Commencement (18 page)

Celia had also told Sally to watch out when she went to see him. “I hear he makes passes at anything with a pulse,” she said. “Did you ever meet Rose Driscoll? She graduated last year, and word is they slept together, then she tried to end it, and he basically stalked her until she got a restraining order.”

Sally sighed. The gossip about Smith girls and their professors always seemed improbable to her, like something out of a bad Harlequin novel. There were stories about lots of the male professors, and they always conveniently included some girl who was no longer around to tell the tale.

His office was dim and windowless, lit only by a small green desk lamp. The desk and tables and couch were cluttered with papers and books halfway to the ceiling, and a million yellow Post-it notes stuck out here and there.

When he looked at Sally, he did not seem to recognize her right away. “How can I help you?” he said.

“Professor Lambert, my name is Sally Werner. I’m in your British poetry course. And I’m here because—”

He raised a hand to interrupt her. “Sally, I know who you are. Please. Sit. And call me Bill. Professor Lambert was my father.”

Sally didn’t really go in for these professors who went by their first names. They were always men, intent on staying young forever, despite the fact that they had achieved a tremendously adult career goal.

She sat down across from him, taking care to remove some papers from the chair and place them in a small pile on the floor. She smiled without showing her teeth.

“I’m here because I desperately need to change my status in British poetry to pass-fail,” she said.

“And why is that?” he asked.

“I’m a science person. I’m in way over my head.”

He nodded. “Poetry is something of a science, you know,” he said. “The elements have to be perfect, exact, in order for the experiment to succeed.”

Sally fought the urge to roll her eyes. He was officially getting on her nerves. Next he’d be telling her that each stanza was like a beaker, full of powerful chemicals called words.

“In any case,” she said. “I guess poetry is just a language I don’t speak. I read the poems you assign each night, four or five times at least. But it’s just a jumble of words to me. The next day, I’m sitting there listening to what the other girls say in class, and wondering if we even read the same stuff. They understand so much of it, and I just …” She trailed off, unable to get the words out. In all her life, Sally Werner had never had to admit that she didn’t get something.

He nodded, looking past her at the door. “Do you enjoy the poems?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she said quickly, then, “Well, to tell you the truth, no. It all seems a bit ridiculous to me.”

“How so?” he asked.

“It’s all so over the top. If you’re going to say something, why not just say it?” she said, before adding, “No offense.”

“None taken,” he said.

He furrowed his brow and cleared his throat.
“Side by side, their faces blurred, / The earl and countess lie in stone,”
he began, in a lofty voice that let her know he was reciting something.
“Their proper habits vaguely shown / As jointed armour, stiffened pleat / And that faint hint of the absurd—The little dogs under their feet.”

Sally stared blankly “Is that one of yours?” she asked.

He sputtered, laughing. “I wish,” he said. “That’s Philip Larkin. ‘An Arundel Tomb.’ This couple has been buried, and their tomb is built to look like them, yet it bears no real resemblance to what they were like in life.”

He continued his recitation. Sally glanced up at the clock over his head. She needed to be in bio, on the other side of the library
and across the Science Quad, in eight minutes. If he would just sign the damn form, she could still get a seat in the front row. She’d have to interrupt him.

“Professor Lam—uhh, Bill,” she started, but he raised his hand and kept on.

“Time has transfigured them into / Untruth,”
he said.

Sally thought of her mother. It was the perfect way to describe what had happened to her.

Bill went on.
“The stone fidelity / They hardly meant has come to be / Their final blazon, and to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love.”

Sally pictured her mother’s plain headstone. It conveyed nothing of the woman she had been, of the life that was gone forever. She remembered driving out to the cemetery after work on summer evenings before the school year began, sitting in the grass in a skirt and heels, searching, searching for a hint of her.

“It reminds you of someone,” he said.

Sally nodded.

“Me too,” he said. “That’s what poems can do. I’m not saying you’ll get every single one of them. Hell, I have an MFA in poetry from Columbia, and I’m lucky if I understand one-tenth of what a poem means. Poems are like people, like lovers. If you try to understand them all at once, your head’s gonna spin. But if you let them take you in, piece by piece, they can move you. Transform you. Thanks for tidying up, by the way,” he said with a grin, and Sally noticed in horror that she’d been absentmindedly forming piles out of the papers heaped on top of his desk. This was a habit of hers around messy people, inherited from her mother, who had once insulted a neighbor by mopping her kitchen floor unasked at a dinner party.

“Oh God, sorry!” she said. “I’m a neat freak.”

“You never need to apologize for cleaning off my desk,” he said. “In fact, if you like, we could make a deal.”

Sally looked at him, and in place of his face she saw her unblemished academic transcript floating in space. Whatever he wanted, he could have.

“The department lets me hire a work-study assistant each year,”
he said. “Someone to help me with research and filing and all that jazz. As you can see, I’ve never actually taken them up on the offer. I don’t need much in the way of research, but I could sure use some help with the organization stuff.”

“Okay,” she said, not sure where he was going with this.

“I don’t really give a damn about papers or grades. I just want every student to connect to a poem—if that happens, my job is done. So. If you could help me out a couple times a week, I might promise to give you a good grade, provided we talk poetry when you’re here.”

“You might?” she said.

He smiled. “I will.”

Sally inhaled deeply. “It’s a deal,” she said. “Thank you.”

They shook hands across the desk. He held hers much longer than she thought seemed normal, and she couldn’t help but think of the story Celia told about the girl he had stalked.

“Who did the poem remind you of?” he asked before letting go.

“My mother,” she said. “You?”

“My wife.”

A widower. It made all the sense in the world. It explained why he was so disheveled, so scattered. He was suffering from a broken heart of the highest order, just like Sally. Bill Lambert needed looking after, and who better to understand him than her? She decided then and there that Celia had been wrong about him.

She came to him for an hour on Monday mornings, after he finished swimming laps in the faculty pool and before her biology class. She came on Wednesday afternoons at three, and sometimes stayed long into the evening, past closing time in the dining hall. On those nights, Bill opened the little mini-fridge beside his desk and brought out food from campus events he’d been to during the week—cold chicken and cucumber sandwiches from a lunch at the president’s house, chocolate soufflé from an English department tea, and, occasionally, tiny bottles of red wine that he pocketed at an alumnae fund-raiser. He sometimes spoke of his house on Paradise Road, a long stretch of Victorians all owned by professors.
But from what Sally could see, he seemed to live in his office. She imagined him terrified to go back to the bed he had once shared with his wife. He rarely mentioned her to Sally, but he often referenced her in class:
My wife, Janice, used to stay up nights rereading
Bleak House
and eating poppy-seed crackers. When my wife, Jan, and I bought the house on Paradise, we used the pages of old Norton anthologies to plug the leaks in the roof

Sally wanted to squeeze his hand at those moments. A few times, she caught Celia giving her a look and realized she must be making her pitying face.

She was supposed to be getting Bill organized, but mostly they just sat in the dim office and talked. He said he’d never talked to anyone that way, especially a student. He recited poems to her, looking straight into her face for her reaction as he spoke. Sally knew she ought to feel moved by the words, but her mind always wandered to other things. She would get distracted by the rhythm of his voice or the smell of his skin, a mix of chlorine and Ivory soap that caught in the air whenever he gestured with his hands.

Bill kept his favorite lines of poetry scribbled on Post-its all around the office, so that inspiration might catch him by surprise. Sometimes when he wasn’t looking, Sally would snatch a Post-it from a book or file folder on his desk and slip it into her pocket. She left them in a little stack on the nightstand in her dorm room, piled neatly and hidden under the alarm clock. Before she went to sleep at night she’d take them out and line them up on the bedspread, reading them over, again and again, committing the words to memory:

The Post-its were the only way Sally enjoyed poetry—distilled down to the most beautiful lines, absent of any context besides the one she created. She wondered what they meant to Bill, and sometimes imagined that they were something like a love letter, a confession of the feelings that he could not speak out loud.

He never read her any of his own poems, but one day when he left her alone in his office for a moment, Sally slid one of his books down off the shelf.
Five Seasons
, by William Lambert. Inside there was an old black-and-white shot of Bill, looking handsome and young. The back cover was sprinkled with quotes: “
Five Seasons
is poetry the way poetry should be written. It took my breath away,” wrote someone she had never heard of from
The New York Times
. “An exquisite rendering of the ongoing battles between men and women, lust and reason,” said Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes! Even Sally knew who he was.

The most famous Smith suicide was Sylvia Plath. Morbid Goth girls who lived on Elm Street always claimed that they had the dorm room that had once belonged to her. April said
The Bell Jar
was her all-time favorite novel, and that Plath had probably always been a little bit off—a poet, a visionary, too smart for her own good. But of course, there was also a man. Ted Hughes. As fucking usual, April would say. According to April, Plath’s was a typical female death. She didn’t rage in the streets, or kill her unfaithful husband and cut out his heart for a trophy. She simply shut her children up safe in their bedrooms, got down on her knees in front of her oven, and slowly, silently gassed herself to death. She was thirty-one years old.

Sally thought about how, back then, Bill really had been something of a celebrity,
a real
poet, whatever that meant. She wondered why he had stopped writing when he came to Smith. Did it have to do with his wife getting ill? A moment later, she could hear his heavy footsteps coming back toward her, and she slipped the book back onto the shelf.

On the way to the Quad from his office that night, Sally realized that she might be falling in love with him. It wasn’t the poems that made her heart swell—it was the way his fingers wrinkled after a swim, the ink stains on his forearm, even the little bald patch on
the back of his head, which he seemed not to notice, or in any case not to care about. Bill was an adult, a real man. He made her feel safe somehow. Sally knew April would probably call it a daddy complex, but that wasn’t it. She knew he felt it, too. There was that energy between them.

But weeks passed, then a month, then two, and he never so much as touched her hand. They talked for hours about movies and novels, poetry and science and family, about Northampton and its strange blend of beautiful nature, true art, and goofy, hippie liberalism. She left his office with a lightness in her stomach and head every time.

On Friday nights she’d go along to Quad parties with Celia. The previous year, all the King House first years had gone in a big group to every gathering on frat row at UMass, every Amherst College tap, and every Smith Quad party, in the hopes of meeting men. They’d preparty in the dorm, drinking gin and tonics and singing their hearts out to some CD by Tom Petty or the Beatles. They’d dance, and laugh, and take their pick of outfits from all sixteen of the first-year closets—the next day no one could remember whose black pants they’d borrowed, whose droopy earrings they’d accidentally left on the bus. At the parties, they spent hours talking to Amherst boys and townies who were probably still in high school, drinking warm keg beer from plastic cups. They rarely met anyone worth calling, let alone sleeping with. At two or three, they would head home, scrub off their makeup, and huddle together in the living room, drinking tea, watching Brat Pack movies or
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, thrilled to be back in the land of Girls Only.

By sophomore year, the enthusiasm had faded. Bree had started dating Lara, and they hardly ever went out to parties. April had stopped attending on principle, complaining that the strong, independent Smithies she knew during the week seemed to be replaced by tube-top-wearing fembots whenever men and beer entered into the equation. Plus, the kind of guys she always went for—skinny, brooding types in Clark Kent glasses and holey sweaters—never attended these sorts of gatherings. For most of the girls in the house, the jig was simply up. They’d met enough unremarkable men at frat parties to know that off-campus husband searching was
just a plain old waste of time. Like most sophomores, Sally and Celia never left campus on the weekends anymore. Celia now refused to attend a Smith house party unless they had an invitation to a private party upstairs. Down below, the dining hall furniture had been stacked against the walls, and guys were trying to score, making awkward conversation, dancing with the first years, pumping the keg. Upstairs, upperclasswomen were taking tequila shots, shooting Polaroids of one another topless to determine who had the best breasts, climbing naked onto the roof to smoke a joint and sing to the moon, starting all-female make-out sessions that they would never speak of again after graduation day.