Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

* * *

  Janet overslept the next morning, and got up feeling as if she had a hangover. She had to skip her shower, and she was too late for breakfast at either Eliot or Dunbar. Taylor was still serving toast, juice, coffee, and cold cereal. She did not feel capable of facing Boswell and Johnson—let alone Professor Evans—without any breakfast. She flung on the first clothing that came to hand, and rushed over to Taylor.

  She had forgotten how very depressing it was. She piled a few items of alleged food onto her tray and walked along the wall, trying to find a table under a window. It was a bright November day out there; surely a little sun must be co ming in even to Taylor's

  basement.

  Yes, it was. It fell, dim and dusty but dazzling in the murk of Taylor, on a scratched table for two, and on Peg Powell's shining light brown hair and white ruffled blouse, where she sat smiling like Patience on a monument and holding hands with Nick. Janet stopped dead, spilling half her orange juice into her glazed doughnuts. Then she backed slowly away until she was safely behind one of Taylor's massive pillars, after which she put the tray down carefully on an empty table and bolted out of the building.

  She arrived in her classroom fifteen minutes early, and sat staring at somebody's metrical analysis of Wordsworth's "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour" on the blackboard. The class gathered. Evans came in, brisk and a little sardonic; he had not found their last batch of papers inspiring, and set himself to explain how they might do better next time. Janet wrote down everything he said. She never felt quite the same again about the excellent advice not to generalize from fewer than three examples; she thought that another two examples of what she was generalizing about at the moment would probably kill her.

  Then they discussed the entry in Boswell's Life for 22 March 1776, in which Johnson, encountering many years after their first meeting the first woman he had been in love with, laughed at the notion that a man never can be really in love but once, and said furthermore,

  "I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter."

  The problem with literature, thought Janet crossly, while Evans delivered one of his more sardonic speeches relating these opinions to Johnson's actual behavior and then to the profound foolishness of students, the twentieth century, and humanity in general, was that either it applied not at all to your private concerns, or else you wished it wouldn't.

  When she went back to Ericson, she found both Molly and Tina rather cross in their turn, on account of having been abandoned the night before in the midst of their ghostly researches—fruitless researches, as it turned out. They had sat out in the grass until twelve-thirty, unmolested by flying books or reckless equestrians, and then given up and gone home. Sharon had called at one o'clock and said Peg was sleeping like a log and could Sharon also go to bed, please? Janet apologized abjectly; Molly asked her if anything was the matter; Janet opened her mouth and surprised everybody, herself most of all, by bursting into tears. They patted her on the back and gave her Kleenex.

  When she had explained the cause, both Tina and Molly looked relieved. "That doesn't mean anything at all," said Molly. "Peg's always melancholy; he was probably just cheering her up."

  "If he's got time to cheer Peg up, why hasn't he got any time for me?"

  "I think that's the problem," said Tina. "You wouldn't be so upset and suspicious if you guys were having a normal relationship. Maybe after he has the Listening Test—"

  "Then he has to study for the written exam and practice for his recital. It's hopeless."

  "Well, if he has time to comfort Peg, it can't be too hopeless," said Molly.

  Janet perceived that she had failed to convey some element of what she had seen, and decided it was probably not communicable anyway. She blew her nose and consented to go to lunch, since this was not a day on which they would see Peg.

  She found herself looking forward to seeing Nick with a feverish impatience; but when she knocked on his door on the appointed date and heard him call, "Come in," she felt suddenly incapable of either ignoring the matter or dealing with it. She went in. Nick had ordered a pizza, and was trying to cut it with a Swiss Army knife that had seen better days.

  "Hello, my lass," he said. "Sit down and put on a bib, if you can find such a thing. This pizza would suit somebody on a liquid diet, but it smells all right."

  "Nicholas, I can't stand this anymore."

  Nick looked up, wide-eyed. "Do you want to go eat soggy sandwiches at Sheila's? I don't mind." He started to get up.

  "No, I mean this. Seeing you once a month. Can't we do something?"

  "I don't see what, until I've got these exams out of the way."

  "Well, I can't stand it, that's all."

  "Would you rather not see me at all?"

  "Yes," said Janet, "I think I would."

  Nick put the knife down, very carefully, on his purple-flowered pillow, and stood looking at her. Janet, advising anybody else in such a situation, would have told her to go ahead and confront him with Peg; it could not do any more harm than she had done already.

  But she could not do it. There was, after last spring and this summer and fall, so huge a collection of unspoken thoughts between them that no single one could fight its way out of the tangle. And what had he been thinking and not saying all that time? She blinked, hard.

  He would not begin; if there was anything to be said, she had say it. She opened her mouth, but her throat had closed. She refused to break down crying on his bed. Nothing in all their relations had made that a possibility.

  She turned and walked out of the room, leaving the door open. She was afraid she would fall down the stairs. Holmes was a modern building with an elevator, so she stabbed the button. She could see the open door of Nick's room from where she stood, once she had let the first rush of tears run out. The bell rang; the elevator came; she got into it and pressed 1. It was possible to beat the elevator by running full tilt down the stairs; they had had a few races that way. The elevator jerked to a stop and opened its doors. The modern, cheerful lounge, full of angular furniture in purple and blue, was empty. Janet pushed open the doors and went outside.

  It was a dark night with a heavy overcast. The wind hissed in the remaining oak leaves. Janet leaned against the bicycle rack belonging to the Women's Gym. She had been thinking about doing this for months; why was she so upset now that she had done it? "Of the passion of love he remarked, that its violence and ill effects were much exaggerated, for who knows any real sufferings on that head, more than from the exorbitancy of any other passion?" Thanks a lot, Dr. Johnson. She could hardly call to mind any other passion.

  "Youth to itself rebels, though none else near." And you can shut up, too, Will of Stratford.

  "And truly in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this." I just bet.

  She went into Eliot and used the first floor's telephone to call Thomas. She could hear the telephone ringing faintly one level down, and a door opening, and the footsteps of the Person going to answer it. An unfamiliar female voice, very pleasant; Janet heard its owner go along the hall and pound on Thomas and Robin's door, pause, pound again, and return to tell Janet over the telephone that nobody seemed to be there.

  Janet declined to leave a message, thanked her, and walked over to the library. It was

  about half full of people who were not terribly harried yet, but Thomas was not one of their number. She didn't want to go back to Eliot: Molly and Tina were studying their Microbiology, which always made them fractious; and even if they were in the jolliest possible mood they would still tell her she had been an idiot, and urge her to call Nick immediately and reopen negotiations. Thomas was the only person she could think of who would really understand the small shiftings of unspoken thought and feeling, minor tremors that might suddenly expand into an earthquake.

  What I w
ant, thought Janet, standing in a portion of the library apparently devoted to the storage of biological works with titles longer than seven words, is something really esoteric or really depressing. Both, for preference. She wandered vaguely in the direction of the stairs, since incomprehensibility was not one of her requirements, and found the modern poetry. She hesitated a little between Pound and Eliot, but remembering again about the incomprehensibility, she took out The Waste Land and retired to a padded room containing a tall girl with a chemistry book and a round boy with three volumes of the Close Rolls.

  "April is the cruelest month, Mixing memory and desire." It was just what she needed.

  The allusions melting into one another, the entirely poetic, utterly alogical connections, the sweep from free to blank to doggerel verse, the mind behind it steeped in everything anybody had ever written. Professor Evans had once told them that if they ever wanted to feel the immediate benefit of majoring in English, they should read The Waste Land. He had been making a rather sour joke about people who didn't understand the purposes of a liberal education, but he had a point. Chaucer, the Bible, Shakespeare—Shakespeare more than anybody, maybe—Virgil, Ovid, Middleton, Dante (she had to use the notes to discover those, but at least she knew who they were, and might read them, next year, or in graduate school), Spenser, Shakespeare again, Homer. "These fragments have I shored against my ruins."

  "You said it," said Janet, half aloud; the girl reading chemistry never stirred, but the boy delving in the tiny print and frustrating dead ends of the Close Rolls glanced up and smiled.

  Janet made a deprecating face at him, returned the book to the shelves, and went back to her own Eliot.

  Her roommates were up, and seemed annoyed that she was not cheerful once more.

  Molly was very tiresome about it all; Tina, however, seemed to understand what had happened, though she could not express it well enough to satisfy Molly.

  "It's odd," said Molly, sitting up in bed in her University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt, worn enough now to be used only as sleepwear, "that Robin and I should be the last ones left. Remember when there were six of us?"

  "You make us sound like one of those mystery novels where they kill off half the characters," said Janet, rather crossly.

  "I wonder what went wrong," said Tina.

  "If you could know," said Janet, mangling Tennyson a little, "you should know what God and man is."

  "Are."

  "Nope. It's got to rhyme with crannies."

  "Sure," said Tina.

  Because she was feeling fed up with the Classics Department, when Janet declared her major she opted for a simple English degree. She was accordingly removed from the custody of Melinda Wolfe and given not to Professor Evans as she had earnestly hoped, but to Professor Fleisher, a kindly man from whom she had never taken a course, largely because he specialized in the modern novel and occasionally taught modern poetry as well He looked like a slovenly and dissipated version of Professor Ferris, and in fact had Ferris's sweetness and brilliance without possessing the cutting edge that made Ferris so formidable a teacher. Janet thought he would make a good advisor, if he didn't take against her for avoiding modern literature. Maybe he would give a seminar in Wallace Stevens, or let her take an independent study. She was beginning to feel a little bewildered and oppressed by so many lectures. Maybe some quiet research would help.

  In the meantime, Professor Fleisher gently brought to her attention the deficiencies of her distribution, and made her map out the schedules for all five terms left to her. Winter term of this, her junior year, was left largely alone: she got to take Victorian Literature, Euripides, and Spenser. But for spring he made her agree to take Chemistry 13 (Concepts of Chemistry, the Chem Department's offering for nonmajors) as well as French 1 to help get her into graduate school and American Literature I to balance her courses in the English Department. Worst of all, he persuaded her to consider Math 10 for fall term of her senior year. ("Donald Brunner can explain math so I can understand it," he told her.) She also ended up stuck with American Literature II that term, though American literature was an area she had been assiduously avoiding. Fleisher was not encouraging about Aristophanes either, but since she had given in on the math and sacrificed Shakespeare's tragedies and romances to the dubious pleasures of Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Theodore Dreiser, she clung stubbornly to her Greek, and he gave in.

  Emerging from this conference, Janet was aware of a profound lack of tension. On some level far below the surface, Melinda Wolfe had been very difficult to deal with. Mr.

  Fleisher, while he had talked her into several less appealing terms than Melinda Wolfe had ever managed, was nevertheless simple and human and seemed to have her welfare at heart. What Melinda Wolfe had at heart Janet had never ascertained.

  On the last day of exams, Thomas called.

  "Robin says you broke up with Nick," he said, without preliminaries.

  "Yes."

  "Are you all right?"

  "Not especially."

  "Why didn't you call, dimwit?"

  "I did; you weren't there."

  "Well, I can't hang around twenty-four hours a day in case one of my friends does something stupid, now can I? You should have left a message."

  "I called too soon; I was too upset. Then I wasn't upset enough, and it was exam week, so I didn't."

  Thomas sighed heavily. Even his nonverbal expressions were almost too much for the telephone. "Look, I've got a plane in three hours and I'm not packed. I'm getting back January second, and I'll probably catch the seven-thirty bus. Why don't you meet me at the bus station and we can go eat awful sandwiches and you can tell me all about it?"

  "Okay."

  "See you in ten days."

  "Thomas?"

  "What?"

  "Thank you."

  "Don't be silly," said Thomas, and hung up.

  CHAPTER 19

  Thomas neither scolded nor lectured, but he did treat Janet as if she were recovering from some obscure sort of nervous breakdown. He made her compare schedules with him, and they settled on Tuesday lunch as a meeting time. He called her at odd hours during the rest of the week, to see how she was doing. Janet was at first exasperated, and then amused, and finally touched. A nagging worry that Thomas was going to go all romantic on her now that they were both free metamorphosed gradually into a certain irritation that he showed no signs of it. She caught herself making tentative motions in that direction herself, and pulled herself up sharply. Nobody who knew as little as she did about how she felt or what she wanted had any business entangling anybody else. It would only spoil the friendship.

  Having decided this, she called up the gynecologist that the Women's Caucus, after months of exhausting negotiation, had persuaded the College to hire to come down once a week and minister to those needs that the Health Service proper refused to deal with. Dr Irving, a thin, gray-haired woman who grumbled constantly in such a way as to make you feel part of the solution rather than of the problem, assured Janet that all her parts were in working order and gave her a prescription for birth-control pills. Janet had specifically asked not to be given the sort Tina had had and Molly still used, and was gratified to have Dr. Irving refer to them as, "Goddamned water-retaining stuff, silly dosage," and give her something else.

  The something else made Janet's appetite erratic but did not actually make her sick.

  Taking the pills comforted her; ever since she walked out on Nick that evening, she had had the sensation that there was no telling what she might do next. The pills would guard against the worst consequences; and it was pleasant to have one's period be so predictable.

  She did not make a TAKE PILL sign to join the battered one Molly still put above her bed; instead she put up the passage Nick had quoted long ago: "I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." This w
as effective as a mnemonic device. It also made her think more kindly even of the beer-drinking, football-playing, practical-joking segment of the student body, mostly but not entirely male, that periodically interrupted everybody's peace. They stole nothing, fought very little, and seemed to feel that the ancientry were not worth bothering with. Clearly, however annoying they were, they might have been far worse.

  Besides, the quotation always made Thomas laugh, though he did not know its actual purpose.

  So winter arrived, and deepened, and departed to make way for a blustery spring.

  When their class schedules changed for spring term, Thomas and Janet changed their meeting time to Friday dinner. Robin gave Molly a bracelet of silver crocuses. Janet chose a moment when Tina was in class and Molly in the bathroom, and asked him if he thought she should return the necklace he had made for Nick to give to her. She knew what normal etiquette said on the subject; she had been ignoring that mostly because the process of returning the necklace would so painfully combine the ridiculous and the melodramatic.

  She kept remembering the stiff little couplet with which Ophel ia had returned Hamlet's presents; she was sure her own effort would be no better and had no wish to be laughed at.

  "I made it for you," said Robin. He was thumbing through Molly's math book, and did not look up. "What would he do with it?"

  "Give it to Peg?"

  "It wouldn't suit her."

  "Why not? She's all fragile and Victorian, isn't she?"

  "You're better off out of it," said Robin. He lifted an entirely sober face to her. He so seldom looked right at you, or seemed to see you when he did, that the impact of his attentive blue gaze was appalling. Janet felt the hair rise along her arms, and remembered that Nick had asked her if she didn't want to go to bed with Robin.

  "Out of a kind of subterranean ménage à trois?" she said, with an extreme sharpness intended for herself, not for Robin. "Yes, I'm sure. But—"

  "But the necklace was for you," said Robin; her tone had not so much as made him blink. He went back to the math book. "Do you keep it."