It Will Come to Me (16 page)

Here he turned to face the faculty

“… to find ways to motivate students, to make them care, to sharpen their intellectual curiosity, to engage in the passionate pursuit of research, to roll back the frontiers of knowledge …”

Ben twisted his head to look back at his colleagues. Who among them, he asked himself, was actually engaged in rolling back the frontiers of knowledge? Many of the scientists were, he supposed. At least they were continually hustling for grant money. But had even the most productive of his colleagues in the humanities rolled back those frontiers as much as a millimeter? The irony was that despite the claims of trendy people in English and anthropology and the language departments, it was only the driest of the traditional scholars—the painstaking collectors of textual correspondences, for example—who made advancements, and those were immeasurably small, a snail's kind of progress. The rest of them, Ben included, were like carp in an ancient mossy pool. Some were great and some were small, but all of them swam in circles and that was as it should be.

Dreddle had read his concluding remarks and now he was releasing the audience, making brushing motions with his hands. “Get out of here,” he shouted over departing cheers and whoops. “Get out of the sun. Back over there in the reception tent. Get yourselves hydrated.”

Waiting his turn as the faculty unwound itself and filed back
into the provost's rotunda, Ben watched Ruth edge her way down a row of seats. He waved, but her view of him was blocked by the brim of her hat. He called to her—he couldn't bring himself to shout—but she failed to respond. Why was he so anxious? It wasn't as if he'd never see her again. She was on her way home, probably, or perhaps to the reception. Even so, if he'd been twenty years younger, or even ten, he'd have made the easy four-foot jump off the platform—some of his younger colleagues were doing that even now—and caught up with her.

O
n his way to the reception he stopped at the office to exchange his gown for the blazer he'd dropped off earlier. It was still locked, as it had been before the installation, but now the work-study student was sitting, or rather squatting, on the floor just outside the door, her long arms wrapped around her knees. “Rhoda,” he said. “Sorry you had to wait. Dolores is no longer with us. She's over in sociology now.”

“Oh no,” said Rhoda. She was a senior who had won a prize last spring for a superior honors project paper. “Since when?”

“Since yesterday,” said Ben, unlocking the door and flipping on the overhead lights.

“Why?” said Rhoda. She turned to look Ben in the eye, confident that any question she asked was a reasonable one and would be answered reasonably. Rhoda reminded him of a girl he'd known in his youth, a self-possessed countercultural type who cycled everywhere and grew her own herbs and kept a hand-bound journal. She too had been a squatter, not a sitter. He'd been involved with her on and off for a few years, a necessarily tentative business because this girl—Naomi, her name had been—was
so coolly independent. Then came Ruth, whose insecurity and moral glamour offered more opportunity for adhesion.

What would a life with Naomi have been like? She wouldn't have been interested in marriage, he supposed, but absent Ruth they might have fallen into some kind of domestic partnership—living in a solar-powered cabin in British Columbia, perhaps. Raising goats? Making cheese? Starting a cottage industry? At twenty-four he'd been in graduate school, not yet firmly bitten by academic ambition, still plastic enough to have actually embarked on some kind of “alternative” life if events had moved him in that direction. At sixty his sense of himself was so rigidly set that he found it difficult even to envision having led a life other than the one he actually had. That was the thing about aging, or rather that was
one
of the things about aging. It wasn't only that he couldn't—or didn't wish to—imagine the future: he also couldn't imagine the past.

“I don't really know why,” he said. “The word just came down.” That was telling her more than he should, but her quick comprehending nod reassured him. “You'll meet her replacement when she gets in.” (And where was Hayley? She'd been late already when he came by earlier.) “There's a pile of copying Dolores left you on the shelf over there.” And there were a number of things she'd left for Hayley as well, three of them urgent. The registrar should be prodded to change a number of inappropriate room assignments. The paperwork for medical insurance for the new crop of graduate students needed to be taken care of. She should call the bookstore about the texts for 201, the Historical Survey, which hadn't yet arrived.

Rhoda set about her copying with her usual efficiency. Letting himself into his own office, Ben saw that the red light on
the desk phone was blinking. He hung up his robe and sat down to listen to the messages. The first was from Hayley, as were the three that followed.

“Professor Blau? Hayley here. Hayley Gamache. Hope you're having a good day. Sorry to say I'll be a little delayed. I've got a bit of a situation here and I've got to deal with it before …” Here came a pause, followed by a thud and a muffled shout, followed by another silence, this one longer and more absolute, followed by a faint click.

“Professor Blau? Hayley again. Sorry we got cut off. I'm taking care of things just as fast as I can and I assure you …” Silence. “Just a moment, Professor. I'm asking for your patience. Just bear with me …” Silence. More silence. Click.

“Professor Blau? I'm on the freeway now? I'm just coming to the exit? I think it's the right exit? Twenty-three? I'm coming from the south? Is that right? You've got to get over so fast. Man oh man. Hold on a minute. Stay with me …” Ben heard the faint squeal of tires, scattered car horns, a sharp intake of breath and then more softly, as if at a little distance, “Oh my God. Some guy just dumped a mattress … A burning mattress …” Soft giggle. Click.

“Professor Blau? I'm at … I'm at Bellevista and Frontenard. Do you know where that is? I think I'm lost. I guess I could get back on the freeway but I'm not sure whether I got off too early or too late. Hang on a minute. I'm going to …”

A series of muted flutters and bumps followed, as of a cell phone tumbling to the carpeted floor of a car, and for the next few minutes Hayley's travels were documented only by obscure whooshes and creaks and changes in the background noise of the engine. Then the car radio was turned on, tuned to the eighties
station. Ben heard the last chorus of “I'm All Out of Love” followed by a bellowing ad for a car dealership he happened to know was not far from the freeway exit Hayley had just taken and then “The Tide Is High” by Blondie, which he remembered from his academic gypsy days, when he commuted every week between three universities in western and central Massachusetts. Not a bad song. Evidently Hayley liked it too, because she turned up the volume and sang along lustily.

H
e found Ruth sitting hatless and alone near the open flap in the air-conditioned tent, drinking something swarming with green flecks. “Mint julep?” he asked as he worked his way around the table toward her. Or rather shouted: the acoustics in here were like the Marabar caves.

“Mojito.”

He sat down. “What's a mojito?”

“It's like a mint julep, but it's made with rum.”

“What happened to the hat?”

“I left it in the car,” said Ruth, giving him a quick warning glance. She had reapplied her makeup, or some of it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I can't be here? Why shouldn't I be here?”

Ben reached over and took her hand. “I meant to say I'm glad to see you.” And in fact he was. “How about we drop it?” he added.

She turned away for a moment, no doubt to hide whatever calculations her face might betray. But her hand remained in place under his and that gave him hope that they might skip the actual playing out of the fight that always started with the move Ben had just made—the no-fault peace offer—and continued with Ruth refusing it and demanding an apology and Ben countering with a threat that his proposal wouldn't stand much longer and Ruth stipulating that an apology was necessary if he wanted to demonstrate that he'd taken responsibility for whatever he'd said or done and Ben provocatively insisting that he didn't think that what he'd said or done was wrong and therefore he couldn't apologize and that the best they could do was to agree to disagree, and so on. This was one of the secondary fights that often followed a major, primary fight, and it was a standard item in their repertoire. Ben always thought of the old joke about the joke convention, where everyone knows the jokes so well that all a joke-teller has to do is shout out a number: Eighty-four! After thirty years of marriage, he and Ruth had learned their fights by heart; to enact them had begun to seem less and less necessary. This might be wisdom of a sort, he supposed. Or maybe just exhaustion. Not that it always stopped them.

He stood and extended his arm to Ruth, who rose to her feet rather hesitantly and took it. Together they embarked on a counterclockwise tour of the reception. Right away it was clear that the Dreddle administration was not afraid of a little expense. This wasn't the usual food-service spread—grapes and one-inch squares of cheese and one jug each of respectably cheap red and white wine. This was the top-of-the-line level of catering, heretofore reserved for donor and alumni dinners and the president's
suite in the football stadium. Nor was the food laid out prosaically in aluminum bins on steam tables, as had always been the case even at the annual chair-holders’ gala. Stations had been set up around the tent serving carved meats and smoked salmon, customized omelets, sushi, artisanal cheeses, elaborate desserts. Waiters—real ones, not undergraduates—circulated, some offering hors d'oeuvres, some flutes of champagne and mojitos. Ben took Ruth's arm and spoke loudly into her left ear, the one without a minimal hearing loss. “So is this an improvement?” he asked. “Is this maybe not quite so boring?”

Ruth shrugged and smiled. Ben stopped a waiter. “Can I get a beer?” he asked. The waiter smiled apologetically, took a deep breath. “We have Fat Tire, sir. We have Redhook Ale. We have Anchor Steam. We have Guinness. We have Sam Adams. We have—” “Anything,” said Ben, “a beer. Just a beer.” Tall, sardonic Josh Margolis from political science clamped a hand on his shoulder and shouted into his ear, “A beer? Just a beer? Can't you outgrow your proletarian tastes? It's a new era. Try a mojito. It's Dreddle's favorite drink. No? How about you, Ruth?” Ruth needed no persuasion to try another. “So,” said Margolis, “are we ready for enhanced leadership?” Margolis was barely forty, ambitious, served on multiple committees. It was rumored that he let the provost win at tennis. On the other hand, he was the only academic Ben knew who had spent a year at the Kennedy School at Harvard without incurring a swollen head. This, and his habit of making undercutting remarks out of the side of his mouth, inclined Ben to like him.

Ruth was tugging at his sleeve. They moved on, fording their way through the growing crowd. Here was the elegant basketball
coach, surrounded by a coterie of well-heeled black Spanglerites. His last few seasons had been lackluster, and everyone said his days were numbered. And there, sitting a little glumly at a table with his handsome worn-out-looking wife and five small children, all of them addressing large pieces of cake with plastic forks, was the new, very Christian football coach, whose last season had been such a surprising success that it was said perhaps he really did have a special relationship with the Almighty. And there was Lee Wayne Dreddle himself in mid-anecdote, surrounded by an element Ben had never seen at a university function before, at least in such numbers. These were Spangler society people, florid oilmen and their sleekly muscled wives, all of whom seemed to have been retrofitted with impossibly slender and bosomy eighteen-year-old torsos.

And here, veering unexpectedly into their path, was Roberta Mitten-Kurz and her husband. “Ah, Ruth,” said Mitten-Kurz, pointedly ignoring Ben, “just the woman I was looking for. I've been waiting for your call. I'm hoping so much you'll say yes.”

“Ah, what?” said Ruth, cocking her head. “Say yes to what?”

“Didn't Ben tell you?” No need for Mitten-Kurz to shout; her stentorian voice was easily audible. “Didn't he give you the letter?”

“Sorry,” said Ben, addressing Ruth but allowing his guilty gaze to slide in Mitten-Kurz's direction. “I meant to. I guess I left it in my other jacket. The pocket.”

“That was really unfortunate,” said Mitten-Kurz, glaring at Ben. “There was a time-sensitive element to that letter. If you have a moment now, Ruth, I can explain.” She took Ruth's arm and pulled her aside, leaving Ben with a look a mother might
give the molester of her child as he was led from the courtroom in shackles.

Bobby Mitten-Kurz was a retired high-school-ring salesman, an amiable fellow about a third the size of his wife. Ben knew him a little from the locker room at the gym, where he played racquet-ball and Bobby used the cardiovascular equipment. Outside that sweaty fraternal context—Ben could bring to mind an image of Bobby's sizable manhood, startling because he was otherwise so physically unimpressive—the two of them had little in common. “Still working out?” he asked.

“Not like I was working out a few years ago,” said Bobby ruefully. “I was a true believer for a while. Now I've kind of let it slide.” He patted his small potbelly deploringly. “You still play racquetball?”

“Not much,” said Ben. “I got lazy too, I guess.” The two of them stood silently, each smiling tenderly at his shoes, until the waiter approaching with Ben's beer offered a distraction. “Whew,” Ben said, taking a long draw on the bottle. “I've been waiting for this. I'm not a champagne drinker. Not a mojito drinker either.” Bobby nodded noncommittally More silence. “Do anything exciting this summer?” Ben hazarded.

“As a matter of fact we did,” said Bobby, looking up and smiling shyly. “We took a trip to Nova Scotia. We're celebrating our fortieth.”