Amherst (2 page)

She reads him extracts from the letters and journals. Austin writes of ‘
the white heat which engulfs my being
.’ Mabel writes, ‘
What else could have made heaven to us but each other?
’

“David didn’t mind?”

“Apparently not.”

“So Mabel had sex with both of them.”

“Sometimes on the same day.”

“My God!”

“She was in love with Austin, but she went on being very good friends with David.”

“Very good friends who had sex.”

“It has been known, Jack.”

He’s watching her, and she feels herself actually blushing. And then, because her own reaction says more than she means, she takes up the book again and turns its pages, as if looking for some new extract.

How complicated it all is. There are no rules anymore, no agreed limits. Friends become lovers, lovers drift back into friendship. We owe each other nothing, but we still hurt each other.

Her gaze falls on a photograph of Mabel Todd taken in 1885, at the height of her affair. The collar of her dress is decorated with flowers, painted by her own hand. She wears long gloves, wrinkled at the wrists.

This long-ago story, this adulterous affair that touched the life of a poet, means more to Alice than the sum of its parts. It has become for her a meditation on the nature of passion. This is how she hopes to incorporate the poems. The lovers act, the poet reflects. And behind Emily Dickinson stands herself, a latter-day Dickinson, staring into the mysteries of love.

Did I miss it? she asks herself. Did I open the package and somehow mislay the instruction manual? Somewhere there has to be this cache of essential information on how men and women manage their emotional transactions. External facts don’t correspond with internal feelings. Why is it so hard to be intimate with men? It’s not physical prudery. She has no objection to sleeping with a man when the occasion seems to require it. But the men of her own age, her friends from university, her colleagues, rarely arouse passion in her. Brotherly love has replaced sexual desire.

So what is it I want? A tall dark stranger? Maybe just once, even if it all ends badly. Someone who’ll sweep me off my feet.

I want to be seduced.

That’s not about to happen with Jack. And yet, to her surprise, she finds she remains possessive. She has no right to such a feeling, but it’s there. She’d like to get him into smarter clothes. She’d like to change the way he does his hair.

“So tell me about you. Is there a girlfriend on the scene?”

“Not right now,” says Jack.

“Not easy, is it?”

“The disease of our time,” says Jack. “Everything’s possible, so nothing seems enough.”

He gives a rueful grin. The comfort of old lovers.

“Oh, Jack.”

She’s remembering him sitting beside her on a bench looking out over the bleak expanse of Seaford beach. She’s remembering their first kiss.

“As it happens,” says Jack, “I have an insight of my own on this. You know I’m teaching in the East End?”

Alice has only a hazy notion of Jack’s recent career. She associates teaching in the East End with missionary work, which gives her guilt cramps.

“Is it very rough?”

“No, not at all. It’s a brand-new sixth form academy in Stratford, right by the Olympic park. The idea is to get local kids into Oxbridge, which means selecting the most highly motivated, which turns out to be mostly kids from the Bangladeshi community. So I’m teaching seventeen-year-old girls wearing hijabs.”

He stops, and puts his head on one side. He’s looking at her quizzically.

“I’ve never actually told anyone this.”

“Please don’t say you’re turned on by veiled women.”

“It’s not a veil. It’s a head scarf that covers the hair and frames the face and goes round the neck. Once you get used to it, it can be very attractive.”

“I think you mean sexy.”

“On the right girl, yes.”

“You really think that?”

“It’s this whole thing about forbidden fruit, isn’t it? Put something just out of reach and you start wanting it.”

“That is so depressing.”

But it’s true. Isn’t that exactly what went wrong with her and Jack? He was too much within reach. She tries to recall her feelings back then, through the intervening layers of guilt. When they parted she told Jack it was because she needed space, but there was something else too, something more like fear. Jack’s need for her frightened her. It felt bottomless. He made her feel tired.

He’s looking at her now, half smiling, and she gets the sudden disconcerting sensation that he’s reading her thoughts.

“This love affair you’re writing about,” he says. “That’s forbidden fruit, isn’t it?”

“And the rest. They were breaking every rule in the book.”

“Not so easy for us.”

“Everything’s possible, so nothing seems enough.” Oh God, now I’m quoting Jack. “You just said that, didn’t you?”

“Even so,” he says, “I don’t want to go back to the old days. At least we can now actually talk to each other. Men and women, I mean. Men and women never used to tell each other the truth.”

“You think we do now?”

“We try.”

Here we are, trying. Everything we say has two meanings: one for the world and one for just us. He really has changed, but it’s hard to say exactly how, because he looks so much the same.

But of course it’s staring her in the face: he’s no longer in love with her. She can no longer presume that he wants to please her.

“When I read Mabel’s letters,” she says, “I almost envy her. Her love was so passionate.”

“You think her passion was real?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

Jack takes his phone out of his pocket.

“See this? This is an iPhone Five. There was so much demand for it I had to wait six days to get it. Over those six days I was sick with excitement, I wanted it so much. Then I got it, and I was in heaven. Undoing the box, taking it out, peeling off the protective film, touching it with my fingertips, arousing it to life—it was all a sort of ecstasy.  Then by the next day it was just a phone again.”

Alice laughs.

“Jack has phone sex.”

“But you get the point. You can have passion or you can have gratification, but you can’t have both.”

He’s telling me this is how he’s come to terms with the past. We were too available to each other, and so the passion died.

“So what are we supposed to do about it?” she says, answering both levels of their conversation.

“Don’t ask me.” He gives his sweet rueful grin. “I do diagnosis. I don’t do cure.”

There is one way to go. She thinks of Mabel and David, good friends who had sex. But she can’t do it. What would be the point? You can’t reduce sex to comfort.

“You’re not planning on running away with one of your sexy students?”

“No way,” says Jack. “Strictly off-limits. I’m just there to teach them Unit One, Aspects of Narrative.”

“Aspects of narrative? That’s what I need. Maybe you should teach me.”

He looks at her, saying nothing, smiling. That damn teacher trick.

“What I mean,” she says, “is I need to know how to tell a good story.”

“You’re the copywriter.”

“You’re the teacher.”

This is safer ground. Enough about real love. Stay with fiction.

“Well,” says Jack, “I can tell you what I tell my students. All stories are defined by their endings. The ending is the story’s destination, and the point after which the story can’t continue.”

Alice thinks about that. Is it self-evident to the point of banality, or is it rather original? She’s inclined to be struck by the fact that Jack has gone straight to the heart of her problem: she has no ending.

“So do you think,” she says, “that you have to know the ending before you start?”

“Start what? A story without an ending isn’t a story.”

“Isn’t it?” says Alice humbly. “I was rather hoping I could just write the screenplay and find the ending when I got there.”

“That’s how they made
Casablanca
. But it’s also how they made ten thousand really rubbish films.”

“Maybe I’ll find an ending in Amherst. That’s what research is for, after all.”

But she’s more insecure on this point than she cares to admit. How much should she plan her screenplay, and how much should she rely on the inspiration of the moment and let it grow all by itself? She prefers the organic method, having already written some pages of strange, almost hallucinatory prose, without any clear notion where they might belong in any greater structure.

“Maybe I should show you my first draft when it’s done. You can do your lit crit on it.”

Jack puts on a mock teacher voice.

“Structure, voice, language, setting, time sequence, character,” he says. “I can do you the full service.”

The bottle of wine is finished. Alice hears herself say, “Do you want to stay and have something to eat?”

“No,” says Jack. “I have a pile of essays waiting to be marked back at my place.”

She only fully understands that she wants him to stay when he tells her he’s going to go.

“It’s good to see you again, Jack. It’s been too long.”

He nods and smiles. They’re still side by side on the old sofa, with the books open before them. Might as well try what Jack calls men and women telling each other the truth.

“So have you forgiven me?” she says.

Silence. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe it’s all so long in the past for him that he can barely remember what he felt. But when he speaks at last, it’s as if it all happened yesterday.

“Nothing to forgive,” he says.

“I think I made you very angry. I’m sorry, I really am.”

He closes his eyes, sitting there beside her, and says nothing.

She can hear his slow breaths. She shouldn’t be doing this, but she can’t stop herself. She’s reeling him in from the past.

“You never called,” she says. “You hated me. I don’t blame you.”

“I didn’t hate you,” he says. “I was heartbroken.”

So he’s back. The soft sound of his voice tells her so. Now she starts to be fearful again.
If you break it, you own it.
Am I ready for that?

Footsteps on the stairs, a key in the lock. Megan to the rescue.

Alice’s flatmate enters in a rush, shedding bags, coats, shoes, complaining of the rain, her lateness, the failure of her phone.

“Can you believe, the fucking battery’s dead! I feel like I’ve died and been buried! Is there anything in that bottle? I need a drink. Actually, what I need most in the world is a pee.”

And she’s gone into the bathroom.

Jack stands.

“When are you off on this trip?”

“Soon. October the fifth.”

“Let’s get together when you’re back. You can tell me all about it.”

“I’d like that,” she says.

She sees him down the stairs and out onto the street. They kiss good-bye, holding each other for a wordless moment in the doorway. Then she watches him lope away through the drizzle towards the tube station. Returning to her room she experiences a wave of sadness.

What’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m like Emily Dickinson. Maybe I know too much and will never fall in love.

3

Mabel Todd did not like Amherst at all. After the busy social life of Washington, DC, where she had been something of a star, the little town in the valley of the Connecticut River seemed to be plunged in a perpetual twilight. There was the college, of course, but most of the faculty was made up of old men; David, her husband, was by far the youngest at twenty-six. The faculty wives dressed in dark colors, ate their suppers at six o’clock, and did not care for playing cards or dancing.

David too was disappointed. He had accepted the position at the college on the understanding that a wealthy benefactor was to endow a new observatory. President Seelye told him on arrival that this was no longer a likely prospect. Also it turned out that David was expected to teach three beginning divisions of mathematics, as well as astronomy.

“Then they must pay you more,” said Mabel.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” said David.

“Oh, really, David! You should stand up for yourself.”

David was a little man, not given to standing up for himself,
but the truth was this quite suited Mabel. He adored her and he indulged her, and most important of all, he gave her absolute freedom.

Sitting together by the light of a kerosene lamp in a room in the Amherst House on Pleasant Street, she allowed him to pet her. He fondled her and stroked her hair as if she were a favorite cat.

“I should have thought you would be bored with me by now,” she said.

“I’ll never be bored with my beautiful puss,” said David. “You know I can’t stop looking at you.”

“That young Ned did some looking of his own.”

“Why wouldn’t he? Amherst has never seen anyone like you.”

“You don’t mind, do you? I think you rather like it.”

“I like everyone to look at you,” said David, taking her in his arms. “Aren’t you my blue sky? You know I kiss the floorboards where you’ve trod.”

“Wouldn’t you rather kiss me?”

So he kissed her, and then became eager, and she had to push him gently away.

“It’s not the right time of the month. Not for at least a week.”

“I’m counting the days.”

Mabel counted the days too. She limited their lovemaking strictly to the fourteen days in the month when she would not get pregnant, and this had been successful, but for one failed experiment. She had got the idea that she was only fertile at what she called “the climax moment of my sensation.” This turned out not to be so. The result was a daughter, Millicent, now eighteen months old, left behind with Mabel’s parents in Washington, DC.

Mabel was not made by nature to be a mother. There had been a time when this had dismayed her. She was aware that
motherhood was a woman’s crowning achievement, but silently she believed that this did not apply to her. She was, she told David, too much of a child herself. Also they were new to Amherst and living in lodgings. Once they were settled in a home of their own, Millicent would join them.

In the meantime, unpromising though it appeared, Mabel intended to make her mark on Amherst. She was given to what she called “presentiments.” She was filled with a presentiment that there was a great adventure about to unfold.