He returned to the bars and the night clubs, but he did not see Celia there. He took home an ever-widening variety of girls with super blonde hair and super white teeth for it seemed as if that had become the fashion over the last year and, indeed, Ernie found himself thinking that the poor, former graduate student had probably made a career change for the better. Sometimes Ernie would read these women what had been written in the book, and what he had later added to it, after Celia, and they would no longer look at him with that look of sad and subtle disappointment. Their eyes would go delicate and a little shiny, and it would be a look that spoke to him of love, or at least the first stirrings of it, a look that softened the superlative qualities of their super blondeness and made them rather lovely.
And one of these women turned out to be an editor for a very posh literary magazine. Her eyes went extra delicate and extra wide, and when she curled into him that night, after the sex, he decided he liked the sound of her breathing; he liked the sound of her accent which might have been from Sheffield, and, most of all, he liked the way that her body twisted alongside his like an ampersand. The next morning, he made her breakfast; the next month, he proposed; and a year later, his first book was met with general critical acclaim.
He lived happily with his editor—she turned out to be named Eira and her hair, when it grew out, was a mousy brown that Ernie loved for being mousy brown—for several years. His books sold well. They moved into a nicer house in the north end of the city, a sprawling Edwardian monstrosity with several floors which Eira filled with many bookshelves. They bought towels beautifully monogrammed with “E&E” and lived together in the general domestic bliss that sometimes occurs in novel interludes and rarely occurs in real life until Ernie began to realize that when Eira looked at him she did not see him—she did not see Ernie Wheeler—she saw a byline with his name, and she saw an author photo of him posed in a thoughtful position with a cat, and when she told their friends about him it was all in the style of an author biography—which is to say it went something like, “Ernie and I live together in the north end of London in a sprawling Edwardian house filled with bookshelves, monogrammed towels and two cats.”
The divorce was messy, but not unprofitable as it gave Ernie enough emotional material for a memoir and three novels.
It was after the second of these novels that Ernie realized he had, by accident, turned into his father, after all. He had the same slightly padded gut, the same slightly receded hairline, and the same lack of investment in the sacraments he had ostensibly subscribed to. It was after the third of these novels that Ernie had a heart attack, like his father, at the age of forty-seven, despite the fact that he had been strong as an ox and healthy as a man could be. As Ernie lay there, gasping, as he felt the cold fingers of something coming from him, the familiar sense of displacement, he thought, This is it. I know what this is, and he felt something stealing into him and pushing him out and then—pop!—
There was darkness for a time, and then there was light.
His body pumped furiously away, and her hips ground furiously up into his, meeting him, giving way like the chassis of an overburdened car. She was older than the last time he had seen her. There were streaks of silver in the gold of her hair, and a nest of wrinkles accreting at the corners of her eyes. Her breasts were just a touch heavier than he remembered them having been, suffering more from the ill effects of gravity. Her skin had a spongy feel to it. But, he supposed, his own body was hardly in better condition if he was being honest.
The sound of their grunting and their moaning rounded off the walls of the South Transept, and, afterward, when they were finished and he lay beside Celia, the length and breadth of her body more familiar to him than that of the one he now inhabited, she said, “It’s you.” And he said nothing. And she said, “I love you, Ernie.” And he said nothing. But he took her hand, and they lay there, in the quiet and the coolness, with a set of dates monogramming themselves into their flesh.
[ breast ]
ETERNAL THINGS
This aforesaid Africanus took me from there and brought me out with him to a gate of a park walled with mossy stone; and over the gate on either side, carved in large letters, were verses of very diverse senses, of which I shall tell you the full meaning. . . .
—Geoffrey Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls
I am the way into the doleful city. . . .
Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I shall last eternally.
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
I meet Stephen at the Turf on one of those rare, hot days in Oxford where the air seems to cling like a fevered hand to your wrist, and the sun is like a blanket smacking a wall, somehow hard and flat and palpable, but not really there at all. There aren’t any tables available outside—too many tourists—and neither of us wants to spend an hour sitting inside, with the stale breath of the beer-soaked floors on our necks.
“I can’t stand the tourists,” Stephen says with the kind of smile worn by the kind of person who hates tourists.
I feel like a tourist. I am checking him out. I am freezing gorgeous little pictures of him in my mind.
He buys us both pints of summer ale. Mine tastes warm and soapy with a sharp, sweet bite of hops underneath it all.
“How is your research going?”
I shrug. Everyone is always asking about research.
“The library’s cold. I had to buy a pair of finger gloves.”
A year ago I would have given a forty-minute monologue on the importance of scribal dialect shifts on the reception of Geoffrey Chaucer. He waits a beat as if he’s expecting more. There isn’t anything more. I stare at my hands—chapped even though it’s the middle of summer.
“There’s a position at St. Andrew’s in Middle English, you know.” He has one of those polished, posh Oxford accents. “Not tenure track, not exactly. But it’s a good position. I’m interviewing for it next week.” His words are like beautiful stones, but there isn’t any give to them. You couldn’t find your way into them, crack them open.
I wonder if I want the position. I wonder if I am jealous. I wonder if I’m in love.
Three weeks ago, I had met a friend from back home in London. She was up for a position at Birbeck College, teaching women’s history. Nervous, almost shy, she had whispered to me that after spending twelve hours a day on her dissertation for four years straight, she didn’t really want to be an academic, after all. She was going to blow the interview. Move back home to California and find herself a husband. What was feminism if you couldn’t choose for yourself?
I think about this as Stephen goes on about linguistic change in the early thirteenth century. He’s rehearsing the arguments of scholars—one or two I’d met on conference—tearing into them, but doing it daintily, like he’s ripping little chunks off with his teeth, chewing, swallowing. I wished he’d do it properly, just go for the throat and not mind much where the blood spilled, but that’s not how it’s done in Oxford. I can still tell he enjoys it though, that restrained viciousness: Stephen, with his posh, smooth accent and these beautifully clear eyes, the kind that could be light blue or light green, but always seem silver when you think about them, colourless, like glass. His face is smooth, boyish, with high cheekbones and a good-looking nose.
I wonder what it would be like to kiss him. I don’t know what exactly we are doing here. Are we just sharing a pint? Is he scoping out the competition? Am I?
I don’t think I will kiss him.
We are two pints in now. The sound moves in Doppler swirls around the courtyard. I drink my ale and imagine kissing Stephen. I imagine the taste of his mouth, perfumed and sharp from the hops. I imagine his lips. I imagine his tongue. I imagine the press of him against me.
“Could you share?” he asks.
“Share what?”
“The list,” he says, “of manuscripts that mention the translation of northern English into southern
. It might be useful for the interview.”
I am thinking about kissing him. He is thinking about the levelling of inflectional endings.
“I thought you wrote on Chaucer,” I say.
“Chaucer, well, he’s annoyingly popular now, isn’t he? I need something esoteric.”
“Yes,” I say. “I imagine you do.”
Stephen smiles. He touches my arm lightly, and now he is guiding me out of the Turf, walking me through the streets of Oxford to a French restaurant on Little Clarendon.
“I’m not sure they’ll have room for us,” he whispers in my ear, but when we get there the place is half-empty. The menu is full of things I can’t really afford, and there’s a single wilted rose in the vase on the table.
Stephen samples the shiraz he has ordered for us both. “It’s too warm,” he says. “We’ll keep it though. I hate to send wine back for being the wrong temperature. Unless . . . ?”
I shake my head. The wine is nice in that way bad wine sometimes is.
We both eat our expensive meals. Mine is very good. I assume his is as well. There’s some awkwardness over the bill as I hand him a twenty pound note and some change for the tip. I can’t tell if it’s because I haven’t paid enough or because I’ve paid at all.
We live in the same end of town, out on Cowley Road, which is probably the least posh area of Oxford to live in. There are sports bars and gambling dens. Sometimes people get mugged. A couple of months ago, a woman was dragged to a nearby churchyard and raped. She was about my age.
Stopping in front of Tesco’s, there’s a kind of magnetism looping its way around us, its bands drawing us closer, closer, tightening concentric circles like ripples on a pond moving in reverse.
His arms are around me, and we kiss after all. His mouth reminds me of the wine, a little too warm, maybe, but still sweet. Our teeth strike once or twice, click awkwardly like heels, and then our mouths are free to make wet circles around each other. This is nice, I think.
“We’re making a scene,” he whispers, smiling, maybe serious, maybe playful.
“I don’t mind,” I say, and kiss him again, running my hands along his arms.
We stand like that, locked together, for a few more seconds before he says, “Fancy coming back to my place?” I think it’s funny, him saying that, like we’re an old Victorian couple.
Chaucer was always writing about love. He claimed he was a bad lover. Too fat. Too old. He got into quarrels with the god of love after screwing over poor Criseyde, making her ditch Troilus and take up with Diomedes just as the whole Trojan War went tits up.
But who can blame her, really? Everything loses its edge over time. Sometimes it takes six hundred years. Sometimes it takes six months. Maybe Chaucer was doing her a favour. Maybe he was giving her a way out.
I’ve been over here for about nine weeks now, researching fourteenth-century manuscripts in libraries across England. I’m consistently amazed by the dullness of it, the way I had been so excited to see my first manuscript, oh, years ago now I suppose, and I still feel that tingle the first time I get one, but it fades quickly now. I can reduce the wonder of touching something six hundred years old to flat boredom in the space of minutes.
I use a plastic ruler I bought at the British Library to measure them, to track their layout, the width of margins, the size of titles, how much space is blank on a page, the shape of punctuation. It all means something, I believe this very firmly, have argued it in countless grant applications, successfully enough to pay for a four-month trip.
It is nine weeks today, and though I’ve hit the tipping point, crossed the threshold between time marked from departure and time marked until return, I’ve found a creeping anaesthesia, what Peter, my colleague, calls “numb productivity.” I can put in twelve-hour days, easy, but I’ve lost track of what I’m doing, why I’m doing it. Sometimes when I talk with other graduate students, I can feel that rush again, the way you can fall in love, momentarily, with someone you’ve begun to get bored with just by hearing another woman talk about him.
I hoped that would happen with Stephen.
My fingers measure his skin—this many inches from shoulder to shoulder, this many from ear to jaw. He has a button-down dress shirt on, and I think about tearing it off him, scattering the buttons, but he turns away from me, on the bed, to unbutton them himself where I can’t reach. I lie back, rest my hands under my head, like I’m watching clouds, until he’s ready again.
Shirtless now, he kisses me and kisses me. Though he’s got those beautiful clear-glass eyes, I find them comically lifeless. I want to see something in them, a spark of real desire. He hasn’t told me I’m beautiful. I still don’t know if he even likes me.
I decide that I don’t like him. His voice is too posh, and his scholarship is dry, all those descriptions of marks in manuscripts, like it matters so much.
I wake up in the middle of the night, and have that instant sense of strangeness, of being in the wrong place. He’s snoring next to me. I lean over and kiss him on the shoulder, the neck. He doesn’t stir. I wonder if I should go home.
It’s late now, or early, and outside Cowley has started to settle into that grim monologue that some cities have after three in the morning: conversations with themselves, the single voice of a dog barking, and then, minutes later, a door shutting. Never two sounds at once.
I feel used to waking up in strange places. I’ve been moving for nine weeks. It gets easier, each time, to run alongside strangers, find easy, quick friendships to get you through dinner, that stretch of hours between the library and midnight. They could be lonely hours, if I’d let them be lonely. But they seldom are now.
I listen to his breathing, count the measures between inhales, decide he really is asleep.
I realize there’s a second set of breaths, and they are not mine.
I’m not terribly alarmed to find there is someone else in the room, I don’t know why. I see him sitting in a chair by the corner, an old man, slightly pudgy, hair a salt-and-pepper crow’s nest. He has a book open, and large, moist eyes. His breathing is shallow, slightly out of sync with Stephen’s, and every now and then he wheezes.
I sit up in the bed, and I pull the covers up to hide my nakedness.
My clothes are strewn about the room, and I can’t get at them, not with him in the corner.
Finally, he looks up, and there’s something familiar about him, those sardonic eyebrows, the double-pointed beard. He’s an old man, and his body creaks like a swing set.
“You’re one of them, then?” he says, though that’s not quite right. His words have some foreign element to them, the vowels long and stretched like taffy. I can understand them, but they make me think of my undergraduate English class, my first taste of medieval literature, reciting the first ten lines of the Canterbury Tales over and over again until Pilcher was satisfied that we had an ear for the rhythm of the language.
“Poetry,” Pilcher used to say. “You have to remember that it is poetry. You have to hear the music in it.”
I look at the old man: he has Pilcher’s watery eyes, veins on his hand as thick and purple as rain-soaked worms. I nod.
“It’s a shame,” he continues in that taffy-stretched speech of his. “You seem like such a nice girl. You should be out doing better things with your life.”
“I’m not a nice girl.”
He chuckles, and this makes me absurdly happy. I’m not sure why yet, though I think I’m starting to realize by this point, to get past the strangeness of this. Because I recognize him, somehow. “Did you read his dissertation? He is not a nice boy, never was. He was dreadful as a student, cutting down his classmates. He never loved it.”
He runs his hand along the book like he’s smoothing a child’s hair. “Little prick,” he says.
It is Stephen’s dissertation, the leather-bound kind rich students have made when they graduate.
“Are you much like him?” the old man asks.
I shrug. “I might be one day. In a few years.” But when I think about it I know that won’t be true.
“What’s your argument then?” the old man asks.
I start to tell him about the form of medieval manuscripts, how in the early fourteenth century there’s so much experimentation because the writers didn’t have vernacular models to draw on, how it was important to find a context for English that placed it alongside French and Latin, somehow distinct but somehow linked to other literatures circulating in the period.
I tell him about the translation of scribal dialects.
I tell him about the levelling of inflections.
I falter.
“You started something,” I say. “Something huge. How did you do it? How did you make something that would last so long? Something that would send people like him and I scrabbling after you with our rulers and our research and our righteousness?”
“Eternal things,” he says with a little smile. “It matters then, does it? How big we drew our letters, how we ruled our margins?”
“A little,” I say. “Maybe.”
There’s a long pause, and I listen to the sound of Stephen breathing. I find myself wanting to touch him.
And then finally, I ask, “Are you ever scared?”
He seems surprised at this, and he squints. I had forgotten how bad his vision must be, working in near darkness; glass for windows was still expensive, and candles too. Though he had written about reading late into the night, I remembered that.
“I was once.” He pauses again, touches the book on his lap. “But now I feel like I’m just waiting. There’s a door, a gateway I was shown once, with words written in black and gold. ‘Through me men go into that blissful place.’”
“‘Through me men go,’” I say half musingly, “‘Unto the mortal strokes of the spear.’”
He nods, looks pleased.
Hair Side, Flesh Side Page 21
