The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story

by Theodora Goss

  “That’s terrific!” said Brendan. “You know, you have a rare and genuine talent. I wish I had your ear for rhythm. It would have helped me with my translation of The Tale of the Green Knight.”

  “Your translation?”

  “The one nobody heard about. You know what Oxford University Press told me? There wasn’t enough scholarly interest in such an obscure Cornish poem. Three years later, they published the translation by Thomas Holbrook.” He grimaced. “Well, at least my translation got me out of graduate school. And to Bartlett.”

  “Why Bartlett?” she asked.

  “The same reason you’re here, I imagine,” he said. “Where are you going to find a tenure-track position for a medievalist nowadays? You were offered this position because old Randolph died, and I’m not joking. Literally keeled over in the lecture hall while his students were taking their final exams.”

  She couldn’t help laughing. “I know, that’s not funny, is it?”

  “Not if you’re an undergraduate who needed to do well on the exam. Are you teaching today?”

  “Not today,” she said. She’d come in to grade the first papers of the semester, which she usually enjoyed doing. They would tell her whether the students were really paying attention and what she could expect from them in terms of run-on sentences and dangling modifiers. But suddenly she felt like getting outside, seeing something other than the four walls of her office. It was a warm fall day. She could see students playing Frisbee on the lawn.

  “Come on, then! Play a little, Associate Professor Morgan!”

  She straightened the papers on her desk, hovered indecisively for a moment, and then followed him out.

  What she realized, as the semester progressed, was that she had never been in love before. Not really.

  On most days, she and Brendan ate lunch together, either in the faculty dining room or, when the weather was fine, outside in the courtyard, watching the undergraduates make out. They laughed, but the sight hurt her, like a tightness in her chest that kept her from breathing freely. How long had it been since she’d kissed anyone?

  Brendan took her to Richmond, to what was supposed to resemble a genuine English pub but served spareribs and key lime pie. On the tables were candles in mason jars. In their glow, he looked more tired than she remembered. “How is your father?” she asked.

  He smiled wryly. “Dad died years ago. Keeled over right in the bookstore while cataloging a new shipment of nineteenth-century medical textbooks. Not a bad way to go, all in all. But I sold the store. I couldn’t stand to go back there after that. And what was I going to do with it, anyway? I had just graduated and I’d already been offered the position at Bartlett.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, remembering how he had looked there, that first day in Clews. Standing among the shelves. “That must have been difficult. You know, I tried to send you a letter there once. I guess it never reached you. Maybe it was after your father died.”

  “It must have been. I would certainly have written back to you, Evelyn.”

  “Then, you weren’t angry?” she asked. It was the first time they had referred to the incident, and she wasn’t quite sure what to say about it. Should she explain about the hallucinations?

  “I could never be angry with you.” He reached across the table and took her hand. It was all right. She wouldn’t have to say anything. After all, it had been more than ten years. Dr. Birnbaum had assured her that, as she grew older, the hallucinations would go away. And they finally had. She didn’t want Brendan to think he was getting involved with a woman who had mental problems. If he even was getting involved; she still wasn’t sure. Although, he was holding her hand. If she decided that she should tell him, eventually … well, then she would. But it didn’t have to be tonight, did it? There was plenty of time.

  After dinner, they drove to the Museum of Fine Arts. They wandered through the galleries, looking at the Tiffany lamps and second-rate Sargents. They stopped in the gift shop, and he bought her a notebook with a picture of John Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott reproduced on the cover. “For your poetry,” he said. She smiled and squeezed his hand, then thought, What am I, fifteen? But that’s how he made her feel.

  They drove back to Coleville in silence. He walked her to the front porch and said, “Evelyn, is it safe to kiss you? I’ve been holding off, you know. Worried you would run away again.”

  It was the first reference he’d made to what had happened in Clews so long ago.

  “I’m not going to run away,” she said. “I promise.” He looked particularly handsome under the porch light, with his hands in his jacket pockets. It was October, already starting to get cold.

  “All right.” He smiled, put his hand on her cheek—how well she remembered that gesture—and leaned down. His kiss was soft, tentative and then, when he realized that this time she wasn’t going to run away, passionate, insistent.

  “Do you want to come in?” she said, breathless.

  “Yes, I want to come in. Most definitely.” He followed her up the stairs, and she realized what she had never seen before, that her bedroom looked exactly like the one at the Giant’s Head. Why had she bought those white pillowcases, that white coverlet overfilled with goose feathers? That small table and the painting of a fishing boat?

  “Evelyn,” he murmured, his lips in her hair. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this.” She felt his mouth on her neck and then moving down to her shoulders, his fingers unbuttoning and then pulling off the blouse she had so carefully chosen as attractive but not too sexy, because she hadn’t wanted to seem too eager. Although she wasn’t thinking about that now, didn’t care what he thought, just wanted it to continue. So this was what it felt like to be made love to. She had never experienced this—not with college boyfriends, not with David, not with the few dates since David that had ended back at her apartment in New York. Brendan touched her with a combination of passion and expertise that she had never imagined existed. It was as though his fingers knew exactly where to go, where to find the secret places of her body, how to tease and caress her so that she cried out in surprised pleasure, wondering at the revelation. Afterward she slept, deeply and without dreams, curled up against his back. For the first time that she remembered, the world felt right, as it should be. As though everything were in its place.

  After that night, they were a couple, although not as far as the college was concerned.

  They never sat together at faculty meetings, never touched while they were on campus. It wasn’t something they had agreed to, but Evelyn had no desire to become the object of gossip, particularly among her students. She was starting to get to know them, especially the ones in her poetry workshop. She was starting to get a sense for who would go on to graduate school, who might actually become a poet.

  The most promising was a girl named Anne Harringon, who was applying for a semester at Oxford, as Evelyn had long ago. “Just avoid Gregory Lambert!” she said while they were discussing the recommendation Anne had asked her to write. “ ‘Fanciful nonsense,’ that’s what he called my poetry, back then.”

  “What a jerk!” said Anne. “I’ll definitely avoid him. Professor Thorne told me to take Hilary Margrave for Victorian literature and Emmet Dowson for poetry. They sure have weird names at Oxford, don’t they?”

  “I’m glad you talked to Professor Thorne,” she said. “He knows more about Oxford than I do.”

  “Yeah, he was really helpful. My sister told me to take his Chaucer class. She was here when his wife died.”

  “His wife?” said Evelyn. She’d been leafing through the recommendation forms, but now she sat very still.

  “Yeah, she fell off a horse or something. Do you think I have the right stamps?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to check with the post office.” Evelyn felt as though she’d been hit in the stomach. Brendan had never told her he’d been married.

  “Well, I really appreciate it, Professor Morgan. I like Professor Thorn
e’s class, but yours is my favorite. Your exams aren’t as hard.”

  “Um, thanks.” She couldn’t concentrate. Why hadn’t he told her? It must have happened here at Bartlett.

  “Hey, Professor? Thanks a lot. I’ll see you on Friday!”

  “What? Sure, Anne. I’ll see you in class.” After Anne left, Evelyn sat at her desk, staring at the stack of midterms. Thanksgiving was a week away. She’d been planning to ask Brendan to go to Boston with her to meet her parents. She hadn’t been sure how they would respond to him—another college professor? But she’d wanted him to see her family.

  “Evelyn? Are you done for the day?” There he was, looking perfectly ordinary, smiling at her from the doorway. Brown hair swept back from his forehead, the hair she loved to run her fingers through, the shoulders she loved to lean against, listening to his heartbeat.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your wife?”

  He stood silent. Then he said, “All right. Come on, let’s go.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Just come on, all right?” There was something wrong, something terribly wrong. She could see it in his face. He turned, and she followed him down the hallway and into the parking lot, almost running to keep up. They got into his car. And then they drove. And drove.

  “Where are we going?” she asked once.

  “To see my wife,” he said. She wanted to ask what he meant, but his face was so grim, so filled with pain, that she just sat there, miserable, wishing she hadn’t said anything.

  They pulled up in front of the Henrico County Medical Center. At the front desk, the nurse said, “It’s past visiting hours, Dr. Thorne.”

  “Please,” he said. “Can I go in just for a minute?”

  “Oh, all right. Just for a minute.” She looked curiously at Evelyn, as though wondering who she was.

  Evelyn followed him down a hallway painted what was probably supposed to be a calming shade of pink, with a sign that said LONG-TERM CARE and an arrow pointed in the direction they were heading.

  He opened a door, entered a room with two patients in it, and walked up to one of the beds. “There she is,” he said. “There’s Isabel.”

  Evelyn looked down at the bed. The woman lying on it must have been beautiful once. She had very pale skin and black hair that had been cut short. There were tubes going into her arms, a band around her head with a monitor attached. A machine helped her breathe.

  “It happened about three years ago,” he said. “She was riding a horse, and it threw her. She’d grown up riding horses, but this was a stallion right off the racetrack. She was trying to tame him. The stable called an ambulance, but by the time it reached the hospital, she was in a coma. She’s been like this ever since. The doctors say there’s no hope, that she’ll never recover. But I can’t bring myself to disconnect her.”

  He took her hand. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. I thought—I wanted to be with you so badly. I thought if you knew, you’d never give me a chance. Evelyn? Say something.”

  She reached out, touched Isabel Thorne’s hand lying so still on the hospital blanket. What could she say? How could she blame him? He must have suffered terribly. She would tell him that it was all right, she understood.

  The tubes turned into vines: thick canes of briar roses, thin green shoots of honeysuckle. They sprouted leaves, then flowers. Pink and white roses blossomed, honeysuckle dangled. She could smell them, thick and sweet. She was standing on moss, in the middle of a forest. On a stone table before her lay a woman in a dress as red as flame, long black hair cascading down and pooling on the forest floor. Roses grew over her, swaying. Honeysuckle wrapped itself around her arms, her throat. Soon she would be completely covered.

  “Evelyn,” said the man beside her. A knight in green armor, a man made of leaves. He was holding her hand: no, in her hand was a tree branch. She could smell loam, the humid forest air.

  She breathed quickly and put a hand to her chest. It was happening again.

  This isn’t real, she told herself. I need to make it go away. The medication, that’s what she needed. It was in her bathroom cabinet. “Just in case,” Dr. Birnbaum had told her. “But I don’t think you’ll need it again, Evelyn.” Well, he’d been wrong.

  She heard a movement. The woman on the table was almost entirely wrapped in vines. Only her head was still free, although tendrils were already reaching across her forehead. She turned her head toward Evelyn and opened her eyes. Black eyes, as deep and black as night.

  Evelyn reached toward Brendan, opened her mouth, tried to speak. I need to go, she tried to say. I can’t be here for you right now. I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise. But nothing came out.

  She turned and ran through the forest, down the pink hallway. A taxi was waiting in front of the hospital. It had just dropped off a woman in a wheelchair and was starting to pull away when Evelyn waved frantically. The taxi stopped.

  For a moment she panicked. How could she ask the driver to take her where she needed to go? “Bartlett College,” she managed to say, although the man leaned toward her as though he could barely hear.

  “Sure, lady, but it’s going to be expensive,” he said.

  She opened the door and slid into the seat. She sat trembling as the taxi pulled away from the curb. She looked back at the hospital. Brendan Thorne was standing there, in front of the sign that said EMERGENCY ROOM, where the ambulances were parked. He was looking directly at her, doing nothing. Just standing.

  She drove home from the college as quickly as she could, ran upstairs to the bathroom cabinet, and shook some pills out of the plastic bottle into her hand. With her clothes still on, she lay down on her bed, where they had first made love. She stared into the darkness. She remembered the forest, the man made of leaves, the stone table with the woman lying on it wrapped in vines. The woman’s eyes, open and staring into her own. Filled with such hatred, as though it had been there, waiting, for centuries.

  She knew the pills would put her to sleep—they always did. Tomorrow she would call Brendan, explain everything. It would be all right.

  But when she woke the next morning, it was not all right. She’d had problems with nausea before, but never like this. The room was spinning around her. She couldn’t stand. She had a vague thought that she should cancel her Friday classes but couldn’t remember where she’d left her cell phone. How could she get to it, anyway, when the floor kept moving? She wondered how many of the pills she’d taken. Too many, more than she was supposed to. She remembered shaking them out into her hand.

  For three days, she mostly slept, although eventually she made it to the kitchen for some crackers and bottled water. When she woke, she wondered where Brendan was, why he wasn’t coming to check on her. Finally, she ventured downstairs to look through the refrigerator and find something to eat other than crackers, holding on to the railing to avoid falling. She brought up The Tale of the Green Knight, the edition Brendan had translated. She opened it to a random page.

  Then Elowen pledged to Gawan that she would be his for ever, whatever might befall them. And he pledged the same to her. And they went together to fight the giants, not knowing that it would be their last day together upon this earth.

  She read bits of the book whenever she wasn’t sleeping, letting the pages fall open at random, reading wherever it opened.

  When Morva saw how Elowen had turned her father and brother to stone, she felt a great hatred for her. But her love for Gawan was even greater than before. She vowed that he would be hers. So she cast a spell, the most powerful spell she knew, at the queen of Cornwall. Elowen fell upon the ground. As she lay dying, Gawan knelt beside her and said such words of love that Morva was angered, and she cursed Elowen, saying, ‘However so much you love each other, you shall never be together, not for a thousand years.’ And then she vanished, leaving Gawan alone with his dead queen.

  Poor Morva, she thought. It must be terrible to hate so deeply. And then she fell asleep again, her face resting on the
open book.

  On Monday morning, she could stand, and her head felt clear for the first time. I have to talk to Brendan, she thought. She tried to call his cell phone, but no one answered.

  When she got to the English department, Stephanie, the secretary, said, “Evelyn, I didn’t want to bother you over the weekend, but could you take over Brendan’s Chaucer class for the rest of the semester?”

  “Why?” she asked, suddenly feeling as though a fist had closed around her heart.

  “His wife died on Friday, early in the morning. She’d been in a coma for the last three years. I don’t know if you knew; he didn’t talk about it much. He sounded awful on the phone, said he couldn’t finish the semester. He called Michael and quit, just like that. I feel sorry for him, I do, but do you know how hard it’s going to be to find coverage for his classes? Michael is taking the Intro to Medieval Lit course, but if you could take Chaucer, that would be incredibly helpful.”

  “Sure,” Evelyn said, without thinking. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I have no idea, but he left everything in his office. His laptop was sitting on his desk. Even his cartoons are still on the door.”

  She drove to his house. It was the same there as well, everything as she remembered, except for his absence. The landlady was there, pounding a FOR RENT sign into the ground. “Oh, he was the nicest man,” she said. “Always paid his rent on time and fixed things himself. I have no idea where he’s gone, honey. He left a note under my door, that’s all I know. Some people can afford to forfeit their security deposit, I guess.”

  She e-mailed him but received no reply. Maybe he didn’t have computer access, wherever he was. But he must still have his cell phone. She called him every day for a week. No answer. It was as though he’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Here’s your tea, dearie.”

  Evelyn looked up and smiled. “Scones, Mrs. Davies? You’re spoiling me, you know.”