It Will Come to Me (10 page)

“Do you
scare
me?” said Beth. “Certainly not. Who'd you scare?

“Oh never mind. A graduate student. It doesn't matter.”

“Graduate students need scaring,” said Beth.

“Excuse me, Beth,” said Ruth. “I've been waiting to have a word with Ben.” She took him by the wrist and led him out of the living room and up the stairs. She wanted to get into the bedroom and close the door, but Ben stopped her in mid-ascent.

“Tell me now. How much does he want?”

“He doesn't want money. He wants to see us,” she said. “He wants to meet with us.”

“Who? Martinez?”

“No, Isaac. With Martinez.”

“Ah, this again.”

“Martinez says he's got something to tell us.”

“What is it?”

“He wouldn't say. He said he wants to leave that to Isaac.”

Ben clutched his head in his hands. “For God's sake, Ruth, why didn't you insist? He has no business … Where are we supposed to go for this meeting?”

“His office. Martinez's office. Look, Ben, this could be very
good news.”
(Could it really?)
“I don't see why you're taking it this way” It would be just like Ben to dig in his heels when negotiations were at their most fragile.

“Do you think he's still there?”

“There? Who?”

“Martinez.”

“In his office?” She had no idea. Maybe he'd gone home. Maybe he was seeing a patient.

“Call him back now. Demand to know what this is about.”

“No,” said Ruth.
“I'm
not calling.
You
call.” The word “no,” she realized, had come out as an indignant yelp. The low chatter of guests standing at the foot of the stairs went silent. She and Ben had been audible—and visible too, she realized, or at least their legs had been—all along. She looked down into a semicircle of faces, all blank, all curious. From left to right: Bobo Ernhardt, a bow-tied mathematician and bicycling enthusiast, not a member of the department but a kind of fellow traveler to the logicians; Roberta Mitten-Kurz, dean of humanities; Bob and Barbara Bachman and nine-year-old Ariel, who held a large Pyrex baking dish full of something she'd no doubt baked herself; two unidentified young women in jeans; and the Brautigans, a quiet couple who lived across the street.

In the midst of this silence, the doorbell rang—a loud, ripe, startling peal. Ruth made her way down the stairs; the guests parted to let her through. She opened the door to a stout middle-aged man in a Mexican wedding shirt, perspiring heavily and holding a giant bouquet of mixed lilies. “Charles Johns,” said Ruth.

“The very same.” He proffered the lilies and she took them, murmuring that they were lovely. Ben was right, she thought.
Charles Johns did indeed have a remarkable voice, with a timbre so deep it reminded her of the gargling devotions made by Buddhist monks.

“Will we be seeing your wife tonight?”

“She sends regrets. One of her migraines.”
Me
graines, as he said it. The British pronunciation.

T
o the wondering remorseful Ruth of the next morning it seemed that the loss of control began when she squawked at Ben and drew an audience. From this moment onward her memories lost narrative cohesion and became episodic. She remembered offering Charles Johns a glass of the Australian shiraz she'd been drinking and finding that the bottle was all but empty. Deftly and efficiently he uncorked a new one and with a sommelier's twist of the wrist poured glasses for them both. This was her third, or perhaps her fourth.

She remembered her second encounter with the young Phil-bys, still marooned on one end of the couch. She'd made a mental note to bring them the Diet Sprites she had promised earlier, but instead found herself approaching them with a bowl of wasabi peas. Todd declined them, but to Ruth's surprise Melinda leaned forward to examine what was in the bowl, her nostrils quivering. “Have you tried these?” asked Ruth, encouraged by this show of interest. “I love them. I eat them all day long.”

Melinda considered them for a moment, then shook her head faintly and leaned back into Todd's shoulder. “Really!” said Ruth. “Try some!” As if to demonstrate how delicious she found them, she scooped up a handful and brought it to her mouth, and then another and another, all the while chewing enthusiastically. Looking
down, she saw that bright green peas and pea fragments and bits of mashed pea had collected on the carpet around her shoes.

She remembered giving Dean Mitten-Kurz a piece of her mind. She'd been meaning to do this for a year now, or at least she'd fantasized about it. She wanted to let it be known how outraged and disappointed she'd been when she learned that the Lola English Department had ended its relationship with Frank Muldoon, an eminent literary critic of Welsh extraction. She'd been surprised and excited when Muldoon moved to Spangler, apparently for complicated personal reasons. In her graduate-student days he'd been considered the preeminent literary critic of his time. His books and essays were magically insightful, rigorous, subtle, always clear, always accessible to the educated lay reader. Even as literary theory became entrenched dogma in one English department after another, the unfashionable Muldoon continued to write, and by sheer force of mind, to command a readership inside and outside those departments.

When he arrived in Spangler he was in his late seventies, but still brilliantly productive. People looked at him wonderingly, suspiciously. When would his powers begin to fail? He taught graduate seminars at both Lola and the local branch of the state university for several years. Just when Ruth had summoned the nerve to sign up as an auditor, the Lola English Department abruptly let him go in favor of a young American studies specialist. Muldoon left Spangler then and moved to Cambridge to teach a seminar at the Harvard of the North. Ruth had met him once, briefly, at a university reception, where he accepted her stammering compliments with gracious modesty. He'd been out on the balcony alone when she approached him, smoking a Players,
looking for all the world like an elderly pensioner drinking his pint in an empty pub.

The dean was standing by the door, evidently trying to edge her way out of the house. She'd been snagged for the moment by Marv Plotkin, a grievance-mongering part-timer. Roberta Mitten-Kurz was an impressively obese woman in her early sixties, a plus-size clotheshorse who wore cleverly knotted hand-painted scarves and enviably expensive silver jewelry. Ruth had dealt with her on the two occasions when Ben had managed to wangle her adjunct lectureships in the English Department.

“Dean Mitten-Kurz,” she called out. Suddenly it seemed she was speaking in a vibrant new voice, a Greer Garson—greets-the-faculty voice. “Ben and I are so pleased you were able to join us tonight.” Mitten-Kurz's head swiveled toward her. Plotkin faded away.

“Lovely party,” said Mitten-Kurz, backing away, “but I'm afraid I have a number of potlucks to drop in on tonight.”

“Yes,” said Ruth. “Tonight's the night for them, isn't it?”

“A wonderful tradition,” said Mitten-Kurz, smiling warmly and reaching for the doorknob. “A Lola tradition.”

Here was Ruth's chance. “Before you go, Dean Mitten-Kurz, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about. I've been troubled about this for some time.” Mitten-Kurz squared her shoulders and turned to face Ruth deliberately. This was a smoothly executed multistage maneuver like the wheeling around of a battleship. It involved the adjustment of various lengths of trailing fabric and gave the dean time to reassume the mantle of her deanliness. “I know I'm not a full-time faculty member,” Ruth began, “not even a faculty member at all, technically speaking …”
In her ears her voice sounded high and wheedling, so she did her best to deepen and steady it. “But I am a member of the university community,” she went on. Mitten-Kurz nodded emphatically. “Yes, you are,” she said. “And a valued one.”

Here Ruth was distracted by tears, which had sprung into her eyes embarrassingly. “I am a member of the community,” she repeated, her voice quavering, “and I believe we all lost something irreplaceable when we lost Frank Muldoon.”
(Do I really care so much about this?
an internal critic inquired. In truth, she hadn't thought about Muldoon for months.) A shadow of dismay passed over the dean's undersized features. “I know I'm not the only one who feels this way,” Ruth added. That was weak, she thought, unnecessarily defensive.

“I think we were all very conscious of how honored we were to have Professor Muldoon among us,” said Mitten-Kurz.

“Well then why isn't he among us now?” said Ruth, registering in some remote cerebral listening post that with this blunt-ness she'd gone too far.

Mitten-Kurz sighed. It was a sigh she'd sighed before, Ruth could tell, the sigh a dean sighs when she is forced to deal with an unreasonable petitioner. “That … decision … came out of a long and complex and sometimes … difficult … conversation among the stakeholders.”

“The stakeholders? Who are the stakeholders?”

“Well,” said the dean evenly, “the stakeholders are exactly who you'd expect them to be.”

“The tenured English faculty,” said Ruth.

“Yes, and elements of the administration. And the board has a certain amount of input. There was a feeling among the English faculty that Professor Muldoon didn't entirely represent the
current thinking in the field. As I think you know, I myself am a sociologist. When I don't know much about a subject I tend to defer to those who do.”

Ruth felt the intended dig. She also registered a suspicion that in fact the dean knew quite a bit about the current thinking. So did Ruth, but something told her not to let on about that. If Mitten-Kurz could play the innocent, so could she. Best to stand her ground as an indignant amateur. “Am I,” she asked, her voice once again quavering involuntarily, “am I not a stakeholder?”

“Well of course—”

“Do I not read? Do I not
think
about what I read?”

The dean had thrown up her hands now, and was smiling a tender, ironic smile in the direction of some imagined auditor. The
characters
we have here in our academic community, that smile said. The irritating characters who are nonetheless a vital
part
of that lively community.

“Stakeholders,” said Ruth, who knew she was speaking too loudly and no longer cared. “Are not all we readers stakeholders?” (Should that have been “us,” not “we”? She was stumbling over her own inverted syntax.) She tried again. “Why can't we all be stakeholders? In literature?” That didn't sound right either, but she'd be damned if she didn't get some use out of this appropriated trope, even though Ben, trapped in conversation across the room, had just shot her a look of horror. “Let me put it another way, Dean Mitten-Kurz. If academics are the only stake—”

But gentle fingers had closed around her upper arm. It was Marjorie Brautigan, her quiet across-the-street neighbor. “Ruth,” she whispered—Marjorie was an anxious, tentative, helpful soul. “People are starting to get hungry? I've been trying to get the table organized? I don't know where you keep things?”

The potluck. Ruth had completely forgotten. It seemed a new dispensation had begun because in the twinkling of an eye Mitten-Kurz had melted away and now Ruth was sitting on a stool in her disorderly kitchen drinking another glass of wine while Marjorie and—to her slightly numb surprise—Charles Johns were taking charge of the chaos of casseroles and baking dishes and salad bowls on the central island. They had transferred what was salvageable of her chicken chili into a microwavable glass bowl and left the blackened pot to soak in the sink. “Thank you,” she said to them a number of times as they methodically ferried the potluck offerings into the dining room, around which she could see that guests were beginning to cluster like deer at a salt lick. “Thank you so much. I can't tell you how grateful I am.”

Then she was sitting outside on the back steps among a group of four smokers, holding in her hand yet another glass of wine. She could be sure it was new because it was white, not red as the previous ones had been. One of her companions was Brad Sonenshein, a veteran graduate student famous for being unable to complete his dissertation. Another was his chronically exasperated girlfriend, Danielle, whose last name Ruth had forgotten. The third was a chunky young man with a head of glossy dark curls. She'd seen him before but had never caught either of his names. The fourth was Charles Johns.

The conversation was languid and intermittent, touching on such topics as Internet movie rentals and the new sushi stand in the Student Union food court. It was the smoking ritual that was the main thing, the communal ritual of inhale and exhale and the wavering room of smoke that housed them all in the heavy warm air. How could she have forsaken the company of smokers? It seemed to her that a certain necessary kind of human
intimacy had all but disappeared from the world, and that one of the few places it could still be found was among the members of these transient communities of exiles who huddle outside hospitals and office buildings and houses. The idea made her want to laugh, and so she did, deeply and inwardly but not inaudibly, because Charles Johns, who was standing apart from the group a little, began to laugh with her and also to cough.

She wanted to talk to him, to take advantage of the marvelous elision of transitions that drunkenness makes possible, but before she could edge over to where he stood, her attention was caught by the face of the chunky young man whose name she didn't know. He had turned so that the light caught his profile. Who was it he resembled, with that high forehead, those dark, liquid, exophthalmic eyes, those curls? Was it Beethoven? No. Was it Orson Welles? No. Then it came to her. “Byron,” she blurted out. “Do you know you look like Byron? George Gordon Lord Byron?” This was her first conversational offering, and apparently it was unacceptable. The young man gaped at her. His companions smirked. Charles Johns, standing out of the light, seemed to be toeing the ground with his shoe.

T
ime had elapsed and she was sitting on the wrought-iron bench among the weedy flagstones at the very back of the property. She had no glass of wine and though she couldn't remember exactly what series of events had caused her to be here and not where she'd been before, she had the impression she'd been left alone in a condition of disgrace. She felt desolate enough to weep.