Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (37 page)

“I am not going to turn on a woman having a breakdown.”

“Do not screw around with this, Tracy. She wrote a threatening letter.”

“You can't really think Elizabeth is dangerous.”

“On the contrary.”

“You actually think she's a danger to Joanne?”

“Don't know about Joanne, and don't care. Elizabeth is a danger to
you.
”

“You're missing the point. I didn't write the letter, and thanks to you, people now know that. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“And they believe it?”

“Immaterial. Once the public sees a person brought in in handcuffs, they will in some part of their minds always think of that person as a criminal. Doesn't matter if the person's name is cleared.”

I rise from my chair. “I've got a track record in this department. I'll mend the necessary fences. And yes, once Elizabeth is in safe hands I'll take your advice to the dot. But you didn't see what I saw today.” Joanne, seduced by her own power, hooked into some strange intimacy by her effect on Elizabeth. I can't yet articulate this in a way that will persuade Jeff, but I know it's real. “Joanne is going to crush her,” I say. “This isn't about me.”

“You're wrong.”

Behind me, Elizabeth startles. For a moment she breathes rapidly, locked in her dream, pursued or pursuing.

“I'll call you later,” I say.

I fill my kettle. While the water heats I keep my back to my bedroom door. Indulging for just this moment the fantasy: George is here, George is asleep in my bed, is sighing in his sleep, the pillow smells of him and his clothing is strewn on my floor but I won't have time to notice because he will wrap me in his arms before he even opens his eyes.

The water boils. I resist the temptation to go to my drawer and finger the one shirt he left there, the one I don't dare put on for
fear I'll dissolve. Instead I brew my tea and try to explain my strategy to myself. I will do only this one thing for Elizabeth, and then I will keep my involvement with her minimal. I've never flown in the face of Jeff's advice before. But, I reason, what choice do I have? To abandon Elizabeth?

After all
—I speak the words aloud in the quiet room—
I'm her adviser.

I pour my tea and return to the telephone that I have used, of late, primarily for bereavement calls:
The engagement is off. No, I guess it wasn't right. Where shall I return your gift?
I pick up the receiver and wait for the dial tone. Framing the card between thumb and forefinger, I dial the number for Elizabeth's mother. On the second ring, Mary Archer answers: a pert Midwestern voice that turns serious the moment I introduce myself. She listens wordlessly. When I have finished I hear Mary breathing. She's terse as I spell out details. The scratch of pencil on paper comes faintly through the line.

Before setting down the telephone I hear myself make a promise—one Elizabeth's mother, whose questions are practical, has not solicited. “We're not going to let her down here,” I tell her over the telephone. “We're not going to isolate her.”

Mary's
thank-you
is so brief I wonder if she didn't understand what I was pledging.

I lay down the receiver and walk through the kitchenette to the bathroom mirror, where I find my uncombed hair and stilled face.

Elizabeth wakes, eats canned soup that I heat over the stove, and sips hot cocoa drowsily. She asks no questions, and seems neither surprised nor grateful to be cocooned in my apartment. Her silence is a relief. I have no desire to speak; am obscurely frightened of her; am painfully attentive to her every move. I minister to her awkwardly and in near silence.

An hour before Mary's flight is due from Chicago, when Elizabeth is asleep once more, I telephone Victoria.

“She's at your apartment?” Victoria's voice is crisp with incredulity. “Don't you know we've been trying to track her down for hours?”

“She's in trouble. The thing she wrote to Joanne is just a symptom.”

“Of?”

“She's had some kind of breakdown. It's severe. I've contacted her mother, who's on the next flight in.”

“Tracy. When I interviewed Elizabeth for this program, I naturally questioned her in a private meeting about the one-year gap on her résumé. At the time she indicated that she'd had some past psychiatric issues. She was not specific on the subject. And I didn't pry, beyond ascertaining that she took responsibility for maintaining her own equilibrium. She said her condition was completely under control with medication, and there was no reason to fear a relapse so long as she kept her life balanced. I should think she needs to reach out in some fashion, face up to what she's done, and communicate to Joanne that she means her no harm.”

“Victoria, do you have any sense of
how
unwell Elizabeth is?”

“Tracy, Joanne has, of her own generosity and against a preponderance of advice, decided not to bring this before the faculty senate until she's had a conversation with Elizabeth. That may or may not be wise, but it's her prerogative. If Elizabeth can't come in to the department right now, then she can at least get on the telephone with Joanne. Either she is capable of being a nondestructive part of this department, or she is not. Don't forget, Tracy, that there is, at this very moment, a seriously ill member of our tenured faculty who is being placed under unnecessary stress. This department does not have time for hide-and-go-seek with a graduate student.”

“There
is
one ill faculty member right now. True. There's also one ill graduate student. I know the department's priorities are with the faculty, but we can't ignore the other side of this.”

Victoria doesn't answer. I realize I'm millimeters away from directly accusing Joanne. Even in my anger I know enough to tack. “When you saw Elizabeth going into dangerous waters,” I say, “with her dissertation, weren't you worried?”

“I had a word with all three parties involved—Elizabeth, Joanne, and yourself. That should have been enough. We are all responsible for our own equilibrium, Tracy. This department is composed of adults.”

On the sofa behind me, Elizabeth shifts. The pillow that's slid, inch by inch, from beneath her head over the past several hours
escapes now and drops to the floor without waking her. Her face is an eclipsed moon, empty of desire.

“I think,” I say, “that getting on the telephone with Joanne right now would be very bad for Elizabeth, and not productive for anyone.”

“I appreciate your concern, Tracy, but you were not the one on the receiving end of that letter. Do not forget that there is the possibility, however remote, of a physical threat to Joanne. Do not forget that mentally ill people who are deranged enough to write menacing rants to colleagues may be deranged enough to do more. It needs to be established right away whether Elizabeth is a danger to Joanne. Joanne wants to speak with her.”

It takes a physical effort to slow my speech and punctuate it with silences, translating my bucking temper into Victoria's native tongue. “I believe that if you heard what I've heard today,” I say, “you might see this matter differently. Elizabeth's world is so removed from reality at this moment that I think it would be a waste of everyone's considerable energy—in fact it would be pouring fuel on the fire—to confer with her now. It's true I'm not in Joanne's shoes. And I'm not an expert. But I'm convinced that if you saw Elizabeth you would agree she needs, before all else, immediate psychiatric help. I'm asking you to trust me. Any conversation prior to treatment will bear no fruit. And I think Joanne's outrage, as justified as it is, will fall on deaf ears.” Or shatter whatever of Elizabeth remains intact. “Elizabeth—the Elizabeth we know, Victoria—is lying in pieces on my living room sofa. Her mother will be here in an hour to take charge of her care.”

There is another roomy silence. Then Victoria, in her own flinty way, relents. “I can't promise that there won't be consequences if Elizabeth doesn't answer for her actions soon.” She pauses. “I expect Joanne will be patient enough to wait a few days more, once I explain the situation. And I will extend myself to keep this matter from getting out of hand. But in the meanwhile, rumors will continue to proliferate. And rumors make people anxious. I can't do anything to prevent that. This is the sort of issue that ends up on the chairman's doorstep.”

We both know what will happen if it does. Grub will swing
open his door, sniff an unpleasant problem, and make it—and Elizabeth—go away.

In my imagination, my chairman's door shuts. The click echoes along a silent corridor lined with literary cartoons, brochure-laden bulletin boards, and the closed doors of my colleagues' offices. The brochures float momentarily in the breeze and are still.

Mary Archer rings the buzzer near midnight. When I open the door, a petite, black-eyed woman in boots and a no-nonsense winter coat nods briskly at me. Beneath her wool cap, her lined face is so chiseled with resolve that, as I step out of her way, I nearly falter with an outsized longing to curl up on the sofa and receive her ministrations myself—this woman who has appeared out of the frosty dark and from halfway across the country to save her child from a nightmare. Without a word to me, she steps over the stacks of books and magazines on the carpet, kneels, and kisses her daughter's forehead. Like a princess in a fairy tale Elizabeth wakes at the kiss, and with an alacrity that leaves me breathless tosses herself into her mother's arms.

“Don't worry, love,” says Eileen. She holds out an unsealed envelope.

Opening it, I find confirmation of the date for my tenure meeting, a week and a half hence.

“You had great chances already,” says Eileen, “and now with Jeff leaving and Joanne going part-time, they can't afford to lose another prof.”

I tuck the letter into my pocket.

“It'll be fine,” prods Eileen. Today she's in earth-mother mode, and I'm failing to be sufficiently appreciative.

I'm about to turn for my office; instead, I linger. Eileen, it suddenly occurs to me, is not only the chief purveyor of departmental gossip, but the best gauge of public opinion. “Unless,” I say, “people still blame me for Elizabeth's letter.”

She clucks her tongue. “Everyone knows Elizabeth wrote it. And no one could possibly blame you for that poor child's troubles.”

Mother Earth lays it on thick, but this morning she does seem sincere.

“Word has it she's gone completely loony,” she lilts. “I hear
they've got her in some kind of lockup ward, and her mother's waiting on her day and night.” She searches my face for a response. When I give none, she takes a draft of coffee from a
YOU GO, GIRL
mug on her desk. ”Now, tell it true, Tracy. Aren't we having a wedding?”

I draw a deep breath. I see no point in dodging this one any longer. “It doesn't look like there's going to be one.” I meet Eileen's gaze and don't look away. “You probably want to know why. Things didn't feel right. I couldn't go so fast. I asked him to slow down. He walked.”

Eileen's eyes widen. The effect, accentuated by her blue eyeliner, is startling. She looks genuinely concerned. For a full minute I think I've silenced her.

“Go ahead,” I say. “Tell me I'm stupid.”

Thoughtfully, Eileen balances a tape dispenser in her palm. “A girlfriend of mine did something like that. She never regretted it—though everybody said she was dumb for losing the guy . . .” Eileen sets down the tape. “I thought she was brave.”

I don't know how to answer this. Eileen is watching me, for the first time, with what looks like respect.

I gesture at the clock. “Meeting,” I say.

In the faculty room most of the seats are already filled. I step past the empty chair by the right wall; Jeff is in Georgia, househunting with Richard. Steven Hilliard—present and accounted for as usual, his attendance now grimly accepted by the faculty—gives me a collegial wave. I make my way to a free seat, weaving past faces that hold more than the usual quotient of curiosity. Fortified by my exchange with Eileen, I am able to see beyond the inquisitive glances and understand that I'm a sideshow to the larger tensions animating the room. Elizabeth's letter has palpably spooked this assembly, but there's something more. Final grade sheets aren't due for another few days, but Jeff has already submitted his; I detect his glittering farewell confetti of A's hovering in the room. There is a jumpy excitement of the sort that animates a high school cafeteria just before a promised fistfight.

Anyone wandering into the room who hadn't known Joanne six months ago would see only a somewhat bulky woman, shoulders rounded, face plump, pacing heavily while the others settle into chairs.
Her colleagues greet her with a blank, preoccupied politeness, as though the change that's overtaken Joanne these last months were invisible to them. Joanne, expert in sixteenth-century poets who took the measure of mortality in sonnets full of chilly graves, scans the gathering with thunderous disdain. Her colleagues' gazes flee.

The fall term is all but over, exams winding down. This is the time when academics wrap up grading and pray to be left alone. But Joanne has been in high gear. She's given up two of her classes for the coming term, yet if anything seems to have taken on more committee work. She's been particularly solicitous of the junior faculty, taking them out for preholiday drinks: jokey, confiding, abruptly interested in their personal lives. It may look like friendship. More likely it's empire expansion. I've played into it at the flurry of end-of-term meetings, gritting my teeth and voting Joanne's side wherever doing so does not directly betray my principles. My hand was the first in the air for her grading-review proposal last Friday, and I voiced immediate and emphatic approval of her motion for the creation of a new fifteenth-century post, leaving the meeting trailing unacknowledged at the rear of her retinue. I'm not stupid. Surely some of the faculty—including any senior colleagues undecided on the question of my tenure—are still watching for confirmation that I meant every word Elizabeth penned.