Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (47 page)

I don't speak for several seconds. “I'm more than worried.”

He hums his assent.

“I don't want everything I've done to be for nothing.”

He breathes. And slowly, as the minutes pass, I begin to understand what Yolanda meant when she said she and Chad like to get on the phone and just listen to each other breathe. In the silence on the line there's some living presence, some palpable, substantial exchange. An inaudible conversation, like something turning deep under the water.

I sit back in my office chair and close my eyes. In Chad's company my anxiety slows. Drizzles. Settles.

When we get off the phone, I'm calmer.

I leave, locking my office for the night. I pass through the nearly deserted corridor, resisting the notion that the scattering of colleagues still at work have shut their office doors so they won't have to see me. I greet Eileen with a nod, aware that despite her faults she's one of the few people in this place with whom I have no bone to pick. Eileen, at least, rarely pretends to be other than she is. Dazedly I scan the departmental calendar with its highlighted meeting reminders, then pull my stack of mail from its cubbyhole. One envelope stands out, and I open it with my face half-averted, as though to protect myself from its slap. I read.

Dear Professor Farber,

We beg to inform you that you have been selected as a Fielding Fellow for the upcoming academic year. You receive this honor in the company of a small number of innovative scholars and artists around the country.

Please contact us at your earliest convenience to confirm your acceptance of the award and for further details.

Congratulations.

Sincerely,

Frederick Daley

Chairman, Fielding Foundation

I read the lines again, then fold the paper and stand still, licking my chapped lips.

A near hysterical giggle rouses me.

“Took you long enough to check today's mail,” Eileen says. “This is the latest I've stayed in this office in fifteen years.”

Obediently my eyes find the clock: five-forty
P.M.

“But I decided you should find the letter on your own. Without my hinting.”

She waits for thanks.

“The fellowship . . .” I begin. I hold up the envelope.

“. . . is
fantastic,
” Eileen sings. “Great for your résumé. But, even better, it bails you out, doesn't it? It lets you sit out your mess for a year, doesn't it? And do your work that you do. This changes everything, doesn't it?”

When I don't respond, Eileen answers for me. “It changes everything. Well, I'm glad I played a teeny little part in making it happen.” Her lip-gloss-bright smile broadens in a way that says she's got a story to tell; but this time beneath the usual avarice for credit there's genuine pride. “They called two months ago,” Eileen says. “They'd narrowed it down to finalists, and they needed references for the final cut. They wanted a letter from him, of course.” She nods toward Grub's shuttered office. “You'd listed him on your application. I passed him the message. The letter he wrote was”—she gives me a significant look—“less than his usual.”

Still numb, I count weeks. This would have been just after my tenure was denied.

“It didn't have
zing,
” Eileen says.

I picture, for a moment, a private sun-filled office. Shelves full of files. Time to write without teaching responsibilities. Time supported by a Fielding Foundation that believes what I'm trying to say matters.

“It was the kind of recommendation letter that would make you lose to another one of those finalists. Not that he said anything direct. Just those little hints he uses to say what he means. No wonder his wife died of throat cancer.”

I look up. “When did she—”

“Oh, years ago.” Eileen waves airily. “Also, I wasn't sure he understood your new project. In all its
significance.
”

This last comment sounds so little like Eileen that I finally give what she's been angling for: my full attention.

“So I wrote a new letter.” She inspects her polished nails. “He doesn't even know what he signs.”

“You—”

“Want to see?” Brightly she opens a folder on her desk, shuffles pages, and hands me a sheet of paper.

To the Fielding Committee,

Professor Tracy Farber is the most estimable scholar to grace this department in the memory of this scholarly assembly. She successfully interrogates the catechistic corners of the literary canon, positing theoretical slippages of meaning and loosing the moorings of the prosody tradition with groundbreaking paradigmatic idiom.

Eileen meets my gaze with a defensive smirk. “Don't you think I know how you people talk?”

She is a paragon of pedagogical prowess. She is also an autodidact, having grown up on a farm.

“A farm?”

“You grew up out west, didn't you?”

“In Seattle.”

“See?” Eileen nods ferociously. “Local color.”

Catch this rising literary star while you can. Her voice is critical to the critical cantabile.

To call her work a radical departure doesn't do it justice.

Sincerely,

James Manning

Chairman

I set the page gently on her desktop.

Eileen waits—for once, with patience—for me to speak. She wears the astonished half smile of someone who has, to her own surprise, proven herself.

“I'm stunned.”

“It figures,” Eileen says. Then, before I understand what she's doing, she stands, leans across her desk, and plants a lipsticky kiss on my cheek. “Now go do something good.”

Along the Hudson, cars whizzing by, I blink into the gusts. I veer east, walk up Broadway, turn west and north in an ever expanding circuit. Manhattan sheds yet another disguise, revealing itself to be a medieval labyrinth: its streets full of mendicants, penitents, and the dazed and footsore newly blessed. To walk is to meditate. I change direction to pay tribute to the museums, monuments to long-past eras and cultures that I haven't visited in months because I've been saturating my senses with books. The museums invite me to march up their broad steps and take possession. I raise my head and laugh aloud. Then, crying, divert course to a favorite park, which I circle humming a tuneless and quizzical riff. It's well past dark before I've completed a long enough circuit to befriend my ballooning thoughts, hear them out, and corral them sufficiently to carry them home to my narrow apartment.

Sitting on the stoop of my building, a monument to an era and culture long past, is George.

CAREFULLY HE SETS
a paper coffee cup on the concrete. He stands.

And I think: George.

He's different from the George of my imagination. He's taller. Handsomer than I'd remembered. And dangerous. Though I've imagined his return endlessly, I always saw it in sweeping, sensuous generalities. Not like this. Not with George so serious he looks as if he can hardly stand. Not with me wrapping my arms protectively around my chest.

Neither of us speaks.

A stern-faced police officer passes on foot, eyeing us: two more potential miscreants on his beat. He strolls to the end of the block and disappears.

“When you called Paula's house,” he says, “I didn't come to the phone.” His voice is low, emphatic. His expression seeks nothing from me other than that I listen. “Because I couldn't. I couldn't speak one word to you.”

I set down my briefcase.

His voice, his face, his generous mouth. His hands, loose at his sides.

He speaks slowly, as though it is imperative that I understand the meaning of each word. “I let myself be bewildered in that house.” He's silent for a moment. “I said to Paula: I made a new life, but it didn't hold the weight I rested on it.”

We look at each other. A breeze picks up, but we don't move.

George says, “I let Paula tell me how to dress for the weather. I let my father tell me what work needed doing around his house. Which relatives to call to give updates on his health. Every call I made, Tracy, was penitence. An apology for the life I'd tried to live.” The wind flops his hair across his forehead. He doesn't brush it away.

“My father tried, with me,” he says. “His health shocked him into trying.”

His hands rise as though to explain something to me; then drop. And I see it as I never saw it before: his solitude.

He says, “All I could think was: I lost my delight.”

“I know,” I say. “George, I—”

“With you I had this
dream.
That everything could be the way it was supposed to be. Then you threw it in my face. And after that, it was just . . . I could hardly . . .” He stops. His face is empty. “One morning, when my father was back on his feet and Paula and I were sitting in the kitchen, she said to me, ‘Why would any woman give back a ring?'

“And I answered her, without thinking I just said, ‘It's because she wants me to finish tearing myself in half.'”

He watches me.

“My mother used to like the hymn ‘Abide with Me.' I never believed it, never believed Jesus offered that kind of”—in his voice the word has dignity and heft—“
guaranteed
love.” A few cars float past; George is an island. “But I believed it,” he adds quietly, “of her.” He stands motionless, as though allowing the vision to take form, then dissipate. I watch it go. “It wasn't enough to give up that dream once,” he says. “You made me do it all over again.” Slowly he wags his head. “Tracy.” The syllables of my name carry crushing freight. His expression falters. “I'm here because the truth is more important than whether I can stand the ache. And you were telling the truth about me.”

He stops, drained. Then he looks directly at me. “The world has its rules,” he says. It's a statement of grief.

I set my hand lightly on his chest. Under my fingertips his heartbeat declares itself. At its steady, quiet message, humility suffuses me so thoroughly I can hold his gaze only with difficulty. I had only love to lose—no more, no less. He risked everything.

“George,” I say. Something breaks the surface of my voice.

I was wrong on that first date with George: Love isn't rest. Love requires you, from time to time, to rip up your soul and replant it. To dare your lover to do the same. To muster sympathy where it seemed impossible. To be, perpetually, two kids joining hands, drawing breath, and deep-diving.

I can't foresee what hurdles or negotiations might lie ahead. All I know is this: love takes faith. And there it is—the first faith my mind hasn't been able to wrestle to the ground. It's a faith at which I'm only a beginner. But I'm willing to labor, imperfections and all, for its sake. I think: let love be my religion, its intricacies, its euphorias, its trials. I think: I want to learn from this man for the rest of my life.

I take a solitary moment to feel it: the silent, improbable blooming of awe. Then I give the answer that's mine to give.

“That doesn't mean,” I say, “that we have to live by them.”

He nods the brief, pained nod of a survivor.

The street is still. The police officer makes his way back toward us, stick swinging. I watch him, momentarily paralyzed by the notion that he might charge at us. Then I find my key and unlock the door to my building, only daring to look up into George's face when I've heard the door latch safely behind us.

The dark sets us loose, the hulking sofa and woolly carpet exert gravity. A blue spark from my fingertip anoints his shoulder as we shed a thick rope of clothing and emerge: The rope of our two bodies. What I've starved for.

Every angel, according to kabbalist literary tradition, has a single purpose. There is an angel to foretell each war, an angel to foretell each birth. There is one angel to open heaven's windows, another to shut them. George and I reunite as simply as though we had no other purpose in life than to teach each other this: this touch.

Don't think it's easy. We stumble, clash, retreat. Laughter resurfaces slowly. Anger surges and has to be pried loose. Love may be my religion, but I am (he was right) irretrievably Jewish. And skepticism is part of the believer's duty.

We meet at the reception hall. It's deserted. With another thank-you to the blank-faced custodian, George leads me to a spot near
the center of the room. “Here,” he says, tracing an invisible circle on the beige carpet. “Ground zero.” He opens the bottle of wine. We sit.

At the Italian restaurant I draw faces on the steamed windows and refuse to utter so much as a monosyllable about my work. “Okay,” I say at last. “Here's the question that's been burning in me for four months. If we're all doing the wave in the stadium, who are we cheering on?”

We see Yolanda in
Downhearted Revue,
in which she's been cast (by an admirer of her H.D.) as the aging, ruined proprietress of a failing cabaret. The play is passable, Yolanda's performance unconvincing because she looks too damn happy. We walk Yolanda to the subway, paying our compliments. (“You were radiant,” George tells her.) Later, in my kitchen, George falls silent, then laughs until he has to set down his ice cream spoon. “You know I respect you, Tracy. But can you please explain to me again why you insist that other play wasn't as bad as we thought?”

A weeknight; both of us with morning meetings; who cares. Near midnight we smother the clock under a pillow. We face each other on his sofa, beers in hand. “Don't stop to think,” he says. “Tell me,” he says, “about the worst anybody ever broke your heart.”