The Englishman (2 page)

Why do I? I can’t really say, except that I knew right away that I am not interested in the Shaftsboro riverside lofts (“real popular with folk from your part of the country”) that Mr. Larsen made me look at on his website.

“And how long would you be planning on staying in the South, ma’am?”

I lean back in my chair and nerve myself to brave his subtle antagonism. “Three years at least, maybe six, maybe longer, if I get tenure.”

“What’s that thing my old father used to say?” Mr. Larsen turns to Mr. Walsh as if for information. “‘Yankees is like hemorrhoids—a pain when they come down and a relief when they go back up again.’”

“Dr. Lieberman!” Karen jumps up, and so does the dog under the table, yelping. “Would you like to see the cabin now?”

I half hope that it will turn out to be a derelict pile, but it’s a city girl’s dream in light-blue clapboard, with white window frames and a white porch. Situated almost a hundred yards away from the main house, it stands on its own in splendid isolation on the edge of the woods, and I have an unnerving vision of myself as Connie Chatterley, engaged in amorous trysts with my illicit lover in our quiet, leafy retreat.

“You don’t need me for this, right?” Mr. Larsen fingers the cigarettes in his breast pocket. Mr. Walsh wanders off into the direction of the garage. Showing people round is evidently woman’s work again.

We enter an L-shaped living room with kitchen; a bedroom is tucked into the inner right angle of the L and looks out toward the woods. All the rooms have dark hardwood floorboards, even the bathroom and the tiny utility room.

Karen Walsh breaks the silence. “My husband’s grandfather used to have pickers sleep in here during the summer, but—well, it’s much too small now.”

“How many people do you employ?” I ask, making conversation to cover my delight at what I’m seeing.

“Up to forty once picking starts. It’s mostly students from schools and colleges around here. And backpackers, from Europe and Australia. They have a camp site over there.” She cocks her head toward the forest.

“And who lived in here before? I mean, before now?”

She tucks her short, light brown hair behind her ears in a nervous little gesture. “Our previous tenants—they moved out three months ago—well, it was a very unsuccessful arrangement. They kept complaining about everything—the dogs, the dirt, the dial-up Internet access, of course, and in the end they left one weekend when we were all away on a family visit, without ever paying the rent that was due.”

She gazes at me as if she was going to say more, but then she decides against it. With her long, sinewy arm she reaches up the banister. “Will you come and see upstairs?”

The upstairs bedroom is larger than the downstairs one, and it has two dormer windows that look away from the farmhouse toward the woods. It’s the perfect place for a study. I have to bite my lips not to burst out laughing.

“It would be very different from what you’re used to,” Karen Walsh says tactfully.

“But I don’t want what I’m used to! I want to get away from what I’m used to! I want a change, a real change! May I?”

My vehemence seems to take her aback a little but she nods, and I open the bedroom window.

“Smell that?”

“N-No—”

“That’s what I mean. This would feel like a vacation in the country, not like work at all!”

We laugh together, and she lays a quick hand on my arm. “Leave it to me.”

When we come back into the living room, Mr. Walsh is fiddling with one of the doorknobs.

“Pop? Dr. Lieberman says it’s exactly what she is looking for.”

“You reckon?”

I try to look resolute but keep my mouth shut.

“We don’t rent out for longer than a year at a time.” He straightens up, his fists propped against his hips.

“That’s fine with me, sir.”

I’m not sure why I want this place at all, given that my prospective landlord seems convinced that I will be a pain in his neck. The only answer I can come up with is that I am in love with the idea of living on a farm, and that I have fallen in love at first sight with the blue cabin.

Mr. Walsh gives his daughter-in-law the curtest of nods and leaves the house.

“So you don’t wanna look at the lofts in town?” Mr. Larsen throws away his cigarette and squints into the late afternoon sun.

The Paul Newman eyes and mine meet in similar stupefaction on their way from the cigarette butt on the porch back to the Realtor’s face. I half expect Mr. Walsh to take Mr. Larsen by the scruff of his polo shirt and shake him till he picks up the offending piece of garbage, but he just walks off toward the main house.

“No, thank you,” I say.

The signing of the lease goes without a hitch. I thank Karen Walsh for her hospitality, feeling that we have established a tentative kind of rapport. When I offer to shake Mr. Walsh’s hand, he indicates by an abrupt little jerk of his head that he intends to accompany the Realtor and me to our cars.

“That your’n?” He points his thumb at my battered ol’ Subaru.

I shrug. “Sorry that I’m not driving my VW Beetle Cabrio today. Or some other fancy European car—you know, a Peugeot or an Audi—like all the other snooty Yankee women.”

The verbal slap does not even make him flinch.

“No, ma’am,” he says slowly and scrapes something off the hood with his fingernail. “I was hoping you came in a Mini Cooper.”

At home in Queens, my report about house-hunting in Virginia produces mixed reactions.

Mom and Nathan stare at me as if I had announced I was going to live under a bridge. Dad gives an incredulous little snort, but Jessica, Nat’s wife, beams at me.

“I
love
that! A cottage! Cottage, or cabin? Is it in the mountains, this place?”

“No, not quite. Shaftsboro is sort of halfway between the coast and the mountains. But it’s on the river. The college, that is. Not the farm.”

“Like Brandeis,” Mom informs nobody in particular.

I shouldn’t have told my mother that I withdrew from the shortlist for a job that would have been half as far away as Ardrossan.

“What do they farm?” Nat wants to know. “Tobacco? Pigs? Chickens? I thought you were a vegetarian!”

“No, not like Brandeis. It’s directly on the river. There’s a sort of…promenade, esplanade, a riverside walk, and the campus is right next to it. It’s beautiful. Come and visit!”

“So you fork out eight hundred bucks a month to share a cramped little apartment in Manhattan because the ’burbs make you heave,” Nathan scoffs, “but move away four hundred miles, and the suburbs are, like, the green belt of heaven?”

“Listen, bub, I’m not moving to the suburbs, I’m moving into the country, and the farmer grows tomatoes and all sorts of berries. Totally vegetarian.”

I know why Nat is giving me a hard time, though. With me out of reach, Mom will turn her maternal searchlight onto Nat and his family, and he hates that.

“Six months, and you’ll be a Bible-thumping Republican,” he predicts with brotherly brutality.

“Have you been talking to Irene, or what? Anyway, on the farm I’ll have lots of space, a forest to walk in, and peace and quiet to do my writing. And that’s all I want, Mom.”

My mother turns to the lunchbox she is packing for me and does that thing where she raises her eyebrows and purses her lips. An allegory of doubt, with a bit of don’t-say-I-didn’t-tell-you-so-when-this-goes-wrong thrown in.

“You may not like living on your own,” she tells my sandwich. “You think you will, because Sheena has been getting on your nerves, but you may find you don’t actually like it.”

“Only one way to find out.” I shrug.

“I’m just worried you will turn into a recluse if you live at the back of beyond all alone in a cabin!”

“Mom, what you’re really worried about is that I might find that I
do
like living at the back of beyond all alone in a cabin.”

“You should be worried, too. How will you ever find a man down there?”

“Not my problem right now. I want a job, not a man.”

“I don’t see why you can’t have both!”

“I’m a one-trick pony, Mom. One trick is all this horse can do.”

Chapter 2

M
Y
F
IRST
T
WO
W
EEKS
I
N
T
HE
S
OUTH
are the first holiday I have had in three years, and I am determined not to open a book to do with teaching or research, nor to write anything at all except a few emails. Instead, and to my deep satisfaction, I have acquired new kitchenware, a faux-suede three-seater sofa and an armchair for my living-room, a rocking chair for my porch (because I want to do this in style), and six wooden bookcases in a chestnut finish. I have been scrubbing, wiping, dusting, unpacking, and sorting, going to work on my new nest.

Here’s a house-warming resolution: I will lug books and paper into my nest but no new man. Men leave me in a mess. The kitchen windows and the living-room windows change from grubby to invisible while I revel in the determination that I will not allow anything or anyone to distract my attention from the project ahead, and that is to press on toward my first tenure review in three years’ time. “Publish or perish!” is the war cry. I intend to publish.

I get a soda from the fridge, sit down in the shade of the porch, and watch the harvest activities on the farm while behind me Bruce Springsteen is singing of the simple life and the ordinary tragedies of heartland America. This is the busiest time of the year for the Walshes. Pop, Karen, and her husband, Howie, seem to be out and about from the crack of dawn till sundown, while Mrs. Walsh—Grandma Shirley—shoulders the household chores and looks after the twin girls when they come home from school.

It would be lonely out here, all on my own. I’m glad I have neighbors, particularly as I zoom out of the picture of me on my porch: the cottage…the main house…the barns…the garages…the fields…the woods. So much of this region is still wooded, and the river winds like a snake away from the Blue Ridge Mountains through the woods toward the sea. No, not like a snake, more like a lizard, one with short legs and small toes. I imagine the lizard trying to make its way toward…someplace…dashing from rock to rock, from cover to cover, because there is an unnamed danger overhead. Gathering strength in the shelter of the stone, panting, then—with only a vague sense of opportunity to guide it—it dashes out and runs as fast as its little legs and tiny toes can carry it to the next shelter. Why can the lizard not stay where it is, and where is it rushing so frantically when there is danger overhead—

“Hey.”

“W-Wha—hey.” I fell asleep again. Must get that under control.

A slim teenager in torn army pants and a purple tank top has materialized, apparently out of nowhere, and she has the same expression of curiosity mingled with suspicion as the raccoon I came across yesterday morning when I went for a stroll in the woods. Her dark hair is cut short, but neither the boy hair nor the camouflage pants can disguise the fact that there is something waifish about her, something vulnerable and stubborn. She looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it, and since she doesn’t seem inclined to speak, I suppose I must.

“Are you one of the tomato pickers?”

Her eyebrows slam together and she shifts on her feet.

“I’m Jules. They didn’t tell you about me, did they? Karen’s daughter.”

She is right; they didn’t tell me about her. And I don’t blame myself for not having caught the resemblance, because if Karen is her mother, her father must be black.

“Hi, Jules, Karen’s daughter. I’m Anna. But I guess you knew that.”

She rolls her eyes, but it is in embarrassment about her own awkwardness.

“Yeah, I knew that. Doctor Anna Lieberman. You’re from New York. Yeah, I knew that too. Man, what wouldn’t I give—” She shifts her weight again and sighs.

“D’you want to come up for a moment? Let me get you a soda.” Yielding to the air of hopefulness that surrounds her like a cloud of smoke, I indicate the rickety bench on my porch. She grins and skips up the steps, and I mentally subtract a couple of years from her estimated age.