Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (36 page)

This question seems to engage her interest for a moment. She thinks about it, then shakes her head. “That's not very perceptive of them,” she says.

I couldn't agree more. But when Elizabeth blinks sleepily and nests back into her chair, I can't help sounding like a piqued schoolteacher. “Isn't there anything you'd like to say to me about that?”

After a moment's consideration she gives the kind of sheepish shrug with which she might acknowledge borrowing a friend's favorite skirt without permission. “Sorry,” she says. Then she waves a hand: there's something different on her mind. “I started the letter as a joke,” she says. “I thought Melville could help express some things to Joanne. The things you're always saying Joanne needs to hear.”

“What made you think that kind of letter would be taken as a joke?”

“At first I wasn't going to send it. But then I saw it was a good thing and I ought to. Anyway it wasn't my decision.”

“I think you'd better explain that last comment to me.”

A smile wafts slowly over her face. “Okay.” Her speech is so soft I edge forward to hear her. “I'll tell you. Because you've always been really nice to me. And I know something amazing, and you deserve to know too. But I need you to promise it will be our secret.”

“At this point, Elizabeth, I don't believe I owe you any promises.”

This seems to shock her. Sorrow washes visibly over her thin body. “That's true,” she whispers. “I guess you might be mad at me.”

“
Mad
doesn't begin to cover it, Elizabeth. I'm shocked, and confused, and alarmed. I'm goddamn furious. I'm also frightened for you.”

She slides lower in her chair. I am seated opposite the loneliest
person I have ever seen. Her expression is utterly desolate. It stirs in me an unfamiliar, uncomfortable sensation.

“I'll keep your secret only if it doesn't compromise me.”

She rouses slowly. “Oh, no,” she murmurs. “No, no, no.” She pauses, attentive. “No, it definitely wouldn't.”

I spread my hands on the tabletop, feeling the fine grid lines soften under my fingers.

“Okay.” She fills her lungs, and lets out a long, breathy sigh. “There are people,” she says.

A few seconds pass.

“Inarguably,” I say.

She looks confused.

I fold my arms across my chest. “Go on.”

“There are people who aren't people.” She gazes at me meaningfully.

“I don't follow.”

“Tracy, I
understand
them now.”

The heavy smell of candles blankets the room. “Who?” I say.

“Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. And sometimes a few others. Most of them are writers, but some of them aren't.”

“Herman Melville?”

“And Emily Dickinson. It's incredible, Tracy. You've been such a good friend to me. So I want you to know this.” Her eyes have shed their dullness and shine now with gratitude, and something more. “You know how when you work, you feel sometimes like the writers are speaking, and you really
hear
them? And your job is to understand their message more fully than maybe even they did at the time they wrote?”

She waits until I give a grudging nod.

“And sometimes you think the writers didn't know everything they meant when they wrote it, because nobody ever does, not even God knows what he means when he writes.” She waits for another nod. “Well, it may be true that they don't know completely what they're writing
as
they write it, but it turns out that they realize it later, I mean once they're dead. Then they wait around for someone who's really listening. And I was in the library a lot so they started really telling me what they thought.”

Very slowly, I take a sip of water and set the glass back on the table. “Which was?”

“Oh,
things.
All kinds of things. They showed me the whole world, they showed me how it's all laid out in the most beautiful words. Orderly and dazzling, and it just goes on forever, Tracy. The whole world, every part of it, is just a shining stream of words, and they can recite it by heart. They showed me what books to look at in the library, and how to make sense of everything through them. At first I didn't know it was them, but then I saw they were guiding me.”

The waitress sets my tea on the table and disappears. Watching Elizabeth, I think of reading Tolstoy at two o'clock in the morning, my mind hopping so it's nearly intolerable to sit at my computer. Of burying my own confusion in Hurston's tongue-in-cheek prose. The lure, the warming light, of books. How delicious it might feel to follow that beacon, farther and farther from shore, until there remained no hope or desire to return.

“And then Melville helped me write a letter to Joanne, and once I started I saw it wasn't a joke at all, because he was helping me tell Joanne how much I admire her but how much she's also wrong, like you're always saying. Melville”—she turns a soft, beneficent smile on me—“agrees with you.”

I weigh the bowl of a teaspoon in my palm.

“He gave me the words to say what I needed to Joanne.”

“Elizabeth.” I dread her answer to this question—a last hope of connecting her to reality. “Who signed that letter?”

She looks puzzled. “Herman Melville. He was talking to me every day last week. Only, he's stopped.” Her pale fingers curl on the tabletop, looking abruptly lifeless. “Just a few days ago. I don't know why. And Emily has stopped too. All of them stopped. They got tired of me, or maybe they think I'm not listening hard enough. That's why I can't write any more letters.” She bites her lower lip, chews it. Her teeth are white, even, heartbreakingly perfect. “I miss them so much, Tracy.” She falls silent. Slowly she closes her eyes.

The thought of George is an updraft in my chest. Shutting my own eyes, I sample all that was delicate between us. All that was warm.

I force myself to sip my tea, barely registering its pungent smell of orange rinds. “Elizabeth.” I set the cup in its saucer. “Has this happened to you before?”

“A bunch of years ago. When I was in college. Then they stopped talking to me. And this fall they came again. But now they're gone.” Her voice is the voice, slow and sad, of a woman speaking alone from a fathomless pool of grief. I feel a sickening drag to follow her into the depths. “They would come at night. It made it hard to sleep sometimes. But I didn't mind. I never, ever,
ever
minded.” Her face gathers, and then she's crying, her constricted throat producing a high, whining noise that she's unable to stop despite visible effort.

“All right,” I say. “All right.” This is the only thing I can say that is compatible with nodding, and it seems imperative that I keep nodding until my thoughts regroup, though it's obvious that what I need to do right now is stand up and stride out of this suffocating café, dragging Elizabeth with me into clear, sensible daylight. “Let's go over this, Elizabeth.” As we have gone over every chapter and theme of her dissertation. Adviser and advisee. “The writers you talk to.”

“They're not from here,” Elizabeth says with effort.

I don't want to hear what she's about to tell me.

“It's true!” she protests, suddenly defensive. She's stopped crying.

“Here, New York?” I pin hollow hope to this shred of logic: Emily Dickinson was from Massachusetts.

Elizabeth shakes her head.

“Here, Earth?”

She nods vigorously.

Slowly, with the fingertips of both hands, I rub my temples. “Isn't it a
good
thing, Elizabeth, if these voices . . . these aliens, just . . . you know.” I flutter one hand. “Go away? Leave you to your normal life?”

She addresses me with reproach. “Herman Melville said you'd
appreciate
my writing that letter. Since we knew you agreed with everything in it.”

“Then Herman Melville is an asshole.”

Elizabeth recoils. With the indignant flush of a woman in love, she corrects me. “Their coming is the most beautiful thing that's ever happened to me. It's what I've been put on earth for. You don't understand what it's like to hear a voice and just know.”

I shake my head violently, banishing the recollection this prompts. “Elizabeth, have you ever been on some kind of medication for this?”

“Yes.”

“Did you stop taking it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I demand.

A martyr before the Inquisition, she replies with head high. “I chose not to dodge the intensity of literature.”

“The
intensity?
I think this is more than—”

“It's beautiful. Books. People have no idea how beautiful books are. How they taste on your fingers. How bright everything is when you light it with words.”

The waitress comes to the table. I send her on her way with a rude flick of my hand. Across from me Elizabeth waits stubbornly for acknowledgment of the truths she's bestowed on me. The wreckage ahead of her terrifies me. I'm frightened not only for her, but—in a way I don't fully understand—for myself.

Surely there is a script I ought to be following, some clarifying, therapeutic question I ought to pose; but nothing has prepared me for this. At length I ask, “Have your visitors done anything to hurt you?”

“They read my
Moby Dick
paper. And tore up a page of it.”

“Why?”

She doesn't answer.

I think of something very intelligent to say. “Why that particular page?”

“I can't figure it out. It was about the figure of Ishmael.” The hollows above and below Elizabeth's eyes are dark, her chest concave. Slowly her mouth dimples. She blinks rapidly. “I just want to understand why they're not talking to me anymore.” The high whining cry begins again, and this time shatters into wracking sobs.

For a moment I take refuge in inane consideration of why Ishmael might draw the ire of Elizabeth's visitors. I'm about to ask Elizabeth exactly what point she'd been making on the page her visitors desecrated, when the ache of my own clenched fists—bearing down on the waxed tabletop like twin mallets—becomes
plain to me. And I do something I've never done with a student. I take Elizabeth in my arms and hold her slim, birdlike figure, and feel, in the shifting of her bones beneath my uncertain hands, the world reshaping around this moment.

“She says this has happened before.” I keep my voice low, though it doesn't seem anything could wake Elizabeth, curled in a blanket on my sofa and to all appearances getting her first solid sleep in weeks.

Jeff's end of the phone is silent. Beside me on the carpet is Elizabeth's crammed backpack, from which—averting my eyes from torn, script-crammed pages—I've seined a black cloth wallet. Thumbing past loose cash and crumpled receipts, I extract a neatly lettered card.

“There are two telephone numbers here,” I tell Jeff.

“Don't do this,” he says. “Things are just starting to quiet down here. I've been on counter-rumor duty all day.”

Twisting the phone cord around my fingers and glancing at Elizabeth's motionless form, I leave my thanks unspoken. “Under ‘emergency contacts' it lists her mother as Mary Archer of Chicago. And there's a number for a Dr. Thomas Haley.”

“If you feel compelled to contact her mother, then do so, but extract yourself from this situation immediately.”

There is a sound from the sofa. Elizabeth shifts, her peaked face flickering. Her pallor, even in sleep, is unbearable. I force my gaze away. And turn my attention to the single thing in this entire day I'm sure of.

“Jeff.” I rest my forehead on the heel of my hand. “Joanne is responsible for this.”

I hear Jeff's desk chair creak as he lowers his legs to the floor. “You're being—”

“No,” I tell him. “I am not being melodramatic. There is such a thing as moral responsibility.”

“Your logic is flawed. How was Joanne to know Elizabeth was crazy?”

“She's not crazy!” I whisper.

Jeff's silence is a laser pointer underscoring the absurdity of this statement. I try again. “What I mean is, Elizabeth's mania—or whatever this is—had been under control for years. She hadn't
had an episode since college. Why should it flare now? I'm not saying Elizabeth bears no responsibility, only that there's something else going on. We've all seen how Joanne's been torturing Elizabeth.”

“
Torture?
” Jeff mocks.

“Yes. Sustained intellectual and psychic baiting is torture. In academia this is the surest way to undo someone, and you know it.”

“You fail to realize how off-base you sound. No one made Elizabeth go off her medication. If she was working so hard that she forgot to take her pills, that's her own responsibility.”

“I can't prove what Joanne did. But I know it's real. I know it in my gut.”

“Ah.”

“Don't be that way. You'd believe me if you'd seen Joanne's face today, when she learned Elizabeth was responsible. She was
glowing,
Jeff. The look on her face was practically indecent. It's like Joanne's been grinding down Elizabeth on purpose.”

“Why?”

“Fear.”

“Your conspiracy theories are not—”

“
Why
not? Maybe Joanne is terrified of being disabled. Maybe she needed someone to free-fall with her. Chillingworth did it to Dimmesdale in
The Scarlet Letter
without lifting a finger. Salieri, if we're to believe the movie, did it to Mozart. You can destroy sensitive people's equilibrium—disturb their
souls
—by gaining their trust. Making them dependent. You never have to lift a finger. And before the eyes of the world you're innocent.”

“Number one,” says Jeff, “stop talking about souls, and get Elizabeth out of your apartment this minute. You're going to be seen as an accomplice. I appreciate your act of charity, Tracy. I do. Don't think I've missed that you're being noble here. Elizabeth is ill and needs help. And yes, the faculty will extend their thinking far enough to acknowledge that this is a disease, and not a reflection on Elizabeth's basic character. But give them a few more bits of bizarre behavior to chew on, and they'll snap back into judgment—next time for good. You do not want to be tarred by that brush.” He pauses. “Number two, don't breathe a word of your Joanne theory to anyone. That includes Victoria. As far as you're concerned, Elizabeth's manic break occurring in the middle
of her dissertation troubles is pure coincidence. Number three, it wouldn't hurt for you to be visibly involved in determining the appropriate departmental response to Elizabeth's actions. Make it known that Elizabeth tried to pit you against Joanne. And drop these three words as often as possible:
She used me.
”