Cook was silent. First, he hated to hear that name on her lovely lips. Second, what the hell did she mean?
Paula said, “The latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry has an article about your work on Kickapoo adverbs.”
“No kidding,” Cook said hotly.
“You’ve seen it, then. The author is F. F. Sweet.”
“You think I didn’t see that, too?” Cook glared across the street at the library. The line was beginning to spill out the front door onto the sidewalk. “Did you recognize the name? It’s the same twit who wrote about that stupid Indian boy with his bloody valentines. And he’s here.”
“Actually, someone else wrote the Linguistic Inquiry article and used F. F. Sweet’s name.”
Cook flinched as if wired to a generator.
“Actually,” she said, looking at him, “I wrote it.”
Cook’s face was somewhere in his hands. It stayed there a long time. He looked up and said, “Why?”
“Lots of reasons. Your theory was wrong, for one thing. I told you it was wrong when we were together, but you just told me to be a good girl and go finish my dissertation—which is pretty funny, because it was my Pottawatomie data that showed me what was wrong with your Kickapoo stuff in the first place. I’d worked out most of my thoughts about it before I went back to M.I.T. to defend, and as soon as I was done with that I went to Oklahoma and worked for a while with some great informants. I’ve been there ever since, actually. I just got a Kartoffel grant that’ll keep me afloat for a year, if I live frugally, which I’m good at.” She had lapsed into a leisurely, self-satisfied manner. She must have seen that Cook did not share in her satisfaction, and she became more businesslike.
“Anyway, the point is I was mad at you. Remember the punch line to that old Kickapoo joke?” Paula looked up to the sky and delivered it. Her pronunciation was so good that someone else seemed to have taken possession of her body for a moment. “Remember? It means ‘A wronged woman can make a man feel like dung.’ I wanted to do that. But I mainly wanted to kill the issue of your brains versus my brains. So—did it work?”
Cook stared at her, barely comprehending what she was saying.
“Too early to say, I guess,” Paula said. “I used F. F. Sweet’s name because his little book is such a nice statement about giving your love to someone and getting it back many times over. I always hated the way you made fun of it. I thought my article would carry a little extra punch with his name on it. How about it?”
Cook felt brainless, like one of those dumb china dolls he’d seen in the backs of cars, with their round heads bobbing endlessly on a spring.
“The editors weren’t any trouble at all. They loved the article. They said such a critique was long overdue—oops, sorry. They think I’m some free-lance linguist named F. F. Sweet. But your boss tried to give me trouble. He called and told me the real F. F. Sweet was thinking of suing me for using his name, and I had to come to St. Louis for a deposition or something.” Paula laughed. “I thought it was you on the phone, pretending to be a lawyer. I’d heard you were in St. Louis, and I figured you’d found out who wrote the article and were trying to get back at me. I said, ‘Come off it, Jeremy.’ When I said your name, it must have freaked your boss out, because he broke down and apologized all over the place. He told me the truth. I think I understand it. He offered you a date with any woman in the world, and you picked me?” She grinned.
Cook didn’t grin.
“Anyway,” she went on, “your boss sort of threw himself at my mercy. He begged me to come to St. Louis. Actually, I was delighted—the Historical Society here has a tremendous Pottawatomie archive, and he was paying my way. He told me to be at this library today at one o’clock. He wanted the two F. F. Sweets on hand, just to make trouble. He said you really liked surprises like that—which surprised me, actually. You’re just full of changes, aren’t you? The only thing I can’t figure out is how he learned I wrote the article.”
“He’s got a hell of a network,” Cook said grimly.
“So,” Paula said, as if everything were settled now, “your couple is on their way to Europe? Are you done with them?”
“You didn’t have to do what you did,” Cook said.
“I know. But it was the best way to show you I could wipe out the things you think make you worthy and still love you.”
Cook found this too theoretical. Did she still love him? He couldn’t understand her sentence.
Paula said, “Tell me what you think this horror in your couple’s marriage is. You never said.”
Cook’s hand went automatically to his shirt pocket. It was still there. He took it out and unfolded it on the table.
She’s a bitch.
He’s a prick.
Money.
He’s a failure.
She thinks he’s a failure.
He thinks she’s bad mother.
The in laws.
Dan.
Something was wrong with it. Pillow had said there was a horror at the core of every marriage, and it was the very same horror. Dan wasn’t in every marriage. Clearly a generalization needed to be made. Cook sighed, took out his pen, crossed out “Dan,” and entered his final theory on the subject:
The man.
“What are you doing?” Paula asked.
Cook stared at the words. He slowly folded the paper and put it back in his pocket.
“What is it?” said Paula.
He couldn’t tell her. She would see it as an admission that he was to blame for their breakup. She would beat him over the head with it. She was so damned competitive. That was her weakness. That was what he would have to absorb—if she still wanted him.
“Tell me,” she said.
“The horror is failing to believe that the other person can change.”
“Really?” She seemed a little disappointed and looked off into the distance. But she was thinking. Her eyes came back to his. “Yeah. I guess that is important.”
“Listen. I love you and want to stay with you forever.”
Paula blinked. “What? You quoting someone? You want me to guess who? We haven’t done that in a while, have we? Sure, I’m game. Say it again.”
Cook’s heart sank. He knew that the restatement of a difficult assertion was always harder than the original statement. He watched her pop the last bit of cone into her mouth and crunch it. He said, “I love you, Paula.” He shuddered with a violent chill. This perplexed him. So did the tears springing to his eyes.
Paula sat very still. She looked so hard to reach, so far away.
“Do you love me?” he asked. He now saw that there were tears in her eyes as well.
“Always have,” she said.
“Will you stay?” he asked.
“Always will,” she said.
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The Full Catastrophe Page 30