Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307)

by Kadish, Rachel

  “I didn’t reject him.”

  She sounds impatient. “You didn’t give your whole heart to him.”

  Terrified she’ll get off the phone, I back down. “What else does he say?”

  “He’s heartsick, Tracy. I mean . . .” Her words slow. “He went to our father in the recovery room. And he said, I failed. Tracy, I don’t know if you understand what it took for George to say that. He and Dad have had some battles that defy description. He said to Dad, My love wasn’t what I thought. My life wasn’t what I thought.” Paula lets this sink in. “I’m not saying George is coming back to the church, that’s not mine to predict. But he’s bent his neck.”

  “Paula,” I say. “Is George in your house? Right now?”

  A moment’s hesitation. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Please,” I say. “Paula. I just . . . I need to speak with him.”

  Another silence. Then she says, in a low voice, “Meg, go tell Uncle George that Tracy is on the telephone.”

  I hold my breath.

  “Tell him,” Paula calls hurriedly after her daughter, her voice rising with what I know to be an argument for me. “Tell him Tracy called to see how Grandpa was.”

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  Nothing. Then, in the background, the barely audible voice of a girl.

  “He’s not coming,” Paula says quietly. “He thanks you for asking after our father.”

  She waits on the phone. I imagine her sitting patiently with me, holding my hand until I’m ready to depart.

  “I love him,” I say at length.

  Her farewell is gentle. “I’ll pray for you.”

  I set down the phone. I microwave dinner. Then sit with the plate in front of me, unable to swallow.

  Pulling up my shade, I turn off my light, and face it squarely: the white flush of the city, its strangling refusal to assume any shape I recognize. My choice—my one slender protest against the armies and acolytes of marriage—has become the organizing principle of my life: isolating me, reshaping my perception of the world, demanding a stubborn, pointless faith that what I saw and felt was real. That I knew when love was being choked; that I knew when I had to upend everything to save it. That I had any idea at all what love was.

  Far below my window a slow crawl of humanity make its way from work to home. Cabs sail down narrow tributaries, marquees twinkle, elevators rush unseen in dark shafts, children’s nightlights flicker. With a twist in my gut I think of Elizabeth in her hospital bed, settling down to blank dreams beneath the buzz of the corridor’s fluorescent bulb and the radio murmurs washing from the nurses’ station.

  Yolanda rises when I enter the Chinese restaurant and leads me back to the table with an expression I can think of only as goopy.

  “This,” she says, “is Chad.”

  Chad, whose skin is so dark it shines under the restaurant’s unsubtle lighting, stands at my approach and beams at me. He extends a warm, dry hand and folds mine into his palms. His eyes, as brown and deep as his smile is white, are lovely. I can’t help softening. He touches his forehead, miming appreciation. Then he invites me to sit and asks me—I’m not certain how he accomplishes this, no words are involved—how I am. He seems to know my story and his deep nod acknowledges the complexity behind my truthful answer: “Managing.”

  I ignore the significant look Yolanda gives me; I’m not ready to sign on completely. But I’m impressed.

  Next to Chad, wearing a worn Mad magazine T-shirt, sits Adam. Next to him Worms, his roommate, leans back against the restaurant’s taupe wall, lids at half-mast under the rim of the ever present baseball cap. Hannah is home getting a last good night’s sleep; she’s past due, and her OB is inducing labor tomorrow. This dinner was Yolanda’s idea, a nearly intolerable generosity: get Tracy’s friends together, cheer her up, get her to leave the books and shake off her mourning for an hour. I wouldn’t have accepted the invitation except that Yolanda is so patently right: I need to get out.

  The food is delicious, the platters piled high. Chad serves himself only after everyone else has taken from each dish. He refills Yolanda’s water glass from his own. When Yolanda drops a piece of tofu he picks it off her breastbone with the deft tips of his chopsticks and pops it into her mouth, where she incises it delicately with her white teeth. As the two pieces melt on her tongue Chad watches: patient, gratified. Yolanda has, it’s obvious, lured her man to bed.

  The conversation hops among work, sitcoms, and what it means when gay men kiss women friends on the lips. Worms remains unaccounted for, rocking Buddha-like on the two rear legs of his chair.

  Chad watches the proceedings with such bright attention that I expect him to open his mouth at any second and speak eloquent English.

  “Saw Great Expectations on TV last night,” says Yolanda. “Do you teach that, Tracy?”

  “Dickens was British. I’m an Americanist.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t that practically the same thing by now? I mean, with Masterpiece Theatre and everything?” Yolanda serves herself a spoonful of bright purple eggplant. “I felt sorry for Pip, but especially for Estella.”

  I poke at my lo mein.

  “Though I guess they all come out better than Miss Havisham,” Yolanda continues.

  “The spider lady?” says Adam.

  “Yeah,” says Yolanda. “It’s lousy to be left.”

  “I didn’t leave him.” Only after the words are out of my mouth do I realize Yolanda wasn’t referring to George, but to her own pained romantic history. No one came here tonight to chide me about George . . . but I’ve been too enmeshed in my own grief to recognize that. I blink Yolanda an apology, and finish haltingly: “I was trying to save something between us.” I picture the books awaiting me in my quiet apartment and wonder how soon I can leave. The air in the restaurant feels thick, the ceiling low. I am becoming Miss Havisham. I am becoming a Dickens character, smoldering with my grievance, burnishing my arguments. Shrinking instead of growing. “Sorry,” I say.

  “No offense meant, Tracy,” says Yolanda. Chad is watching me, his eyes bright with such overflowing empathy that I have to look away. When I turn back he is squeezing Yolanda’s plump turquoise-laden hand.

  “The heart is a muscle,” Worms says.

  The table is silent.

  Worms teeters peaceably on his chair, intent on a plastic hanging plant above the corner radiator.

  But of course, I think, that’s right. The heart is a laborer. It’s built for this. Love is meant to be work. The notion is, in some small way, fortifying.

  “Ew,” says Adam, smacking the side of Worms’s head. “Don’t get all deep.”

  Worms picks up his fork and continues eating.

  After dessert Yolanda walks me to the door. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I shrug my coat onto my shoulders and give her a grim smile. “Thanks a lot for doing this. I really appreciate it.”

  She hesitates, then digs in the rear pocket of her jeans for a piece of paper, which she hands to me.

  “He’s in my yoga class,” Yolanda says. “He’s a little stiff in the upper back—most businessmen are—but he’s pretty limber for a guy with a stable job. He’s cute, and he’s looking for someone. I gave him your number.”

  In a neat blue script, orderly but masculine, is the name “Dan Cooper.” And a phone number. The paper floats on my open palm, neither accepted nor rejected. The slightest breeze from a fan could blow it away, but there is no breeze. The paper rests on my palm, and I know George isn’t coming back.

  Dan Cooper sits opposite me, buttering a roll. He is a thoughtful, good-looking, perfectly nice man.

  “I graduated from Harvard in eighty-seven,” he answers. “But I didn’t go straight to law school. Before that I took a year off to bike.”

  “That must have been interesting,” I say automatically—then, with a surge of restless energy, I preempt his response. “Not really. Actually it was a stationary bike.”

  He
holds the roll in midair for a full second. Then he laughs politely. “Oh, no. I biked all over the Pacific Northwest. I’m very passionate about the environment.”

  He bites into his roll, and chews.

  Elizabeth’s voice is so wan I strain to hear. “Thank you for coming.” Dressed in a pale blue button-down shirt and baggy sweatpants, her wet hair smelling like baby shampoo, she seems more like an undergraduate on study break than a recent discharge from a locked psychiatric unit.

  As I hang my coat and set down my briefcase in the apartment’s narrow entryway, Mary appears with a steaming mug. She passes me the tea with both hands and the sotto voce greeting “Hot.”

  I blow on my tea. The moist heat reflects upward to my brow and cools there, leaving me lightheaded. I don’t know why I’m here. I could have taken Jeff’s advice and refused Mary’s request, but I didn’t, didn’t even consider refusing. It would be a lie to say I’m here on a mission of mercy. It’s more selfish than that. I need Elizabeth, for some urgent unarticulated reason, to snap out of it.

  “Thanks,” says Elizabeth for the third time. “For coming.” She turns and walks ahead of us into the living room.

  “There haven’t been other visitors,” Mary explains.

  “The grad students are probably spooked,” I say to Mary. “People get superstitious. Which is no excuse.”

  She seems unperturbed by the absence of Elizabeth’s fellow students. Without another word she turns to follow her daughter. She reminds me, I think with yet another flash of anger, of my own mother. Too passive to shout, storm, question. My mother, whose primary response to my breakup, other than a few phrases of puzzled sympathy that sounded like reproach, was Your father will be so disappointed.

  Another insomniac night has left me frazzled. Balancing my tea with care, I follow Mary down the narrow corridor and into Elizabeth’s apartment.

  I’d pictured Elizabeth breaking down in a florid jumble, tearing wallpaper from her Fort Greene walls like the Charlotte Perkins Gilman heroine. Instead her apartment is impeccably neat, decorated with Shaker-like austerity. White sheets shroud two floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Mary’s hand is evident, too, in the bare desktop, all evidence of literary striving presumably sealed into the cardboard box in the corner, marked PAPERS. The apartment is a literary crime scene. My eyes wander repeatedly to the box. I find myself thinking of the gems of observation trapped there, attained at such cost to Elizabeth.

  Seated on the sofa, Elizabeth is utterly still. Her lips are pale and her blinks so slow and infrequent that I find myself anticipating each with mounting disquiet.

  I sit in the chair Mary indicates.

  “I need your help,” Elizabeth murmurs. “That’s why I asked my mother to call you. Joanne will let me off the hook if I write a letter of apology.” She unfolds herself: a protracted process, as though her limbs were steeped in regret. On the side table sits her mother’s handbag. Opening it, she produces a pen, which she cradles with a moment’s longing. Then she hands it to me. “Joanne says she won’t involve any committees. She says the whole thing will be between the two of us. It will be settled, I won’t get forced out of the program. But it’s hard”—she stares at the pen, which lies in my open palm—“to write. And my mother says she doesn’t want me doing it alone.”

  “You know the politics, Tracy,” injects Mary firmly from the sofa.

  “You want me to write the letter to Joanne?”

  Mary and Elizabeth nod.

  I set the pen on the coffee table and address myself to Mary. “You do realize, don’t you, that this won’t end the problem? A letter of apology, which constitutes a confession, will sit in Joanne’s desk. Any time she feels like bringing Elizabeth down, all she has to do is hand it to a dean. That could be a year from now. It will prevent Elizabeth from having any real security in the department, so long as Joanne is around.”

  Mary hesitates only a second, then answers decisively. “We still think it’s generous of Joanne to offer this option.”

  “Have you met Joanne?”

  Mary looks at me sharply. “No. Why?”

  “Come on,” whispers Elizabeth with sudden passion.

  Mary reaches for a small gray answering machine positioned beside the phone, and presses Play.

  This is Joanne. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. A long, forbearing sigh blows from the machine’s microphone. Elizabeth, while I don’t at all understand what happened, I am willing to accept a written apology. I could take that letter you sent me to the faculty senate, you know. I could take it to them for next week’s meeting. A long pause. But I won’t. If I receive a letter from you. Joanne’s voice drops; she seems to pull the receiver closer, and when she speaks next, enunciating clearly from inside the small gray box of the answering machine, she sounds like she’s right here in Elizabeth’s spare living room. I forgive you.

  Elizabeth’s light touch on my hand makes me jump. Undeterred, she puts the pen between my fingers. I shake her away, but don’t drop the pen. I have to agree with Mary: Elizabeth doesn’t have a choice.

  With the slightly awed demeanor of a child embarking on an art project, Elizabeth brings a notepad. “If you write,” she says, “my mother can type it later.”

  Determined to get this over with as swiftly as possible, I settle at the bare desk and set pen to paper. “To Joanne Miller,” I say.

  “Dear,” says Elizabeth. “Dear Joanne. No last name.”

  I write the words, then turn back to Elizabeth. “I would like to apologize for—”

  “I beg your apology,” she says.

  “—for the offense I caused you?” I suggest.

  “And my poor judgment in doing so,” adds Elizabeth.

  “It wasn’t poor judgment,” I say testily. “It was a breakdown. How about I was not well?”

  “My poor judgment,” insists Elizabeth. “I should have known better than to let them make me do things people wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why did you ask me to do this if you’re going to write it yourself?” My voice quivers with unexpected anger.

  Elizabeth takes a step backward. “Thank you for doing this, Tracy.” She looks so meek I want to shake her.

  “When I have regained my strength,” I say, penning the words, “I hope to make this apology in person. For now—”

  “It will be in person. I mean . . . I’m going in to the department to give this to her,” says Elizabeth.

  “That’s crazy.”

  Mary flinches. Elizabeth looks out the window.

  With a sigh I strike the line and continue. “I would like to assure you that I am aware my actions were deeply inappropriate. I intended no harm to you, and hold you in great respect.”

  “Greatest,” says Elizabeth, who has crept back to peer over my shoulder. When I don’t respond she repeats, quietly: “Greatest.”

  I write the word, then add what’s necessary in a rush of irritation. “I hope this incident, inappropriate and upsetting as it has been, will not overshadow my years of work and devotion to the department. I am committed to completing my dissertation just as soon as I am well, and I hope to have the opportunity to demonstrate my dedication to academia and to this department. Whatever I can do to make up for my behavior, I will do.”

  “Thanks a lot,” says Elizabeth, when I’ve set down the pen. “I think that’s my best chance at getting back.”

  I hand her the letter. She stands reading it: pale, beautiful, young. She could tear up this letter and go on to a different profession, one that wouldn’t commandeer her sanity so powerfully. One that doesn’t prize, above all, solitary fever-pitch thinking. “Are you sure you want to go back?” I say.

  Elizabeth presses the page to her chest, uncomprehending. “It’s my life. It’s . . .” A powerful grief crosses her face, a grief I feel in my gut. “Literature is the most beautiful thing in the world.” Her speech is reflexive, a blind plea for understanding. “It will be hard to go slow, when I’m better. You don’t know wha
t it’s like. Being lightning. Being able to hear them directly, to write down what they tell me. On the medicine, I have to figure it all out for myself.” Elizabeth offers a strange smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay on my medicine. If I don’t, I burn up. No one can be lightning without burning up, right? Not for more than a millisecond. Or something.” She giggles miserably. Then, soberly: “I’m going to ask Joanne to be my adviser. When I go back.”

  “That’s insane,” I say before I can censor myself.

  “She emphasizes the evolution of prosody,” blurts Elizabeth. “So do I.”

  “She emphasizes the evolution of sixteenth-century prosody,” I fire back.

  Elizabeth says nothing.

  I stare at her. There is a taste of acid in my throat.

  Mary sips her tea.

  “What makes you think Joanne would even accept that?” I say.

  “I just—know her. You know what I mean?”

  Slowly I shake my head. I imagine Joanne: the iron gray noticeably taking over her hair, the moon-round face, the thickness in her voice. The slight limp she seemed to develop out of nowhere this week. Then I look at Elizabeth’s wan features. I don’t understand the symbiosis at work here. Elizabeth and Joanne, and whatever bargain of despair, punishment, or reward they might transact, have stepped beyond my reach. Only when Elizabeth turns her head toward me do I see her request for forgiveness.

  When Elizabeth trudges off to the bathroom, Mary turns to me. “She says she needs to show her face and let everyone know she’s still devoted to the program. Is that true?”

  “Mary,” I say, “I don’t know whether she’ll be able to recover from this politically, no matter what she does.”

  Mary takes this in. Her face is stolid. She motions toward the bathroom. “She wakes up in the morning thinking of books. I won’t take that away. Is there a way for Elizabeth to do this dissertation without being driven day and night?”

  “That depends whether she chooses to wear Joanne’s choke collar.”