Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (19 page)

There is a thin tapping from the hall: my excuse for a moment away from Hawthorne, Blithedale, and Elizabeth, all mired in romanticisms irrelevant to mine. With a brisk “back in a second” to Elizabeth, I rise.

In the hallway Jeff is hanging a framed photograph on his office door. The black-and-white image appears to be a picture of the nave of an enormous church, but its wooden arches and shadows stretch and twist in a way that subtly defies gravity.

Jeff gives the nail a final tap. “It's by a local photographer,” he says.

I move closer. The photograph is indeed an image of a church, but projected onto a man's naked shoulder and back.

Hammer in hand, Jeff eyes the poster. “Is it straight?”

“On
your
door?”

He folds his arms: Very funny.

“Why don't you just tell him you're gay?”

Jeff tuts. “Too easy. I want to see how long it takes him on his own. I considered hanging a gay-pride flag on my door, but I didn't think he'd know what it meant.”

“What is it about toying with Paleozoic that so appeals to you?”

“Tracy, my friend, I have selectively played straight more times in my life than you'll ever know. Now I've got tenure. I'm entitled to the small pleasure of fucking with the emeritus. Besides”—he lowers his voice even further—“I go down next week for my job talk.”

“To Atlanta?”

He answers with a slow-hatching grin.

My headache, momentarily forgotten, returns with a hard throb above my right eye. “You're serious about this?”

With an expression of barely attained forbearance, he slides the hammer back into his briefcase and sets a hand on my shoulder. “Yes.”

“I hate you.”

“Hate you too.” He blows me a kiss. “Did you hear the latest from Eileen?”

“You're diverting me.”

“I think you'll like this diversion.” He glances down the hall, then his thin lips form a smirk. “Joanne's furious. Some student was entering those summaries of student evaluations into the undergrad course guidebook, and instead of typing a description of Joanne's lectures as ‘lucid' the kid typed ‘lurid.'”

“No.”

“Oh yes.”

“That's terribly unfortunate.” My poker face holds for a millisecond, then dissolves under Jeff's blue stare. “It's also the funniest thing I've ever heard.”

“There are seven hundred copies out. The head of the student committee came to Joanne's office to apologize, and she told him he could save his breath. She called it, and I believe this is an exact quote, ‘a puerile act of sabotage.' The world is conspiring against our dear Joanne.”

“I want to take that student out to lunch.”

“Now, now,” sings Jeff. “It's childish to bear ill will against a colleague.” He pins me, momentarily, with a disapproving frown. Then the Cheshire cat grins once more, leaving me with the familiar queasy sensation of lagging a step behind Jeff. And wondering yet again whether Richard, too, finds it impossible to be certain of Jeff at times like this—or whether he's able to step inside the perimeter that separates Jeff from the rest of us mortals, fathom the well-oiled gears, wind and unwind the highly polished clock that is his lover.

Back in my office, I find Elizabeth snoring, her head tilted against the wall. I consider waking her, then decide against it. She wouldn't take my advice about rejecting unnecessary work—now she's exhausted. If she's late for a class because she was desperate for a catnap, let it happen. I wash my hands of this. I slide her paper to the side of my desk, open my laptop, and turn my attention to the statement I'm composing for my tenure packet. I've been given a December tenure meeting date: relatively late in the season due to some faculty scheduling conflicts, but Jeff thinks I'll be all right. “Just make the packet as thunderous as God,” he
said. I've taken him at his word, shaping every publication and official kudo into a dossier that is, to my pleasant surprise, intimidating.

When Jeff comes to rouse me for lunch I don't hear his approach, so engrossed have I become in blending confidence and modesty in a proportion designed to impress anyone on the tenure committee who hasn't yet formed an opinion of me. I can compare Faulkner to Fellini using only my abdominal muscles. I can balance everything Henry James ever wrote on the tip of my nose. I like Gertrude Stein.

“Hungry?” Jeff swings my door wide.

I glance at the clock. Over an hour has passed since I installed myself at my desk. Elizabeth hasn't stirred.

Jeff crosses his arms and slumps his lean frame against the door-jamb, in his black-on-black outfit looking more than ever like a hieroglyph for boredom. With an amused nod, he indicates Elizabeth. “What's with her?”

“She's sleeping it off. She was in the library all night.”

“How could she have been in the library all night?”

At which moment I realize what pique and undercaffeination blinded me to earlier: the library closes at eleven.

“She was probably just out clubbing, having a hot night with a half-dozen bodybuilders,” says Jeff. “Mousy grad student by day, street troller by night. Let her have her rest.”

But I'm embarrassed: for letting a student sleep in my office; for failing to catch the contradiction in her library story; most of all, for being made a fool of. I defended Elizabeth to Joanne, and in doing so worsened an obscure enmity that's reared its head just as my tenure review process is beginning. For thanks I get an idiotic, undergraduate-level lie about a library all-nighter.

It takes several repetitions of her name and a firm shake to wake her. My hand on her shoulder feels like a violation, and I withdraw it the instant her eyelids flutter. “Elizabeth,” I repeat.

“Yes, I'm sorry.” She struggles upright.

“I've got a question for you.”

Her gaze lolls around the office, lands on my desk, my computer, me. “Oh shit,” she murmurs, and her pale cheeks flush a hot red. From the doorway Jeff watches with a smirk.

“
How
were you in the library all night last night?”

She answers me with obvious relief at not being asked a more difficult question. “I broke in.”

With a low whistle, Jeff steps inside and closes my office door. “Beg your pardon?”

Elizabeth looks from me to him. Then her dark eyes come home to rest on mine. I feel their tentative weight.

A powerful, irrational sense of responsibility turns my voice hoarse. “Tell us,” I say. “It's okay.”

“The bell had already rung, and I hadn't left, and the guard found me on his last round through the stacks. He was pretty mad. So I pretended to leave, and while he was on his walkie-talkie I jumped the barrier and slipped back inside.” She pauses, then utters a soft hiccup of a giggle. “He didn't even see me. I spent the night in the rare books room.” She laughs again, louder this time, and with edge.

I picture the lithe form of a cat burglar sailing over the barrier, leaping balletically between shadows to claim the orgiastic delights of two-hundred-year-old volumes. Elizabeth's slim figure suddenly looks a good bit less sickly.

“Wasn't it dark?” asks Jeff, sounding mildly impressed. I shoot him a look: we ought to be expressing concern, not fascination.

Grinning at Jeff like a co-conspirator, Elizabeth plunges an arm into her backpack and fishes out a small plastic contraption, which she straps onto her forehead. She reaches up to flip a switch and the headlamp glares blue-white into my eyes.

“I got it at an outdoor goods store.”

Jeff and I squint in turn as she looks at each of us for approval. “Oh, sorry.” She shields the bulb until she's able to find the switch.

As she twists to return the extinguished headlamp to her backpack, the words run through my head:
canary in a coal mine.

I turn to Jeff. He gives me a mocking salute:
this one's yours.
With an exaggerated flourish, he bows to Elizabeth, now watching us expectantly from her seat. “I'd love to stay and chat with you ladies, but I've an appointment with the Queen.” He leaves, closing the door firmly behind him.

“Elizabeth,” I begin, and then don't know how to continue. To gain time, I make a show of pulling her MLA paper toward me and lowering my head as if reading. For a while I stare blankly at
the first page, considering: Is this just the mild mania of an overtaxed graduate student? Or is she losing her grip? And if she isn't, and if I make a fuss about protecting her well-being, how badly will I shoot myself in the foot? Absently I flip to the second page, and scan the opening paragraph of an entirely new paper.

It has been asserted (see Farrell and Gray's
Crying After the Moon: Calvino and His World
) that Italo Calvino's magical universe had primarily Cuban and European antecedents. Yet a brief look at some nineteenth-century American texts—texts available in both Cuba and Italy during Calvino's youth—may indicate that his literary influence also included, to a significant degree, American Romantic writers.

I raise my eyes. “I thought you were writing about Hawthorne.”

“Oh, sorry. Did I leave the opening page of the Hawthorne draft there? You can throw that out. The new paper, the one I want you to look at, is about Calvino. I changed my mind last night.”

I read on, flipping pages slowly. Fifteen minutes later I look up to find Elizabeth nibbling dreamily on the nails of one hand.

The paper is gold. Once more Elizabeth has taken a common critical assumption, documented its origins, then provided enough counterevidence to flip it on its head. Whatever is going on with Elizabeth, her mind is obviously as lucid as ever, faulty margins notwithstanding. It occurs to me that with some sleep this might be fine. Straightening the pages under Elizabeth's gaze, I ask myself what Victoria would do if she were here. It's the kind of situation she would know how to handle graciously: attending to her younger colleagues' needs while giving their emotional lives a respectfully wide berth. Expressing concern without being nosy.

I don't ask Elizabeth why she broke into the library. “Go home,” I say in as firm and kind a voice as I can muster. “Get some sleep. You've written a terrific paper. Now call in sick.”

“But I've got work to—”

“Go home, Elizabeth. Sleep deprivation is for political prisoners. Go home and get yourself back on track.”

She stands and swings her pack across her shoulder. There's an audible thud as it connects with her back. I wince, but she doesn't seem to notice. As she shrugs her way into the straps I rise and open the door for her.

“Thanks,” she breathes. Leaving my office, she accelerates to a rapid stride, the echoes of her footfalls crowding the hall as though one step at a time were not enough for her.

“Sleep,” I say, as she rounds the corner and disappears.

The breeze whips the deck of the ferry. This is our fifth consecutive joy ride between Manhattan and Staten Island—a full afternoon's cruise for free, New York's most accessible thrill for low-budget lovers.

The ferry churns through sparkling water, the day so bright I regret leaving my sunglasses at home. George balls the wax paper from his picnic sandwich and stuffs it into our makeshift trash bag. “How's Yolanda?” he asks.

“Much better, I think—despite the extension. She'd been counting the days until closing night, so I thought she'd lose it when she learned the play is reopening in SoHo next month.” I squint at the water. “But maybe it's therapeutic, having to face the kind of guy she falls for and act out the consequences every night. She got hit on by some dancer at a party this week, the smooth-operator sort she usually flips over. And she refused him. Never, in all the years I've known her, have I heard of Yolanda saying no to a well-polished bad apple.” I turn and watch the horizon of Staten Island recede. “This Bill thing has been worse than her usual, which is saying a lot. Yolanda has had a rough go of it.”

He grimaces. “I sympathize. The world can be a forest of wrong people.”

“And she lets her hopes soar for each one. Which is part of the beauty of Yolanda.”

“Well, didn't you?”

The wind picks up; I brace myself against the railing. “Not the same way,” I say. “I hoped to fall in love. But I was pretty content in the meanwhile.”

He tilts his head, studying his orange juice container. “Still, haven't you been hungry to meet the right person and get started with life?”

“I've wanted to meet someone, yes. But I think my life has already started.”

Inverting the container, he takes the last swig, then wraps an arm around me and pulls me close. “I've lived for it.”

“What about everything else going on in your life?”,

“It's so much water treading. Important water treading. But not the real thing.”

“. . . which is finding someone, and making that life wave go forward?”

He laughs, but his face is earnest as he answers. “That's how I feel, anyway. Love, kids, the future. That, and taking care of the ones who raised you. If you're able.” He hesitates, watching me. “I think it's important to understand your priorities, and try to steer so you don't end up sorry. Life is finite.”

The ferry chugs heavily through the harbor. The Manhattan terminal, blanched by the autumn sunshine, comes into view. We near the dock.

For me, moving forward has meant writing the next paper, putting together a tenure packet; debunking, subverting, inverting. I've committed myself to a life of service to literature. The quotidian is a waste of time. I don't send holiday cards—it only encourages people to expect them next year. I don't darn socks. People need to eat? Hence the discovery, in 1645, of takeout. My salary is largely subinvestment-level, my parents give no indication of needing or desiring help, my future is abstract, and health is not something that occupies my attention. I think about my responsibilities to my “family unit” as frequently as I think about taxes—which is to say only as often as necessary to stay out of trouble.