Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (16 page)

Joanne's expression is mocking:
Speak for yourself.
“No one's forcing her to do the extra reading.”

“Joanne, I know your aim is to help. But you've been a graduate student. If a professor on your dissertation committee strongly suggests a book, you're going to read it. Perhaps you're unaware that because of your suggestions, Elizabeth has already requested to have her defense date pushed back?”

Joanne offers a noncommittal shrug.

“You and I know Elizabeth is one of the brightest sparks to come through this department in years. She ought to sail through the dissertation process. She should be in the downhill stage by now. Instead she's getting more and more anxious. We've all seen students who are burnt out by the time they get their Ph.D.s. Most recover, but some don't. Let's not put Elizabeth in that position. I'm her adviser, and at this point any time I ask her about her progress she looks as though I'm with the torture squad.”

Joanne's smile is icy. “I'm sorry you don't have a better relationship with your advisee.”

From the book-lined wall behind Joanne, Victoria looks up, her face heavy with disapproval and a strange kind of pity.

“Joanne.” I keep my tone deliberate. “If this is something between you and me, let's settle it, rather than playing it out through Elizabeth.”

She takes her folder from the coffee table and centers it, almost
lovingly, under her arm. “My dear,” she says, “maybe everything isn't about
you.
”

“Joanne,” Victoria says in a low voice.

Joanne's words have lifted me to the balls of my feet, where I balance, calves trembling. “I'm not going to be dragged into a contest of insults. Elizabeth is an adult and free to choose her own course. I simply ask that you consider whether your advice is in her best interest.”

Joanne presses her lips into the form of a smile. “You've made your point.”

Exit Joanne.

Victoria, frowning, follows her without a glance at me or Jeff.

I face the shelves, bouncing lightly on the balls of my feet, scanning book spines blankly. From the sofa pillows behind me comes a soft yowl.

“
Jesus!
” I wheel to face Jeff. “Don't give me that bullshit about women's arguments being catfights. This is serious.”

Jeff emerges from the sofa like a Cheshire, sardonic grin first. “
Why
is it serious? Elizabeth may be timid, but surely she can take care of herself. And if she can't, she'll need to learn. If she wants a career in academia, she's got to develop some basic political survival skills. You can't do it for her. Your five-alarm response is uncalled for.”

“I disagree.”

“Why? Tracy, Joanne can't take criticism. She never could, and this semester she's got a bug up her butt, who knows why, and nothing you or I do is going to change that. Is she obnoxious? Of course she is. Plenty of people are. Why is this worth fomenting World War Three?”

“You think
I'm
the one fomenting?”

He blows me a kiss.

I have no rebuttal. What appeared logical a few moments ago now seems foolish. But I recall the cold blue light sliding across Elizabeth's face and I know that Jeff is wrong. “I'm not trying to belittle Elizabeth's ability to take care of herself,” I say. “But she's got the worst case of good-student compulsion I've ever seen. And it's going to get her in trouble.”

“Does it occur to you you're being a bit controlling about this?”
Eileen's cart rattles by the faculty-room door at an excruciatingly slow pace. Stubbing the toe of my shoe into the carpet, I wait for it to turn down the far corridor.

“You think I am?”

Jeff's hands hover over his keyboard. “Life will be much easier,” he says, “if you let this be Elizabeth's problem.” His gaze returns to his laptop. I watch his eyes move down the screen. His fingers tap restlessly. “Great,” he murmurs. “More e-mailed excuses from my worst student.” He fires off a reply. Then his hands stop moving. “What's this now?” He falls silent. In the space of a minute his expression changes from skeptical to stunned to boyish. I wait for him to speak.

“The chairman makes his move,” Jeff says softly.

“What chairman?”

“Emory.” His eyes are still on the screen. “They've been given a line for a senior hire. They're inviting me to apply—give a job talk, meet the deans, the whole thing.” He blows out air, as if exhaling a long draw of cigarette smoke. “Richard told them last month that he was considering leaving to be with me, but we didn't think they'd move so fast. Coca-Cola must be doling out that cash.” He lets out a sharp laugh. “So Emory is going to try to cherry-pick me.” He looks up. “I like the sound of that. I can be the cherry-cola prof of Brit lit. Of course they'd have to offer me tenure. That's going to require playing some serious hardball.”

“You'd leave me here with White Fang?”

“In a heartbeat,” he says. His eyes drop back to his screen. He types rapidly.

A few moments pass before he looks up. “Oh, did I miss that cue?” He shuts his laptop, sets it on the sofa, stands, and regards me gravely. Then he startles me with a strong hug. “You're the one thing about this department I'd miss.”

“Honestly?” I say, my chin on his shoulder.

He speaks the words slowly, his narrow chest thrumming. “You make this place marginally human.”

“That, Jeff, is the nicest thing anyone's said to me in all my years in this department. Pathetic, but true.”

Pulling back, he chucks me under the chin.

The door opens and there's a hoarse gasp. “Oh. Terribly sorry.” Paleozoic, pipe in hand, actually throws a hand over his eyes to
prevent himself from seeing whatever untoward acts Jeff and I might be up to, standing here fully clothed in the faculty lounge. Ash scatters onto the carpet. Paleozoic looks confusedly at it, embarrassment stamped on his face.

Jeff snorts. “No call to be sorry.”

“I don't need to know,” Paleozoic wheezes, warding off enlightenment with an airy, panicked wave. And is gone.

Late at night, lying on my back with one leg close enough to feel the warm fuzz of George's, it strikes me: I am, for all the advice I have dispatched on the subject, utterly lacking in rules about relationships. During the three and a half weeks I have known George, I have been on drugs. Experiencing Technicolor flashbacks to here and now. Prone to fears and euphorias, not responsible for my actions. Love, as far as I can make it out, is contiguous with panic.

The digital clock glows green by the bed. George is fast asleep. I flip my pillow, adjust the covers.

I know a few rules of life. There is the Statute of Irrelevant Authority, which holds that if you shoot a crumpled paper across the room in the middle of a meeting, and if it drops right into the trash can, then your comments will instantly and thereafter be heard with more respect.
If she can do that, what else can she do?

Then there is the Cookie Thief Paradigm: Sometimes it is better to ask forgiveness than permission.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to eat those.

Beside me, George sighs. Who ever heard of anyone sighing in his sleep? I rest gingerly on the pillow and wonder whether this staggering weariness portends disaster.
A weary man,
I think.
A man exhausted by his choices.
My eyes open in the dark room, I conjure the bleakness of his gaze after a demanding day at work, and try to fathom what inner darkness it might signify. And remember a long-ago March weekend Hannah and I spent in Boston. It was evening; Hannah and I paused on a footbridge over the Charles River to look over the frozen, glinting surface, and it was then that the world came apart. Without warning there was movement all around. What should have been solid fractured and shifted; the horizon spun toward me in slow motion.
I was twenty and recognized immediately that there was something wrong with me—a stroke, a heart attack, surely there was some terrible clinical name for this dizziness that set me clinging to the bridge's stonework. Only as the world's peculiar motion accelerated did I understand that I was fine. That my panic was due not to disaster but to the simple fact of change. The river had, at that very moment, broken. Chunks of ice turned, swirled deliberately, entered widening channels of black water. Hannah and I ran from side to side of the bridge as the jigsaw that had been Boston's winter spun and floated downriver, faster, irreversible, heading for the bay. Spring.

At two in the morning, with a man I've known only twenty-four days sighing in his sleep beside me, this metaphor is utterly unconvincing.

The Grocery Checkout Proviso: The more things you care about, the more vulnerable you are. If you are part of that epicurean minority in this country that is still offended by violations of the English language, you will be slapped in the face every time you stand in line at the market.
FIFTEEN ITEMS OR LESS
. Caring passionately about grammar—caring passionately about anything most of humanity doesn't care about—is like poking a giant hole in your life and letting the wind blow everything around. Is like walking out your door with a big sign that says
PLEASE FUCK WITH ME
. The villain will seize the advantage, take hostages. For every single new thing or person you love, your vulnerability increases by a factor of precisely three billion. Falling in love is absurd. I am an absurd person.

Afternoon. Turning to Hannah for sanity, I find her in her apartment wiping vomit from the toilet seat.

Hannah is in her seventh month, beautiful, and head-turningly pregnant as she fills me in on the latest: Elijah, now napping, has mostly recovered from his bug, but the cough still makes him throw up. Refusing my offer of help, she finishes wiping the toilet and douses the area with air freshener. I sit on the sill of her tub—a perch where I've been advised through more troubles than I wish to recall. Hannah flips a wrung-out sponge onto a shelf, washes her hands, then flicks droplets of water onto my upturned face.

“Can you clip my toenails?” She sits on the closed toilet lid and grins saucily at me. “Don't worry, I washed my feet. I can't reach
them over my belly, but I'm pretty sure I squirted liquid soap down there sometime in the last month.”

I make much of wrinkling my nose. “You're lucky I like you.” Then I kneel on the bathroom mat, remove her thick socks, and take her broad and perfectly clean feet in my hands. She passes me the clipper and leans her head luxuriously against the rolls of toilet paper stacked on the tank of the commode. “Adam was by yesterday afternoon, to drop off a CD he pirated for Ed.”

I survey her pale, overgrown toenails, then probe delicately with the clipper. Adam has a new job, with a company that does something with software marketing. Fortunately the work—which Adam has refused to describe to me in detail, calling the very description a waste of breath—hasn't cut into his music-pirating time. Most afternoons he drops by Hannah's en route to his Ultimate Frisbee practice to help himself to leftovers and overstimulate Elijah. According to Hannah, she's now living the life of Penelope, but with a twist: each day she works to raise her child right, and Adam comes along and undoes the day's lessons.

“Turns out he and Kim are off again,” she says sleepily.

“Did I know they'd been on?”

“They were more on than ever before. They were free agents while Adam was abroad, but they got back together as soon as he returned. Adam wanted to live with her.”

“He wanted to
live
with her?”

“Yup,” says Hannah. “But Kim said she wasn't ready to stop dating other people.”

“Is he having a tough time about it?”

“Well . . .” From my position, I can see only Hannah's belly and her upturned chin, which bobs lazily as she speaks. “He's sad. But he's also okay. He says Kim is a
neat girl.
” Hannah's imitation of her brother is gentle. “And he knows she cares about him. He says a commitment is something you have to be ready to make. And if Kim isn't ready there's no point quizzing her for explanations.” Hannah rolls her head forward off the toilet paper spools. “He says he's not psyched to just keep dating her, not unless it's for real.”

“You know,” I say. “Adam can be impressive.”

“You planning on clipping my nails?”

I've been holding Hannah's feet as though they were eggshell china; now I work the clipper around calluses and do my duty in silence.

“I can't get over how great George was with Elijah,” she says once more.

I brought George over for a spaghetti dinner with Hannah and Elijah on Wednesday night. We've already discussed Hannah's impressions of George by phone, Hannah's voice radiating approval. But it's a pleasure, I admit, to hear her rehash in person.

“He's such a good guy, Tracy. I really like this one. Of course, Ed now says
he
should have been here on Wednesday to give his stamp of approval. But if I'd said the least word of encouragement about Ed joining us for dinner he'd gladly have skipped out on his plan to work late that night. Then he would have spent half of this weekend in the office to make up for it, and I'd have been on my own here, with Elijah sick.”

I wait to give Hannah a chance to say more about Ed, though I know she won't. Out of respect for her I make it my policy not to pry, though it seems to me that Ed could do more to help her. Back in college Hannah never seemed to think Ed withholding; rather, she was grateful for his every utterance. Barely complaining, she put up with the dozen ways he kept her waiting. She thought his humor wry, while I privately found it careless of her. When, just after graduation, he finally broke up with her to go trekking, I thought it was all over but the cleanup; cautiously I began to voice some of what I'd thought all along. But Hannah couldn't stop grieving. A full year of Hannah's grief passed before Ed returned to the United States, humbled by malaria and the thunderbolt conviction that Hannah was the one. And he's been devoted ever since, placing himself in Hannah's hands with almost childlike trust. I can only assume this was what Hannah wanted—a man she could shepherd along. When they got engaged, I had to eat my words. I promised her I was thrilled for her happiness. Besides, I said, how would
I
have the slightest idea what made a good marriage? I'd never seen one. Neither, Hannah admitted reluctantly, had she. Neither, for that matter, had Ed, whose parents had divorced when he was ten. Hannah planned the wedding in a square reception hall; that way if things heated up between the exes someone could
blow a whistle . . . and each parent (Hannah joked until the joke wore thin) could retreat to his or her corner.