My Education (25 page)

“I'm coming over,” she said. “I'll have Dutra with me. He can give me directions.”

When they arrived, an hour later, they were almost as long coming in: with an antique brass floor lamp with a clear blue glass marble on top that screwed down the lampshade; an old crazy quilt I'd admired countless times where I'd seen it tossed over her downstairs armchair; three framed paintings in radiant, lush sunset colors, all bosomy with afterglow clouds and ripe fruit trees and avalanches of velvet and languid or serenely dead sylphs; and two loud boxes of mismatched kitchenware, more kinds of pots, pans, and skillets than I'd realized were made; and towels and pillows and sheets in a motley of patterns, all pleasantly wash-paled and exceedingly soft; and penultimately a glazed pot full of green glossy leaves and very small, very white star-shaped flowers exuding a honey-rich scent like a swoon; and finally, Martha and Dutra each hefting an end, a massive rug rolled in a tube and secured with duct tape. My painstaking, awkward furniture arrangement, the futon-couch at an angle on one side, my armchair and half-dead houseplant marooned opposite in unsuccessful colloquy, was quickly erased. The rug—a box-cutter emerging from Martha's back pocket—was sliced out of its bindings and unfurled into the room. It was an Oriental rug, in a palette related to that in the pictures, but more darkly saturated: bloodred and apricot orange. I stood to one side with the jasmine, for that's what the plant was, in my hands, rooted there by my pleasure and shame which were trying to strangle each other. In the end pleasure might have prevailed, but her toga was stained, and her eyes blurred a little with tears.

“Is it all right I helped warm your house?” Martha whispered to me nuzzlingly, when Dutra, inaugurating my bathroom, briefly left us alone.

Was it? Now the apartment looked just as I'd hoped that it would, when I'd hoped to impress her. In fact, apart from the fish tank, it now looked like it ought to be Martha's apartment.

“Of course it is,” I murmured. “Thank you.”

“It's a sweet place,” she said. “I love it.”

“I hoped that you would.” I fell speechless, an inexplicable lump in my throat. I'd copied my door key for her, imagining it would make a significant gift. Childishly I'd envisioned the act of bestowal: like sliding a ring on her finger I'd lay the key onto her palm. And as fairy-tale keys tend to do, it would open far more than a mere wooden door. But it now seemed superfluous. Everything beguiling in these rooms she had brought in herself. The key stayed in my pocket.

Dutra returned and a hammer and nails and a bottle of Glenlivet (“
The
Glenlivet,” mugged Dutra, impressed) emerged from one of the two kitchen boxes. While Dutra poured, Martha hung the three Maxfield Parrish reproductions (for that's what they were), shifted my furniture to her satisfaction, and removed the jasmine from my hands to the front windowsill where she thought it might get enough light. Along with all these things of hers into my rooms had come a smell, encyclopedic and subtle, like a threadbare tapestry on some epic subject: her former lovers and gardens and meals and travels and sails and wounds and orgasms and perhaps even failures, a dusty and vegetal, floral and heat-baked and cool-moist and unnameable smell. The smell of her past, her past self, here where my self was seeking its future.

“I can't hang out,” Dutra declared in a voice that would not brook dispute, throwing his scotch back and raising a hand in goodbye.

I didn't object, but Martha said, “Oh, come on. I haven't met the fish yet.”

“The fish is right there. Ginny can make introductions.”

“Martha, Country Joe. Country Joe, Martha.”

“
‘Country Joe'
?” Martha said.

“Dutra named him.”

“Jesus, Dutra. I forget what a hippie you are.”

Provoked, Dutra forgot he was leaving. “Here's a case where you don't understand the big picture. Country Joe is the pioneer fish. To establish the right chemical balance in a saltwater tank you have to start with one tough little fish. He eats, he pisses, he shits, the levels seesaw like crazy until the nitrogen cycle gets going and the tank's safe for fish. Get it? Country Joe isn't really a fish! He survives where most others would die, and by his very existence creates an environment healthy for fish. So after this preliminary stage, it'll be
Country Joe and the Fish
.”

“You really are a fucking hippie,” said Martha.

We sat, Martha and I on the futon-frame couch, Dutra at an angle to us in the armchair, all of us framed by the rug's boundary as if riding a raft. We passed the bottle of scotch back and forth. We watched Country Joe flutter up, and drift down, and flutter upward again in his luminous cube. There was no other light in the room. How had she done it? She had bound the room deftly together, as if tucking the ceiling and walls into the carpet which served as their bed. Now all was snug. It was graceful and spare but not bare. I was growing drunk, and her scent, which had flooded my rooms, and uprooted my frail little seedlings of self, now drugged and aroused me. I wondered if style such as Martha possessed was inherent, or learned. Learned, I decided; give me ten years and I'd have it as well. God, give me ten years, but right now! What was the future with Martha that crowded my dreams? What bright shapes bodied out of the clouds? Much of the time my desire was so humble it didn't reach past the next day: if only she'd lavish me with her assurance. She was a generous, ravenous, unrestrained lover, yet this she withheld. If only she'd tell me she never intended to leave. Other times, covertly ambitious, I ventured to install her in the very same domestic fantasia I'd nursed since girlhood, which in fact required little renovation to replace gruff Han Solo or gloomy Lord Byron with lithe, sly-mouthed Martha—still we lived in some sun-drenched abode and reared flawless offspring and made love every day years on end. Very often, and sometimes unkindly, Martha posed me the challenge of describing to her any future at all we could share, as if I were the water-bound fish, and she the versatile frog, in one of Joachim's sad picture books. She implied there was simply no world for us. Yet I saw it clearly—too clearly to dare share with her.

The tank steadily burbled and hummed. Dutra and Martha were talking about the Great Barrier Reef, their low voices sheltered in vastness. “I feel like we're outside,” I said suddenly. “Camping.”

“I would love to go camping,” said Dutra.

“Then we should,” Martha said.

“In the woods,” I agreed. “In the woods, with that smell . . .”

Martha got up to go to the bathroom, but the sense of entrancement remained. When she returned she slipped behind me on the couch, scissoring her long legs around me and holding me close, as if we were sharing a horse. I sank into her, closing my eyes, and felt her hands, with their rough finger pads, steal under my shirt. She gardened without gloves, too impatient for them, and her long narrow fingers had become stained with dirt in the needle's-width creases, like esoteric tattoos, and her fingertips were shaggy and dry and undid me far more than when they had been creamy and smooth. I heard her quick breath, and my own, and then my mind seemed to yaw between hunger and the dim recollection of Dutra, still in the armchair. Struggling upstream against pleasure I looked and saw him, his own eyes remote as he watched us. Martha craned over me, catching my mouth on her own, and when I arched back to kiss her more deeply her hands closed on my nipples and assailed them with torments, tender shapings and whispery teasings and sudden hard pinches and twists, and I let out a groan, no longer caring who heard or saw what, and her mouth broke away.

“Did you used to touch her like this?” I heard her wonder to Dutra, her voice thick and bemused. “It's amazing. She's so sensitive. You have every inch of her nerves in the palm of one hand.”

“You're a psychopath,” Dutra remarked. It might have been in that way that he had of giving two opposed meanings from which one might choose—but the words, though I heard them along with the rubbery squeak of the scotch bottle's cork thumbed back into the bottle, and along with his loud angry tread on the stairs, couldn't pierce the dense fug of my lust. I would not allow them. If I did, it was only to think, with superior pity,
Poor Dutra.
I did not even know if he'd closed my front door, as I clawed off her clothes and devoured her body, sprawling over her hand-me-down rug, as if I could force not just tongue breasts and hands but each knuckle and toe joint, each shoulder and kneecap, the whole ribcage and skull, somehow into myself. Sucking here, shoving there. When all else failed swallowing whole. Then I really could keep her.

•   •   •

Because school had resumed without me—because there wasn't even Dutra running late to his class, spanking his alarm clock on the far side of the wall; because my Professor of Longing operated on a rarefied emeritus calendar which placed our next meeting somewhere between Christmas and Easter; because, for more money, I'd begun writing movie reviews for the local free weekly, at a fee of thirty dollars per review out of which I must pay for the ticket, so that to make any money at all I spent hours on end by myself in the dark watching all the worst films of 1993—it was weeks before I realized what it meant, that school had resumed without me. It meant that Martha had resumed her conspicuous life on the campus, without me. Already, on the pretext of Anya's Teutonic severity, Martha had managed to shift our affair entirely from her house to mine, so that I no longer stepped through her doorway, let alone slept in her bed. Now I equally didn't walk with her the length of the Quad, my arm brashly snaking her waist, regardless of how many times I'd imagined just such a perambulation. She and I, sitting shoulder to shoulder at some visitor's lecture, weren't stared at or whispered about. My name wasn't comprised in a fresh, titillating graffito. Admiration, notoriety, envy—I didn't need any of this, but I wanted acknowledgment. I was so proud that she loved me—did nobody know? Her separation from Nicholas, her love affair with me must have been the first-ever installments of the tale of the Hallett-Brodeurs that hadn't been broadcast all over the campus. Yet when I said as much to her she gaped back, amazed and offended. “I suppose that you want me to publish the banns,” she exclaimed.

“I didn't say that. I just asked why it seems to suit you, that I'm never on campus, now that I'm working and not taking classes.”

“It doesn't suit me. I miss you all day. Can't you tell, when it's night?” It was night now, and she lay on my bed, in between her old sheets, and, to make her point further, slid one thigh between mine and reached under me, seizing my ass. But, though gripping her greedily back, I pursued my subject.

“If you miss me all day, let's have lunch. At the Movable Feast.” Movable Feast was the student café in the English department's basement, where professors and students held meetings while dining on sandwiches named, to cite just one example,
Absalami, Absalami!
Movable Feast was the English department's piazza, its most heavily used public space.

“I don't have lunch on days that I teach. I don't ever have time. And if I did, I would sooner eat dirt than at Movable Feast.”

“Then take me as your date to the dinner for Slavoj Žižek.”

“Have you been reading my mail?”

“You left the card on my table, Martha. Tell me why you won't take me.”

“I'm not
not
taking you—I'm not going myself. That man subsists entirely on Diet Coke. Why would I go to a dinner for
him
?”

“Then take me someplace you
are
going.”

“I don't go anywhere! Regina, when I go out at night, I see
you
.”

“And you only ever see me at night. Here. In my apartment. Ever since I moved here, you treat me like your mistress.”

“I'd much prefer being treated like a mistress to being treated like a wife. Lots more fun.”

“We're talking about my preferences, not yours.”

“Oh!—would you prefer
this
,” she renewed her assault, deftly reversing herself so her redolent cunt squashed my face, “. . . or would you prefer
this
?”

Small as our town was, even when I did make the hike up to campus my move had put me on completely different paths from before, and this was how I ran into Casper, my friend of the first weeks of school. Even before I'd dropped out Casper had drifted into a world of postmodern cereal boxes and abstruse applications of Freud to broadcast television, and I'd hardly seen him. Now we were thrilled to discover we'd moved to apartments just a couple of blocks from each other. “What are you taking?” Casper asked as we mounted the crumbling shale steps of the steep creekside trail. “I haven't run into you anywhere.”

“I took the term off, but I probably won't reenroll. I've been working. Long, tedious hours at very poor pay. It might be a career.”

“Really!” Casper cried, his admiration more pleasing than Martha's. “God, I wish I'd thought of that. I have two papers overdue from the spring and one from last fall. Every day in the morning I think, Today's the day that I'll start work on them. And by lunchtime I think, Why do today what can wait till tomorrow?”

“Where are you going now?”

“Happy hour at Hot Jalapeños. Haven't you been? It's the best happy hour on the hill. Two-for-one margaritas and three-for-one shots, and if you're able to eat a whole one of this really hot pepper without having water for five minutes after, they take half off your whole evening's bill.”

“Wow. That sounds really tawdry.”

“It is, absolutely, downscale. A frat-boy-type place. Shalom Kreutzberg”—an art historian and shopping-mall theorist—“turned me on to it last semester. It's the so-bad-that-it's-good place to go.”