Robert B. Parker (17 page)

A college crew swept by on the river, the oars moving in muscular unison, the coach following in a small red speedboat yelling instructions through a megaphone.

“I got my B.A. for somebody else,” Jennifer said. “But the Ph.D. was for me.”

“If nothing else,” I said, “it certifies endurance.”

Jennifer nodded. “It’s more,” she said. “It means I can proceed as Jennifer Grayle instead of Mrs. John Merchent.”

“It’s the way I prefer to think of you,” I said.

She smiled. “The Ph.D. is certification. But in fact, I may have learned more from you, Boonie, than I did from the Ph.D. In a way, you’ve brought me up. I had a chance to see in you things I see in no one else. You remain what you are. You are true to yourself.”

I smiled. Jennifer shook her head impatiently.

“I know that’s a cliché, true to yourself, but I don’t care. You are. You don’t betray what you are because you want something from someone or you are afraid of someone. Most men I know, and women, really do lead lives of quiet desperation. You don’t. Because you don’t I know that it’s possible not to.”

I knew if I pointed it out to her she’d see the irony of that, that she’d remember that my life was a single-minded desperation. But it would have led us to an area we tacitly avoided, an area too uncertain for us, where I, as much as she, feared the terrain and the consequences. So I nodded and shrugged. I knew what she meant. In a
sense she was right. My one consuming desperation eliminated all others. Caring only for her, I was free to care about nothing else.

“You taught me by being with me, Boonie, and by being what you are. And by being …” Jennifer seemed briefly to search for the right word. Then she made a small laugh. “I’m so taken with my new intellectual eminence that I’m searching for original phrases. The hell with it. What I mean is that you are completely steadfast. Watching you manifest that has been of more service to me than I can say.”

“This should probably all be saved for Valentine’s Day,” I said. “But I have learned as much from you as you ever did from me. I’ve learned that my definitions, my rules, my certainties, are not universal, that feeling something strongly doesn’t make it right. You are good, and when you do things that I wouldn’t do, they can’t be bad. They can only be different.”

We stopped walking and Jennifer turned toward me and we looked at each other.

“Each of us seems to have been able to offer just what the other needed,” she said.

Beyond the point where we stood the river turned and deepened, flowing under trees that darkened its surface. As the channel narrowed and the water hastened in its rush, twigs that had floated placidly past us began to dance upon the surface, tossed by the compressed energies beneath them.

“Yes,” I said. “I have noticed that too.”

I had begun to excerpt small pieces from my journal and polish them and send them out to small intellectual magazines that paid you in free copies. The magazine published several of them and I was encouraged. They were not stories really, they were small, fragmentary set pieces whose meaning, if there was any, resided in the language itself. One reviewer called them sketches and said that my style was “spritely though not without error.”

Jennifer’s doctoral dissertation,
Jane Austen and the Function of Being Female
, was published, slightly revised, by the Wesleyan University Press and got some rather good reaction in the scholarly journals. Some of the feminist press liked it too, but some found it lacking in doctrinal purity.

“It’s what you get for using big words,” I said. We were having coffee in the faculty section of the Taft student cafeteria. Jennifer smiled.

“I don’t like it, Boonie. I hate being criticized.”

“Who likes it?”

“You’ve had criticism on those sketches you published. You don’t seem to mind.”

I shrugged. “It’s publish or perish,” I said. “If they keep me from perishing, I am willing to take some intellectual abuse in journals of limited circulation.”

“But it must make you angry sometimes, or hurt your feelings.”

“At a low level,” I said. “But not very deeply and not very long. I didn’t write it for them, you know? I like what I write. If you like it too, it’s unanimous.”

She shook her head. Around us the students ate and studied and read
The Boston Globe
. The smell of coffee and steam-table food dominated the other smells: tobacco, perfume, the disinfectant soap that they mopped the floors with. The noise was mostly boisterous student sounds. Profanity, the current phrases, the occasional blare of a portable radio. The service was mostly Styrofoam and plastic, so there was little of the clatter that you often hear in a cafeteria.

“That would never be enough for me,” Jennifer said. “Just your approval and my own. I need a larger audience. I need to be liked and admired by a lot of people.” She paused and sipped her coffee. “In fact, I tend to get angry at people who don’t like me or people who don’t like what I do. I hate disapproval and I am inclined to take it personally.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” I said. “I think you’re never wrong.”

“Never?”

“Well, hardly ever. I didn’t fully approve of that Dear John you sent me in Korea.”

A busboy in a white coat pushed a clean-up cart among the tables, cleaning off the napkins and Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons and torn wrappers from sugar and Sweet ’n Low. At our table he stopped and swept our unfinished cups into his plastic trash and wiped the table clean with a damp towel. Jennifer and I looked at each other. The kid moved on, oblivious to us.

“Seemed a little late to protest,” I said.

“Boy’s probably preoccupied with other things,” Jennifer said.

“Musing,” I said, “passionately on the potential for scoring some grass after work.”

I went and got two more cups for us and brought them back to the table. Jennifer was looking at her lecture notes. She had that capacity to work in three-minute bursts if need be, to accomplish something in the smallest of time frames. I couldn’t. I needed long, uninterrupted stretches. She smiled at me when I put the coffee down.

“You know,” she said. “I’m not sure I was wrong to break up with you back then. Isn’t that a lovely quaint phrase from the past? ‘Break up with.’ The person I was might not have been able to do it. I was sort of scared of you. You had so much passion and it was so fierce. You were so moral, so insufferably honorable, so needy. It put a great deal of pressure on me. I wasn’t like that. I’m still not like that. But I’m beginning to be able to feel good about what I am. I’m not like you and I don’t mind. But back then, I don’t know. In secret I felt, maybe I wasn’t even clear on it myself—it’s not my kind of introspection, especially then—that you were a kind of implicit criticism of my own failures.”

I nodded.

“You were—you know this—the first person I ever knew who had a code of behavior. I didn’t even know people had them except in fiction. Real people simply did what they could to get what they wanted. So when I encountered you and you had actual views on right or wrong which were not rooted in being popular or getting a date for the ATO house party, I thought it must be the only code. If I weren’t like you I must be bad.”

“I kind of thought that myself,” I said.

“So if I’d married you I might have been miserable. You might have been miserable too. We might have made each other miserable.”

“I was pretty miserable without marrying you,” I said.

“That’s where those sketches come from, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes. I kept a journal, and I’ve been mining it.”

“A journal?”

“Yes. All through it. Even entries that I don’t remember making. Thirteen spiral notebooks.”

“When do they stop?”

“They haven’t stopped,” I said. “They are ongoing. They began when you started returning my letters. After a while I started writing and not mailing.”

There was complication in Jennifer’s face. I didn’t recognize all of it, but puzzlement was there, and something stubborn.

“I won’t feel guilty about that,” she said.

I drank some coffee. It had the taste it always had when you’ve drunk too much. It didn’t really taste good.
Low-level addiction. Or habit. I wondered if habits were addictive.

“What are you going to do with it, Boonie?”

“The journal?”

Jennifer nodded.

“Eventually,” I said, “I will probably edit it down into a novel, or maybe several. In the meanwhile I will pluck out some quick publications so they’ll give me tenure.”

“I’d like to read it,” Jennifer said. Her coffee grew cold in front of her. It often did. When she became interested in something, anything, it was nearly exclusive. She leaned toward me a little and her wonderful face was serious and interested and thrilling. Her voice was wonderful too, full of unimaginable possibility.

“The whole thing?” I said.

“Yes. It’s not just curiosity. I’m a good editor, maybe I can help.”

“Work on it together?” I said.

“Yes.”

My life’s work, now shared with my life’s purpose. I was flooded with ecstasy. It was hard to breathe except in small, shallow gulps. Art and life unified, or almost. I clenched against the vertigo.
Control
.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll bring it in tomorrow.”

Jennifer sat with me in my office with one of the journals spread open between us on my desk, and the rest of them in a large cardboard box that said on the side
ROLLING ROCK
.

She shook her head a little. “They are … they are simply remarkable, Boonie, they are …” She hunched her shoulders a little and shook her head again. “I understand you. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that so fully articulates …” She hunched her shoulders again and held them hunched while she searched for the proper phrase. Then she let them drop in a kind of resignation. “I understand you.”

“But do you respect me,” I said.

She smiled. “I respect you like hell,” she said.

“Do you remember the circumstances when we saw Nichols and May?”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “You were on your first leave from basic training and I met you in New York. You didn’t even have civilian clothes.”

“In a way it’s like thinking about other people,” I said, “like thinking about our children. We slept together in the same room at the Biltmore and we didn’t have sex.

“You thought it would be ignoble,” Jennifer said. “I was afraid I’d get pregnant.”

“What do you think I have to do to make this journal into literature?”

“It’s hermetic,” Jennifer said. “It is entirely internal. It might have all taken place in a cave as far as connecting with the larger world is concerned.”

“Yes. It’s just you and me.”

“No. It’s just you, I’m in there only as I impinge on you. There needs to be more. Not necessarily more of me. More of life. More landscape. More chronical.”

I nodded.

“The way you are is not common, but it must be human. I’d like to see us connect it some way to other human experiences, so that a person reading it could say, ‘Yes, yes, that’s right.’ ”

“You seem to be suggesting a lot of work,” I said.

“Yes,” Jennifer said, “a lot. But it’s not more work than we can do.”

“There isn’t anything that is more than we could do.”

“I know.”

“You make me better than I could be alone. I am more than my own sum, with you.”

“I know, Boonie. You have done that for me. I am much more than I could have been if you hadn’t come back.”

“That’s not my doing,” I said. “That’s yours.”

“I deserve credit,” Jennifer said. “I’ve become almost
a whole other person, and I’m proud to have done it. I had gone back to school before you returned. But once you returned you embodied possibility.”

“Lazarus,” I said.

“Yes. Rebirth was possible. And more, you were someone who would always approve of … no, that’s wrong. You wouldn’t always approve. And you shouldn’t. That’s nursery-school gobbledygook. You were someone who was absolute. You were certainty. Approve or disapprove, you were irrevocably mine. Whatever I did would not change you; the world would not change you.”

“You were right,” I said.

“Yes. I know. I always knew. Even when I married John I knew that he wasn’t the one I could count on. You were. It made life more possible. It was a certainty. As I grew older I found there were no other certainties.”

“So how come you married John?” We were in the midst of the afternoon. Students wandered up and down the corridor outside my office door, keeping appointments with professors, keening over grades, and puzzling over comments in the margins. From the main office there was the sound of typewriters and the mimeograph machine and the photocopy machine. But in my office the silence seemed to spiral back down a dwindling quarter-century as I asked, out loud, for the first time, the question to whose drumbeat I had stepped since 1954.

“You wanted all of me, Boonie. Not just to love me, to own me. To possess me, to own my soul, to own all of me. I don’t think I quite knew it then. But now I do, and one way that I do is because now you love me. Just love me. Don’t wish to hold me in vile duress. Now you can trust me, and so now I can trust you.”

“You’ve made me whole,” I said.

She shook her head. “The commitment made you whole. Even if we were never to be lovers you’d be whole.”

“Ever wilt thou love,” I said. “And she be fair.”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

“But if we were never lovers, I wouldn’t be happy,” I said. “I would always want to be.”

“But you’d be whole.”

I nodded.

Jennifer’s face was steady on mine. I listened to the sound of my breath going in and out. I heard myself swallow once.

“Nineteen fifty-four was too early,” Jennifer said. “Neither of us was whole then.” I could feel myself rocking slightly in my chair, volitionless, thick with silence, faintly dizzy. Jennifer got up and went to the office door and closed it and turned and looked at me and said, “Now we are.”