Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (42 page)

During the ten minutes that Elizabeth, Victoria, and I wait in the lounge, a half dozen faculty members show for coffee breaks. One by one they enter, linger over the electric kettle or coffee machine, peruse the shelves in vain for an unaccountably absent volume. They murmur to Elizabeth—
Good to see you, How's it going.
Empty queries, excuses for a few seconds' searching gaze, enough to take in the fiercely ironed blouse and slacks, the peaked
face and clenched hands. They leave tucking their impressions into their pockets, tender for barter at a later and livelier gathering.

The door opens. Joanne is winded. Her grip bends the letter's slim profile. She holds it, chest-level, like a trophy.

Elizabeth's struggle to lift her eyes is monumental.

“The apology,” says Joanne, “is clearly sincere.” She swirls the air with Elizabeth's letter. Her face is flushed. “I'll grant you the right to continue in this program.”

Elizabeth's lids close in thanksgiving.

“But forgiveness isn't everything,” Joanne cuts in. “There's the matter of your dissertation.”

“I—”

Silently I counsel:
Don't let her ruffle you.

“I'll get it done as soon as I'm able,” Elizabeth breathes.

Good girl.

“That's not enough. You've already got one gap in your résumé. Just how long do you plan to delay before going on the job market? It won't look good.”

“Joanne, I've been meaning to ask you—” Elizabeth glances guiltily at me: we'd agreed she wouldn't suggest this today, but like an affection-starved child she's unable to refrain from giving all. “Will you be my adviser?” In her quavering voice the question sounds like a proposal of startling intimacy.

Joanne lifts her chin. Without turning from Elizabeth or altering the substance of her words, she addresses herself directly to me, and her message is one of unalloyed triumph. “Inefficiency,” she says, “is a luxury you can no longer afford.”

“I think what Joanne means,” Victoria interjects, a distinct note of warning in her voice—to Joanne? to Elizabeth?—“is that this event has damaged your reputation. The more promptly—within reason—you can demonstrate that you're capable of getting your work done, the better.”

“I understand,” says Elizabeth.

“Do you?” presses Joanne.

In my thirty-three years I have never felt so strong an urge to punch another human. I catch Victoria's eye. Her mouth is pursed.

“We're running out of time,” warns Joanne, as though she expects Elizabeth to start typing right here. “I'll work with you. But
if you don't give us your final draft soon we'll have to take it out of your hands.”

No one can bring a dissertation draft before a committee without the author's permission. Surely Elizabeth sees through this bluff?

Joanne steps heavily toward Elizabeth, close enough for a private conversation. Under Joanne's stare Elizabeth seems to lose her ability to focus. Her eyes widen but find no purchase.

“I don't understand what's been taking you so long,” Joanne confides.

And something in me turns to stone.

Elizabeth's speech is thick. “I'll reset my defense-date as soon as I can. I'll let you know. I want to tell you how grateful . . .” She cannot finish the sentence. Her face is saturated with abasement, and with an emotion I recognize even if she cannot: hate. Her eyes drop to the floor. After a long silence her head drifts up and, with a quick, admiring glance at Joanne, she leaves the room.

Victoria turns to Joanne. “She'll need time to recuperate.”

Joanne shrugs. She folds Elizabeth's letter neatly in two, and slides it into the pocket of her slacks.

“You were hard on her,” Victoria persists. “Understandable, but—”

“I see myself in her,” Joanne says evenly. “I know what she's capable of.”

“It's a real gift to a student,” says Victoria, “when a professor takes a personal interest in her abilities. But let's remember that for the moment Elizabeth is not as capable at
living
as she is at literature.”

In the pause that follows, both women seem to become aware of my presence. I don't budge. To move would be to jar a fragile new understanding: I've been wrong. Joanne does not want Elizabeth driven out of the department.

“You need her here, don't you?” I say.

Joanne laughs aloud.

“Like a house,” I say, “needs a lightning rod.” The words are spoken. There is no stepping back now, between us.

She turns to me: face set, fists curling at her sides, stance defiant. Solid limbs chaining her to a crippled future. The statuesque body, the athletic grace and physical power Joanne has exerted all
her life like a magnetic field, have betrayed her. In another universe she and Elizabeth and I would console one another—each in our own way bereft. But Joanne, heedless, hurtles toward vengeance. It's to silence her own grief that she's flagellated the department. And it's for this that she'll exact punishment of the department's brightest star.

I've read miles of gothic literature, in which demons embody the power of human malice. But I've never understood—have never even bothered to wonder—what draws the demon to its victim. Now I see it. Joanne's relationship with Elizabeth, I understand, is the truest intimacy she's got.

In the stifling room, the ponderous bulk of Joanne's isolation is all but overwhelming.

With my eyes I condemn her to it.

“Too bad about losing your advisee, Tracy,” she says. “And too bad about your engagement. I hear it was quite precipitous. Rash entry, rash exit. Next time maybe you'll be more judicious.”

Victoria stands. “Joanne Miller, that was cruel.”

With a deliberate, luxurious motion, Joanne removes her glasses, blows a speck of dust off one lens, and puts them back on. “Terribly sorry to hurt you, Tracy,” she says. Then she gives a smile that chills me. She starts for the door.

My voice, to my shock, is steady. “Elizabeth needs to recuperate before she can take on a shred of academic work. The doctor was adamant. Nothing less than six months' complete rest.”

Halfway to the door, Joanne stops. Without turning she says, “I'll give her two.”

They leave, Victoria with an uneasy nod to me.

Alone in the lounge, I reach shakily for a volume of Arnold. I read.

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling
. . .

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

“Hey,” says Joseph Yee. He sticks his head in the door and scans the room with a disappointed expression. “How's it going?”

In answer I lift the book and read. “
We mortal millions . . . in the sea of life enisled.
”

Five minutes later I'm walking Elizabeth out of the department.
Within ten steps of leaving my office her composure crumbles and she sobs violently in the deserted elevator.

On the sidewalk Mary waits, cradling a steaming cup of coffee; judging by her stained mittens, it's not her first.

Elizabeth opens her arms and takes her mother in a fierce hug, which Mary returns guardedly, swaying with the force of her daughter's sudden, giddy laughter. “Joanne accepted the apology!” Elizabeth sobs into her mother's neck. “I can't believe it. She says I can stay if I turn in my dissertation soon.”

I watch Mary's face. Uncertainty solidifies into a grim anger that heartens me.

“I told Joanne that Elizabeth needed six months off,” I tell Mary.

Elizabeth lets go of her mother. “But you know the doctor said I only need—”

“Don't you think I know my colleague?” I snap. To Mary I say, “Joanne agreed to two months.”

“That's until
February,
” says Elizabeth, as though Joanne's counteroffer were the height of kindness.

“That's still enough pressure to bring you down, and don't forget it.”

Elizabeth's tear-streaked face goes blank. But, to my surprise, I've earned a forceful nod from Mary: a first, spare gesture of appreciation.

The two retreat along the avenue of gray stone buildings: the mute pollution-tinged bones of the city that appear, in this failing light, to embody stoicism.

I slip inside the coffee shop. There, I buy an espresso as though the act were a religious devotion, and drink it George's way—without sugar. Is there no bottom to missing him? No point at which I give up wishing for his return? Weeks have passed. I no longer call. The days of his absence stack one upon the other, throwing an ever more damning shadow against the count of our days together. Yet he can still walk into my thoughts without warning, order my coffee, decline sugar.

In the crowded coffee shop I recall a time when I observed in safety, content to know all and risk nothing, cagey about what role love might play in my life. From this distance, my former musings about love seem like fatally flawed equations, physics problems
calculated without factoring in a basic condition. Love has mass and volume. Put it into your life; it must displace something. As it has displaced my notion of what was good and important in the world, and substituted this: The knowledge that there is nothing more important than people willing to stand up for the truth of each other. The understanding of what it is to protect another fragile being. The understanding that I, too, will grow old.

I could have done no different with George. But nothing prepared me for how much love would hurt.

Is that it? Is that where my love story ends?

Tragedy!
says the dying father to his daughter in the Grace Paley tale.
You too. When will you look it in the face?

The daughter, gutsy and inventive, has a different idea.
Everyone,
she insists,
real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

The shop is bright and noisy and I want to rivet it with a cry. I try instead to summon some vestige of postmodernism. The object, I counsel myself numbly, is fungible. “Love” passes on, and in its place come new and equally powerful “Loves.”

Like a wave.

I drink the espresso and burn my throat: a small act of truth.

Hannah's baby looks like a radiant, bright-eyed Winston Churchill.

“She's the make-out queen.” Hannah's voice is suffused with unspoken delight. The air is thick with a sweet, waxy, new-baby smell. Hannah, propped in bed against a bank of white pillows, wears a girlish ponytail and the white granny nightgown that robes her like a maternal angel. “She gets this twinkle in her eye, then she just opens her mouth and sucks on my face. Ed's too. When she's older she's going to get herself in trouble.”

Ariel may weigh only seven pounds, the motions of her limbs may be confined to flailing and involuntary startles, her vocabulary may consist of mews. But every crinkle of her pinched face implies mischief. She's going to keep her mother good company.

Hannah wolfs a chocolate scone. “I can't believe you traveled an hour and a half on the subway just to buy me these.”

“Eat.” Yawning, I fluff the quilt around Hannah's legs. I was awake until one
A.M
., reading. The restoration of my solitary, meditative evenings has indeed brought its pleasures. Only when I lie down to sleep does my body turn inarticulate, its recently learned
language torn away—my hands so cold my belly flinches from them and I swathe myself in a cocoon of blankets and curl, immobile.

Nonetheless.

I woke this morning, dressed, and made the admittedly absurd trip uptown to Hannah's favorite pastry shop. Hannah neither demands nor expects extravagant generosity. It's what makes surprising her such an uncomplicated pleasure. I'm trying. No more Miss Havisham.

Ariel's head rests on Hannah's knee, and I caress its oval top. The startlingly rapid pulse in the silky skull tattoos my palm in reward. I shut my eyes and relax into my place at this tableau. Babies have always made me the tiniest bit claustrophobic. But this one, for some reason, feels different. I could sit here forever, paying homage to the miracle of this tiny breathing body.

From the living room Elijah shrieks and Adam gives an answering banshee wail. The smell of waffles comes from the kitchen: Ed is making a rare cameo as chef.

“Did I mention that I get a full week off from house duties?” Hannah grins as contentedly as though nursing day and night, with a toddler barging in to demand boo-boo kisses, were a holiday.

Then her smile fades. “Still no word from George?”

“And I don't expect it. But my problems are the last thing you need to worry about. Look at her.”

Ariel is taking in the red-and-blue-patterned quilt, blinking at the stitches millimeters from her glistening eyes.

“I'm really sorry, Tracy.”

I keep my eyes on Ariel. “Anyway,” I say softly, “I'm trying to concentrate on other things.” I glance at Hannah, who is patently relieved. “Like work,” I say. “And my tenure review. The politics with one of my colleagues have been horrendous lately. More than I've had time to tell you. More than anybody this minuscule”—I indicate Ariel—“should have to hear. Also”—I make a face—“I've got to get a dress for this faculty club affair. It's a big deal. You know how much I hate shopping.”

“I'd go with you if I could.”

From down the hall there's a thump, a howl from Adam, and a storm of giggles from Elijah.

“Adam!” Hannah calls sharply.

There's a delay, then a recalcitrant “
What?
”

“Come here.”

There is a heavy dragging sound, and a moment later Adam slide-steps into the room, Elijah clinging to his leg.

Hannah pats my knee with her free hand. “I know who owes you a personal-shopping favor.”

Adam eyes his sister, then turns to me. “I told you she's a moron,” he says.