Black Elvis (11 page)

"Valley fever," he says, over chimichangas and margaritas in a popular, run-down Mexican restaurant in south Tucson, its outside walls decorated with hubcaps. "The doctor claims it has something to do with birds. The good thing is, you can only get it once. I'm all set for desert living from here on."

She stares at her silverware, none of which matches, and all of which seems to have come from Goodwill. She can't tell if this is quaint and authentic, or just someone's idea of quaint and authentic. His hair is getting overlong, and his skin has a greenish cast to it, in spite of all the sun he's been getting.

"Why are we together?" she asks. "Please tell me. Because I worry about it all the time."

"I don't know."

"You don't know? Do you think that's what I want to hear?"

He touches her hand. "
Telegamy
, remember?" This is a word he learned from her, one she may have invented. Things don't seem so bad if you have a name for them. His illness, for instance, which had him so down until he learned what it was called. To lay some groundwork in case he should get hired here permanently, he's already mentioned his "brilliant classicist" partner to at least three colleagues, one of whom turned out to be a senile professor emeritus—religion—who later tried to take his wallet. He had to physically push the man away.

"You like this. Displacement, setting up shop in a hostile, spiky environment." She's feeling it coming on again, the dark, nervous wash of energy that makes her misbehave, that makes her into, as her mother has always been so fond of pronouncing, "her own worst enemy." "And you know what?" she says. "It's not
telegamy
. Not really. Because if it were, we'd be married.
Monogamy
,
polygamy
,
telegamy
."

"You want me to marry you?" he asks.

"Oh, Jesus Christ. No. Absolutely not. I'm not ready for that. Nothing of the kind. I'd just like to try being in the same place for a while."

"Because I would."

"You would?" She looks down at her plate, at the shredded lettuce alongside the mangled remains of her meal. Her period is way overdue, she's been feeling strange, her breasts are sensitive. Last week, she bought a home testing kit, but it's back in upstate New York, still in its box. "You would?" she repeats. "That's nice of you."

Thinking about what he's just said, he feels suddenly dizzy. It occurs to him that he has in his defense the fact of his illness, which like drunkenness, or a pair of quotation marks, can serve to distance the apparent meaning of a statement from absolute or empirical truth. Of course, he would marry her. Given the right circumstances, he most certainly would. Maybe someday he will. He finishes his margarita and wonders about ordering them both another.

Thanksgiving is horrible—they spend most of it in the car. His uncle takes everyone out to a diner in New Jersey. This is supposed to be fun. The waitresses wear Pilgrim hats. On the ride back to Byron, she makes him pull over so she can throw up.

"It wasn't that bad," he says.

She thinks about how she didn't take her pills. About how she may have on purpose rolled the dice.

They don't talk about jobs at all.

At the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago, just after Christmas, she does not attend his paper. She couldn't care less about his paper. Joe has claimed not to have any interviews, but she's pretty sure he's cheating on her—not with a woman, but with a city in Minnesota. What she can't figure out is why he's keeping it a secret, inventing reasons he'll be gone for a while ("Coffee with Rob Skelton—you remember Rob . . ."). She's told him nothing. To tell him would be to influence the situation, and she doesn't want to do that. In
Star Trek
terms, she would be violating the Prime Directive, influencing the flow of history. Joe is a big
Star Trek
fan.

In the hotel lobby, where it is much more pleasant than the arctic air of room 1607—the heat is out for their entire tower—she watches the academics drift about with their coffees and their brief cases, eyes nervously darting around like those of prey on the veldt. She and Joe didn't even have Christmas this year. Instead, they have this—a convention. Restaurants, drinks (she's limited herself to one), more restaurants—she can barely fit into her good black pants. Tomorrow, they will each return to their respective homes. It worked out cheaper this way, and also, she's got an appointment at a clinic in Utica for Tuesday. She went back and forth on it, cried a little, called her friend Tonya back in Iowa, then chickened out and ended up making the whole conversation be about swimsuits and the impossibility of finding ones that didn't make them look like prudes or "before" advertisements for Weight Watchers. She's not that far gone. There probably isn't even a heartbeat yet. The temperature in Tucson at the moment, she happens to know, is sixty-two degrees. She's been monitoring it daily.

A young woman sits opposite her, pretty and also blonde, but with a face that's a little too pale, lips thin as French beans. She's wearing white hose under her charcoal skirt.

"God, I hate this," she says.

"Up for a job?" asks Kate.

She nods. Her skin is papery, her eyebrows barely there. "This is my third try. I defended two years ago. If I don't get something this year, I figure it's more or less over. I'm sorry, it's not your problem. But this is torture of a high order."

Kate squints to read the woman's convention badge, which announces that she is Dara Simeon, from Penn State. "Here's my advice, Dara. Pretend you're in court—answer all the questions, smile as much as you can, but don't offer information they don't specifically ask for. And don't say anything about your personal life, all right? You do
not
have a personal life."

"Thanks," she says, getting up and smoothing her skirt.

"You might want to imply you're sexually available," Kate says. "It couldn't hurt."

In the Hilton lobby, Joe waits for it to be time to ring up to the room and let them know he's here. He likes interviews, likes the feeling of possibility they provide. New people, new places. He's aware that Kate wants nothing more than to settle down and be done with it, and he appreciates that, but he's not sure he's there yet. It's a game they are playing, and he's always been good at games. People often underestimate him, and he likes that about himself. Even on the basketball court, he was always the surprise, the guy who could strip the ball from the opponent when he wasn't expecting it, head down for the easy layup. What she doesn't seem to understand is that he's
with
her. He is! This is how it works in academia. You sacrifice some things to gain others. If they were starting out as lawyers, they'd be working such long hours they'd never see each other anyway. If he were in the military, she'd have to get by with not seeing him for years at a time. He's tried to get her to see it his way, to understand that they have it better than everyone else. Two campuses, two different sets of friends.

He checks his watch. It's time. Bemidji? He doubts he'd go there under any circumstances. But this part, the dancing and dating, this part he can do. He's going to make them want him so bad they'll be sweating. The elevator doors hum and part. He's going to kill Bemidji.

She charms a guard and gains access to the book fair, wanders the tables and booths, marveling at the profluence of printed material, the sheer overwhelming weight of all this paper, of all these thoughts people have had. Textbooks and monographs and shiny novels and literary and scholarly journals. She should cancel the appointment, she thinks. This is not life. She could force herself to have one, a real one. The life of the mind is a lie. She first began studying Latin in high school, back in Des Moines, not because she liked it particularly, but because it made sense to her in a way that other things did not, things like boys, her lack of popularity, her father's silences, her mother's moods. With Latin, if you learned the rules, you were all set. You knew what was what. But then one thing had led to another, and now here she was. Had she ever wanted any of it? Her dissertation? The two years of teaching at a private school in Connecticut and coaching field hockey, a sport she barely understood but had lied about having played in order to get hired?

Another guard notices her lack of a convention badge and explains that she'll have to leave.

"It's all right," she says, brightly. "I'm in the wrong place anyway. I thought this was Marshall Field's."

Kate looks up at the thick snow sifting down out of the purple gray sky, visible through O'Hare's glass and steel exoskeleton. Joe's flight is delayed until at least 4:00
P.M.
They are outside a coffee place, in between terminals. Already she can feel him slipping away. "I know about the interview," she says. "Just tell me how it went."

He looks into his cold coffee, then back up at her. "It was no big deal. I didn't want to upset you."

"Upset me? I told you about the job in the first place."

"Not so well. There were four of them in the room. One woman had huge tits, and I overcompensated and talked to a spot about a foot above her head." He coughs. All this is true. What he doesn't add is that on the way out, the chair of the search committee, a red-bearded man who looked like the descendent of lumberjacks, had shaken his hand, given him a meaningful look, and said, "You'll be hearing from us soon."

"Why would I want you not to interview? We need a real job, even if it does come with ice fishing."

"I never thought of it as real," he says. "But still, I shouldn't have kept it a secret."

Flights everywhere have been canceled, and people are hurrying past them in all directions, muttering, hauling their belongings, their tired children. Across from them, having beers at another table, is a couple who have obviously just returned from a cruise. They have tans, gold jewelry, hats. Kate understands that for some people, happiness is simply another commodity, that it absolutely can be purchased.

"Next week," she says, "if it isn't warm in Tucson, let's get in the car and drive south until we get someplace that is. Someplace with palm trees, all right?"

Joe sees on her face the hopeful, earnest expression he first fell in love with, the one that he's kept packed away in his mind and only taken out when he's thought that perhaps they should give up on this. Last week, she called him in tears to say that she'd made a fool of herself at a faculty party by leading everyone in a sing-along of "American Pie." "
I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here
," she'd said.

"Yes," he says. "That's exactly what we'll do."

"They're not the boss of us."

"No one is."

After they have kissed and said goodbye—their gates are in different terminals, and the weather is starting to let up—she walks slowly past the shops and hot dog stands, once again alone, and tries to stay calm by reminding herself of who she is. There is nothing like an airport terminal for this, for cutting identity down to its essentials. Job, home, destination, significant others. All of these people, temporarily cut loose from their moorings, scrambling to get back to someplace safe. Tomorrow, if only for a few days, she'll be back in the snowdrifts.
Modo fac!
she liked to say to her class on the first day of the semester, attempting to prove the flexibility and relevance of a dead language.
Just do it!
And this, her furious hands clacking chalk:
Hodie adsit, cras absit. Here today, gone tomorrow.
For a moment, she almost thinks she can hear him coming up behind her to tell her no, he's not going back, he's coming with her, and the hell with all of these people. But it's only one of those carts ferrying the elderly and overweight, and she hurries to get out of their way.

In mid-July, our landlady removed the front door to the house to get it repaired, and the next day, when I came back from my shift at Café D'Oro, the failing sandwiches-and-dessert place I'd managed to get hired at as a waiter, I discovered that we'd been robbed. The thieves had taken our black-and-white television and about two hundred dollars worth of stereo equipment. They'd also taken our instruments and amps.

Ed called Renata to yell at her. "How are we supposed to live with no door?" he asked. I sat at our tiny kitchen table and stared out over the clothes wires strung across the back yards. The wind was picking up and shaking the leaves and my skin felt clammy; a storm was coming in.

After a while, he came out of his bedroom and joined me. "What a bitch."

"I think she owes us money here," I said. "You can't take the door off a house in the middle of the city and not expect it to get robbed."

"She didn't want to talk about it. She says we have a door." This was true; the missing door was downstairs. The door to our apartment was still in place, though the wood in the frame around the strike plate was all busted out where the thieves had kicked their way through. Ed took out a Viceroy from his shirt pocket and went into the kitchen to light it off a burner. He'd recently cut his long hair and grown a goatee, hung up photos of Charles Mingus and Ron Carter on his bedroom wall. He'd been wearing the same suit jacket over a series of white T-shirts now for more than a month. "She said she was disappointed in us."

"She's going to be a lot more disappointed now that we have no equipment." I looked around. Husks of dirty paint curled down from the ceiling near the windows. A narrow hall led to the front bedroom, which served as Ed's room and our rehearsal area. We'd hung up one of those Indian drug-curtain things on a clothesline to separate the entrance to my tiny room off his, in which I barely had space for a single bed, a dresser, and a chair. We had this place at a below-market rate because we'd promised to make a lot of noise. The landlady wanted the old man downstairs to move out of his rent-controlled unit, and she figured we might do the trick.

"I'm reporting to you what she said."

"Maybe she ought to just give us a couple of thousand to kill him," I said. "It's simpler."