It was eight A.M. on a Saturday, and Kate and Mark were sitting in their usual spot in the deserted student dining hall. This was the only time all week they dared venture into this student space, but they risked it for the free coffee and good omelets. Besides, early on Saturday mornings, it may as well have been their private quarters; most students didn’t show until well after noon. On this particular morning, Kate glanced up from the conversation to see Samuel Blake striding toward her, smiling, his eyes bright. She looked at Mark, who turned and waved, gesturing Samuel over. Then, to Kate’s amazement, Mark stood and, lifting his plate from the table, said, “Oh my, will you look at this. I need a waffle. Right now.” He left the table, nodding to Samuel as they passed each other. Kate could have killed Mark, but smiled at Samuel as he pulled up a chair. She tried to ignore her own wild pulse.
“Good morning,” Samuel said softly, setting his tray down. Some of his coffee had spilled, leaving a cloudy puddle around the base of the cup.
“Good morning,” replied Kate, unsure exactly what to say next. She’d had no rehearsal for this.
“I’ve been trying to get up earlier on the weekends. The time just keeps slipping away from me. Mark said you guys had this standing date. I hope I’m not intruding—”
“Oh, not at all,” said Kate, a little too loudly. She wanted to seem more carefree. “We just eat omelets and talk. Nothing top-secret.”
“Okay. So to fit in, I’ve got to be able to eat omelets and to talk.” He grinned, pointing to his plate. “Step one accomplished. What about step two? What do we talk about?”
The real answer was “We gossip.” Kate imagined these words coming out of her mouth and felt shallow, so instead she said, “Our research,” although this was a stretch. Most Saturday mornings, she and Mark could barely muster the energy for a couple of grunts. She was glad Mark wasn’t there to call her a show-off.
Samuel shook his head. “Oh no. I’ve made friends with the smart kids! The smart kids who actually have careers!”
“Hardly,” laughed Kate. “We discuss our failed research, our rejection letters from press after press, all the convincing reasons not to argue what we’re arguing—”
“And what are you arguing?” asked Samuel, taking a swig of his coffee. His eyes were zinging into her, blue and sharp.
“Oh, well, I’m not sure yet, actually.” She cleared her throat. She remembered now just what she’d enjoyed so much about Samuel all those months earlier on the president’s lawn: his forthrightness. When he had a question, he asked it. He wasn’t particularly cocky either, a trait that usually went hand in hand with forthrightness, especially in young male academics. His clarity had caught her off guard. She felt he could see right into her, into her brain, and she was willing to give him access. She changed the subject. “And we talk about our classes—”
“Please don’t dumb down the conversation on my account!” Samuel teased. “I swear I’ll try to keep up.” He held his coffee cup in the curve of his hand, looking down at it, swirling it around. When he looked up, his eyes were serious again. “Really, Kate. I’d love to know. What are you researching?”
“Mary and the color blue. There have always been miraculous sightings of the Virgin Mary, always. While I was writing my dissertation on Mallory, I ran across a number of medieval accounts of such visions, but the timing was all wrong for me. So I made some photocopies about this tiny German village where all these men, descendants of this one family line, keep spotting her. Or rather, she keeps appearing to them. She’s been visiting them for millennia.”
For an instant after Samuel posed his question, before the words rushed from her mouth almost on their own, Kate had wondered how she’d answer. Revealing her thoughts about Mary felt a bit like speaking about her family, something she couldn’t let herself do. The subject was intensely personal, powerfully irrational, and didn’t necessarily follow the neat paths of academic inquiry. But Samuel’s honesty, his avid stare, had made the words surge out of her. She’d just started blurting about Mary instead of responding the way she usually did with colleagues. Usually she tried to sound both dazzlingly erudite and breezily witty. Now, here, she may have just made a fool of herself. So much passion over something so potentially boring: medieval research!
But then she looked up. Samuel was smiling at her. He didn’t say anything. He was waiting, waiting for her to continue. So she smiled back, letting her mind sink into the delicious conundrum of Mary’s blue robes. This time she spoke more slowly. “You see, I believe that even paintings of Mary count as sightings. Because sight is the sense that experiences two-dimensional art, and sight is the sense with which these men report witnessing her. Both paintings and visions point to an imagined, altered reality.”
Samuel nodded. “Wow.”
“I know, I know. And get this: everyone, to a person, who sights her reports the piercing, blinding blue of Mary’s robes. Blue like gold. English doesn’t have a word for that kind of blue. Azure? Lapis lazuli? A brilliant, blinding blue. Nothing like the blue we encounter in our daily lives.”
Samuel was leaning forward in his seat. “Mark told me you were smart.”
Kate blushed. “Not that smart. I haven’t exactly got an argument yet. That’s my next task. I do have a title: ‘Mary’s Blue.’ I just need to find a damn argument already.” She felt herself deflating a little. She needed her full mind to do this work, and somehow, with Samuel in front of her, she couldn’t gather her whole brain together. She felt lost in ideas.
But Samuel shook his head, smiling. “That’s interesting. I’d love to talk to you about this some more. See, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between art and life, about how art informs our lives and doesn’t simply reflect the way we live. Wasn’t it Plato who said— Ah, Mark! Come sit!” Samuel gestured a smiling Mark back to the table.
Kate Scott, Samuel Blake, and Mark Rios sat together for two hours, as sunlight moved across the walls, and coffee cooled, and the first students to brave the day began to show their sleep-filled faces. Outside the dining hall, before they parted on the path, Samuel asked Kate if she’d be interested in coming to one or two of his lectures. Maybe she’d even consider guest-lecturing on her own idea sometime. Kate said she wasn’t sure, and Samuel put his warm hand on her arm and said, “Just come, then. Come and see what you think.”
As Samuel walked away, Kate could feel Mark thrilling beside her. All he said was “I guess you’ve met your match. Doesn’t even ask you out. Invites you to a lecture.”
And so her courtship with Samuel began. They spoke about ideas: hers, his, those of the great minds of literature and history. They kissed, and they hiked together on Saturday afternoons, and Kate spent less time alone with books about the Virgin Mary. Soon Kate and Samuel were having easy, good sex and spending nearly every night wound around each other in Samuel’s queen-size bed. Kate could feel, as spring swelled, a rush of good feeling inside herself, a new hope, a loosening. It was as if she were unpacking her vital organs out of a deep freeze. She found herself unable to remember the last full day she’d spent in the library. She surprised even herself when she asked the seminar she taught if they’d be up for holding class outside, under the blossoming cherry tree, on the first bright day of spring. Meanwhile, Kate visited Samuel’s lectures and listened as his voice lilted up to her in the back of the lecture hall. Being pulled into Samuel’s world made her body warm. She pretended she was visiting a different life. Samuel Blake kept the reality of Marcus Berger’s letter, lingering in Kate’s desk drawer, at bay.
A late April breeze shivered across the lake as Kate Scott and Samuel Blake walked at the edge of the water, almost holding hands, on an evening that would surely end in lovemaking. Not just sex but lovemaking, something new. Kate knew that what she wanted now from this man was lovemaking, and yet some dark glimmer in the back of her mind told her she wasn’t prepared, wasn’t worthy of what could come. Maybe giving her whole self to the act of sex would be cr
ossing an irreversible, invisible line. She’d have to reveal truths she hadn’t shared even with Mark, revisit a past she’d hidden from herself.
She pulled her attention to what Samuel was saying about his stepmother’s intrusion into the family. Samuel and his brother had been brutal. “I can’t believe she endured us,” he said.
“She obviously loved your father, Samuel.”
He stopped walking. “Why do you always call me Samuel?”
She laughed and started walking again, forcing him to catch up. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Technically, yes. But you’ve heard people; they call me Sam all the time.”
“Yes, but Samuel has a ring to it. Samuel is beautiful to say, to hold on your tongue.” She felt herself smiling at the literal interpretation of her words.
Samuel laughed. “I’ve never heard it put that way. I like it when you call me Samuel.” He put his arm around her, making a warm bubble around their two bodies. “I just don’t think I’ve ever heard someone so determined to say my name before.”
“I suppose names just matter a lot to me. They’re powerful.”
They walked in silence, the crunch of gravel under their shoes, until Samuel’s voice filled the air. “And what about you?”
“My name? Oh, very boring. Just Kate Scott. Kate short for Katharine. With two A’s.” She almost added, “Because I liked that spelling,” then caught herself. People didn’t name themselves.
Samuel stopped walking and turned to face her. “You’re beautiful,” he said, brushing her hair off her shoulder, and it was this simple clarity, this truth he could share with her, that made Kate want him in her bed.
They were in Kate’s bedroom now and they were kissing. He was still wearing his tweed jacket, and the rough of it was harsh through her blouse. It smelled of him, tinged with a trace of cinnamon and rain, and it made a soft scratching sound between them as they kissed. The kissing was soft and familiar. She knew his tongue already, the warm hush of his mouth as it opened on her lips, the bright smoothness of his teeth.
Samuel looked up and laughed. “I feel like a kid again. In a dorm room with a beautiful girl. About to do something.”
“Standard issue,” she joked, knowing he felt the shift too, felt the knowledge that this time their sex would feed more than just their bodies. Not just because she’d finally invited him to spend the night at her place; they both knew it was more. Kate gestured grandly around her small dorm apartment. “I figured I was a perfect fit for a house fellow. I’m schoolmarmish, able to make really good brownies for study breaks, and I’m not someone who needs a lot of sleep.”
“That’s really why you live here?”
“Well.” His hands were warm on her back. “I like the students. It sounds strange, but I like the noises they make. Their racket keeps me from feeling lonely.” Samuel nodded. Kate was surprised at her honesty with this man, and further surprised that her liking the noises made sense to him. Everyone else, including Mark, thought she was insane for wanting to live in the middle of a dorm, surrounded on all sides by eighteen-year-olds.
Now Samuel was walking to the head of the bed. He pointed to the poster hanging above it and looked closely, blinking in the shadows of the room.
“Mark brought it back to me from a conference in New Orleans,” Kate said. “He said it reminded him of me.” The poster was a photograph of an African statue, a female nude outlined from the side. She was curved, with hips and breasts and thighs and wide arms. Kate found herself considering the poster from Samuel’s point of view, and of course the woman looked nothing like her. But she’d known what Mark had meant when he’d given it to her. He’d meant that this woman was brave and alone, fierce in the world. Kate had so appreciated what it said about Mark’s understanding of her that she’d framed the poster and kept it over her bed so she could sleep under it every night. The woman was a dream, an aspiration. She heard herself say: “It’s funny, you know? Because he was right. I look at it, and it helps me remember not just who I want to be but who I am. How to be.”
Samuel smiled at her and said, “Do you mind if I do something strange without explaining myself?”
She looked at the bed and said, “Well, it depends on how strange it is.”
For the first time she saw Samuel flash with embarrassment. “No no no oh God no!” He laughed. “I should watch how I phrase things. No, I just mean about her,” and he pointed at the poster.
“Sure.”
He shrugged his jacket off his shoulders, then brought it in front of him, opening it with both hands as he leaned over the bed to reach to the top of the poster. He tucked his jacket over the top of the frame, draping and shrouding the African woman.
“Don’t I even get to ask?” she managed after a moment.
“Come to my lecture tomorrow and all will be explained,” he said as he reached toward her. “You know where it is. Evans 206. Two P.M.” He pulled her onto the bed, and from that moment on, there would only ever be a before and an after.
THE FIRST TIME I EVER KNOW what a picture is is when Myla shows me a picture of our mom. She tells me stories about Mom and how she flies and looks in our window at night and makes sure we won’t die or injure our persons. But this time Myla reaches up to the picture on the piano and puts the frame on the ground and opens up the back and pulls out just the plain photo and says, “Pru. You know what this picture means?” and of course I don’t know. So I say no and she says, “It means Mom was real once. Only three years ago, before the car accident, she was here. You were just a newborn,” she says, “but I was five years old and I remember her. And this picture remembers her. It means she was real. It means she lived on this earth.” Then she points to this poster we have in our living room. “And that painting means the painter was real. Monet, the guy who painted that picture? He saw those lily pads on his pond and in his head and wanted to make them real, so he painted them. But they weren’t art before that.” Then she holds up the picture of our mom. I want to kiss it, but Myla says I’ll have to wait until it’s back under glass before I do that. “You’ll ruin it,” she says. “You have to realize it’s precious. Once this picture goes away, then she’s gone. Then the proof of her is missing.” Even though I’m so little that I don’t even know what “proof” means, I know what she’s saying is serious. Proof is a good thing to have. And pictures can give it.
ON THE PHONE THE NEXT DAY, Kate gave Mark the usual update, stopping short, as always, before providing the salacious details he craved. She also held back on the way things had changed, about the newness she and Samuel had made together. Even explaining about the jacket, about the way Samuel had placed it over the poster, sounded silly. She didn’t know how to tell Mark that she knew it was an important thing to do, even if she didn’t know what it meant, or why Samuel had done it.
“So, coffee? This afternoon?”
“I can’t,” said Kate. She could practically hear Mark’s eye roll over the phone.
“Another Professor Blake lecture, I presume?” he said, unable to hide his hurt.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Mark paused. “I should have made you guys sign a contract promising that once you started doing whatever it is you’re doing, it wouldn’t disrupt my normal schedule. I mean, I have needs too.”
“How about dinner?”
“You sure you don’t have plans with the Professor of Love?”
“I’m sure. I’ll come over. We’ll reinstate movie night. I promise.”
Kate hung up and got off the bed, where she’d been sitting since Samuel had gone. Growing aware of the time, she went into the bathroom and brushed her hair in front of the mirror, examining her face. More than once Mark had commented on her natural aversion to mirrors, to the fact that the only one hanging in her apartment was here, built in to the cabinet. She hid the real reason for such omission: her face was a shock to her each time she saw it. It was a shock because it was her, the her that was the carryover from every
thing else. And yes, it was beautiful. There was no denying it. Her body had changed with age; she’d become curved, and her hair had been long and short and long and short in the interim, but her wide eyes, the scooped bridge of her nose, her lips that pinked when she bit them, the freckles dappling her cheeks, all that was the same. When she thought about her looks, it seemed strange that no one ever recognized her; apparently people were willing to believe what they were told before they’d trust their own eyes.
She opened the cabinet and traded her reflection for a collection of lotions and creams. She’d cut her fingernails, and that would give her just about enough time to make it to Evans 206 by 1:55.
Inside Evans, her heels clipped down the echoing hallway and made her sound adult. They sounded authoritative, the way she thought she must look from the outside. Kate Scott Kate Scott Kate Scott, they beat out.
The lecture hall was old-fashioned, a relic from the early days when the college had devoted itself to nurturing the young minds of aristocratic women. Kate had taken to entering at the back, so she could look down on the heads of all the students as they settled in. They clapped down the wooden chairs before they sat, oblivious at first to Samuel’s presence at the head of the room, where he was waiting for their eyes. The room buzzed with sound and movement: the swish and scratch of jackets being stuffed under chairs, the crackle of gum being unwrapped, the pock of pens being uncapped, the unzipping of bags, the thump of books on the terraced floor.
Samuel flipped off the lights, and simultaneously a projector burst bright light against a screen at the front of the room. In the first of Samuel’s lectures Kate had attended, she’d noted with jealousy the presence of a teaching assistant. Not only did TAs diminish the paper-grading load, they also undertook such mundanities as the turning on of projectors, a task Kate always had to figure out on her own. She’d suffered through more than one embarrassing disaster with in-class slide shows.
The Effects of Light Page 2