What She Saw... (18 page)

But New Jersey was even more of a nightmare. Her mother, Roberta, couldn't say the word
psychiatrist
out loud. (The
food
doctor
was as close as she'd gotten.) Even though Roberta was the one who took Phoebe to see an Indian man in a brown suit in a high-rise building in Fort Lee who asked her a lot of nosy questions about her mother. (Wasn't that ironic?) And speaking of eating, sometimes she couldn't. But sometimes when she did, she made herself sick. And the truth was that it wasn't just sometimes, it was all the time. It was almost every day, sometimes twice a day. It started during her junior year abroad that never was. It was all pretty terrible. It was all pretty tragic.

Bruce Bledstone made it less so.

He never dispensed advice. That wasn't his style. And he never told her much about himself other than the fact that he'd been born and bred in Kansas and hadn't been back there since. But he'd listen—he'd listen!—one leg propped up on his desk, the other planted on the floor. And he'd hand her a box of tissues when she started to choke up. And he'd smoke her cigarettes while he listened to her rave. And sometimes, between the inhale and the exhale, he'd tell her about the “late-capitalist pigs who run this country,”
her
country. (He didn't identify as a citizen.) And still other times they'd just be sitting there, neither of them talking. And he'd be staring at her as if she were his, even though she wasn't. And she was young, and she was stupid—but she wasn't that stupid: she knew what some looks meant.

She knew it was okay to visit even though it wasn't Thursday.

AT FIRST SHE'D make up excuses. Then she ran out of excuses. Then she'd just show up, sit down, and start babbling. The visiting professor never told her to leave. He never told her to stay, either. But he gave her keys to his office, so she could leave the books and articles he'd asked her to find him in a neat pile on his desk. She'd stick a note on the top of every pile. She signed them all, “Faithfully, P.” She thought that was a pretty ironic way to sign off. She assumed he'd know what she was getting at.

It was hard to imagine that he wouldn't have.

“I was thinking of dropping out of your class, or at least changing to pass-fail—you know, for ethical reasons,” she informed him one afternoon at Pita Paradise. They'd stopped in for some lunch on their way back from the Political Philosophy Library.

“Drop out?” He wrinkled his brow, narrowed his eyes quizzically. “Why would you do something like that?”

“Some people in the class, well, you know . . .”

But it wasn't clear he knew anything. “No, I don't know.” He played dumb, or maybe he really was.

Maybe he was the naïve one after all.

“Some people in the class are starting to get the wrong idea about us,” she mumbled into her chickpea salad. It wasn't exactly true. It seemed like a good way to introduce the “right idea”—namely, the idea that Bruce Bledstone might be falling madly in love with her. Now he performed a single, protracted nod and said, “I see.”

“Well, what do you think I should do about it?” Phoebe asked him.

“That's not for me to say,” he answered. “Though as a general rule, I would advise against worrying about what other people think. Especially since other people are usually wrong. On the other hand, there are no absolutes.”

“Right, of course,” she chirped, her disappointment bottomless.

BUT THERE WERE encouraging signs on other fronts. For example, one Thursday after class, the visiting professor informed Phoebe, “It's no secret that my marriage is in crisis.”

She tried to act surprised. In fact, she'd done her research. “I didn't even know you were married,” she lied. “I mean, you don't seem like you're married.”

He shrugged. “It's not something Evelyn and I go around publicizing.”

“Of course not.” Phoebe shrugged back.

As if to keep your marriage a secret were the most natural thing in the world, when the only married people she knew intimately—her own parents—seemed perfectly comfortable having others regard them as a single, state-sanctioned entity.

“To be perfectly honest, neither of us actually believes in the institution of marriage,” he continued. “We have a marriage founded in convenience—financial as well as collegial.”

“But do you love her?” It came tumbling out of her mouth. She didn't mean to pry; she was just curious. Curious if people really married for the tax break.

“Love her?” Bruce Bledstone repeated Phoebe's question as if he didn't understand—as if it were a pretty naïve question to be asking. “I guess I love her. Why would you ask something like that?”

But she didn't have an answer for him just then. And she tried to meet his eyes. But he looked away, toward the window. There were no scenic views of the lake or mountains that afternoon. It was raining too hard, and the fog was too thick. And she could tell he was mad, and it nearly destroyed her. “I'm sorry,” she murmured. “It's none of my business.”

“Marriage is a complicated institution,” he told her—or maybe them both. “Not to mention a bourgeois construct.”

Then he asked her for a Camel, and she was more than happy to oblige—nearly ecstatic for the opportunity to offer him something that he wanted. Because somewhere along the way, his happiness had become the measure of her happiness. And because somewhere along the way she must have perceived that he didn't need her the way she thought she needed him.

She had this idea that he would.

She had this idea that he would find her beautiful, and that would be enough. She didn't understand then that the world is filled with beautiful girls. Or that beauty fades—even in youth. Which is to say that once you get to know people, they stop looking like anything in particular.

IT WASN'T SO many weeks later that the visiting professor called to say he wasn't feeling his best—something about a bad cold—
and would Phoebe mind dropping off this week's research assistance at his rental house downtown
? “It's a forty-minute walk from campus,” he said, “but there's also a bus.”

She told him walking would be no problem—she could use the exercise. And besides, it was a nice day, nicest one so far this year. She wrote his address on her hand. She told him she'd be over after French. It was dinner-hour by the time she arrived at 84 North Route 11, a sky blue saltbox dating back to the 1950s.

There was more crabgrass than real grass in the front yard. And the porch was leaning to one side, and the shutters were hanging off their hinges. Phoebe couldn't quite believe that a man of Bruce Bledstone's stature would live in a house in that kind of disrepair, but it was he who came to the door, so he must have. He must have wanted to see her. He greeted her with a toothy smile and a jocular pat on the back. “Well, hello there, Phoebe,” he said. “Come in, come in.”

So she came in. She was wearing the same black miniskirt she'd worn to the first day of Hegemony 412, along with black tights, a green top, and chunky black shoes. He was wearing white jeans and a brown sweater and socks with no shoes. He didn't look particularly sick. He hadn't lost his appetite, either. He turned to her midfoyer. “I was about to order a pizza. Do you eat pizza, Phoebe?”

She was thinking she should have worn her hair down. “As long as you don't get pepperoni or sausage,” she told him. “I don't eat red meat.”

The living room wasn't much to look at. There were no pictures on the wall, no carpet on the floor—just a striped sofa, matching easy chair angled toward an oversized TV, and a blond-wood coffee table situated between the two. The visiting professor took Phoebe's coat, asked her if she'd like something to drink. He said he had vodka and gin. She asked him for a screwdriver. He disappeared into the kitchen. While he was gone, she arranged herself on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, inspected her chronically mutilated cuticles. (They had looked worse in the past.) It was another five minutes before he returned with her drink, which he set down on the coffee table at her feet. Then he sat himself in the easy chair to her right and pressed the power button on the remote.

There was a big war going on halfway around the globe, in the Persian Gulf, and his TV screen was fulgurating as if in the throes of some kind of firefly convention. “This is your government in action,” he offered during a commercial for some do-it-yourself pregnancy test.

“It's not
my
government,” she protested. “I didn't even vote in the last election!”

“You should vote if you believe in democracy,” he told her. “I don't know if you do.”

The problem was: neither did Phoebe. And she made a mental note to find out. By which she meant,
ask Bruce Bledstone if he
believed in democracy at some later date
. In the meantime, he refilled her glass. He kept refilling it. Then the doorbell rang. From the sofa, she listened to the visiting professor chewing out the delivery boy for being so late. That's when it first occurred to her that Bruce Bledstone wasn't necessarily the nicest man.

But, then, what did she care? He was nice to her—nice enough to let her sit on his sofa and watch his all-news station and eat his pizza and ramble on about all the inconsequential people who'd passed through her inconsequential life. It never occurred to her that he might have fed on her attention the way she fed on his. Or that visiting professors of critical theory got lonely just like everyone else. She thought they had bigger things to worry about—bigger, better things that ended with the suffixes
ism
and
ony.

He returned with a flat box balanced on his uplifted palm, like a gentleman waiter in an old-fashioned Italian restaurant. He sat the box down next to her drink, then sat himself down next to her body. “You should have told me you didn't eat pepperoni,” he scolded her between bites.

She told him that she had; she acted annoyed.

Secretly she was relieved.

She wanted to be empty for him—empty so he could overwrite her. So she was not herself—someone else. Because she'd had enough of Phoebe Fine, the sorority-reject nervous-breakdown bulimic with the bloated face. And because she was seeking escape from a life that seemed like no life at all— just a mind-numbing alternation of work and play; and day and night; and beds made and unmade; and bodies soaped and sweated and soaped; and empty stomachs filled and emptied and filled all over again.

And because she wanted to be so empty that her recent past—her recent failures and rejections—would become irrelevant. So she could start from scratch—a blank slate, pure unadulterated epithelium, two-dimensional and in no hurry to become three. So all you saw was all you got. So ordinary people couldn't get under her skin. (There'd be no skin to get under.)

And because Bruce Bledstone was to be her getaway car. That was the master plan.

Phoebe picked the crust off one slice. He ate the rest of the pizza. The scud missiles didn't stop. “Do you think a lot of civilians are dying?” she asked him at half past nine.

“It's a fucking bloodbath over there,” is what he said.

At which point she tried to imagine what it would be like to lie in a bathtub full of blood. But it was the image of a warm bed that dominated her conscious thought. She must have started to yawn.

“It's getting late,” said Bruce.

“It's getting late,” agreed Phoebe.

“I should drive you home.”

She didn't answer.

He drove her home in his dark red Chevy Caprice with the beige acrylic-knit interior, and he said good night before she'd even gotten out of the car.

BUT IT WASN'T so many nights later that the visiting professor rang Phoebe up to see if she might be interested in joining him and a few of his colleagues for a drink at a local cocktail lounge.

“Sure.” She tried to sound casual even while she was practically bursting with gratitude for the invitation. That Bruce Bledstone thought she was worthy of associating with actual faculty members!

That Bruce Bledstone wasn't embarrassed to be seen in the company of Phoebe Fine.

He said he'd swing the Caprice by at nine.

She dressed in a black leather skirt and a fake-fur coat.

He was wearing a gray suit jacket and a navy blue Mao cap.

“Hello there,” he greeted her from behind the wheel.

“What's this music?” she said, fastening her seat belt.

“It's Bulgarian folk.”

“I didn't know they had bagpipes over there.”

“You don't have to like it.”

“It's okay. I mean, it's not really my taste.”

“What's your taste?”

“More like Madonna, Lisa Stansfield, that kind of stuff.”

“I like Madonna.”

Phoebe couldn't believe her ears. No matter that his tone was equivocal. It made her think he understood. It made her want to reach over and hug him. “You like Madonna?” she squeaked with joy.

“I like that one from a few years back,” he continued. “What's it called? ‘Material World.' ”

“You mean ‘Material Girl'?”

“That's the one—it's a very clever song.”

“Yeah, it's a good song,” Phoebe concurred. “But I think a lot of people misinterpreted it. I mean, they thought Madonna was celebrating being materialistic. But I think she was actually making fun of it. Don't you think?” She turned to the visiting professor for validation.

But he had none to offer. “It could very well be,” he said, smiling cryptically, his green eyes glinting in the headlights of a passing camper.

Then she didn't know whether to feel like a genius or a jackass—not until she got to Pete's Tavern.

Then she felt like a genius.

“THIS IS MY tireless research assistant, Phoebe Fine,” he said, introducing her to the assembled crowd.