Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (33 page)

“I'm lost, George,” I say.

“I know,” he says. His voice is strained. “I don't understand what's gone wrong.”

Squeezing, I find his hand in the depths of his glove. “These last weeks have thrown me. I can't breathe.”

We walk for another moment before he answers. “I assumed going quickly was the best thing.”

We pass a steaming pretzel cart. A man whirs by in a wheelchair, propelling himself with long scoops of his arms. With a synchronous absent-mindedness we turn deeper into the park, past the shuttered façade of the carousel. We walk in silence. George doesn't speak or look at me. His glove clasps mine so loosely it hardly feels like his hand is inside.

“George, I'm asking you to tell me honestly. What's your rush?”

He does not answer. We pass the dairy, pausing to allow a few rosy-cheeked toddlers in moon suits, shepherded by their stunned-looking parents, to amble across the path in front of us. When they've passed I start forward, but George hasn't moved. He gestures wordlessly after the toddlers. I turn to him; his face is tense with longing.

“Yes. I can imagine it, too,” I say. “But we haven't even figured out the marriage thing yet. We haven't even learned how we solve problems together. Why jump ahead? Since you started pushing, it's like you're a stranger.”

He emits a strangled sound: the sound of someone about to override his better judgment and say something he shouldn't. “Tracy,” he says. “Life is a lot easier if you don't overthink everything. If you just take some leaps.”

I speak softly. “Imagine the leap I just took for you.”

“We both took a—”

“George, like it or not, this is who I am: someone who wants to consider each step she takes. I can't quite understand why you're so surprised by my taking marriage seriously. I start to worry about how unseriously you seem to take it.”

“Tracy.” He turns to me. His face wears the loneliness I've glimpsed there before. This time, though, it is distilled into a plea for my understanding. His gaze leans into the words as though he's struggling with a foreign tongue and doesn't trust his speech to communicate all he intends. “There has never been anything more serious in my life.”

I set my hand on his arm, and nod.

He continues. “I think, Tracy, that this is harder for men than you realize.”

I touch his cheek with my gloved fingertips. “You know,” I murmur, “that's what Adam said.”

George's expression solidifies. “You talked to Adam?”

“Just about how I thought engagement was affecting your outlook—”

“You said that?”

“I told him a little about our recent conversations, but—”

He pulls away. His silence is more alarming than any retort.

After a minute he says, “You talked about what my father said? And my concerns about finances?”

“Why is that bad?” I ask. “He thought it was totally understandable. We're talking about
Adam
here.”

His words are clipped. “That was a confidence I entrusted to you. You repeated it.”

“I'll keep secrets for you, George. I'll keep any secret, anything at all, if it's reasonable. But I won't keep the secret that you're a human being.”

He shakes his head roughly, then takes a step away from me. He wears a look of pure shock—as though he's undergone a sudden amputation without anesthetic. “Tracy, this throws our trust into question.”

“It's not a matter of trust, George. It's just . . .” My hands rise to plead my case but have nowhere to go. “It's just that I don't think you need to feel shamed. I have a different sense of—”

“Don't tell me what to feel.” His voice quakes, his face registers vertigo. “Don't try to control me.”

Some red line has been crossed. This man may be my soul mate, but something is holding him by both shoulders.

We walk. As we near the back of the zoo I picture them as though they were right before me: the polar bears in their concrete arctic dioramas, and their dirtied fur raises inchoate objections in my throat. Slowly I'm filling with rage at marriage: the alien language in which George and I now struggle to communicate. Trailing George, I shut my eyes and try to imagine myself without him. I discover that I can. I can picture going back to a solitary life, a life of predictable comforts, intimate friendships, and invigorating projects.

But I don't want to. And there is only one way to restore breathable air to this abruptly suffocating park. Every love—I see this
as clearly as if it were written across the frigid sky—comes down eventually to the issuing of a dare.
Try to change me, and I will leave you.
And everything hangs on how this challenge is played out.

I stop walking, as does he. “You know what I want?” I say. “I want you to be with
me.
Not with some hypothetical blushing bride. You're acting like you've gotten engaged to an idea, not a woman.” I look to the park benches, the passersby, the little children in snowsuits, as though to corral them as witnesses. When I continue my voice is softer. “I want to be with you more than anyone I've ever known. But not if we've got to be two figurines on a wedding cake.” I hesitate. “Remember, George? Remember what we're like together?”

His lips are pursed in thought, his face turned down. My hand floats to his shoulder and then, when he does not respond, to his cheek. I do not pause to consider what I'm about to do. There seems, at this moment, nothing to consider. “We've got to start over,” I say. “I can't do it this way.”

I pull off my left glove. There is a sharp, buzzing sensation in my head, like the loud protest of a loose wire. I finger the ring—sparkling, understated, exactly what I would have pictured had I ever dreamed myself an engagement ring. “This is beautiful. And I want to wear it because it's from you. Please give it to me when you want to be my partner.”

I unfurl George's gloved fingers. With a quick prayer that Adam is right and Hannah a moron, I set the ring in George's motionless palm.

“Until then,” I say, “let's spend every day together. Let's move in together, George. My place or yours, I don't care. Let's figure out every step together as lovers and best friends.”

He looks up. His eyes are quiet and clear, as though something has at last penetrated the fog of the past few weeks.

“I love you,” I say.

He shuts his eyes and keeps them shut. I have a long time to read his face, which seems more handsome and honest than ever before. He breathes evenly, as though relieved of some great weight.

After what seems like minutes, he opens his eyes with an unreadable expression. He pockets the ring. Then, without another glance at me, he turns his back and walks away.

I STALK MANHATTAN
for hours, fueled by a tumble of urges, turning east, west, south, or north as
WALK
signs dictate. If I stop moving—so goes my thinking—something terrible will happen. In this manner, following Broadway and its tributaries into the mid-Nineties, I ignore the fact that something terrible already has. I watch the sidewalk, noting as for the first time Manhattan's topography.
How easy it is
—the thought seems to take several blocks to form in my mind—
to forget that there's geology under all this concrete, until it rears up beneath you
. I stride the hills and contours of Manhattan's scarified face. Crossing Broadway, I fall in behind a teenaged boy walking two huskies. An old man crossing opposite us glares as he nears the trio, then points a finger at one of the huskies in ferocious accusation. “You owe me a beer!” he shouts.

If George were here, he'd think this was hilarious. And this—the picture of George wagging his head with laughter, squeezing my hand as we make our way down the sidewalk—is what rends the spell that has held me together since afternoon. The cabdriver listens without comment as I sob for seventy blocks. I stumble into my apartment, its white walls liquid, and fall asleep on the sofa with a comforter pulled over my face.

I wake at five in the morning, my head ringing with silence. Lying still is intolerable. My apartment is stifling. I dress in sweatpants
and sweatshirt, throw on my coat, and take the elevator to the street. The morning is cold and cloudy. I make my way to Twenty-first Street and lap Gramercy Park with the bundled dog walkers and insomniacs, pausing at random, drifting mindlessly around the locked fence. The sun inches higher in the white sky. Schoolchildren and their parents begin to appear, lunch bags in hand. I wheel at the sight of a tall man walking down the sidewalk toward my building.

Not George.

I continue my circuit.

Seated on a bench along the downtown side of the park is an ancient-looking woman. Her face reminds me of melting wax, and her chin and neck—i f they can be said to be two separate features—exhibit the same glacial flow downward as the mound that is breasts and belly. Her cheeks are soft with wrinkles; her eyes rheumy, suggestive of some capacious sympathy.

Drawn to her slumped figure, which looks as if it's traveled the earth, I hesitate beside her bench.

Her eyes meet mine, their soft gaze sampling my face. She works her jaw for a moment before speaking. “Welcome to the patriarchy,” she snaps.

Maybe Tolstoy was right. We're doomed.

Hannah prepares tea in my kitchenette. She arranges mugs and spoons on my coffee table deliberately, saying nothing until I reach the bit where I mentioned to George that I'd spoken with Adam. Then her hand flies to her mouth.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

Which clearly means it isn't.

“I think, Tracy, that the mistake was to tell George you spoke to Adam.”

This makes me feel so sick I can't answer.

“Did you apologize?”

Reluctantly I shrug: I don't exactly recall.

“You're dealing with a man, Tracy. Men might talk to women about their doubts. But they don't tell each other. And they can't bear being outed to other men as unconfident.”

“Oh right, I forgot.” I sound hysterical. I sound bitter. “Not unless they're drunk and have just survived being gored by bulls while escaping a sinking ship. Or unless they're on the battlefield and at least one of them is bleeding to death. And even then they can only refer to each other by last name and they have to pound each other on the back until someone cracks a rib. Is that it?”

Hannah sets a soft hand on my shoulder.

Jeff leaves me three phone messages, two on my office line, one at home. He needs to speak with me. Urgently.

I wait until an hour when I know he won't be at his desk, then telephone his office and leave a message. “Been a little busy here. Nothing much, you know. George and I seem to have broken up.” I draw a ragged breath, irony failing. “I think I ended it, but . . .” I hesitate, then set down the receiver.

I lie in bed, watching the ceiling. In my head rings my useless protest:
I don't understand why he won't even return my calls.
And Hannah's gently meant eulogy:
You didn't let him be the man.
I think: I am not competent to navigate this world, a world in which kindergarteners apparently know what I failed to realize: You can't give a ring back. It's against the rules.

I sleep fitfully, waking to dial George's number and leave another rambling message. Rising to go to the bathroom, I bump walls. I reach into a cabinet for a dish, misjudge the height of the shelf, and scrape my hand so it bleeds. Proportions confound me. My body is undergoing a transformation, turning foreign. Like Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider only in reverse: a night of nausea, dizziness, flashbacks, followed by the early morning discovery that my skin is chalky, my breasts cold, my leg muscles too weak to carry me. I think of my undergraduate Women's Studies professor and briefly consider looking her up, to inform her. To accuse her. To tell her that evidently those women's studies courses were like vocational training in technical support for Betamax. Teaching me the perfect skills to navigate a system that never took hold.

Would she laugh at me, set me straight? Does she live in a universe where men and women behave rationally?
Or is she homeless and unemployed, urging her clamoring shopping cart down the sidewalk? On the back of her coat a sign,
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
.

“Quite a week for you to phone in sick,” says Eileen. There's an unmistakable edge to her voice. While I sort the mail in my cubbyhole she sits back and regards me with the glittery gaze of a predator licking its chops. “Quite a week,” she says, “what with everybody worked up over losing Jeff, on top of the letter incident.”

I look up from my mail only long enough to nod. The only thing that persuaded me to leave my apartment today was the patent need to put in an appearance in the department and somehow, otherworldly though it feels, conference with half a dozen students on the bibliographies for their final papers.

“Of course,” Eileen says, “we understand your calling in sick the last two days . . .
if
you were really sick?” She eyes me hungrily. “I asked Jeff if you were off somewhere making moon eyes with your fiancé. He said that was no longer likely.” She leans forward. “Did you
really
call it quits?”

I turn my back, leaving her at her desk to simmer over my failure to explain the breakup or ask about the letter incident, whatever that might be. The flak I'll catch for my absence during whatever minor political earthquake this represents is of no consequence to me. In two days, my image of academia—its elaborate castles, dungeons, and balustrades—has been redrawn in two dimensions. There is a limit to how much energy I can spare for the morality plays of this department.