And then, it seemed sleep had only borrowed a moment, and waking, Dinah felt her bare legs against the blanket. In fact she was naked below the waist, and the blanket was a crust of mothballs and there was the university crest beneath her fingers. Henry was propped up on pillows beside her. He was looking straight ahead, and his mouth was moving.
She was still drunk. Her stomach was funny and her ears were, too. That was why she couldn’t hear Henry. Had she simply stumbled into the wrong bedroom? She closed her eyes and reeled. When she opened them again she was surprised to see that Henry wasn’t talking to her, actually. He was talking to James, in the doorway. James, in his driving gloves and overcoat. Where was he going?
It seemed as though Henry were trying to say something in her defense. How peculiar. Henry was saying, not to her, but to James, that he, Henry, loved Dinah.
James disappeared from the doorway. He must be in one of his moods. He’d been up all night, thought Dinah, orienting herself carefully, with Cousin Charles. Henry was sort of cradling her. It would be rude if she pushed him away, although she felt that she wanted to vomit. He was explaining something.
She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t noticed, Henry was saying.
Yes, she thought he had looked a bit sick spilling out of the taxi.
No, Henry was saying, not Charles. “You can’t honestly say you haven’t,” said Henry. “Come on, Dinah.” His body was next to hers, the same and different from James’s. What did she mean, the same? What was she doing? It was too dark in Henry’s bedroom to see where her clothes were, panties and slacks; it was as if her bottom half were under water.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Henry was saying. Henry tensed his face into an eerie, plaster smile in imitation of James’s at the end of that New York City weekend. “And then the unjustified, insupportable sadness!” Henry’s indignation sounded almost practiced. “You can’t explain James’s moods, Dinah,” Henry insisted. He paused and searched her face. “Unless you’re a doctor.”
7
Jonathan Hughes turns in another piece that really is transparently about his mother. He sees literature through the lens of her absence, he argues. He’s working on what he calls a song-cycle. Marguerite says, “An elegy?” Her dignity—she maintains—requires that she raise an eyebrow. He raises one back at her. Her pulse quickens. But still, he’s the wettest straight man she’s ever encountered. The most sentimental mammal, like a whale, although he’s not large, and he doesn’t sing, unless you count the song-cycle. He most definitely will not be hunted into extinction for his oil. She entertains herself imagining how passionately he burns to be a writer, with a capital W, and so on. His parents were probably so good to him it was like having four parents. She catches herself. He stops by during her office hours and lodges in her half-closed doorway. His chest spreads out like an ocean, or like a little boy’s chest.
“Hey.” He smiles. Marguerite tells herself that he can’t help it that his voice is a lovely woodwind mid-register.
Her ears pop when she’s nervous. “Come on in,” she says. She can’t meet his creature eye, though. She’s pricklingly aware that she’s been overthinking again—everything. Her bottom half is the chair, and she watches helplessly as he surveys her bookshelf. What a cliché, but her soul feels bare, unattractively puffy.
“I’m teaching my own course next semester,” says Jonathan.
Still without really looking: “Good for you.”
She chides herself, there’s no need for retaliation. But he doesn’t look hurt—bemused, maybe. Maybe he thinks she’s petulant. She hopes he doesn’t think she’s jealous.
Why does she feel like picking a fight? A monkey could do creative writing. He waves toward her books. “I have to come up with a reading list.”
Out of all the books in the world. As if the world were his oyster. Is that what a whale thinks? He fails to close his mouth when he’s done talking, his lower lip hangs open, all the nerves are in his brain, but he’s too young not to be self-conscious.
She says, “What do you write about?”
He blinks. She gets a tiny spasm—she can’t quite tell remorse from embarrassment. Suddenly it occurs to her he may use them all—her, her class—as raw material. She sees him as a carnivore, she sees him working on a screenplay.
He’s saying something about the dynamic between form and content, the dialectic—it’s nothing she hasn’t heard before, and she finds herself sort of hovering, once more, over his long, girlishly lustrous brown hair, delicate glasses. She’s seen him playing Frisbee with a loose pentagon of undergraduates. Once, in the fall, a stocky girl in a bikini top and cutoffs sailed the disc straight into the glare of an elm at sunset. Despite herself, Marguerite stood riveted at the edge of the quad as Jonathan borrowed a football from a couple of Madras-wearing future brokers and aimed it at the treed saucer.
And just like that, after their next class, he asks if she’d like to get a drink together. Her surprise shows, she guesses, and he covers his tracks: “It’s nothing.”
He turns to pack up. “No, sure,” says Marguerite.
He straightens, he’s as bright as a mirror. “Caffeine or alcohol?”
“Are you kidding?”
There’s a bar on campus. Marguerite has only been a few times, she likes to think of herself as more of a dinner party drinker, although when was the last time she went to a dinner party? The truth is that she drinks alone in her apartment. The Grad Towers are seventies bloc style, dinosaurs of raw concrete with narrow, recessed windows and orange aluminum accents. There are dank interior courtyards, exposed concrete staircases, and empty bridges that connect the four thick-ankled buildings.
They don’t have much to say, walking a couple of quiet blocks, but Marguerite feels almost high-spirited in the Friday December darkness. Stamping a little bit in the cold, she tries to stamp out her compulsion to dissect the unaccustomed cheeriness.
A security guard is more or less a belly on a thin folding chair in the open doorway. Marguerite can hear the tink of cues against lacquered balls and a bartender singing along with low music. She wonders what the security guard thinks about this particular assignment. Versus busting frat kids with six-packs in deep bushes?
The place, it occurs to her, is oddly preemptive. She can’t imagine it existed in her mother’s day, not to mention her grandparents’. It strikes her that the university can’t appear to profit from student drinking; on the other hand, if it charges too little for the drinks, how are students expected to avoid becoming alcoholics? She doesn’t share her train of thought with Jonathan. They offer their IDs to the guard—is Jonathan as nonplussed as she to be nearly thirty? He wears a black pea coat. So does Marguerite, it’s practically a uniform.
She takes in the foosball and darts, microwave nachos and cold cereal sold in mini boxes. She feels good-humored and not disingenuously curious: did the trustees and the architects sit down together and decide to hide a great big watering hole in a windowless crater?
Jonathan pulls out a chair for her, and she wouldn’t have guessed it would be so pleasant to feel taken care of. Or else she’s quick to forgive. He folds his coat over his own chairback. “Marguerite,” he says warmly. “What can I get you?”
And suddenly, in his absence—it’s like she’s had the wind knocked out of her. She has nothing to live for. She’s exhausted. How will she hoist a glass of elixir? How will she lift her eyes off the scarified table, as sticky as a freshly licked stamp? It really is the dregs of the semester. One drink and she’ll excuse herself. If she doesn’t already have a good case of mono she’d welcome one; she doesn’t need a drink, she needs a grave.
She can see Jonathan ordering at the bar, his low ponytail, did he dream of having long hair when he was a child? She really doesn’t think he was denied anything. Not spoiled, but empowered. She sees him enchanting his mother. One drink, then she’ll make her escape.
Getting out in front of it with a plan enlivens her. She con
jures up her fish-spined advisor in Paris. He’s plotting a side trip to Majorca or Morocco, it’s getting dark at four o’clock in Paris, too, remember. She sees her advisor hoping the attractive undergrad he installed in Providence will remember to leave at least one sink dripping so the pipes don’t freeze when she decides, at the last minute (relationship repaired with high school linebacker boyfriend), to go home for Christmas. She can hear her advisor remark to his prize-grabbing Swedishka: “You think Marguerite Webb is sleeping with Jonathan Hughes yet?”
Where’s Jonathan? Would it be unforgivable if she got up and checked on the status of their drink orders?
Her advisor once told his wife, “Marguerite is too cold a person to ever really get literature.”
“Not to put you on the spot,” says Jonathan, when he returns. “But I’m a little bit in love with you.”
“Wow,” she says. For some reason they both start laughing. Then they clink glasses, “Chin chin,” she says, and they start laughing all over again. She has a headache—so what. A headache like billions of tiny green flowerheads: dinosaur moss was the same as our moss. Horned turtles were having their day beneath the armored sun. Testudo atlas, eight thousand pounds. Not as heavy as a car. Not close to as heavy as 18½ Maple, their little cottage.
Marguerite read the encyclopedia in bed under the covers; Grandmother Webb staked out some distant corner of the floor plan. Each dinosaur was scaled to the shape and size of a human being: in some cases the human form barely reached the knees of the beast. She read until it put her to sleep, which she soon discovered was better than falling asleep crying.
She dreamed of the little boneheads below, their crowns of bone-thorns, sipping uncertainly from the yellow lake. All kinds of debris kicked up into the dusky atmosphere.
An Edmontosaurus on its side, red spaghetti uncoiling across parched rock outcropping. A beak like a duck and the long, thin neck of a sea serpent. God had not yet been created in order to create more adorable-looking creatures. Herbivores would have died first, when plant life could no longer support them.
Because the circumstances of their deaths were apocalyptic, their whole lives seemed tainted by apocalypse. Time, too. One second was the gulp of a year. A million years was a single day with a red sun and a river of lava...
Quetzalcoatlus flies across the gray sun. There is so much dirt in the sky that the earth may be, in effect, buried.
The quetzal, Mrs. Goff had once told her, was the national bird of Guatemala, where they lost their only child.
Jonathan pushes out from the table island and points to her drink again. “Yes?”
Yes. Baggy clothes, white shirttails out the back of his sweater. Would his hair have lost that gorgeous sheen if he’d played more football? She’s entertaining to herself when she’s drinking, she suddenly remembers. She shouldn’t have another. She should, absolutely. She’s no longer tired. She used to smoke. She wants a cigarette now, desperately, she’ll bum one off the waifish art history girl shooting pool with her three boyfriends in the corner.
Another cliché, but it really is hard to know how much time has passed in this deep interior chamber. She’s reached the bottom of the glass—three times? Who is she kidding. Seven?—where the cocktail straw scrapes and the fibers of lime are already drying. She decides she’s too drunk to dwell on it. Drunk enough to divine her mother’s secrets.
Mr. Goff, the cathedral ceiling of his forehead, his figurine of a wife tucked in beside him. Mr. Goff, hungry for knowledge, in love with Diana. How did he explain the fact that she would take no money from the outrageously moneyed family of her child’s father? He must have known it was her decision.
Now the campus bar is full, and friendly. People are beginning to order the nachos and, Marguerite notes woozily, instant noodle soup in Styrofoam. The bartender pours the boiling water. No doubt somebody is drinking away his or her college education, albeit in three-dollar increments; somebody else is writing a paper on the bar itself, sourced and footnoted, contextualized, cross-disciplined, cross-referenced.
The messier she feels, the more everything seems to connect, and it’s all for the best, she’s quite certain. Jonathan returns with drinks like crystals. “I’m still a little bit in love—” he smiles. She’s in a state of spongy acceptance. He smells good, whiskey-laundry.
He doesn’t say a word about her choice of drink when he sets it before her on the little table. His drink is amber. She appreciates the simple manners.
“So the seminar’s gone well for you?” she manages.
She’s always liked him, she’s her very own retroactive fortune teller. Love at first sight is always in the past tense. Riding the swells of her vodka and cranberry, feeling a little bit bloodless, she believes everything she tells herself.
She pushes her hand toward him across the table. Her hand comes to a stop when her arm is fully extended. He draws one finger down each of her fingers.
Footsie on the table. Handsy. With their claws. Did the dinosaurs? He does have a wet mouth. He makes clucking sounds between phrases. Unselfconscious. She’s happy for anyone, she tells herself, who’s so close to his original, infant nature.
He smacks the table gently. “Think about that,” he says. About what? She has no idea.
“I’m going to relieve myself,” he says, “then I’ll be back and I’ll bring you another another.” He grins. He probably has to go badly. It’s as if she blinks and he’s gone. She’s unsettled, open in all the wrong places. She can’t really remember anything they’ve talked about.
Time expands to fill the empty space at the table. A minute is an hour. Feels like an hour. Marguerite’s thoughts pull away from each other, harden, and become separate thought-rocks.
She feels herself sober. She realizes she’s at the point in the night where, no matter how much more she drinks, she’ll only sober.
She closes her eyes. Allows herself to imagine her mother standing outside on a tiny Juliet balcony, it’s barely a foot deep, a cheap stucco façade, the apartment they rent in—say—Carmel, California. She’s always liked the way it sounds like candy. Half the cars are coming and half are going, from her mother’s balcony.
The velocity of the world should cancel itself out, thinks her mother. When she thinks of her daughter.
Marguerite hears the blender from the bar chewing up ice and freezer-burned strawberries. There’s no fat-padding around her eardrums. Everything is exposed to her bony hearing.
She closes her eyes again. She hears sand—remembers playing in the sand beneath an enormous white cloth sunhat.
She’s four, maybe. Crabbed over, excavating, her expression intent, proud, even engorged with the adulation of the entire human race in the form of her mother. Her mother isn’t in the snapshot, but Marguerite is certain she took it. Marguerite’s expression reflects her.
Why did her mother do it, allow it, whatever you want to call it: just lie there? Diana wasn’t sore yet but she would be.
Marguerite should have known that a woman who would just lie there, disconnected, would be equally capable of just leaving.
8
Henry was family.
And in the weeks that followed, he was fawningly, meticulously attentive. He took Dinah home to meet his wild, daddy-long-legs sister Margaret. Margaret affected a swoon, irreverent, bawdy, slavish: “Oh let me corrupt you!” she would cry as she presented Dinah with a pair of diamonds one day, the next day opera tickets. She, too, took Dinah to New York City. She had a cultivating spirit. She would have made a benevolent, even playful colonialist. Dinah could picture her as a schoolteacher in some outback, falling in love with a fourteen-year-old native.
It was Margaret Webb who assembled everyone: maids Dinah couldn’t keep track of, an old-fashioned butler, a neighbor who’d given Dinah a turn around the paddock on horseback, Henry and Margaret’s parents. There was a roaring fire in the study, silver trays of cocktails that caught the glint of it, and it seemed to Dinah that they were all clappi
ng heartily and toasting her pregnancy even before Margaret brayed the announcement.
(“The Christmas party?” Henry had suggested. He had pulled her in and whispered hotly, “Our first try, Dinah.” She didn’t have to say anything. “God, well then this is meant to be, isn’t it!” blurted Henry.)
She changed her name to Diana. She would write the spring semester from the guesthouse, so as to finish out her first year of college. Everyone said she was darling, and of course she would want to finish, because it was true she had taken a scholarship.
Through the spring she became even closer to Margaret, who was a cunning and sophisticated eight years older, and had been living in New York City and spending too much money, since college, on a series of confidantes. Margaret had been home redeeming herself at the time of Diana’s arrival; she had meant to stay shut up and dry out in her girlhood room through August. But now she recalibrated. “What would you do without me, darling?”
“Oh come on,” said Diana, delighted.
“I can’t just let my little brother’s wife languish,” Margaret admonished her own higher nature.
Long afternoons they ate smoked almonds and Margaret drank gin while Diana splashed white wine in her seltzer. If Diana wanted the sea air Margaret would balk, then spoonily capitulate and drive her down to the beach club. Margaret declared the water putrid borscht. “It’ll make you contagious,” she warned, grinning. She would stand on the boardwalk with her arms crossed, watching Diana.
It wasn’t long until Margaret confessed her infatuation. Diana was so surprised, and flustered, that she felt obliged to match Margaret with her own secret. She looked down at her lap, the tightening belly, and said shyly, “All right. And I’m still in love with your cousin.”
“My cousin,” repeated Margaret uncertainly. “James?” Then, “I knew it!” Margaret put on a great show of satisfaction, even relief. “You unfaithful wench!” She blared her smile.
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