In the Middle of All This (3 page)

Lauren swiveled toward him as he sat beside her. His parents were still here, but all parents had been dismissed at the end of the convocation two days before. “Look, Tristan,” she said, recognizing the panic in his eyes. “You're not going to get in. There's a wait list twenty students long, and I think you need to move on with this.”

“I
want
a freshman seminar,” Tristan said, his face crumbling. “I
need
a freshman seminar.”

She touched his elbow lightly. “It's not going to happen.”

“Couldn't you call him?”

Though she considered Lazlo an ally of the junior faculty, he was the chair of the History Department and could be a bit regal. She picked up the phone and dialed.

“Professor Lazlo's office.”

“Hi, Mary, it's Lauren. I've got a student here who really needs to get into David's freshman seminar.”

“Lauren.” Mary sighed. “I'm so sorry.”

Lauren swiveled away from Tristan and dropped her voice. “His parents are still here.”

“Sounds like he's one foot out the door already,” Mary concurred. “I'll put you through.”

Lauren glanced briefly at Tristan. His eyes were glistening. If he didn't get a fifth course, then she was really going to lose him. What would the dean of retention say?

“Is that Lauren?” David said thickly into the phone. “Lauren, my good friend. So good of you to call. I never hear from you often enough.”

“Hey, David.” He always laid on the irony. At least he was married to a genuine person; she had no idea how Cindy lived with him. “I've got a student here.”

“A student? Imagine!”

“Yes, yes. And he'd love to be in your freshman seminar.”

“Hah! Even the provost's daughter can't get into that course. Tell him to take the year off and try again.”

“David?”

“Lauren, my child, if I give in to you, then all my other acolytes will—”

“Thanks a lot, David.” She hung up.

“Tristan,” she said, almost gaily.

He just looked at her.

Cognitive dissonance, she thought. Cognitive dissonance. “That Civil War stuff,” she said, “is old history. It's recycled news. It's past yesterday. Is that what you want to devote your misery to?” She realized she'd been sitting inside too long, and on such a nice day. “Let's talk about something living, something breathing, something
right now
. Something that still matters. Biology. Management. Spanish. Whaddya say?”

“You're funny,” Tristan sniffled. “But I want that course, I came here for that course, and if I'm not going to get that course”—he rose from his chair and smiled at her, smiled as if he'd known this was coming from the moment he signed his enrollment letter in the spring—“then I'm probably out of here.”

Probably. That was something to latch on to.

“Film and the Vietnam War?” she tried, even though she knew it was full.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. He pouted just like Max. She could have hugged him.

“Absolutely uh-uh?”

“Thanks for seeing me, Professor Kelly.” He shook her hand, just like an adult.

“Don't forget our last orientation dinner tonight,” she said gamely.

He smiled and shook his head again. Now he was an adult. Now he had made up his mind.

As he left, she called, “Tell your parents I said hello.”

She sagged back in her chair, eyeing the door. Thirteen minutes to go. Maybe no one else was coming. Maybe she was done. It was hard to believe classes would begin tomorrow. It was hard to believe that in front of her stretched the whole appalling semester, the syllabi to distribute, the lectures to deliver, the discussions to pry from her students, the papers to assign and collect and grade and return, the department and committee meetings to attend, her own work to write, the trips to London to squeeze in. What little time—was it really only months now?—she and Martin had been told they had left with Elizabeth draining from them. The students indifferent, besieged, hostile, often medicated. Paxil or Prozac or Ritalin, she couldn't keep track. At a dinner party she'd once cornered a colleague from Residential Affairs and demanded to know how many students were on a prescription, their personalities sandblasted into blandness. “A lot,” the colleague said, studying the label of his beer bottle. “But in percentages?” Lauren insisted. He shrugged. “Thirty?” Lauren guessed. The colleague began peeling back the label. “Forty?” The label curled slowly from the bottle. “Fifty?” He gave a slight but definitive nod and crumpled the label in his hand. Maybe it was better that Tristan left.

“Professor Kelly?” A student stood in the door. “Lauren?”

She squinted. She knew she needed glasses, but the ophthalmologist insisted she just needed to squint. She wondered if there was any more migraine medication in her briefcase.

“Come in,” she said. “Sit down.”

It was Jane Doyle, a sophomore, a departmental major, and Martin's advisee. She wore black lingerie and too-tight jeans.

“I'm dressing like my roommate,” she explained.

“Oh.” Lauren nodded.

“I was wondering if you'd talk to me about transferring.”

“Transferring?” Lauren tapped the pen against her cheek.

Jane stared at her, rubbed her hands against each other. “It's really kind of awful here, you know.”

Out Lauren's window the late summer sun was slowly tingeing the tall sugar maples rising from the quad. Where to begin, where to begin. It was only registration, for god's sake. She knew it was awful, but depending on your reasons any place could be awful. “How so?” she asked.

Jane gave a mock dramatic sigh.
“You know.”

She smiled wanly. “Tell me about it.”

“The whole wretched J. Crew-Gap undergraduate culture,
of course
. The lazy, platitudinous professors. The shrinks over in Psychiatric Services who keep wanting to put me on medication. And, good god, there are just so many dead people here.”

“I'm not even going to ask you what that's supposed to mean.” Lauren pulled a folder from her desk drawer. “What about a year abroad?”

Jane glared at her. “I don't want to go to
England
. I don't want to go to
Germany
. I want to go to someplace anthropological, for god's sake.” She took a breath. “I know, I know, humanity is everywhere.” She was mimicking Martin's line, and they both smirked. “But sometimes it's more human other places.”

“The Gap,” Lauren pointed out, “is everywhere.”

Now Jane looked out the window. “I probably couldn't get the same amount of aid anywhere else anyway.”

“How do you know that?”

The student sneered. “So you
want
me to leave?”

They laughed. Martin and Lauren had coddled her all last year. But if she wanted to transfer, they had to help. Jane thumbed the strap of her top. Her pale face reddened.

“I am so bored, and I just got back,” she said sadly.

“Everybody's on the brink.” Lauren kept her voice smooth, touched the girl's wrist. “Sometimes the beginning can make you feel like that. That it's really a kind of cliff.” She could strangle herself for this psychobabble. Atop the building the bell clock tolled; tiny reverberations rumbled from the floor. “We'll help you get a list together,” she promised. “We'll help.”

Jane rose, her face—Lauren saw with relief—composed. “I know,” she said. “I guess you'd better be going. Tell Martin I'm still here.”

“I will.”

She strode from the room, her back stiffening in the inordinately revealing attire.

Since the Kappa Theta infanticide last year, Lauren felt that she ought to call Psychiatric Services at any hint of crisis, but, good grief, then they'd parachute in with all their medications and another personality would be dosed into remission. Sometimes all Lauren could see was that face, and sometimes she couldn't summon it at all, couldn't hear the voice. And she'd feel a panic and confusion rise within her. Was Cara short, was her voice bubbly? No one had even known she was pregnant. All those classes she sat through without uttering a word, all those empty smiles, all those careless nods of recognition and understanding, then that one Friday of chatterboxing, when she talked and talked in class, and afterward Lauren had said quietly, “Cara, are you all right.” “Oh, sure,” she'd said, “I'm great.” Saturday night she'd dumped her newborn into a trash can at the Yankee Motel. I'm great. It wasn't, I'm not well. It wasn't,
Help me
. It was, I'm great. Great. She was great. She was serving three to five. Four weeks into their first semester, their house still in boxes, Max breast-feeding, Sarah a first grader, Elizabeth undiagnosed (a bad back, the doctors in London were thinking), the trees just turning. The student was a cheerful girl, she had a family, she doodled in class, she wrote gossipy columns for the newspaper, she had a roommate, she belonged to a sorority. She killed her own baby. Almost no one knew what to make of it. The president, a Canadian who insisted he was from Boston, had declared the matter private. The provost had counseled to keep in close contact with the students, to have a sense of them, to watch for danger signs. Campus Security had asked after anything unusual, and Lauren had confessed how Cara had talked and talked in class that day and that she had been wearing mirrored sunglasses until she'd been asked to take them off. Did they tape-record that conversation? Martin wanted to know, not in a paranoid way, just out of curiosity, just for the sake of speculation. She couldn't remember. The baby's death the newspapers called involuntary manslaughter, a turn of language that at first glance could make it sound as if the student had allowed her child to choke on a piece of food.

Lauren poked the necessary folders into her briefcase, locked shut the door, and stepped down the worn stairs to the lobby. In the empty quad the grass was deep green and newly mown, the trees stout and densely grooved. Along a distant asphalt path, the provost marched to his blue BMW. Atop the white administration building slumped an American flag.

She didn't have to feel deflated. A year was a long time, and they had gotten through it, and now it was a new year. New students—at least some. Now Sarah was in second grade, and Max was in day care two days a week. Now they continued in a steady, if vulnerable way. Martin was always flying off to be with Elizabeth, and at Lincoln College there were always students falling off the edge. There was always
something
. That was what approaching forty was all about. The first mammogram, the first colonoscopy, the first biopsy.

She sped into the walk home. It was really just about getting blood to the brain and keeping it there, and then you never felt sucked under. You only felt speed. You could only keep moving. Otherwise, you'd drop. She blew by the houses on West Main, New England clapboard or redbrick, porticoes or screened porches, many windowed, two-toned painted shutters, dimensionally shingled roofs, gutters with custom guards, maple-fenced backyards. From the corner she could see to East Main where it met Fourth, could see that Martin had switched on the lamp over the front door in the fading daylight. Inside he'd be setting pots on the stove, rinsing vegetables, slicing skin from chicken or fish.

The wrong end of Main Street, everyone called it. The houses less stylish and kept up, the elementary school squatting opposite and beyond it the dulled shopping center, half ruined by a flood two summers past.
Don't worry
, the realtor had told them,
it was a once in a lifetime type of event
.

FALL

 

So, did you empty yourself out good for me?” Dr. Dowler smiled as he glanced briefly from the monitor.

Martin nodded, still dazed from all the laxatives. “Real good,” he said.

“I'll have the nurse start the IV, and when the anesthesia kicks in, we'll proceed. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The doctor stepped from the tight blue room.

“Just have to check on a few things,” the nurse said. She examined the equipment, then turned to the gurney, where he lay on his side. She was about his age, maybe younger, with a wide, sunny face and a roll of fat around her waist. “We don't get many young guys in for this kind of thing,” she said. “Something specifically you worried about, or family history?”

“Family history,” he said.

“Let's hope you check out clear.” She came around to face him and gently tugged at the neck of his gown and looked down the front of his chest to the rest of him and then let his gown fall back against him. She smiled. “Everything looks okay,” she said.

Was she
checking him
out? A grin slopped over his numb face. She hummed to herself as she watched him and watched the IV and watched the monitor.

Soon—or was it later—Dowler came in. “How you feeling, Martin?”

“Good,” Martin said.

“The monitor's right there, if you want to watch.”

“In full color,” Martin said.

“Yup.”

Martin tried to stay awake for it, but his head was light, and his eyes heavy, and inside he was empty from the forced evacuation and the starvation diet, and he was drifting, falling. People had told him that it hurt so much you couldn't possibly sleep through it, but here he was, relaxed, all checked out, checking out. It wasn't so bad. It was nothing. A snap.

He woke against a tearing, cutting, churning pressure that felt like someone was trying to expand his anus with an outboard motor.

“Almost done,” Dowler said.

That wasn't
too
bad. But still Dowler drilled. Martin squirmed and was held against the gurney.

“Almost done,” Dowler said again.

Yeah, right, he told himself.

Gradually, slowly, as if, with a tenuous string, he were removing the Hope diamond from his rectum, Dowler pulled the scope from him.