My Education (26 page)

“Irony can be a health hazard. Who do you owe papers?”

“Oh, God. And not even a margarita yet safely in hand. Kreutzberg, of course. Luc Botelli, that Hum Center visiting scholar.”

“‘Aesthetic/Prosthetic'?”

“The same. But he's gone back to Venice, so it's hard to get motivated. And Hartmann for Baudrillard and Ballard last fall.”

“You must have something around you can hand in for that.”

“That's the problem. Why bother at all? If I've already said everything, all by myself, then how trite must it be?”

My true self felt so far from this conversation that, paradoxically, I homed in ever closer, fascinated, my true self trailing my physical self just offshore of, perhaps, my left shoulder. Casper was Casper but I was a perfect impostor; every cell that composed me had remade itself; I was not the same person he'd known. Aesthetic/Prosthetic and Ballard; I'd never care a fig about these things again. Only love mattered to me: the singularity of it, the damnable difficulty of it, the certain solution I knew must lie just out of reach. We emerged at the top of the trail, streaming sweat from the effort just the same as before I'd met Martha, but my sweat was invisibly different; its scent must have changed. All the chemical soup of my body had changed. I thought of Country Joe, creating his environment, excreting the waste that would then feed the wee organisms that would then feed the algae to feed Country Joe—if that was even what happened; Dutra had so patiently labored to teach me the nitrogen cycle on which all the life in my tank would rely but my brain was too scrambled by love to absorb anything—and then I thought of Martha, her elusive life force, swimming in, swimming through, firing chemical changes and cycles. And at the same time I was laughing with Casper, and now weaving a little as I shifted from shoulder to shoulder the lead weight of a bagful of library books I'd been skimming for pithy expressions of longing and was now on my way to return. A car crossed the sidewalk in front of us, exiting out of a faculty lot, and without breaking conversation or stride we diverted around its back end and as if God had cut the sky's string I was smote on the top of my skull and sent flying, like the ball by the star slugger's bat, with a shattering
CRACK!
and pain yanked the blinds on my eyes and I hit the asphalt.

“Jesus! Oh my God! Regina!” I could hear Casper shouting. My vision slid around like grains of sand. Whatever image it last held had been smashed to the smallest component. The dead weight of my head, lightning-struck, dangled down from my neck. Its pain arrowed out in a ceaselessly flowering starburst as if strewing wide all the shards of my skull that were actually crunching around in my scalp. This is how a broken neck feels, I thought wonderingly, except that somehow I had heaved up my torso, I was no longer sprawled on my face. Casper had me beneath the armpits and pulled me onto the sidewalk, well clear of the subtle driveway. Bit by bit I blinked together a smeared panorama, my library books strewn in an arc.

“My books,” I mumbled. My tongue was still there. I dragged it over my teeth. They were still there as well. I had a pink and white skid mark the length of my forearm, where I must have thrown the arm up to shelter my head as I fell, but somehow nothing was broken. The throb in my skull now retracted and grew more intense, as if defining its outlines, but even my skull was somehow in one piece. “Ow,” I added. “Ow ow ow! What hit me?”

“That parking-lot barricade thing,” Casper said, indicating. “It was raised up for that car and we walked under it, and it came down right on top of your head.”

“Ow!” I cried again, belatedly frightened.

“No shit.” Casper's teeth were chattering in the heat; he was almost more frightened than me. “It sounded like, some sort of—”

“Like a two-by-four hitting a huge ball of bone.” Pushing away Casper's effort to help I struggled onto my feet. Anger and embarrassment had quickly outstripped fear. I had the idea that the sooner we moved from the site of the mishap, the less likely that it could inflict any permanent damage. In my impatience I reeled on my feet and Casper caught at my arm.

“Are you sure that you're okay to walk?”

“Of course I'm okay to walk! But I have a headache.”

“Of course you fucking have a headache! And your arm is scraped up.”

“It's okay. Stings a little.”

“I feel absolutely horrible, Regina,” Casper burst out, stricken. “I should have noticed that thing!”

“It's not your job to notice the things I walk under. Don't feel guilty. You'll make my headache hurt more.”

“If my guilt gives you headaches, you're in for a very uncomfortable future.”

After Casper had picked up my books and insisted on carrying them we resumed on our way, both of us darting glances side to side as we proceeded up the sidewalk like soldiers afraid of an ambush. My head's throbbing deepened another half-octave, seemed to tuck in its elbows and knees and settle in for a permanent stay. “I can really use that margarita now,” I remarked when at last we had reached the library and surrendered my books to the heap of Returns.

“You still feel up for it?”

“More than before. Lead the way.”

“Here's to Numbing the Pain,” Casper said.

Hot Jalapeños was on the Collegetown Strip, just outside University Gate, so that Casper and I were now headed back downhill again for the first time since we'd started to walk. Adding that to the loss of my library books, I felt buoyant. Tonight Martha was coming with me to the movies; the theater showing the film that I had to review wasn't close to the campus, but it was an art house, which made it a campus appendage. There was a strong chance we'd see someone she knew. My eagerness for this to occur was counterweight to her unstated, but to me clear and vexing, reluctance for it to occur, and I was eager to refute that reluctance, to lay hold of the proof that it didn't exist. When we ran into her eminent colleague while buying our popcorn, her arm would hook my waist and her voice state my name as she made the unhesitant introduction—it was this pleasingly natural scene, vividly enacted in the playhouse of my mind, that so buoyed me as Casper and I strode toward margaritas. But the scene also blotted out others. What if the person we saw was some friend of my own—like that erstwhile friend of my own who was also her husband? Theorists of passion often term it “all-consuming” but I found it excluding instead; there were vast realms of life it refused to consume, but boxed up out of sight. I charged Martha with happily keeping me separate from campus, with its many ogling eyes and wagging tongues, but there were times I suspected myself just as glad, and that my bravado in quitting my program was disguised cowardice. I brazenly wanted the shock and the envy, but I shrank from the possible condemnation. Perhaps just like her I was selfish in love, and not brave. And so I hectored her to meet me at Movable Feast, to accompany me to the movies, while all the while I kept Nicholas, and friends and partisans of Nicholas, and the very concept of Nicholas, boxed out of sight—his last intrusion, on that day I had seen his apartment, not complicating but assisting the effort. For I had seen him consigned to a separate if parallel realm. It consisted of those bright and cold rooms with the scant furniture and the ficus; perhaps the parking lot at Mighty Buy; and perhaps a few more strange locations neither Martha nor I could have found even if we had tried.

Ducking into the Wawa I bought a bottle of aspirin and then Casper and I, bouncing with restored merriment, entered Hot Jalapeños. The gaudy teal and yellow dining room was eerily empty but a racket of music and voices reached us from somewhere in the back. “Will you be joining us for Happy Hour on the patio?” inquired a ponytailed hostess, in a hot-pepper-monogrammed golf shirt and khaki short-shorts. “All the tables are taken, but there's standing room at the Cocktail Palapa.”

The patio was as raucous and crowded as the inside dining room had been silent and empty, but I still spotted him right away. So did Casper. “Introduce me,” Casper implored as I froze in my tracks, for of course Casper knew I had served as the Chaucer TA, and had no idea my role, in relation to Chaucer's
professor, had changed.

“No, Casper—”

“I'll be so well behaved!”

“It's not that, you don't understand—” Yet for all the density of obstacles, of drunken young men in backward baseball caps and drunken young women in ponytails and short-shorts all packed shoulder-to-shoulder between oversize white plastic tables impaled with umbrellas exclaiming
¡Sauza!
, the unwanted encounter came rolling toward me as if it were Nicholas parting the crowd, and not, somehow, myself, leading Casper, in helpless acquiescence to Nicholas's own helpless wave. Sitting on the far side of the patio framed by two other men, on a bench with its back to the trellised rear wall, he was as trapped by my startling appearance as I was by his. It was the secrecy of our relation that trapped us, in preventing our rushing away from each other. But it peculiarly freed us as well, by enforcing fatuity. “I see you've made wise preparations,” he yelled when we reached him, with necessary loudness and superfluous cheer, and indicating my bottle of aspirin. “Regina brilliantly taught Chaucer with me last semester,” he announced to his companions, who were Harrison Franklin, the often condemned Southern Gentleman writer, and a scowling and dead-white-complected young man with copious and in some strange way lewd, as if both simian and pubic, long and tangled black hair pouring out of his face and his scalp. “Working with me has taught her the true value of aspirin, as you can observe. Andrew Malarkey of Trinity College Dublin, and our esteemed visitor this semester; and Harrison Franklin, professor and author, whom I think you may already know; meet my dear friend Regina Gottlieb, and her friend, I'm afraid—”

“Casper Rosen,” managed Casper, now all head-bobs and gulped syllables. “Second year, English department—”

“Of course I recognize you. You're one of the young prodigies who understands Shalom Kreutzberg.”

“I'd hardly say I understand!” Casper cried with delight.

“Caspar happens to be my favorite name,” Nicholas revealed, as if his own discomfort fed the flame of his charm. His hair was drenched at the scalp, and his cheeks burned with color. Like an octopus his companions had reached out from the table, Franklin this way, Malarkey that, and somehow captured two chairs, into which Casper and I were assimilated. “Even Regina might not have known that,” Nicholas went on, grazing me with his voice as if he'd touched my knee under the table. It was a furtive signal—we knew what they didn't, and could keep it that way. “But she can no doubt guess why.”

“The painter,” I offered, accepting my cue.

“I was hoping to name my son Caspar,” Nicholas abruptly added, as if, just when he'd pledged discretion, impulse had him veer the other way. Now he'd made mention of Martha inevitable. With a flash I understood—as if, soused in the bosom of Hot Jalapeños, such understanding was some sort of insight—that serious drinking was happening here. All three men were already drunk, not in the way of the undergraduate students tumbling like puppies from table to table, whose drunkenness was more than half mob behavior, a raucous effusion that burned as much alcohol, in the heat, as they were likely consuming. By contrast the drunkenness of Nicholas and Malarkey and Franklin was packed in the marrow, disproportionately dense for its volume. It might blow up without any warning and God knew what would happen.

But then Casper, unknowingly snuffing the fuse, said, “I'm afraid mine's the Friendly Ghost spelling.”

A waitress had appeared. “Four margaritas,” we urged her. “Two—plus the two that are free.”

“All at once?”

“All at once,” I affirmed. I had learned from Laurence.

“Quite right,” said Malarkey. “Casper the Ghost is American, and you're an American. I don't understand this poncey trend of foreign names for American children. Bloody American children named ‘Kwame' and ‘Dante' and ‘Krishna' instead of just normal American names.”

“What's a normal American name, Andy?” asked Nicholas kindly.

“Well, ‘Andy' does very nicely, doesn't it? Just as nicely for you as for us.”

“Very neutral and Christian.”

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do quite nicely as well. But no, we must have
Joachim
.”

Back in danger again; yet attention had drifted. “Open that aspirin, Regina,” Franklin badgered me. “Your bottle says two hundred tablets. That's forty for each of us here.”

“Are we doing a suicide pact, or averting hangover?”

“Suicide is a form of hangover aversion.”

“Andy, you bring out the camp counselor in me when you say things like that. I'm going to take you canoeing this weekend. That will clear out the cobwebs. It keeps me alive.”

“Regina doesn't hold your faith in boats, Nick. She's aspirining up.”

I wondered if these three men had confessed to each other their reasons for anguish, or if, far more likely, they hewed to an unspoken code to say little, ask nothing, and drink all they could. Franklin's sadness was proud, almost savage, as if he dared you to take it away. Malarkey's sadness was distracted and sullen; of the three he seemed least to enjoy his companions, as if somewhere, his solitary teenager's room was still waiting for him, with its Sex Pistols posters and refrigerator-size stereo speakers and a scuffed patch of wall where he propped up his feet, and he longed to get back to that refuge as soon as he could. Nicholas's sadness was apologetic. He seemed to hope it would bother no one, even me. I realized the secret we shared was far more intimate than the knowledge of who was, or wasn't, whose lover. The unspoken code was mine also. I must stop noticing Nicholas's sadness; his steady gaze told me to leave him his pride.