The Blue Bistro (23 page)

“Not tonight,” Thatcher said. “Is that okay?”

“Of course.”

Thatcher removed his blazer and laid it across Adrienne’s computer table. Then he shed his loafers and his watch and his belt and he climbed into bed. Adrienne was nude—her towel had long ago been mixed up with the covers—and when he realized this fact, he inhaled a sharp breath.

“Sorry,” she said. “I showered when I got home, and . . .”

He kissed her and Adrienne was filled with awe. How had she survived ten days without his mouth on hers, his tongue, his lips, his body pressed against her body? How had she survived? It felt as though she had gone ten days without food, without water. Because she was hungry for him. She was starved.

October 1, 2002

Dear Sully,

The one thing I remember my mother telling me about love was that you couldn’t hunt it down or sniff it out. Like all great mysteries in the world, my mother said, it just happened.

This summer was the best summer of my life. But although I wished for it and wanted it, love didn’t happen to me the way it happened to you. I can’t explain it any better than that. I hope someday you’ll forgive me for taking off like this, without warning, without good-bye. I thought this would be easiest—for me, certainly—but also for you.

If there was something else I could say, I would say it. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Adrienne

Before she met Thatcher, Adrienne had been down the road and around the bend with three and a half other men. The first, chronologically, was her academic adviser during her fifth year of college. Adrienne was twenty-two years old, trying to earn enough credits to graduate from Florida State. Her transcript—with courses from IU Bloomington and Vanderbilt, and AP credits from her high school in Iowa, not to mention two semesters at Florida State—looked like a patchwork quilt and smacked (so her father claimed) of a half-baked effort that was draining him of his savings. She had plenty of class hours and good grades but nothing that equaled a major. She had started out as elementary ed at IU, then at Vandy she switched to sociology with a minor in art history. Florida State didn’t have a sociology major, though they did have anthropology, which she could qualify for with twenty-six more credits. Or she could go the route of art history, but she felt this wasn’t a major that would ever present any career opportunities, and her father agreed.

Thus, the academic adviser.

The first time Adrienne met with Will Kovak, she barely
noticed him. She was too agitated about her tattered state of affairs. Her father was right: She wasn’t taking college seriously, she was flitting around, unwilling to commit to a major or even a school. Sure, some people transferred once, but twice? She hadn’t made a lasting friendship or held on to a single interest since her mother died. She had toyed around with notions of law school (everyone she knew who didn’t have long-term concrete goals applied to law school); she considered becoming a personal trainer; she had taken a course called African Drumming and really enjoyed it; she wondered if she should drop out of school and get a job. But where? Doing what? Her father and Mavis pelted her with possible vocations. Mavis thought she should teach the deaf. Her father thought she should take the hygienist’s courses and join him in practice. Both of them thought she should see a shrink. With all these disturbing notions flooding her mind, Will Kovak registered only as a body behind a desk. His office was dark; the venetian blinds were pulled against the strong Florida sun. She could hardly see him. All Adrienne cared about was her transcript, which lay on his desk like a trauma patient. Could he save it?

“Psychology,” Will said, after reviewing Adrienne’s file for fifteen silent minutes, during which he referenced the college manual four times. “I can get you out of here in January with a degree in psychology if you take five classes this semester.”

Psychology?
Adrienne laughed. She could be her own shrink! But psychology had a scientific, even medical, sound that would please her father. Without stopping to think, Adrienne stepped behind Will Kovak’s desk and hugged him around the shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

He was stiff; he gave her an embarrassed smile. “You’re, uh, welcome,” he said.

Adrienne met with Will Kovak a second time to figure out what the five classes would be and then a third time to have him sign her add–drop slip. It was during this third visit that Adrienne began to wonder about him. He was an associate professor of world literature, but he was only twenty-nine.
And he was cute, in a bookish way, with longish hair that curled at the neck and rimless glasses. Adrienne had hooked up with a few guys at beer parties, but these guys struck her as young and clueless, and because Florida State was as big as some developing countries, she never had to see them again. She hadn’t been on a date since her first junior year at Vanderbilt, when Perry Russell took her out for fried chicken then talked her out of her virginity. She was ready for something different. She asked Will out for coffee, and after a very long, very awkward silence with Adrienne standing there in the near-dark and Will staring at his folded hands, he said yes.

In this way, the first real relationship of Adrienne’s life began. She entered the peculiar universe of young academics. It seemed to Adrienne that in these circles the person with the most abstemious lifestyle was the most worthy of admiration. Adrienne and Will attended the free foreign film series sponsored by the university, they went to readings at the bookstore, they went for coffee, and, at Adrienne’s insistence, splurged on the occasional beer at Bullwinkle’s. They studied together at the library and they spent every night making love on Will’s futon in the condominium unit that his parents bankrolled. The condo had a tiled bathroom and a gourmet kitchen with an island and granite countertops, but it was as if Will were embarrassed by these amenities and, to make up for them, he kept the rest of the condo as spartan as possible. The living room was dominated by two card tables pushed together and covered with an Indian print tapestry and piled with books and Will’s laptop computer (also bankrolled by the parents). The bedroom had just the futon mattress on the floor, a row of votive candles on the windowsill, and a boom box on which Will played his favorite kind of CD—the movie soundtrack.

Adrienne was out of place from the beginning. Amid all the older, unwashed, ramen–noodle eating, Edward Said–reading, quiet smart people, she was a dilettante undergrad who had a steady source of cash from her doting dentist father. She liked to sit by the pool, she liked to watch David Letterman,
she had zero interest in grad school. Every so often, Will would drag Adrienne to a “party” thrown by one of his teaching assistant friends. These were usually held in an un-air-conditioned studio apartment where graduate students and young professors, many of them foreign, drank very cheap Chianti, smoked clove cigarettes, listened to Balinese gamelan music, and talked about topics so erudite they might as well have been speaking another language. Adrienne hated these parties, and when she complained about them to Will, he confessed that he hated them, too, but the danger in not going was that they might gossip about him.

Will was quiet and shy and extremely concerned about what his older and more established colleagues thought about him, but he excelled at intimacy—at lighting the votive candles and putting on soft music and sharing things about himself. Adrienne knew he was an only child, that his parents lived in a Manhattan brownstone on Seventy-second and Fifth Avenue; she knew he occasionally smoked pot before lecturing because it helped him to relax; she knew the names and complete histories of his six previous girlfriends (one of whom was his second cousin, who sometimes called late at night from her job as night auditor at Donald Trump’s posh resort in Palm Beach); she knew the long and Byzantine road that led Will to his dissertation topic about
War and Peace.
It bothered Will that Adrienne never talked about herself. “Tell me about your childhood,” he said.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“What about your parents?”

“What about them?”

“What are they like?”

“Why are you asking me so many questions?”

“Because I want to know you,” he said. “Tell me about your first kiss, your last boyfriend. Tell me
something.
”

“I can’t,” she said. She was afraid if she opened her mouth, a lie would pop out. That was how it always happened.

“You can,” Will said. “You just don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” she admitted.

“You don’t trust me,” Will said. He would usually end up
leaving the bedroom and falling asleep on the bare wooden floor in front of his computer. These fights bothered Adrienne only slightly. It was a small price to pay for her privacy.

When the semester ended and Adrienne graduated, Dr. Don flew to Tallahassee for the ceremony. On the way to the airport to pick him up, Will asked, “Why isn’t your mother coming?”

Adrienne could remember staring out the window at the hot, green Florida hills. She yearned to disappear in them. Adrienne’s roommate at Vanderbilt had asked her this very same question when Dr. Don showed up alone for parents’ weekend, and Adrienne had told the roommate that Rosalie stayed home because Adrienne’s brother, Jonathan, was very sick.

“Well,” Adrienne said. “Because she’s dead.”

“Dead? Your mother’s dead?”

“This is your exit,” Adrienne said.

Dr. Don took Adrienne and Will to Michelsen’s Farm House for dinner, and in those three hours, Will mined Dr. Don for every conceivable detail of Adrienne’s childhood—including, after two bottles of wine, the maudlin story of Rosalie’s illness. Will gobbled up every word; Adrienne sat in astounded silence. She could not believe her father was emoting like this with a virtual stranger.

Dr. Don kept slapping Will on the back. “Professor at twenty-nine . . . really going places.” Later, to Adrienne, he said, “Quiet guy, but he’s got a strong handshake and a nice smile. And he is solely responsible for getting you out of this place before your thirtieth birthday.”

“Funny, Dad.”

“I give him credit. A professor at twenty-nine!”

“Don’t get attached,” Adrienne said.

“Why not?”

“I’m breaking up with him tomorrow.”

“Oh, honey, no. Not because of me? If I said I hated him, would you stay together? I hated him.”

Adrienne called Will the next day to tell him it was over, and she could hear the anguish in his voice reverberating through his near-empty apartment. “I thought after last night that our relationship was heading in a new direction,” he said. “I feel like I know you so much better now.”

“I’m sorry?” Adrienne said.

Ten minutes after she hung up, Adrienne called him back. She wanted his cousin’s phone number.

“Why?” he said.

“Because,” she said. “I want to work with her.”