by Libby Malin
He stopped and turned, surprised to find her right behind him. Her blue eyes blazed, her cheeks were red from anger or effort. He wanted to kiss her.
“You have it precisely wrong,” he said lowly. “Oyster Point -- of which you now seem to be the official spokesperson -- never felt I was good enough for it!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“TOM, YOU REALLY screwed the pooch, didn’t you?”
Megan looked at her brother over her sunglasses at an outdoor café near the university. They were having a Sunday meeting to go over Tom’s liability, and he’d just described his disastrous get-together with DeeDee the day before.
“I tried!”
“I wish you’d stayed to visit with Dad more. He gets lonely.”
“I know, I know. I’ll go again. But that’s all I need -- a guilt trip to go on top of the wasted trip itself. I probably burned half a tank of gas yesterday.” He drummed his fingers on the table before realizing he was doing precisely what his father did when he was irritated. But he was irritated. At himself, mostly. He was educated and cultured. He should have been able to check any baggage at the door when dealing with DeeDee. He was a mature adult, capable of high-level reasoning.
“So,” he continued after sipping some of his latte, “what do I do now? Can you talk to Bewley’s lawyer and make this go away, because I don’t think anyone is going to move DeeDee.”
Megan sighed and pulled some papers from a soft leather attaché at her feet. “These are requests for your phone and email records from Bewley’s lawyer. Got them yesterday.”
“What?”
“He’s trying to establish a pattern of contact with DeeDee so that he can prove you had something going on with her before the little altar escapade, and you acted somewhat ‘maliciously’ in stopping the wedding.”
“He can’t violate my privacy like that!”
“Calm down. I think I can make this go away. But the point I’m trying to make is that he and DeeDee are swimming in a red-hot pool of strong emotions right now. And his lawyer isn’t doing anything but feeding the fire, probably loving the billable hours. Someone has to try to calm things down before this eats up a tremendous amount of time.”
He grimaced. “I appreciate the time you’re devoting to it.”
“Don’t you think you can try again, Tom? C’mon, you and DeeDee were an item once. I actually thought at one time that--” She stopped herself and shrugged.
“What? Say it.”
“Well, I thought you two might be the real deal. I thought it might get serious. Opposites and attraction and all that.”
“We’re not opposites,” he said. “We have a lot in common. Both of us fight stereotyping.” At least he did. DeeDee only seemed interested in fighting it when it involved her pride.
“Whatever. I just thought there was something there. If you ever thought there was, now’s the time to draw on those warm, fuzzy feelings.”
“That’s manipulative.” He looked up and saw Gloria exiting the apartment building nearby. Wasn’t that Heather’s apartment building? Good lord, Gloria did have something going on with Heather.
“It’s not manipulative if something real is there. Some real bond. All I’m saying is, if it is, draw on it, get her to calm down. Try to get her to understand that she’s hurting you by continuing with this, that it’s in her best interest to settle with Buck.”
He frowned and started drumming his fingers again.
“All right. I’ll email her, though. I’m better with written words.”
“That’s the spirit.”
***
After Megan left, Thomas strolled through campus, headed to his office. He knew he’d find peace there, and right now his mind was roiling. He felt angry, mostly, but he wasn’t sure why. Angry at himself, yes -- for falling victim to the dare that had led him to stop DeeDee’s wedding. It made him feel trapped -- he couldn’t win, whether he gave into the dares or he didn’t. It had always been like that. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. He’d thought that responding to the dares would make them stop, would wipe the slate clean on the “Timid Tommy” part of his life. But they hadn’t. They hadn’t done a single thing to get people in his hometown to take him more seriously.
Maybe timidity is the better part of valor, he mused.
It also saddened more than angered him that DeeDee was not more understanding and grateful for what he’d done. Sure, she’d said she was going to say no to Buck. But Tom had helped her pull the trigger. Didn’t she realize just how hard it had been for him to stand up in that crowd and shout out his objections? He froze when he thought about it. It felt as if that had been a different person.
Did she really believe he was snobbish? Surely their summer together had demonstrated to her that they were equals. He remembered long afternoons swimming and boating with her in the bay. She’d been working for her dad by then, but her schedule had been pretty flexible, and he’d convinced her more than once to take off when the sun was bright and hot, and the water beckoned. How young they’d been!
He had to remind himself that he was now only in his thirties. He wasn’t old.
Up ahead, he spotted Gloria sitting on a bench reading. His first inclination was to avoid her, now that he knew of her liaison with archenemy Heather, but she looked up and saw him, waving as he approached.
“Beautiful day,” he said cheerfully as he stepped toward her.
She smiled and squinted into the sun. “Yes, I thought I’d enjoy it while it lasts.”
“Spring does seem to come in fits and starts,” he said. He longed to ask her about the faculty meeting but wanted to be careful how he broached it.
“That was some meeting on Friday,” he began, inwardly cringing at how awkward he sounded. “Interesting project, though,” he added in what he hoped was a bright, cooperative voice.
“I hope you weren’t uncomfortable with it,” she said, obviously not fooled by his attempt to sound chipper. “I really don’t think anyone is out to undermine your work, Tom. It’s important work.”
Glad she’d provided an opening, he sat down beside her, leaning forward. “Actually, it does make me a bit uneasy.” He sighed. “Aefle is my area of expertise, not theirs. Yet they sounded as if they wanted to put him -- and me -- through some sort of modern-day Inquisition.”
She chuckled. “You exaggerate. It’s just like peer review, nothing more, nothing less.”
“I got the impression Heather thought it was something more.” He glanced at her to see her reaction. She remained calm and unreadable. “She seems fixated on Aefle. Doesn’t she have enough to do in her department?”
“Well, actually, I think she was going to use the Aefle research in a course she’s teaching next semester,” Gloria offered.
“What?”
“Don’t get all excited -- it’s just a part of her usual course on Revisionism in Historical Research: Patterns, Patriarchy and Paternalism.”
“She thinks Aefle is a bit of paternalistic revisionist history?”
“She thinks Aefle is not the norm.” Clearly seeing how agitated he was becoming, Gloria sat forward and faced him. “Don’t get upset. This is Heather’s life’s work -- fighting male attempts to whitewash patterns of sexism and gender bias. She sees it all the time. And Aefle is a bit, well, anachronistic for his time. Didn’t one of his writings talk about women as being ‘equal in the Lord’s vision?’ You know that’s anachronistic. Aefle’s words stand out. It’s only natural one would wonder…”
“But that’s what makes him such a discovery!” Thomas started drumming his fingers on his thigh. Heather might have a perfectly valid mission in her life but not when it interfered with the truth of his research. Aefle wasn’t like one of her typical stifling male villains. He was different. She only disliked him for defying the pattern of victimhood she sought to bemoan.
“My theory is that Aefle understood tyranny -- the tyranny of the group, of group-think. He himself was beaten down, so he natur
ally had sympathy for others in his predicament. That included women!”
“Don’t get upset, Tom. It’s just part of the give and take of scholarly debate.”
“Yes, that’s what Heather said at the meeting, wasn’t it? She has plenty of material to discourse on about sexism and worse. Why focus on Aefle? It’s hard not to take it personally.” He stood up, afraid he’d say something impolitic in his pique. He never used to get irritated like this at colleagues. What had changed? “I have to go. I need to catch up on some work, some papers, some… research.” He walked away, not giving her a chance to comment further.
***
In his office a few minutes later, he could hardly bring himself to concentrate. He kept thinking of Heather, of Gloria, of all the insufferable faculty. What he’d said to Gloria echoed in his mind. Heather’s quest was personal. For whatever reason, she was gunning for him. And Heather had a great deal of influence on campus. In fact, many faculty members were more than a little afraid of her. She was articulate and powerful, and lionized by her small, but passionate, group of students. They made up for in voice what they lacked in numbers.
In the few years he’d been at the university, he’d witnessed Heather’s students protesting guest lecture visits by Evangelical authors, book signings by Republican administrators, presentations by Israel supporters and even the acceptance of research grants from multinational companies that didn’t adequately promote abortion rights. Once Heather had someone in her sights, it wouldn’t be long before the scarlet letter of Apostasy was figuratively sewn onto his or her shirt.
Was she after him because of Aefle or because he’d dared to try to get close to Gloria, clearly Heather’s current paramour? Maybe he should just talk to her about it.
And say what -- I really have no interest in Gloria any longer, have at it? That would infuriate Heather even more, having someone question her academic motives by suggesting they were driven by personal needs. But if he did nothing, she would continue to pursue poor Aefle, bringing Thomas down with her little insinuations, her doubts, her questions about “validity.”
After pacing and muttering and cursing for a few minutes, he finally sat down, forcing himself to work. There was respite. On his desk, the department secretary had left a stack of mail. Among the usual bunch of junk was a package from the university library.
Guessing what it was, he opened it with trembling hands. Finally, when the tape and string and brown paper were a jumbled mess on his desk, it sat before him -- a copy of the latest Aefle manuscript, which the library had acquired at his request. The original would be under lock and key in the stacks.
With growing excitement, he peered at the pages. Oh, this was wonderful -- even in black and white, he could recognize Aefle’s hand, how he occasionally “colored outside the lines” when decorating initials, how he curved the serifs on his letters at a strange angle. He'd requested a black-and-white facsimile for his first foray into the book, since that printing could be rushed more quickly than the finer color copies that required more time for adjustments. Each page of the book had been photographed, and after a few anonymous nerds touched up the contrast in the digital files, they were sent to a printer for special made-to-order editions.
Here was his old friend. He sat down, eager to leaf through the papers, if only to feel in communion with a kindred spirit, a man, who, like himself, had been browbeaten by his “betters.”
But as he turned the pages, admiring his old friend’s skill, cheering him on when he saw improvement in his technique, a pattern began to emerge that at first irked him, then set his heart racing and his temperature rising.
At first he thought they were flukes caused by the glare on the page from the lights used in the photographs.
But then he noticed the smudges didn’t appear in the same place on every page.
They only appeared in the large initial letters, the ones decorated to tell a story or illustrate a scene. There in the wider expanse of a large “C” Thomas could make out faint markings. It looked as if other letters were encapsulated in the margins of that “C,” other words.
Thomas pulled a magnifying glass from his drawer with shaking hands. He peered through it at the copied pages and saw quite clearly what his friend was spelling out.
Gisela.
A name. A woman’s name.
Overcome with emotion, Thomas sat back in his seat and laughed out loud.
Aefle had been in love. And like a schoolboy carving the name of his crush in his desktop, Aefle had painted his beloved’s name on his manuscript pages.
***
Tom raced to the library before it closed. He demanded to see the original pages. After a fuss with a part-time student worker, he was finally ushered into a climate-controlled room where he was allowed to look at the vellum leaves while a rare books librarian hovered anxiously beside him. If the librarian had his druthers, Thomas thought, no one would ever check these books out at all – and they'd stay in perfect condition..
In dim light he perused the pages, comparing them to the copies. Realization dawned. He’d not seen it before because Aefle wrote his beloved’s name by employing a higher saturation of ink for his private messages, easy to miss in the vibrant palate of colors. It was only visible to Thomas now that he’d seen the more darkly inked images show up on the black-and-white copy, where they stood out in stark contrast.
He remembered his graduate work. He’d looked at originals then, not copies. And once he’d written down the snippets of Aefle’s poetry he’d found in the flyleaves, he’d not gone back to the originals, instead relying on what he thought then were the far more accurate and versatile color copies. Was it possible that all of Aefle’s work contained these other secret messages -- that, in addition to his forays into poetry, he’d included notes about his lady love?
Thomas was on fire with the zeal of discovery. He had to know. He had to get the university library to request an interlibrary loan of the other originals. No -- he didn’t need that just yet! He just needed copies, like these black-and-white ones that picked up the denser color saturations. His mind thrummed with the possibilities.
He spent the rest of the afternoon poring through the manuscripts, comparing them to the copies, verifying what he’d seen in his office. Gone was the outside world and all its troubles. Gone was Oyster Point and its nagging tug of unresolved conflicts.
He was so transfixed with what he’d found that he didn’t even notice the library was closing until he was told he had to pack it in so they could return the valuable originals to their climate-controlled containers.
No matter. He rubbed his eyes and scooped up the copies. He’d take them home, to his apartment, and spend the evening jotting notes on what he’d found. Already he’d pieced together sentences, fragments….
Aefle had been smitten with a dairy maid named Gisela, and he’d been so overcome with affection he’d had to share it in his illuminated manuscripts. There, in the capital letters, was the tale of his sweet torment, the description of her flaxen locks, her dimpled smile, her raucous laugh. She might be low-born, he wrote in his hidden notes, but so was he. They were both God’s children, smiled on by his sunny desire for all His creatures to find happiness.
His breath came fast as he strode across campus in the dusk, contemplating poor Aefle’s fate. How the man must have yearned for his Gisela, sitting in a scriptorium, meticulously, droningly drawing his images, filling them in with paints, being reprimanded for poor craftsmanship -- Aefle had included his thoughts on those occasions in his flyleaf scribblings.
In his apartment a few minutes later, Thomas was just settling in to look at the notes when his cell rang. He almost ignored it. He was intent on this heart-stopping revelation. Heather and her crew would never be able to question Aefle’s validity now. Here was proof positive the man was a living being, as real as they all were, with the same age-old preoccupations and worries. He wasn’t “anachronistic,” as Heather was so eager to prove. He was m
erely human.
Unable to ignore the jangling phone, he finally took a look at the LED. Shock -- it was DeeDee.
“Thomas, look, I just wanted to say--” she launched in with no intro “--I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you timid. And you left your jacket here. I can mail it back tomorrow.”
He leaned back, smiling. His spirits lifted. “No problem, really,” he said, “I shouldn’t have stormed out. It was unseemly. And hang on to the jacket. I’ll be in town to see my dad at some point and can pick it up.”
“Well, I do have a way of flying off the handle,” she said.
“You have a right to be irritated when people are less than forthcoming. And I fell into that category when I didn’t tell you the real reason I stopped your wedding. I’m awfully sorry about that, DeeDee.”
“Sounds like we’re both a bunch of sorry folks tonight,” she said.
He laughed. “Actually, I’m feeling pretty happy right now.” And because he could no longer contain his excitement, he explained his new discovery to DeeDee.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TO HIS SURPRISE, DeeDee was genuinely excited for him. She asked questions that demonstrated more than just polite interest. She congratulated him several times. She listened.
“Tom, that sounds like it’s something groundbreaking for you. Will it help you, you know, get a raise or something at the university?”
“Actually, it might….” He explained where he was in the tenure quest.
This led his mind back to his conversation with Megan, though. His tenure journey would go a lot more smoothly if he could rid himself of the distraction of the lawsuits. And since DeeDee seemed in a conciliatory, reasonable frame of mind, maybe now was a good time to broach the subject.
“I’m glad you brought that up, DeeDee. Actually, I’d be able to move things along more smoothly if we could put our heads together and make these legal problems go away. You’re justifiably upset with Buck’s brutish treatment, but one could argue -- I mean, I would argue -- that standing down, dropping your countersuits, that is, might go a long way toward calming the storming seas of his temper.”