The Sonnet Lover (2 page)

“Actually, that’s what I wanted to ask you ab-bout,” Robin says, stuttering a little on the last word. I haven’t heard Robin stutter since first semester freshman year, when he started taking voice and acting classes. It must be the film show tonight that has him so nervous. “You’re…what…in your mid-thirties?”

“Thereabouts,” I say, thinking,
Close enough.
No need to tell him that at thirty-nine I’m at the bitter end of my thirties. “Why?”

“Because you were at La Civetta when you were in college and I wondered if some of the same teachers were there. I’m going back there this summer and I’m trying to decide what classes to take.”

We’ve reached Graham Hall, the nineteenth-century brownstone that houses the comp lit department and my office. The building is named for Hudson College’s most famous alumnus, Cyril Graham, who donated his New York townhouse to the college, along with the use of his villa in Tuscany, La Civetta, four decades ago. There’s a plaque with Cyril’s profile etched in bronze beside the front door, and as I turn to answer Robin’s question (making it clear, I hope, that he shouldn’t follow me up to my office), I can almost feel the old man’s hawklike eyes boring into my back.

“Well, let’s see,” I say, pretending that the year I spent at La Civetta twenty years ago is such a distant and minor episode that I have to ransack my memory in order to recall its dramatis personae. “The old man himself was there, of course,” I say, cocking a thumb over my shoulder at the plaque, “teaching that class…what did he call it?”

“The Aesthetics of Place,” Robin says, smiling.

“My God, is he still at it? Does he still go on about the Mitford sisters and the Duchess of Windsor?”

Robin smiles and looks a little more relaxed. “He manages to imply he went to Oxford with both Oscar Wilde
and
Evelyn Waugh—a chronological impossibility—and was simultaneously lunching with Fellini on the Via Veneto while making silk screens with Warhol at the Factory—a geographical impossibility.”

I laugh, relieved to see that Robin’s stutter has disappeared again. The remarks about Cyril Graham sound like a set speech. Even his pose—one hand grasping the lapel of his vintage jacket so that the sun glances off its gold Medusa-head buttons—looks rehearsed. I suspect that Robin, like many a stutterer before him, has learned that his delivery is improved by rehearsal. “I have to admit that I enjoyed that class. It was such shameless gossip and a rest after declining Latin nouns with Harriet Milhouse and memorizing Renaissance architectural terms with Professore DelVecchio.”

“I think they’ve retired,” Robin says, “but I would have thought the class you’d mention first would have been the one on the sonnet—”

“Oh, but the professor who taught that class was a graduate student,” I say, perhaps a little too quickly—as if I’d had my excuse for not mentioning him ready. “He went back to Rome the next year to finish his degree.”

“Bruno Brunelli, right? He’s back. His wife, Claudia, took over the job of hospitality coordinator from Bruno’s mother, Benedetta, only in Claudia’s case it’s really a misnomer—”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know.” I hold up my wrist to check the time but my watch isn’t there. “Damn,” I say, “I must have left my watch in class.” I always take my watch off in class and lay it on the desk so that I can keep track of where I am in my lecture without having to look at my wrist. I’ve never left it behind, though. Had Robin’s question rattled me that badly?

“I’ll run back for it,” Robin offers gallantly. “Will you be at the film show?”

“Of course, Robin, I wouldn’t miss your opening night, but please don’t bother—”

“Then I’ll give it to you there,” he says, brushing away my objections, “and we can talk some more? There’s something really important I have to discuss with you.”

“If I can get through your flock of admirers after your film is shown, I’ll be happy to talk to you.” The shadow that had been over him in class is back—or perhaps it’s just that the spring light is fading from the sky, leaving us both in the shade of the brownstone.

“I might need rescuing from an angry mob instead. The film isn’t going to be what everyone expects.”

“That’s just opening-night jitters, Robin. I’m sure it’ll be great.”

“But even so, will you?”

“Will I what? Rescue you?”

Robin lays his fingertips on my wrist—in just the place laid bare by my missing watch—and I shiver at his touch. The spring day’s promise of summer has faded to chill evening. I start to laugh at the absurdity of Robin’s request, but when I see the look in his eyes I don’t.

“Of course,” I tell him, “I’ll do my best.”

I carry the chill of Robin’s touch up three sweeping flights of the main staircase and one back-stairs flight to the garret (formerly a maid’s room) under the eaves that’s been my office for the six years I’ve taught at Hudson College. Mark Abrams, the college president, has offered to relocate me to the new faculty building on Mercer, where I’d have elevator service, high-speed Internet access, and German coffee machines perking finely ground Colombian coffee all day long. But I prefer my little garret with its egg-and-dart moldings and nonworking fireplace. Besides, I have my coffee at Cafe Lucrezia on MacDougal, which has two working fireplaces and makes the best cappuccino this side of the Atlantic.

I wish, though, as I open the door, that I’d run in for a cup on the way here, because the office, with its blinds closed all day against the spring sunshine, feels cold. An unaccountable sadness stirs in me—as if I’d missed something by closing out that light from my dusty bookshelves and faded green upholstered Morris chair—and pulls me across to the window to open the blinds before turning on the desk lamp.

The Graham brownstone is on the west side of the park and the sun has already passed over its roof, but I can still see the last of the light reflected on the old townhouses that line the north side of the park, turning the sooty New York bricks to a rich Florentine ochre. I close my eyes to preserve that Mediterranean color for one moment longer and feel, where I’d felt chill before, the warmth of an embrace spreading across my back.

“You’ve got to stop letting yourself in,” I say, turning into Mark’s arms. “I’m going to scream one of these days and the secretaries in comp lit will come running.”

“We’d just have to explain that you were reacting to departmental budget cuts. You wouldn’t be the only one screaming about that.”

I’m about to register my concurrence with my colleagues but Mark kisses me, pressing the length of his body against mine so tightly that I feel the wide ledge of the window cutting into the small of my back. I ease myself onto the ledge, pulling away from his kiss.

“I wish all my faculty were so easily persuaded to see the necessity of cutting back,” he says.

“I certainly hope you don’t use the same persuasive techniques on them,” I say, leaning lightly onto the cold windowpane behind me. I imagine that one day I’ll lean back a little too hard and the two of us will crash through the glass and hurtle to the pavement below, where we will land, limbs entwined, below the amused bronze gaze of Cyril Graham. This is where we made love the first time, three years ago, after a faculty party, and even though I live only two blocks away and Mark’s apartment is only a short subway ride uptown, we’ve made love here many times since then. It’s the risk, I think, of someone discovering us that still draws us here. Mark had thought then that we should keep our affair secret—at least until I made tenure. At first I’d been suspicious that he wanted to keep the relationship secret only because he didn’t intend to stay in it, but he’s been (as far as I can tell) a faithful lover for three years. Only lately, as my tenure review looms near, have I found myself wondering whether half the pleasure in our affair comes from that enforced secrecy, and half the pleasure in making love here from feeling that cold glass barrier, hard but fragile, always at my back.

Mark brushes the hem of my dress halfway up my thigh, but I catch his hand. “Don’t you have a speech to give in, like…ten minutes?”

He makes a face but quickly smooths my dress back over my leg—a little too compliantly, I think.

“Is this what you’re wearing to the reception?” he asks, taking a step back to observe my outfit—and also to give me room to get down from the window seat.

“That’s the plan,” I say, moving past him toward my desk. I slip out of the jacket I wore to class and slide the silk scarf from around my neck to reveal a sleeveless black cocktail dress that I found in a vintage clothing store on Horatio Street last week. Then I sit down at my desk and turn to the mirror I keep propped up on the bookcase between the collected
canzoniere
of Petrarch and Helen Vendler’s book on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Mark sits on the windowsill and lights a cigarette—another vice he saves for my company alone even though I’ve managed to quit—while I let my hair down and start to brush it.

“You should wear it down,” he says when I start to coil it back into a twist. “The color is so pretty—like a Botticelli madonna.” He smiles at his own compliment, proud, I think, that he’s recalled my favorite painter.

“Why this sudden concern for my appearance?” I ask, leaning a little closer to the mirror to see whether he’s right—whether the color is still more gold than silver. It is, but only just. I still look fairly young (
mid-thirties,
Robin had said) but for the tiny lines at the corners of my eyes and the light silvering around my temples. “It’s just the student film show.”

“Some of Cyril Graham’s Hollywood cronies are coming and they’re sure to report back to him. It wouldn’t hurt to make a good impression.”

“That will be good for Robin Weiss,” I say, ignoring the idea that anyone from Hollywood would be interested for two seconds in a fortyish English professor, “to have his film seen by people in the industry.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s why they’re here. Graham told them the film was done on the grounds of the villa and he expected from what he saw of the filming that it would be quite interesting—and there’s even talk of a major film being made at La Civetta based on a screenplay Robin’s written.”

I frown into the mirror—instantly aging my face several years—remembering what Robin had said.
The film isn’t going to be what everyone expects.
“Well, I hope it’s not too much pressure on Robin,” I say. “He looked ragged in class today.”

“Don’t you think that you’re perhaps too emotionally involved with your students?” Mark asks.

I angle my mirror so that I can see Mark’s expression—or rather, more important, to see whether he’s watching
my
expression. To see whether what he’s really concerned about is my emotional involvement with
this
particular student. Three years ago, when Mark and I first found our way back to my office after that faculty party, Mark had expressed his professional concern that I’d become overly familiar with Robin Weiss. I’d been seen having coffee with him at Cafe Lucrezia and he spent a lot of time in my office.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Mark had said then as we climbed the back stairs to my office, “except that it would be natural for a boy to have a crush on a such a beautiful woman.”

The compliment had taken me by surprise. Not because I didn’t think a man could find me beautiful, but because Mark Abrams had struck me as too serious a man to bother with compliments. I knew he was very ambitious for the college, that he planned to transform Hudson College into a premier liberal arts institution. Like a lot of my colleagues, I had not always been happy about how he was going about achieving that goal—deferring money from more traditional academic departments to the more high-profile film department, for instance. I had become so used to thinking of him as an adversary in departmental meetings that I hadn’t considered him as a prospective suitor.

When I had let myself into the office I crossed to the window ledge, where I sat down and lit a cigarette (I still smoked then). Instead of reminding me of the no-smoking rule, he crossed the room and, letting his hand rest on mine for a moment, took the cigarette out of my hand and raised it to his lips.

“Maybe,” I said, watching him inhale. His lips were a trifle thin—no Cupid’s bow—but he had a strong jaw and the kind of clean-cut features that aged well. An undeniably handsome man. “But would it be natural for a woman my age to be interested in a boy?”

He didn’t answer. I’m sure he thought it was a rhetorical question and that the way I pronounced
boy
was meant as a disparaging comparison with the charms of an older man. He tossed the cigarette out the window and kissed me, pushing me onto the windowsill until I felt the cold glass at my back. He never asked me about Robin Weiss again, but I’ve often wondered whether it’s ever occurred to him that I never answered
his
question, that I merely turned it back on him the way I did with my students.

He doesn’t appear to be thinking about that now as he stands at the window, one hand in his trouser pocket rumpling the line of his good gray wool suit, one hand still holding the cigarette, which has nearly burned down to the filter. He’s looking out over the park, toward the NYU buildings on the east side, their violet flags glowing in the late spring sunshine. He looks like a general surveying a neighboring kingdom and planning his attack. He doesn’t appear to notice that I haven’t answered his latest question, either. He flicks his cigarette out the window and comes up behind me, resting his hands on my shoulders. “You need a vacation,” he says, massaging the tight muscles.

I glance at my own reflection in the mirror to gauge my expression. The last time Mark and I discussed the summer, we decided (or rather, Mark suggested and I agreed) that we should spend it apart. After all, my tenure review was coming up in September. Why risk anything now? Had he changed his mind? Did I want him to have changed his mind?

“I’m taking one,” I tell him as I apply a coat of mascara to my eyelashes. “Six weeks at the cabin in Woodstock, where I plan to finish the sonnet book.”