Desire Lines (6 page)

Chapter 4

K
athryn’s grandmother is seated in a wheelchair in the main living room of the Oak Bluff Retirement Home when Kathryn arrives.

“Grandma Alice?” Kathryn calls across the room, and the old woman looks up, the glare from the overhead light reflecting in her glasses. She is wearing a blue-striped dress, flesh-colored support hose, and dainty powder-blue nylon slippers, her thin legs splayed slightly on the metal footrests. Her wispy gray hair is haloed around her head.

“Kathryn,” she says in a shrill voice, holding up a folded newspaper. “Just in time. What’s a five-letter word for ‘streetwalker’?”

“Streetwalker?” Kathryn says, coming toward her. “Whore, I guess.”

“W-H-O-R-E.” Her grandmother bends over the crossword, carefully filling in the blanks with a pencil. She looks up. “I had ‘hussy.’ This seems to fit better. But it is a rather ghastly word, isn’t it?”

“Who makes up these crosswords, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I should fire off a letter to the paper about it.” She sets the crossword in her lap. “Of course, I write a letter about once a week for some reason or other. I can just imagine the dread in that office every time an envelope with my shaky handwriting comes in.”

“You keep them on their toes, Grandma.”

“And they need it, too. Who else but someone like me has the time to mess with them?” She looks up at Kathryn, squinting into the fluorescent light. “You’re looking a little tired, my dear.”

She sighs. “I know. Mom’s already pointed that out.”

“So I don’t need to mention the hair,” she says. “Red’s not really your color, you know.”

“Well, that makes two things that you and Mom agree on.”

“That’s because it’s not opinion, dear; it’s fact.” Grandma Alice leans forward. “The divorce is final?”

“Yep. I’m a single woman now, Grandma, just like you.”

She sticks out her chin. “Too bad. I always liked Paul. But I suppose what I liked about him was probably what made him a bad husband.”

“Oh, really?” Kathryn moves behind her wheelchair. “Want to go out on the porch?”

“In, out, whatever.” She folds her hands in her lap and Kathryn wheels her outside. “He was quite a flirt, wasn’t he?”

“Did he flirt with you, Grandma?”

She cranes her neck to look up at Kathryn, and grins. “Outrageously.” Kathryn wheels her over to a spot in the shade near several old women sitting in wicker chairs, fanning themselves.

One of them nods. “Hello, Alice.”

“Hello, Mary, Joan,” she says. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

“A little hot for my taste,” Joan says, making a face.

“Is this your granddaughter here?” Mary asks.

“Yes, it is. Say hello, Kathryn.”

This is an old joke between them. “Hello, Kathryn,” Kathryn says.

Grandma Alice looks up and smiles, and then pinches her arm, hard, on the inside. “We just came over to say hello. We’re going over here.” She points to an empty corner of the porch.

When they’re safely out of earshot, Kathryn says, “I can’t believe you
pinched
me, Grandma.”

“Did I ask to be set over there? Gawd. Those two will talk your ear off.”

Kathryn sits down in a white chair opposite her. “So, do you have any friends here, or are you rude to everyone?”

She narrows her eyes. “I’m not rude. It’s just my personality.” Sitting up straight, she primly smooths her blouse. “And yes, I do have friends. Selectively.”

“So you’re not lonely, then.”

“Of course I’m lonely sometimes,” she says. “Everyone who’s alone gets lonely—it’s inevitable. But I’d rather be lonely than have to chitchat with frivolous old ladies.” She gives Kathryn a shrewd look. “Of course, it’s much harder when you’re accustomed to companionship. You’re pretty lonely these days, I’d wager.”

“I don’t know,” Kathryn says. “I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m just kind of numb.”

“Well, that’s all right.”

“No it isn’t.” She leans back and closes her eyes, the heels of her hands against her temples. “It’s humiliating. Paul has a life.”

“And so do you.”

“No I don’t. I’m alive. I’m breathing. That’s the most you can say for me.”

“Here we go, Kathryn feeling sorry for herself….”

“Grandma, I’m just facing reality. I came home because I didn’t know what else to do.”

“And what’s wrong with that? You’ve been through a mess. You need some time to relax.”

“I don’t want to relax. I want to get on with my life.”

“For God’s sake, girl, take the pressure off,” she says crisply. “Life is long. There’s nothing you have to get done in such a hurry.”

“I feel as if I’m drifting.”

“So drift.” She lifts her thin, knobby hands from her lap and waves them back and forth in the air. “You’ve been moving in one direction, and now you need to go in another. You’ve got to take some time to figure out which way to go.”

“Oh, Grandma,” Kathryn says.

“Besides, I need you around for a while. Put some distance between me and your mother.”

Kathryn reaches over and squeezes her hand. “She tries.”

“She tries, I know. She tries. All that trying makes me tired. Promise me one thing: Promise me that when it gets to the point where you have to try so hard, you’ll just leave me alone. Okay?”

She starts to protest. “But she means—”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” Kathryn says.

After leaving her grandmother with her crossword puzzle, Kathryn sits in the car in the parking lot, twisting the ring on her finger.
There’s nothing you have to get done in such a hurry.
She imagines Paul tonight, playing bass guitar with his band at a small club in Charlottesville as he does most Saturdays, a little cluster of groupies swaying together up front. Her life with him seems suddenly hazy and far away.

KATHRYN HAD MET
Paul at the University of Virginia, where both of them were enrolled in the English master’s program. She was twenty-five, he was twenty-seven. She’d been writing a newsletter for a women’s health organization in Washington, D.C., a low-paying and tedious job, and had come to the conclusion that maybe she should consider teaching instead. He’d spent the previous two years living in Africa, learning Swahili and contracting intestinal diseases. The first time she saw him, with his curious Indian elf shoes, dark hair, and piercing brown eyes, she thought he must be foreign, but when he opened his mouth she heard the elocution of a New England prep-school graduate.

“Of course,” he’d replied thoughtfully to a small, reedy professor’s assertion that E. M. Forster’s work expressed a dialectic uncertainty about identity versus nature. “But shouldn’t we be interrogating these on a grid of social analysis rather than wallowing in solipsistic interpretations of the text?”

“Yeah,” Kathryn murmured, thinking aloud. Paul, Professor Digby, and the rest of the class turned to look.

“Was there something you wanted to add, Kathryn?” the professor inquired.

She looked down at her notebook, blank except for a shopping list and a few mazelike doodles, and shrugged. “I just agree. That’s all.”

After class Paul caught up with her in the hall. “Thanks for speaking up in there. I’m so sick of these old-school professors who won’t engage current theory.”

“Mmm,” she said.

“So,” he said, loping along beside her, “do you really agree with me, or were you just annoyed at Digby?”

She stopped. “I pretty much agree with you. Though I’m not sure it has much to do with what he was talking about.”

“I know. I just wanted to bring it up. So few professors at this place are really grappling with the imperialist, almost fascistic hold of Western so-called literature over—”

“You know what?” Kathryn broke in. “I’m late to meet someone. I’ve got to run.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“I love your shoes,” she said. “Well, see you later.”

By the third week of school, Kathryn had begun to loathe the English department. She hated the thick burned coffee in the makeshift student lounge, the sign-ups for reading groups on arcane subjects, the desperate tone of the grad-student newsletter, the tense, pale faces of second-years waiting to find out if they’d made the cut. By the end of the first month she decided that she wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

“I’m getting the master’s and getting out of here,” she told Paul. They
had begun meeting after class and walking across the Lawn to the College Inn, a student hangout, for coffee. “All I’m really interested in is the reading, anyway. I’m no good at the criticism part.”

“So you don’t want to teach.”

“I don’t want to teach enough to put up with all the bullshit.” They walked up the white marble steps of the rotunda. It was late afternoon on a hot day; leafy branches drooped over the wide marble porches extending from either side of the dome. “And besides, I’m sick of being poor and undervalued and anxious all the time. What kind of a life is that?”

“But it won’t always be this way,” he said. He sat on a bench overlooking the grounds and started playing with a large, yellowing leaf.

“Oh, no, not always. The next step is to fight to get a spot in the Ph.D. lineup, then to finish an overly cautious and politically correct dissertation, then to get a job at a mediocre college—somewhere in the continental United States, if you’re lucky—then the whole tenure nightmare, then departmental bickering and backstabbing …”

“You do make it sound pleasant,” he said.

Kathryn sat against the wall, her legs up on the bench. “Well, what about you? What do you like so much about it?”

He started to tear the leaf into little pieces. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Though they had little in common, Kathryn and Paul got along well together for a time. She appreciated his passion for his work—he was so definite, so confident in his opinions. Surely some of that would rub off on her! And though he would never admit it to anyone but her, he secretly admired her disdain for the program, her unwillingness to play the game. It helped him keep perspective when the pressure got too much. They were constantly arguing and making up, which Kathryn mistook for a good sign. After all, her parents had never fought, never so much as raised their voices, and look at what happened to them.

Paul’s parents, WASPs from Main Line Philadelphia, were cordial but stiff with Kathryn, and her parents didn’t know what to make of Paul. “Are you sure he’s not gay?” her mother whispered worriedly after meeting him
for the first time. “He wears those odd shoes. And remember, you thought Will was straight, too.” “I think I’d know by now,” Kathryn said, laughing, but the question kept her up at night. He could be; how would she know? When she finally asked him, he took the question more seriously than she would have liked. “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he said, “and I can honestly say that no, I don’t think I am.”

By now, despite her misgivings, Kathryn had grown to love him. When he took her hiking at Rockfish Gap and presented her with his grandmother’s engagement ring, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. They were married a year to the day after they met, in a tiny stone chapel on the edge of campus, in the middle of a rainstorm. Kathryn wore a long white vintage dress and pearls; he wore a tuxedo he owned and a bow tie made of kente cloth. At the front of the church on the right sat Paul’s nuclear family; Kathryn’s mother and brother, Josh, sat at the front on the left, and her father and stepmother sat in the middle. A scraggly bunch of their grad-school friends, bearded and bespectacled and pale, filled the middle pews. Rolling thunder drowned out their vows.

After the ceremony they raced across the wet lawn through pouring rain with tux coats over their heads toward the cars. Josh rode to the restaurant with Paul’s siblings, Maura and George.

Paul and Kathryn, following behind them in Paul’s ten-year-old Saab, watched Maura pull out a joint and hand it to Josh over the seat. “They’re smoking pot,” Kathryn said, incredulous.

Paul nodded.

“I can’t believe it.”

“They’re celebrating, Kat.” He turned to look at her, and she noticed that his eyes were glazed and red.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re high.”

He shrugged and put his hand on her knee. She pulled away. “Oh, c’mon, Kat. Lighten up,” he said.

Kathryn dropped out of the program six months later, after abandoning a master’s thesis on the topic of “[Gyn]Ecological [W]Rites of Spring: Edna Pontellier’s Rude
Awakening.”
Paul made the cut three months
later and headed off into the thickets of the Ph.D. program, exploring D. H. Lawrence and Zola and their depiction of miners as working-class heroes. His working title, he joked, was “Mining the Great Minds’ Mines.”