Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (35 page)

She waits for me to acknowledge this. When I don't, she continues.

“But I wouldn't hand over the letter, to Victoria, or the police, or anyone else. Its author didn't have the guts to address me directly and”—she gives me a bullish look—“I'm not intimidated.”

Perhaps. Perhaps, too, Joanne recognizes truth in the letter's accusations and fears their public dissemination more than she fears any letter writer's potential ill will.

Might Elizabeth have intended to threaten Joanne? Nineteenth-century prose is full of morbid phrasings and allusions to human frailty. Quoting Melville one naturally runs across references to cold bodies, madness, mortality. Still, if I received such a letter, such a mix of worshipful tenderness and accusation along with ambiguous phrases of farewell, I would call the police. I consider whether I ought to call them myself, right now, and let them take over the matter. Then I picture pulling dusty volumes off my shelves and trying to illustrate, while the cops drag Elizabeth away, that the words Melville penned to Hawthorne were consistent with nineteenth-century prose, and do not necessarily constitute a death threat.

“Are you denying authorship?” Joanne charges.

“You know I didn't write it.”

“You didn't
write
it. Is this a semantics game? Did you hire a typist?”

She's playing for time—beneath the repeated accusation is fear. I drop the letter onto Joanne's desk, where it slides to within an inch of her blouse. “Why,” I say slowly, “would I do anything so crazy? For God's sake, even if I had a desire to, I'm up for tenure. This would be the stupidest move I could make.”

A small muscle works in Joanne's jaw.

There is a step behind me, then a soft rapping at the open door. “Joanne,” says Victoria. “I hope you'll excuse my intrusion. This is surely a difficult moment. I wanted to tell you I'm certain that Tracy didn't write that letter. It would be an absurdly self-destructive thing for her to do. I have full confidence in her innocence, and I hope you will too.”

Victoria ex machina.

Joanne's expression is utterly neutral.

Victoria addresses me. “Elizabeth wrote it. Didn't she?”

Looking only at Victoria, I give a shallow nod. “I think.”

Joanne lets out a small sound of protest.

Victoria steps toward the desk. “May I read it, Joanne?” she says softly. “I promise I won't divulge its contents without your permission.”

Joanne doesn't answer. Victoria takes the letter from the desktop and scans it. Her frown deepens: the letter is crazier than she'd thought.

“Is that Elizabeth's typewriter?” Victoria asks me, indicating the letter.

“I know she borrowed a typewriter from Eileen.”

“Stole.” Victoria shutters her eyes. With a sorrowful mien, she executes some inner calculus I'm not privy to. “Eileen noticed a few weeks ago that it was missing from its shelf.”

For an instant Joanne's eyes, too, are closed. When she opens them she wears an expression I did not expect.

Some things in life are like shooting stars. A fragment of the cosmos streaks into the atmosphere and sears its trail across the sky. By the time you free your hand from your pocket to point, by the time you say,
Look, there's a shooting
—it's gone. Either your companions have seen it, or they haven't and never will. So no one else will ever see what I see at this moment—the expression on Joanne's face that is there, then gone: satisfaction.

“I'll be in my office,” says Victoria to Joanne. “Please stop in later, and we'll discuss an appropriate response to this.”

Victoria is gone. Joanne's eyes are focused somewhere beyond this office, her gaze luminous, her face alive, mobile, eager, as though she's waiting for the answer to an astonishing question. Seated motionless at her desk, she is arresting in a manner that frightens me: the manner of an eighteenth-century consumptive euphoric with her own demise.

“Joanne,” I say.

She looks surprised by my continued presence in her office.

My head feels as if it's going to explode. “I've been told,” I say, “that you're grappling with an illness. I know it's your personal business. I have no intent to pry. But I do want you to know I'm sorry for any extra difficulty the recent tensions between us have added to your life. If there's any way I can help—covering your classes, anything—I hope you won't let our past troubles stand in the way of asking. I'm your colleague. This department should be a resource for you. I'm committed to doing my part.”

Joanne's clipped “Understood” directs me out of her office.

In the hallway Grub stops short at the sight of me. He assumes a chairmanly half grin, which he holds in one cheek like a wad of tobacco. Approaching, he pats me confidingly on the arm. “You're the kind of person,” he says, “who is smart enough to mend fences.”

My voice quakes. “I didn't write that letter to Joanne.”

“Of course you didn't.” His smile ratchets up to a higher setting: he doesn't want to know whether or not I wrote the letter. “
And
you're smart enough to mend fences.” With another firm pat on the arm, he strolls to his office and shuts the door.

Jeff stands before a row of half-empty bookshelves, a volume in each hand. On the desk behind him sits an open cardboard box labeled
OFFICE—BOOKCASE
.

He turns at the sound of my footsteps, relief lighting his blue eyes.

“I didn't do it,” I say dully.

“I know. You wouldn't.” He wags his head. “It's about time you showed up here to put a lid on the rumors.”

“Does anyone seriously believe I did it? I know Victoria had to take Joanne's accusation seriously, because that's Victoria. But why would anyone else?”

“Tracy.” Jeff shuts his eyes, and shakes his head as though mourning my obtuseness. “There are people in this department who've been trying to get a fix on you for a while.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you're different. You're not a political player, and you don't socialize within the department. You've got original ideas and have had a lot of success, and have managed not to become a completely political animal. People haven't a clue what to make of you. That hasn't been a problem, until now. Do you understand envy, Tracy? Now they've got something to chew on. In fact they've got a couple things. They now believe they understand your motivations, and not only are your motivations drearily mundane—professional competitiveness, made more virulent by private romantic failure—but your choice to write Joanne a hate letter was idiotic. You've been brought back to earth. That's very satisfying to certain people.”

“You want me to believe”—I gesture beyond his door—“they're ready to assume the worst?”

He lays one book, then another, in the box. “You seem to be laboring under the perception that these people are your friends.”

I watch him take a roll of packing tape and seal the box. “Jeff, that letter is patently insane. They'd have to believe I was psychotic.”

“No, they wouldn't. No one's seen the letter. Joanne is refusing to divulge anything but the briefest quotes—which of course are being amplified and distorted through the grapevine. Joanne has been calling it ‘character assassination of the most cowardly sort.'” He pushes the full box to one side and sets an empty one beside it, then stops. “It was Elizabeth, wasn't it?”

My hand rises to my forehead. “I think.”

“I'm sure.” He sighs, then begins to load books into the new box. “I already told Steven and Eileen it wasn't you. I'll keep spreading the word.”

At this assurance, some inner strut gives. I don't lean so much as sag against the doorframe.

“Good lord, girl.” He stops working. Folding his arms, he whistles, taking his time at it. “I'm glad you're back,” he says finally. “This was getting out of hand in your absence.”

“This is”—I make a feeble gesture—“unreal. I don't have energy for this shit. I've got bigger things going on in my life at the moment.”

Jeff steps closer. Gone is the nonchalant exterior. “Tracy, listen carefully to what I'm saying to you. You're in personal hell right now. That's plain. I'm sorry to see it, though I think you've just saved yourself a world of heartache. But there will be plenty of time for licking those wounds later. I have seen a lot go down in this department, and this smells like smoke. You'd better drop everything else and deal with this letter business.”

“But I didn't write—” I don't bother finishing the sentence. I can already hear Jeff's response: that I need to find Elizabeth before my colleagues' images of me solidify. I need to learn what the hell is going on and stop her before she puts other opinions of mine on display in her next burst of departmental pyrotechnics.

If there were ever a moment to take Jeff's counsel, this is it. I feel, though, as if I've donned a lead apron. All I want is to settle
into Jeff's swivel chair and savor its familiar contours, along with the relief that Jeff has, after all, no need to bask in I-told-you-so's.

“I'll do spin control,” says Jeff, and his keen expression tells me that he will be fierce in my defense with what departmental clout he still possesses. Setting down his books, he takes my shoulders and steers me, not ungently, toward the hall. “You go find out what else she's doing to screw you over.” From his doorway he watches me go. When, unlocking my office, I glance back, his face is a study in worry. Pausing, I turn and survey the long corridor of faculty doors. All save Jeff's are shuttered.

From my office I dial Elizabeth's home number. She doesn't answer. Holding the receiver loosely, I allow the phone to continue ringing while I consider my next move. Repeatedly I come up blank. The phone rings on in my hand, twenty, thirty times, a hollow sound. Then, from a distance, I hear Elizabeth pick up.

I press the receiver to my ear.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers before I can say a word. She sounds drugged.

“Elizabeth, what in hell is going on?”

She cannot speak over the phone. She will not explain why. Each syllable seems to require effort. She agrees only to meet me at a Tribeca café.

It will take Elizabeth at least half an hour to reach Tribeca from her Brooklyn apartment. I phone my students, offer their answering machines rescheduled conference times, post a sign on my office door, and set off downtown. At first my fury-lengthened strides gulp the city blocks. My feet slam to the rhythm of
how could they think,
which transforms itself gradually into
how could he think,
and then—blocks later, my pace slowing—a one-word riddle:
belonging.
Confusion eclipses rage. I drift along Broadway, peering into storefronts. The world has tilted. Taking out my cell phone, appealing to it to break the obscene silence between us, I dial George's number.

In measured, impregnable tones, George's answering machine fields my call.

“George?” I say, stalling in the middle of the sidewalk. Pedestrians swerve to avoid me. “George, I need to talk to you. I miss you. And frankly things are all going to hell right now. I don't
understand anything. I don't understand why just being true to what I think, being true to
you and me,
means the bottom drops out. Call me. Please. I'm asking. I didn't mean to hurt you. There's also this thing happening, at work, it's crazy, I mean really crazy, not that that's important right now, but I could—I just refuse to believe everything can be so easily shattered. Everything. It's this crazy distorted broken mirror of who I think I am. George, don't we know each other? Don't you know me? Don't you know I'd never—”

George's machine cuts me off.

I fold my cell phone and consider flinging it into the nearest trash bin.

She is seated at a table. Though it's easily seventy degrees in the tightly packed space, she wears a heavy coat and scarf. The air is waxy with the ghosts of dozens of candles. The table where Elizabeth sits—and where I join her, settling straight-backed on a flimsy metal chair—is coated with overlapping patches of colored wax. Without looking at me, Elizabeth carefully scores another line down the table's center with a thumbnail. The line joins tens of others; scar by scar she is laying a fine grid across the table.

“It was the only letter I wrote,” says Elizabeth to the tabletop.

“You woke up and realized the consequences?”

Startled by the anger in my voice, she raises her head. Dully, her wide black eyes meet mine. She is pale, and, if a face can be said to be closed, hers is sealed. It is the face of a refugee. Of someone preoccupied by fear and exhaustion, expecting no salvation.

“No.” The word is a sad hiccup. Her chapped lips separate in the specter of a laugh: the possibility of consequences hadn't crossed her mind. “I couldn't write any more letters, not real ones.”

“
Real
ones?”

She doesn't answer.

“Elizabeth. Do you realize what you've done? To your career?”

At length she shrugs.

“Why isn't that important to you?”

She doesn't answer.

The waitress brings water and silverware for me. I order tea. The waitress leaves. I stare blankly at the menu's gritty columns, trying to gather my thoughts. Elizabeth's letter has already strewn
political shrapnel about the department; even in the best-case scenario I'll never know the full extent of the damage to my reputation. I consider my upcoming tenure review and feel ill.

When I look up, Elizabeth is reclining in her chair, yawning, looking for all the world as though she's about to take a nap.

“Did it occur to you, Elizabeth”—my voice is tight—“that people would assume I'd written that letter?”