My Education (28 page)

It took me a beat to realize that the volume was all the way down. “. . . just about eight. Are you splashing around in the shower? Oh, here you come, a gazelle trailing droplets across the wood floor. Pull the blinds, please. Okay, you are not picking up. Listen, I got held up but I'm on my way now and I'll be there in less than ten minutes. I'm sorry we're missing the movie, but I'm bringing some pasta I made and a bottle of wine so don't worry your head about dinner.”

“Gottlieb, eight twenty-five. I'm using the Hobo's pay phone. Why aren't you home?”

“Regina, I'm over at Dutra's. He hasn't seen you all day. It's
nine
, we said eight. Please call Dutra the instant you hear this.”

“Regina, I've just been back by your apartment. Your downstairs neighbor guy says he heard you come in more than three hours ago and never heard you go out, so I'd like you to pick up the phone, please, and kindly stop fucking with me.”

“PICK. UP. THE. PHONE.”

“I've come home now and had the pasta and wine by myself. I hope you realize your only good excuse has you bleeding and dead in a ditch and if that's the case I'm going to feel like an asshole for being so angry, so either I'm an asshole, or I'm legitimately angry, and either way it is fucking unpleasant.”

“Regina, it is seven o'clock in the morning. Wake the fuck up and answer your phone.”

“Nine-forty
A.M
. I'm going to class now where I will be the queen bitch to my innocent students. No news reports of you bleeding and dead in a ditch.”

“All right, Gottlieb. It's noon. You've woken up now, wherever you are, and found your panties and shoes and tiptoed past your sleeping new friend—”

Nicholas brought down his finger on
STOP
. “Why not enjoy the rest of these in private.”

“She was
here
,” I realized with horror.

“Yes, she was. Quite a number of times. And I, in my drunk foolishness, didn't answer the door to her knock, and ask her, as someone who was hopefully sober, to drive you to the hospital. Regina.” He'd taken the crown of my head in his hands. “I'm going, before Martha arrives here again. Look at me and say you will go to the doctor.”

But I didn't care about doctors or health. I didn't care about my brain, perhaps suffocating in the dented and tight-fitting vault of my skull. Perhaps it was the swelling of my brain that prevented my caring about it—I only cared about her, and what she might think of me, and how quickly and permanently such dark groundless thoughts might dampen love. That was enough to swell with fear my foolish heart, and send it running around my ribcage like the proverbial chicken relieved of its head. “Where did you park?” I demanded. “Are you parked out in front? Did she notice your car?”

He withdrew his hand now and perhaps also reeled in something else that was less tangible. “In fact I'm parked three blocks from here,” he said after a moment, “because you had trouble explaining to me where you live. Worry about your head, Regina. If for no one else do it for me. I feel responsible. I was too deep in my cups.” And then before I could go to my window, to make sure Martha wasn't at that very moment arriving outside, he'd shut my door behind him and was descending the stairs. I heard the downstairs door as I reached my front window, in time to see him passing the trunk of the redbud and crossing the street.

His sudden absence was as strange as his presence had been. Dropping my toga of blankets, I made my way gingerly to my tiny efficiency kitchen, holding on to the walls. In the fridge were two liter bottles of red Gatorade, one half empty, and a jumble of moderately decent and fresh edibles: an orange, a banana, a yogurt, and a loaf of white bread. All of this had come from Hobo Deli and Nicholas; apart from Smucker's jam and Tabasco my fridge had been bare. My hands were trembling: hunger, I hoped, though I felt I had no appetite. I made myself peel and eat the banana, and then looked in the bathroom. My clothes had been rinsed out, though not entirely cured of pink stains, and hung over the rod. A towel lay like a rug on the floor, and was damp. On the closed toilet lid, on the far side of the sink from the tub, lay a very small book, blue clothbound, almost looking, from a few feet away, like a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. I picked it up and saw, faintly stamped on the front,
Shakespeare's Sonnets.
He must have had it in his back pocket when he started to bathe me, and then removed it to the relative dryness of the closed toilet lid. He must have also had pink vomit stains on his own shirt, though in the twilight in which I'd just seen him, I hadn't discerned them.

I lost time again as I sat on the closed toilet lid with the book in my hands. Its cloth binding was very fine, but very dry, and in some way alive, strangely warm. Perhaps silk. It felt disproportionately heavy in my hands, as if every wrong I had done to its owner was closed in its covers. I could almost think that I'd ruined this also, dropped it into the toilet already. But for the moment the book was still dry. The necessity of keeping it so didn't soften my sense of deceit as I hid the book on a high shelf, at the same time as I heard Martha's car pulling up.

•   •   •

If Martha's fury was titanic when she thought I was standing her up, even more titanic was the countervailing flood of her remorse. It agonized her that she had banged, shouted, worst of all darkly concluded while all the while I lay helplessly—alone—in my apartment in the grip of a head injury. “I should have broken down that door!” she declared. I knew that some of her distress was concern for herself and not me. It was the lesser part, but potent—she intensely disliked that she'd lost her composure, that she'd betrayed an insecure and anxious need, and what was worse with Dutra, and my downstairs neighbor, for onlookers. And so perhaps I was able to feel I was sheltering her with my lies and omissions, and not just accepting emotional tribute I didn't deserve. The little blue book of sonnets lay gathering dust in the darkness. The key I'd made for her—with which, when I failed to answer her knock, she might have let herself in to discover her estranged husband vomit-spattered and drunk on my couch—was lost in a jumble of junk in my desk drawer. In my story, it was Casper who'd gotten me home. “Why did he leave?” she demanded. “He should have stayed with you.” “He didn't know, Martha. He didn't know I was hurt.
I
didn't know I was hurt.” I basked in her fussing attention while a part of me grieved. I didn't think that I'd ever grow used to this fact that pure-feeling emotion comprised every possible taint, dishonesty and excess self-love being only a start. Of course I did grow used to it, but not soon enough.

Nevertheless I devoured her repentance. After weeks of having used every pretext to confine our affair to my apartment, she swept me back into her house. I was made to sleep late every morning, awaking to jars of fresh flowers she placed by the bed. To prevent dehydration she harassed me all day to drink mineral water, pouring me glasses herself out of blue-tinted bottles. She cooked me cream-drowned wild mushrooms and sweet pea risottos and vibrant red ratatouille, all the life-giving foods of late summer. Murmuring jokes and admonishing lust, she insisted we must be restrained making love, “so as not to burst any blood vessels,” though always, in the end, the first pebble bounced down the hill and the avalanche followed, and we found ourselves heaving for breath in a nest of stained bedsheets and uprooted hairs.

One morning the clock ticked past ten and we, strangely unhurried, remained standing entwined in the kitchen. A noise of thick soles and pram wheels over gravel forewarned us, and yet Martha did not rush me out of the room. Anya entered, with Joachim in his stroller, to encounter the person she assumed her professional predecessor.

“Anya, this is my Girlfriend, Regina,” said Martha, her arm looping my waist and her hand nuzzled in my front pocket, lest her meaning be misunderstood.

“We've met,” Anya said, rousing herself from an onset of amazement visible as a rash, despite the fact her stolid features had not even twitched. I could hear her future recitation of this résumé item—
then there were the two college professors with the one little boy. Beautiful house, with an excellent kitchen, and they were both so good-looking—but they divorced. You know why? The wife was a lesbian. Total rug-muncher. And the girl she was doing it with was the old babysitter!

It wasn't quite the introduction to an eminent colleague I'd already scripted and staged in my rosy-hued mind—but Martha made clear it was merely a start. By increments, adding less and less water to cocktails, and more and more vigor to sex, we brought my convalescence to an end. One night, as we sat in her bed with a bottle of Glenlivet (“
The
Glenlivet”) in the pillows and an old Hitchcock movie on pause, she remarked, “The department is giving a big bash for Ernie O'Rourke. It might be a can't-miss. Should we go?” Ernie O'Rourke was the crown jewel of the English department, an octogenarian poet who, having already racked up every national honor, in the last year had received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Any party for him would be lavish with high-quality free food and booze, but I knew, as she meant me to know, that the caliber of the event wasn't why she had now brought it up.

“Should
we
go?” I asked, peering at her.

“There's not anyone else in the room.”

“I don't need to be introduced as your ‘research assistant,'” I said. “I've already got all the research work that I can stand.”

“I'd introduce you as my Girlfriend,” she said. “To those guests so poorly brought-up that ‘Regina Gottlieb' won't suffice.”

We'd slid sideways into the sheets and lay facing each other, the movie forgotten. “Are you sure?” I asked seriously. “Everyone in the world will be there.”

She reached for my hair, as she liked to do sometimes, and toyed with the coarse, bristly ends. “Yes,” she said. “Why am I hiding you? Nicholas knows.”

I didn't say, with a satisfied pounce, “So you
were
hiding me.” Some moments are free of all taint. I kissed her, and she drew me against her, though first we removed the scotch bottle and TV remote from the bed—to give love a clear field, or clean slate.

•   •   •

“I have to say, for someone who's supposedly fully recovered from head trauma, your short-term memory's really alarming,” complained Dutra as we drove to the mall to ostensibly shop for a piscine companion for Joe. My real agenda was makeup and shoes for the party for Ernie O'Rourke, for I was so elated and agitated, and impatient for and frightened by, the prospect of what felt increasingly like my debut, or my public deflowering, or both, that my mind skittered and spazzed when it functioned at all, and Dutra, whose characteristic agitation rather took the form of tenacity, was finding me close to intolerable. “For niTRATES
you want no more than twenty parts per million,” he persisted, “for niTRITES you want zero. Null. Zilch. Nitrites kill. Now say again, what were your readings—”

“Have you ever been inside the Scroll and Compass?” I interrupted. The Scroll and Compass was the fancy private club that due to its unapologetic exclusivity was somehow both outside university bounds and most deeply embedded within them, the secret wheelhouse. It was there that the party would be.

“Once, when I was an undergrad. We broke into the tunnels that connect the quad buildings, where all the plumbing and heating and cooling stuff is, and from there we got into the Scroll. Only as far as the basement before somebody tripped an alarm.”

“What was it like?”

“It was like a basement,” Dutra said impatiently. “With big heaps of white aprons, I guess for the lackeys who serve at the dinners. Ginny. Focus. You had pH above eight-point-oh, right? But below eight-point-five. Ammonia should be
zero
, nitrites should be
zero
.”

“I can't tell nitrites and nitrates apart.”

“This is just what I'm saying about short-term memory loss.”

“But I never could tell them apart. Who can tell them apart?”

“Ni
trite
has the
i,
like in
kill
. Ni
trate
has the
a
, that's
‘okay'
—”

“Is this the way that you ace all your classes?”

“Mnemonics are one piece of it.”

“Nemonicks? What on earth are nemonicks?”

“You see? You were a literature grad student, Ginny. You used to know what ‘mnemonic' meant! I told Hallett I thought you should see a neurologist but she's such a fucking WASP about doctors.”

“You called Martha? Why? How are WASPs about doctors?”

“They don't need them because they're immortal. I would have called Hallett because I hadn't seen you in days but then she called me first.”

“About what?”

“About
you
, Dopey. Jesus! Your brain's like Swiss cheese. She called to tell me about your concussion because you hadn't bothered.”

“I'd had a concussion, Dutra. I wasn't in my right mind.”

“
And
she called me to ask my advice, but of course didn't take it.”

“What was your advice?”

“Did I not say two seconds ago that I told her you should see a neurologist? You have zero retention! Who am I? Where are we going and why?”

“Kidnapping!” I called out the car window, my voice snatched by the wind as we sped down the road. “Help! A strange man is taking me I-don't-know-where!” At last I saw Dutra suppressing a smile.

Since the boozy night of my apartment's “housewarming,” Dutra's manner when I spoke about Martha had been palpably different: constrained, and at moments of lapsed self-control even irritable, as if, though he wasn't aware that he showed it, he'd had his fill of her. From the start of my romance with Martha I'd suspected that Dutra, despite being, according to self-diagnosis, unusually highly evolved, was unable to take us as seriously as he would have had Martha been male. We were pleasingly racy, and pleasingly decorative; being third wheel to us meant a ringside seat to a diversion, not exclusion from something profound that did not involve him. He teased us as he might have a pair of kid sisters—and not until that night in my apartment had he started to doubt that he still had the prominent role.