Music for Wartime (21 page)

She finally answered the phone around eleven that night, and didn’t realize until she heard Leonard’s voice how strongly she’d believed it to be Malcolm.

“Thank God,” he said. “You’re okay, then.”

“How long have you been calling?”

“All day. We were starting to think—What can I do to help?”

She knew he wanted some concrete plan to fix everything.

“Because I gotta be honest,” he went on, “this doesn’t look good for the whole department. As a whole.”

She wasn’t sure if he meant the grievance or the letter or her absence. Or the vomiting.

“Oh, come on, Leonard. It doesn’t look
that
bad. Not as bad as half the stuff I’ve heard you say. For Christ’s sake, you use the word
coed
, Leonard.”

“I’m confused.” He sounded tired.

“Of course you are.”

And why not hang up on him, too, while she was at it?

From seventh grade (after she got over mono) through grad school, Alex had not missed a single class. Freshman year of college, her roommate had practically tackled her to keep her from leaving the dorm with a 104 fever, but Alex just kept walking, stopped to sit on the sidewalk halfway to biochem, got up again and staggered the rest of the way. It wasn’t a matter of maintaining her record, but of principle. Unlike Piet, who’d once shown up at home in the middle of the semester for “National Piet Week,” which he celebrated by watching television and getting his mother, Alex’s stepmother, to do all his laundry.

But the next day, she stayed home. Oddly, her phone did not ring. Maybe she’d scared Leonard off. Or maybe her students hadn’t said anything, grateful for the free time. After that one missed day, she couldn’t imagine going back the next, because she didn’t know what to expect. She pictured walking into her 222 to find someone subbing for her. Or only three students who’d bothered showing up, the rest assuming class had been canceled for the term. Or everyone asking if she was all right, and her not being able to lie. She wondered if her lifelong punctiliousness had just been a fear of losing her grip. She wondered if she’d known all along that one little thing gone wrong in her world could unravel absolutely everything else.

Oddly, she found herself taking heart in the fact that Coleridge’s mariner had made it safely home. He’d done his penance, and continued to do his penance in telling the tale, and Alex wished for something heavy to hang around her neck, something horrendously painful. She considered her ring, which she still hadn’t removed, but hanging it on a necklace chain would only call people’s attention to its absence from her finger. Instead, she took it off and put it in a Tupperware and put the Tupperware in her freezer, which she’d once heard was a good place to store jewelry.

She felt lighter, not heavier. But it was a start. She made herself go for a walk around her neighborhood, staring at people’s driveways and the falling leaves and chained-up dogs and unclaimed newspapers. When she came back, there were two messages on her phone. One was from Piet. The other was from the bridal boutique, confirming her dress fitting.

Piet was in town the next day to catch up with friends and to see a woman he’d found on the Internet.

“That’s a pretty expensive date, isn’t it?”

They met up in the morning, Piet usurping the entire red velour couch in the back of Starbucks. “Look at it this way,” he said. “I get here, which is a nice vacay for me anyhow. She feeds me, if she likes me she puts me up, and maybe in the end I come out ahead.” He was getting an Australian accent, and it suited him. The sun had aged his face fifteen years in the seven he’d been there, and that suited him, too. “Listen, Al. Where the hell’s your ring?”

She managed to get the story out, or at least the parts about Eden Su and going AWOL at work and calling off the engagement. Not the girl part, the part about wanting to be beautiful. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

He laughed. “When have you ever not known what you’re doing?” He was shredding the wooden stick he’d used to stir his coffee. “What I don’t get,” he said, “is what’s this Asian chick got to do with Malcolm?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I got all day.”

“It just set me off. Or maybe it was—maybe the idea that someone could look at you and just not see you at all. See something totally different that isn’t even you.”

“Right, but this is different. Malcolm knows you better than anyone, right?”

“Theoretically.” This was the place where she might cry, if she were the kind of person who cried. “I need you to do something with me. You’re not meeting this cyberwhore till tomorrow, right?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. We’re going to go visit my dress.”

She figured if she already owned the dress, it might as well fit her. And a lot could happen between November and May. By May, she could be marrying someone else entirely. But really, she’d gotten this stupid idea in her head that if she tried it on, something would change. She’d been hoping for something big and white and horrible to hang around her neck, hadn’t she?

It really did hang, too, from its halter strap—crisp and shiny and gaping way too big. A little Russian woman flitted around her with pins. Maybe not Russian, she reminded herself. Maybe Lithuanian. Maybe Ukrainian. Maybe Minnesotan. Piet sat on a pink-cushioned bench and watched. “Looks great,” he said. “Look even better with a ring on.”

She stared in the mirror, not at the dress but at her horrible face. Her skin was dry and her eyes were puffy, her hair a dark mess. She wanted a necklace with a big red stone, to match that brilliant red on the albatross’s neck. What she hadn’t been able to describe to anyone about that day in Tumby Bay was the sublimity, the blinding beauty of that bird as it flew, and as it lay where it fell. She could bring back in an instant that moment of white light rising beyond the leaves, her hand shaking against the gun. The echo of the shot seeming to come first because her ears went dead, then the load roar as they woke again. The flapping and cracking as something fell through the trees, branch by snapping branch. She wanted black arms on her gown, to match the dead bird’s wings. She wanted to take it all back, to return to that moment at the lake’s edge and take back that one moment of horrible misprision. And if she’d seen that bird wrong, and seen Eden Su wrong, who was to say she hadn’t seen Malcolm wrong, too? She’d been walking around blind ever since that day.

“You look miserable,” Piet said. “I’m calling him right now.” He pulled out his phone.

“No! Please don’t.”

“I already dialed.” He held the phone out of her reach, like he’d done with stuffed animals when they were kids. She couldn’t move away from the Russian woman’s pins.

“Malcolm, listen. It’s Piet. Yeah, my sister’s been an idiot, she’s sorry, and she’s standing here in her wedding dress looking gorgeous. You’d be a fool not to take her back. What do you say?” He listened for a minute, and she could hear the rumble of Malcolm’s voice, but not his words. “Sure, sure. Good man.” He clicked his phone shut. “He says call him tonight and you can talk.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“No, you’re not.”

They walked out into the street, her dress left behind in a bag like something hung up to bleed. “See, things are looking brighter,” Piet said. “As soon as I show up.”

“All that’s happened is you’ve meddled.”

There was a park up ahead, so they sat on a bench. Geese flew above, real ones, with brown bodies and black faces and white chinstraps.

“So really you’ve got four options. You go back to Malcolm and back to work; you forget about Malcolm and focus on the job, or vice versa; or you leave it all behind and go live someplace you’ve always wanted to go. I mean, your problem is it’s undecided. And you’ve never been a girl to leave things to chance, just sit there and let things happen to you. So, you take action and you select an option. One, two, three, or four.”

Piet had that way of talking that you’d agree to anything he said. And if she no longer believed she could see clearly enough to find her way, at least she was starting to believe in luck. She reached into her pocket. She said, “Go ahead, pick a card.”

The next morning, Eden Su was walking down the big sidewalk that cut diagonally across the campus green, hunched under a carapace of red backpack. She wore a silky blue sweater over black leggings. Alex raced behind the music building so she could meet her face-to-face, rather than sneak up from behind. She had just dropped off her statement for the Grievance Committee, and it was a good one. Whatever Eden had to say, stellar writer that she was, it wouldn’t hold up against Alex reasoning with the committee on an adult level.

When she was about ten feet away, Eden spotted her, and there was a slight trip to her step. She put her head down again, as if she planned to walk past and say nothing—which made Alex angry, rather than just desperate to end things. This girl had taken it upon herself to ruin an adult’s professional reputation and tenure prospects, but now she was acting as if they were eighth-grade enemies with crushes on the same boy. And Alex wouldn’t accept that. It gave her the courage to approach Eden as an adult talking to a child, rather than as a desperate woman begging a twenty-year-old for mercy.

She stopped walking right in front of her and said, “Eden.” And smiled patiently.