Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (12 page)

“But why would anyone believe that rumor?”

“Because straight people are so hung up on the third syllable of ‘homosexual' that they think we want to bugger everyone. Plus plenty of them secretly hope—for reasons only their therapists know—that homosexuality doesn't
stick.
”

“You really think the faculty is so backward?”

“This faculty is relatively enlightened. Which is why I'm not going to bother correcting the rumor—it wouldn't have legs here. But that's not my point.” He lapses into a moody silence. After a minute he says tersely, “Don't believe the commercials. Or our I'm-from-a-town-called-Hope president. We live in a reactionary country. The only way to succeed is to see through the system.”

I know better than to speak. I wait until Jeff's irritable expression passes and he takes a long gulp from his water glass.

“Have you considered telling Paleozoic directly?” I ask. “Nipping the rumor in the bud? You're tenured and you're out. It's too late for anyone to label you ‘special interest' and stick you over in Gay Studies. Why not be direct?”

“Paleozoic,” Jeff says, “is going to figure this one out for himself. I want to see what it will take for him to realize.” He stretches his neck, rolling his head from one shoulder to the other. “Besides, Elizabeth is cute, in a Kate Moss kind of way. If I were wired that way, it wouldn't be a bad match.”

“Well, I hope you like women with scoliosis, because she's going to have a case pretty soon.”

“Because . . . ?”

I drop onto the sofa cushion beside his. “Because Joanne's advising my advisee. She's just given her a last-minute reading list that would debilitate your average grad student. And you know Elizabeth—she's already read everything she needs to, she's practically done writing the damn dissertation. She doesn't need someone making her insecure about irrelevant material.”

“You're awfully ticked off. It's just a reading list, right?”

“It's not just a reading list. It's the principle.”

“Aren't you being a tad possessive?”

I back off from my annoyance long enough to consider this. Elizabeth is the brightest grad student I've known. It would be natural, wouldn't it, for me to feel territorial? “Maybe,” I say. “Still, Joanne could have made a friendly suggestion or two, rather than
giving Elizabeth—who is a setup for eleventh-hour dissertation paranoia—a brain-breaking list. It's just inappropriate. I ought to talk to Joanne about it.”

“Mmm.” Jeff leans back on the threadbare couch. He puffs his narrow cheeks and expels the air slowly. “If I were you I'd be careful about that.”

“Because?”

“Something's up with Joanne.”

“That was obvious at the grade-inflation meeting.”

“True,” Jeff says. “Though most people have already chalked that particular stunt up as a power play—more flagrant than Joanne's usual, but something they're willing to overlook, mostly because nobody wants to have to take over the job of organizing these meetings. What I mean, though, is that this week she's jumping on people for the slightest thing. You should have seen the to do list she gave Eileen this morning.”

“I was wondering what was with Eileen.”

“And I think Joanne's particularly ticked off at you. When your twentieth-century class came up in a discussion this morning, she pronounced your name as though you'd been caught in a broom closet molesting Spenser.”

“What's she got against me? No offense, but you're flip with her all the time. I'm nothing but polite.”

“Yes, my dear, but I”—he draws himself up on the sofa, and looks at me sternly—“am a faggot. And straight women let gay men get away with anything. We don't figure into the picture. We're beyond sexism. We're utterly unthreatening. No hierarchy to sort out, no mixed vibes. And don't play dumb about this, Tracy, because it's part of what makes our friendship so easy. No matter how I behave, I am not personally threatening to you.”

Checking myself before I launch a rebuttal, I recall my first encounters with Jeff, and the relief I felt sparring with a man with whom there would be no complications. “I see your point,” I say.

With a wave he acknowledges victory.

“But what did I ever do to Joanne?”

Jeff takes the copy of the
PMLA
from the coffee table and thumbs it. “If people's biases required rational cause, I could have brought the entire Little League for court-martial when I was eight. I think you ought to let this reading-list thing go and let Joanne
climb out of her foul mood on her own. Elizabeth is an adult. She can take care of herself.”

As if on cue, the door to the faculty lounge swings open and Joanne and Grub enter.

“. . . which sums up how I feel about Gilman,” says Jeff. “Did you ever read
Difference and Pathology?
”

“You're good,” I whisper to Jeff, as Joanne cuts in sharply from the coffee machine.

“You two are talking about Sander Gilman?”

“We were comparing his more recent output with his earlier books.” Jeff twists to face Joanne, his expression completely relaxed: a master at work.

Joanne peels the top from a container of creamer, dumps it into her cup, and stirs her coffee in a tight whirl. She gives a small, competitive smile. “Overrated,” she says. “All of it. From start to finish.”

Jeff tuts softly. “Oh, I don't think so.”

Joanne offers a styrofoam cup to Grub, who declines it. Grub turns to scan a bookshelf, nodding in evident approval of the volumes he finds there. Periodically he lifts the bowl of his pipe and takes a deep draw.

“Are
you
a Gilman fan, Tracy?” Joanne asks.

“To be honest, I haven't read him in a while. Sounds like I need to read his recent work and see what I think.”

Joanne shrugs: It makes no bloody difference to her what I read.

“How's life?” I'm not nearly as good as Jeff, and the attempt at friendliness comes out stiff.

She regards me for an instant, her face unreadable. Then she answers airily. “Fine. And how's
your
life?”

Hell with Elizabeth's reading list; Jeff is right. Departmental peace is more important. And Joanne is, in many ways, a colleague I respect. “Good.” I offer Joanne a direct, warm smile.

Joanne sips her coffee. “Lovely.” Her voice is flat.

After the door has shut behind Joanne and Grub, I rise and open the single window that lets onto the air shaft. I fan my scooped palms in a clumsy sidestroke, but succeed only in urging a few wisps of Grub's pipe smoke toward the ceiling. When I turn back toward to the sofa, Jeff is looking at me mournfully.

“
What?
”

He wags his head. “Now you've really put your foot in it.”

“What did I do wrong?”

“You're happy. And you advertised it again.”

“Am I missing something?”

Jeff flaps his journal to clear the smoke around the sofa and, with an impatient glance at me, goes back to reading.

“I wasn't advertising,” I enunciate. “Besides, that wasn't
happy.
That was just friendly.”

“Happy,” he mutters without looking up.

“Fine. What's wrong with being happy?”

Jeff lingers over the page another moment, then lays it in his lap. “You'll be shocked how angry it makes some people. Especially people like Joanne.”

“Because?”

“She doesn't have a life. She's never mentioned a boyfriend or girlfriend. She may go on the occasional weekend ski trip with old rugby pals, but have you ever heard her mention a close friend? This department is her world.”

“Isn't it all of ours?”

“Not like that, Tracy, and you know it. You and I care about lit, and we're ambitious about our careers, but we also have friends and outside aspirations, and now you've got this guy—”

“I
might
have this guy. We've only been on two dates.”

“Now you've got this guy—and you're lit up like a light bulb, which Joanne has surely picked up on even if she doesn't know specifics. People like Joanne have nothing ahead of them but ladder climbing. Don't get me wrong, I'm dedicated to Brit lit, sure. But I don't plan to spend my life analyzing someone else's passions without having any of my own.”

With a pang it occurs to me that until two weeks ago the circumstances of my life may not have been so dissimilar from Joanne's as Jeff seems to think. It's an uncomfortable thought: Was George right when he said I hadn't told him about myself? Have I truly let the rest of my life atrophy? And how often in the last year have I gone to hear music or see a show, bought something for myself other than work supplies, had
outside aspirations
of my own? I can count the occasions on the fingers of my hands—and two of them date since meeting George.

Jeff is still fixing me with his stare. I stare back, hoping he sees something in me that I can't see.

Jeff stands. He picks up his satchel, slings it over his shoulder, and carries his empty mug to the sink.

I rouse myself. “Hold on,” I say. “I still don't buy it as an explanation for Joanne's behavior. People always rehearse that crap about single women, as though we turn pathological the minute we either turn forty or get a cat. As though women's singleness mandates rage at the universe. As a single woman, I've got to tell you that's nonsense.”

Jeff pauses mid-step and grins, signaling that this debate now has his full attention. “Aha. So as a gay man I'm
not
immune to charges of sexism.”

“Not if you can't come up with something better than the old singleness-equals-bitchiness chestnut. Joanne wasn't always such a rotten colleague—and as far as we know she's lacked close friends and relationships for years, not just a few weeks.”

Jeff makes a long, low, ruminative sound—half hum, half growl. “Maybe she's jealous of my torrid affair with Elizabeth.” He rinses his mug and glances at the clock: three minutes until the start of his seminar. “Speaking of affairs, how's Mr. Tabouli in the sack? You two rogering each other yet?”

“This would be your business because . . . ?”

“Have you ever met a subject that wasn't?”

I stand and we both walk toward the door. “Things haven't gone that far.”

“Good.” He pats my cheek. “Mama always said, ‘Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free.'”

“Your mama said no such thing.”

“She should have. If I'd waited, maybe Richard would have turned down Emory in the hope of getting in my pants.”

“You could as easily have turned down
your
job and gone to Georgia.”

He smiles a rueful, soft smile, and for an instant I believe I'm glimpsing the other Jeff—the one he doesn't show at work, even to me. “No blame intended.” He shakes his head. “I just miss the guy.”

Jeff isn't going to see Richard again until Thanksgiving. I try to think of a consoling response, but he changes the subject first.

“When's your next date with Mr. T?”

“Tonight.”

“
Tonight, tonight,
” Jeff warbles, then swats my arm with his
PMLA.
“Stop smiling. You're giving me hives.”

He opens the door wearing faded jeans and a lime green sweater with white pinstripes. While I've never much noticed men's clothing, the sweater George is wearing is not a sweater I can feel sanguine about. No Manhattan Jew under the age of seventy would be caught dead in those colors. Shedding my coat, I remind myself I haven't liked most of the Manhattan Jews I've dated, too many of whom have communicated a powerful aversion to getting dirt under their fingernails. As George takes my coat, I remind myself: This is a man who scoffs at all-black wardrobes, sees nothing unrefined about iceberg lettuce, contact sports, dirt. I forgive the sweater.

The place, a one-bedroom, is modest but clean. On the walls are a few posters of jazz greats. Tall shelves hold books, a few low-maintenance plants, a few photos of clean-cut twenty-somethings smiling on mountaintops and scruffier thirty-somethings smiling in city parks. On the coffee table, alongside two beers and a bottle opener, is the video. I've come here, officially, to watch a comedy titled
Topknots
with George. This is, though, our third date: the pivotal date years of experience have taught me to fear. If
Topknots
gets watched at all, let alone before midnight, it's not a good sign.

As George hangs my coat, I notice a framed photograph on a bookshelf. In the picture a wiry, teenaged George hugs a woman who, though she's petite and freckled, can only be his mother: a soft-faced woman with a no-nonsense fringe of straight brown hair, dressed in a comfortable blue cardigan. Her brown eyes are bright. Still, it's not her warmth but something else about the photograph that arrests me. The key to reading a family photo, I realized long ago, is noticing where the hands are. The hands give it all away: who's on the inside, who's left out in the cold, who holds the family together. In my own family photos I generally span an airy breach between my parents, my hands anchoring their semismiling likenesses.
In this photo George and his mother hug, but it's George's arm that pulls his mother close, his hand on her shoulder securing her in a protective embrace that won't release just because the shutter does. The photo strikes me powerfully. It takes me a moment to identify the feeling as awe. I think: He'd never abandon her.

“She died,” George says. He stands beside me, perfectly still, hands folded in front of him. “She was on a train that derailed just outside Toronto, on the way home from visiting her sister in Vancouver. It happened a few weeks after that picture.”

I turn around to face him. “I'm so sorry.”