I said I had read nothing much recently and Lola began objecting to something she calls the Oprah Effect, a recent flood of what she calls mawkish memoir. She is an English professor now, and I suppose publishing fads are an occupational hazard.
“People tell me I should write a memoir,” she explained, “because I’ve had five stepfathers. But that doesn’t make me automatically interesting.”
Privately I disagreed with that. Number four offered her cocaine when she was eleven years old. She enjoyed it, too. Number three used to knock her mother around until Lola, age ten, phoned the police. Her mother never forgave her for it. Number two was an alcoholic pool shark who dragged her, illegally at age eight, every afternoon and evening to the kind of ramshackle establishment where he could earn his keep, as he put it—though in fact he was wagering the child support money paid by number one.
I used to speculate that perhaps in a childhood peppered and plagued by stepfathers she learned very early how to please individual men according to their own particular caprices. I could never test this hypothesis, of course—never sit down with her and some other beau over dinner to watch them interact. But I remain convinced that it was this essential responsiveness, this eagerness to please, that also made her first a diligent student and even, later, an exceptional scholar.
Anyway, I must have known that any groom she chose would be moody and domineering. When her marriage collapsed, two years before we had lunch in Evansville, she telephoned me. It has always been her voice that gets into me without warning—that I can’t defend against. It is surprisingly soft and low, a confidential rasp. On the occasion of that phone call in particular she spoke urgently.
“Nathan,” she said, “you were right.”
I had no idea what she was referring to. I only found out over lunch two years later that she meant my cruel prediction. It would have been wrong to ask at the time—to interrupt her confession, whatever it was, with a demand for details, dates, and times. I had said any number of things to her over the years, many of them gloomy and pretentious. She has even now an uncanny ability to quote things back to me I would rather not hear.
I simply held the phone to my ear and asked her to continue. She explained cryptically, without comment, that she was losing her surname.
I listened not so much to her words as to her sweet gravel voice. I had not heard it for a couple of years. When we were undergraduates she used to talk enthusiastically about early matriarchal societies while I sat back admiring her legs. Perhaps I did not know Lola then as well as I do now, although we live thousands of miles apart with our own separate careers and families, and we correspond sporadically at best. Back then I was too distracted by that voice, especially when it crinkled into a giggle unchanged from childhood, by her copper hair and calm blue eyes, and by her face, which suggests a Native American ancestry she doesn’t have. These days she complains that her profile looks every day more like Thomas Jefferson’s on the nickel, but she is still beautiful, and she knows that.
“I was quite offended,” she said over lunch, “but knowing what you did of me at that time, I can see why you said it. And you were right.”
Then came her quiet retaliation.
“I had some difficulty back then,” she said, “distinguishing between friends and lovers.”
Lola is now married again—it’s his second marriage, too—and she is the stepmother to his daughters, who are eight and ten. I have never met him, but Google describes him as a pioneer of online insurance sales. This has made him wealthy, but I cannot believe that a man of any spirit could stoop to an occupation so tedious.
More offensive to me is a photograph Lola e-mailed of a recent Christmas. They are all in her mother’s living room. Lola and her mother are wearing festive dresses, Lola’s brother is wearing a tie, and the little girls have ribbons in their hair. I suppose it is Lola’s latest stepfather behind the camera, and I don’t know what he looks like. Eric, her new husband, however, is seated at the end of the couch nearest the camera with his legs crossed at the knees and one bare foot projecting into the room. That foot becomes somehow both the foreground and the focal point of the photo; it has the lurid gloss and closeness of things seen in dreams. Eric himself is unkempt and unshaven, with a belly that begins at his sternum, wearing shorts and a faded athletic T-shirt. But it is the naked foot thrust in front of everything else that speaks loudest: here is an overgrown adolescent who ignores the customs of another home and makes it his vulgar own.
Lola is a year older than I, and we met in the summer after her freshman year of college and before mine. We had never met before that because she went to a West Side high school where all the students got stoned during lunch hour. I went to an East Side high school where the English teacher got stoned during lunch hour and afterward abandoned the curriculum to share his passion for Bob Dylan and William Blake. He would lend any student anything from his record collection or his extensive library and not really expect it back. Later he was fired for giving cans of beer to students who came to his house to listen to bootlegs after school. That was probably the end of meaningful education in Evansville.
We spent our free afternoons that summer on the crumbling remains of a World War II shipyard over the river, five minutes’ walk from the restaurant. What purpose our haven served in the manufacture of warships I don’t know. It was essentially a vast concrete box directly fronting the shoreline; in the rain you could sit inside with a fire going. If a bottle, bucket, log, basketball, prosthetic limb, hat, Barbie doll, or child’s car seat floated by we’d throw rocks at it. The river is cleaner now. There was graffiti everywhere, and beer cans and candy wrappers, yet we seldom came across other people. Some friends of mine were responsible for that graffiti: on reading Beowulf, Peter had spray painted a monstrous severed arm above the words GRENDEL LIVES. In a city of 130,000, only a dozen or so people would have understood that. Elsewhere there were quotations from Andy Warhol and J. D. Salinger; gnarled curious faces adorned the interior walls, and outside austere spray painted depictions of the heads on Easter Island warned the uninitiated away.
We generally sat on top, and sometimes we waved to the men working on coal barges bound for Pittsburgh or Memphis. Some of those barges are a quarter of a mile and more in length. I wanted to do that, I said, just like Mark Twain. Lola told me an uncle of hers had taken that job, the only thing he could get when he was released from prison. Three months later he lost a leg between two immense coal-heaped iron sledges.
We talked endlessly about ourselves and watched the sun falling slowly into the Ohio. I discovered that she was receptive to cheap romantic flourishes and soon we had olives and grapes and wine and volumes of poetry with us. My English teacher had pressed Yeats on me urgently, and I never knew why until I read it to Lola. I do not mean that she was suddenly, tritely smitten. Both of us were more than that, swept away and possessed by the lofty ideas therein, what Lola called the nobility of joy and by the unanswerable need to rediscover the “old high way of love.” These are not sentiments that sprout naturally by that mindless shining river in the subtropical summer heat, but by moonlight we sought out every shadowed corner, every neglected wood, any private place, where the only sound came from timid river waves. I am not sure that is what Yeats had in mind, but it worked magically for us.
I didn’t tell her that it was my first time. She didn’t tell me that she had someone else waiting for her in Bloomington.
Talking to Lola was like leading some old-fashioned dance. She did not often bring up a topic herself, but she responded to anything I said thoughtfully, at length, ending in a droll flourish or a penetrating question. I was sometimes caught off guard by this when I was simply thinking aloud. Some opinion I didn’t know I had would surface and she would probe it delicately until—usually—I reconsidered.
Yet facing each other over the table and waiting for food was initially awkward. It had been six years since we last met in person. It occurred to me that we neve
r had mutual friends. That, after all, is the rule for such conversations: exchanging bulletins on the lives of mutual acquaintances and gossiping about mutual dislikes.
I never had many friends in Bloomington. It’s a pretty, pleasant town, but there’s nothing there but the university. Consequently there’s a kind of suffocating liberal orthodoxy that emanates from thousands of roosting academics, and an ideological effluvia that trails after shoals of jazz musicians, abstract expressionist painters, and self-published poets—my friends tended to be people who didn’t like it much either. Important research is done at IU, particularly in ornithology, but it is overshadowed and undergirded by a culture of vapid SAVE THE PLANET sloganizing and forty thousand earnest ignorant undergraduates insisting that YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. There’s a competent Mathematics Department there running a good statistics course, but obviously those kids aren’t enrolled in it. I had imagined a university town to be a place where intelligent people had original thoughts and argued about them in good faith from first principles. Lola was never that naïve. She ran around with all kinds of tedious political activists and people who studied post-things.
One of Lola’s English professors published a passionate essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education when we were undergraduates. In it she argued that although it might be negligent not to teach recent developments in the field, it was surely next to criminal to go around annihilating students’ enthusiasm by discussing whether, for example, Jane Austen tacitly condoned slavery. Let them learn, she wrote, to cultivate guilt and grievance elsewhere; in the classroom let them learn to read appreciatively.
“The Guilt and Grievance crowd,” Lola told me at the time (already adept in a sort of dismissive Bloomington tone that preempts argument), “took this as an accusation of indoctrinating young minds.” Later that year the professor was denied tenure and she left to take up a post at a community college in Kansas.
If I were going to live in Indiana again, I’d live in Bloomington, but at the time I found it overwhelmingly disappointing. To Lola it was salvation from the unbearable enduring shame and torment of being from Evansville. Every art opening, poetry reading, foreign film, irrelevant protest march somehow eradicated her fearful manic past; and of course every tedious activist, Borges aficionado, and cut-glass sculptor she took up with redeemed her by association. The longer I lived in Bloomington marinating in militant dogma the more I began to think that perhaps once upon a time there was a place in America where two people of diametrically opposite views could respectfully disagree: that was in Evansville, circa 1988, the last year my dad the mathematician shared an office with Shane’s dad the poet. I don’t mean that they were adversaries in the Last Civil Dispute (there should be a historical marker), but that it was only possible in Evansville because it is so far behind the rest of the country—which had already hived off into smug homogeneities like Bloomington. Or, for that matter, Brattleboro, Vermont.
Lola was too smart to remain under the spell of those other men for very long. Yet she had trouble breaking things off with anyone. All through college she increasingly snuck off with me. When I could get her we would spend a day together cycling somewhere outside Bloomington to pick strawberries or sitting in Dunn Meadow reading Yeats—I am looped in the loops of her hair; Lola’s hair has no loops, but that is beside the point, and Yeats would be the first to tell you this. She would spend the night with me, and in the morning explain why she couldn’t leave Owen or Ian or James. I had other names for them, of course. When she left I began drinking, and found myself, hours later, guilty of some ridiculous act. Pulling a pizza drunkenly out of the oven I burned my forearm on the oven pan, horizontally. Immediately I applied my arm to the pan vertically to scar myself with a capital L. The result was a lower case t so I did it again, and again, until I got it right. I still have the scar.
I found out one boyfriend’s last name during an argument at the end of a week we spent together. I had never even heard of him but it was a week, apparently, that he spent in California. After she left my apartment I looked him up in the phone book and found his address. I don’t know what I intended to do.
With twelve bottles of beer in my backpack and a pair of binoculars around my neck I climbed a hickory tree in the courtyard of his apartment complex, and I watched him watching TV. I did not know I would earn my living in more or less the same way a few years later—that, in fact, Lola would be responsible for introducing me to my mentor, Gerald.
If Lola was there she never appeared through the window, and I never saw him speak. He struck me as a kind of dislocated surfer, with straggly blond hair and a blank expression. I think he was an aspiring filmmaker, but I get them all mixed up. I got bored of him very quickly, and I couldn’t see the TV. For the rest of the evening I lobbed my empty beer bottles into a pool of light on the road beneath a streetlamp. The glass glinted and bounced as it shattered and came to a rest gleaming back at me in an invitation to shower down more. I peeled the labels off for purity. Twelve bottles in thousands of shards beneath a bright light make a beautiful sight from fifteen feet up, a faint reflection of the sunlight on the Ohio flashing like coins, and I wished I had brought more.
I was sometimes tempted—even encouraged—by friends of mine to go pick a fight with one or another of Lola’s other men—for my own benefit, someone said. It would have been stupid and juvenile, but that is not why I refrained. It would have been inadequate. I wanted to burn their villages and pillage their monasteries and spike their severed heads. I dreamed of living in a dueling age with my breast pocket filled with letters from Lola. When finally Joe or Russell or Chris ran me through with a minié ball or a blade, my heart’s blood would seep through to censor her indiscretions. That was a fate I could have accepted. What I could not abide was the banality of a small Midwestern town full of students screwing each other without consequence.
And yet, reconsidering now, it seems to me that I had the best of an impossible situation. She did not, could not, deceive me as comprehensively as she deceived those other men, and now, fifteen years on, we are still, in her word, friends.
Over lunch I asked her how often she returned to Evansville.
“Only to see my brother,” she said. “My family isn’t like your family. Educated.” She meant affluent. I had been to her mother’s house once when we had first met. It was very clean but very small. It now sits in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in town, where—says Lola—people with no shoes live in houses with no windows. It wasn’t like that back then.
“I rarely visit. I don’t really go anywhere.” She shrugged.
“Me, neither,” I said.
“Remind me what you do in Vermont?”
“I work in a hawk hospital,” I said. “A raptor rehabilitation center, officially.”
“How lovely,” she said.
“Only job I could find,” I said. “My CV is a train wreck.”
“Where did you get your PhD?” I said. I thought this was a safe question, but I was wrong.
“In Michigan, where we live now. I did my dissertation on Yeats,” she said, as if this were unimportant, an afterthought.
She wore heavy owlish glasses I resented for obscuring her face. The lenses magnified the folds in her eyelids distractingly. She wore makeup, too; discreetly and carefully and wholly unnecessarily.
“Well, why did you decide to get a PhD in the first place?”
“I was tired of staring at computers all day. I wrote software manuals for a while. I needed something a little more human than that.”
She had small perfect hands that almost disappeared behind her pint glass whenever she sipped her beer. Her knuckles were white, her fingers pale; she was thin, angular, and exact.
I couldn’t imagine where or how she had gone straight. That is, she was less animated, established in her new career, and seemed suddenly to me like anyone else—beautiful and brilliant yet dull and predictable, stable and sane at last but circumscribed and cloistered in her
own narrow academic world. Once at a greasy Waffle House at ten in the morning she had leaned over the table and kissed me urgently for no reason. Customers stared, but she paid no attention. I could not imagine the woman facing me now doing the same thing—could not imagine even the idea of it penetrating her heavy glasses and polished professorial speech.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “what happened to your first marriage?”
“I got bored,” she said. I could have guessed that much. “We had the same literary tastes, I suppose, but nothing else in common. Two months after we married we found we simply had nothing to talk about.”
I tried to imagine this. The best conversations I have ever had have been with Lola, once discussing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for upward of twenty minutes. Obviously the sandwiches had nothing to do with it: Lola could make anything entertaining. I could not picture the man who could find nothing to talk about with her.
“Nothing to talk about? Was he an accountant or something?”
“No. An English professor.”
When Lola had moved away from Indiana I became involved with a series of other women who were her opposite. That is, they were faithful and trustworthy and steadfast, as well as shallow and self-absorbed. I did not seek them out or calculate my way to her antithesis, of course, but I was in some sense recoiling from her unconsciously for years. I wondered about these ripples of consequence and whether she had claimed that PhD in a similar reaction to that first beleaguered boring husband.
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