Perfect Reader (22 page)

“You too, you too.”

“So what’s it called, your organization?”

“Oh, man, I wrestled with that one. It seemed so important, and on the other hand totally trivial. So I’m just calling it Intelligent Darwin. Kind of a play on Intelligent Design, but also that’s what it’s about, how this place desperately needs to wake up from its liberal elitist hypocrisy and accept that there are other ways of looking at the world. That there is room out there for both ways to be taught, side by side. I’m proselytizing, aren’t I? I’m so used to making my pitch, it’s hard to turn that mode off. Wow. Who would have thought back in high school, when I was baked out of my brains, smoking those Parliament Lights like it was my life’s work, that it would come to this.”

“P-Funks,” Flora said, their name for the cigarettes.

“I mean, could those things have been any worse for the environment? With those
plastic
filters. Shit. But what did we know, right?”

“So wait,” Flora said. She scanned Esther’s face. Her sincerity was plain. But then, Esther had met all her wildly divergent phases with smooth-faced earnestness, as if the contradictions were a problem of interpretation. “Your organization is pro–Intelligent Design?”

“Don’t look so shocked, Flo.” Esther laughed, clapping her hands together, a gesture Lily echoed. “I’m not a leper, just a Christian. I got pregnant, the guy flaked, and I was all set to get an—well, to end it, and then I couldn’t. And I began to see things differently. To understand what my parents had been trying to tell me all those years. That they weren’t trying to control me, though it really felt like that. But no, they were trying to save me. I know, Flo, you should see your face right now. It must be super weird for you, hearing me talk like this, seeing my conversion. But I’m still the same Esther, just a little less messed up.”

Flora felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Paul. She had almost forgotten she had come there with him. It had taken him a while to notice she was gone.

“Hey,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“Esther, this is Paul,” Flora said. “Esther and I went to high school together.”

“How do you know this character?” Esther asked her. “How are ya, Paul?”

“You two know each other?” Flora said.

“I roped Paul into doing some pro bono stuff for me—you know, dealing with some IRS nonsense for I.D., et cetera.”

I.D.? Id. Flora waited for Paul to explain their connection. He was smiling widely, dimpling them indiscriminately. Obviously, he found Esther quite amusing. Who was this man? Volunteering his time to the anti-Darwin lobby? She hoped to God Paul and Esther had never had sex.

“Paul was my father’s lawyer,” she felt she had to say. “He drew up his will. That’s how we met.”

“That’s intense,” Esther said. “And now you’re—”

“Biking,” Paul said. “You can’t put it off forever.” He nudged Flora with his elbow—a pal-like, brotherly nudge.

“Cool,” Esther said, turning from Paul to Flora. “So, Flo, give me your number and I’ll call you. I’ll ditch the missus”—she nodded toward Lily—“and we’ll catch up.”

“Good luck with that,” Paul said. “She doesn’t answer the phone.”

“That’s not true.” How did he know that? She hadn’t known he’d noticed.

“Okay, well then, here’s my card. I know, weird, I have cards, right? But call me sometime.” Across the bottom, below the contact information, ran a single line of Scripture printed in cursive:
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not
.

Esther thought herself so different, so far from all the other Darwinians; in truth, they were all seeking illumination, a way out of the darkness through their separate and opposing methodologies. But what was so bad about darkness? And wasn’t faith, of any sort, a whole lot of trouble to go to?

Flora slid Esther’s card into her back pocket and climbed onto her bike. How did one take leave of a believer? “Peace be with you”?
“
Take care, Esther,” she said, and she pedaled off down the path without waiting for Paul, into the uncomprehending darkness, to which she was accustomed.

Her parents might have let life go on as it was, but it was Dr. Berry who said no. A terrible thing had happened, but her father was still her father. She couldn’t keep avoiding him and his house; she couldn’t keep running away.

“You’re a horseback rider, you know the expression—‘You have to get back on the horse,’” Dr. Berry said.

That was a metaphor. Studying poetry in school, Flora had learned about metaphors. She’d known about them for a while, but now she understood them, mostly. Dr. Berry wasn’t really talking about horses. So it wasn’t worth explaining that she had never gotten on the horse in the first place.

“I don’t want to get back on,” Flora told her. “I didn’t like it that much to begin with.”

“Didn’t like what?”

“The house.” That’s what they were talking about, wasn’t it? “It’s not even our house anyway. It’s Darwin’s house.”

“You never liked it? Never liked living there?”

Flora thought it through. “I loved it. But I didn’t like it much.”

That earned a slight smile. “Is there anything you could do to make you like it more, to make it feel more like your house?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

She did not ever want to see those bunk beds again, with their glow-in-the-dark star stickers spelling out
FLORA
across the top headboard and
GEORGIA
across the bottom. She did not want to climb the steps they’d jumped from or see the emptiness of the third floor. “If it looked different, maybe. New furniture, a new wardrobe for the house.”

Flora guessed Dr. Berry would laugh, but she said, “Sounds like a good idea.”

So the next week, they went shopping, Flora and her father, performing their shrink-certified homework, at a department store in the mall, over an hour away. It was the longest they’d been alone together in months, and soon they exhausted all their topics of conversation.

He told her again how impressed he’d been with her Macbeth, her sense of the language. “It’s hard stuff,” he said. “But you’re a natural. As if you’d been speaking in iambic pentameter from the word
go
. You have poetry in your soul, Flora-Girl.”

“Thank you,” she said, formal and shy, as if he were someone else’s parent.

They were silent for a while and then he asked, “Any word from the Wizard?” and Flora turned and looked out the window at the other cars as they passed them.

“Not yet,” she said.

Her mother had gone shopping on the day they moved to Darwin, but she had made mistakes—the point had been to make mistakes. At the mall, in the home department of the windowless store, with its furniture arranged as though in rooms—bedroom after bedroom, den upon den—Flora was careful not to make mistakes. They bought a new rug and a new lamp and a new desk. Best of all, they bought a bed to replace her old bunk beds—a canopy bed, something she’d always coveted now hers, like the bed of a girl in a story. She couldn’t quite believe it was hers, strange to have the longing no longer necessary. If you wanted to, you could swing from the thin wrought-iron bars, from which a gauzy white fabric hung, but Flora didn’t want to.

The new furniture was delivered and the old given away and the workmen from Darwin Buildings and Grounds came and they pulled up the carpeting and they pulled down the paisley wallpaper, and Flora helped. It was her first afternoon in the house, and she spent it scraping, yanking, tearing, gummy grime embedding itself beneath her fingernails. Destruction felt good, though she saved a small strip of the paisley, folding it into the pocket of her pants and later tucking it into the top drawer of her new dresser. They listened to Top 40 on the radio on a scratchy, paint-flecked boom box, and drank cold soda Betsy brought up for them when it was time to take a break. “The guys,” as Betsy called them, teased Flora:
What, was she trying to take away their jobs, working so hard like that? Trying to make them look lazy?
She laughed and shook her head no. That was the thing about the President’s House—there were so many people around and it was never boring, never empty. It was her mother who had hated living in the house, not Flora.

A week later, there was newness—the bed where the dresser had been, and the lamp, which was a standing lamp, now by the bed, not on the desk, and the rug blue and pink and fringed, and on the walls they’d painted wide blue and pink stripes and the room looked like wrapping paper; it looked like a present.

The Tuesday after the room was done, she and her father went back to Ponzu for the first time in ages, the last time they would ever go.

The hostess asked, “Where’s your sister?”

Flora looked at her father. “It’s just us tonight,” he said.

On the car ride home, he said, “That Chinese restaurant in town is pretty good.”

The next day, Flora told her mother how much she liked the new room, how it was better being in the house than she’d thought it would be, thinking her mother would be glad for her, but what she said was, “Funny. He was so reluctant to change anything when we first moved in.” Though Flora could remember her mother saying, “Why bother?”

“Would you rather I hate it there?” Flora asked her.

“No, of course not.”

“You don’t think I should have a new room?”

“Don’t you think you and your father need to talk about all that’s happened, too?” her mother said. “Shouldn’t you tell him how you’re feeling? I don’t know that problems can be solved in the long run through furniture.”

Then Flora felt a little bad about the new room, too, in addition to loving it so much. She cared about the wrong things. She was materialistic, a bad thing to be in most places, but especially in Darwin. She was not too good for this world, like Georgia, who almost was. No, she was just bad enough for it. But the room was so beautiful—Flora couldn’t believe it was hers. It was just how she wanted it. She loved it guiltily, madly.

17

The Underworld

T
HEN THE SNOW CAME.
It formed itself into steep banks with a tough, crusty shell. You walked on top, yards above the earth, until your foot sank through the crust, half your leg suddenly vanishing. Shoveling the front steps became Flora’s new vocation, replacing the coffeepot cleaning. A large truck plowed her driveway, the noise of scraping and mechanical heaving that first morning rousing her rudely from bed, but by the time her coat and boots were on, it had scuffed itself away, and days later a bill arrived. This was life in the country. On the sidewalks, salt crunched underfoot. A snowman in professorial regalia appeared on the Darwin quad. But inside her father’s house, all was warm and dry. Paul’s friend the contractor had stayed the leaking of the roof, the sound of men working, fixing, laughing, filling the house for days.

Other things, like the snowplowing, that her father had set in place before his death still continued. Like Mrs. J. Because Flora’s father had left her money, Mrs. J. insisted on coming twice a month to clean, though Flora tried to tell her it seemed silly; she had plenty of time to do it herself, and the house, with just her in it, never got that messy. Or maybe Mrs. J. did not like to leave anyone too long alone in the house—Cynthia, Flora, anyone who wasn’t Lewis. Maybe she liked to make sure Flora hadn’t fucked anything up too irrevocably—the dog still breathing, the roof still standing.

Also, his subscription to
The New York Review of Books
. The big-headed cartoons unnerved Flora. She read only the classifieds. She imagined everyone read only the classifieds, with the exception of Paul, whom she’d caught in the act of actually reading other things. But she couldn’t get enough of the self-parody of intellectuals: “Deeply moral 50-something MWM seeks discreet and cultured 30-something WF for talks about Foucault and meaningful orgasms.” Curious omission of a comma—did that mean talks about meaningful orgasms? How riveting.

At first, it had seemed a novelty that she was permitted by law, even expected, to open another person’s mail—her father’s mail, like his journal, and his house, hers. The first and last credit-card bill had presented a puzzle. What, specifically, had he bought for $46.82 at Finch’s Books? Was it Cynthia he had taken to dinner at that seafood restaurant by the shore he liked so much? Even after she’d contacted everyone, with Paul’s help closed accounts and changed names, mail kept arriving for Lewis Dempsey; to the junk mailers of the world, he was still alive. Did he want a gym membership? Was he aware of recent alterations to the state’s recycling rules? Had he given up on animal rights? Even Darwin College still sent him the odd invitation: cocktails in honor of the young classicist who’d published a new translation of Thucydides; the Religion Department was hosting a panel of prominent atheists—would he be interested in attending?

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Flora made her way across snow and salt to class and back again, the rest of her quiet, studious week taking shape around the lectures, which were themselves bookended by her bedridden weekends with Paul. She loved the class, loved hearing Carpenter read aloud from the poems they discussed. She’d forgotten how much she loved being read to. When Carpenter read, he was a young man, lighter, his voice crisper, and less wrinkled. In her reading, Flora knew exactly what she liked, her taste clear and definite, and she loved when Carpenter pointed to the exact moments she had particularly noted and underlined, the feeling both of kinship and of knowing the right answer. She loved watching the relationships between students shift and evolve in the room, who sat with whom, and the sudden burst of noise as the class, released, lifted from their seats. Her favorites were the ones who looked nervous when they raised their hands and blushed when Carpenter approvingly responded. Had Flora wasted all her years in school? Why had she not liked it more then, when it mattered?

After class one day, Carpenter sidelined Flora. “Ms. Dempsey!” he called over the heads and headphones of undergraduates. “How are you finding the course?” His pale eyes through his pink glasses searched for affirmation.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “I love being back in the classroom. Though, really, it’s all new to me. I’ve never read Eliot, you know.”

“No!” Carpenter sounded breathless with dismay, as though she’d admitted to complete illiteracy. “Your father never encouraged it?”

“He did, some. But he didn’t like to press. And I was always more of a prose reader.”

“Surely one doesn’t have to choose between the two—as a reader or a writer!”

“True. I was just going to stop by the library and take out the edition of
The Waste Land
with Pound’s annotations,” she told him.

“Borrow mine!”

“That’s kind of you to offer.”

But Carpenter insisted. “It’s right in my office. Have you ever been down to the Darwin tunnels?” he asked. “I despise wearing an overcoat, so when on campus in the winter, I rarely see the light of day.” He laughed joyfully at his own idiosyncrasies.

“No, I never have,” Flora said.

The tunnels had been built over a century ago, back when winter was really winter, to connect all the original buildings of the school. They’d been closed in the late sixties, during the campus unrest. Now there was only restricted access—for faculty and students with disabilities. But Flora had been in them several times in high school. Her father had a master key—a remnant from the presidency—which she occasionally borrowed for a midnight swim in the college pool in the new gym, or the exploration of a deserted dorm in hot summer. She and Esther had sneaked into the tunnels late at night to get stoned and scare themselves.

“Allow me,” Carpenter said, offering the crook of his arm.

How to read his gallantry? Why was he courting her? A post humous poke at her father? It must be unsatisfying to have your nemesis die midfight and no one win or lose or repent or forgive—a Pyrrhic victory of sorts for Dempsey. The too-soon dead-honorable, tragic—have the distinct advantage of moral superiority. But then, she might also represent a comforting, nebulous zone for him—not a colleague, not a pupil, neither insider nor outsider, in between, and thus safe. And she had sought him out, not the other way around. Chosen his out of all the possible Darwin courses. Maybe he regretted his long animus with her father and was seizing in her arrival a chance to make it up.

The tunnels were like something out of a submarine—or a submarine movie: dark and fetid, mysterious pipes dripping questionable liquid into puddles below, long sections where one had to bow one’s head to pass by. Flora remembered, dimly, pretending with Esther to be on the hunt, or hunted, crooking their elbows, hands clenched around imaginary guns, looking behind in the paranoid style. Since that time, she’d learned claustrophobia. As Carpenter wound her through doorways and sudden rights and lefts, she imagined he was leading her to a place from where she could never return. Years later her skeleton would be discovered by a student on crutches, on his way to class.

“I never found the article you mentioned. About my father’s work,” she told him.

“No?”

“I looked online that afternoon but couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“The Internet is so labyrinthine, isn’t it? Retracing one’s circuitous search steps nearly impossible. Someone should write a contemporary adaptation of ‘Hansel and Gretel’—lost online, bread-crumb bookmarks pecked away by faulty memory and malicious worms.” He looked to her for appreciation.

She smiled. “Yes, true.”

It didn’t seem quite enough. “I’m sure I don’t remember where the article was. It’s possible I heard it in conversation, English Department chatter, that kind of thing. I’m afraid
my
old memory isn’t what it used to be.”

English Department chatter? Was Carpenter playing games? Or was he just a fond and foolish old man? They walked and crouched in silence, and were on a long stoop-backed stretch when Flora’s gaze fell upon Cynthia, walking toward them in her wildly colorful arrangement of vest, scarf, and tights. It was an awkward space to cross paths with anyone. Spotting her, Flora extricated herself from Carpenter’s arm.

“Hello, Flora,” Cynthia called out in surprise. “How are you, Sidney?”

“We tackled Yeats today—and now we gird ourselves for Eliot.” Seeing Cynthia’s confusion, he added, “The lovely Ms. Dempsey is auditing my class. Do you know she’s never read
The Waste Land?
I have the privilege of introducing her. She’s interested in Pound’s annotations.”

“How nice,” Cynthia said. “You’re really settling in.” She leaned in and kissed Flora stiffly on the cheek.

“Beginning to, I think.” Flora couldn’t read Cynthia’s expression. Wistful? Annoyed? Her thin lips were stretched taut, her eyes gray and distant. Had the happy couple once walked arm in arm together through this very tunnel? Had they kissed in the shadows when they found themselves alone? Was she in the thick of a memory?

“I bought a bicycle,” Flora offered, apropos of nothing. “Since I last saw you. Though now with the snow …”

It was an uncomfortable threesome, her relationship to each uncertain, and complicated by her father. They were watching her too closely. “This is my first trip down to the tunnels,” she said. “Darwin’s underworld. I’d thought they were a myth. And really, there is something mythical about them, isn’t there?”

Carpenter nodded; Cynthia shrugged. It was not unlike the feeling she’d had growing up, post-divorce, whenever she found herself in the same room as both her parents—the fear that she would somehow make things worse, the nervous silence, the compulsive need for dull talk. Her life was a series of triangles, her father often at the helm. Maybe it came from being an only child, the defining familial structure a threesome. Wasn’t that an expression: “Bad things happen in threes”? Flora remembered her mother cautioning her against play dates with two other friends when she was little. “Threes are unstable,” she’d said. “Somebody always gets left out.” But if her mother believed that to be true, why hadn’t she done something to alter the volatile makeup of their family before it was too late?

“You’re a difficult woman to reach,” Cynthia said. “I’ve even thought of buying you an answering machine.”

“A Luddite in the digital generation—how delightful!” Carpenter was jolliness itself.

“No, not really. The old one broke. I haven’t gotten around to buying a new one.”

She had disappointed him again. “Do you two see a lot of each other, then?” he asked.

“We’re getting to know each other,” Cynthia said. “We have her father in common.”

“Yes, yes, of course. It’s nice that you have each other to lean on during this difficult time.” Neither Flora nor Cynthia responded. “I was recently thumbing through
Reader as Understander,”
he went on. “Quite good, quite good. It almost deserved its reputation, I think. Dempsey had a way with words, didn’t he?” The way Carpenter said the phrase, it sounded not quite a compliment, as though her father were a charlatan, a huckster.

Cynthia stood motionless, her countergesture to the chronic nods of agreement. “He was a brilliant writer,” she said.

Carpenter turned to Flora. “You know, I read some drafts of the early chapters when he first came to Darwin. He’d started it before your family arrived, then put it on hold for a few years. But I was an early encourager, telling him he had to get back to it.”

“Really,” Cynthia said. “No, I didn’t know that.”

It seemed true, sincere. Had that, then, been the source of the rift—Carpenter’s early edits?

“Do you have a minute? Can I show you something?” Cynthia asked Flora, her back to him. “It’s just in my office.” She pointed back in the direction from which Flora had come. “It’s part of the reason I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Professor Carpenter and I were just—”

“No, no, Ms. Dempsey, this sounds far more urgent. I’ll bring the book to our next class.”

“If you’re sure you don’t mind,” Flora said, anxious for one of them to be gone. “Thanks so much.”

“Right. Yes, well, if you’ll excuse me, ladies,” he said. “I have office hours to attend to. Nice to see you both.” He bowed his head and retreated. They watched him scurry, crablike, away.

“So,” Cynthia said as soon as he was out of sight. “You two have become quite chummy.” Her disapproval was excessive, as though she’d caught them together in bed. “I’m puzzled, Flora. Your father couldn’t stand that man. It strikes me as more than a little odd that you’ve chosen to study with him.”

She said “puzzled,” but she meant
pissed
. It was the first time Flora had seen her bite. “We’re hardly chummy,” she replied. “I thought I should know something more about poetry, for my new role, as my father’s literary executor. His was the only poetry lecture available this semester.”

Cynthia did not look chagrined, as Flora hoped she might, her expression preoccupied, as if she hadn’t been listening. They walked without speaking, ducking in unison to avoid the interstices of the school—the veins and arteries of plumbing and electricity—like navigating the inside of a body, with odors foul and strange, and knots of activity that looked destined to fail. When they emerged in the Art History building, Flora caught a glimpse of pink sky and breathed. The world still existed.