Highland Fling (12 page)

Love affairs only caused trouble. The temporary pleasure often came with permanent consequences, she knew. She’d dabbled in that drama once before, and there was nothing there that could sway her again. Her energy was much better spent pursuing her career, since that was the route to a satisfying, focused life.

But, alongside motherhood, her position also came with a significant double shift, and after Charlie fell asleep she quickly tidied the living room and cleaned off the table before settling down to work on her classes and monitor her email in her home office.

The office was much like her life – tidy, happy and filled with Charlie’s small touches. The macaroni-encrusted pencil holder on her desk had been his most recent Mother’s Day creation; a picture of him grinning at her, missing teeth and all, dominated one corner of the desk. It looked like exactly what it was – a mother’s small adult refuge in a child’s house, in which the light of her life was a welcome presence.

Switching on her PC and waiting for her email to open, Libby unpacked her briefcase and quickly marked the short quizzes she’d given in her second-year class, and sipped at the mint tea she had prepared. It was hard to believe it was already late October, as it felt like the first week of classes was just the week before. But the sound of an early angry wind at the side of her modest, two-story house reminded her that Halloween was coming soon, and, not long thereafter, another northern-Ohio winter.

Libby hitched up her sweater and hugged her mug closer as she pulled her slippered feet up on the chair and began to scan her messages. Asbestos removal… planned maintenance shut down on the library search engines… the usual memos. A small smile curved her mouth as she noticed an email from “S. Webster.”

One of her favorite students, Seth Webster was also a tasty treat on the eyes that she’d have to be blind not to enjoy – she wasn’t dead, simply celibate. But, aside from his physical charms, he was also a joy to have in class. His grades were solid, and he’d saved her more than once by raising his hand to answer a question when his classmates seemed immune to the stretching silence. She had once unrealistically believed that good professors didn’t have favorites, but she now realized it was unavoidable as long as classes were taught by humans instead of machines. Besides, since teaching assistants and computers did all the marking in the large classes like her second year lit course, she wasn’t even directly responsible for his grade. So there was no harm in her acknowledging that he, like so many mature students (the term the university euphemistically used to describe older people who returned to school) that she’d known, made the class a better place. There was something about adults making the considered decision to return to their education that seemed to make them care a bit more about it all, and that was a relief in the sea of young bon vivants the classes were usually populated with.

Clicking open Seth’s email, she read his question, which was something about an optional reading mentioned in class that he couldn’t remember the author of. At the end, she snickered at his closing, “This is the last thing I’m going to do to prepare, I promise. Getting too old for all-nighters.”

She answered his question, and then paused and typed, “You’d better get your sleep, grandpa – got a full day of chasing kids off your lawn tomorrow.”

Hitting send, she hoped she’d read his casual tone correctly. From their brief after-class interactions over the past two months, he struck her as a good-humored guy. She was gratified when she got his response: “Hey, don’t make fun. You too will be creaky some day.”

She smiled, and sent off a brief reply that she was sure he’d do fine, and she wished him luck, effectively putting an end to the conversation.

She was curious when she got yet another reply back from him, sassing, “So, I guess that means you won’t take pity on my age and infirmity and give me all the answers?”

Laughing now, she shook her head at his informal tone and surprised herself by rather enjoying his banter.

“I will share the secret to acing every test,” she typed. “The best way to cheat is to hide the answers in your head.”

She wished him goodnight, and this time he replied with a simple, “Har-dee-har-har. Night, Dr. Sullivan,” and she let it go.

Since she wasn’t remotely interested in romance, she allowed herself to enjoy occasional exchanges with Seth. He was very different from the absent minded men and brash young boys she usually encountered at the university, and she found him refreshing. Besides, he was, after all, an extremely handsome man, and she was sure she’d caught more than a hint of male interest from him. Though she was no fan of romantic love, everything female in her glowed at the thought of still being attractive enough for casual flirting.

Maybe she could even consider it keeping in touch with her research. Harmless experimentation, since there was no chance someone with her acumen into attraction would allow her to fall prey to it.

Romance as mutually exclusive to stability, as a modern fraud, was her stock and trade. Without sentimentality, she explored romance as part of the current malaise that discouraged people from being happy, satisfied, and mature individuals. The pursuit of passion turned them away from marriages based on partnership in family and child rearing to those of random heart or loin flutterings that were destined to fade, and which may or may not leave behind a companionship the couple could fall back on. The belief in romance, in her experience, only led to dissatisfaction, and her work explored the ways in which romantic film, theatre and literature brainwashed people (particularly women) into thinking that bonds built on dependability, loyalty, shared goals, and other recently devalued character traits were worth less than those built on pheromones, lust, chemistry, physical beauty, illusions of youth, and other such aspects of the emotion that many called “love.”

Tracing the increasing social acceptance of people valuing personal desires over responsibility, mapping how relationship disintegration increased with the commercialization and disposability of society in general, Libby’s work had created quite a stir in academic circles used to believing the modern way was the best way. In effect, she was telling people “to thine own self be true” wasn’t always best if it stemmed from fancy instead of sense.

And she should know. Not only had her own mother been a perpetual victim of this romantic fool’s errand, but she herself had fallen. But only once. She stiffened her spine. And that was all the folly she would ever allow herself.

No, she didn’t believe in romance as people used the term...but she’d be a fool to deny the existence of chemistry altogether.

And Seth Webster was a charming man, indeed.

She was glad she understood that a little flirting was all she would ever indulge in. Sighing, she turned to the far more anxious batch of inquires in her inbox, still feeling lightened by the brief conversation.

~* * *~

“Perhaps the most misinterpreted line ever written in English, ‘There never was a tale of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo’ is an expression of poetic irony,” Seth read to himself, taking the evening off after writing his last midterm. “This irony has been missed by every schoolgirl, and many a scholar, ever since Shakespeare was deemed appropriate for study.

“As Ira Greenswitch so ably and correctly identified in his recent commentary on the so-called tragedy, Shakespeare’s take on Romeo and Juliet’s untimely demise was a vast deal less sympathetic than that of modern readers. It is an error in our romance-directed brains that we willfully neglect the idiocy of the teen lovers’ catastrophic decision to commit suicide rather than tame their hormones. Having been trained by Hollywood to cheer for the lovers to the point of sacrificing all other social and familial concerns, we seldom remember at the end of the tale that Romeo was ready to live and die for a different girl, Rosalind, mere acts before. We fail to ask ourselves if he would have recouped from the loss of Juliet, as well, had he allowed himself the logical thought to do so.

“It does a disservice to Shakespeare’s cunning perception that English classes across the globe now teach this play as an actual “tragedy” when the text, if read with one’s tongue in one’s cheek, is more of a testament to the insanity of unrestrained lust. Rather than a holy writ of the romantic canon, the reader is further ahead to see it as a cautionary tale against embracing the foolishness of ‘two against the world’.”

“Holy cow,” Seth whispered, thinking that this professor of his – Liberty Sullivan, author of
Blinded by Love: How Popular Culture has Created and Sold Romance
– had some serious iron girdles in her closet if this is how she saw Romeo and Juliet. “Hey, Kelse?”

“Yeah, Dad?” his daughter asked from the coffee table where she was working on her trigonometry homework. Her sandy-colored hair was up in a sloppy bun, giving her a studious air he knew she’d rather die than expose outside their homey den.

“What do you think about
Romeo and Juliet
?”

“It’s okay, I guess,” she said with a shrug. “Easier to understand than
King Lear
, but not as cool as
Macbeth
. Why?”

“This book,” he explained, flashing the cover to her, “says that Romeo and Juliet were hormone-driven teenage idiots who would’ve been better off just waiting for their attraction to wear off than killing themselves.”

“Well,” Kelsey said, leaning back against the sofa where her father sat and twisting a fallen lock of messy hair in thought, “you can’t really argue against that. I mean, suicide is pretty extreme just for love or anything else. They were really young, so it’s sad they decided to die instead of figuring out a better option. They could’ve at least waited a bit to see if they really loved each other, or whatever – or waited for their parents to die off. Yeah, it was a bit stupid of them to off themselves just because someone told them they couldn’t have what they wanted. Kind of like a temper tantrum, really – only involving poison. Kind of pathetic, really.”

Seth sat staring at his daughter for a moment, caught between being dumbfounded at her practical and jaded assessment and proud of her for having an abnormal level of perspective where many teenage girls would have vowed Juliet was the ultimate goddess of true love for stabbing herself over a boy.

“I don’t know – they kind of give teens a bad name, I think,” Kelsey shrugged again and picked up her pencil to continue with her trig assignment.

“Such a modern girl,” Seth said with a shake of his head, knowing Dr. Sullivan would have applauded her no-nonsense attitude. “After homework, we’re watching
Casablanca
– no excuses.”

Kelsey gave a disgusted sigh and whined, “This is some sort of father-knows-best-life-lesson, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he answered, and turned to the index of his book to see what the wet blanket Liberty Sullivan had to say about the movie, dreading her pessimistic analysis of that one. “By the sounds of things, we need a little Romance 101 around here.”

“Ugh,” Kelsey grunted with a roll of her eyes, as she bent back over her paper.

“Go figure,” he muttered and read Sullivan’s passage to himself: “
Casablanca
often offends postmodern sensibilities because its heroine shows a timeless concern for collective human need over her own transitory impulse towards pleasure, wherein lies both the eternal mystique of the movie and greatest frustration for modern viewers. While Rick was tempting, Lazlo offered a connection beyond shallow coupling. The former is the trend in modern romance. The latter option is amongst the more substantial foundations of pre-modern marriage, now largely abandoned, much to our detriment. Even Rick, the hero of the individualist romantic crowd, was intelligent enough to realize momentary lust was nothing compared to the role of lifelong helpmate.”

When did being a romantic become such a bad thing, anyway, Seth asked himself as he tossed the book to the other end of the sofa. Seth had never identified himself as a romantic before, but his annoyance over her analysis made him realize it about himself. Most of the time, he was practical and logical, but he had to admit he strongly believed in the “myths” of love. Yes, there was the Right One out there for everyone. While he wasn’t actively seeking her, knowing she was out there made life more bearable. If one didn’t have that hope, it would be like all the sparks went out of the world. He supposed Libby would say that was a pipedream sold to him by corporate America, and it irked him.

Libby Sullivan was an enigma to him. This pessimism and disapproval over passion, he just couldn’t reconcile with the youth and vitality he saw in her. He knew she had a good sense of humor, and she seemed like a kind person. She was pretty and warm in a professional sort of way. He’d seen her traipsing across campus with her red backpack on, looking every inch the young co-ed, instead of a professor. She was the type of woman who’d always look younger than her age, by virtue of her good bone structure and her nature, which tended to be a bit hipper and more energetic than most thirty-something professors. She very rarely wore more than the lightest skiff of makeup on campus, so her skin was still relatively unlined and smooth, which, combined with her creamy, rosy complexion, made her look about nineteen sometimes. 

That freshness, in combination with her mature curves, impressive brain and wicked glint in her eyes, was a heady mixture that continued to draw him to her more every week.

Seth wondered how such a smoking hot woman had become such an anti-love Scroogette.

He couldn’t help but consider what a delightful undertaking it might be to thaw her out.

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