by Louise Penny
Though Alyce would sometimes raise her hand in class to answer a question Simon had put to several rows of students, that no one else knew to answer or had answered inadequately. “Yes? Miss—” Just perceptibly, Simon might smile. But Alyce did not mistake the gesture as an invitation to smile back.
It was in this way that she’d attracted Simon Meech’s attention, of course. Always the bright young schoolgirl determined to be impressive to her teachers.
As a young instructor Simon inclined toward haughtiness, disdain. A kind of Kinch—James Joyce’s notion of himself as Stephen Dedalus, a brilliantly unhappy young man in his midtwenties, vain and uncertain, insecure, eaten up with pride. Yet, in his way, wanting to be good.
Before coming to the university to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy, Simon had been a seminary student for three years. He’d intended to be a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, but, as he’d told Alyce, his plans had not worked out.
Another girl would have asked, But why not? but Alyce understood that Simon did not want to be asked such a question.
Nothing personal, private! Nothing that pried into the young man’s soul. Alyce understood, for she did not want to be asked such questions either.
Through lowered eyes Alyce observed him at the front of the classroom, her lover. Though she did not consciously think lover.
For was love involved? She had not heard love—the word—uttered between them.
In class Alyce took careful notes. Or it appeared that Alyce took careful notes. Leaning over her notebook in a trance of concentration, hair falling across the side of her face as she moved her pen quickly across the page.
Now her feverish note-taking had a singular theme. What could not be uttered aloud took shape beneath her pen. I am afraid, Simon . . .
But no. Why should she announce that she is afraid.
Instead she would say, Simon, I think . . .
But this too was weak, craven. Why should she say merely, I think!
Bravely she would say, Simon, I am . . .
But her resolve faded. Her courage melted away, a puddle at her feet. How could she bring herself to tell her sardonic Kinch-lover, I am pregnant.
The words would not come. She could not choke up such words, which were both banal and terrible. Her tongue had gone numb, a chill suffused her body.
Hurrying away from the classroom even as the bell clanged. If Simon glanced after her with something like surprise, that Alyce should be so eager to leave the classroom even as other students lingered to speak with him, she didn’t want to notice. Away, away. Must get away.
Desperate to hide in the women’s restroom, beneath the stairs. To check another time. To determine if.
Though knowing—No. Don’t be ridiculous.
In less than a week she’d become compulsive about checking her underwear, to see if the bleeding had begun. Though knowing that it had not.
In the morning after troubled sleep checking her nightgown, bedsheets. But—is it? No.
Haunting to her now, the dark menstrual blood that refused to appear. Like a shadow that, when you glance up, startled, has vanished—has not been there at all.
He’d tried to pull out of her at the crucial moment, Simon had.
Tried, but had not, or had not exactly. Not entirely.
A groan of something like pain, anguish. The hawkish Kinch-face contorted for a long moment, the teeth bared.
She’d scarcely seen him. His lower body. His penis, which was (she would try to recall afterward, as one might try to recall a frightening dream, to master the dream) blunt and hard, hot with blood and angry-seeming.
Yet soft-skinned. Astonishingly soft, flaccid. When they’d lain together panting and sweating and whatever had passed through them like an electric current had vanished as if it had never been and she’d felt it—felt him—against her belly, sticky with mucus.
For this was love, was it? Naively she’d wanted to think, It’s a promise. Love will come.
The truth was, she’d hardly known what was happening. What Simon was doing to her, or trying (awkwardly) to do to her, which yielded no pleasure for her, only just a sharp-piercing shocking hurt between her legs that had felt like an evisceration.
Clumsily they were lying together on a sofa in Simon’s apartment, much too narrow for them. The sofa was not very clean, and now it would be less clean, a patina of grime on a nubby beige fabric. Without wishing to, Alyce had noted the frayed carpet, stains in the hardwood floor and in the faded wallpaper. A smell of cooking odors from the floor below. The apartment was furnished, Simon had said with a smiling shrug, as if to absolve himself of responsibility for it.
It was an interim life, Simon said. A between-life. Neither here nor there. Not yet.
She hadn’t known what he meant. Much of his speech, airy, witty, self-conscious, Alyce didn’t quite understand; but she understood that she was expected to react, with a smile, laughter, admiration.
In their lovemaking Simon had panted like a creature that has been hunted down, not like a hunter. Yet Alyce would recall he had hunted, pursued, chased down, all but coerced her.
Not rape. Nothing so physically coercive. Instead he’d made her feel shame, that she had caused him to misunderstand her.
“Why did you come back here with me, then? Why are you being disingenuous now?” He’d professed surprise, reproach when Alyce had seemed to resist him.
Disingenuous. She knew what this word meant though guessing he might assume that she did not know.
“I—I don’t know . . . I’d thought—you wanted to . . .”
Spend time with me. Talk with me. About linguistics, philosophy of mind . . .
She’d been confused. Her brain wasn’t functioning with its usual precision. Like a fine mechanism into which static has been introduced, to befuddle.
Simon had shocked her by addressing her with an air of disdain, sarcasm that was totally unlike the way he’d behaved at the reception or the way he behaved in the classroom. Oh, but didn’t he like her? She’d thought he had liked her.
Like a child she was abashed, wounded. Naively wanting to say, But I’d thought you liked me . . .
But then, hearing the petulant edge in his own voice, Simon smiled, and was friendly again, and charming; holding her hand, stroking her arm, her shoulder. Telling her that she was very beautiful, he’d seen from the first day in their class that she was very beautiful, and quick to understand what others were slow to understand or never understood at all. He had seen that she was special. It was rare that any undergraduate had such an instinctive grasp of philosophy, especially a female undergraduate. (Had Simon been about to say girl? But he had not.) He’d had trouble looking away from her, he claimed, paying proper attention to the other students. He’d shown her first short paper, intriguingly titled “Zeno’s Paradoxes and Our Own,” to the professor who lectured in the course, who’d been impressed as well. Both had agreed on a grade of A.
He was leaning very close to Alyce and breathing audibly, hotly, like one who is not accustomed to such intimacy yet believes it to be his due.
Still, Alyce held herself stiff and unyielding. Her heart was beating rapidly as the heart of a creature that is trapped, that has not quite acknowledged it is trapped.
“Well. We can leave. We don’t have to stay if you’re not comfortable here, Alyce.” Simon’s voice was flat, dismissive. The enunciation of Alyce was not flattering.
“I—I think—yes, I would like to l-leave . . .”
Her voice trailed off. The misunderstanding had been hers, that was clear. Yet, she had no idea what to say. Apologize? Simon saw how she was hesitating, trying to smile, and put his hands on her, and his mouth against her mouth, and so a kind of fury passed over them.
Not rape. Not—precisely.
Though her body tensed against him, unmistakably. Stiffening in sheer physical panic, dread. Another man, a truer lover, would have relented, drawn away. Would have soothed the frightened young woman, comforted her, spoken to
her. But not this man, who’d lost awareness of Alyce except as a physical being, in opposition to him, but weaker than he, unable to withstand his greater strength.
Oh Christ. Jesus! The cry was torn from him.
Not pleasure, such intensity of feeling. Convulsive, anguished.
Not guessing at the time, he would blame her.
Afterward she’d dressed quickly, in the bathroom of his apartment, a space so cramped she could barely move without colliding with the sink, the toilet, a wall. Clumsily washing herself, not meeting her dazed and bloodshot eyes in the mirror, dragging wetted fingers through her straggly hair.
He’d walked her back to the residence, mostly in silence. Long Kinch-legs, eager to stride ahead of her. The air was colder, the mist had thickened. The tall straight fir trees were near-invisible. She would recall, her pride would insist, Simon had clasped her hand for at least part of the walk, but in fact he’d only just gripped her arm at the elbow from time to time, not so much to comfort as to hurry her.
“I’ll let you go, from here. It’s not a great idea for us to be seen together.” He’d stopped at the sidewalk leading to her residence and was already backing away.
No kiss. No final squeeze of Alyce’s hand. She would tell herself, of course, he was concerned for her, for her as well as himself.
She would not see him again. She would stay away from his class, which met late on Thursday afternoons. He’d had so little awareness of her in that moment; he’d forgotten her entirely in the very instant of penetrating her body.
Hating him. So very ashamed that she had not been able to withstand the man.
She would not stay away from class. Certainly not!
Why should she deprive herself of philosophy? She loved and revered the texts she was reading for the first time—Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Locke, Hume. John Stuart Mill. Ridiculous for her to stay away from class because of the man, and risk a failing grade.
And she would see Simon Meech again. If he summoned Alyce, she would come to him.
In all, five times. In the furnished apartment, arriving by stealth, after dark. On that sofa. As winter deepened. As dark came earlier each day, and snow muffled the stone walkways, and there were more of Alyce’s clothes to be tugged off by the man’s impatient hands. And afterward clumsily washing herself, her raw and chafed and heated body, avoiding her reflection in the mirror. Is this me? Alyce? Doing such things? The wonderment in it, dread and pride commingled.
Touching her mouth, tenderly. Lips swollen from being kissed, sucked.
Yes. It is you. No one else.
3.
And then Roland B___ interceded in her life.
No one could have anticipated. (Alyce could not have anticipated.) How crossing the snow-swept square in front of the university library a few days after she’d had no choice but to realize that she must be pregnant she’d heard a familiar voice calling her name—“Alyce?”
Blindly she’d been making her way. Head lowered, thoughts abuzz with alarm, fear. No. Can’t. Not possible.
The surprise of her name in this public place like a burst of music.
She turned and saw—who was it? A gentlemanly older man—in a brown winter overcoat with a sealskin collar, pumpkin-colored knit cap pulled down over his head—crinkling his eyes at her in delight. “Miss Urquhart? It is you.”
Startling Alyce, the gentleman reached for her hands. She was too surprised to shrink back shyly.
“Alyce, I believe? Hello.”
“H-Hello . . .”
It was an astonishment to be greeted this way by the visiting poet, who was so formal in his speech in the seminar. Rarely—indeed, never—had Professor B___ called any student by a first name that Alyce could remember. She wouldn’t have dared to assume that the poet even knew her first name or that, outside the seminar room, he would recognize her.
“Have you seen the Poet’s House, Alyce? No? Come, then. You will be my first visitor.”
“I wish that I could, Professor, but . . .”
“It’s close by. In this direction. My dear, come!”—linking his arm through Alyce’s arm in a display of mock gallantry.
How playful Roland B___ was, in the bright, open air! Not a small tentative man as he’d appeared in the seminar room but as tall as Alyce, and quite forceful.
The Poet’s House, as it was called, was a handsome old faded-red-brick Edwardian residence that looked as if it were held together by the thick-clustered ivy that covered its walls. Set back behind a wrought-iron fence and gate, it had the air of a quaint period piece; in its small front lawn was a statue in black marble of the Presbyterian minister who’d founded the college in 1847.
In the foyer a brass plaque noted that such distinguished poets as Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Galway Kinnell had been residents in the house. The interior exuded an air of faded opulence: antique furniture, musty brick fireplace, French silk wallpaper, Steinway grand piano with several (muted) keys, which Roland B___ cheerfully struck as he led his visitor into the drawing room.
“Let me take your coat, dear. You will stay awhile, I hope.”
“I—I can’t stay long. I was on my way to the library . . .”
“And would you like tea, dear? I was going to prepare tea for myself.”
No, no! I must leave.
“Y-Yes. Thank you.”
Roland B___ was standing somewhat close to her, smiling.
She could see just his lower teeth, which were somewhat small, uneven, stained.
Roland B___ was observing her with a smile. The flush in his cheeks and glisten in his eyes made Alyce wonder if he’d been drinking in the afternoon.
No doubt it was lonely for him here, away from friends and companions in Boston. In the seminar he’d several times spoken of Boston with a wistful air.
“Your choice of tea, dear: green, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Lapsang.”
Whatever Roland B___ was having, Alyce said she would have.
“You are very agreeable, dear Alyce! In our seminar you are not so easily persuaded.”
This seemed to Alyce a remark provocative as a nudge in the ribs. As if, through the weeks of the semester, the poet had been hoping to persuade her—of what?
How little he knew of her, or could guess! Alyce herself could not bear to think of her predicament, what grew in her belly like a tiny acorn, unstoppable.
Leading Alyce along a corridor into a rear bedroom with elaborate white molding at the ceiling. A four-poster bed with a brass headboard, threadbare Indian carpet, tables piled with books and magazines. A small chandelier hung from the ceiling, also brass, in need of polishing.
“Here you have a glimpse, my dear, of a bachelor’s stoical life. When I was young I yearned to be alone, and got my wish. And now I am older, and the danger is past.”
Seeing that the faded quilt on the bed was crooked, Roland B___ deftly smoothed out the wrinkles.
The four-poster bed was not large, an old-fashioned double bed, but you could see that the occupant used just one half of it, with large square pillows propped up against the headboard; on the bedside table, a notebook and a stack of books. There came to Alyce’s nostrils a faint, musty smell of bedclothes not freshly laundered.
“D’you read in bed, Alyce?”
Alyce nodded yes.
“D’you write in bed? In a notebook?”
Alyce nodded yes.
“Reading poetry, scribbling poetry, dreaming poetry. Yes, I’m sure that you do.”
Roland B___ was standing uncomfortably close to Alyce. She laughed nervously, and edged away.
In all of the rooms of the Poet’s House that Alyce had seen, the poet kept books, papers, worksheets. You could see that wherever he went, Roland B___ had to have a book at his fingertips, and he had to have his work. In a bay window he’d positioned an antique writing desk so that he could sit and gaze out the window at the brick-walled courtyard filling up with snow.
“My dear Alyce, sit
! Sit here.”
Roland B___ urged Alyce to sit at the desk, hands on her shoulders. Then leaning over her, his chin grazing the top of her head.
Very peculiar, Alyce thought this. As if Roland B___ was imagining he might see through her eyes.
Alyce would have liked to throw off the poet’s hands, leap to her feet, and escape. But a sensation of lethargy came over her, as if her limbs had lost their strength. She could barely move.
He sees that I am unhappy. An open wound.
“You are welcome, you know. At any time.”
In the courtyard snow was falling steadily now. A swirl of white, mesmerizing. Soon the old, faded brick would be obscured by powdery snow. Footsteps would be muffled. Voices would be muffled. Within the movement of the snow flurrying to earth all was still. Alyce Urquhart and Roland B___ might have been alone together in a remote place, in a remote time. The elderly poet standing behind Alyce, hands on her shoulders, silent, staring out the window at the foreshortened view filling up with snow.
In that way it began.
All things begin in innocence.
That is to say, ignorance.
4.
God help me. Even if you don’t love me.
5.
Feverishly her brain worked. Like a cornered rat, she thought herself. Scrawling lines of poetry until her fingers ached.
Yet she did nothing. Like one waiting for—what?
Each morning after a feverish night. Choking back waves of nausea she could not bear to think was morning sickness.
So banal! Shameful.
What had taken root inside her, without her awareness. What grew darkly, flourished. That tough rubbery little slug not to be named, still less confronted.
What she could not acknowledge, had revealed to no one. And could never, to her lover.
For he was Kinch, he would be repelled by her.