It Will Come to Me (3 page)

Sitting here, an unobserved observer, she took note of the scene: the
LET'S OBEY THE LAW, PEOPLE
sign painted in bold letters on the tented ceiling above the bar; the proles swarming around it like piglets on a sow; the two aging, enigmatic hippie proprietors manning the taps. This was exactly the kind of vantage point Ruth instinctively sought: a wall at her back, a pocket of shadow in which to take shelter, an unobstructed view. She wished she could stay down here all evening, enjoying the cool darkness and the tranquilizing thud and shake of the jukebox.

An idea came to her. Perhaps here, right here in downstairs Nirvana, she'd found the material she'd been looking for in vain upstairs, the elemental stuff, the mother lode of passion and conflict. And wouldn't it be interesting to make a study of the proles, to investigate their lives. She could see the research stretching out ahead through the fall and winter months, and then in the spring she could start the actual writing. But could she really sustain this vision of the proles as embodiments of Dionysian vitality?
How much passion and conflict can be generated in a life spent waxing and buffing cafeteria floors or driving a gnome cart? She felt a little ashamed to catch herself entertaining such a fatuous notion. The proles worked harder than she could imagine. It was unbecoming in her to envy them the solace of boozy camaraderie, to entertain fantasies about infiltrating their society.

And besides, she'd never get up the nerve to approach them—not unless she drank a very great deal. And what would happen then? The last time she'd spent a lot of time in a bar was more than thirty years ago, before she was married. She and a friend had rented a cabin in the Adirondacks. They fell into a habit of spending evenings at a lakeside roadhouse, where the locals bought them round after round of beer and told them tales of unfaithful wives and children lost to custody disputes. Boredom and curiosity had been the rationale for this early fieldwork, and the result was that she was backed into several dark corners and several tongues were thrust down her throat. That wouldn't happen now, would it? Not that she'd want it to, but perhaps it was the price of access. She hadn't appreciated then how universally accepted a passport her nubility was. She saw that only in retrospect, as she was seeing so many things. How dim she'd been then, how unable to assess herself! If telepathic communications could be directed backward through time, she'd whisper a message to the Ruth of 1972, the one who used an army-surplus shell canister as a purse and wore her luxuriant auburn hair in a badly maintained long shag:
You are sexually adequate.

She'd heard it said that you don't feel old on the inside, and it was true. She didn't feel old or even middle-aged. Instead, she felt every age she'd ever been—every age, that is, except the age she was. Her variously aged selves were so active within her that
she pictured herself as a kind of human lava lamp; the glowing mass of self-stuff continually heaving and stretching into twin and triplet blobs and then into great bubbling litters which reconvened and merged once again, if only briefly, into one. What was the age of that reconstituted self? About thirty-four.

It cost her an effort to remember that the proles were not older than she was, as those men at the roadhouse had been. They were not even her contemporaries. They were younger—a lot younger. Hard living and poverty and self-neglect had aged them at a much faster rate than the academics, but the fact was that she had fifteen years on most of them, twenty years on some. Yes, she was neither daughter nor wife. If anything, she was mother, but not the kind of mother they'd have in mind. If she was mother she was a tall, angular, bluestocking kind of mother who wore a lot of black—a hag, in other words. But no, she wasn't a hag. Nothing so definite as that. She was simply unplaceable, and hence invisible.

C
arrying a full plastic cup of beer in one hand and a slightly less full one in the other, she climbed the basement stairs and rejoined her own kind. The cast of characters who had witnessed the baby-upending incident had been replaced. She was once again merely an arty-looking faculty wife, the object of quick, mildly curious glances, mostly from women assessing her clothes and jewelry. Climbing the steps, she saw that Ben and the student were gone. They'd been replaced by two preteen girls who sat front to back and cross-legged on the landing at the head of the steps, one French-braiding the other's hair. She suspected they were the children of somebody she knew. Should she greet them? As she registered this small social worry, a larger anxiety
displaced it. Where
was
Ben? It wasn't like him to disappear. Why hadn't he come looking for her? Was he angry? Fed up in a final kind of way? Had he never existed at all and had their thirty years of marriage been a hallucination, as in the plot of a made-for-TV movie she'd watched the other night when she couldn't sleep? She stopped, turned in a slow circle to look for Ben, drained the slightly less than full beer in one long pull.

She walked up the exterior steps to take up her old post on the terrace by the stone railing, the backs of her knees aching. It was dusk now and the air had cooled. The hazard lights of the cars parked along the inner campus loop made a long blinking chain and the branches of the big live oak overhanging the chemistry building rustled faintly in the evening breeze. Looking down, she could see that the gathering had swelled to half again its earlier size. Something had shifted; the change in light had become a change in tone. The faces of its constituents obscured by darkness, the crowd below her had taken on a sluggish malevolence; it seemed to Ruth that it was beginning to seethe and shudder like water coming to a boil. In her present dilated and paranoid state it was easy to envision the graduate students as a zombie army or a convocation of pod people. She could see them trickling in from all directions, appearing from out of the shadows at the summons of the Hive Mind, assembling to take up torches and stagger stiffly across the campus and out into the world, where they would find new campuses in which to take root and propagate.

Where was Ben? She wanted to tell him about this fantasy. He would find it amusing, and she would take comfort in his willingness to point out the obvious—that of course the graduate students were not undead but living human beings with emotions and aspirations. She would say yes, but that was just her point.
They were people, young people. So where were the extremes in their natures? They were a stunningly docile bunch. It was as if they'd been deprived of some vitamin since birth—or, more likely, given too much of one. Not only did they not compete with one another; they seemed to do their best not to distinguish themselves. Their idiosyncrasies were superficial—trademark hats, nicknames, the occasional tattoo. Their entertainments were childlike, green beer on St. Patrick's Day, heart-shaped cakes on Valentine's. The girls liked to bake and tended to gain weight. The boys watched sports and moped.

They were utterly unlike the wolfish, haggard, chain-smoking graduate students of Ruth's youth. She found it hard to remember that the ones who belonged to Ben were studying philosophy; to all appearances they might have been working on MBAs or degrees in physical therapy. They were very kind to one another, much more so than her own peers had been, and touchingly polite to their elders. But where was their complexity? Where was their angst? And—this was really baffling—where was their lust? It seemed to Ruth that they shied away from one another sexually. Ben disagreed; he was quite sure they got up to plenty because, he said, young people always do. You just want them to, said Ruth—you wish
you'd
gotten up to plenty. But they won't oblige you. They're too careerist.

You could find them in the library at all hours. Their dedication to their goals was steady and dogged, but what drove them was a desire for security, not distinction. They were working for a place of their own in the academic preserve—that, and tenure. They wanted to be marsupials, creatures with no natural enemies who could look forward to living out their days in absolute safety. The graduate students were good children. It was unfair
to compare them to zombies. If anyone was undead it was their professors.

The graduate students were anxious. Ruth could sympathize with that. But it was hard to tell what motivated some of Ben's colleagues. Their emotional repertoire was extremely limited, the spectrum ranging from blank contentment to donnish amusement to agitated peevishness. They were peaceable souls—apart from the occasional mystifying temper tantrum—and utterly undefended.

Twice, over the years of Ben's career at this university, a throwback had appeared, a creature with a full set of claws and teeth and an inclination to use them. The first, a Simone Weil scholar in the Religion Department, sued the university when she failed to receive a prize. In the process, she publicly accused two of her male colleagues of sexual improprieties. The result was a cascade of marital breakups, some directly traceable to the accusations, others less so. That had happened twenty years ago, the university's last major scandal, remembered now by almost nobody. The Weil scholar, her lank blond hair gone gray, continued to walk the corridors, though she wasn't given a lot of committee assignments.

More recently a Kant specialist in Ben's department defamed his colleagues to the dean when his demands for a large raise and a reduced teaching load went unmet by the chair. The department's reaction—Ben's too, though he raged privately—was to roll onto its back and expose its belly. Ben and his colleagues humored this man, whose name was Dwight Fremser, worked around him. They managed this without complaints, without spiteful asides; their forbearance was extraordinary. Eventually he left to take a chair at Emory. Ben had just taken over as chair and Ruth had
to host a farewell dessert party for the Fremsers, who were sweet-toothed teetotalers. She and Ben had the worst fight of the second half of their marriage that night. This had happened only three years ago, but already the department's collective memory had gone dim. Academics, it seemed, have trouble holding the idea of human evil before their minds. By now, the era of Dwight was only a Bad Time Long Ago.

A small flurry of activity pulled her eyes to the sundial plaza across the access road. Under a streetlamp, two small boys were bedeviling a golden retriever with sticks. The scene reminded Ruth of one of those side panels in an illuminated medieval manuscript, meant to portray a minor saint undergoing some incidental scourging. “Bad boy!” they shrieked in unison. “Bad boy!” The dog sank slowly onto its haunches, its tail still thumping. The children continued; the dog ducked its big head to one side and winced. Ruth clutched her ears. It was cruel! Somebody should
do
something. Tears sprang to her eyes and a noise escaped her that might have been a theatrical scream of protest, but was in fact a creaking groan audible only to herself. As if in answer a young woman in khaki shorts—presumably the children's mother—trotted across the street and took them by their wrists, leaning down to remonstrate with them softly as she led them away from the dog, which shook itself briefly and trotted off, the stupid resilient thing.

B
en's hand was on her shoulder. “Look who I found,” he said.

Ruth turned. It was Ben's colleague Bob Bachman and his wife, Barbara, and no wonder he sounded triumphant. The Bachmans
were not often seen at Nirvana. They were chamber-music devotees, gallery-opening attenders. Discovering them here was like sighting a pair of flamingos in New Hampshire. Ruth gave her damp eyes a quick swipe with the back of her wrist and extended her cheek to be kissed.

The Bachmans were a very small couple who lived in a large house with the youngest two of their four very good children. Bob was a historian of science. Ruth had nothing against him. Barbara had trained as a psychologist, but had given up her profession when her children were born. Recently she'd taken a part-time position as a researcher in the Medical School.

The Bachman family had never owned a television. The Bach-man children, whose names were Maya, Noah, Joel, and Ariel, were exemplary; their science-fair projects were the stuff of legend. They all played stringed instruments and every November the Bachmans rented folding chairs and invited the humanities faculty to a family musicale in their living room. For years, Ruth had been waiting for one of the children to manifest signs of mental illness, but in abrogation of all the laws of action and reaction, it hadn't happened. Not only were all four of them accomplished; they were sane and happy and genuinely nice, and Ruth was left to chew the bitter cud of envy and resentment. The bill for her own apparently incorrect child-rearing practices had come due. She'd been wrong, and even if twelve-year-old Joel Bachman was picked up for cocaine possession, she would not be vindicated.

“What brings you here?” she asked, and was relieved to hear that it sounded like a plausible conversational gambit. “Well,” said Bob, “do you remember Frames for Less?” He was a confiding, vole-like man, famous for the puzzling way he began at the periphery and moved elliptically toward the center of any thought.
Barbara was equally famous for the vigorous way she stepped in to make sense of his orphic utterances. “We're meeting an old student of Bob's and then we're having dinner at that new Afghani place where Frames for Less used to be. Can you join us?”

Ben gave their excuses—tiredness, teaching day tomorrow, casserole defrosting. Barbara registered these by nodding once, emphatically. Then, pivoting on her heel, she turned toward Ruth, effectively forcing her to step back a few inches. Barbara was one of those people with no regard for the rules of personal space. Tiny though she was, she stood her ground so squarely that in her presence Ruth felt weak and wavy, like some pallid underwater plant. “So,” Barbara said, crossing her arms in front of her chest, “Ruth. Looking well. Up to what?”

“Not a lot,” said Ruth. Name, rank, and serial number was her rule with Barbara, but sometimes she found herself saying more than she had intended and then, to explain or qualify the too much she had said, she felt compelled to say still more, giving Barbara material to exploit in future interrogations.