Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  "You look awful," said Janet. "Maybe you should be pouring out your sorrows to me instead."

  "Thank you very much," said Thomas, without much heat. "It wouldn't help. Allow me to feel useful and intelligent by telling me your troubles; that's the best thing to do."

  They ordered their food and stood looking at the grease-spattered menu and the bunch of marigolds on the countertop. When the food came, Thomas paid for it over Janet's protest and carried the tray to a remote corner of the room. At least it hid enough food for two on it; he didn't look as if he'd been eating. She should have asked Kevin about him more often, last term.

  "Now," said Thomas, taking a gulp of his coffee, "what seems to be the problem?"

  Janet told him, in as much detail as she could muster, and doing her best to keep Christopher Fry out of it. She felt she was not being very coherent, but Thomas sat nodding at her, absorbing food and information in the same deliberate way.

  When he had finished, he swallowed the last of his coffee and said, "I think you expect too much."

  Janet took a deep breath, and Thomas said, "Not of love; not in the long run. I think you expect too much from the time you've had. It's only been a year; and only three months of it had any leisure at all in them. And people don't really discover everything about one another in the first months of acquaintance. They think they do, but they don't. They just like fooling themselves. And you're not very good at that, I don't think."

  Janet had always feared that she was very good at it; perhaps that was just the exception that proved the rule, if she could fool herself into thinking she was good at fooling herself. She shook off this impending tangle and said, "All right. That takes care of my attitude. But what about Nick? He seems all friendly and open and cheerful, and he seems to talk about himself a lot; but he really doesn't say much. He's met my family dozens of times. All I know about his family is that they're in England and he doesn't go see them during vacations. And he makes inexplicable remarks. And he and Robin are just maddening. I'm sure Robin knows all this stuff."

  "You planning to marry him tomorrow?" said Thomas.

  "Robin?"

  "No, you dimwit, Nick. What's your hurry? He's met your family because you love them and are proud of them. What if he doesn't love his and is ashamed of it? Do you think there are no parts of you that won't stand the light of day? Just you take a good look at them, before you go accusing Nick of being secretive and refusing true intimacy, or whatever exactly it is you're upset about." He stopped suddenly and ran a hand through his lank hair.

  "I'm sorry. But I meant it. Give the lad some time. These extroverted people are often the most insecure of all, you know."

  "But—''

  "What's the matter, do you see some better prospect wasting away for lack of attention?"

  "I don't see people as prospects," said Janet furiously, "and that has nothing to do with it."

  "Of course it has."

  "You are the most unromantic person I've ever met."

  "Thank you," said Thomas, with every evidence of sincerity.

  Janet sighed. "Have you got any prospects?"

  He shook his head. "It's so difficult to know how to go about it."

  Janet stared, openmouthed; she had just started to close her mouth and school her expression when he glanced up and caught it. "Well, Tina was awfully lonely, you know,"

  he said, "and she had a sort of theory that one must have a boyfriend in college or one is a failure; and it hurt her feelings very much that Nick preferred you. But you see how that all worked out." He shrugged.

  Janet clamped her teeth together over a strong desire to explain to him that if he would just look at them as he was looking at her—possibly stopping first to wash his hair and put on a less grubby sweater, but possibly not—women would fall into his arms in droves.

  They would only fall out again, presumably; and maybe he didn't want that sort of woman, anyway. "What sort of person are you looking for?" she said, a little breathlessly.

  Thomas's whole face hardened, as if he were about to say something unforgivable.

  Oh, great, here we go again, thought Janet. But then he shrugged again, and looking over her right shoulder he said, "A motherly sort."

  "I'm not sure I know any."

  "They're in remarkably short supply these days," said Thomas, with an extreme grimness that surprised her.

  "Well, look, give us some time. You don't expect people our age to have quite gotten the knack of it, do you? We're still half children ourselves."

  "Mmmm," said Thomas. "Well, maybe." He seemed to gather himself together, and looked at his watch. "Well. Are you willing to give Nick a little time?"

  "I notice you don't say effort."

  "I don't think it would work with Nick."

  "Mmmm," said Janet, in her turn. "Why don't you come and sit with us at dinner? It's been ages."

  "I notice you don't say, eat dinner with us."

  "After all this?"

  Thomas laughed, and got up. "All right," he said. "If I'm very good, do you think Robin and Molly will argue?"

  "I guarantee it," said Janet, getting up too. "They hold completely irreconcilable notions about Henry V. "

  "Do you ever get tired of Shakespeare?"

  "The woman who is tired of Shakespeare," said Janet, in her best tone of exaggerated sententiousness, "is tired of literature, for there is in literature all that Shakespeare can afford."

  "Mmmm," said Thomas.

  CHAPTER 17

  Winter term passed peacefully. Janet did realize, round about the fifth week, that among Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, she was bereft of her native language, and had to read straight through all the novels of Raymond Chandler to restore a sense of proportion and keep all her translations of The Iliad from coming out in blank verse.

  She discovered that Nick had not read any Chandler, and once she had persuaded him to do so, they had the food for many a discussion. Thomas, it transpired, was passionately fond of Chandler. His own favorites were the same as hers, The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister, whereas Nick insisted on regarding such inferior efforts as The Lady in the Lake and The High Window as Chandler's best, which gave them food for more discussion than any of them would live to finish. Tina read one or two of the novels and settled on The Big Sleep to defend. Molly refused to have anything to do with Chandler, saying that the amount of violence in Shakespeare's history plays was more than enough for one term.

  Tina went out with Jack Nikopoulos four times, which made Janet and Molly hopeful.

  But she came home from the last of these dates, at eleven o'clock of an arctic February evening, and demanded that Molly and Janet put on their boots and come with her to the little stream in the Lower Arb. She wanted to toss her brand-new three months' prescription of birth-control pills into the water and wash her hands of romance altogether.

  They had a prolonged argument, dealing jointly and severally with whether Tina might not want the pills later, what she might do if suddenly thrust into a tempting situation, how the vile drugs and the indestructible plastic case might affect the wildlife, and why it couldn't wait until tomorrow. But Tina was immovable. They could stay up here if they wanted to—she was going down to the Arboretum this minute and get rid of these goddamned drugs. Janet looked at Molly and nodded. Molly shrugged crossly, got out of bed, and began to put her boots on.

  "Oh, thank you," said Tina, and hugged Janet hugely.

  "What are roommates for, if not to be foolish together?"

  "Am I being foolish?"

  "You're right to get rid of those blasted pills. Giving up on romance seems a little hasty."

  "Well, it's not like I'm entering a convent. I just feel happier if I don't worry about it.

  Theoretical biology is bad enough, right now."

  "You may have something there," said Molly, less crossly.

  They went as softly as they could, in heavy boots on an uncarpeted and creaky floor, and left Eliot by the side
door. The moon was full; another new fall of snow blurred all the corners of the world. Their breaths made great blue clouds in the fierce dry air. The temperature was somewhere on the wrong side of zero. They got thoroughly covered with snow just scrambling down the hill to the bridge to Dunbar. Janet hoped they would not get lost in the Arboretum and die of exposure.

  "There's open water right here, Tina," she said, "and with all the soapsuds from Eliot, what are a few artificial hormones here and there?"

  "I want it to be carried far away," said Tina. "It'll just bob up and down there till spring and annoy the ducks. And it's got my name on it."

  "Well take it off, then," said Molly.

  "No, that's cheating. Come on. I want the other stream. It's hardly ever frozen."

  They trudged up the hill to Dunbar and down its other side. Half Dunbar's windows were still lighted; Janet saw that Nick and Robin's was dark and Thomas and Kevin's, next to them, was dimly lit, as with one desk lamp rather than all the overheads. Go to sleep, dummy, thought Janet.

  Up the snow-caked asphalt road, past the playing fields and the ruined bones of the lilac maze, down the hill to the highway, a black ribbon in all this blue and white. No traffic. They ran across the highway—one always ran, for some reason—and slogged through the snow. Past the stone wall, a mere lumpy drift of snow, down the narrow path, which you could tell from the buried underbrush only because it didn't crackle under your weight, and so to the little humped bridge, also half hidden in whiteness.

  They plunged to the middle of the bridge, pushed the snow off its railing, and leaned on it. The stream was a sunken wriggle of white in a white field. Even the trees hardly showed; they were either white with snow, or as black as the dark between them.

  "It's no go, Tina," said Molly. "It's frozen."

  "Listen a minute," said Janet, who knew this stream.

  They were quiet. The fog of their breath billowed out over the silent snow. No, not quite silent. A remote trickle, as of a faucet dripping in a distant room, rewarded Janet's attentive ear. She listened closer, and could hear the faint rush of the water going about its business under the stifling cloak of winter. "Hear that?" she said.

  "That's all very well," said Molly, "but it's frozen up here just the same."

  "We could jump on the ice," said Tina.

  "You certainly could not," said Janet. "We could find a rock, though. Isn't there a pile of them just the other side of the bridge?"

  "We forgot our flashlights," said Molly.

  "Well, they're for finding pipers, you know. Come on, let's just scrabble a little."

  Molly did this with a will, and while Janet was still entangled in a dead branch, she came up with three round, heavy stones. Janet flung the branch from her and followed Molly back to the center of the bridge.

  "One rock each," said Molly. "All together, or one at a time?"

  "All together," said Tina, picking up a rock. "Ready, set, go."

  They lifted the rocks over their heads and hurled them onto the ice. Molly's bounced harmlessly under the bridge; Tina's produced a lovely spiderweb of black cracks and a glorious splintering noise; and Janet's, hitting this a little off-center, made a hollow crunch followed by a jagged black hole.

  "Go for it, Tina," cried Molly.

  Tina dug in her pocket and extracted her round box of pills. She leaned alarmingly far over the railing and shied it at the hole. It slid neatly across the ice, paused, and dropped in with a faint splash, like something falling down a well. Molly cheered. Tina joined her.

  Janet leaned, staring. The hole in the ice seemed to go down forever; and yet this was not a deep stream.

  "It's cold," she said to her roommates. "Let's go home."

  The next evening was Thursday, which she always spent with Nick in his room. Robin and Molly would betake themselves to various places, as the mood took them; several times Janet had come home to find them lying on the floor of the room in Eliot, studying or arguing. After she and Nick had made up for a week of neglect—he was taking one of the dread twenty-four-credit terms, having decided on a double major in Music and Classics or possibly Music and English, and it left him even less leisure than usual—Janet told him about Tina and the pills.

  "I'm not sure that was wise," said Nick, lying back amid the disarranged bedclothes and looking very sober. His sheets were dark green with huge sprays of lilac on them, and as a background to his wild dark hair and odd features made him look distinctly faunlike.

  "And it doesn't bode well for Thomas, does it?"

  "Why does everybody persist in thinking Tina's the only girl for Thomas, when everybody including Thomas agrees they never really suited one another to begin with?

  Tina says every girl in the folk-dancing group has a crush on him, and they were all dreadfully disappointed that he didn't keep on attending after she broke up with him, even if he couldn't dance and couldn't learn to."

  "Have you told him so?"

  "No; I don't see much of him—privately, anyway. Why don't you tell him? He lives next door."

  "He's not there much," said Nick, "but I'll make a note of it." He wound his fingers in a stray lock of her hair, and smiled. "This is getting nice and long."

  "If I keep it long all summer, you'll know I take you seriously."

  "If I thought you did not," said Nick, "I should be very upset."

  Janet looked at him. His expression was earnest but not overly concerned. Having brought the conversation to this point, she was not sure she would be wise to go on with it.

  She remembered what Thomas had said. There had certainly been no time this term.

  "How's the corrupt and despicable Classics Department?" she said.

  Nick was leaning on his elbows; on the word "despicable," he flung up both his hands with enough violence to push his head and shoulders into a crevice between the pillows.

  "I'd really rather you said you didn't believe me, than to take that tone about it," he said in a muffled voice.

  "I do believe you," said Janet, "at least, I don't think you'd lie to me about it—I believe you intellectually, but it's hard to get an emotional grasp on something like that with so little solid information."

  "Do you think all those jokes about Classics majors being about in their heads are based on nothing?"

  "Having met some of you," said Janet, giving him a poke in the ribs, "I know they're not. But—"

  "It's been a quiet time," said Nick. "These things run in cycles. We are due for an unpleasantness in a year or two."

  "Wonderful. Why don't you tell me about unpleasantnesses in the past: I'm sure they make wonderful gossip."

  Nick didn't move. After a moment he said consideringly, "From time to time somebody's spouse finds out about Medeous."

  "Finds out what about—oh." Janet started to ask for names, and stopped. Brilliant, cherubic Professor Ferris, with his dry-spoken wife; the intense and humorous Janie Schafer, who had switched to the History Department but whose jokes Peg and Kit still remembered, who had a husband; even Melinda Wolfe, who was not married at all—did she really want to hear about the eruption of their private lives into the violent public light?

  "Gossip is mischievous," said Hesiod, "light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of." She remembered it so well because it had fallen to her to sight-read it in Medeous's class. "Wait a minute. You say it's all Medeous's fault, but how long has she been here?"

  "Five years, so."

  "There were jokes about Classics majors long before that."

  "True for you."

  Janet sighed. When he got Irish, there was very little to be done with him. She was greatly surprised when he sat up suddenly and said, "The head of the department has often been a trifle odd."

  "Victoria Thompson was a Classics major," said Janet, struck by a revelation. "Was it the head of the Classics Department who got her pregnant?"

  Nick began to laugh, in much the way Robin did instead of with his own usually moderate chu
ckle. "Oh, dear dear dear," he said at last, wiping his face upon the blanket.

  "My dear girl, the head of the Classics Department in 1897 was our own Professor Medeous's grandmother. Think of the outrage of the biologists."

  "Maybe she just hounded her righteously, then," said Janet, smiling a little sourly.

  "She was not at any time a righteous woman," said Nick. "Why are you brooding over poor Victoria?"

  "Tina's pills, probably," said Janet, giving up on rational conversation and lying down again. "If Victoria had had any, she never would have gotten into trouble in the first place."

  "If she'd lived in a time that made any decent provisions for such trouble, she'd have got out again."

  "Well, maybe."

  The term wound to its close. The February thaw came in March, and having melted every flake of snow and icicle in sight and covered all available surfaces with a thin film of water, withdrew again in favor of an arctic cold spell that froze everything solid.

  The Biology Department canceled Biology 13, obliging Janet and also Nick, whose distribution credits were in rather worse shape than hers, to sign up for Physics 20. This class was thrillingly titled, "Revolutions in Physics," but was referred to by Kevin, witheringly, as "Physics for Poets." It irked him that majors in the humanities should have a physics course tailored for them, while the hapless science major who needed a couple of English or history courses had to take English 10 with the terrifying Evans or History 12

  with the incalculable Wallace like anybody else. Sharon suggested that the College must figure science majors were smarter than humanities majors, but this only got Nick and Robin as irked as Kevin.

  Janet was amused, having heard the entire argument in ev ery possible form every year since she was ten years old. It was her private conviction that anybody could be taught to read a poem usefully but that some people could not be taught mathematics no matter how you went about it. She kept this theory to herself, knowing already the sort of trouble that expressing it would cause.

  She also registered for her father's class in the Romantic Poets and, after a struggle with Melinda Wolfe, for Greek Lyric Poetry. Melinda Wolfe wanted her to have one, or preferably two, of the tragedians under her belt before tackling lyric poetry; she also recommended Plato or Herodotus or Thucydides. But it became clear fairly early in the interview that she would rather Janet took the wrong Classics course than no Classics course at all. Janet thought this was odd, but was happy to employ it to her advantage.