It Will Come to Me (2 page)

It wasn't that Ruth wanted to promote adulterous liaisons between faculty members and graduate students. All she asked for was a world where the expectations of her childhood might be borne out—a world of background and foreground, light and shadow, up and down. One day when she was ten or eleven, a pair of lovers, both faculty members, both married to others, had come to her parents to confess their intention to run away together. They literally appeared on the doorstep after lunch. Ruth's parents led them into Ruth's father's study—he was a classics professor at a small New England college—where all afternoon the lovers petitioned for their blessing. Ruth's parents gave them a sympathetic hearing but refused to sanction their plan. There were intervals of shouting, a few blasts of anarchic laughter from the man, much quiet sobbing from the woman. Pressing her ear against the door, Ruth heard it all.

What she needed was a world in which such excitements were at least hypothetically possible. It wasn't that she wished to enter into them herself. That was in fact exactly what she didn't want. She was entirely dependent on other people to act it out for her, to provide her with something to observe, something to record, something to speculate about. She didn't require anything splashy; at this point she'd settle for a malicious glint in somebody's eye, a quick exchange of sympathetic glances. But here on this quiet Southern campus she was apparently living at the end of history. There was nothing to write about, no affairs, no scandals, no feuds of any but the pettiest kind. There were
misfortunes, more and more of them medical, but misfortune is not the stuff of novels, at least not the kind she wanted to write. There were a number of difficult people, certainly, but in most cases they were discreetly ignored. The expectation was that eventually, like tired children, they would learn to comfort themselves and go to sleep.

D
ull. Dull dull dull. Nirvana was dull. Potluck dinners were dull. Convocations were dull, but luckily she was excused from attending them. Lectures were almost always dull. The department picnic was so dull—four hours of desultory Softball in the blazing late-May sun—that she pleaded with Ben to be let out of it. She herself was dull. The other day Ben had run a finger along her cheek and told her she had a pleasant face. A pleasant face!

Of all the dull events in the academic calendar, the annual dinner honoring university chair holders was, in the end, the dullest. It was also acutely frustrating, because it got her hopes up. The chair-holder dinner was the only dress-up occasion of the year. It held the promise of a little glitter, a little transcendence, and every October, in spite of herself, she found herself looking forward to it. There was a cocktail hour with real bar drinks and white-jacketed waiters (they were undergraduates, but so what?) circulating with trays of hors d'oeuvres. Ruth genuinely enjoyed the early part of these evenings; she welcomed the chance to observe people from many different vantage points, all removed from the action. She liked to patrol the outskirts of the party on Ben's arm, pointing out to him the latitude with which some of the honorees and their spouses interpreted the term “black tie.”
Even so, there were always a few striking costumes to admire. Last year a quiet little wren of an Indian molecular biologist elicited gasps when she made her entrance in a midriff-baring white satin sari. And there were notables to be spotted—a very new dean, backed up against a wall by a pack of sycophants, or a recent hire in Anthropology with a shaved head and a tattooed neck. Not that there was anything particularly exciting about that: trendy academics were the tamest of exotics, utterly habituated to the academic preserve, declawed cheetahs paraded on jeweled leashes by the department chairs who acquired them.

Later, sitting at a round table in a partitioned-off section of a commons room, eating hard-to-identify morsels served in nests of frisée lettuce, she paid for her earlier pleasure. Typically she found herself seated next to a professor emeritus of engineering with two hearing aids. On her other side would be a mathematician, or an empty chair. Ben generally had better luck. His dinner partner was usually the conversation-starved wife of the engineer, who kept him occupied with anecdotes about her grandchildren.

Dessert was served and watery decaf was poured. The president of the university clinked his glass with his fork and bade various faculty members to come forward to receive praise and parchment scrolls. Then it was time to introduce the speaker, always an academic with a vaguely recognizable name and a long history of coziness with the president. “Now I don't want to tell tales about Old Joe here,” the beaming, swaying president would begin. He'd throw an arm around Old Joe's shoulders, launch into a story about Old Joe's paradoxical modesty, his self-effacing collegiality, his heroic integrity. He'd detail the many presidential commissions to which Old Joe had been named.

Then Old Joe (who was on alternate years a female) would
rise to speak. Last year's Old Joe had been a physicist, an academic of the spare, ascetic type, a perfect complement to the stout florid president. His topic was “The Role of the Arts in a Science-Oriented Curriculum.” Ruth looked down at the collection of empty plates from which she had just fed. How could she have left herself no solace? Not a sip of wine remained, and the waiter who had filled her glass repeatedly during dinner had gone off duty. She saw him leaning insouciantly against a wall, a napkin drapped over his forearm. Not a crumb of cheesecake either. Across the table some anorexic had abandoned hers after taking two bites.

All through Old Joe's address her consciousness flickered, but she came to for long enough to register his rhetorical strategy. He was plowing through the arts, detailing the ways that each “keeps us human.” She dropped off again, jolted awake at intervals by the muted detonation of one thuddingly inevitable phrase after another. Universal language. Vibrant tapestry. Enrich our spirit. But what really kept her from sleeping soundly through the after-dinner harrumphing and speechifying was an idiot voice that kept piping up inside her. What about me? this voice demanded. I know about
you
, Old Joe, but what about
me?

At last there came a gentle rain of applause. Ben was standing at her back, a hand on her shoulder. Groggy and enraged, Ruth shrugged it off. It was the polite clapping that infuriated her, and Ben's complicity. How could these people sit still for this? They should be hurling water glasses, overturning tables. It wasn't just that Old Joe had subjected them to a collection of dozy platitudes. He'd also insulted their intelligence with his assumption that the arts serve a merely restorative function. Not that her dinner partner would object. And not, come to think of it, that
she'd be any happier if the speaker had reversed his ordering of the importance of the arts and sciences. She was no arts booster. The ones she knew were irritating in their own right. There were many flavors of academic dullness; at this university it happened that the flintily dull taste of science predominated.

The guests rose. The president bellowed out his farewell and a reminder to guests to check under their chairs for the numbered sticker that matched the one on each table's floral centerpiece. Ruth won, as she often did. Clutching her prize she followed Ben through the crowd and out the door into the clarifying air of the evening. She had a throbbing white-wine headache, and on the way to the parking lot she hissed her complaints. Holding her arm tightly, Ben hustled her along, smiling tightly as they passed people they knew. Once the car doors were closed he turned to her and told her in a low steady voice how angry he was that she'd spoiled his pleasure in this occasion—which was, after all, intended to honor him. “You know what?” he said. “I don't like you when you drink.”

I
t was true. Drinking made her angry. That was more readily apparent now than it had been fifteen years ago when she was angry all the time. These days she was relatively calm. Since menopause had taken her off the wheel of premenstrual instability she no longer shrieked at Ben for breathing audibly or flossing his teeth in front of the television. In some ways she'd gotten crankier, but it was a broad, level, abstract kind of crankiness. She could see a long way, standing here on this high plain of middle-aged equanimity, and what she saw disappointed her.

The fact was that she actually drank less than she used to, or
at least less often, partly because now there was a physiological price to pay—heartburn, disturbed sleep, a flattened depression the following day. She knew a few women her age who had given up drinking entirely, but somehow it seemed essential to keep her hand in. Most nights she abstained entirely. But once a week, occasionally twice, she drank, always a little more than she should. She might drink a big martini, for example, followed by a beer. Or she might drink four glasses of wine. Or two beers followed by two glasses of wine, or the other way around. Many permutations, but always the same result: the genie of grandiosity was born in her chest. You're too intense, it told her, too original, too
brave
for these careful people. This meant Ben, so she picked a fight with him.

Time for another beer. She moved over to Ben and tapped him on the shoulder, holding up her plastic cup. “Get you one?” “Oh yes,” he said, pulled back into the scene, “yes please.” She turned inquiringly to the student, who flashed her a smile, held up his water bottle and mouthed, “I'm good.” No you're not, she muttered to herself as she descended the steps from the second-floor terrace, stepping gingerly over pairs of outstretched legs. You're just conventional.

But not quite gingerly enough, because her foot caught on something that threw off her balance enough to send her lurching down several steps with her arms outstretched, breaking her fall against one student's chest and another student's shoulder and finally the stone balustrade at the foot of the stairs. She took a moment to examine the abraded palms of her hands, then turned to see what it was she'd tripped over. A purse? A bike helmet? No. Apparently it was a baby, a very small one, strapped into a car seat. A company of young couples had risen as a body to surround
the baby's mother, who was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, cradling the baby in its car seat. Through a stand of heads and shoulders Ruth could quite clearly see the baby's face, an enraged knot of negative capability All was eerily silent for a long moment, and then a great wail rose up and out of it.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” Ruth cried, pushing up the steps against a tide of concerned murmurers. A few faces turned her way. “Please!” she called out. “Let me through. I want to see …” The baby was crying lustily now. “I'm so sorry,” Ruth repeated. “I just didn't see it. Is the baby OK?” The look the baby's mother gave her was not so much one of blame as of nonrecognition, as if she were unsure how to respond to a being that had yet to be classified and described. “I'm sorry,” said Ruth again, but now a move was afoot to shoo people away so that the mother and baby could make their way down the stairs to the access road and into a waiting car, driven by a weedy young man Ruth assumed was the father. In a moment the crowd had closed up around the hole the resolved event had left. There was nothing for it but to climb down the remaining steps and make her way around the corner, stonily ignoring what she took to be looks of disapproval, to the wide-planked wooden door that led down a final flight of stairs to the basement where the kegs were kept.

The barroom, if it could be called that, made her think of a festive antique submarine; it was a dark, smoky, air-conditioned cylinder with pale-green plaster walls, hung year-round with twinkling holiday lights. Down here was where the electricians drank, the maintenance men, the guys from buildings and grounds—the proles. A space alien happening to wander down from the upstairs aspect of Nirvana might conclude that he'd stumbled upon an entirely distinct species, like the underground Morlocks who
terrorize the gentle Eloi in H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine.
Up above among the academics, the rule was quiet and moderation; down here it was noise and excess. For every beer the academics drank the proles drank three. At a recent dinner party the topic of alcohol abuse downstairs at Nirvana had come up—Ruth, in fact, had been the one to raise it. One of Ben's colleagues made a prissy observation about how it certainly couldn't be good for anyone's health to drink that much, and a sociologist mumbled something about shortened time horizons.

The proles smoked and guffawed. When they threw back their heads in laughter she could see that they'd lost molars. They coughed wetly and hung on one another, stumbled a little as they dismounted their stools to head for the bathroom, flirted lewdly with the occasional stubby female who joined them at the bar. Whenever a young woman from above invaded the proles’ territory they fell awkwardly silent, but when Ruth appeared among them to order her three beers (one for Ben, one for her now, one for her later) they seemed hardly to register her existence. She was neither one thing nor the other to them, she supposed, neither daughter nor wife. Though once, a few years ago, a redheaded prole resting his head on the bar had peered up at her craftily and told her she looked like Carol Burnett.

Clutching her three beers to her chest, she shuffled across the floor Geisha-style, doing her best not to spill. Even so, several ounces sloshed down her front. She found a seat on a bench in a quiet corner where the chess players sometimes sat. These were representatives of yet another nonfaculty tribe, the computer technicians and audiovisual specialists, who signaled their class affiliation by wearing button-down short-sleeved shirts and hooking their cell phones to their belts. The walls around the
chess corner were rich with graffiti. There were the usual offers of sexual favors attributed to third parties, accompanied by the phone numbers of those third parties, the usual crude drawings of phalluses. There was also a kind of minimalist poem, written out vertically in spidery pencil: