A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  I stopped, listening. I thought I heard the sound of water dripping.

  “We need to make a plan,” Benjamin said, leaning against a stone wall, wiping perspiration off his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “What kind of plan?”

  “I want to see you as much as I can before I leave the country,” he said. “I’ve found a place to go about an hour and a half away, in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” he was saying, both of us breathless from climbing. “If you tell your parents that we’re going away together tonight, will they let you come with me?”

  “I’m too old to have to ask them,” I said, my head spinning.

  “You said your family was strict.”

  “And Catholic, I know.” I had no intention of going over the series of lies I’d told him. “But I’m out of college.”

  “Then it’ll be easy,” he said, taking off up the hill again. “As long as you want to come.”

  We came upon the place all of a sudden, a soft, damp blanket of grass between the fountain and the creek.

  “Is this it?” I asked.

  “It is,” he said. “Now look over there.”

  Beyond us and below, no more than twenty yards, was a cup in the woods, a stretch of grass where a community of tattered souls was living under sheets drawn between the branches of trees, blankets spread on the ground, breakfast cooking in a big pot on an open fire, a village of homeless people already stirring, about their day.

  “Is it safe to be so close to them?” I asked.

  “Here is safe,” he said.

  “I mean from danger?”

  “From company, Sophia.”

  2

  I lay on my back at the edge of the Rappahannock River, the sun coming up through the mist, my hand skimming the surface of the water, Benjamin’s head on my belly.

  In the near distance the sound of frogs.

  “Did you ever collect tadpoles?” I asked.

  “Every spring from Rock Creek in a mayonnaise jar. They always died,” he said, “and so I know nothing about frogs.”

  “Rana temporaria. That’s their official name,” I said sleepily. “Do you know how they mate?”

  “I never gave it a second thought.”

  “You need to know.” I giggled. “The male grabs the female and stimulates her to release eggs and the eggs are fertilized in the water. Very efficient and cold-blooded.”

  He ran his tongue across my cheek and over my nose. “I don’t even like frogs,” he said.

  “Nevertheless, I’ll tell you what you missed about frogs,” I went on. “The tadpole is born with internal gills and a fish tail and during metamorphosis the gills and tail are reabsorbed and the tadpole develops walking legs.”

  “I thought you were a musician,” he said, moving his body so his head was resting next to mine.

  “I used to be a student of biology,” I said.

  It was the closest I came to telling Benjamin the truth.

  “And your tadpoles turned into frogs?” he asked.

  “They died.” I said.

  We had been in Virginia for two days, near the town of Orange, where the Blue Ridge Mountains faded smoky blue in the distance and the land unfolded in green hills with long vistas. We were staying in a cabin beside the river, eating at the inn, hardly eating, ordering for one, the plate between us, feeding each other dessert with our hands.

  I ran my fingers through Benjamin’s hair, and his eyelids fluttered open. He was beautiful, perfectly shaped, with a broad forehead, rich brown skin the color of milky coffee, his hair peppered with gray. In particular I loved his eyes, green eyes flecked with yellow, capturing the light.

  “Gray at twenty-eight?” I asked.

  He turned over, kissing my lips.

  “Aging prematurely,” he said, his breath in my mouth, our eyes wide open. “Old enough to take care of a child like you.”

  We had been together all day, from the first light creeping up from the bottom of the world to night, when we lay naked in the half circle of light from the crescent moon coming through the window of our ancient rickety bedroom.

  We were staying in one of several small houses built after the Civil War on a large property along the river, restored to replicate the simplicity of life in the late nineteenth century. The bed was a rope bed, with a thin mattress and a light quilt, and we could hear the river running over the rocks while we lay wrapped around each other, drifting into sleep.

  Before I left home, I had told my parents that they would meet Benjamin if things materialized between us.

  My father said under no circumstances could I go off with someone he hadn’t met.

  “He has to say that because he’s your father,” Julia said as I stood in the kitchen with my backpack. But she seemed relieved for me to leave, and I imagine that she was weary—they were both weary—and didn’t want to feel responsible for me any longer.

  Milo was beside himself with joy.

  “Will you marry him?” he asked me.

  “She won’t,” Bernard said. “She won’t be able to marry him, Uncle Milo, because we don’t even know who he is.”

  “We know, we know,” Milo said impatiently. “We listened to the music he wrote to her. So you’ll marry him, won’t you, Claire, and then the house will be full of music.”

  “Maybe. Sometime,” I added, already captured in a net of my own lies. One more hardly seemed to matter.

  Before I left to meet Benjamin, I checked my phone. There were six messages from Victor, calling and calling to find out what I knew.

  My body against the sheets was a long silk robe. It could float without sinking on the surface of the rushing river if Benjamin were to lift me from the bed and put me in the water.

  “Can you come to Prague to visit, Sophia?” he asked the night before we left Virginia, lying on the sheets, our hands barely touching. “Maybe for Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “We have only begun, and a year is too long to be apart.”

  “I’ll try to come, but it will be our first Christmas without my brother.”

  “Come later, then. Come for the winter or the spring or the summer. We’ll take a tiny apartment above the river.”

  He lifted his body over mine, stretched my arms above my head, his hands in mine, our feet entwined. We were exactly the same size.

  3

  The morning of the day Benjamin left for Prague was hot, with a steady light rain and no wind. We drove back to Washington with the windows down, sprayed with warm rain, talking about names.

  “I was named for my grandmother Sophia, who was dead when I was born,” I said.

  “Like me. I was named for my dead grandfather, Benjamin and my mother’s father, Asa.”

  “So you carry on names in your family?” I asked.

  “Especially in my mother’s family,” he said.

  “We do, too.”

  “What about Alberto?”

  “My brother was the only Alberto that I know of. I’ve never asked why he was given that name.”

  I kept straight the facts of my deception by using the details of my mother’s transplanted Chilean family.

  Gradually over the last days, “Sophia” had become familiar, more than familiar. My name, with the sound of sensual music drawing out the syllables—So-phi-a. The woman I had been to Benjamin for these blissful days, and who I wished I could be. I wanted to walk out of my life into this one we had made together in an isolated outpost of our common imagination.

  “Would you name a boy Alberto if you had one?” Benjamin asked.

  We had talked about Alberto, about his death from encephalitis, how it had been so swift, almost like an accident for the shock it had given my family.

  “I don’t know what I’d name a boy.”

  I had never considered naming, never had a reason to think of it, expecting one day to have a child.

  “My brother was the only Alberto to me.” I slipped out of my sandals,
putting my feet against the dashboard. “I think I’d name a boy Steven.”

  “Steven.” Benjamin pulled into a gas station north of Culpeper. “Why Steven?”

  “I love the name,” I said.

  “An Anglo name.” He patted my thigh. “It would go well with Reed, don’t you think?”

  I smiled. “I’d name a girl Gabriela,” I said. “That’s not Anglo.”

  “I like Gabriela.”

  “Or Laela. I have more girls’ names that I like than boys’.”

  He was getting out of the car to fill up the gas tank and grabbed my hair, kissing the curly ends.

  “Don’t bolt while I go into the store,” he said.

  “I’m here forever,” I replied.

  I slept while he was gone, the sweet and heavy sleep of long days together, and must have dreamed, since he told me I was whimpering when he returned with a cold bottle of lemonade, touching it to my bare legs, waking me with a start.

  I rolled the bottle across my damp, hot face.

  “We were talking about names, remember?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “I would call a boy Asa.”

  “Did you ever meet the Asa grandfather?”

  “He was my favorite person growing up.” He reached down and took my hand.

  “What about a girl’s name?” I asked.

  “Beatriz. That was my mother.”

  “Very beautiful.”

  “She was very beautiful.”

  “We’ll need a lot of children for these names,” I said.

  “How many do we have?”

  “Steven and Beatriz and Gabriela and Asa and Laela. Do you think we can afford five children on a composer’s salary?”

  “We’ll manage. Five is a good number. Big enough to last.”

  “That’s what my mother always says. A small family is no good. You need a tribe.”

  At a stoplight in Warrenton, he put his palm against my cheek.

  “You could be pregnant, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He laughed. “And then what?”

  “Then I call you and come to Prague and we have our baby and live together in the apartment over the river.”

  “And marry?”

  “Of course marry.”

  “Are you religious?” he asked.

  “You mean Catholic?” I asked. “We are Catholic, raised Catholic, but I’m nothing now.”

  “So we’ll be married by a justice of the peace or whatever equivalent they have in the Czech Republic.”

  We turned onto Route 66.

  “Do you want lunch?”

  “No lunch,” I said.

  We had eaten very little in the last three days, but I wasn’t at all hungry.

  He dropped his hand onto my bare leg, and I held it there.

  “Could you be pregnant?”

  “I wish,” I said. “But no.”

  Which wasn’t exactly true. In the days and nights we’d spent together, I’d used no common sense. This love affair was destined to be brief and end, something Benjamin did not know and I didn’t think about. I had not been careful with him. I hadn’t been careful with my life for months, not since I met Victor Duarte.

  “What’s going to happen between us now?” he asked as we drove into town.

  “We’ll write back and forth, but in English, not music, this time.”

  We drove across the Fourteenth Street Bridge from Virginia into the city, heading to Dupont Circle, and once we were in town, neither of us spoke. He pulled the car over to the curb at Dupont Circle, where we had planned to say good-bye. That evening he was due to leave for Prague.

  On the grass around the circle, police stood watching the traffic, fifteen of them at least.

  “No stopping there!” one of them shouted at Benjamin across the traffic.

  “I’m letting someone off!” he called back.

  “You can meet my parents later,” I said. “When you get back next year.”

  “And you’ll come to visit?”

  “I will,” I said.

  But back in town, in the hustle of traffic and horns and police and the sounds of a nervous city, the cold chill of reality crawled up my spine.

  “I’m sure your parents would want you to have this kind of happiness.”

  “I just can’t promise Christmas,” I said.

  He dropped his hand on top of mine.

  A storm of sobs was gathering in my throat, and I couldn’t speak.

  In retrospect, this was the moment I could have made a decision to tell Benjamin the truth, and I don’t know why I didn’t. Was my mind too foggy to follow the long paths of eventualities? Would I leave with him for Prague? Would Victor harm him if I told the truth? Harm me? Harm my parents?

  And who was I? This person who had been with Benjamin—was this person Claire Frayn? Or the one I’d been just last month, Sophia Lupe, planning vengeance with Victor Duarte in subterranean rooms?

  But there is no answer to be found in this kind of thinking.

  I did what I did.

  “Leave quickly, quickly,” I whispered. “I don’t want to see you go.”

  I opened the car door.

  “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”

  I kissed his cheek and shut the door.

  He pulled into the traffic, entered the outside lane of the circle, and I watched his car round Connecticut Avenue, turn south on Massachusetts and disappear.

  He didn’t turn his head to look back at me or wave.

  At the CVS drugstore, I slipped into a space between the store and movie theater, leaning against the wall. I don’t cry easily, hadn’t cried in the days and weeks and months since Steven’s unbearable death, afraid if I gave in to tears, the weeping would never stop.

  People walked by, taking me into account, hesitating, moving on, not wishing to intercede, except for a young boy pulling against his mother’s hand when she urged him on.

  “Are you dying?” he asked me.

  I shook my head, wiping my face with my arms.

  “Is she?” He turned to his mother, still holding her hand although he had moved as close to me as he could without letting go of her.

  “This is not our business, Timothy,” his mother said.

  And she dragged the boy past me, past the movie theater, the CVS drugstore, his head still turned in my direction.

  On the edge of Dupont Circle, I checked my voice mail. One message from Victor.

  “No luck? We’ll meet tonight at Café Rouge around 9 P.M. and regroup. I called his father’s house and was told Benjamin had left the country.”

  I moved away from the traffic noise and dialed Victor’s cell.

  “Benjamin had no interest in seeing me, so I never saw him,” I said. “And I can’t come to the Café Rouge. I can’t see you. Something has come up.”

  I turned the cell phone off and tossed it into the trash can next to the CVS drugstore. When I got home, I would cancel my phone service and, tomorrow, the post-office box.

  From Dupont Circle I walked toward Bethesda, taking the back streets, my pack heavy in the heat, my legs liquid. The rain, more mist than water, had the vague sick smell of mulberries.

  It was a long walk, just under seven miles, and on the way I stopped for water, for coffee, to wander through the books at Politics and Prose, at a toy store where I bought a set of jacks, a game Steven and I used to play. He always beat me, did not even try to lose.

  Walking north and in no hurry to get home, I left the day behind, heading toward dusk. By the time I reached our subdivision in Bethesda, the sun had almost set, orange in the west behind me. In the direction of our house, the leftover light striped the horizon, so I was walking into shadows. I had the sense of walking with the essence of Benjamin, as if the remembered chemistry of a person could take on his actual presence.

  Mr. Denver was in his yard and motioned to me.

  “I have tomatoes from my garden for your family,” he said, handing me a p
lastic bag with a few ripe tomatoes in it. He smiled. Close up and under the streetlight, I could see his crooked smile and bad teeth.

  “Thank you,” I said. “We love tomatoes, and this year we don’t have a garden.”

  We never had a garden, because the airplane hangar took up all the space in the backyard, and Mr. Denver probably knew that, but I was feeling generous that afternoon, even toward Mr. Denver.

  The lights in the front of our house were off, and also those in the hangar—the kitchen light beamed a triangle across the yard as I walked down the street.

  But the cars were in the driveway, so my family must be home.

  I went up the front steps to the unlit porch, reached into my pack to feel around for the house key, which was at the bottom.

  Standing in the steel-gray dusk, my head down, searching for the key, I had a sudden sense of presence in the darkness just beyond the porch, screened with lilac bushes and hydrangeas.

  I turned, staring into the large blue hydrangea at the front, and in the bushes a form began to materialize.

  “Hello? Is anybody there?”

  “Sophia!”

  Victor stepped out into the circle of distant light from the streetlamp, wearing Steven’s old khakis cut off at the ankle and his yellow sport shirt with the tail out.

  “I got your message on the voice mail,” he said. “I knew where you lived.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Steven used to invite me for dinner sometimes, but I never came until now. Too much a city rat for this neighborhood.”

  “You got my message?” I asked. “It didn’t work.”

  “So you said.”

  He moved closer to the porch.

  “Did you know when you gave me these clothes that Steven had left a ten-dollar bill with my phone number on the corner of it in the pocket of the pants?”

  He put the ten-dollar bill on the porch railing.

  “I told you that something has come up.” My voice had the thin whine of a cheap string instrument. “I can’t see you, so please leave and don’t come back.”

  I turned the key in the door and pushed it open with my shoulder. Once inside the house, I double-locked the front door, turned on the porch light to see if Victor had come out of the bushes onto the porch, but he had disappeared, melted into the night, an apparition of my imagination.