Robert B. Parker (13 page)

I said, “Hello, Jennifer.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“It is good to see you again.” My voice was steady and calm, far from me, off in some rational distance, proceeding in its rational way.

“Boonie,” she said.

“The very one,” my voice said.

“Boonie, my God, Boonie.” She took my hand suddenly and leaned over and kissed me on the mouth lightly, and pulled back. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

I nodded.

“You son of a bitch,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Round the world,” I said, “and I’m going again.”

“I want to hear,” she said, her face now intent upon me, as it had been upon the chairman. “I want to hear about everything.”

“I’ll be happy to tell you,” I said.

“We’ll have lunch,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Here,” I said. “I’m a student.”

“My God, so am I.”

Her face was a little better than it had been when she was twenty-one. It knew more things. It was not—and the thought squeaked along my nerve lengths—the face of a virgin, for instance. Nor was it, as much as it had been, the face of a child. It contained that same sense of charge, of kinesis, of distilled and radiant femaleness that it had contained when I first saw it, but it had become more elegant.

“Here?” I said. “You’re a student here?”

“Yes, I’m working on my M.A. and I have an assistantship. I teach two sections of freshman English.”

She was right here. I hadn’t been lucky often in the last eight years, but the luck I’d had was mortal. It was luck that Tom Hernandez was hosing down his sidewalk in front of the restaurant. It was luck that Jennifer had gone back to school and here. Where we’d be near, where I had room to work. My hands felt like they were shaking,
but I looked at the one that held the sherry and they weren’t, they were steady.

She had her hands on her hips and her head cocked looking at me. “Boonie,” she said, “you look wonderful. Whatever you’ve been doing it’s certainly been good for you.”

“Maybe,” I said. “When do you want to have lunch?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Faculty Club.”

“Will they let me in?”

“Are you a teaching assistant?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a sophomore.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll meet you out front. I have a card as a T.A. and a card as John’s wife.”

“Noon?”

“I’ll be there. Boonie, there’s so much to talk about.”

“I hope so,” I said.

I had a studio apartment on Revere Street and that night I went over my outfit for the next day. I’d never been to a faculty club. But I’d seen a lot of faculty. My wardrobe was sufficient. I polished my cordovans, washed and dried and ironed my chinos, and went over my blue blazer with Scotch tape to get off any lint there might be. I had two clean shirts: blue and white. I chose the white one and put it out on the bureau. Tie selection was easy. I had a black knit and blue and red rep. I took the rep. I tucked a pair of dark blue socks into the cordovans, and put them on the floor at the foot of the bed. Then I stood back and surveyed, dressing myself in my imagination and, I realized, making slight indications of the dressing motions as I went through it: socks, pants, shirt, shoes, tie, coat. Belt. I had forgotten a belt. I had only one, a dark brown alligator belt. I got it from the closet and hung it over the hanger throat where my pants and blazer were. A pocket handkerchief would be a touch of class, but I didn’t have one. I checked my wallet. It
would be awkward if I couldn’t afford the lunch. There were nine dollars in my wallet. I got out the checkbook and wrote a check for cash. I’d cash it at the bursar’s office after class. Tomorrow I had a nine and a ten. I’d be free at eleven.

I checked out the wardrobe again, then I got undressed and read
Piers Plowman
until I got too sleepy. Reading
Piers Plowman
does not impede sleepiness. When I put
Piers Plowman
down and turned off the light I was sleepy but I couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t expected to and I didn’t fret. I lay as quietly as I could and kept my mind as empty as I could. I thought about what I’d do if I had all the money I wanted. And what I’d eat if I were to create my absolute perfect menu, and what kind of car I’d drive, and what kind of house I’d buy, and what kind of wardrobe I’d create. I thought about the all-time greatest ballplayers by position (I spent time deciding if Stan Musial would be a first baseman or an outfielder.) The all-time greatest ballplayer poll stopped somewhere in the mid-nineteen fifties because I didn’t know anything about the players in the second half of the nineteen fifties. After Jennifer had married John Merchent, I’d lost half a decade. I moved on, listing the ten most desirable women I could think of, but once again those lost years hampered me, and always there was the steady tension that centered in my solar plexus. The night seemed shorter than it should have, had I been continuously wakeful. Morning came.

I brushed my teeth carefully, showered for a long time, and shaved closely, lathering twice and going over it again. I dried my hair by rubbing it with a towel, and toweled the rest of me dry. I sat on my bed, put on my
dark blue socks, stood up, unwrapped the white shirt from its laundry package, and put it on. I buttoned it from the top button down, and then put on my pants, right leg, then left leg. I tucked in the shirttail, smoothing it all around, and buttoned the pants and zipped the fly. I slid my belt through the loops and buckled it and lined up the buckle with the line of my shirtfront and the line of my fly. Then, using a shoehorn, I slipped into my shoes, and tied them with one foot on the floor and one foot resting on the edge of the bed. I tied the tie in a simple four-in-hand knot and shaped the knot after I had drawn it tight. With my thumb and forefinger I smoothed the roll in the button-down collar. My hair was dry. I had a very short haircut so it dried quickly. Looking in the bathroom mirror, I made a part with my comb and then brushed the hair. Back out in my bed-sitting room, I took the blazer off its hanger and slipped into it. I didn’t have many clothes, but what I had were good. The blazer was all wool with a full tattersall lining.

In the bathroom mirror I tried the jacket buttoned and unbuttoned and decided I’d arrive with it buttoned and unbutton it as we sat down. I held a small tietack against my tie and decided instead to tuck the shorter end inside the label loop.

I didn’t have a topcoat, so I went with no coat and shivered some waiting for the elevator at Charles Street Circle. But I’d spent too much time on my appearance to set it off with an army surplus field jacket. (Not mine. Mine had disappeared long ago during the years of exile somewhere west.)

I took notes in my medieval literature course, but automatically, listening only with my hand and pencil,
and my U.S. history class went by unrecorded. After class I left my books on a windowsill in Memorial Hall and cashed my check at the bursar’s. I had fifty minutes until noon. It was too cold to walk outside. So I began systematically to pace the corridors in the Student Union, ascending the stairs at the end of each corridor and walking back on the next floor in the other direction. I wanted to smoke. I hadn’t in more than a year. I wouldn’t now. I kept walking. In my head the refrain to the Four Freshman version of “Take the A Train” reiterated without volition, over and over and over.
Control
, I thought.
Control. You’ve been shot at in Korea and you’re afraid of this? Control
. The faculty club was on the top floor of the Student Union. At five of twelve I was waiting outside the door. In the hall, near the elevator. I knew she’d be late. She was always late. But I wasn’t. And I wouldn’t be.

Across the table from me Jennifer ate a crouton from her salad. She had always eaten like that. If she were given a plate of peas she’d eat one at a time.

“Have you missed me, Boonie?” Her gaze was straight at me as she said it.

“Yes,” I said.

“There have been a lot of times when I wished you were around,” she said. “To talk to. To help. To explain things. You were always so good at that.”

I nodded. The dining room was large-windowed and bright with the winter sun. The walls were Wedgwood blue with white trim. The floor was carpeted in beige, and the tablecloths were pink.

“Have you been doing wonderful, exciting things, while you’ve been gone?” Jennifer said.

I smiled. “I don’t know. A lot of what I’ve been doing since your wedding is a little vague. I was drunk early and often.”

She nodded. Her eyes steady on my face. “You were drunk at the wedding,” she said.

“That was amateurish,” I said. “I got much more professional as I matured. By the time I got west of Chicago I was a major league drunk.”

“How are you now?”

“I’m not a drunk anymore.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not that much to say. I worked at different things, moved around the country, ended up down-and-out in L.A., and decided to make a comeback.”

The weight of her interest was delicious. I remembered the department chairman yesterday, and all the men I’d seen her talk with. I knew that everyone she spoke with felt this way, but it was still as dulcet and entrancing as if it were only me. And at the moment, it was. She wasn’t calculating in that. She really was interested and she really did concentrate on whatever, or whoever, was before her. What I had come to understand in the years of booze and sorrow was that the impact of her personality created in her no sense of obligation. She could entrance people and so she did. It was a power she used neither for good nor evil, but for the simple, unexamined pleasure of its exercise. I came to understand that before I knew I understood it. There was no Eureka, merely one day I noticed that I had known this for a time. She loved being central. There was nothing malign in this, or even selfish. It was simply a need and she fulfilled it with no more thought than one would give to drinking a glass of water. I wondered if there was more. If thirty-year-old Jennifer was different. There would be time to find out.

“How has it been going for you, my love,” I said.

She nodded her head repeatedly. “Good, good. I have a daughter, Suzanna—we call her Sue Sue.”

“Sue Sue?”

“Yes. It is awfully beach-clubby, isn’t it? Her father started calling her that right after she was born. She’s almost four now. We waited until John got his degree.”

“You been going to school long?”

“No, this is the first year. I was a housewife till then, but I was getting stir crazy.” She shrugged. “So John helped me get a teaching assistantship. I love it. After eight years, I just love it.”

“And the kid?”

“John’s mother looks after her during the day. She and Sue Sue are close and they have servants, of course, too.”

“Never thought John would go into teaching,” I said.

“No. That is a surprise. His brother went into the bank, but John wanted to be a professor. There’s family money, of course. I don’t know how people do it who have to live on a professor’s salary. But John really enjoys the students. I guess banking never excited him.”

“Still in Marblehead?”

“Yes, right next to John’s parents.”

“How’s that work out?”

“Oh,” Jennifer shrugged, “not as badly as it might. Margaret, my mother-in-law, is very handy for Sue Sue, and all. She’s kind of bossy and full of advice. You know the kind. Often wrong but never uncertain? When we were first married and John was getting his Ph.D. at Harvard she came to our Cambridge apartment one day when we weren’t there and rearranged my furniture.”

“How’s John feel about her?”

“Oh, he says I shouldn’t let it bother me. If we disagree, he tries to mediate—he’s very reasonable, you know. His field is the eighteenth century. He’s always the man of reason. If Margaret and I have an argument, he judges the thing on its merits.”

“She’s wrong,” I said.

“Margaret?” Jennifer looked startled.

“Yeah. If she disagrees with you, she’s wrong. You’re right. You are much too wonderful to be wrong.”

Jennifer laughed her thrilling laugh. “Oh, Boonie. It’s good to have you around again. Can we be friends?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s one of the reasons I came back.”

“Like we were? You really were the best friend I ever had.”

“You were that to me,” I said.

“And you really were, still are, like nobody else. I still haven’t met anyone like you.”

“And I was just a kid then,” I said. “Wait till you see how much better I’ve become. You may tear off all your clothes and pounce on me.”

“Gee,” Jennifer said, “we could never eat at the faculty club again.”

The sexual reference made my throat tighten. I had to force my voice out, but it sounded normal enough once out. I thought of her and Merchent waiting before they had the baby, taking precautions, and having intercourse carefully, sleeping together each night, being naked together often. I thought of the casual and intimate possession that people develop when they’ve been married a few years, a possession that excludes the rest of the world, that sets them apart regardless of their passion for
each other, that marks
us
and differentiates from
them
. It was almost too much. It almost overwhelmed me. Almost drove me backward into the despair I’d worked so fiercely at overcoming. For a moment everything swam in front of me, and ran together, and I clasped my hands beneath the table as hard as I could, swelling the muscles in my arms and then my chest and back.
Control
. I had come this far. I was with her. Talking of being friends. I could look at her, and if I reached out and touched her, she wouldn’t flinch. “Time is but the stream I go fishing in.” The time she’s been with Merchent, the kid, the press of nakedness, the life they led, was downstream from where I fished. The stream kept going and the water I fished in was always new. When I had her again, the others who had had her wouldn’t matter. Except as obstacles they didn’t matter now.

In a classroom in the science building there were thirteen whites and three Negroes. All the whites except me wore lapel buttons that said
HONKIES FOR INTEGRATION
. I was for integration, but I wasn’t sure that we sixteen were going to get it done.