dent in our egos—turns out we're not the first sentient generation on the planet after all. Other people have been just as perceptive, just as worked up, about the same damn human problems we face. I love the theory part—trying to link books together with ideas, like a string of nonidentical pearls.”

“I'm with you,” he says.

“I specialize in American lit. The interwar period.”

“Why?”

I smile. “I like it.”

He matches my smile. “Why?”

His teasing unlatches something in my gut—the anxiety I've carried all day without realizing it. A happy laugh escapes me, and I know that this time I won't clutch like on the phone. The relief acts on me like caffeine.

“It wasn't easy settling on a field. Did you know that Christopher Columbus ended up going mad?”

He shakes his head.

“Did you know that a Thomas Paine fan exhumed Paine's body in order to rebury him in England—but the plan fell apart and the bones got lost?
Lost.
So our country's most plainspoken, secular, ahead-of-their-times bones are out there somewhere, floating. I mean, a person could spend her career on just those two ironies. I considered it, for about a week. But early America didn't hold me. There's just no way around the fact that the settlers banished neighbors for ‘divisiveness' and ‘error,' and I didn't want to spend my life looking at the world through their eyes.
The Enlightenment was a little more appealing—all that Puritan stuff eased up enough to let in some whimsy, and by then Ben Franklin had broken the news that individuals were people too. And more women began writing.” I hesitate. I hadn't planned to go into such detail. But it feels good. And he's smiling at me over his pasta. ”The problem was, Thoreau still got censored for saying a pine tree might go to ‘as high a heaven' as a man. And reading past all the slavery-era racism just made me tired.”

George has set down his fork and is listening.

“I was too much of a city girl to go for the Transcendentalists. I did get hooked on the nineteenth century, though, and almost stayed. I spent a long time on Dickinson and Chopin. And I think Melville is the greatest American writer, period. He just—he wrote about”—under George's gaze I blush—“the power, the holy terror, of life. Even somebody like me, whose life has been comparatively a cakewalk, can see how
true
his work was, if you know what I mean. I loved Melville so much I almost wrote my dissertation on him. But there was the twentieth century peeking over the horizon. I read Hemingway. And Faulkner. And Zora Neale Hurston.” I raise my water glass and drink. “You get me talking.”

He reaches across the table and takes my hand.

I let my palm rest lightly against his. The warmth is delicious. I bounce my hand gently. Our palms make contact, part, rejoin: a frank, curious conversation.

“So,” he prompts. “The twentieth century was eyeing you over the horizon . . .”

“Before this, authors still addressed the audience as Gentle Reader. The twentieth century is when people stopped assuming the reader was gentle. Nobody could afford to be gentle anymore. The stakes were too high. We already knew what gentility got us: World War I. So now, no more distant third-person narratives. No more blind dedication to principles, noble suffering in silence. Even lovers couldn't be idealized anymore. Everybody had to struggle together to build something honest, even if it was messy. Readers had to pay their ante and roll up their sleeves right next to the authors. It's not that you
couldn't
believe in patriotism, or love, or glory—postmodern pessimism hadn't yet arrived. But you had to build it from the ground up. Europe had failed, the whole world was up for grabs, and America was grabbing. Anarchy, Prohibition, the Harlem Renaissance, radio, cubism, Freud. And in the
middle of all that, the writers changed the sentence. They made it growl, if you know what I mean. And yes—interwar America had its uglinesses. But the writing is transcendent.

“So I switched to twentieth century and modernism. I wrote my dissertation on Hurston. That's it. That's my story.”

Hand still supporting mine, he sips his wine. “Now what?”

“I'm up for tenure.”

“When?”

“This winter. I'm trying not to worry over it.” I hesitate, distracted by a glimpse of his collarbone, which is sturdy-looking. “But I'd be an idiot not to make the extra effort these days to keep my ducks in a row.”

“And the tenure process?”

“Coming along.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I don't like to burden people—”

“Doubt it'll break me.”

“Either I get tenured and promoted this semester, or I'll go on the job market—something I'd rather not contemplate.”

“That bad?”

“I'm one of the lucky few Manhattan Ph.D.s who didn't have to move to Boise or Anchorage for a job after graduation. My adviser retired the year I finished my Ph.D. and green-lighted me to fill his spot. One day I was at my graduation, lined up in my robe with a few hundred strangers, all of us with those ridiculous wind socks draped down our backs. The next day I was a prof. I deserved the job: I had good publications and a solid academic record. But so did dozens of others. I'd have to be pretty arrogant to deny the role of luck. Half a dozen smart classmates of mine got nothing but adjunct offers.”

He hasn't let go of my hand. His barely restrained smile dares me to continue as though there were no other current running between us. I dare him, in return, to listen.

“And there but for the grace of the tenure committee go I—back into the pit of nonbenefited slave labor over which we junior academics dangle.”

“I'm with you,” he murmurs.

This, I see, is George's verbal signature. The words mean only
I understand,
but when he says them it sounds like
I'll keep you
company.
I'm not only talking—I'm talking to another person, truly talking to another person, the way most conversations aren't. I crack open a window on my life; out come thoughts I've confessed to no one.