Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (49 page)

I set my hands on her shoulders and look straight into her piercing eyes. “Thank you,” I say.

My last lecture concludes with an overview of contemporary literary trends and a meditation on their influences on journalism, Hollywood, Hallmark cards, and the White House's PR machinery. When I've finished, there is a surge of applause. I don't take it to heart. I haven't yet issued final grades, and there are several students in the hall who wouldn't be past hoping such an expression of good will might be reciprocated. I organize my papers at the podium, wave curt thanks to the students, and wait for the hall to empty. The applause goes on, long enough to make me uncomfortable. I look at my hands, at the clock, and finally back up at the clapping students. I imagine their life goals flittering in the air like newly hatched moths.

I pack my office, rejecting the temptation to wait until evening to haul the book boxes to the elevator. I've got nothing to be ashamed of. I work with the windows open, admitting a spring breeze that makes everything—even the stale departmental air—smell newly woken.

Eileen has settled on the edge of her desk to survey my progress. She nods approvingly each time I huff past her with a large book box. “I've seen them come and go here, love,” she says. “And now, now you're leaving.”

I carry my box toward the elevator.

With a wicked lilt, Eileen continues. “And some people don't deserve to have their secrets kept anyway.”

I kneel stiffly, tipping the box onto my thigh and from there onto the carpet beside two identical boxes. When George arrives at six we'll load his car. Together we'll bear my academic life along trafficked side streets to my new office: a bright airy Hudson Street room with a view of brownstone rooftops. “I don't think I want to know,” I tell Eileen. “No offense.”

“As if I believe that. Now”—she glances exaggeratedly around to confirm that we're alone in the reception area—“why do you think Steven took a year off from Oxford to come here?”

I have no patience for riddles of a faculty that's ejected me. But before I can turn away I know the answer.

“He and Joanne met at the MLA conference two years ago,” says Eileen. She giggles. “He said her passion
rocked his world.
Can you imagine it? I guess some people think arrogance is attractive.”

Brushing away the distaste that's since overlaid the image, I recall Joanne at her lectern in the shadowy light shedding from the screen. The soaring vaults of an anonymous sixteenth-century architect behind her. The ocean of uncertain faces before. In a ringing voice she revealed it to them: earth and firmament, error and luster. Vanity, death, mighty love. She was, in her conviction, stunning. As Steven doubtless saw. Their meeting must have felt like gravity.

Eileen stage-whispers from the edge of her desk. “After a year of visits they decided to try living on the same side of the ocean. They made the plan last March, but by summer they were through—just before her diagnosis.” Eileen shakes her head with an expression that falls short of sorrowful. “Steven decided to stick it out here and be civil, and help Joanne if he could. Of course she didn't let him—she barely spoke to him all year, even though he went to all those horrible meetings for her. Wounded pride. God knows why she never cut the cord and took him off her little faculty-meeting e-mail list. The sicker she got the nastier things got. I don't know which one hates the other more now.”

Looking back, it's so obvious I'm shocked: how Steven's participation in faculty meetings evolved from steady conspiratorial support of Joanne in September, to thin-lipped demurral by Thanksgiving, to pitched battle by December. As Steven's solicitous encouragements replay in my head, I see the dozen ways he used my tenure candidacy as grist, provoking Joanne in a language no one else understood.

“She's a horrid person, Joanne,” Eileen says brightly.

“Who knew about this?” I ask.

“Not a one of you,” Eileen pronounces, the enormity of her burden stilling her. It's a moment before she nods herself back to duty. “Except Victoria. And
him.
” She points toward Grub's office. “When Steven interviewed. And we can all be sure
he
forgot the minute Steven told him.” Eileen crosses her arms against her bosom.

I used to think love was an extra—a spice that made life more fulfilling for some. It occurs to me now that it's dangerous, that who has it and who loses it decides the course of the world.

I know better than to believe Eileen kept a departmental romance to herself all year. Probably she learned of it only now, from
a departing Steven, who left this week for England. Probably he debriefed Eileen, after his year's forbearance, in a burst of bitterness.

Or perhaps Joanne spilled the beans herself. I realize I don't care. I can set Steven and Joanne's tale down beside so many others, turn my back, and walk out of this building.

I am in my office, girding to lift the last box of books, when Joanne appears in my doorway. Scanning my emptied shelves, she speaks with studied neutrality. “Packing?”

Let Joanne flaunt triumph. My eyes belong on a bigger prize. I work the tape over the box's top flaps.

Joanne watches in silence. When I'm finished she says, “Let me.” Brushing past me, she kneels and, with a slight stagger, lifts the solidly packed box. “Where to?” she breathes. There's something plaintive about her expression. Yes, she's showboating, but her gloating can't harm me any further, and she knows it. Rather she needs to prove something, to me and to herself: that she can stare down illness.

I let her hold the box for a moment. Her arms tremble noticeably.

“There,” I say in a low voice. I point to the desktop not two feet from where she's standing. She sets the box there with an expression of regret.

“All's fair?” She extends her broad hand.

As she waits, her hand wavering slightly, her pale brown eyes telegraph an urgent request. It's a request not for forgiveness but for something more: confirmation that I can see in her a colleague I recognize; that my seductive, magnanimous adversary is still alive; that Joanne Miller is something other than what illness has made her.

She never intended to be this way. No one does. That's the definition of tragedy.

I hoist the box. “
Did not we meet,
” I say, “
to Truthe enthrall'd, our Soules enlarg'd in this Hallow'd Hall.
”

Her hand is still extended. I leave her in the emptied office.

In the faculty lounge I find Paleozoic withdrawing his saucer from the cabinet. Three o'clock. He acknowledges my presence with a world-weary smile, then fills his infuser with tea leaves and
lowers it delicately into his steaming cup. In his gray V-neck and slacks, white-dotted navy socks and bedroom slippers, he bends carefully over a side table, where he sets his tea to brew.

I find my mug in the cabinet and wedge it into my briefcase. From behind me comes the rasp of a match, then a surge of blue pipe smoke. The sofa's springs creak, taking Paleozoic's weight. He lets out a contented gasp.

“Something you ought to know, Tracy.” He waits for me to turn. His lined face is furrowed with the delicate work of breaking difficult news. “It's come to my attention that Jeffrey Thomas was, all this time, a closet homosexual.”

The smoke thickens the air. If there is any activity in the department outside this room, its sound does not penetrate.

“Really?” I say.

Paleozoic replies with a grave nod. Slowly the small, Churchillian smile reasserts itself. “Our friend hid it well,” he says. “Anyone might have been fooled. But at the end of the day, secrets will out.” He sucks on his pipe.

“How did you know?” I say.

“Ah.” He lets the syllable trail off in a ripe puff of smoke: it may take some time, but a man of discernment can tell.

“Aha,” says Grub from the doorway.

I glance at the clock: 3:05
P.M
.

“Aha indeed,” rumbles Paleozoic.

Noticing me, Grub gives a vague, apologetic wave. “Beautiful afternoon, isn't it?” He doesn't wait for a response but crosses to the cabinet, whence he withdraws a saucer and cup along with a small French press. From the freezer he extracts a bag of his own coffee—no bitter departmental brew for the chairman. He mixes coffee and hot water noisily, then, leaving the used spoon on the counter, settles on the armchair, one palm hovering atop the French press.

Searching the cabinet for traces of my career in this room, I find few. My sugar packets I bequeath to the department. My honey bear I reclaim, unwilling to leave its pudgy belly to my former colleagues' grasping hands. The petty logic of the rejected. I turn to find Paleozoic scrutinizing me from the sofa.

“You know, Tracy.” Paleozoic pulls on his pipe: a small wet sound like a feeding fish. Slowly he exhales. “You can't always get
what you want.” He fishes a small metal object from his pocket; tamps his pipe gently; examines the tamper minutely, replaces it in his pocket. ”But, if you try sometimes, you just might find . . .” He trails off. A few seconds pass; he begins to look alarmed.

“You just might find . . . ?” prompts Grub, slowly pushing the plunger on his coffee.

Paleozoic bobs his eyebrows in thanks, then finishes his advice with an ash-scattering flourish. “You get what you
need.
” Sucking on his pipe once more, Paleozoic turns to his longtime colleague and, with an expression of gratitude, claps him on the back.

This is what the state of New York provides to a couple upon issuing a marriage license.

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Ultra

I am not making this up.

We visit. Elizabeth, wan but alert, greets us with a lovely, heart-turning smile. The doctors believe she will soon be ready for a limited resumption of her work. Mary isn't taking chances. Elizabeth's dream has always been a life in academia; Mary is selling her home back in Evanston and will stay with her daughter until she finishes her dissertation.

In the noisy restaurant where we take her for dinner, Mary watches a family seated nearby: a toddler girl and two older boys, parents issuing orders across a crumb-strewn table. Midway
through the meal the younger boy cries, is comforted, and clambers onto his father's lap, from which safe perch he will eat the remainder of his dinner. Mary's face is inscrutable as she watches. When the family has gone she says, “You turn your life upside down for the people you love.” She folds her napkin and sets it on the table. “It's what love is for.”

It's late when we drop her back at the hospital. She thanks us once more for dinner and stands in the poorly lit parking lot until our car rounds the corner. I imagine she remains there: a compact woman in a jean jacket, colossus of endurance. Watching our rented car's progress down the long slope toward the highway. Then she turns and steps back to the ward where her daughter, with the humility of a child, awaits permission to read and write once more.

We zoom down I-87. This stretch of highway has no lamps, and the red taillights of the sweeping traffic are a pageant of human focus: the couples and the families, the late-evening commuters, the long-haul truckers. Driver after driver flaunts his immunity to the speed limit and the laws of physics. George's foot plies the accelerator, mine taps a phantom brake. A fleet of motorcyclists on bikes half the girth of our car weave dangerously between lanes. Swooping around us at an impossible angle, a biker somehow straightens from a dip that—as it plays on in my mind—flips him onto the pavement, snaps him, sends us spinning. I hardly catch my breath before another roars past in similar style.

People courting death left and right. George drives with one hand on the steering wheel. His face is lit faintly by the dashboard. The resilience of his skin, the expanding width of his shoulders as he draws breath, the flushed warmth just beneath his collar: all are palpable to me from this distance.

There's not much point in trying. No description in a book or movie or song has ever come close to what it is to be in the presence of the man I love. Lying next to George at night; coming across him unexpectedly as I unlock the door to our apartment; sitting beside him as we drive the reckless highway; he is breath and heat and welcome; he is the steady thread of a pulse, a path laid out to the horizon, the part of life that says
forward.
No one has ever made me as loving, angry, sexy, forgiving. I've lost my
map, and navigate by feel. We settle into each other with a warmth so perfect I can mention it only with awe.

I rest my palm on his thigh. Without taking his eyes off the road, he lifts it to his chest and holds it there.

People misunderstand happiness. They think it's the absence of trouble. That's not happiness, that's luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble. No two people have the same trouble, or the same way of metabolizing it. Q.E.D.: No two happy people are happy in the same way. Even Tolstoy was afraid to admit this, and I don't blame him. Every day brilliant people, people smarter than I, wallow in safe tragedy and pessimism, shying from what really takes guts: recognizing how much courage and labor happiness demands.