Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307)

by Kadish, Rachel

  Shifting the plate on his lap, Adam raises his leg and, with the toe of one sneaker, nudges a book to the near edge of my coffee table. He picks it up and glances at the author photo on the back jacket. “She looks like a housewife in a floor wax commercial,” he says. “Except she’s just had a nervous breakdown.”

  George takes the book and holds it next to Adam’s cheek. “Actually she looks a little like you.”

  Adam blows a kiss.

  George scans the back of the book, then the inside flaps. “She probably had reason to be tired.”

  “Why?” says Adam. “She had to wax everybody’s floors for real?”

  George shrugs, and sets the book back on the coffee table. “Could be. She was writing back in the nineteen-thirties. Can’t have been easy for a woman writing then.”

  And though I’ve always disliked Dorothy Parker, though I’d have been much more interested in her work were she not sardonic by reflex, unable to stop playing to the audience long enough to let on that anything actually moved her, I now look at her photo—a deliberately unglamorous shot taken long after the Round Table years—with sheer love.

  Adam glances at me. Then he turns to George. “You are such a kiss-ass,” he says. “I’m taking notes.”

  Worms sets down his plate. Slowly he looks from Adam to George to me, considering. At length he speaks. “Dude,” he says.

  Thus shall he be entered into the Book of Deeds. George: a thoughtful man. Paying respect to feminism in his own way. The jury may still be out on long-term compatibility, but initial signs are promising to say the least. In retrospect, our sole argument seems—doesn’t it?—a foolish panic over semantics.

  He rolls onto his side, dragging the sheet with him. Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, who cares. I slide into the lee of his back and drape a hand over his bottom. His ass. His butt. The words are either absurdly leering, or else childish—our literary heritage may go into paroxysms over breasts and thighs, but has declared itself too dignified to dwell on this part of the anatomy. Lightly furry. Warm. Tracing a path up his side with my fingertips, gliding, hushing—is there any word for that sound skin makes on skin?—tucking my chin over his shoulder, I inhale. You cannot be with a man if you don’t like the smell of the spot where his neck meets his chest. There it is: a new Rule for Love. You must like the smell of that place. Also, the face he makes in bed just before he lets go. No matter how foolish it might be. That face is a secret, a light flashed into a well’s depths. I have my own, too—a face I’ve never seen. George knows it. I entrust it to him.

  I fall back into sleep planning a day spent at a museum; at a street fair; in a library; in this bed. Wondering—as I shed each thought into the vanilla light that’s soaked through the window shade—whether this is how a person might start thinking about a lifelong commitment: there are so many things I’d like to do with this guy it could take a lifetime to do them.

  “Hey.” I rap my knuckles on Jeff’s door as I open it. “Did I leave my Complete Hurston in here?”

  He sets down the phone receiver and gives me a smile I don’t like. “I don’t care about your Hurston. I scheduled my job talk.” He puts on a light Southern lilt. “Fixing to head down next week.”

  “You’ve dusted off that accent awfully fast. How long did you live in Georgia as a kid?”

  “Ages seven to nine, before moving to scenic New Jersey. Long enough to pick up a prêt-à-porter accent, which came in handy on the phone. The guy in charge of scheduling asked me right away if I was, and I quote, ‘one of ours.’” There is a pen lying flat on Jeff’s desk; he gives it a satisfied twirl. “Ah most suhtainly am.”

  “You’re shameless.”

  “The word is ‘hirable.’”

  I make a face. “Where’s my damn book?”

  Flashing me another brilliant grin, he shrugs.

  There’s a knock on the open door. Joanne stands stiffly in the doorway, waiting to be invited.

  “Hi, Joanne,” says Jeff, without gesturing her forward.

  She steps into the office. Ignoring me entirely, she addresses him. From my seat I watch her profile: chin taut, shoulders hunched forward. A boxer entering the ring.

  “Have you heard about the rescheduling of today’s faculty meeting?” she says to Jeff. “It’s been moved half an hour later.”

  Jeff glances down to his desk calendar. “It’s four-thirty now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to have to leave early, then.”

  “We need you there,” says Joanne.

  “I’ll be there only for the first half-hour.”

  Taking a small step closer to Jeff’s desk, Joanne slaps down her trump card. “We’re going to field proposals for the new core curriculum,” she says. “And summarize the flaws of current offerings. I don’t need to tell you how much is at stake. Our recommendations go to the Humanities Committee, which reports to the Coordinating Committee, which writes the summary for the Academic Committee. And they’ll be determining the new standards. We need to discuss the English Department’s position and philosophy.”

  Jeff gives the pen on his desk another spin, and, while it’s still a silver blur, leans back in his chair. “In lurid detail, I’m sure.”

  Joanne stands in front of his desk. Stock-still.

  I have no idea why Jeff is doing this. The hairs on my arms rise to attention: an animal instinct, right here in the sacred precincts of Literature. For an instant I’m actually frightened Joanne is going to step around Jeff’s desk and knock him cold.

  Instead she turns and faces me. The words are lead. “I trust you’ll be there too, Tracy.”

  Nobody here but us office chairs. “Sure thing,” I say.

  “I trust you’ll be there too,” Jeff mimics when Joanne’s gone.

  “Are you nuts? Why provoke her?”

  Placidly, Jeff pens something onto his calendar. Only when he’s finished does he answer me. “Joanne will let it go in a couple days.”

  “You’re so sure?”

  “I’m not a threat to her.”

  “Will you stop with that?”

  “It’s true. Never underestimate the faggot factor. She’s still hoping I’ll be an ally. It would take something bigger to put me on her permanent shit list.”

  “I’ve got to tell you, I think you’re off-base on this one.”

  “Just watch. I’m still under the threshold. You, my friend, don’t have that luxury.”

  I refuse to engage this.

  Jeff leans back in his chair. “Maybe it’s that acne that’s making her so mean,” he muses. “She’s looking like a teen all over again. Who do you think is making her hormones act up?”

  “I pity him.”

  “Or her.”

  “You think?”

  Jeff weighs the question for only a heartbeat. “No,” he says. “Not gay. Not the type.”

  I consider, and shrug. “What’s on your schedule this afternoon that can’t be moved?”

  He taps his silver pen on the fresh marking on his calendar. “It says here I have a plan to go to the gym. Get a workout.”

  With these words I finally understand that Jeff is leaving this department.

  “Want to know a secret?” he says, standing and stretching his veined arms overhead. I glance at Jeff’s wall clock: a spare, polished silver disk with twelve faint marks etched around its face and only one hand, indicating the hour. It’s nearly two, time for his next seminar.

  “Sure,” I say, following him to the door.

  He speaks quietly. “If Emory doesn’t work out, I’m going to Atlanta anyway. I’ll edit journals or hoe peanuts. And fuck Richard happily every night and massage his buns when his department stresses him to distraction.”

  Still inside the door, I face him. Seminar or no, Jeff cannot simply present this scenario and sail glibly out the door. “You would truly leave academia altogether for Richard? Jeff? Come on. I understand you’d leave New York, but drop your whole career?”


  He steps into the hall, and only there does he face me. He closes his eyes for a long moment, as though reminding himself of a need for restraint. When he opens them, his expression is serious. “It baffles you, does it?” he says. He pulls his office door shut.

  Twenty minutes into the faculty meeting, Steven Hilliard takes up arms against the core curriculum proposal that has been backed by both Joanne and, we are led to assume, Grub—a proposal that would focus the mandatory writing courses heavily on the classical canon, steeping undergraduates in Beowulf and Behn, Surrey and Spenser, Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Wilde and the Brontës, and presenting Woolf’s 1927 To the Lighthouse as the outer limit of progress.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” someone whispers behind me. I turn to find Jesse Faden, our pale, long-haired aesthetics specialist, looking peeved. Jim Lakes, seated beside him, is nodding. “Since when do visiting faculty get invited to curriculum meetings,” Jesse adds, including me in his audience. “Or does being from Oxford mean you can just invite yourself?”

  I turn back to Jeff, who looks irritable. For once, I see, he doesn’t know the answer. He watches Steven keenly.

  Directing his comments at Marion Lewis, the latest mouthpiece on behalf of the Joanne-Grub proposal, Steven sharpens his assault. “I’ve got to say,” Steven begins, “I’m stunned to hear these arguments here, of all places. I thought the furor over canon definition died down a few years ago, even on this side of the pond, and right-thinking people conceded a few changes needed to be made to accommodate modernity. Why would you want to undo that progress?”

  Steven is one of those young academic Turks who makes cockiness his signature. By reputation he’s got the intellectual firepower to back it up. And in this case I believe he’s right. But the brash delivery, combined with his unaccountable involvement with this department’s politics, raises brows around the room. Eyes turn to Grub. Yet Grub, despite his known stance on the canon (epitomized by his view that there’s no need to include Native American literature in American lit syllabi, as surely comparative literature can manage that), is as mute as if such outspokenness were normal behavior on the part of visiting faculty. Gradually the scattered expressions of scandal among the older faculty abate.

  Marion Lewis is a gray-haired eighteenth-century specialist with a repertoire of brown and gray cardigans. He doesn’t socialize with the twentieth century—never offered anything beyond a collegial nod once he learned I’d passed up Melville for Hurston. He’s one of those professors with the irritating habit of requiring students to fill in the blanks in his own sentences, endlessly coaching as they steer grudgingly down the narrow corridor of his own thoughts: The word you would expect here is what? [long silence] What word? You would expect the poet to use the word ‘morning.’ Instead he uses the word ‘dawn.’ Well, is this telling us something? [long silence] Is it?

  Now Marion glances at Joanne for support. Fortified, he sheds upon Steven a tolerant smile implying a consensus that modernity is a passing fad. As are visiting Oxford men.

  Steven continues, unperturbed. “I’m here for only one year,” he says, “but I can promise you that if you choose this route, you’ll be pointing a terrific department backward.”

  At five o’clock on the dot, Jeff rises and steps out the door, Joanne nodding tersely in his direction as though she herself had authorized his departure.

  Selecting a less confrontational phrasing, I support Steven’s point. I then list the justifications for a more flexible set of requirements, incorporating the classics but offering undergraduates the opportunity to take one of their writing seminars on a spectrum of topics including African American literature, postmodern text, Bible as literature, literature of the American South, gender and text, Native American orature and literature, contemporary literary theory, and a new syllabus proposed by Ginny Jones titled “Literary Evolutions.” And half an hour later, this is the approach that wins by a narrow margin, though the vote is close enough (and a Joanne-enforced and tacitly Grub-backed plan intimidating enough) that a compromise is decreed: both suggestions will be presented to the Coordinating Committee. “And will be judged by their merits,” asserts Joanne.

  Just outside the conference room, Grub corners Steven. “Hilliard,” he says, tapping a suddenly discomfited-looking Steven on his sternum. “You’re the sort of man who speaks his mind about aesthetics.”

  “I try to,” says Steven, with bite—as can only a visiting prof with nothing to lose. The end of the meeting has left him inexplicably riled. With his wavy, dark hair, rosy cheeks, and flared nostrils, Steven looks like a nineteenth-century painting of Youth Confronting Falsehood. This place is getting to him.

  “Tracy?”

  I turn reluctantly from this tableau to face Victoria.

  “Do you have a moment?” She gestures me toward her office, only a few doors away.

  I follow her, noting along the way that I’ve never seen Grub buttonhole Victoria. It’s difficult, in fact, to imagine anyone trying to manipulate her; Victoria seems capable of staring down any member of the department.

  Inside Victoria’s office, a single wood-framed Edward Hopper graces the wall opposite the desk. Within the austere sweep of choppy gray waves, a white sailboat appears so isolated that, though a rocky New England coastline is clearly visible in one corner of the picture, I’m reminded of Melville’s accounts of the Nantucket whaling-man’s terrain. Alone, in such remotest waters . . .

  Not what I’d hang on my wall to make me feel at home. Clearly, though, Hopper’s vision has a different effect on Victoria.

  The rest of her office is sparsely decorated. Two wide shelves are lined with books whose spines declare her specialty in Irish literature. A photograph of two beaming, leggy children occupies a small corner of the lower shelf beside the window.

  “Yours?” I ask, careful, despite her age, not to assume the boy and girl pictured are her grandchildren. I seat myself opposite her, my back to the Hopper. Other than the fact that she’s a widow, I know nothing about Victoria’s personal life.

  “My sister’s grandson and granddaughter. My husband and I never had children.”

  A silence fills the office.

  “There’s a small thing I want to say to you, Tracy.” She speaks deliberately, with a thoughtful pause as she composes each sentence, and an air of finality after its utterance. “I’m hoping a brief word to the wise will suffice.”

  If I didn’t respect Victoria’s intelligence, I might be revving off my seat by the time she rounded the corner of this second thought. Instead I study her reserve: an ability, anomalous in this city, to say far less than she knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg, wrote Hemingway, is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

  “I am not unaware that Joanne has been difficult lately.” Pause. “I believe, however, that it’s important to show sympathy.”

  Victoria sets her hands lightly on her desk.

  Silence.

  “I do try to be sympathetic,” I say. I’m conscious of slowing my speech, lest it sound flippant by comparison. “Is there something particular that’s upsetting Joanne?”

  Victoria looks at me gravely, then shakes her head. “That’s not mine to say.”

  The next long pause is my refuge, as I try to find an angle of entry that doesn’t pressure Victoria to take sides.

  “It’s been rather difficult,” I say at length.

  She nods.

  “I believe Joanne has been inappropriate with Elizabeth, and that concerns me. And”—I can’t help pointing this out—“I feel she’s been gratuitously nasty to me on several occasions.”

  Victoria gives another deep nod. “I’m sure your points are valid.” With startling directness she meets my eyes. “And I am aware that Joanne is not an easy personality.”

  The relief I feel at this last statement is prodigious, and utterly out of proportion to Victoria’s words. It’s as though she’s taken my hand and consoled: My child, you are unders
tood. While I wish she’d offer to set Joanne straight, I can’t help reacting to Victoria as I sometimes react upon meeting former soldiers, women and men now immersed in civilian life, whose vestigial military bearing seems to mandate my trust in a way I don’t completely understand.

  “I wanted to tell you I’m aware of Joanne’s behavior,” Victoria continues. “You don’t need to wonder whether everyone else is blind to it. What is visible to you is visible to others.” A long stare past my head, then that same direct gaze. “I’ve told the same to Elizabeth.” She registers my appreciation with a nod. “The only thing I would ask of you at this time is to show sympathy.”

  Sympathy.

  Victoria smiles: a limited but friendly, tough-times smile. This conversation is over.

  “Thank you, Victoria.” I’m not sure precisely what for, but trust I’ll sort it out later. “I’ll bear this conversation in mind.”

  I exit the office, Victoria already flipping a book’s pages as I pull the heavy door shut. I step down the hall, aware that a part of me that had been clamoring for justice has, for now, been quieted. A voice of calm has spoken from the edge of the wilderness.

  Sunday noon, George is distracted. He’s taken it upon himself to make brunch—a complicated omelette involving fresh herbs and a redolent cheese that’s a clear violation of his usual budgetary austerity. When the omelette is finished, George covers it, sets it in the warm oven, and disappears, looking tense, to the shower. He takes so long under the hot water that he practically oozes steam by the time he joins me once more, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. I greet him with a burst of political commentary about the newspaper articles I’ve read in his absence: a summary of the effect of AIDS on women in Africa, a piece about Clinton’s travel schedule, another depressing article about global warming, and more about the decline of national education standards. “You might want to read the education article,” I murmur as I pop my cool coffee into the microwave. “Or maybe not—your blood will boil.”