Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (8 page)

“If you want to know what academia is really like,” I say, “here it is in a nutshell. I've got a new project in mind, and I'm excited about it—I keep hopping out of bed at night to jot down notes. So I just wrote it up for a few applications, the sort of fellowships that offer a year off the academic grind to just do your own work. I'm not going to win one, it's like an academic lottery ticket. But everyone applies. Now strangers on fellowship committees are going to read my new ideas—yet I haven't breathed a word of them to my colleagues. And I won't, until I'm on the other side of my tenure review. The project is too risky, too easy to snipe at.” My words slow. “Dealing with academic politics,” I say, “is like reading a book while walking in a rainstorm. You crane your neck like hell to anchor the umbrella's stem while you turn pages. Step over puddles while trying to keep your eyes on the printed words. And pray you're not about to put your foot in it.”

A comfortable silence unfurls between us.

Then he says, “You fill a lot of time talking about your work.”

My hand goes dead in his. “If you weren't interested in all that, you could have said so.”

He shakes his head. “That's not what I meant. Everything you said is interesting. What I meant was that I asked you to tell me about yourself. And now I know a lot about what you think about. But not much about you.”

I withdraw my hand. “Is there a difference?”

“Yes.”

“So what was I supposed to tell you?” There's no masking the hurt in my voice.

He shakes his head again, watching me. “I don't know.”

My words sound brittle. “Give me your best guess.”

“Maybe who you used to be. Who you are now. Who you hope to be. What you're afraid of.”

“I'm afraid of not getting tenure. Does that count?”

He thinks a moment before answering. “Not really.”

I straighten in my seat. He is, once more, a stranger. He's responding as though I haven't just been pouring out my heart, intellectually speaking, for an entire meal.
Do you criticize all your dates,
I'm on the verge of asking. But what I mean is,
How dare you?

“Water?” he says. He refills my glass from the pitcher on the table. He doesn't, I have to admit, sound like someone who's just passed judgment—but rather someone who's stumbled across something that's piqued his interest. There it is again: that thoughtful, inquisitive look. It's obvious it means me no harm. But I feel harm. I can't recall the last time I felt so rattled.

“What about you?” This time I keep my voice neutral. “Tell me who
you
are.”

He opens his mouth and laughs. “Touché,” he says. “Okay . . . I have a new theory about the universe. It came to me this week.” He watches me. Once more, that gentle dare. “Yesterday, while sitting at my desk, I thought: Life isn't people or animals or trees.”

“No?”

“Nope. Life isn't us, though we make that mistake all the time—thinking we're life. But life is really just this big glorious wave, like a wave in a pond—it's the
energy
that moves across the pond. And the thing is, we're insignificant.”

“We are?”

“Imagine doing the wave in a stadium.
We're
not the wave—the wave is its own creature. At one instant all the people standing are part of it, the next instant the wave has gone past us forever.”

“Unless you're a Hindu or Buddhist, and you believe the stadium is circular.”

He smiles—I've taken the dare. “All right. But we can't know the stadium's shape. All we know is, we can't hold onto the wave. It doesn't belong to us any more than it belonged to the millions of generations it already passed through, on its way to wherever it's headed. We're just little bits of matter that get to be the ones in the wave for this particular millisecond.” He stops to consider me. “I was sitting at my desk this morning, just thinking how beautiful the whole thing is. And how before we fall back to being nothing—to being just empty water drops—we want to procreate. Send along our descendants, so they can be part of the wave for their own millisecond, too. And maybe their kids and grandkids
might each be part of the wave for a flash, when we're already way behind in the wake. It's like we're wired to be sure that the wave goes on. That's our whole“—he hesitates, then his palm describes a low arc over our table—”
purpose.
On earth. To stand up, and flap our arms. And sit down again and wish the wave well. And hope someone else keeps the damn thing going.”

I think about this, fork stilled over my plate.

“That's it,” he says, sitting back to watch me. “The World According to George.”

And George doesn't waste time.

“I like the idea of five billion people standing up at once,” I say. “Doing the wave.”

“Would look pretty good, eh?” he murmurs.

“More than good. Staggering.” I chew a forkful of pasta. “Though—you think maybe we have some other purposes on earth? Any other legacies we leave?”

He considers, then grins. “You seem worth doing the wave for.”

I can't help laughing in his face—a high, glad laugh. So he doesn't think badly of me?

He polishes off the last of his pasta.

Or is he just flirting, upping the ante to pass the time?

“Admit it,” I say. “You use this routine on all the women.”

“I throw food to get their attention, then dazzle them with kitchen-sink philosophy?”

“Well, give me this: There aren't too many men who talk about procreation on a first date. It's a bit forward, don't you think?”

“So this is a ploy?”

I level my fork at him. “You could be a serial food thrower. I hear about that all the time.”

He chuckles.

The waiter brings the dessert cart.

And as I watch George mull the selection, a loose feeling overtakes my limbs: the knowledge that something important has happened. I order blindly, echoing George's choice.

The waiter brings two cannolis. I've never eaten a cannoli, never thought I'd like them. But these look delicious.

Across the table, George cracks the shell with his fork.

That's when it hits me: a man who composes theories of the universe, a man who makes me notice things I never noticed—there it is. Right there. This is my romantic.

At the entrance of my building we stop. George smiles right into my eyes. He pulls me into a hug—my head slips just under his chin, and for a second I fit against the surprisingly muscular elasticity of his chest. Then he lifts my hand and kisses it—a warm, soft kiss.

And I think: Did I just lose him?

Wednesday afternoon's meeting has been called by Joanne Miller. According to an e-mail addressed to the entire department—including, in a break with usual protocol, graduate students—it has come to Joanne's attention that the faculty has no consensus on grade inflation. Hence Joanne's e-mail, titled “Time to Clean House.”

Grade inflation has come to my attention too—as well as the attention of every major national newspaper, everyone in higher education, and even a handful of enlightened parents. A few intradepartmental resolutions on the subject would, indeed, be useful, and if Grub were a more energetic chairman he'd have convened a meeting on the subject months ago. Instead he's turned the task over to Joanne, whom I once heard him refer to as “bushy-tailed.”

Walking the several dozen yards from my office to the conference room, I try to muster my thoughts on grade inflation. Instead I'm distracted by recollections of last night. Was George, in chiding me for talking too long about my work, dismissing everything I care about? Belittling the dedication and passion I've poured into literature? Or was he after something else; was he coaxing me to peer out of a shell—one I've grown comfortable in? And was I too defensive? And didn't I break up with Jason because he
didn't
challenge me? And was that the stupidest move a sentient human has ever made?

Reaching the conference room, I tuck these thoughts away and focus on the unpleasant business—and colleague—at hand.

The first time I encountered Joanne, during my second semester as a graduate student, she was at the lectern. I'd arranged, as part
of a requirement for a pedagogy seminar, to attend four professors' opening lectures of the semester. Joanne's course was titled Sixteenth-Century Literature. At ten o'clock sharp she darkened the hall without a word of greeting to the students, many of whom became plainly uneasy they'd entered the wrong room. Up went a giant projection of King's College Chapel. There was a moment's deep silence. Then Joanne began to recite. “Did not we meet, to Truthe enthrall'd, our Soules enlarg'd in this Hallow'd Hall.” Another silence. Several chairs creaked. “Most people,” intoned Joanne from the bulb-lit lectern beneath the screen, “approach the great cathedrals with awe. They ought to approach them with relief.” The slide changed to a view of the chapel's interior. “These buildings, and the literature that went with them, embody an era in which people weren't afraid to believe what they believed—no matter if that brought glory or suffering.” Behind her, the lacy stone vault of the chapel soared impossibly high. “No apology
there,
” she said, stabbing the slender shadow of her pointer onto the screen. “Entering this lecture hall, you've stepped into an era that predates doubt. A person might win or lose, live or die—but life was struggle, never paralysis. Moral uncertainty was not in the sixteenth-century worldview. You may think of the sixteenth century as the era of obsessive love poetry, but that's only because our modern perspective has blinded us to the more important aspects of this writing. In fact the sixteenth century was an age of poets like none since. Poets who wrestled with the workings of the world. The capacities and limits of the soul.” Joanne gave a swift signal to a waiting TA. The hall lights snapped on; King's College Chapel vanished. Stepping to the center of the stage, Joanne loomed over the dazed students. “They built the moral house you think in.”

Another prof might not have pulled it off. Joanne, though, has that magnetism you sometimes see in physically powerful people. She's a big woman—not overweight, just post-college-jock-imposing—with a voice bred on the rugby field and a carriage that hints she might tackle if you resist her interpretation of a sonnet. She has a wide face, faint freckles, and pale-lashed brown eyes that, under rimless glasses, are keen and unblinking. Her prematurely gray-streaked hair, pulled back in a tight bun, gives her face a powerful dignity.
In a certain light, caught in a certain becalmed mood, she brings to mind a larger-than-life figure in an allegorical painting by Raphael, or even a Vermeer portrait: her face timeless, her unmasked gaze so thoughtfully penetrating it unnerves.

These days the sixteenth-century gig is staffed either by pallid romantics, drawn by all those sonnets detailing women's features in fourteen innuendo-laden lines, or by morbid souls fascinated with the unforgiving morality plays of an age when life was synonymous with suffering. All those paeans to loss. All those marble busts of dead cherubic children, cold stony ghosts of their former ruddy selves. Joanne's cospecialists are a mousy, bookish lot, even for professors. Among this cohort Joanne is—agree or disagree with her—a standout.

At the end of that first lecture I scribbled in my notebook:
At last! A prof unafraid to show intellectual passion!

That was then. Since I joined the faculty, Joanne Miller has appeared on my radar primarily as a somewhat self-important colleague a rung higher on the academic ladder (five years older than me, and recently tenured). She's a solid academician and publishes reasonably often. Her papers are persuasive if not lightning-bolt original. I know little else about her, as she never reciprocated the overtures I made when I was first hired. But I've had no problems with Joanne, apart from a few skirmishes upon joining the faculty. (Garden-variety turf battles. Would I
please
ask my students to exit lecture quietly, so their clamor of postlecture liberation won't disrupt Joanne's Spenser seminar across the hall? She doesn't know what I'm doing to them in there, but they sure sound happy to get out. Just kidding.)

It's only her recent push for departmental all-star status that's earned Joanne an upgrade to true nuisance. She's going to climb the academic ladder by sheer bloody-mindedness. She's willing to take on the committee work no one else wants; she's poised to organize and discipline the entire faculty at Grub's behest. Joanne's blunt organizational missives have become a regular addition to the department's e-mail in boxes. Yet when I groused to Jeff he dismissed me. “You want to do the work?” he said. “Let her be chairman's pet.” Joanne may be tenured, says Jeff, but the sixteenth century is out of vogue. The reach of her work is limited, and she
knows it. Every department has a majority whip. Better her, says Jeff, than us.

I join the small crowd assembling in the conference room. Faculty and grad students file in slowly, the grad students pooling just inside the entrance—unaccustomed to attending faculty meetings, they lean against the wall, hesitant to claim a professor's habitual seat.

Entering, Jeff pauses beside me. “This is going to be fun,” he whispers. “Joanne's been collecting dirt. I predict a departmental steam cleaning. Alas, I happened to have an unusual number of competent students last term.” His blue eyes pop as he mimes the yank of a noose around his neck. He takes his seat.

The faculty is nearly assembled: the theorists intermingled with the Romanticists, our two Medievalists seated beside a clutch of postmodernists, who as usual look depressed. I settle between Jeff and Steven Hilliard, a literary theory specialist visiting this year from Oxford. Steven greets me as casually as though there were nothing irregular about the presence of a visiting prof at a faculty meeting. When Grub enters, Steven rises to greet him with a genial hand clasp, making me recall Jeff's darkly approving commentary upon meeting Steven:
You have to be pulling strings somewhere to get that kind of access to the chair. Even with a genuine British accent.
Maybe so. But you also have to be either a masochist or an extreme political climber to attend another department's meetings by choice—even if some well-meaning faculty member has taken the highly unusual step of inviting you.