Music for Wartime (18 page)

We will repeat these facts till they sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound like fate.

T
o Alex’s personal horror and professional embarrassment, the Cyril College alumni magazine ran an obnoxiously chipper blurb that September, in a special, blue-tinted box. She read it aloud to Malcolm on the phone:

FOWL PLAY

Assistant Professor Alex Moore has taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” many times since joining the English Department in 2008, but she developed an unexpected intimacy with the poem when, duck-hunting in South Australia this June, she accidentally shot and killed an actual albatross.

Moore, whose doctoral dissertation at Tufts focused on D. G. Rossetti and his muse Jane Burden Morris, took aim at what she thought was a goose.

“My students are never going to let me hear the end of this,” she says.

Because the birds are protected under Australian and international laws, Moore incurred a hefty fine—hopefully the extent of that legendary bad luck! She has no plans to hang the bird around her neck. “The wingspan was over two yards,” says the 5-foot-2 Moore. “
That
would be asking for it!”

Those exclamation points killed her, the way they tacked the whole episode down as farce. And the cheery italics. None of Alex’s tired sarcasm had come through. She vowed in the future only to give quotes via e-mail, so she could control the punctuation. (“You’re my favorite control freak,” Malcolm said.) Plus there was that photo to the side, her book-jacket photo with the half smile, perfect for suggesting Pre-Raphaelite intrigue and scandal, but here verging on the smug. A month stuck dealing with the South Australian police and Parks Department; half her grant spent on the fine; her research summer wasted; and all of it snipped down by a freelance writer named Betsy into photo, irony, pretty blue box.

And as for the bad luck, it was just starting, waiting for her back home like her postal bin of unopened mail. Not the “hefty fine” kind of bad luck, but the “Your career is over” kind, the “Why aren’t you wearing your engagement ring?” kind.

“Didn’t take you for a hunter,” she heard about twenty times that first department party back in the States.

“I’m not,” she’d say, or “You don’t know who you’re dealing with here,” or “I’m really more of a gatherer.”

She ended up telling the full story, and as she talked the whole party squeezed around where she sat on the arm of the couch—even Malcolm, her fiancé, who’d seen it happen. He was sweet to listen again, and sweeter still not to chime in with his own version. Her colleagues sat on the coffee table, the bar, the floor, and sipped white wine. She told them how her half brother Piet had invited her and Malcolm to his place outside Tumby Bay for June. “He’s not Australian,” she said. “He just thinks he is.” And then once they got there, Piet, in that way of his—just masculine enough to intimidate Malcolm, just Australian enough that everything sounded like a fine, foolish adventure—convinced them to come shooting at his lake, so he wouldn’t miss the last day of duck hunting season.

“Australia is the new America,” announced Leonard, her department head. Or rather, he slurred it through his beard. The new hire nodded. Everyone else ignored him.

After Piet brought down three ducks and his dog had dragged them in, he wrapped Alex’s hands around the gun and showed her the sight line.

“What kind of gun?” someone asked.

“I don’t know. A rifle. It was wooden.”

She’d seen something barely rise above the stand of trees on the small island in the lake, and shot. If she thought anything, she thought it was a white goose. It crashed down through the trees, and Piet sent Gonzo swimming out to it. Gonzo disappeared on the island, yapping and howling and finally reappearing, sans goose, to whimper at the water’s edge.

“Christ,” Piet said, and took off his clothes—all of them—to swim out. He emerged from the trees after a long minute, full frontal glory shining wet in the sun. Malcolm slapped his entire arm across his eyes. “She’s a monster!” Piet shouted. “You’ve slain a beast!”

Thirty minutes later, Piet, half-drunk, was on the phone to his friend Reynie at the Parks Department, asking him to come out and tell them if that wasn’t the biggest fucking bird he’d ever seen. They took two double kayaks out—Piet and Reynie, then Malcolm and Alex, who still hadn’t seen her victim. It lay there, enormous, wings out, half on a bush, a red spot fading out to pink on the white feathers of the neck. Its whole body glared white, except the wings, tipped in glossy black. “It was beautiful,” she told her colleagues. “I can’t even describe it—it had to do with the light, but it was just
beautiful
.”

“You shouldn’t have brought me out here, Piet, Christ,” Reynie had said. He put his hand on the bird’s back, and Alex walked around to get a better look at the face, at the rounded, almost cartoonish beak. “I’ll have to write you up, and you’ll lose your license and pay a fortune. It’s a wandering bloody albatross. They’re
vulnerable
.”

“Vulnerable to what?” Piet was using his phone to shoot photos, moving the bush branches for a better shot.

“Extinction. Jesus Christ. Vulnerable’s a step from endangered. Piet, I don’t want to write you up, but you shouldn’t have called.”

Piet snapped a picture. “Didn’t shoot it,” he said. “
She
did. Not even
from
here, never shot a gun. Girl’s excelled at everything she ever tried in her whole damn life.”

“Which is how I spent the next three weeks camped in Adelaide,” she told her colleagues. The ones who were out of wine took this as a cue to stretch and reload at Leonard’s bar.

“Hey, great story!” Bill Tossman clapped her on the shoulder, used that loud, cheesy voice more suited to an executive schmoozing on the squash court than a professor of modern poetry. “Wish I could stay to hear the end, but my two friends and I here are late for a wedding!”

They laughed, then all started in:
You must be parched! Can I get you some water? Hey, take a load off!

“You’re going to do that all year,” Alex said. “Aren’t you.”

And yes, they did, until the real bad luck became public in November and they suddenly didn’t know what to say to her at all.

She actually taught the Coleridge that fall, and passed around a copy of the photo Piet had e-mailed her. It was an unfortunately dull section of 222, half frat boys who only took classes as a pack (one, confused by her story, later indicated in his paper that the mariner killed the albatross because he thought it was a goose), a bunch of foreign students, mostly Korean, who never spoke, and a freshman English major named Kirstin who made every effort to turn the class into a private tutorial. They passed the photo listlessly, one of the boys raised his hand to ask how much the bird weighed, and Alex made a mighty effort to turn her answer into a discussion of the weight of sin and Coleridge’s ideas of atonement.

Kirstin compared the poem to
The Scarlet Letter
and one of the boys groaned, apparently traumatized by some high school English teacher. Alex wished someone else would talk. Poor Eden Su, for instance, in the front row, was one of those Korean students. She wrote astounding papers, better by a mile than Kirstin’s, and yet she never spoke in class unless Alex addressed her directly, and even then, she whispered and pulled her hair across her mouth. Alex had asked her to stop by her office later, and now Eden was slowly picking apart a cheap ballpoint pen.

By one o’clock she was in her office on the phone to Malcolm, the red leaves on the maple hitting the bottom of her window again and again. He was in Chicago, meeting with his thesis adviser. He’d be back the next night, and was asking if she wanted to grab dinner.

“I’ll take you someplace nice,” she said. “You’ll need champagne.” These meetings were probably his last before he defended his dissertation, and they were going well.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s up to you. I just won’t feel like dressing up.”

“Right.” She found herself saying it flatly and quickly, but he didn’t seem to notice. So she went on. “Sometimes girls like getting dressed up.”

He laughed. “Okay. Boys like to wear jeans.”

“My student is here.” She wasn’t. “We’ll talk later.” She hung up.

The problem, the source of all her snippiness, her cattiness, her being such a
girl
about everything, was that since they’d gotten engaged nine months ago he had not once, not a single time except during sex, which absolutely didn’t count, called her beautiful. In sharp contrast to the courtship phase, when he’d say it several times a week, one way or another. She’d known the staring-into-her-eyes thing wasn’t going to last forever, and it had been a crazy year, with the Australia trip and his dissertation, but nine months and
nothing
. Not that she was counting, but she was. She’d have settled for a peck on the head and “Hey, gorgeous.” A whistle when she stepped out of the shower.

She’d been so caught up in being engaged and close to tenure and publishing her articles and generally getting everything she wanted that it wasn’t until those weeks in the Adelaide hotel, alone with Australian TV and her own thoughts, that she started wondering if she could live with Malcolm the rest of her life, never seeing beauty reflected back at her. And she wondered, if she felt like this now, how she’d feel at nine months pregnant. Or fifty years old. Or terminally ill.

It was regressive and petty and uneducated to care about beauty, but she did. God help her, it was closely tied to her self-esteem and probably had been since about fourth grade.

Here was Eden, arriving like a prophecy, knocking with one knuckle on the open office door. Alex motioned her in. Eden’s eyes had that jet-lagged glaze common to all the foreign students. Every year Alex assumed it would wear off by October, but it never did. She’d mentioned it once to Leonard, and of course he’d had a theory. “You know why, right? They stay up all night texting their friends back home. Refuse to adjust to American time.”

Eden sat on the edge of the chair, red backpack on her lap. It almost reached her chin—a canvas shield. “Eden, I just want to touch base with you.” No response. “You’ve been getting solid A’s on your papers, but I need you to understand that twenty percent of your final grade is class participation.”