Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (25 page)

In the theater my hold on George's hand grows so faint he gently anchors it with his other hand to keep it from slipping. Instead of fostering meditation, the dark, cavernous room inspires vertigo. We sit side by side before the film's lush panorama, my hand loose in the warm trap of his palms. On the screen a feast of colors sways, and the beautiful, sad faces of the actors grow still more beautifully sad as
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
reaches its denouement and love ends tragically.

We leave the theater amid a thick crowd. George looks serious. As we walk down Broadway, I ready myself for confrontation. I dread his interrogation about my distant mood, and am eager for it—for the true contact that will follow my confession of turmoil.

After several blocks he speaks. “I did some thinking during the movie, Tracy. I'll be in Buffalo next week for that state educators' conference, and I'm thinking I ought to take an extra couple days and go on to Albany for some meetings.”

When I don't speak he continues. “Yesterday I was on the phone
with Paula, and my father actually asked to get on the phone with me, for the first time in years. He didn't say much other than ‘Your sister says you're well.' But from him that's a big step. I doubt it'll mean much. The breach between us is far too big. But Paula says she'd like to come to meet you, and there's a chance my father may actually come with her. Paula says they'd like to come in two weeks.” He tilts his head, skeptical. ”Anyway, I'd been planning to go to Albany that week, but I figure I ought to get that travel over with now . . . so I can give my full attention to bracing you for my father's sermons, or deep freeze—whichever comes.” He squeezes my hand. ”But it means I'll be out of town all next week. And I wanted to check that with you, because so much is going on right now.”

I can think of little I want less than to meet Earl Beck. But no one's asked me. A bubble of indignation rises, only to be extinguished by reality: engaged women are, aren't they, expected to meet their future in-laws? I feel sick at the thought of all that might be expected of engaged women. As for letting go of George for a full week? A desperate desire for a few days alone vies with an equally desperate desire to wrap my arms around George's neck and insist,
Don't leave me.
But pleading with my lover not to take a weeklong trip seems incongruent with self-respect.

Is it?

Nothing's clear. Except that a weeklong business trip is not the matter he and I need to discuss. I open my mouth to unburden myself; then, with George watching me, shut it.

I want to turn back to the theater and bury myself in the movie's heartbreaking vistas.

“Okay,” I say.

He stops walking and faces me. “It's okay with you?” I nod.

“You seem tired,” he observes.

Too tired to stay out late. Or debate the movie's symbolism. Or match George's ardor, or his sleepy, quizzical touch.

“Congratulations,” says Elizabeth, running a finger along the folders on my shelf. “Thanks,” I say.

She stares at a stack of files, now tapping her fingertip on her
pouting lower lip. Relieved at her apparent lack of curiosity about my engagement, I sit back in my chair. Fatigue laps at me, drawing my head back until I'm looking at the ceiling. The night's sleep hit a shoal at two in the morning and spun in fragments until dawn. George slept soundly beside me, one leg stretched across my thigh.

“What are these?”

I tip my head forward to see what Elizabeth is looking at. “Nothing,” I say sharply.

“‘Tolstoy and the Big Lie,'” she reads off the tab of a file. She fingers the others in the stack. “‘Literary Gloom, European.' ‘Literary Doom, American, Nineteenth Century.' ‘The War Against Joy, Modernist.' ‘The War Against Joy, Postmodern.' ‘A Conversation with Paley's Father.'”

I have no idea when Elizabeth assumed this almost proprietary comfort with my office. It's like having a kid sister rummaging in my things. “Notes,” I say. “For a project.”

Now I have her full attention. “It doesn't look like your American surrealism research.”

“That's because it isn't,” I conclude with asperity. I wave her toward her seat.

She doesn't move. “Well, what
is
it, then?”

Noting that this emboldened Elizabeth is considerably more irritating than her spooked predecessor, I pick a pencil from my desktop, examine the tip, and insert it in the electric sharpener, which makes a whining sound. “It's a new book I'm considering. One I'm researching on the side for the moment.”

“What did Tolstoy lie about?”

I click the pencil down onto my desktop and feel its needle-sharp point. In truth the project could benefit from a little airing in the company of another mind. Elizabeth is an incisive intellect. She's rigorous and thoughtful. Most importantly, she's not on my tenure committee.

“This is absolutely confidential.”

“Of course.” Her face is bright with concentration.

“It's not going to win me tenure. It's a book I hope to start writing next year.”

“Got it,” she says, conspiratorial.

I hesitate. “It's just this,” I say. “I think there's a deep, long-running bias against literature about happiness. A cultural mistrust of anything but tragedy. The only happiness a writer can allude to without risking his reputation—and then only briefly—is that sort of false Happiness in Perpetuity that wraps up Dickens novels. You know—marriage between two characters who can be expected to go cross-eyed with contentment and stay that way until they die.” As I speak, my voice gains confidence. I sound like myself. ”It's as if our whole literary tradition, which has been unsparing on the subjects of death, war, poverty, et cetera, has agreed to keep the gloves on where happiness is concerned. And no one has addressed it. I mean, shame on us all—readers, critics, writers. Anybody who tries to take happiness seriously is belittled. The writers who pen happy endings risk getting labeled ‘regionalists,' which is like a paternal pat on the head and a nudge back to the children's table. Or worse, they're called ‘romance writers'—the literary world's highest insult. In fact, I wonder sometimes whether some of the most obnoxious dismissals of women writers, which feminists have interpreted as sexism, are actually part of something else. Women talk about happiness more freely than men do, and that's one major reason why they've gotten slammed. Men are in the Romantic tradition; woman write romances. Had Grace Paley not included some tragic stories in her mix, her whole oeuvre might have been ignored. If Eudora Welty had written more tragedy—if she'd used humor only to take people apart, rather than allowing them to remain stitched together—those last idiots still calling her a regionalist in the seventies wouldn't have had a leg to stand on. In fact they'd probably have crowned her an Epic Writer. And if Edwin Arlington Robinson hadn't been so depressed, you'd never have heard of him. There's this cultural fear of thinking seriously about happiness—I'd go so far as to say it's a cultural debility. People talk about culture wars over sexuality and race. But we're in a culture war over the nature and feasibility of happiness. And no one even acknowledges it.”

Elizabeth is nodding.

“Tolstoy,” I say, “is just my symbol for the problem.”

She's still nodding.

“I sometimes think the only writers who've gotten away with writing seriously about happiness with their reputations intact have done so on the sly. Sort of sneaking it in at the margins. So
that's what I want to look at. Writers who do that. Welty, Bambara, a dozen or so others. And I want to look at how they do it, and how the critics read them, and how it all plays out over their careers.”

Elizabeth stops nodding and falls silent. For several minutes she scans my bookshelves, tapping again on her lower lip.

“I like it,” she says. “It's daring.”

In a heartbeat I've forgiven her nosiness. “The idea isn't fully worked out, of course,” I say. “It's in the early stages. But I think it's worth exploring.” For the first time in days, I feel energized. “Let's get coffee. Then we can catch up on your dissertation progress.”

We walk silently through the hall. Outside the door of the faculty lounge, Elizabeth pauses. “How will you set up a conversation between Tolstoy and Bambara?” As she speaks the door swings open and Steven exits.

Stepping inside, we're greeted by Jeff, who is seated on the couch marking a student paper, a bored expression on his face. “Who's trying to span Tolstoy and Bambara?”

“Whoops.” Elizabeth giggles and drifts to the bookshelves without another glance in my direction. I stop in my tracks, staring at her.

Jeff frowns at me. “Too broad.”

“You don't even know what the project is,” I say sharply.

“Don't need to. Too broad.”

Elizabeth is absorbed in the bookshelf. I fill my mug with the last of the pot, reach into the cabinet for a clean filter and load the coffee for another run. Jeff and I haven't had a substantive conversation in four days—not since the morning after my engagement. Ignoring the heat in my face, I turn to him. “Don't you ever pause before you pass judgment?”

Jeff flips a page of the paper he's marking. “What's the point?”

I watch him finish the paper, toss it onto a stack by his feet, and start another one—the last of the pile. With a giant sucking sound, the coffee starts to brew.

“Have you heard, by the way?” says Jeff, pen poised. “The Coordinating Committee is supposed to release its initial recommendations tomorrow.” He sighs deeply and rests his head against the back of the sofa. “So now all await the first poke from the finger
of God. Which subspecialty will be rewarded with dozens of TA's; which will suffer fiery torment.” Opening his eyes, Jeff makes a swift mark on the paper he's been reading. ”Grub is so excited he's been incontinent four times.”

“Who's Grub?” says Elizabeth.

Jeff looks at her blankly. “Did I say that aloud?”

Elizabeth's hand flies to her mouth and stays there a moment. Then, dropping her hand, she lets out a guffaw. “Who
is
it?”

Jeff yawns. “So how's the work?” he says.

“Fine.” Elizabeth speaks airily, and with a barely restrained, private-joke smile I don't like. “I wrote two more papers. And I'm finishing up another round of note taking for the dissertation. I'm going to focus more on the era's political and religious tropes as filtered through imagery and argument. Less on romance motifs. Joanne thought I'd do better to concentrate on the more universal themes if I'm going to make my argument about Dickinson precipitating a shift in American literary culture.”

Unreal. I open my mouth, but Jeff is quicker.

“Interesting,” he says. “Joanne may, by sheer coincidence, have a point.”

“That change,” I say, “could set Elizabeth's dissertation back a full year.”

“But focusing on something other than romance motifs may better position Elizabeth for the job market.”

Elizabeth watches us as she might fish in a tank, her lips curling in a smile of amused curiosity.

“This isn't about job positioning,” I say. “It's about intimidating a graduate student out of the dissertation she wants to write. This is crazy.”

“Not crazy at all,” says Jeff. “Just politics. If you want to get published, write about literature of political strife. Analyze the hideous things poets said to one another a hundred years ago. Chart literary power struggles. That's what's hip. Joanne has a point. If you focus on romance these days, you're passé.”

“Jeff,” I say. “Forget whatever disagreements I have with Joanne. You actually think Elizabeth ought to defer her Ph.D. and labor for peanuts another year in order to become more mainstream? You're advocating that?”

“Of course I am. I tested the waters and built my own publication record on the set of standards that was current. Right now romance is out, poetics of politics in—so Elizabeth should write the necessary dissertation.”

“Academics are supposed to be intellectually independent. I know you advocate realpolitik. But what's the use of freedom of speech if everyone aims for the middle?”

“Elizabeth can find a way to express her unique interests in a way that conforms to current trends. It's simply a career move.”

I don't answer.

“I would think,” he says, “you'd recognize the merits of self-preservation.”

He turns back to the paper on his lap, frowns over it briefly, then scribbles something in the margin and tosses it to the stack at his feet.

Moving deliberately, I step toward my only friend in this department. The tightness of my throat is out of all proportion to the subject we're discussing. I understand that he's baiting me, in this week of blinding confusion, not just to make a professional point but to underline my folly: my thralldom to emotion, my passivity, my failure to control my life.

Jeff's posture hasn't changed—arms wide on the back of the sofa, relaxing as assiduously as any undergraduate—but I know I have his full attention. Behind me I hear Elizabeth breathing softly. I say to him, “You spit in the temple of literature.”

Elizabeth lets out a fresh guffaw.

Steven Hilliard opens the door. “Am I interrupting?” he says.

“Thank God,” I say.

“Tut,” says Steven with a wicked grin. “Don't quarrel. We need stout yeomen. The Coordinating Committee made a last-minute request for some paperwork, and Eileen is gone for the day. Joanne needs volunteers to help with the collating.”

“I'll be there shortly,” I say. At the moment I am too wrought-up to be in the same room as Joanne Miller.

Elizabeth slips out the door behind Steven.