Pamela Dean (53 page)

"Oh, for God's sake—Nick—"

"No, not once. That's why. Come along."

Outside the doors of Chester Hall, Thomas said, "Wait a minute," and began digging in his pockets.

"What are you—oh. Don't worry about it. I'm on the pill."

"After all the lectures I got for subjecting Tina to—"

"I spoke to you about it exactly once. Anyway, this is a new modern formula that causes me no trouble at all."

"All right, then," said Thomas. He put his hand on the bar of the door, but did not push it. The light from the building cast half his face into shadow. "You don't come anywhere near my bottom lip," he said. "More like the collarbone."

"Excellent. Then you won't have to reconcile yourself to a dark world."

"That's true," said Thomas, as if she had hit him, and shoved the door open.

Janet followed him, hoping he was not going to suffer a return of his temper in the next fifty minutes. He didn't, even though it was rather longer than fifty minutes, mostly because each party tended to burst into hysterical laughter and affect the other. Janet realized gradually that this was due not to nervousness so much as to the fact that the coldness of Thomas's hands, the sweatiness of her own, the hardness of the floor, the scratchiness of the carpet, the inconvenient placement of the piano so that it took up more than its rightful share of floor space, and the recalcitrance of all material objects were in fact funny, and that both of them, even in so delicate a situation, had to wit to realize it.

Thomas had not learned love from whatever masters—mistresses, really, thought Janet, and started another round of laughter—had taught Nick; but he had one valuable quality that made up for any amount of clumsiness, uncertainty, and ignorance: he was indubitably present, bodily and mentally, at any given moment. She had not realized until now, having no basis of comparison, in how many ways Nick had not been.

"Does one always think unkindly about former lovers while having a new one?" she asked, while they were setting the room to rights.

Thomas sat down on the piano bench and gave vent to one last gurgle of laughter.

"One tries to, I suspect," he said, wiping his eyes. "I'd think it would depend on the lovers.

And on one's personality. Some people fool themselves about the present, and others prefer to exercise selective memory on the past. Why do you let me pontificate like this? Let's get something to eat."

They called Bartholemew's, which would deliver pizza unt il two o'clock, and had a large one sent to Eliot lounge, where they sat talking until four in the morning. Janet then lay awake for another hour, trying to decide what she had done. All modern philosophies would advise her to think of it as an incident, now over; but you could not disconnect events, even irresponsible events, like that. Amoeba, unaccustomed to human beings'

walking about in the middle of the night, abandoned his post at the foot of Tina's bed and came and sat on her chest and purred, which eventually did send her to sleep.

She slept through her math course the next morning, which made her feel very guilty, even though she had been skipping it with abandon since it began. Thomas had proposed behaving frivolously until the end of October, but Janet wondered if three weeks of this might not be enough. She ought at least to go to her classes, even if she still cavorted outside the classroom rather than doing her background reading and starting to prepare for her comprehensives.

At the thought of the comprehensives she shuddered, and decided to read some James Joyce before lunch. Into this unproductive exercise walked Thomas, announcing his presence by shooing the cat, who had learned to open the door, back into the room, and then shutting the door loudly.

"Good morning," he said.

He looked ill at ease. He was probably wondering what to do, just as she was herself.

Leaping up and kissing him seemed indecorous. Janet felt that she had made the first move, and he should make the second. He, of course, was probably wondering if she was regretting the entire business, and talking himself into letting her decide how to proceed.

"Lord," said Janet, "what fools these mortals be. Did I forget to tell you I'd respect you in the morning?"

"Not exactly," said Thomas, sitting down on the end of her bed and winding his long fingers up into knots. "It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol."

"If it is, I haven't been sober for years. I am of the same mind as I was last night. If you are having any second thoughts, you'd better say so. Don't prolong the agony, for God's sake."

"There isn't any agony to prolong," said Thomas, rather sharply. "What do you say to fifty days?"

"What is this, a limited-contract marriage?"

"If you like. We could see what we thought at the end of it."

"Well," said Janet, "it makes a change from Nick, who implied and assumed a whole lot of things but hardly ever stated anything."

"Is that why you went after me in that downright way just now? It's hard on the nerves, you know."

"That's my natural approach, I'm afraid. But Nick was very good at stifling it—I don't think he meant to, but he had a different set of assumptions and—I don't know—there was something awfully powerful about them. He made you feel like an idiot if you tried to go contrary to them."

"Robin's much the same."

"Yes, only it's impossible to figure out what Robin's assumptions are, so you just go on as usual."

"You can afford that, you don't live with him." This might have been an automatic remark, but it sounded heartfelt.

"Is he giving you problems?" said Janet.

"Nothing serious," said Thomas.

Having been just chided for being downright, Janet didn't press him for details; she gave him a kiss instead.

Ten days later she was rummaging on the top of her dresser in search of Amoeba's flea collar, which he knew how to take off and enjoyed hiding, when the sign above her bed caught the corner of her eye. "I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth could sleep out the rest." She felt extremely cold. It was not that she had missed a pill—it was that she was five days into the seven days on which one was not supposed to take any, and her period had not begun.

Janet sat down on Amoeba's tail, got up again so he could hide under the bed and complain, and stood in the middle of the room staring at Tina's picture of a bust of Beethoven. Don't panic, she told herself, this could mean many things, and the one you're afraid of is the least likely of the lot. She got out her Penguin Shakespeare, since rereading

Much Ado About Nothing
had been what she planned to do after finding the collar. She found herself looking up
All's Well That Ends Well
in the table of contents instead.

She went out into the hall and called Dr. Irving's office in the city. They put her on hold for ten minutes. Dr. Irving did not sound at all concerned, but her instructions were less than reassuring. "You shouldn't go back on the pill if there's any chance you might be pregnant. Use some other form of contraception—I can fit you with a diaphragm next Tuesday, if you want to make an appointment—until you can get a pregnancy test. Yes, I do them. No, not till you've missed your next period. Yes, I know that's another three weeks—it won't hurt you to use some other contraception for that long—even abstention wouldn't hurt you for that long. Yes, make an appointment with the nurse down there if you want to see me Tuesday."

Janet hung up carefully, and found herself muttering as she shut the door of her room.

"Abstention is not the problem," she told Amoeba. She sank down on her bed and picked up the Shakespeare again, leafing through its preliminary pages with shaking fingers.

These were facsimiles of the opening pages of the 1623 Folio; she had pored over them from time to time, but the erratic spelling and the old-style
s
that looked like a misconceived
f
made them difficult. She thumbed through "To the Reader," the picture of Shakespeare, which had always looked a little startled to her, past the elaborate dedication to William, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip, Earle of Montgomery; past the closely printed, wandering essay addressed "To the great Variety of Readers," from which one learned that Shakespeare's friends had scarcely received from him a blot in his papers; past the laudatory poems by Jonson and Holland; past the table of contents (they called it a Catalog) with its decoration of cupids and peacocks and hunting dogs; past more laudatory poems; past the page containing the Names of the Principall Actors, to the opening lines of
The
Tempest.

Janet thought she saw Robin's name go by, and turned ba ck to the list of players, wondering what might look like "Robert Armin" out of the corner of a distracted eye.

There were two Richards in the first column, but no Roberts. Samuel Gilburne, Robert Armin. No, it really did say that. William Ostler, Nathan Field, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley—surely not. No, that was what it said, in nice clear italics, and the
s
at the end of the first name, where it looked normal to modern eyes. William Ecclestone, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield. "For pity's sake," said Janet. Richard Robinson, John Shancke, John Rice.

She looked at the first column again. No Thomas Lane; no Jack Nikopoulous; no Melinda Wolfe, of course, women didn't act in Elizabethan times. Just those three names.

They were fairly common, except maybe for Armin. But for there to be three of them—and the way Robin and Nick talked. Not aliens but—what? Time travelers? "You
are
pregnant"

said Janet, "and you're having fancies." Saying it aloud made her perversely certain that she was not pregnant; but that meant, of course, that she was not having fancies.

She got Tina's copy of
Webster's Biographical Dictionary
down and looked up Robert Armin. Nothing. Nicholas Tooley. Robert Benfield. Nothing. She looked up Hemmings and Condell, who had put together the Folio, just to make sure she had not wandered suddenly into some alternate universe. Yes, Webster's did admit their existence. She checked the index of Tillyard's
The Elizabethan World Picture.
Nothing. She had read the General Introduction to this edition of Shakespeare several times; she read it again. And then on page twenty-four it was, a list of the actors who had comprised "a vital core" of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's company. Robert Armin was the last name listed.

She pulled a box from under her bed, and found the little stack of books Professor Davison had recommended as additional reading. She had read most of them, and Robert Armin and Nicholas Tooley and Robert Benfield weren't in them. But there were several she had never gotten around to. "Robert Armin, actor," was in the index of Harrison and Granville-Barker's
A Companion to Shakespeare Studies,
and from the three references there she learned that he was an author of plays himself, that he had replaced Will Kempe as the company's comedian, playing parts such as Feste and the Fool in
Lear
and perhaps somebody called Autolycus in
The Winter's Tale.
He could sing, said the essay, because the parts he played called for music; Shakespeare had not written any singing clowns until he had Armin to play them.

He could sing all right. He had definite and peculiar opinions about
Hamlet;
he talked familiarly of Shakespeare; he was certainly an actor. Janet shut the book and looked around the room, at the familiar scarred oak furniture; the red carpet; the four-year-old curtains, looking a little faded across their middles; Tina's sewing machine in the corner; the gray cat asleep in a patch of sunlight on top of Molly's biology notes. This was much harder to believe in than the Fourth Ericson ghost. And Nick, whose name appeared in no reference she had—though he was probably in the library somewhere, if she wanted to look him up—was a greater enigma than ever.

Janet began to laugh. Why in the world was she rummaging through all these books?

Why was she thinking of looking people up in the library, when they were walking around to be talked to?

"What's The Meebe done now?" said Molly, coming in the door and tossing her armload of heavy books onto her unmade bed.

"He's asleep; I was laughing at myself."

"Want to share the joke?"

Janet opened her mouth; and after a moment, she closed it again. She thought in terms of looking things up in the library not just because of her upbringing and her training, but because if those people walking around to be talked to had wanted her to know what she would be looking up, they could have told her. Nick's curious reticence was suddenly explained, though it didn't necessarily make much sense. None of it made sense, really.

Why should four-hundred-year-old actors, if they were that old, come to a midwestern liberal-arts college? If they weren't old, but just time travelers, which made more sense, because they didn't
look
old—no, she was dreaming; she was crazy.

"Molly, have you ever missed a period, while you were on the pill?"

"No, worse luck."

"But some people do?"

"Usually while they're getting adjusted to them, in the first few months. Why don't you call Dr. Irving?"

"She said go off the pill till it's time to do a pregnancy test."

"Oh, wonderful. You're probably not, you know—unless—have you missed any pills lately?"

"Nope."

"Well, you're probably not, then."

"Right."

"I know it's no use telling you not to worry about it, because you're going to. So just thank God it's not last year. Utter a grateful prayer to the Supreme Court. And you could call the Women's Caucus and see how much they've got in the abortion fund."

Janet felt sick.

"Yes, I know that's cold-blooded. But think about the worst, if you have to worry, and get it over with."

"Is that the worst?"

"Abortion? You aren't thinking of having the baby?"

"Now you're talking as if there were one."

"That's what we're doing, looking at the worst. Have you talked to—" Molly closed her mouth.