She never intended to be this way. No one does. That’s the definition of tragedy.
I hoist the box. “Did not we meet,” I say, “to Truthe enthrall’d, our Soules enlarg’d in this Hallow’d Hall.”
Her hand is still extended. I leave her in the emptied office.
In the faculty lounge I find Paleozoic withdrawing his saucer from the cabinet. Three o’clock. He acknowledges my presence with a world-weary smile, then fills his infuser with tea leaves and lowers it delicately into his steaming cup. In his gray V-neck and slacks, white-dotted navy socks and bedroom slippers, he bends carefully over a side table, where he sets his tea to brew.
I find my mug in the cabinet and wedge it into my briefcase. From behind me comes the rasp of a match, then a surge of blue pipe smoke. The sofa’s springs creak, taking Paleozoic’s weight. He lets out a contented gasp.
“Something you ought to know, Tracy.” He waits for me to turn. His lined face is furrowed with the delicate work of breaking difficult news. “It’s come to my attention that Jeffrey Thomas was, all this time, a closet homosexual.”
The smoke thickens the air. If there is any activity in the department outside this room, its sound does not penetrate.
“Really?” I say.
Paleozoic replies with a grave nod. Slowly the small, Churchillian smile reasserts itself. “Our friend hid it well,” he says. “Anyone might have been fooled. But at the end of the day, secrets will out.” He sucks on his pipe.
“How did you know?” I say.
“Ah.” He lets the syllable trail off in a ripe puff of smoke: it may take some time, but a man of discernment can tell.
“Aha,” says Grub from the doorway.
I glance at the clock: 3:05 P.M.
“Aha indeed,” rumbles Paleozoic.
Noticing me, Grub gives a vague, apologetic wave. “Beautiful afternoon, isn’t it?” He doesn’t wait for a response but crosses to the cabinet, whence he withdraws a saucer and cup along with a small French press. From the freezer he extracts a bag of his own coffee—no bitter departmental brew for the chairman. He mixes coffee and hot water noisily, then, leaving the used spoon on the counter, settles on the armchair, one palm hovering atop the French press.
Searching the cabinet for traces of my career in this room, I find few. My sugar packets I bequeath to the department. My honey bear I reclaim, unwilling to leave its pudgy belly to my former colleagues’ grasping hands. The petty logic of the rejected. I turn to find Paleozoic scrutinizing me from the sofa.
“You know, Tracy.” Paleozoic pulls on his pipe: a small wet sound like a feeding fish. Slowly he exhales. “You can’t always get what you want.” He fishes a small metal object from his pocket; tamps his pipe gently; examines the tamper minutely, replaces it in his pocket. ”But, if you try sometimes, you just might find . . .” He trails off. A few seconds pass; he begins to look alarmed.
“You just might find . . . ?” prompts Grub, slowly pushing the plunger on his coffee.
Paleozoic bobs his eyebrows in thanks, then finishes his advice with an ash-scattering flourish. “You get what you need.” Sucking on his pipe once more, Paleozoic turns to his longtime colleague and, with an expression of gratitude, claps him on the back.
This is what the state of New York provides to a couple upon issuing a marriage license.
Newlywed Kit.
Distributed by First Moments.
Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.
The valuable coupons, samples and literature contained in this package have been carefully selected to help give you both a great start.
Contents:
• Coupons for Proactiv® Acne Solution
• Secret® Sheer Dry Gel Solid antiperspirant deodorant. Goes on Clear
• Oil of Olay®—lipstick and moisturizer samples
• 1 roll Bounty® paper towels
• 1 free sample Mr. Clean®
• 1 free sample Tide® with bleach alternative
• 2 free samples Bounce® (It doesn’t.)
• 1 small roll Charmin® Ultra
I am not making this up.
We visit. Elizabeth, wan but alert, greets us with a lovely, heart-turning smile. The doctors believe she will soon be ready for a limited resumption of her work. Mary isn’t taking chances. Elizabeth’s dream has always been a life in academia; Mary is selling her home back in Evanston and will stay with her daughter until she finishes her dissertation.
In the noisy restaurant where we take her for dinner, Mary watches a family seated nearby: a toddler girl and two older boys, parents issuing orders across a crumb-strewn table. Midway through the meal the younger boy cries, is comforted, and clambers onto his father’s lap, from which safe perch he will eat the remainder of his dinner. Mary’s face is inscrutable as she watches. When the family has gone she says, “You turn your life upside down for the people you love.” She folds her napkin and sets it on the table. “It’s what love is for.”
It’s late when we drop her back at the hospital. She thanks us once more for dinner and stands in the poorly lit parking lot until our car rounds the corner. I imagine she remains there: a compact woman in a jean jacket, colossus of endurance. Watching our rented car’s progress down the long slope toward the highway. Then she turns and steps back to the ward where her daughter, with the humility of a child, awaits permission to read and write once more.
We zoom down I-87. This stretch of highway has no lamps, and the red taillights of the sweeping traffic are a pageant of human focus: the couples and the families, the late-evening commuters, the long-haul truckers. Driver after driver flaunts his immunity to the speed limit and the laws of physics. George’s foot plies the accelerator, mine taps a phantom brake. A fleet of motorcyclists on bikes half the girth of our car weave dangerously between lanes. Swooping around us at an impossible angle, a biker somehow straightens from a dip that—as it plays on in my mind—flips him onto the pavement, snaps him, sends us spinning. I hardly catch my breath before another roars past in similar style.
People courting death left and right. George drives with one hand on the steering wheel. His face is lit faintly by the dashboard. The resilience of his skin, the expanding width of his shoulders as he draws breath, the flushed warmth just beneath his collar: all are palpable to me from this distance.
There’s not much point in trying. No description in a book or movie or song has ever come close to what it is to be in the presence of the man I love. Lying next to George at night; coming across him unexpectedly as I unlock the door to our apartment; sitting beside him as we drive the reckless highway; he is breath and heat and welcome; he is the steady thread of a pulse, a path laid out to the horizon, the part of life that says forward. No one has ever made me as loving, angry, sexy, forgiving. I’ve lost my map, and navigate by feel. We settle into each other with a warmth so perfect I can mention it only with awe.
I rest my palm on his thigh. Without taking his eyes off the road, he lifts it to his chest and holds it there.
People misunderstand happiness. They think it’s the absence of trouble. That’s not happiness, that’s luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble. No two people have the same trouble, or the same way of metabolizing it. Q.E.D.: No two happy people are happy in the same way. Even Tolstoy was afraid to admit this, and I don’t blame him. Every day brilliant people, people smarter than I, wallow in safe tragedy and pessimism, shying from what really takes guts: recognizing how much courage and labor happiness demands.
George and I hurtle down the highway, having breached that boundary where logic evaporates and all that remains is a single instinct, that love is simply this—this monumental and elementary thing: the willingness to be changed by someone.
A driver invisible to me unrolls a car window and, from the dark interior, taps a cigarette on the sill. A shower of tiny red lights bounce and split on the road, skidding in the rush of wind and dark wheels, then extinguish without a sound.
For Discussion
1. Tracy Farber is a young, educated, professional single woman living in a big city. How is she similar to and different from other heroines in contemporary literature?
2. Tracy’s ex-boyfriend describes her as “the world’s most unlikely romantic” (p. 9). What does he mean by that? How is this description apt? In what way does George challenge Tracy’s outlook on romance?
3. Tracy states, “For people who claim to want happiness, we Americans spend a lot of time spinning yarns about its opposite” (p. 4). Do you agree that American literature has a fixation on doom and gloom? What lies behind this cultural mixed message? Do you agree with Tracy—does the happiness that we have an inalienable right to pursue deserve our serious consideration as well?
4. On her first date with George, Tracy explains the many reasons for her deep love of literature (p. 42). Do you agree or disagree with her list of the attractions of literature? What motivates you to read? Would you add any reasons of your own to the list of literary pleasures?
5. Tracy goes on to describe her choice of twentieth-century interwar literature—Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner—as her specialty, after very nearly succumbing to the seductions of Herman Melville and his contemporaries in nineteenth-century American literature. What does her choice say about her as a person? When Jeff says to Tracy, “There’s something very nineteenth-century about you,” what does he mean by this? In general, how do your own reading choices reflect your personality?
6. How does Tracy’s vacillation between the romantic and modern/post-modern literary periods parallel her shifting thoughts on love? Tracy later reflects on the difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of love (p. 280). Which view do you think is healthier?
7. In the course of dating George, Tracy solicits advice from friends and relatives—Hannah, Adam, Yolanda, Jeff, her cousin Gabby, Aunt Rona—each of whom offers different counsel. How do each person’s own romantic views color how he or she reads Tracy’s situation? What would your advice to Tracy have been?
8. Kadish threads a great deal of humor throughout the novel. Which incidents and observations did you find most entertaining?
9. Aunt Rona and Tracy’s mother, in encouraging an otherwise perfectly content Tracy to find a husband, subscribe to a very limited definition of happiness. How do their opinions on love and marriage reflect larger societal trends? Is Tracy’s reaction to the pressure typical of professional women of her generation?
10. As it turns out, George, too, has a very narrowly defined idea of what constitutes happiness. How does his revelation of his future plans affect his relationship with Tracy? Do you think Tracy is justified in responding the way that she does?
11. George and Tracy come from different cultural backgrounds—George still grapples with the fundamentalist Christian upbringing he’s left behind, while Tracy comes from a Jewish family. In what ways are their situations more alike than it would appear on the surface? How do their religious differences play into the relationship?
12. Consider some of the other couples in the novel—Jeff and Richard, Hannah and Ed, Yolanda and Chad. How do Tracy’s observations of these very different relationships influence her thinking about her relationship with George? What does each of these couples offer as evidence for Tracy’s larger theory of happiness?
13. How does the literary correspondence between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville factor into the intradepartmental tension among the English faculty? What ironies are inherent in the episode involving the letter? What comment does it make about the relevance of literature?
14. Tracy speculates at various points in the novel that Joanne might be jealous of her, jealous of love, jealous of life. What, in your opinion, is the truest source of Joanne’s animosity? Do you think her actions are justified?
15. Tracy’s professional life is marked by conflict and betrayal, yet she tries to stay above the political fray whenever possible. What are some examples of actions that could have damaged her career? Do you think she made the right decision in helping Elizabeth?
16. Who, in your opinion, is ultimately correct about happiness—Tolstoy or Tracy Farber? How does the novel Tolstoy Lied itself support Tracy’s claim that the opening line from Anna Karenina is misguided?
About the Author
RACHEL KADISH’s many honors include a Koret Award, a Pushcart Prize, and citations in the 1997 and 2003 editions of The Best American Short Stories. Her work has been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Tin House, Story, Bomb, Moment, Sh’ma, Congress Monthly, and Lilith. Kadish, a graduate of Princeton University, earned her M.A. in fiction writing at New York University.
Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) Page 38