Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (20 page)

“You've thought about some topics more than I have,” I say, leaning against him as the ferry slows. “You think about mortality. Personally, I like a little denial. I concede I have a bladder; it's made itself evident. I suspect, though, that I might not have a liver—it's never so much as cleared its throat. I certainly don't have islets of Langerhans.”

George absorbs this without comment, but his smile says,
What a beautiful fable.

The notion that he might think me immature catches me off-guard. As the ferry bumps gently into its dock, I argue silently in my own defense. So what if we'll all get sick and need help and die? So what if things can end badly with no appeal? The beauty of life is in denying mortality, not arranging your life around it.
Soaring has everything to do with amnesia about the ground. Why shouldn't we do it as long as possible?

“Do you think I'm fatuous?” I say.

“Nope,” he says. As the dispersing passengers fan out around us, he stops on the landing and takes me by the shoulders. “Tracy, I think you're very slender.”

We walk north in a silence relieved only by the sounds of traffic. I tread the cracked pavement as faintly as though I'd just received a body blow. When at last I venture a glance at George, I'm greeted with the burst of laughter he's been reserving since Whitehall Street. Stopping in the middle of foot traffic, I have only two words for him.

“Come on, that was worth it just for the expression of horror on your face.” He hugs me, not the way you hug a person to jolly her out of a bruised ego, but long and hard, cradling my head. “No,” he says after a moment. “I don't think you're fatuous. You're a fantastically thoughtful person who has just had different life experiences than I. Plus you're fun to be around.”

“Yeah, well. Watch you don't get pulled over for crimes against the language.”

“Just what are the language police going to do to me?”

“Suspend your poetic license. Slap a writer's block on you.”

“I'm frightened.”

Which is precisely where two
A.M
. finds me, alone in my apartment, an October rain dotting the windowpane. It's the first night I've spent alone in recent memory, and I bicycle my legs slowly in the cool sheets, feeling George's absence, knowing he's forty blocks uptown prepping for a seven
A.M
. conference call. Before I met George I was untouchable. I was a sprinter looping a track, lapping those slower runners set back by love, by breakups, pregnancies, by their insistence on living life as though it were a one-way street full of personal opportunities that would not come again. Me, I jogged blithely past. It strikes me now, insomniac under the faint luminosity of my clock radio, that nothing spectacularly new has happened to me for twelve years. I've moved along a preset course, from undergrad to grad student to teacher. I've published articles, a book of criticism, and an anthology, accomplishments that were praised but not unexpected. My image in the mirror has
shown little alteration through Ph.D. and salary negotiations; my ovaries, I believe, aren't aging; I will be thirty-something for several decades at the least. I've known myself to be—loath as I am to boast—immortal. Last winter, when the surgeon who'd performed my appendectomy stopped on his rounds to tell me all had been normal, my relief was marred by the tiniest sting of betrayal. I found it neither entirely comforting nor entirely plausible, this assurance that my insides were ordinary plumbing and tissue readily incised, retracted, oxygenated. Already the memory of the stabbing pain, the stack of books I'd dropped, the blurred taxi ride to the hospital, was fading. I waited—don't most of us wait?—for the surgeon to tell me: You were not in the least bit normal, not ordinary and vincible flesh and blood at all. Inside you are exceptional. Inside you are gilt, frescoed. You are driven not by the muscle beating in your chest, but by a pump of alabaster, ether, quicksilver.

I try out a bit of melodrama:
Nothing will ever be the same as it was before I met George.
Spreading my arms, I slide them slowly along the sheets, simultaneously reveling in the solitude of my bed and understanding that I like it in part because I know he will be here tomorrow. George has become a pillar of my happiness. If we broke up there would be no easy recovery, no untouchability in being alone. Life has become a one-way street.

A thought not at all conducive to sleep. Because if love can happen in my world, anything can happen. The choices I make matter, and can pilot me irrevocably toward better or worse. Life is not infinite. Carpe diem.

Even Jeff, I register, knows this.

Even Adam. Adam—who broke up with Kim rather than continue without commitment—knows what I have been too dumb to realize. This thought is so sobering I actually register gratitude when sleep relieves me of it.

On the morrow I wake with a new knowledge: I have come to a crossroad in my adult life. I decide to roast a chicken.

I dial the number. “Mom,” I say.

Her voice is faint on the telephone, as though Manhattan were not across the continent from her kitchen counter, but in another solar system. I picture her in her school clothing: a vest buttoned over a pale blouse, dark slacks, pumps. A tall woman with a raspy
voice that never seems to rise, with straightforward friends who don't demand much, with students whose crises and triumphs don't penetrate the walls of her house—students who passed anonymous through her classroom each year of my childhood and never offered hints. The only romantic counsel my mother ever extended to me was a consoling, if uncertain,
Tracy, you're one in a million,
followed by the advice
You shouldn't be so picky.
I never did work up the energy to point out her mathematical inconsistency . . . or what it stood for. The simultaneous blessing and curse tendered to a daughter who's made a very different choice: the stated desire for my success, the hobbling passivity about its likelihood.

“Buy a small chicken,” she says. “Three or four pounds.” It's clear, from the puzzlement in her voice, that there is more she'd like to ask. That she suspects my telephone call means this George I've mentioned is serious. But we have no signal for this kind of conversation in our family semaphore. My mother is unpracticed at prying into my personal life. If she did, if she asked a single pointed question right now, delight and fear would tumble out of me whether or not I thought it wise. But I've learned not to volunteer information on my own. I've poured water onto dry sand too many times to expect anything to germinate. All you're left with are an empty pail and a somehow shameful stain.

“Baste every twenty minutes,” she says. “And don't forget the paprika.”

There is a long, awkward silence.

“Do you know how to light your oven?” she asks.

I buy the chicken—Perdue, because that man wouldn't lie. I carry it back to my apartment, wash the rubbery insides, and plop it in a foil pan purchased for the occasion. There it sits, naked in the pan. A dead chicken.

The slaughterer has left a small flap hanging where the chicken's neck once was—a frail tube, an airway or perhaps a blood vessel, nearly translucent.

I stare without touching. Then, following my mother's instructions, I dress, sprinkle and dot, and land the chicken in the oven.

During the initial round of basting I consider, for the first time in my life, becoming a vegetarian. Then I consider something else: We're all going to die. There's no such thing as existence without change. While my moral logic is admittedly unclear at this point,
I gradually become privy to another, higher truth: The chicken smells fantastic. I have a vision of the future—of myself as a mortal, vulnerable, loving, one-way-street woman literature professor. I will cook chickens with (useless as this is to the chicken, foolish and politically void)
respect.

“You two are making me nauseous,” says Adam, digging into a drumstick with his knife.

George grins and wraps me tighter. He and I stuffed ourselves on chicken over an hour ago. Adam, who dropped by with his roommate to return the CD player I'd lent him, showed up, with the uncanny timing of a practiced freeloader, just as we were about to clear the table. Leaning together against my double-stacked bookshelf, George and I watch Adam and the roommate, whom he's introduced as Worms, eat. Adam is sporting the Beer Pong shirt and blue jeans he wore to work. Worms, round-faced and unshaven, wears his baseball cap so low on his forehead that his gray eyes are barely visible. From that zone of privacy the world must appear heavy-domed—a television screen Worms watches out of the corner of his eye while he drowses on the sofa.

Shifting the plate on his lap, Adam raises his leg and, with the toe of one sneaker, nudges a book to the near edge of my coffee table. He picks it up and glances at the author photo on the back jacket. “She looks like a housewife in a floor wax commercial,” he says. “Except she's just had a nervous breakdown.”

George takes the book and holds it next to Adam's cheek. “Actually she looks a little like you.”

Adam blows a kiss.

George scans the back of the book, then the inside flaps. “She probably had reason to be tired.”

“Why?” says Adam. “She had to wax everybody's floors for real?”

George shrugs, and sets the book back on the coffee table. “Could be. She was writing back in the nineteen-thirties. Can't have been easy for a woman writing then.”

And though I've always disliked Dorothy Parker, though I'd have been much more interested in her work were she not sardonic by reflex, unable to stop playing to the audience long enough to let on that anything actually moved her, I now look at her photo—a
deliberately unglamorous shot taken long after the Round Table years—with sheer love.

Adam glances at me. Then he turns to George. “You are such a kiss-ass,” he says. “I'm taking notes.”

Worms sets down his plate. Slowly he looks from Adam to George to me, considering. At length he speaks. “Dude,” he says.

Thus shall he be entered into the Book of Deeds. George: a thoughtful man. Paying respect to feminism in his own way. The jury may still be out on long-term compatibility, but initial signs are promising to say the least. In retrospect, our sole argument seems—doesn't it?—a foolish panic over semantics.

He rolls onto his side, dragging the sheet with him. Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, who cares. I slide into the lee of his back and drape a hand over his bottom. His ass. His butt. The words are either absurdly leering, or else childish—our literary heritage may go into paroxysms over breasts and thighs, but has declared itself too dignified to dwell on this part of the anatomy. Lightly furry. Warm. Tracing a path up his side with my fingertips, gliding, hushing—is there any word for that sound skin makes on skin?—tucking my chin over his shoulder, I inhale. You cannot be with a man if you don't like the smell of the spot where his neck meets his chest. There it is: a new Rule for Love. You must like the smell of that place. Also, the face he makes in bed just before he lets go. No matter how foolish it might be. That face is a secret, a light flashed into a well's depths. I have my own, too—a face I've never seen. George knows it. I entrust it to him.

I fall back into sleep planning a day spent at a museum; at a street fair; in a library; in this bed. Wondering—as I shed each thought into the vanilla light that's soaked through the window shade—whether this is how a person might start thinking about a lifelong commitment: there are so many things I'd like to do with this guy it could take a lifetime to do them.

“Hey.” I rap my knuckles on Jeff's door as I open it. “Did I leave my
Complete Hurston
in here?”

He sets down the phone receiver and gives me a smile I don't like. “I don't care about your Hurston. I scheduled my job talk.”
He puts on a light Southern lilt. “Fixing to head down next week.”

“You've dusted off that accent awfully fast. How long did you live in Georgia as a kid?”

“Ages seven to nine, before moving to scenic New Jersey. Long enough to pick up a prêt-à-porter accent, which came in handy on the phone. The guy in charge of scheduling asked me right away if I was, and I quote, ‘one of ours.'” There is a pen lying flat on Jeff's desk; he gives it a satisfied twirl. “Ah most
suhtainly
am.”

“You're shameless.”

“The word is ‘hirable.'”

I make a face. “Where's my damn book?”

Flashing me another brilliant grin, he shrugs.

There's a knock on the open door. Joanne stands stiffly in the doorway, waiting to be invited.

“Hi, Joanne,” says Jeff, without gesturing her forward.

She steps into the office. Ignoring me entirely, she addresses him. From my seat I watch her profile: chin taut, shoulders hunched forward. A boxer entering the ring.

“Have you heard about the rescheduling of today's faculty meeting?” she says to Jeff. “It's been moved half an hour later.”

Jeff glances down to his desk calendar. “It's four-thirty now?”

“Yes.”

“I'm going to have to leave early, then.”

“We need you there,” says Joanne.

“I'll be there only for the first half-hour.”

Taking a small step closer to Jeff's desk, Joanne slaps down her trump card. “We're going to field proposals for the new core curriculum,” she says. “And summarize the flaws of current offerings. I don't need to tell you how much is at stake. Our recommendations go to the Humanities Committee, which reports to the Coordinating Committee, which writes the summary for the Academic Committee. And they'll be determining the new standards. We need to discuss the English Department's position and philosophy.”

Jeff gives the pen on his desk another spin, and, while it's still a silver blur, leans back in his chair. “In lurid detail, I'm sure.”