Amherst (13 page)

This is the passage that is on Alice’s mind as she heads back up the interstate to Amherst. It’s no answer to her puzzle over how to end her story, but it is something important nevertheless. It’s the beginning of a whole new line of thought about the nature
of Mabel’s love affair, and more than that, about the nature of romantic love itself.

What if we seek love not because we long to be discovered by another, but because we need to affirm ourselves? This makes it a very different enterprise, and one that is not negated by the death of the lover.

Alice is excited. New ideas swarm in her brain.

I, just myself, and because it is I.

Mabel was seeking to know herself and believe herself to be uniquely valuable. She was driven to assert her own worth against the greater meaninglessness of life. Did she delude herself? In her extreme need, did she fabricate a noble passion, and then call upon it to give her life a glory it otherwise lacked?

There’s something else here, something more. Alice knows it, but her mind can’t quite grasp it. To say that romantic love is a form of egotism is merely banal. She has held in her hands all day the relics of a passion which transformed several lives. It’s not good enough to mock the claims of the lovers, to know better than they knew themselves what they were feeling. They used the words of their day to give voice to their emotions. “I am to him the holy of holies,” wrote Mabel in her diary. “The inner sacred temple.” No use snickering over the unconscious sexual imagery. Something true and powerful is at work here. What if it’s something bigger than love? What is there that’s bigger than love?

She reaches Amherst with enough light left in the sky to enable her to find her way home through the still unfamiliar town. This time she succeeds in making the turn off Route 9 onto Pleasant Street, and so down Main, past the Evergreens and the Homestead.

The house on Triangle Street appears to be silent and empty. Thirsty, she explores the fridge for something to drink. She finds a carton of apple juice. She’s sitting at the kitchen table writing up her notes when a young woman appears, her cheeks flushed, her long blond hair disheveled.

“Oh, hi,” she says. “Great. Apple juice. Just what I need.”

“I didn’t know Nick was home,” says Alice.

“Yeah, he’s home.”

The young woman gulps her juice and stares at Alice.

“Oh, right. You’re the English girl.”

“Yes,” says Alice.

“Well, I gotta run. Nice to meet you.”

And she’s gone. Alice hears her bare feet pattering up the stairs.

She tries to return to her notes, but she’s distracted. The nameless young woman is about her own age, maybe younger. Attractive in a simple-enough way. If she wants to spend the late afternoon with Nick, and he with her, that’s their business.

So why does it piss me off ?

She’s embarrassed by her own reaction. It makes her seem prudish—or jealous, which is worse. She doesn’t like finding she thinks the worse of Nick for his casual approach to sex. It’s not as if he’s pretended to be any other than he is.

The fact is she can’t make Nick out. He doesn’t add up. One minute he comes across as sensitive, even wise; the next minute he’s acting like a jerk. Surely there’s a disconnect between reading Emily Dickinson and having sex with students?

Noises from the hallway. Voices on the stairs, a door opening and closing.

Then Nick comes into the kitchen.

“I didn’t expect you back till later,” he says.

“I don’t like driving in the dark,” says Alice.

“So how was it?”

“It was good.”

He gets himself a beer from the fridge. Drinks from the bottle.

“You met Marcia.”

“Apparently. She didn’t introduce herself.”

“She said.”

“She said she didn’t introduce herself?”

“No. She said she met you.”

“I’m sorry if I was in the way,” says Alice.

“Not at all. She wanted to know about you.”

“What about me?”

“What you’re doing here. All the way from England. How I know you.”

“How well I know you.”

“That too.”

“I hope you were able to reassure her,” says Alice.

“Up to a point,” says Nick. “Marcia takes a fairly simplistic view of these things.”

“That no girl can resist you?”

“That what can happen usually does happen.”

“And I’m sure with Marcia it does.”

As soon as she says it, she regrets it.

Nick finishes his beer in silence.

“Sorry,” says Alice. “None of my business.”

“So tell me about Yale. Did you get what you wanted?”

They start to talk about Mabel and Austin, and pretend the crackly little exchange didn’t happen. He’s interested in all she has to say. Telling him makes it take on a shape in her mind.

“The more I read Mabel’s diaries,” she says, “the more I get the
feeling of what it was she was really looking for. The strange thing is, I’m not sure it was love at all.”

She reads him the passage she’s copied out: “ ‘I had a passionate longing to be loved for my own individual aroma
 
. . .’  It’s more than wanting to be loved. It’s as if she wants to know she exists.”

“Is that something bigger,” says Nick, “or something smaller?”

“It’s bigger. It has to be bigger.”

She can see him thinking about that.

“You think it’s smaller?”

“No,” says Nick. “I’m wondering about something else. You know how we’re always looking for hidden motives and deeper drives? We’ve been taught to take it for granted that what people say they want is just a cover for something else, for some more potent, unadmitted need, like sex or status or identity. I’m thinking now how that carries an assumption with it, a sort of hierarchy. At one end are all the little desires, and at the other end is the big engine that drives the train. Sorry, my metaphor’s collapsing. A train isn’t a hierarchy, is it?”

But Alice is interested.

“Do you mean the little desires might be as significant as the big ones?”

“I don’t know,” says Nick. “I’m just not as respectful of Big Theory as I once was. It doesn’t seem to be the way I lead my life.”

“How do you lead your life?”

“I think I lead it moment by moment. A chain of tiny impulses and decisions. I’m not sure they add up to anything greater than themselves. Or rather, if you add them all up, you don’t get one single big thing, you just get a bag full of lots of little things.”

Alice is disappointed. He reads the look on her face.

“Look, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get back to Mabel and Austin.”

“No, I want to get it,” says Alice. “It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t bother to try to make sense of our lives.”

“Like, make a screenplay of our lives.”

“No, that’s something else.”

But suddenly it seems to her it isn’t something else at all. Why should her attempt to make sense of her own life be any different from turning Mabel’s life into a story?

“So you don’t think your life makes any sense?” she says.

“I don’t even know what that means,” he says. “I’m not disagreeing with you. I just can’t make that sum add up anymore. My life is in too many pieces.”

“Okay.” She thinks about that. “So it’s all random. Doesn’t that do your head in?”

“Not anymore,” he says.

“Everything is just for nothing?”

“Or for itself.”

“Oh, okay, I get it. You live from moment to moment, meaning you just do whatever you feel like. Live a life of passing pleasures.”

Like sex with Marcia.

“Does that seem so worthless to you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

And she doesn’t. She wants there to be a journey and a destination, but maybe that’s just childish. Like wanting there to be a father God and a life after death where all the sacrifice finds its reward.

So what about love? Is that just one of the little pleasures that fills our dwindling store of days? She wants to ask Nick what love means to him, but somehow it feels too personal. To him or to her? So she asks him about Mabel.

“Do you think Mabel was fooling herself ?”

“No more than any of us,” says Nick. “I like the idea of being loved for . . . what was it? Her individual aroma.”

“I’m beginning to think she was just seriously insecure. She’s forever writing about how attractive she is, and how men can’t keep off her.”

“What was her relationship like with her father?”

“Oh, her father loved her, if that’s what you mean. He adored her. But he was a disappointed man. One of those self-made intellectuals stuck in a job inferior to his talents. He was a clerk in some office attached to the Naval Observatory. Mabel always called him Professor. I think he may even have given himself the title, but he wasn’t a professor. Do you think that might have affected her?”

“Fathers matter to daughters,” says Nick. “Doesn’t your father matter to you?”

“My father’s a selfish womanizer who never wanted me in the first place,” says Alice.

“Oh, boy,” says Nick.

“So what? My mother loved me. I have a fantastic stepfather. I’m fine.”

“I believe you.”

“I suppose you think Mabel had a father thing for Austin?”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes,” says Alice, “but I hate the way Freud’s made us all reduce relationships to these corny stereotypes. You’re the one who wants to junk Big Theory. Couldn’t she have fallen in love with him because he was a fellow spirit?”

“So you still want to believe in love. For a while back there I thought you were moving on.”

“Moving on where? To some sad little conclusion that love is just a bundle of neurotic itches that we want to scratch? I don’t like that. Do you like that?”

“No,” says Nick. “I don’t like it. Just like I don’t like Santa Claus being my dad in a false beard.”

Suddenly a real personal detail. Alice is disarmed.

“Did he really do that? Your dad?”

“Yes, he did. He kept the beard in a bottom drawer in a chest in the passage where we hung our coats and lined up our Wellington boots.”

“And you found it.”

“There you go. End of innocence.”

He’s grinning as he says it.

“I don’t believe that,” she says. “I bet you knew already.”

“Yes, I knew. I recognized his special dad smell. Cigarettes, coffee. His individual aroma. No false beard could hide that.”

Alice thinks how she never knew a special dad smell. It was always her mother who snuck her stocking onto her bed the night before Christmas. She thinks how much she loves her mother, and suddenly she misses her with a terrible ache.

“I do want to believe in love,” she says. “Don’t take it away from me.”

“I could never do that, Alice.”

He hardly ever calls her by her name. There’s no need when there’s only the two of you in the room. The effect is unexpected, as if he’s touched her.

“I don’t want to think love’s just egotism,” she says.

“It would make a rotten screenplay.”

“And a sad life.”

“That happens whether you like it or not,” he says.

“To you, maybe. Not to me.”

“Good for you. Rage against the dying of the light.”

“That’s Dylan Thomas,” she says. “Haven’t you got an Emily Dickinson line?”

Straight off he gives her a verse.

Behold this little bane—

The boon of all alive—

As common as it is unknown

The name of it is Love—

Alice gives a shrug, and pulls a face for him. What can you say?

“Don’t you just love her half rhymes?” he says.

“I love everything about her,” she says. “Emily believes in love.”

“But she calls it ‘this little bane,’ ” he says. “And ‘the little toil of love.’ ”

“I don’t care. I say she wanted to love. I say she did love.”

Alice’s defiance, based on nothing. Nick’s response takes her aback.

“I wanted to love. I did love.”

What can you say to that?

“I just didn’t know it at the time. Then the time came when I did know it. But it was too late.”

“This was Jack’s mother?”

“Yes. Laura.”

“There must have been others.”

“There’ve been others, yes. But not like that.”

“It’s not as if you haven’t had your chances. And by the way, you are married.”

“So you’re still angry with me.”

“Why should I be angry with you?”

“Because of Marcia. Because of your dad.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” She jumps up, gathers her papers together. “Your sex life is your problem. My father’s my problem. I don’t need this.”

Ridiculously, she finds herself in the grip of a tantrum, like a two-year-old child. She knows it’s entirely unnecessary but she can’t control it. Sensing she’s about to burst into tears, she runs out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

In the safety of her room she does cry, a little, but it’s mostly out of frustration with herself. What was that all about?

About Marcia. About my dad.

She hates Nick, knowing she resents his afternoon with Marcia. She hates his knowing she has a father who didn’t love her, which makes her into someone looking for love from an older man. She hates being understood more than she understands herself. She hates the feeling that he’s in control and she isn’t.

That’s a lot of hating. Who knew I was so wound up?

She decides to get out of the house. She needs some kind of supper anyway. She pulls on a coat against the night chill and goes out, not looking to see if Nick’s still in the kitchen, not announcing her departure.

She walks up Main Street and goes into a pasta restaurant near the center of town. It’s a plainly furnished place, priced for a student clientele, and only about a quarter full. She sits at a table by the window and orders herself a large glass of pinot grigio and a bowl of carbonara. Her wine comes and she drinks it fast, staring at the street outside, seeing nothing.

This wasn’t meant to turn into my story.

She’s angry at herself for being angry with Nick. She replays
their conversation in her mind, seeing as she does so his quizzical face gazing so steadily at her, silently interrogating her, finding answers she does not mean to give.