Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307)

by Kadish, Rachel

  When Jeff comes to rouse me for lunch I don’t hear his approach, so engrossed have I become in blending confidence and modesty in a proportion designed to impress anyone on the tenure committee who hasn’t yet formed an opinion of me. I can compare Faulkner to Fellini using only my abdominal muscles. I can balance everything Henry James ever wrote on the tip of my nose. I like Gertrude Stein.

  “Hungry?” Jeff swings my door wide.

  I glance at the clock. Over an hour has passed since I installed myself at my desk. Elizabeth hasn’t stirred.

  Jeff crosses his arms and slumps his lean frame against the door-jamb, in his black-on-black outfit looking more than ever like a hieroglyph for boredom. With an amused nod, he indicates Elizabeth. “What’s with her?”

  “She’s sleeping it off. She was in the library all night.”

  “How could she have been in the library all night?”

  At which moment I realize what pique and undercaffeination blinded me to earlier: the library closes at eleven.

  “She was probably just out clubbing, having a hot night with a half-dozen bodybuilders,” says Jeff. “Mousy grad student by day, street troller by night. Let her have her rest.”

  But I’m embarrassed: for letting a student sleep in my office; for failing to catch the contradiction in her library story; most of all, for being made a fool of. I defended Elizabeth to Joanne, and in doing so worsened an obscure enmity that’s reared its head just as my tenure review process is beginning. For thanks I get an idiotic, undergraduate-level lie about a library all-nighter.

  It takes several repetitions of her name and a firm shake to wake her. My hand on her shoulder feels like a violation, and I withdraw it the instant her eyelids flutter. “Elizabeth,” I repeat.

  “Yes, I’m sorry.” She struggles upright.

  “I’ve got a question for you.”

  Her gaze lolls around the office, lands on my desk, my computer, me. “Oh shit,” she murmurs, and her pale cheeks flush a hot red. From the doorway Jeff watches with a smirk.

  “How were you in the library all night last night?”

  She answers me with obvious relief at not being asked a more difficult question. “I broke in.”

  With a low whistle, Jeff steps inside and closes my office door. “Beg your pardon?”

  Elizabeth looks from me to him. Then her dark eyes come home to rest on mine. I feel their tentative weight.

  A powerful, irrational sense of responsibility turns my voice hoarse. “Tell us,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  “The bell had already rung, and I hadn’t left, and the guard found me on his last round through the stacks. He was pretty mad. So I pretended to leave, and while he was on his walkie-talkie I jumped the barrier and slipped back inside.” She pauses, then utters a soft hiccup of a giggle. “He didn’t even see me. I spent the night in the rare books room.” She laughs again, louder this time, and with edge.

  I picture the lithe form of a cat burglar sailing over the barrier, leaping balletically between shadows to claim the orgiastic delights of two-hundred-year-old volumes. Elizabeth’s slim figure suddenly looks a good bit less sickly.

  “Wasn’t it dark?” asks Jeff, sounding mildly impressed. I shoot him a look: we ought to be expressing concern, not fascination.

  Grinning at Jeff like a co-conspirator, Elizabeth plunges an arm into her backpack and fishes out a small plastic contraption, which she straps onto her forehead. She reaches up to flip a switch and the headlamp glares blue-white into my eyes.

  “I got it at an outdoor goods store.”

  Jeff and I squint in turn as she looks at each of us for approval. “Oh, sorry.” She shields the bulb until she’s able to find the switch.

  As she twists to return the extinguished headlamp to her backpack, the words run through my head: canary in a coal mine.

  I turn to Jeff. He gives me a mocking salute: this one’s yours. With an exaggerated flourish, he bows to Elizabeth, now watching us expectantly from her seat. “I’d love to stay and chat with you ladies, but I’ve an appointment with the Queen.” He leaves, closing the door firmly behind him.

  “Elizabeth,” I begin, and then don’t know how to continue. To gain time, I make a show of pulling her MLA paper toward me and lowering my head as if reading. For a while I stare blankly at the first page, considering: Is this just the mild mania of an overtaxed graduate student? Or is she losing her grip? And if she isn’t, and if I make a fuss about protecting her well-being, how badly will I shoot myself in the foot? Absently I flip to the second page, and scan the opening paragraph of an entirely new paper.

  It has been asserted (see Farrell and Gray’s Crying After the Moon: Calvino and His World) that Italo Calvino’s magical universe had primarily Cuban and European antecedents. Yet a brief look at some nineteenth-century American texts—texts available in both Cuba and Italy during Calvino’s youth—may indicate that his literary influence also included, to a significant degree, American Romantic writers.

  I raise my eyes. “I thought you were writing about Hawthorne.”

  “Oh, sorry. Did I leave the opening page of the Hawthorne draft there? You can throw that out. The new paper, the one I want you to look at, is about Calvino. I changed my mind last night.”

  I read on, flipping pages slowly. Fifteen minutes later I look up to find Elizabeth nibbling dreamily on the nails of one hand.

  The paper is gold. Once more Elizabeth has taken a common critical assumption, documented its origins, then provided enough counterevidence to flip it on its head. Whatever is going on with Elizabeth, her mind is obviously as lucid as ever, faulty margins notwithstanding. It occurs to me that with some sleep this might be fine. Straightening the pages under Elizabeth’s gaze, I ask myself what Victoria would do if she were here. It’s the kind of situation she would know how to handle graciously: attending to her younger colleagues’ needs while giving their emotional lives a respectfully wide berth. Expressing concern without being nosy.

  I don’t ask Elizabeth why she broke into the library. “Go home,” I say in as firm and kind a voice as I can muster. “Get some sleep. You’ve written a terrific paper. Now call in sick.”

  “But I’ve got work to—”

  “Go home, Elizabeth. Sleep deprivation is for political prisoners. Go home and get yourself back on track.”

  She stands and swings her pack across her shoulder. There’s an audible thud as it connects with her back. I wince, but she doesn’t seem to notice. As she shrugs her way into the straps I rise and open the door for her.

  “Thanks,” she breathes. Leaving my office, she accelerates to a rapid stride, the echoes of her footfalls crowding the hall as though one step at a time were not enough for her.

  “Sleep,” I say, as she rounds the corner and disappears.

  The breeze whips the deck of the ferry. This is our fifth consecutive joy ride between Manhattan and Staten Island—a full afternoon’s cruise for free, New York’s most accessible thrill for low-budget lovers.

  The ferry churns through sparkling water, the day so bright I regret leaving my sunglasses at home. George balls the wax paper from his picnic sandwich and stuffs it into our makeshift trash bag. “How’s Yolanda?” he asks.

  “Much better, I think—despite the extension. She’d been counting the days until closing night, so I thought she’d lose it when she learned the play is reopening in SoHo next month.” I squint at the water. “But maybe it’s therapeutic, having to face the kind of guy she falls for and act out the consequences every night. She got hit on by some dancer at a party this week, the smooth-operator sort she usually flips over. And she refused him. Never, in all the years I’ve known her, have I heard of Yolanda saying no to a well-polished bad apple.” I turn and watch the horizon of Staten Island recede. “This Bill thing has been worse than her usual, which is saying a lot. Yolanda has had a rough go of it.”

  He grimaces. “I sympathize. The world can be a forest of wrong people.”

  “A
nd she lets her hopes soar for each one. Which is part of the beauty of Yolanda.”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  The wind picks up; I brace myself against the railing. “Not the same way,” I say. “I hoped to fall in love. But I was pretty content in the meanwhile.”

  He tilts his head, studying his orange juice container. “Still, haven’t you been hungry to meet the right person and get started with life?”

  “I’ve wanted to meet someone, yes. But I think my life has already started.”

  Inverting the container, he takes the last swig, then wraps an arm around me and pulls me close. “I’ve lived for it.”

  “What about everything else going on in your life?”,

  “It’s so much water treading. Important water treading. But not the real thing.”

  “. . . which is finding someone, and making that life wave go forward?”

  He laughs, but his face is earnest as he answers. “That’s how I feel, anyway. Love, kids, the future. That, and taking care of the ones who raised you. If you’re able.” He hesitates, watching me. “I think it’s important to understand your priorities, and try to steer so you don’t end up sorry. Life is finite.”

  The ferry chugs heavily through the harbor. The Manhattan terminal, blanched by the autumn sunshine, comes into view. We near the dock.

  For me, moving forward has meant writing the next paper, putting together a tenure packet; debunking, subverting, inverting. I’ve committed myself to a life of service to literature. The quotidian is a waste of time. I don’t send holiday cards—it only encourages people to expect them next year. I don’t darn socks. People need to eat? Hence the discovery, in 1645, of takeout. My salary is largely subinvestment-level, my parents give no indication of needing or desiring help, my future is abstract, and health is not something that occupies my attention. I think about my responsibilities to my “family unit” as frequently as I think about taxes—which is to say only as often as necessary to stay out of trouble.

  “You’ve thought about some topics more than I have,” I say, leaning against him as the ferry slows. “You think about mortality. Personally, I like a little denial. I concede I have a bladder; it’s made itself evident. I suspect, though, that I might not have a liver—it’s never so much as cleared its throat. I certainly don’t have islets of Langerhans.”

  George absorbs this without comment, but his smile says, What a beautiful fable.

  The notion that he might think me immature catches me off-guard. As the ferry bumps gently into its dock, I argue silently in my own defense. So what if we’ll all get sick and need help and die? So what if things can end badly with no appeal? The beauty of life is in denying mortality, not arranging your life around it. Soaring has everything to do with amnesia about the ground. Why shouldn’t we do it as long as possible?

  “Do you think I’m fatuous?” I say.

  “Nope,” he says. As the dispersing passengers fan out around us, he stops on the landing and takes me by the shoulders. “Tracy, I think you’re very slender.”

  We walk north in a silence relieved only by the sounds of traffic. I tread the cracked pavement as faintly as though I’d just received a body blow. When at last I venture a glance at George, I’m greeted with the burst of laughter he’s been reserving since Whitehall Street. Stopping in the middle of foot traffic, I have only two words for him.

  “Come on, that was worth it just for the expression of horror on your face.” He hugs me, not the way you hug a person to jolly her out of a bruised ego, but long and hard, cradling my head. “No,” he says after a moment. “I don’t think you’re fatuous. You’re a fantastically thoughtful person who has just had different life experiences than I. Plus you’re fun to be around.”

  “Yeah, well. Watch you don’t get pulled over for crimes against the language.”

  “Just what are the language police going to do to me?”

  “Suspend your poetic license. Slap a writer’s block on you.”

  “I’m frightened.”

  Which is precisely where two A.M. finds me, alone in my apartment, an October rain dotting the windowpane. It’s the first night I’ve spent alone in recent memory, and I bicycle my legs slowly in the cool sheets, feeling George’s absence, knowing he’s forty blocks uptown prepping for a seven A.M. conference call. Before I met George I was untouchable. I was a sprinter looping a track, lapping those slower runners set back by love, by breakups, pregnancies, by their insistence on living life as though it were a one-way street full of personal opportunities that would not come again. Me, I jogged blithely past. It strikes me now, insomniac under the faint luminosity of my clock radio, that nothing spectacularly new has happened to me for twelve years. I’ve moved along a preset course, from undergrad to grad student to teacher. I’ve published articles, a book of criticism, and an anthology, accomplishments that were praised but not unexpected. My image in the mirror has shown little alteration through Ph.D. and salary negotiations; my ovaries, I believe, aren’t aging; I will be thirty-something for several decades at the least. I’ve known myself to be—loath as I am to boast—immortal. Last winter, when the surgeon who’d performed my appendectomy stopped on his rounds to tell me all had been normal, my relief was marred by the tiniest sting of betrayal. I found it neither entirely comforting nor entirely plausible, this assurance that my insides were ordinary plumbing and tissue readily incised, retracted, oxygenated. Already the memory of the stabbing pain, the stack of books I’d dropped, the blurred taxi ride to the hospital, was fading. I waited—don’t most of us wait?—for the surgeon to tell me: You were not in the least bit normal, not ordinary and vincible flesh and blood at all. Inside you are exceptional. Inside you are gilt, frescoed. You are driven not by the muscle beating in your chest, but by a pump of alabaster, ether, quicksilver.

  I try out a bit of melodrama: Nothing will ever be the same as it was before I met George. Spreading my arms, I slide them slowly along the sheets, simultaneously reveling in the solitude of my bed and understanding that I like it in part because I know he will be here tomorrow. George has become a pillar of my happiness. If we broke up there would be no easy recovery, no untouchability in being alone. Life has become a one-way street.

  A thought not at all conducive to sleep. Because if love can happen in my world, anything can happen. The choices I make matter, and can pilot me irrevocably toward better or worse. Life is not infinite. Carpe diem.

  Even Jeff, I register, knows this.

  Even Adam. Adam—who broke up with Kim rather than continue without commitment—knows what I have been too dumb to realize. This thought is so sobering I actually register gratitude when sleep relieves me of it.

  On the morrow I wake with a new knowledge: I have come to a crossroad in my adult life. I decide to roast a chicken.

  I dial the number. “Mom,” I say.

  Her voice is faint on the telephone, as though Manhattan were not across the continent from her kitchen counter, but in another solar system. I picture her in her school clothing: a vest buttoned over a pale blouse, dark slacks, pumps. A tall woman with a raspy voice that never seems to rise, with straightforward friends who don’t demand much, with students whose crises and triumphs don’t penetrate the walls of her house—students who passed anonymous through her classroom each year of my childhood and never offered hints. The only romantic counsel my mother ever extended to me was a consoling, if uncertain, Tracy, you’re one in a million, followed by the advice You shouldn’t be so picky. I never did work up the energy to point out her mathematical inconsistency . . . or what it stood for. The simultaneous blessing and curse tendered to a daughter who’s made a very different choice: the stated desire for my success, the hobbling passivity about its likelihood.

  “Buy a small chicken,” she says. “Three or four pounds.” It’s clear, from the puzzlement in her voice, that there is more she’d like to ask. That she suspects my telephone call means this George I’ve mentioned is serious. But we have no
signal for this kind of conversation in our family semaphore. My mother is unpracticed at prying into my personal life. If she did, if she asked a single pointed question right now, delight and fear would tumble out of me whether or not I thought it wise. But I’ve learned not to volunteer information on my own. I’ve poured water onto dry sand too many times to expect anything to germinate. All you’re left with are an empty pail and a somehow shameful stain.

  “Baste every twenty minutes,” she says. “And don’t forget the paprika.”

  There is a long, awkward silence.

  “Do you know how to light your oven?” she asks.

  I buy the chicken—Perdue, because that man wouldn’t lie. I carry it back to my apartment, wash the rubbery insides, and plop it in a foil pan purchased for the occasion. There it sits, naked in the pan. A dead chicken.

  The slaughterer has left a small flap hanging where the chicken’s neck once was—a frail tube, an airway or perhaps a blood vessel, nearly translucent.

  I stare without touching. Then, following my mother’s instructions, I dress, sprinkle and dot, and land the chicken in the oven.

  During the initial round of basting I consider, for the first time in my life, becoming a vegetarian. Then I consider something else: We’re all going to die. There’s no such thing as existence without change. While my moral logic is admittedly unclear at this point, I gradually become privy to another, higher truth: The chicken smells fantastic. I have a vision of the future—of myself as a mortal, vulnerable, loving, one-way-street woman literature professor. I will cook chickens with (useless as this is to the chicken, foolish and politically void) respect.

  “You two are making me nauseous,” says Adam, digging into a drumstick with his knife.

  George grins and wraps me tighter. He and I stuffed ourselves on chicken over an hour ago. Adam, who dropped by with his roommate to return the CD player I’d lent him, showed up, with the uncanny timing of a practiced freeloader, just as we were about to clear the table. Leaning together against my double-stacked bookshelf, George and I watch Adam and the roommate, whom he’s introduced as Worms, eat. Adam is sporting the Beer Pong shirt and blue jeans he wore to work. Worms, round-faced and unshaven, wears his baseball cap so low on his forehead that his gray eyes are barely visible. From that zone of privacy the world must appear heavy-domed—a television screen Worms watches out of the corner of his eye while he drowses on the sofa.