Unlovely (34 page)

Claudia devoured the paragraph. It was a
small college with no graduate program in foreign language, so Mark taught
every level of Russian, as well as literature survey courses and a periodic
interdisciplinary course with a history professor. He had even been department
chairman.

Claudia scrutinized the candid photos on
the page, but she couldn't see Mark in any of them. That was a disappointment.
There was, however, an email address at the bottom of his biography.

She clicked on it, and a page opened
with Mark's name in the address bar. She clicked on the subject heading and
typed, "Someone from your past remembers you," and then tabbed down
to write her message:

Mark! Long time, no see! It seems you're
doing well for yourself. I'm not surprised. You crossed my mind today and I
thought I would look you up. I just wanted to say hello and to let you know I
remember you most fondly.

Best wishes,

Claudia

Claudia sat back in her chair and looked
over what she'd typed.

She imagined what Mark's expression
would be when he noticed her email in his inbox. He would come into his office
in a lather, hassled with the petty politics of faculty life and the stupid
problems of stupid students, planning to rush through his correspondence before
his next class. Opening his email account and glancing over the messages, he
would see her cryptic subject line and be intrigued. First, he would think it
was spam, and perhaps even begin to delete it, and then he'd see
"Milford" as the sender and wonder: Could it be Claudia? My Claudia
from the university? After all these years?
And maybe he would smile, or
his breath would catch and he would take a moment to remember their past.

He would click on the email and read it
through once quickly, then again much more slowly to be sure he didn't skip a
word. Would he be disappointed that she hadn't said she'd missed him? She
wondered if he would write her back, something coolly pleasant but engaging.
Perhaps this email would be the beginning of a correspondence, and as messages
went back and forth over the course of weeks it would gradually warm in tone to
the point where they would begin to speak of perhaps seeing one another again,
just for fun. Just for old times' sake.

Temptation. Should she actually send the
email? She could be in touch with Mark again within seconds. Years of distance
– Click! –
and
gone. It would be so easy.

Claudia read her message one more time,
hovered over the send button, and then lost her nerve. She canceled the letter
(
yes
, she clicked
, I really do wish to discard this message
) and
watched the screen return to Mark's biography.

In a flash the elation evaporated and
she felt alone and depressed. The cord was cut, just like that. No reunions
today. Claudia sat staring at the screen, disheartened. Then, a glimmer of
happiness returned.

Despite her loss of nerve at the end,
this had been a great victory for Claudia. She had been unsure about reopening
this chapter of her life, but she'd done it. Today's search for Mark
demonstrated personal growth, a willingness to take chances, and moreover, it
signaled a new beginning for Claudia. She was going to find the thing that had
been eluding her. She just knew it.

"That's enough for one day,"
Claudia said aloud, shutting down the computer. There were other links
available to her, links which would lead to even more information about Mark,
but Claudia decided that simply knowing where he was would be enough for the
moment. What she'd learned that afternoon already gave her plenty to think
about.

Claudia headed down to the dining hall
with a lightness in her step that hadn't been there in a long while. She felt
young and alive. She had butterflies in her stomach and wondered if she'd be
able to eat at all. She was so excited! Her brain told her to slow down, calm
down, but she didn't want to. Why should she? Why not just be happy? She was
allowed to be happy too, wasn't she? Happiness wasn't just for the Vanessa
Fosters of this world.

Logic told Claudia that all she'd done
was look up a name on the Internet, there was nothing more to it than that. But
it seemed like much more. She'd opened a locked door. All of a sudden she had
renewed access to the man she loved (and yes, she would finally admit it – she
loved him. She'd loved him all this time, had unconsciously used him as the
yardstick against which she'd measured all the other men who had pursued her).
He may never know that she was looking for him and thinking about him, but a
connection had been made. She had information, she knew him better now than she
knew him this morning. She was learning about him. He was her secret boyfriend.

Claudia imagined sitting with her mother
in the hotel lounge again. Her mother would ask her if she were seeing anyone.
Claudia would say, "Not really, but I have been sort of back in touch with
Mark Adams."

"Mark Adams?" her mother would
say. Her face would light up and her eyes would search Claudia's to make sure
she was sincere. "The fellow who went to Russia? That Mark?"

And Claudia could meet her eyes and
answer, "Yes, that Mark. He's doing so well. He's a professor. I believe
he was even the chair of his department." They could converse about him
again. He wasn't just a memory for her anymore, frozen as Mark-the-student and
her former lover. He was real, and moving through space, and living a life.

Claudia took a seat in a back corner of
the dining room. She'd brought a book with her so others would see her reading
and leave her alone. She ate her tuna casserole, which tasted much more
delicious than usual, and sipped her iced tea, staring at a page of Thomas Mann
and seeing none of it, lost in her thoughts.

What was space, anyway? What was
distance? She couldn't see Mark and he couldn't see her, but she couldn't see
someone who was separated from her by a wall, either, or someone sitting behind
a curtain, four inches away. That didn't mean they weren't together. People say
they "share a flight" when in fact they never set eyes on each other;
they say they "went to college together" when in fact they never sat
next to one another in class. Who's to say what it means to be together with
someone? It's arbitrary, an abstraction. You could work next to someone in a
cubicle and never know that person at all.

Now that Claudia knew where Mark was,
she had some idea of what he must do during the day. That, in conjunction with
what she'd learned about him in college (she knew what kind of man he was, she
was sure of it) meant that the fact she couldn't actually see him was more an
inconvenience than any sort of real separation. It would be an unorthodox
friendship – two participants, but only one really conscious of her
involvement. It would be in some ways unsatisfying, to be sure, but it was so
much better than the years of wandering in the desert to which she had
subjected herself up to this point.

Claudia thought about all the other
links she'd seen for his name. Some of them certainly led to information about
other men named Mark Adams, but some led to her Mark. Perhaps there were links
to scholarly papers he'd written, or letters to the editor of his local
newspaper. She could read his thoughts again! She could intellectually engage
with him. Perhaps he commented on some online article. She could comment as
well, maybe under a pseudonym, and they could banter back and forth. The
thought of having any kind of conversation with Mark again, even a virtual one,
made her tingle.

There were layers and layers of
information available to her, but she had to be prudent. She should explore it slowly,
uncovering piece by piece, taking her time. It would be like discovering Mark
all over again. It would be like going on a series of dates with a new man and
finding out a little more that delighted you about him during each meeting.
There was no rush to do this all at once.

Claudia allowed the dining hall waitress
to take away her tray, and then got a cup of coffee to take up to her rooms.
She left the dining hall sipping gingerly at her coffee, the sidewalk beneath
her feet littered with the buds of trees giving themselves over to the warmth
of spring. The sap was running again. Claudia breathed in the evening air; the
sky was a little lighter tonight than it had been at this time the evening
before, if she wasn't quite mistaken. It promised to be a lovely night.

Claudia walked up the stairs, down the
hall, and stopped at her door. She tucked her book precariously under her arm
to extract the key from her pocket. She got the key, but she dropped her book
and tilted her cup. Drops of coffee stained Thomas Mann's face, ran down his
cheeks and disappeared into the dark carpet. One of Claudia's tenth graders,
just leaving her room two doors down, skipped over to help. She retrieved the
book, wiped the cover on her jeans and held it out to Claudia, who unlocked the
door and pushed it open with one sharp hip.

"Oh! Thank you, Stephanie!"
Claudia smiled. "Aren't you so nice to help
me!
"

"You're welcome, Fraulein,"
Stephanie responded wonderingly. She hadn't realized until this moment that
Fraulein Milford even knew her name; in class she always seemed to refer to a
seating chart. And she had never noticed before that Fraulein Milford had such
nice, straight teeth, very white despite the coffee. Her German teacher was
even kind of pretty when she smiled. Well, maybe not exactly pretty, but
approachable. Not as scary.

The next day Claudia woke up happy and energetic. She
dressed in her nicest cotton sweater and skirt and looked in the mirror to
appraise her appearance. Her eyes were sparkling, her complexion clear and
unblemished. She was beautiful.

After a breakfast of oatmeal with
raisins (she skipped the coffee, sensing caffeine would overload her already
excited system), she headed off to greet her first period students. As Claudia
stood before her German III class, she perceived the potential in each of them
to do marvelous things, she saw their young lives as full of infinite
possibility, and she felt truly gratified to have her job. It was wonderful to
love what one did for a living. It was a blessing.

The girls were drilled on their
vocabulary and declensions, and they did as well or as poorly as usual per each
child's habit. Today was different, though, in that Fraulein Milford
complimented or gently corrected them much more warmly than usual. It was a nice
change from what the girls had grown accustomed to – she had made not a few of
her students cry in the past – but her manner left them feeling a little out of
sorts. They rather expected some horror to occur later in the class period:
perhaps their teacher was being uncommonly kind to soften the blow of a
national German language assessment, maybe she was trying to get them to relax
so as to turn on them later in a surprise attack, but the forty-five minutes
passed without any disturbing incident. They left the room, breathing a
collective sigh of relief and glancing at one another in pleased confusion.

Second period was Claudia's Russian
class. There weren't many students taking Russian, so Claudia taught elementary
and intermediate Russian simultaneously, giving one level an assignment while
she did oral drills with the other, and then switching. The girls were mostly
juniors and seniors, and tended to be, in Claudia's estimation, her more mature
and intellectually gifted students. Many of them had been in her German
classes; they were the better students, the girls who had performed well enough
to avoid her scorn. Having survived German, they were willing to sign up for
yet another round of language instruction with Fraulein (or as she was
addressed in this class, Claudia
Antonova
).

Russian. Claudia loved it. She loved the
sound of it. She loved the spooky stories about the boyars and Ivan the
Terrible and Boris Godunov. She loved the revolutionary movements of the 19
^th
century. She even loved the Bolsheviks (not really, of course, but as an
intellectual exercise. It was interesting. You had to admit they were
frightfully effective in their methods). Claudia could well understand the
appeal of Russian to a man like Mark. It was a tough country with a tough
history. Claudia was so full of good will this morning and felt the creative
juices flowing through her so powerfully, that she decided to go off script.
She shut her lesson planner, folded her hands on her desk and cleared her
throat.

"Shut your books, ladies. Today,
I'd like to talk to all of you together as one group," she said to the
bewilderment of her students. "That's right: please close your books and
stow them under your seats. We're just going to talk about Russia for a while,
rather than do our usual lessons."

The girls sneaked incredulous glances at
one another; if there was one thing they could count on, it was Claudia
Antonova's
routines, and this was definitely out of the
ordinary. Even Claudia was a little surprised at herself for having made the
decision to throw her lesson plans overboard. She just felt so happy about her
semi-reunion with Mark after all these years that she had to share it with
someone. Not the whole story, of course, but she needed to allude to these
exciting developments in some way with another human being or she felt she
would burst. She didn't want to talk to anyone who mattered. She wasn't ready
to share with her mother, Melanie or her Latin department friend, and certainly
not with Peggy. But these girls didn't know anything about anything. What harm
could it do to take one day off, just to skirt around it a little, to give a
little hint about it?