What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  Back again.

  Here’s the thing: I don’t really have an outlet for talking about Bret outside of this journal. Sometimes I wish I still had Annabel to confide in, because she’s pretty experienced with boyfriends and would probably have an opinion about what’s going on. I’d talk to my mother, but she’s so protective of me that she’d just wind up getting angry at Bret even if he hadn’t really done anything.

  So, journal it is. Journal and, by extension, you. I bet you feel really privileged.

  I have one more Bret story, and after that I promise I’ll shut up. I’m curious to know what you’ll think about this one because it’s about a teacher, sort of, and since you’re one, too, it’s possible that you might have a particular read on this. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you’re not even reading this. I can’t say I’d blame you if you weren’t. I’m pretty sure the last English teacher I had, Mrs. Belisle, never read a damned word I wrote. One time I turned in a writing assignment that was nothing but word vomit and gibberish, and all she did was put one of her check marks on the top of it, like always.

  I went to visit Bret at Columbia one time, this past October. I really liked it there. Here, I feel like people stare at me all the time. But there, on campus, no one would give me the time of day, and I kind of liked that anonymity.

  It was a big deal to take a bus to New York all by myself, especially because I had to change buses in Boston—I’m surprised my parents even let me do it. I drank Bret’s supply of vodka and orange juice and got violently ill the night I arrived, and all the girls in Jay Hall (that’s his dorm) kept coming up and cooing about how cute it was that he had a girlfriend in high school. The next day, once I was sobered up, we went to go visit one of his professors at his apartment off campus, on Riverside Drive by the park. You might find it interesting to know—maybe you already do know—that J. D. Salinger’s family lived on Riverside Drive, too, just two buildings from where the professor lives now. I made it a point to walk past it and take a good look, but to tell you the truth, it just looks like any other building. That’s one of the strangest things about New York, in my opinion; nothing ever looks all that special or distinguished. Even the supposedly special things blend in with everything else.

  This professor, whose name is Dr. Louis Rose, had taught a summer humanities program at Dartmouth two years before, the same one Bret had attended as part of a Gifted and Talented program; I guess Dr. Rose was part of the reason why Bret had wanted to go to Columbia. He’d kept in touch with him the whole time and wanted to follow him wherever he went. He’s taken classes with him two terms in a row now. Kind of a man-crush, if you ask me. I’m not exactly sure what Dr. Rose was getting out of it in return, other than adulation.

  “He’s completely brilliant,” Bret was telling me as we crossed Broadway on our way to the professor’s apartment. “He’s written two books about Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene. He’s a Spenserian scholar. It’s pretty cool if you think about it.”

  “You didn’t have to put it that way.”

  “What way?”

  “‘Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene.’ I know what he wrote.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Parts of it,” I said, which isn’t technically untrue. I have this big poetry anthology that I got at a yard sale once, and I’m pretty sure that an excerpt from it is in there. While I can’t say I’ve exactly read it, it’s possible that my eye has fallen on a phrase or two as I’ve flipped around in the book looking for other things.

  I knew I was supposed to feel flattered that Bret had deemed me worthy of meeting the famed Spenserian scholar Dr. Rose. And I was flattered, I have to admit; I felt as though Bret wanted to show me off, for once. Once we got to the apartment—which seemed pretty small to me, for a professor’s apartment—Dr. Rose turned out to be this wizened old man who had little boils on the back of his head popping out between tufts of thinning white hair. He was wearing an untucked shirt and cotton pants and loafers with no socks, which didn’t make him look very scholarly to me. But I still felt ill at ease, meeting him. Like some country-mouse kid who had turned up uninvited at the door. He looked me up and down and then back and forth and sideways, then looked away and started talking to Bret about books.

  He went to one of the shelves where his books were—his apartment had wall-to-wall shelves installed, which I admit made me jealous—and took down one book that looked even more ancient than the rest. “You would not believe what I paid for this,” he said to Bret. “One of the oldest known copies left on earth, and now it’s mine.” He opened it lovingly, paused, and read aloud, ‘Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild / So goodly won, with her own will beguiled.’ That’s from Amoretti, as I’m sure you know.”

  I was pretty sure Bret didn’t know, but he nodded with such vigor that I thought his head might snap off the end of his neck.

  Aside from books, Dr. Rose had a lot of plants in his apartment. I was sitting in a wooden rocking chair, sort of apart from Dr. Rose’s armchair and Bret on the chair beside him, and all I could do was look at these plants. When people have too many plants in their home, it makes me think the plant owner’s trying to hide something. I like the idea of camouflage, hidden things, mystery—even plain old distractions—but in this particular case I was waiting for a tiger or something to jump out from all that greenery.

  “Bret, I still sometimes think about the students in the summer workshop we had together,” Dr. Rose was saying. “Do you remember Charles, the boy with the long ponytail? The one who always wrote poems about hitchhiking? I wonder whatever became of him. His work always had such interesting recklessness.”

  I thought the phrase “whatever became of him” was odd. I doubted that this Charles guy was old enough to have become anything yet.

  “I heard he got early acceptance at Wesleyan,” Bret said. “I don’t know if he ended up going there.”

  “I always worry about boys like Charles going by the wayside. They so often do, when they’re so clever and so scattered. That kind is easily led astray if they don’t find some structure in college.” And I swear Dr. Rose looked at me then. Had he decided, just from a glance, that I was scattered? That I was easily led astray? Or was he warning me of something?

  Then—horrors—the famed Dr. Rose turned to me. “Bret tells me you’re something of a writer yourself.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. I’m not a fidgety person by nature, but I found myself wanting to fidget in the worst way. “I wouldn’t say that. I do like to write sometimes.”

  “Who are your influences?”

  “Influences? Oh, I don’t write very well,” I said, evading the question. “I guess I’m influenced by . . . anything dark. I just write, that’s all.” My voice sounded dumb even to my own ears. Schoolgirlish.

  “You just write,” Dr. Rose marveled, as though I had said something in a foreign language. Why can’t I ever express myself properly?

  But lucky me—Dr. Rose let me off the hook and started directing all of his comments at Bret again. He was going on about some poetry text he’s translating from the French, from some poet I’ve never heard of and whose name I can’t recall now. He took out some papers and started reading one of the translated poems aloud; Dr. Rose has one of those very theatrical “I’m reading capital-P Poetry” voices, and I was so busy hearing his meaningful pauses that I didn’t really catch what the poem was all about. Something about a man seeing a woman whom he used to sleep with in Paris, only it was years later and he didn’t find her attractive anymore.

  “It speaks to the nature of lust and the waning of lust that comes with age or with settling,” Dr. Rose said after he was finished. “I wouldn’t call it complacency, but I do see it as settling for a more traditional, grown-up path. You, Bret, are still in the age of lust, are you not?”

  Bret laughed. When he laughs, he always sounds as though he�
��s dislodging something from his nose. “Believe me, if you aren’t now,” Dr. Rose went on, “just wait a little while. Someday you’ll meet a real woman, and after that things will never be the same.”

  I felt as though I’d been slapped. As though I’d been written off as “not a real woman,” just some dismissed kid, someone of no real gender and of no real consequence to anyone. After that comment of his, I didn’t listen so much to what he was saying anymore. He said something about his photography hobby, and what he’d done with his garden the summer before, and how he was going to get his kitchen remodeled and take a trip to Reykjavik soon, and all I could think was, Who cares? Who cares about stuck-up people who have too much money to piss away on trips and kitchens? When Bret and I were getting ready to leave, Dr. Rose surprised me by saying, “Jensen . . .” (He pronounced it Jen-seen, for some reason). “Jensen. May I take your picture before you go?”

  He didn’t ask to take Bret’s, or to take one of Bret and me together. This was just about the most catastrophic thing he could have asked of me. I don’t even think I can begin to tell you how much I hate having my picture taken. The results are disastrous; I always end up looking like a squat little gnome with one wonky eye and a tense mouth. But I let him take my picture, because I felt like I’d screwed up enough already and wanted to be on good behavior in front of Bret. As he snapped the shutter, I could almost see myself through Dr. Rose’s camera—a pasty, surly girl in oversized clothing and shoes that were falling apart. It was a really crappy thing to have to see.

  As Bret and I started walking back to his dorm, passing by a guy sprawled out on one the park benches who looked like he might have been dead, he asked me, “What did you think of Dr. Rose?”

  “He was a little pretentious.”

  “You’re judgmental.”

  “A person can make judgments without being judgmental, you know.”

  “Well, you didn’t come off as all that impressive yourself,” Bret said. “You didn’t present yourself as well as I’d hoped.” And I didn’t say anything to him for a long time after that, because I hadn’t realized it was a test, even though I had already known, on some level, that I had failed.

  A couple of weeks later, when I was back here in Maine, Bret called to tell me Dr. Rose had developed the photo he’d taken and given it to him: “It’s not the most flattering photo, but it does look like you. I’ll send it along with my next letter.”

  So. That leads me to this thought. And a pathetic thought it is, too—a pathetic note to end this journal on.

  I don’t think Bret realizes how much I’ve come to depend on the occasional kind word from him. How much I depend on praise or a compliment or a phone call or a letter. Nor can he understand how much it hurts when I don’t get these things. If he knew, would he act differently? Would he give me more or give me nothing at all? I know it must seem beyond stupid, me starting off thinking he was repulsive and now needing his acknowledgment all the time and feeling like I’ll die if I don’t get it. Sometimes I feel like I almost hate Bret, and other times I think I want to have about twenty of his children, even though I really would rather hurl myself off a bridge than get knocked up even once. I realize none of this makes the least bit of sense. Does it make any sense to you?

  Vera finished reading Jensen’s entry. By the time she had reached the end of it, lying there on her mattress, she felt mixed emotions. The first was a sense of disappointment, knowing that Jensen had this weakness in her—the weakness of needing to be liked and cared for. But it isn’t fair to be disappointed, Vera reproached herself. It wasn’t fair for her to expect more from Jensen, a fifteen-year-old, than she felt for herself.

  The second emotion, empathy, came from the nurturing part of her, which wished to counsel the girl—to tell her that yes, her feelings did make sense. Vera had been warned, when going through the multiple-interview process for her position at Wallace, that it was important to not act as a therapist to the students. “Many of them are bright, and with intelligence comes emotional problems sometimes,” Sue MacMasters had said, wiggling around in her seat to lean in closer to Vera. Almost conspiratorially, she’d added: “Some of them are on medication. If you see any of the red flags we talked about, you must refer the student to one of the guidance counselors. Don’t attempt to take on these problems yourself.” Vera had nodded, privately irked by the way Sue’s eyes had widened when she had uttered the phrase on medication. It was clear that this was something far outside the head of the English department’s personal experience. Bizarre, Vera thought, that some of the faculty seemed more sheltered than the students.

  She stood up and stretched, as though to shrug off Jensen’s journal entry and this admonition of Sue MacMasters’s. It was getting dark, and outside her studio window she could hear people in conversation as they walked by—people dressed up to go out for a Friday night. She found herself wanting to go out, too. She called her old friend Caroline on the off chance that she might be able to slip away for the evening. But Caroline was always so busy; she had recently launched her own literary magazine with the assistance of some local poets, and she’d had her first baby five months before. Vera had not actually been able to get her out of the house since then, and while common sense told her that it was hard for a busy mother to find child care, she suspected, rather childishly, that Caroline was so in love with her infant daughter that there was no love left for Vera. She got Caroline’s answering machine, left what she hoped was a upbeat-sounding message, and looked out the window some more. Another lost friend, she thought, appropriating the phrase from something she had seen in Jensen Willard’s writing.

  More couples passed her window: young women in high heels that clattered precariously against Dorset’s cobblestone streets and the shaggy young men who hovered at their sides. She decided to go to Pearl’s by herself, have a drink or two, and head straight home.

  • • •

  A jazz ensemble played at the bar that night. The band was competent, if not exactly good, and Vera found herself singing a little to herself as she sat on her stool, humming and purring into her gin and tonic and then, changing it up, into her whiskey and Coke. When she had been a little girl, her father had liked listening to jazz and big band classics on one of the AM radio stations; whenever he drove her somewhere, this music played in the car, and though Vera went through a stage where she pretended she thought it was corny—some of the crooning harmonies, she’d said, sounded like people mooing—she loved those songs and had liked sharing them with her father.

  “Singing and smiling,” a voice next to her said. “Somebody’s happy. Or is it the whiskey?”

  Vera looked over to her left guardedly. A man had taken the bar stool beside hers. He seemed tall, judging by the way he hunched his shoulders and upper torso over the bar, and he had a long, not-unhandsome face. He reminded her of someone, but she could not think of whom. “You look like someone,” she informed him, and when she put two and two together, she sucked in her breath a little. Ritchie Ouelette.

  “I look like someone? Who might that be?”

  “Jimmy Stewart,” she said, recovering quickly.

  “Jimmy Stewart, eh? That’s a new one.” The long-faced man stared at her openly for a while as she stirred the straw in the last of her drink. “You’re very beautiful,” he said. She ordered another drink.

  She guessed the man to not be scandalously younger than she was—perhaps in his early thirties, which was not outside of the realm of decency. The man said he was up from Louisiana for the weekend, visiting a friend. They exchanged some banter above the sounds of the band and began to look at each other in a speculative way. They wove in and out of the bar to take cigarette breaks outside, though Vera had quit smoking a few years before; she borrowed his cigarettes and his matches. Wasn’t there something in The Catcher in the Rye about Holden Caulfield lighting matches—some beautiful line? She couldn’t remember. She leaned aga
inst the brick facade of the bar and closed her eyes as she drew the smoke into her lungs.

  “You okay?” the bouncer doing door duty asked at one point.

  “Yes,” Vera said. She wasn’t exactly sure if Jimmy Stewart was standing next to her anymore. She was aware only of cool air on her face and a humming in her ears from the music on the other side of the door.

  What happened during the rest of the evening was something she had to piece together the next day. There had been more drinks, of course, and Vera had the faintest memory of being away from the bar, in a car heading to 7-Eleven for beer; she remembered the man who looked like Jimmy Stewart keeping his hand on her leg as he drove. She noticed a ring on his hand, and she heard the man’s voice saying, “My wife and I have an understanding.” She remembered, next, lying on a beach—whose idea had it been to go to a beach at the beginning of March?—and she could see the man putting his pants on, his mouth twisted up as though he wanted to laugh. “I’m cold,” Vera remembered saying, sitting up in the sand with her arms wrapped around her legs—and then, when he didn’t get the hint, she had whined, “Come hold me. I’m cold.” Reluctantly, the man came and hunkered down next to her in the sand. He held her as if it were a duty, the way a young bachelor who doesn’t want children might react when urged to hold a friend’s infant. She was wearing her dress, but her tights were clutched in a ball in her hand. That was the last mental picture she had. The rest went blank, up to a point.

  The next thing she remembered, she was walking home in the direction of her apartment. How she had ended up on foot was a puzzle; the beach was a twenty-minute drive from her place, so it was possible that Jimmy Stewart had either ditched her or, more likely, dropped her off somewhere at her behest. She always enjoyed a walk when she’d reached that level of intoxication. The wind on her flushed cheeks always felt good, and in such instances she liked to imagine her legs chugging along like forceful little pistons: left-right-left.