It Will Come to Me (6 page)

He realized that he'd forgotten to introduce himself to Ricia Spottiswoode. This was potentially a major gaffe, one he had to correct. But somehow she had gotten past him and wandered all the way across the room to the far window, where she stood in profile, her hair blazing. Whether this was an impulse of shyness or a bid for attention was hard to guess. Perhaps it was both. He walked toward her a little tentatively, as he might have approached a wary cat or a skittish colt, one hand extended. She offered hers and let it lie in his like a resting dove. To shake it would have been a violation. “I love the room,” she said. Her voice was a confiding whisper; he had to lean close to hear it. She waved a vague hand at the floor—the banana peel, the glimmering scatter of change, the frothing smoothie cup still lying on its side.

“Oh,” said Ben, “we were just cleaning up in here. The ordinary … inhabitant … is a bit of an eccentric. We didn't know he'd left such a mess. The cleaning staff—”

“No,” she interrupted. “I meant it. I like messes. I often wish things were messier.”

She was young, but not as young, seen close up, as she had seemed at first. Perhaps thirty. Her face was long and pale, with an oddly belligerent jaw. It made him think of a sea horse's face. Her eyes were a deep unfocused blue. Her artlessly tangled hair was a remarkable new-penny red.

“Has the English Department been helping you get settled?” he asked. “Have they found you a place?”

“Well yes they have,” said Ricia, “but I'm afraid we're not sure we like it. It's kind of sterile. We like things to be old.”

“You're here from where?”

“Providence.”

“Oh,” said Ben. “You'll find it's very different—”

“We understand, but we thought they might have found us something …”

“Yes,” said Ben. “My wife and I like old places too, but nothing goes back very far around here.” It was true. A New Jersey boy himself, he'd grown tired of apologizing for Spangler. The city was cosmopolitan; it was quirky; its cheap ethnic restaurants were unrivaled by those in any city he could think of, and that included New York and Los Angeles, or so he said when he defended Spangler to East and West Coast visitors. In parts it was oddly beautiful. But there was no denying its gargantuan chaotic sprawl, its flatness and rawness, its eternal newness—or at least its failure to age. The Texas sun peeled paint, the hemorrhagic rains rotted wood. It was almost as if the elements were doing
their best to “distress” Spangler, to create the illusion of age. But only the slow moldering of centuries creates charm; new decay makes ugliness.

“Where have they put you?” he asked.

“Oh, I don't know. Some big condominium complex. Charles!”

She had a voice when she chose to use it. Charles left his conversation with Dolores and joined them. Clearing his throat thunderously, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a small notebook. “It's called the Waters on Shadyside” he said, his voice filtered through phlegm. “It's on the 215 access road.”

“Oh yes,” said Ben.

“No water in sight and very little shade,” Charles Johns observed, clapping the notebook shut and re-pocketing it.

Ben knew the Waters on Shadyside. It had been written up in the paper when two floors of its parking garage had flooded after the last gully washer. “That's a Spangler thing,” he said, “naming places after nonexistent geological features. There's a Lake Spangler and a Mount Spangler.”

Charles Johns smiled blandly. Ricia looked dismayed.

“There really are some very pleasant areas,” Ben went on, feeling himself pressed into service as a representative of the Spangler Chamber of Commerce, “but nothing much older than the turn of the century. You might want to have them show you the Museum District. There are some very appealing …”

He had been about to say “bungalows,” but out of the corner of his eye he saw that Dolores was shaking her head vehemently. Once again she'd saved him from stumbling into error. In this case he'd been on the point of encouraging the Spottiswoode-Johnses to demand that the English Department rehouse them. The dean
would have heard about that, and he was already in trouble with her. Elias Wertmuller of the Religion Department had taken him aside recently after a Curriculum Committee meeting and warned him that she'd been making ominous noises about the Philosophy Department's less-than-positive attitude toward university service and the perception, on the part of some, of its “elitism.” “There are some very appealing exhibitions,” he began again. “I believe they've got some woodblock prints up right now—a show of, ah, I believe, nineteenth-century woodblock prints.”

Dolores was bidding for his attention again, raising her eyebrows and pointing at her wrist. “Oh,” said Ben, “I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me. I seem to be late for class.” He re-shook Charles's hand, and then Ricia's, murmuring the conventional expressions of goodwill that the office of chair had forced him to memorize.

H
e'd drawn a new room, too big for this class. A bank of audiovisual devices, baffling and useless to him, blinked and hummed above the central desk. The students had distributed themselves in the usual way; four or five keen-eyed boys and two earnest girls sat in the first semicircular row of seats, directly in front of the desk. These could be assumed to be the most ambitious of what was always a hardworking bunch. They'd already purchased the packet of course readings and they'd be lined up outside his door ten minutes before tomorrow's office hour. The rest—the average and the unclassifiable, from whose ranks he could expect to discover at least a few interesting minds—had spread themselves out rather thinly through the rows. As always, the athletes sat in the back, six healthy specimens this season,
up from four last fall. Looking down at the roster he noticed the names of two promising football recruits. Over the years he'd become known as an athletic supporter. Not because he'd ever given a jock an unfair advantage; more likely because he could be seen in the stands at nearly every home game in every sport, even women's basketball.

Ben was a good teacher, not an inspired one. In his thirty years of teaching he'd learned to expect his students to like and trust him. Generations of them had imitated his habit of rocking back and forth on his heels like a davener. Though generations of students had written warmly respectful comments on his teaching evaluations, he'd never won an award, never drawn the kind of adulatory attention that some of his colleagues seemed to inspire. Writing came more naturally to him than teaching, though writing too was a great effort.

Even so, he kept trying to improve. He offered conferences. He wrote extensive comments on papers. He revised his syllabus every few years, tried consciously to refurbish his stock of illustrative anecdotes in the face of what seemed an ever accelerating process of cultural turnover. In the mid-eighties he'd jokingly accused a graduate student of being a nattering nabob of negativism. A what? said the student, but a few others in the seminar remembered. Last year he'd alluded to the Jonestown massacre. Jonestown?

These were Lola freshmen, and he knew they would prove to be bright and conscientious enough, but this morning they were gaping at him like guppies in a tank. As he stood over his notes and roster, giving the introductory silence a moment to settle in, he scanned the rows, searching for an answering human gaze. There it was, unmistakably, directly in front of him in the second
row, emanating from the lively, kohl-rimmed eyes of a big tattooed person in black leather shorts with a stiff ridge of pink hair running down the middle of his or her otherwise shaven scalp.

“This is Contemporary Moral Issues, Philosophy 101,” Ben announced. “Is everybody in the right place?”

The front-row students snapped opened their notebooks. Some of the athletes put away the sports page. The big pink-haired person smiled at Ben. It was a generous smile, utterly undefended, showing a pierced tongue and much gum tissue and many small teeth. Who are you,
compañero?
, thought Ben. And what is your gender?

“Let me start by saying a few general words about philosophy,” he began as he always did when teaching an entry-level course. “Does anyone happen to know what the word means?” Silence. Nobody ever knew, or if they did they were too cowed to speak out. Ben turned to the blackboard, writing
PHILO
in bold block letters. “ ‘Philo’ means love,” said Ben, “or ‘love of “ Below
PHILO
he wrote
SOPHY.
“Or,” he added, erasing the Y and replacing it with
LA,
“‘sophia.’ Can anyone guess what that meant in the original Greek?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Wisdom,” called out a voice as gender-indeterminate as Big Bird's.

“Right,” said Ben. “Philosophia. Love of wisdom. How do we show our love of wisdom?”

Silence.

“How do we
seek
wisdom?”

A girl in the front row raised her hand. Ben nodded. “We ask questions?”

“That's right,” said Ben. “And this semester that's exactly what we'll be doing.”

W
hat in hell kind of name is ‘Ricia’?” asked Ben. Ruth was sitting at the desk in his study in front of the computer screen; he was standing over her. They'd gotten onto the subject of the Spottiswoode/Johnses at the dinner table and decided on the spot to do some research. With Isaac out of the house, they could leave the remnants of their omelets and salad on the table, act on this kind of impulse. The computer was taking its time to boot up.

“It's short for Patricia. Pa
treesha.”

“Pat is short for Patricia. Patty is short for Patricia. I never heard of Ricia.”

“What's she like?” asked Ruth. “Is she attractive?”

“She's ethereal-looking,” said Ben. “Ophelia-like. Not beautiful.” She wasn't, it was true, and it was always wise to make this kind of stipulation when he could do so without lying. “She does have amazing red hair,” he added after a moment.

“Affected?”

“I thought so. I don't know poets. She could be a regular Will Rogers by their standards.”

“She's not a poet. She started out as one but now she's a memoirist. That's how she made her reputation. And then she wrote one of those spiritual how-to-write books. What's the husband like?”

“He's big, like a bodyguard. Much older. He could be my age.” The computer gave its “I am born” electronic trill.

“Here we go,” said Ruth. “Amazon first, or Google?”

“Come on,” said Ben. “Let me do it. Let me sit.”

Grumbling a little, Ruth stood. Ben sat down, drew himself
closer to the desk, squared the mouse on the mouse pad, and brought up the Amazon home page. “What's her memoir called?”

“I'm Nobody.”

Ben tapped in the title. The page materialized, and the book. “Enlarge it,” said Ruth. The cover was a full-body photograph of Ricia lying submerged in water. She was shown from above, eyes wide and blank, vague garments spreading, hair billowing. The title was rendered in watery script above her head. The subtitle,
Who Are You?
, floated between her collarbone and her décolletage.

“Very effective,” said Ruth.

Next came the blurbs. “Ricia Spottiswoode,” Howard Richards had written, “has undertaken the fabulous journey from poetry to memoir. She has survived the trek—survived it, I might add, triumphantly. She returns to us bearing messages from the underworld of childhood trauma—messages that we ignore at our peril.”

“Oh please,” said Ruth.

Ben scrolled down past the book's Amazon ranking number, a respectable 1,067 three years after its publication. He moved on to the newspaper reviews, a long parade of ellipsis-studded raves—”… coruscatingly brilliant …,” “… courageous and poignant …,” “… heartbreaking …”—and from there to the seventy-nine reader reviews. A quick survey of these found that roughly two-thirds were positive (“I cried!”), one-third negative (“Gag me!”).

Ricia Spottiswoode's most recent book,
The Divining Rod: Feeling Your Way Through Writers’ Block
, was number 178 on Amazon. Once again, Ricia appeared on the cover. This time she
sat on a wooden stool in a short black skirt and a violet sweater set. Her legs were fetchingly crossed, her arms folded under her breasts. Her hair had been pulled away from her face, one bouncy lock left free to follow the line of her cheekbone. She was smiling a conventional lipsticked smile. She looked friendly, and undeniably pretty.

“It's the
sane
Ricia,” said Ruth. “It's Ricia the role model.” On to Google: 220,000 hits for Ricia, 230 for Charles Johns. On closer examination nearly all of these were for other Charles Johnses—a Charles Johns recorded as present at the raising of the colors at the VFW lodge in Schoharie, New York, on Veterans Day in 1999, for example, or a Charles Johns rounded up for vagrancy in Spokane. There were only a few hits that clearly applied to the Charles Johns whom Ben had met that afternoon, and they all involved Ricia Spottiswoode.

One of these was a
Poets and Writers
interview that followed the publication of
The Divining Rod
, featuring a spread of photographs of the Providence, Rhode Island, loft she shared with Charles Johns. He was shown in the kitchen in a chef's apron, peering at the photographer over half-glasses as be boned a fish. Ricia appeared in profile in front of a Victorian stained-glass window at the head of a staircase, her hair a cloud of fire. In another photograph she reclined on an antique love seat, a cat draped along her hip, her head leaning against Charles's shoulder. The rest of him had been cropped out of the picture.