Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (24 page)

In a short time the hyperventilating subsides. I take a first normal breath, then another. My wet eyelashes bat the black lettering that parades across the creamy page, each letter bold and expansive as though seen through a magnifying glass: the last paragraph of “My Literary Shipyard.” I raise my head slightly.
To start right is certainly an essential,
says Twain. I slam the book shut.

“Professor Farber?”

At the second knock I open the door. A sophomore from my twentieth-century course, a sleepy-faced, dimpled late-teen in sweatpants, steps inside and hands me a paper.

“I'm here for our revision conference? About the Didion paper?”

“Ah yes,” I say, with such force that she startles. Sniffling as I settle into my chair, I gesture at the box of tissues on my desk. “Allergies,” I explain.

“Oh my God, that
sucks,
” she declares.

Thereby proving once more that students are smarter than they seem.

Before venturing to the mailboxes I wash my face and apply makeup. I pass down the corridor without encountering a soul, collect my portion blindly from the honeycombed mail slots, and scan the bulletin board for new announcements. I'm quick, but not quick enough.

“Congratulations, Tracy,” calls Eileen from her seat, the greeting a lasso to hold me until she's free for an interrogation.

Victoria, standing at Eileen's desk, turns.

As I expected, some offhand comment of Jeff's has already radiated from the faculty lounge to the central gossip artery of the department. I wave to Eileen, make a vague gesture at my wristwatch, and start toward my office. But Victoria calls my name and signals for me to stay put. I wait with mounting agitation while she accepts a folder from Eileen and files it in her briefcase.

When Victoria steps toward me it's with an approving smile. “Who's the lucky fellow?”

“George,” I say. “Beck,” I add, then don't know what else to say.

“Oh?” prompts Victoria.

“Yes. George. He's . . . great.”

“I should hope so.” Victoria's amusement expresses itself in a slight compression of her lips. I don't know whether to be embarrassed or laugh along.

“I wish you a long life with Mr. Beck, full of great happiness.” Victoria's voice drops; behind her I see Eileen lean forward over her desk on the pretext of watering a plant with a mug I'm certain has no water in it. “My husband and I were lucky with the happiness part,” Victoria says. “We didn't have so very long together, but what we had was good. We kept each other on our toes. Marriage can be a wonderful, mutually energizing arrangement.”

I don't know how to reply to this, but, bless Victoria, she's said her piece and with a firm pat on my shoulder—the first physical contact she's offered since a welcome-to-the-faculty handshake five years ago—she leaves.

“Well,” sings Eileen, smug as a clerk catching a customer shoplifting. “Who's been keeping secrets?”

The first door off the corridor opens and Joanne emerges from her office, a small stack of pages in hand. “No secrets,” I answer sharply.

“When's the date?” prods Eileen.

“No date yet.”

“Where's your ring?”

“No ring yet.”

Eileen's brows shoot toward her hairline. Her fingernails tap a polished disapproval on the surface of her desk.

“The photocopying for the CC,” says Joanne, dropping the pages on Eileen's desk.
Core Curriculum,
or maybe
Coordinating Committee.
If you have to ask what Joanne's acronyms stand for, you're not part of the club.

“Tracy's engaged,” says Eileen slyly, paper-clipping the pages.

“I know,” says Joanne without a glance at me. She pokes the top of the stack. “This one goes to Manning, and I want these in triplicate to send out with individual notes.”

As Eileen pencils these instructions on a pad, Joanne swings her head toward me. For a second she looks nauseated; the very sight of me, I am given to assume, makes her ill. Then, in a voice calibrated for broadcast, she offers her own congratulations: “Jeff says you hardly know the guy.”

After lecture, during the fifteen-minute break between student conferences and seminar, I will murder Jeff.

“Maybe what Jeff said is I haven't known George for long,” I correct Joanne. “Maybe that's what he said. But I know George well enough to be sure he's the guy for me.”

“That's
beautiful,
” chimes Eileen, with the sort of lascivious spectatorship that reminds me why certain types of romance novels deserve a spot on the porn shelf.

“Sometimes you just know,” I add. And sometimes you are piercingly terrified: a piece of information neither Joanne nor Eileen needs.

“Good, then,” declares Joanne. “Good.” She folds her arms, consigning me to my fate like a C-student who has just informed the university of her decision to drop out. “If it were done when 'tis done,” she says, with an abstracted gaze past my left ear, “then 'twere well it were done quickly.”

“That was nice,” says Eileen after Joanne is gone.

Though I hate to play into this obvious fishing expedition—Eileen's attempt to divine my feelings toward Joanne—I have to set the record straight on this account. “It certainly
wasn't
nice. That was a quote from
Macbeth.
It's Macbeth talking about committing a murder.”

Eileen's flat brown gaze meets mine, and I register a flicker of recrimination for my failure to deliver my personal romantic gossip gem directly to her desk. “Still,” she says doggedly. “It was nice.”

“And?” says Yolanda.

“And it's like we're on some satellite audio-link since he proposed. There's just this . . . gap. Between me and him. Between what I say and what he hears. It's like dealing with a stranger. It's like having a Mack truck driven over our relationship.”

“And?” says Yolanda. “Don't hold back now. Give me your worst, sweets.” Both arms braced on the table, she goads me with a nod, ready for any hurricane-force wind I might unleash in the mirror-spangled diner.

I'm too tightly wound for irony. “How could he have proposed so fast?”

Hands to her skull, Yolanda pantomimes Munch's
The Scream.

“Yol, George obviously doesn't even know me well enough to know I'd need time to think about marriage. To talk a few more things through with him, and live together, and learn how we fight and make up, and get used to the whole idea. He doesn't even know me that well yet, and he wants to marry me. What does that say about him?”

“Maybe that he's in love with you?” She unfolds her arms and grips the tabletop. “You two are just doing this the old-fashioned way. You got engaged, and now you'll get to know each other.”

“Maybe,” I breathe. “But I didn't want to do it this way. I lie in bed next to him and spend half the night quietly freaking. And he and I have barely spoken in the last forty-eight hours, because we're on the phone all the time with our public. I didn't know we had a public, but evidently we do. Mostly our parents' cousins. And they're very gratified about this engagement. I don't even
want
to be engaged, I just want to be with George, like it was before Sunday. But I can't get un-engaged without bringing my life down around my ears.”

“Which is fantastic. Tracy, I've got to tell you, I see that you're suffering, I see that for you this is catastrophic, but I have no idea why. I'm trying to comprehend that you think this is the worst thing that has happened in your life, when it looks to me like the best and most romantic, and frankly I'd like to be in your shoes.”

“You'd like to have unknowingly pledged your troth to a man you're crazy about but have known only eight weeks?”

“If he was cute,” says Yolanda. And then, more fiercely: “If he loved me.”

There's a long silence.

“How's it going with Bill?”

She blinks. “It had been easier for a while.”

“Now it's shitty again?”

“Not according to the audiences.
They
like us onstage. By closing week, people were even starting to say nice things about Bill's Freud, and our
chemistry.
” The word is a curse. Her face goes blank, restless. “Maybe if I didn't have to kiss him in that one stupid scene, maybe I wouldn't be reminded all the time. But when he kissed me at the last three performances, suddenly it was like he was
into
it again. You know what I mean? It's like he's trying to
fucking torture me. I can't
believe
we have to reopen in two weeks, even if it's just for a short run.”

“I'm sorry,” I say.

Yolanda doesn't answer. She scans the café. Without lifting her hands, she stretches a long finger toward a man crossing the room. “What do you think?”

I track him in the mirror opposite our table. Lean, reddish hair, nice face. “Not bad,” I say, with as much encouragement as I can muster.

Yolanda crows. It is an unattractive sound, stripped of wistfulness or optimism, and it tells me Yolanda is turning some corner—though onto what path I don't know. “Gay,” she pronounces. “Or if he isn't yet, he will be as soon as he meets a nice woman.”

She falls silent. Then, still silent, begins to cry.

I can't remember the last time I saw Yolanda cry. Not, it seems, since we were girls. Through these past years of disappointment, and even with Bill, Yolanda has so steadily broadcast rage that it's been easy, I suddenly see, to miss the magnitude of her distress.

I take both her hands, and hold them. The café's clatter waxes and wanes.

She stops crying and closes her eyes. We sit holding hands. Then she draws a shuddering breath, and looks at me. “I'm going to be okay,” she says. There's a long silence. She puckers her lips into a fish mouth, crosses her eyes. With a decisive laugh, she lets go of my hands and digs in her gym bag. She offers me a vitamin. “Keep up your strength,” she says.

I take it with a sip of ice water that freezes my throat. Swallowing, I'm hit with a recollection of Joanne's face in the instant when, turning toward me, she faltered. Was that dislike, as I assumed? Or is Jeff right—was it envy?

“Tracy,” says Yolanda. “You've got to relax.”

“I can't even sleep,” I murmur. “I don't know how to talk to him. I've never had trouble talking to him before—”

“And you need to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Going through life like a deer in headlights,” she says. “Because let's just assume everything's going to be okay—which it
probably will be. Think of all the time you'll have wasted worrying. And if everything is
not
okay, is there anything you can do about it now—since you're going to marry George anyway? Because he's great, and because you love him. I mean, you're here in this café with me to tell me you're terrified of being engaged to him, right? But you're not actually considering
not
marrying him. Right?”

“I
am
considering it. I am. I can't marry a man who acts like a stranger. Who—”

“This is just nervousness. And it's also very Tracy.” Banished are the tears; Yolanda's voice gains volume. She is, once more, on stage. “You're worrying about things in advance, so if everything goes wrong you'll be able to claim you saw it coming. You'll be able to say Tracy Was in Control Even if She Got Married Against Her Better Judgment. Am I right?”

Yolanda is, with her fuchsia leotards and chunky heels and disaster of a love life, an archangel of commitment. And she does know me.

“That's possible,” I offer.

She winks, gives a last, dismissive wipe at her eyes, and sips her water. “At least you can admit it.” Setting down her glass, she lays a hand on my elbow. “Tracy, call me any time you need. I have no fucking idea what to say. But call me any time.”

At home I drop my briefcase, survey the blinking answering machine with gimlet eyes, and press Play.

He is a wonderful wedding consultant. I was given his name a year ago and held on to it because, you know, maybe Gabby, but oh well, soon maybe, right? It could happen, God willing, if Gabby made the least little effort. She's terrific, Gabby. She only shouldn't be so picky. Suddenly out of the blue sky she tells me she's dating a rabbinical student—now, five minutes later, no more rabbinical student. Don't ask me why because she tells me nothing. Here's the information, Tracy love. Use it in good health. I know this is a Seattle business, and you're in New York, but I'm sure they can give you advice. I'm so happy for your news. I am. All right, I wish George were Jewish, but I'm glad for you because it's wonderful.

I stand over my answering machine as Aunt Rona's voice spells
out the name and phone number of Herb Levine's No Ordinary Wedding Express and closes with three loud kisses.

A key turns in the door. It might as well turn in my gut. In the five minutes I've spent in my apartment, my need to see George has grown so keen the click of the tumblers lifts me to my feet.

“Ready?” he says.

Only now do I remember: This morning George offered to get tickets for an evening movie.
The phone can't reach us in the theater,
he said with a laugh. Not that he's seemed to mind it: the stream of congratulations, the awkward greetings from long-lost relatives. George has hailed each—even the fundamentalist cousin who didn't return his calls for years—with warmth, welcome, a hearty clean slate.

He sets down his briefcase and loosens his tie. His arms wrap my waist. “Of course, we don't
have
to go. We can order pizza, and eat it in bed, and get crumbs everywhere, and practice for our honeymoon.”

My jittery laughter reminds me, for an instant, of Elizabeth. “Let's not waste the tickets,” I say. Suddenly the prospect of a cool, pitch-black theater—a blank space in which to think, George beside me—promises salvation. “I've heard great things about this movie.”