My Education (11 page)

“. . . I always mean to read when the baby is sleeping, but then I just stare. I see textures vibrate. Like, the threads in the carpet. Because I'm so tired . . .”

“I'd like to read the same book that you're reading.”

“That's sweet. But I've said I don't read anymore.”

“I think bicycle thieves might be living next door. Under my window, in the little side yard you can't see from the street, there's all these dismembered bikes strewn everywhere.”

“Have they spotted you up at your window? Be careful. They won't want a witness.”

“If I disappear, you can avenge me. It's the house to the left, when you're facing my door.”

“You say that as if I've been there.”

“You could come here.”

“Could I?”

“I wish you would.”

“Why?”

“I miss you.”

Her husky laughter. “You don't know me. But maybe that's why.”

What did we talk about? Nothing. The night sounds. The incomprehensible show that her nanny/housekeeper, off the clock for the night, was watching down the hall in her room, on her tiny TV. The loud, angry music that Dutra was playing downstairs—but only the music, only the fact of there being upstairs and downstairs, and not Dutra, not anger, not anything close to my separate existence, or hers. We seemed to be dozy night watchmen, on some lofty tower beneath teeming stars, offhandedly trading remarks as we lay side by side with our greater attention cast far out to space, to some imminent wonder we both sensed was making its steady approach . . . the actual words that we spoke seemed inconsequential. Yet sometimes, for a moment, on the wing of some ambling irrelevance, again we'd dip gingerly into our selves and our strange situation. “I only wanted to say,” she repeated, by way of another attempt to conclude the phone call, for every few minutes she began, yet did not reach the end, of an ending remark, “I was sorry I flounced out like that. I'm not angry at you.”

“It's funny to hear you say ‘flounce.' You're not flouncy at all. You're an opposite something.”

“Like what?”

“Now you're asking to flirt.”

“I didn't mean to. No flirting.”

“Isn't that why you called me?”

“It's not.”

“Then why did you?”

“I don't know. Just to talk for a while. Just to say I was sorry for flouncing.”

“I'd like to see you.”

“No,” she said, a reflex—as if she, like me, hardly heard what we said to each other. For we spoke for the sluiceway of words we created, that bore us along; to discuss the direction might somehow inhibit the motion.

Sometimes she called me at eight, and sometimes at eleven; sometimes we spoke for two hours, and sometimes a few minutes; a week might have passed in this way, or just three or four days. The measure of time mattered less than of weight and momentum, and one night when these seemed to have crested a preordained mark, and as Dutra sat smoking his bong on the couch with the TV on mute and the turntable playing and the slabs of his textbooks in heaps around him adequate to protect him from me, I knew talk was no longer required for motion, and walked out the back door without waiting for Martha to call. I walked up the long hill to the campus, the steam from my body replacing a coat. It was still very cold but I smelled the wet earth, dark bare patches of which now exceeded in size the gray crusts of vestigial snow. Under moonlight I bisected the quad, my shadow sharp-edged and elongated on the flagstones. I passed the bright yellow squares of the library windows, behind which my erstwhile fellows were still toiling over their texts. My purpose seemed suddenly, thoroughly different from theirs, as if a point of divergence had long passed me by, and only now did I notice the change. I passed the ugly juridical hulk of the English department, its colonnade raised in the thirties as proof that the school was a serious place—but at night, under moonlight, in spring, all this moon-silvered kingdom of turrets and archways was plainly the same little state agricultural school it had been at the start. The field's furrows awaiting their seeds and the animals restlessly pawing their stalls. The landscape I crossed was abiding and elemental; I seemed to see through its various garments to what lay beneath. I left the region of campus, and sidewalks, and walked at the edge of the steep, curving roads, where the shadows of trees thickly barred the moonlight. Houses lay at the backs of deep lawns, and then disappeared behind masonry walls. The few times a car passed, sweeping me with its headlamps, I thought that the driver might call the police. I wasn't jogging in exercise clothes. I wasn't walking a dog on a leash. My reason to be there was clear to no one but myself—and Martha. Despite her consistent refusals to see me, I felt expected.

When I passed through their stone entry columns and walked up the drive, I could see a few lights on upstairs. I rounded the side of the house. Through the double interference, of the solarium's glass and the kitchen's, shone the solitary light of the breakfast-nook lamp. I thought of Nicholas's cozy encampment, and wondered if that nook was his particular place. But the nights Martha called me, she was usually in the kitchen. I'd hear her filling a kettle for tea, stacking dishes in a cupboard, sliding drawers open and shut. Performing what struck me as pretexts, for lingering there by herself. It was dark close to their house on account of their numerous prospering trees, and already, in the course of my walk, I'd turned into a creature of shadows. It only briefly surprised me how easy it was to become a voyeur, and duck into the shrubs on tiptoe, the noisy uproar in my heart somehow only enhancing my stealth.

It was Martha in the breakfast nook's pool of light. An open magazine and a steaming mug sat on the table before her, untouched. Her hands lay out of sight beneath the table, perhaps in her lap. Her gaze was cast forward in thought. Past her I could see the telephone, mounted on the far wall. In love contrary impulses constantly war with each other. I wanted to feast on her image unseen, and I wanted to seize her attention, so that my hand flew up to tap on the glass even as my inner voice exclaimed angrily,
Wait!
It was too late; she'd seen me. Astonishment and anger froze her face, and then she scooted so quickly out of the snug nook she almost spilled her tea, and it seemed possible she'd shout for Nicholas, or phone the police. But she came out the kitchen door and through the solarium, stopping me at the threshold before I came in. “Nicholas is home!” she exclaimed in a sort of shrieked whisper. “What are you doing? He's up in his study.” But she'd taken hold of my hands, or else I'd taken hers, and she was warming the gnarled, icy claws they'd become in the course of my walk, for despite all the heat beating out from my core, my hands and feet and lips and ears had gone numb. “You're wearing pajamas,” she scolded, of my thin, inappropriate clothes. We were wringing and squeezing and clutching our four hands together as if we'd given them the task of communicating on behalf of the rest of our selves. I tried to pull her close to me and kiss her and she said, “No! Are you out of your mind?” Yet her hands kept their tight grip on mine; she pressed her forehead to mine so our mouths couldn't touch but our stern gazes locked, at such close range our eyelashes tangled.

“Let me come in a minute,” I whispered.

“No! Nicholas is upstairs. Everyone is upstairs.”

“I won't do anything. I'll just sit and warm up. I feel cold.”

“How am I supposed to explain you, if Nicholas comes in the kitchen?”

“You can say that I came for a visit.”

“At ten-thirty at night? In no jacket?”

“You can say I was taking a jog.”

“You don't jog. You're not dressed for a jog.”

“He won't see me. If we hear him, I'll run out the door. Besides, he's already in bed.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because he goes to sleep early, and you stay up late. When you call, he's already in bed.” I wasn't sure if this was true. I only knew that, when she called, she was alone—whether Nicholas was out, or asleep, or for some other reason behind a closed door.

Her hot, bony forehead still pressed against mine. “Ten minutes,” she finally said. “I brewed tea. You can have some and go. While sitting on opposite sides of the table.”

We crept like thieves into the kitchen and gingerly I seated myself at the outermost end of the breakfast nook bench, on the side that was nearest the door. It was the same spot I'd sat in before, grading papers the previous fall, but some translucent reality membrane had been peeled away so that it no longer seemed the same place. I was shuddering and chattering with cold, and hugged myself, and clenched my jaw, to keep quiet, while Martha almost silently poured out my tea, and the silence of the house reasserted itself so that, at its deepest profundity, it yielded to me the faintest broken thread of a televised voice, that might have even been coming from some other house. Apart from this, nothing. I felt sure that, if Nicholas coughed, I would hear him and slide out the door long before he set foot on the stairs. But then Martha, once she'd set down my tea, instead of seating herself on the opposite bench, pulled a chair to the end of the table, so that we were seated diagonally, and only need lean the slightest bit forward to touch. The sledgehammer blows of my heart filled my ears, and my exquisite attention to audible clues was destroyed. I raised a hand and cupped her cheek, and inwardly swooned at its softness, and she, tipping forward, again tented her forehead on mine, and took my own cheek in her hand. “We must stop this,” she whispered. Lovestruck, almost moaning with shame, we caressed our reflections, my tea going cold. Science tells us that scent is retained by the brain for a longer duration than the evidence gathered by eyes, ears, or hands, but my experience differs. I can still feel with unparalleled vividness the strange vulnerability of Martha's face on my palm and the pads of my fingers, as if it were the first such, of some rare or taboo category, I'd ever dared trespass upon with a touch—a shy and sheltered buttock or breast, even a velveteen scrotum, hot and dry and just powdered with down, and not the dazzling aspect she most often turned to the world. And at the same time I knew that my face felt as strange and forbidden and tender to her, for we could not stop avidly stroking each other, as if we were a pair of Helen Kellers who had just linked the name with the flesh—caressing and heaving our guttering breaths, and passing from solemn surrender to dismayed embarrassment to embarrassed bemusement to solemnity again, as if all our foreignness to each other were encompassed in the ambit of a cheek.

“We must stop,” she repeated at last, sitting back suddenly so that she broke all our points of contact. “I'm sorry. I need you to leave.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Yes.” Her face had gone bleary and distant and offered no purchase. Stunned, I believed her to the point of mute despair, yet disbelieved her to the point of almost laughing in her face, and for a moment it seemed possible that I really would laugh, and that she would laugh also, and clutching hands we'd run out her back door and keep running to some unknown place. At that age I'd only lived four different places, of which the town where we'd met was the fourth, and I truly believed that commencing a wholly new life was just a matter of changing location. But her face and her voice were so altered, that instead I stood blindly and went out her door, and back down that long, ludicrous hill that the glacier clawed out of the rock all those eons ago. At home in my bed, clutching blankets, I grieved at the loss.

At the same time I still disbelieved her, and kept one ear pricked for the phone.

•   •   •

Only Martha's omniscience, in which I believed by instinct and without reservation, enabled my fierce dignity in the following months. I avoided all groups, to be sure not to hear her name spoken. I kept my eyes sternly downcast, to prevent them from seeking her out down the halls, or in the throngs on the sidewalks, or among loungers sprawled in the strengthening sun on the quad. I stayed away from the department on the days I knew Nicholas taught. With equal prompt care I deleted each message from Laurence, all identically warm and upbeat and devoid of allusion to what had occurred at the party, and with luck and some diligence didn't run into him, either. I would not seem to put myself under her gaze—her omniscience got no help from me, hence retained my untroubled belief. She saw me. She saw me, near midnight, framed by my own lonely square of yellow library light. She saw me in silent attendance of each of my classes, at all moments purging her face from my thoughts, meantime grinding my molars to dust. She saw me at home, grimly watching my printer saw out the accordion pages of three end-of-term papers that were each, in distinctive ways, brilliant and overly long and excessively weighted with footnotes and for good measure handed in early, and destined to be skimmed and rewarded the cursory A. She saw me achieving ceasefire with Dutra, not by confession nor supplication, but the simple resumption of habits. She saw me sharing the bong with him nights, watching
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, and eating the stir-fry I made for us both out of all things not rotten dug out of our fridge. She saw me go to bed alone, and rise alone, and refrain, in my fierce dignity, even from masturbation; she even saw me refrain, when the term finally ended, from the distraction of a trip to New York. “You sure?” Dutra asked one last time, heaving his duffel bag into his Volvo. I knew he wanted very much for me to come. He wanted to show off his city to me, for, to his boundless amazement, despite my adequate wit and sophistication, which this past year had endeared me to him, I had never set foot in that place whose very image appeared in Webster's as the birthplace of both “sophistication” and “wit.” “I'll show you a
fabulous
time,” he cajoled. At least for the four-hour drive, he was afraid to be lonely.