Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307)

by Kadish, Rachel

  “At which point every single person in that room was past his limit. No one could sit still. Carole made a motion for a show of hands to conclude discussion, Victoria seconded it, and everybody filled out their paper ballots in utterly rancorous silence. And here I am.”

  Behind Jeff, the corridor is still.

  “What about Victoria?” I say.

  Jeff’s expression darkens. “This is Victoria,” he says curtly. “In other words, she didn’t cross lines of propriety. She stated your case firmly, but in respectful terms. A few times she commented about being distressed at the nature of this dialogue. She cautioned Joanne when Joanne got egregious—but she cautioned me too at several points. She performed her function as moderator with admirable evenhandedness.” The word, as Jeff pronounces it, could cut diamond. “She thinks highly of you, Tracy, and told everyone so. But she made equal time for Joanne’s tirades. Fairness is Victoria’s religion. She’s too bloody well-bred to take sides. She could have—she’s one of the few people who knows the whole story and is senior enough not to be intimidated by Joanne. But she was appropriate. Meaning her voice never rose above the indignant. Not even when it might have been the only damn thing to wake people up. She worked at protecting our collegial tone. She made a final statement about you being a solid scholar and good colleague, and told the group she trusted this would be taken into account.”

  I splay my fingers on my desktop.

  “I tried, Tracy. So did Jesse Faden. And Jim Lakes, which was a surprise. But I’ve never seen so many guilty-looking mutes. If it’s any comfort, I don’t think half the department’s going to be speaking to each other after this.”

  “I’m going to lose my job.” I loft the sentence in the air, expecting it to dispel. Instead it gains weight. “Because of politics.”

  Jeff stays mum, though his answer is right there in his pained expression: What do you think I’ve been trying to teach you all these years?

  “Do you think you swayed them at all? Maybe?”

  Jeff shrugs.

  I consider closing my office door, but don’t. If my tenure is refused, I want every faculty member who chose the path of least resistance—every one too timid to stand up to Joanne—to have to walk past me.

  A door bangs open down the hall. Footsteps follow as the conference room drains of occupants. No voices accompany the footfalls. At the sound of someone nearing the office, I swivel bravely to face the corridor. Joseph Yee, I think blankly. Or Henry Shillman. Or Jim Lakes.

  Just before they reach my office, the footsteps stop short, then softly about-face.

  “Jesus,” says Jeff.

  I don’t look at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  He leaves my office. A moment later he’s back. “You lost it by one vote. And Grub abstained.”

  “Grub never abstains,” I whisper.

  A brisk, determined tread approaches, its owner unmistakable. I stand and, turning my back on Jeff, step into the corridor. Joanne nears, her face turbulent. She does not slow as she nears me. Only at the last minute do I understand that she is planning to pass without acknowledging my presence. A victory fly-by.

  Blindly I step into her path.

  She stops. The brisk walk I interrupted has left her grabbing for breath, her chest rising shallowly, sweat dampening the neckline of her blouse. Her thickened features are flushed. “Get out of my way,” she says.

  “You’ve won.”

  Joanne’s mouth twists.

  “Now admit it,” I say. “What you just did in that conference room was a crime.”

  “You,” she says, “have an astonishing sense of entitlement. Who promised you tenure?”

  “I never assumed I’d get tenure. I assumed I’d get a fair hearing.”

  “I believe you just had one.”

  “I had nothing of the kind.”

  Joanne breathes. “Sour grapes.” Her voice is husky.

  “Admit what you did to Elizabeth.”

  At the mention of Elizabeth, Joanne smiles. Her face is frightening, nearly erotic in its intensity. “What precisely would you like to hear me say?”

  Carefully I pronounce each word. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

  Joanne’s pale lashes bat her cheeks.

  “Don’t give me that shit,” she says after a moment. “I’m the one who’s going to see Elizabeth through.”

  Too late, I see that this is the truth—and I recognize the role I’ve played in this drama. Joanne never meant to destroy Elizabeth, only to bring her low enough to be forever indebted; only to make of her gratitude a monument to Joanne, defying mortality. I’ve misunderstood. Elizabeth was never the canary in the coal mine. It was me.

  “Well?” says Joanne. There is a flicker on her face—a moment of choice. Then her eyes, rock-steady, fasten on mine, and decline to see a fellow human.

  I start shaking. I can’t stop. The trembling of my limbs is undisguisable. I’ve never been so cold in my life. Pivoting, I let Joanne pass.

  A second later Jeff is standing beside me with my briefcase and my coat. He sets a hand on my shoulder. “I give you an A for outstanding use of Shakespeare.”

  I wrap my arms around myself. “You give everyone an A.”

  He seats the coat on my quaking shoulders. “I’ll give you an A-plus. Come on, valiant warrior. Let’s get out of here.”

  I don’t budge.

  “Haven’t you had enough? I know I have.”

  I pull the coat tighter and, leaving Jeff without another word, set off down the hallway.

  “You’ve heard?” Victoria says when I step into her office. Studying my face, she sighs, then motions me to sit.

  I don’t move.

  “You know,” she says. “This is one of those rare occasions when I could really use a drink.” For a moment her gaze rises and settles on the wall behind my head. Then, with an expression of forbearance, she turns to me. “The incident with the book was what clinched it. People didn’t know what to think. I believe there was a record number of abstentions. And while I respect people’s decision not to vote, it didn’t help the—”

  “Why?”

  She tilts her head.

  “Why do you respect it?” I charge.

  She’s silent. Then she shutters her eyelids and opens them slowly, indicating her fatigue, and by extension implying mine: a pantomime choreographed to excuse my behavior. “I’m sorry, Tracy.” The words are an offer. She’s handing me a good soldier’s death, a restrained and noble farewell.

  I turn to leave. At the door I stop. I know I should not say this, and know I’ll regret it if I don’t. “Victoria.” The shaking has quieted; my voice is surprisingly steady as I face her. “I used to respect impartiality. I now see it as cowardice.”

  She shuts her eyes and does not open them.

  Jeff is waiting outside my office. He drapes my scarf across my shoulders and buttons me into my coat. Carrying my briefcase, he ushers me toward the elevator.

  “My God,” I murmur. As the elevator descends, bubbles of dread swim through me. “Don’t they know—”

  “In the back closets of their minds they do.”

  “We could find that kid. He’d say I threw the book to him. For him to catch.”

  The elevator quivers to a halt.

  “I didn’t throw it at him,” I say.

  On the sidewalk, the frigid air stings. Jeff knots my scarf.

  “Throwing the book,” I repeat, “wasn’t assault. It was a celebration. Of literature. Of postmodernism.”

  “Of love,” corrects Jeff. “You were high on love, and you shared it with the world.” He straightens. “I’d like the world better if more people acted that way. I’d be a different person.” He stares darkly up the avenue. “Let’s get you a cab.”

  This is how the world likes to believe in courage: there is a gene for it.

  People who lack the courage gene? Their frailties are understandable and deserving of consolation. People wh
o have the courage gene? They are laudable, and need no support. They are, after all, courageous: constitutionally resilient.

  Besides, haven’t they, through their own stubborn behavior, brought their problems on themselves?

  Hannah and Yolanda try. But there is only so much they can say. I drift from their thin phrases of comfort. Thoughts of my career fill me with dismay—I flee them. Reading is intolerable. I light on books with a greedy hope that is, with the abrupt turn of a page, snuffed. There is no refuge in the house of words, the delicate latticework of references and the pretty patterns it used to cast. The corridor of my thoughts, which always augured a destination, now opens onto a void.

  I am not in this room, I think, sitting in my apartment at night. I am not here. This is only my body. And I find it hard to care what happens to that.

  Now and then my thoughts lean in vain toward the extinguished sun of George. What I remember has grown totemic. In his absence I recycle longings. For his eyes. For the warmth of his broad hands. For my own body, revealed to me. This is what it means to have lost someone: to turn him into a fetish.

  Seated on my sofa I open Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language and read the words aloud to the quiet apartment. I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence. I shut the book, then fling it onto the table and watch it slide to the far side and drop out of sight. Fuck intelligence. I’m here on the rooftop, having cannily avoided the floodwaters of dishonest relationships and hypocrisy. No one comes. I could feel betrayed by feminism for setting my expectations so high. But feminism isn’t any more to blame than the golden rule, or any other principle that coaxes a person toward a more exacting standard of behavior. I used to quote that old movie line to Yolanda without really believing it: where love is concerned, the only way to win the game is not to play at all. I’ve never known a lonelier postulate. If I had the energy I’d call Washington and suggest some edits to that hypocritical Declaration of Independence our civics teachers love to quote. Life? Yes. Liberty? Sure. The pursuit of happiness? Ha. Double ha. Happiness draws enemies. In fact I’d underestimated the virulence of the problem: We don’t just have cultural fear of happiness. It’s outright hostility. The joy that lofted a book through the air is held against me; academia takes its mortar and pestle and grinds. O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick.

  Thus with a kiss I die.

  The bell of my soul—is there anything bleaker, amid depression’s inertia, than to be conscious of one’s own melodrama?—has stopped ringing.

  Lying motionless on the sofa, I weigh the urge to upend my tidy apartment. Make life look like it is. Instead I telephone Adam.

  “I thought being independent-minded was the point,” I say. “I thought I’d be seen. They acted like they could substitute a bunch of rumors for what they knew of me.”

  “Yeah, Trace,” says Adam, “but you should have seen some of the petty bureaucrats in Russia. That’s how people act when they know they don’t matter. I mean, nobody cares about literary criticism except the people who do it, and every single English department knows that . . . no offense.”

  So now I’m culturally irrelevant, on top of everything? My thoughts scatter. Then, at length, regroup: Literary criticism matters. It’s like the computer code behind a program everybody uses. Only a few people care enough to work on the code, but it keeps the program of cultural transmission on course. Thinking this ignites a brief flare of resolve—until I consider the daunting prospect of job searching so late in the season. “Shit,” I say. “How am I going to get top-notch recommendations after that tenure debate? Forget those fellowships I applied for—the committees ask for rec letters. Forget finding another good job, let alone anything local. I’m going to have to leave New York. Or, I’ll stay. I’ll work as a tattoo artist. I can tattoo lines of Poe onto people’s chests. I can tattoo Plath.”

  “You’re going to get a job,” Adam says. “I keep telling you. It’ll be a few sucky months, and then you’ll be appointed emperor of Workaholic U.”

  “Everyone said I had tenure, there was no question. Until I fucked it up. I fucked it up, just like I fucked up with George.”

  Through the phone I hear the long scrape of a wooden window opening. Adam says, “Anyone who thinks that’s the dumbest thing they ever heard, honk your horn.”

  Boerum Hill’s rush hour floats through my telephone, a sustained surge of automotive indignation. Adam holds me out over the street for a long time.

  The window rattles shut.

  “Okay?” he says.

  He waits as I settle.

  Quietly, elegiacally, I say, “I must be the stupidest Ph.D. in the world.”

  “Statistically speaking, Tracy, there’s got to be a stupider one.”

  The relief of not being addressed in hushed tones sustains me until late that afternoon when I leave my apartment to pick up my rental car. Mary’s phone message was dispassionate. Elizabeth is back in the hospital, this time one north of the city. It’s more expensive, but Mary’s been told good things about the medical staff. Elizabeth tried to kill herself. Two weeks ago. The same day she brought the letter to Joanne. Mary turned to check the time on the subway platform’s wall clock. And then a man was grabbing Elizabeth, just as she was about to dive.

  Now, said Mary’s voice on my answering machine, she’s on a new medication. She seems improved.

  A train, a blasting horn, the tunnel’s shuddering air. I don’t know which is more unbearable—this image, or Mary’s matter-of-fact tone.

  The Manhattan I find outside my door is transformed. Or, perhaps, only stripped at last of a foolish veneer. I pick my way through the landscape that was rushing all along beneath the familiar one—every subway platform a ledge I could step over and be broken, every snow-dusted car a vehicle I might die beneath.

  I am too practical.

  At the rent-a-car bay I take off my boots, settle with dread into a gray sedan, spread the map on the passenger seat, and stiffly pilot my way north, the pedal a living thing beneath my socked foot.

  I reach the hospital. Elizabeth looks smaller, like a child clinging to the enormous blue raft of the sofa. Her black eyes are lifeless. She says little to me and avoids direct contact.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper to Mary while Elizabeth is occupied with a nurse. “I wish I’d known earlier. I would have come.”

  Mary’s look says it all: I’d made it abundantly clear I needed to focus on my tenure.

  “She told me,” Mary says after a moment, “that it was because she couldn’t hear the voices. She said the world was too dark without them. She told the nurse she was a dazzled soul. Maybe you know what she meant by that?”

  I close my eyes and sigh. “A Grant of the Divine—That Certain as it comes—Withdraws—and leaves the dazzled Soul—In her unfurnished Rooms. Emily Dickinson.”

  Mary purses her lips and nods.

  “How long will she be here?” I ask.

  “The doctors say there’s no telling how long this time. I’ve rented my place in Chicago, and signed a month-by-month lease on an apartment just a few blocks from here. I’ve lined up some library work as well.”

  I study Mary’s expression. She has just uprooted her entire life to undertake a long siege outside the gates of her daughter’s mind. Yet again she’s as straightforward as if it were a grade-school outing she’d been asked to chaperone.

  The nurse finishes her conversation with Elizabeth and retreats.

  “Did you get tenure?” Mary says, glancing at me.

  I rub my neck. “No.”

  She’s silent. “I’m sorry.”

  We listen to the nurse’s hushed tread fade down the hall. Mary watches me gravely. Then something shifts in her face. “I didn’t think,” she says, “that you’d stick by my daughter.”

  “Then you underestimated me.” The words are bitter.

  “Yes,” says Mary without rancor. “It’s usually the right judgment.”

  “I can’t figure you
out,” I blurt. “Don’t you get angry?”

  There is a long, serious silence. Mary’s face flickers with the effort of memory. “Not anymore,” she says. “I ran out of things to do with it.”

  We stand together, neither of us speaking. Then, after a moment, she smiles: a rueful, gentle welcome.

  Before leaving I approach Elizabeth. She’s retreated to a wicker rocking chair, where she sits motionless: legs blanket-draped, weightless as a moth. For just a moment she lifts her chin. The smile she offers me, small and lovely, is the greatest act of determination I have ever seen.

  I will pick myself up, move on, carve a new life. But I let myself stop insisting she will.

  I set my palm on her bony shoulder. The chair sways. She looks up once more. “It’s okay,” I say. “We just . . . trusted the world too much.”

  Very slowly, she nods.

  Weeks pass. Classes begin. I prepare lectures with grim attention; watch undergraduates tramp slush into the auditorium; stand at the lectern and loft them silent warnings against the afflictions of a life in books. After they leave the floor is dark with grime. I avoid faculty meetings. Infrequently, I visit the faculty lounge. My colleagues, who it turns out were just about to leave, greet me with tight nods. Only Victoria lingers, asking after my work and prospects without mention of our last conversation—a denial I privately deride only to discover, as days pass barren of other conversation, that I welcome it.

  The semester chugs along with its onslaught of midterm labor, but without the adrenaline that normally fuels the uphill jog into spring. I finish out my evenings marking student papers with my office door shut, in a froth over humankind’s cowardice. My red-penned commentary has grown keener: I am generous with praise for originality, incisive at the slightest hint of intellectual slavishness. My lazier students grow increasingly anxious about grades. The best seem increasingly devoted, as though my sharpened bullshit-detector has uncovered a craving more powerful than the desire for A’s.

  Late at night I e-mail everyone I’ve ever been on a conference panel with. I dig through files for addresses of colleagues who teach in Chicago. In Denver, in Iowa City, in Seattle. Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Austin, Houston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Ithaca, Syracuse, Toronto, Middlebury, New Haven, both Cambridges. New York City. This is the first round.