Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (28 page)

“Part-time medical leave, for the spring. She'll give up two of her three courses. I'm handling the paperwork.” Eileen wags her head with a sympathy that's hard to believe. Even she can keep a secret of this gravity. If she chooses not to, it's because she can't stand Joanne—a fact that had escaped my attention until now. It's obvious Joanne would not want me, of all people, getting inside information on her health problems—making this revelation a perfect dollop of revenge to mix with the more public support Eileen will surely offer Joanne. I'm being used, but also—even in my shock I can appreciate this—protected. For a few seconds I contemplate the limitless array of missteps from which Eileen has just saved me.

“Now why did you
think
she got so sensitive when it sounded like the students were making fun of her in the course catalogue?” Eileen's habitual defense: it's not rumormongering if everyone should have guessed.

I accept my penance. “I couldn't figure it out.”

“Not that Joanne always makes sense.” Eileen giggles. “Except to herself, of course.” Sobriety wafts over her. “It can be crippling, you know. And she used to be a big athlete. People can die from lupus, too. Though I hear that's rare. But Victoria seems to think it's a serious case.” A final glance at me; then she casts down her eyes and wags her head, the picture of empathy.

I find Jeff sitting at his desk with one hand draped over the telephone, as though he hasn't yet disconnected from a conversation that ended moments ago.

“I just learned something important,” I tell him.

He flitters his fingertips: my news can wait. “Richard thinks I've been an ass,” he says. “He thinks that when you first told me you were engaged you needed support, rather than my real opinion.” He screws his pale lips into a small, pained-looking rose. “I
was
harsh.”

In the eight years I've known Jeff, this is the closest thing I've heard to an admission of error. Lowering myself into the seat opposite him, I loft a thank-you across windy, highway-threaded miles to the mysterious Richard. So that's who makes Jeff tick: A man who isn't afraid to stand up to him. Who values friendship over principle. Who's chosen a specialty in Queer Theory, as out as can be, while Jeff coolly chooses when to divulge each crumb of information. I take a moment to imagine their fights: long Sunday checklist versus lazy brunch, tidy desk versus photo-cluttered surface. The thought of these two torturing each other makes me like Jeff a good deal better.

“You
have
been harsh,” I say. “You know I value your opinion. Sometimes it's simply a question of how it's voiced.”

Jeff's raised eyebrow knocks aside this olive branch. I've misunderstood; he wasn't apologizing, just mulling. He sweeps something invisible from his desk and deposits it in the wastebasket, his half-mast eyelids flickering with perturbation.

Joanne's knock at the door spooks me. Guiltily I meet her owlish stare. Her broad face looks poreless, nubbled and not quite clean—something I've noticed for weeks without noticing. Now I realize her skin is in fact overlaid by a hearty coating of peach-brown—the thick makeup of an actor stepping from swaying curtain shadows onto glaringly lit boards. How long has she put on that mask before coming to work?

“A word?” says Joanne.

Jeff nods her in.

“Two of your undergraduates had the bad judgment to hold an extremely loud gossip session outside my office door. They made it impossible not to overhear. But it was lucky I did. It turns out some joker is raising false hopes in your class.”

“Really?” says Jeff, his voice betraying not the slightest interest.

Joanne pauses, slightly, to catch her breath. She continues. “According to your students—who of course tried to squirm out of any confession the minute I cornered them—some attention-starved classmate of theirs claims to have overheard one of your TA's telling another that when he flipped open your roll book to check a student's attendance record, he saw column after column like ”Substance: B-plus; Presentation: B-minus; and then in the space for semester grade, an A already filled in.”

Jeff doesn't answer. If he's surprised, his face does not betray it.

“So now,” says Joanne, “the rumor has spread. Of course, it's up to you whether you want to disabuse your students of their fantasy that A's are guaranteed. Or let the lazier ones skewer themselves on it.” She stops, breathes. Leans, as if casually, against the doorjamb. “But I felt you ought to know. About the fabrication.”

Grading sheets aren't due for over a month; Joanne and the others weren't meant to discover Jeff's grading mischief until late December at the earliest—by which point he should have received his countersigned copies of the Atlanta contract and given notice to Grub, effective at the end of spring semester's paid leave. I anticipate Jeff's handling of this ripple in his plan: the charade of laughing off the rumor, only to submit an unblemished list of A's in December. His parting fuck-you will be postmarked, impersonal, and after the fact.

“There's no fabrication,” says Jeff. His delivery is as cool as ever, but the muscles of his forearm, as he massages his jaw, are tight. He knows this is impolitic.

Joanne looks puzzled. “One hundred percent A's isn't a student fabrication?”

I stare hard at Jeff, but he doesn't so much as glance my way. I understand what he's doing. He doesn't approve of my choices, he cannot apologize for speaking his mind, but he values my friendship, and he will, with implacable flair, commit this small political
suicide for me—reparation for the dozens of times he's watched his own back while I took heat from Joanne. Bearing the standard of our friendship, he gallops off to a mission I desperately want aborted.

Jeff's sigh speaks of regret admixed with awe. “It was an act of God.”

“An act of God,” Joanne repeats.

He takes off his glasses and folds them, the soft dual clicks the only sound in the office. He rubs his brow, then speaks softly. “God”—Jeff points upward—“came down”—a gesture toward the carpet—“and put the A's in the roll book.” His eyes, steady and calm, dare Joanne to demur.

Joanne's throat emits a strange cluck: the sound of something giving way. As she tips up her chin, drowning, I see that she has considered Jeff her friend.

Her words hit the air like tacks. “I wish I'd been in this office,” she says, “to witness the theophany.”

“You missed it,” says Jeff in the same patient voice, “because you were too busy making life miserable for Elizabeth.”

Beneath the healthy tint of her makeup, Joanne's face darkens with fear, and it hits me that her look of nausea at our recent encounter was neither dislike, nor envy of love. It was envy of life.

“I see what's going on here,” she says, though it's obvious she cannot see, she cannot see at all. She leaves the office brushing the doorjamb with her fingertips, blind.

Jeff blinks at me. Then one corner of his mouth lifts in a tight salute of a smile: no thanks necessary. With a pointedly unhurried motion he turns a paper on his desk. His cheeks and forehead are pale, his lips compressed. He could as easily be the one with a grave illness. Or Elizabeth. Or me, I think. The whole department is drawn, poised for some terrible outburst.

“Jesus, Jeff,” I breathe.

He rolls his head briskly from shoulder to shoulder, the movement an alloy of adrenaline and release. Stopping abruptly, he releases a long tunnel of air. “Yeah,” he says. With the single syllable his face opens, and he wears the frank, grateful flush of a man warming his hands over a stove.

It hurts to break the news.

“How sick?” he asks after a silence.

“Must be bad, for her to take off from work.”

He chuckles, waves a hand in acknowledgment of the inappropriateness of this, and is quiet again. I consider leaving.

“It's a shame,” he says. “But Joanne had it coming.” The equation having been solved cleanly in his head, he seals it with a nod. “Fuck, though. Richard is going to give me hell.”

George phones from his hotel room in Buffalo. The meetings were productive. He leaves for Albany at six
A.M
. — an early start, but the only flight he could get. He's longing to see me, isn't it amazing how hard it is to be apart. Paula, by the way, has started asking about wedding plans.

“How about a small ceremony?” he muses. “Maybe next month. The less time we leave for planning, the less the details can drive us crazy. Then we can take a few months for just us, maybe to ride waterfalls in barrels, or go on a low-budget camel trek, or maybe just recover from writing all our thank-you notes, before we try to start a family.”

The phone offends my ear; I move it an inch away.
I'm not even certain I want to have kids.
The statement is an incendiary I will not toss, though I finger it in my pocket, along with its companion:
I don't even know if I ought to marry you.
“Who says we'd start trying right away?” I say.

From this distance George's voice is preshrunk, unreal. “It's just a suggestion,” he says gently. “We can wait a few more months if you like.”

The upstairs neighbor's vacuum cleaner thumps its way across my ceiling.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I've had a lot on my mind.” I hold my breath.

“Work going okay?”

The saga of Joanne and Jeff offers itself, ready explanation for my distress.

After I'm finished, he's quiet for a few seconds. “Jeff is a bit of an asshole, isn't he?”

“He can be.”

“He's right that Joanne brought it on herself—bad behavior is bad behavior. It's just a shame no one knew she was ill. Things could have been handled differently.”

“I have no idea now how to conduct myself with Joanne.”

“Sounds like Victoria had it right. Be as sympathetic as you can. Also give a lot of C's. No, I'm joking—just grade fairly. Jeff's sins shouldn't fall on your head.”

“
Shouldn't.
” My voice is clipped.

There's a silence. “You sure you're okay, Tracy? You just . . . sound like you've had a hard day. With Jeff and all.”

George, who's never seemed the sort to mince words, is being oddly circumspect.

“I'm okay,” says my script.

HE
: “Okay? And . . .” [beat] “. . . okay with everything else?”

Do not
—urge the stage directions—
waltz into explosive territory over the telephone.

SHE
: “Getting used to all the changes in my own way.”

HE
: “That's good. I think. Is it?”

SHE
: [a laugh] “It's good.”

HE
: [decisive] “I think it's great.”

The music blares and turns brittle. I look down and notice the stranger I'm dancing with has two injured feet. I want to pull him closer, but every step risks breaking him.

SHE
: “Me too.”

“Just so you know,” George teases, “any time you want to stop using birth control I won't object.”

The clock radio spits static and love ballads. My head still welded to the pillow, I work my hand onto the snooze button and silence it.

With rapid strokes, my high school algebra teacher chalks the formula on the board:
Tracy times x equals y.
“Now,” she begins, underscoring with her chalk, “y equals marriage. And
x
equals the changes you will make in your life in order to make this marriage thrive.” She stands back to survey the equation. “Whatever the problem is on your side, whatever the disagreement or disparity of vision, it has to get balanced. You just solve for
x.
”

I scrutinize the chalkboard. “What if I'm not sure about y?”

She dusts a hand on her skirt, leaving a ghostly palm print. Then, with a practiced glare, she hands me the chalk. “This,” she says, “is what grownups do.”

I'm dreaming.

“Just listen to your inner voice,” soothes the used-books dealer, tucking a hank of her skirt into her belt as she climbs the ladder to retrieve a volume.

My inner voice. Was
that
it—the voice that said that
thank you
to George's father, those two words that meant
Yes, I will marry George Beck?

“Indeed,” says Freud from the high shelf, passing the woman the book. “That, child, was your unconscious: your psyche, speaking up after thirty-three years of silence with two decisive syllables.” He exhales a wreath of smoke and taps ash off his cigar. “Your kishkas.”

“Hardly,” H.D. counters irritably from the base of the ladder, which she steadies as the book dealer descends. Cigar ash rains down on her head. “What you heard was a million years of culture. Ballads and folktales and fairy tales, all conditioning women to speak these two words and nothing more.”

“Why are you so passive?” screams the truck driver, leaning out his window as he barrels down the avenue. “Just tell him what you think.”

Swimming up through sleep. Soul singers swoon. Lewis Carroll rows his boat across the lake, Alice at the prow. They wave at me, smiling. Their hands grow enormous; their oars turn to flowerpots; their voices are as tiny as mouse prints.

When George phones from Albany, his voice is ratcheted a notch tighter than usual. “I can't talk long now,” he says. “I've got a meeting in an hour and I haven't prepared. But I needed to hear your voice.”

I sit down on my sofa. “You okay?”

He lets out a long breath. It drops, ripe and trusting, into my ear. “I've had better days,” he confesses. “I spoke with my sister this afternoon, and my father got on the line. It took about twenty seconds for him to get to the point. Which was that marriage may yet propel me back into the fold—Jewish wife and all. Assuming, that is, that you convert—otherwise we're not
equally yoked.
”