by Amy Lapwing
“You who know about love,
I seek for a treasure outside of myself;
I don’t know who holds it
or what it is.
I sigh and I groan.”
She was stunning. A smile deepened on Michael’s face.
The next day he decided to go get Charles for lunch instead of waiting for him.
“Hey, B-sharp, you ready?” Michael called at Charles’ door.
Charles looked up from the essay he was reading and said, “Hey, Mitch, listen, you know—”
Michael waved the apology away. “No, it’s—” He shrugged. “I was being—”
Charles cut short the embarrassing moment. “Well, either you’ve given her up, or you’ve made some progress.” He stood up, flicking his pen into the Harvard mug on his desk, and pocketed his glasses.
“I’ve put in my request.”
“Your request?”
“For a date. I expect a response in six to eight weeks.”
“Sounds like progress to me,” cheered Charles. They walked shoulder-to-shoulder down the breezy yellow hall.
At the fac lounge they ate with the usual crowd: English types, musical types, a Classics guy, a grad student finally coming to the end of his thesis and hoping to buy a little insurance before his defense. Michael felt the same excitement of anticipation as at the party, thinking he would see Justina at any moment. Every female who passed by their table got his glance, even the guy with the ponytail from Computer Science, to his especial chagrin. People at his table were finishing and leaving. He looked around the thinning room, but could not find her. Reluctantly, he left with Charles. Who was she talking to about him? What was Pascale saying?
That night he sat at the piano and tried to remember a Brel song. He would order the music tomorrow. As he lay in bed, pieces of their conversation came back to him. In the replay, though, his responses were quicker and wittier. She was the captive. Her face was smiling, the almost blond hair shining. But he could not seem to remember what she looked like, exactly. It was maddening. He wanted to see her right now, a picture, anything. Tomorrow, she’ll have to eat lunch tomorrow. Or be at the language lab. Should I go find her? ¡Mierda! I should just wait. Just wait until I happen to see her, and if it feels right, I’ll ask her out again. If I go running after her, she’s going to frick out. All right. All right. I’m going to sleep now. Goodnight, Justina. I’m going to sleep now. He spoke the words aloud to his over-working mind: “Goodnight, Justina.” He rolled over and fell asleep two hours later.
Michael’s quiet expression as they had listened together in the language lab accompanied her for the rest of the afternoon. She decided to ask Pascale about him tomorrow. Then she remembered his stabbing eyes. She called Pascale that evening after dinner and asked her over.
Pascale put down the plastic frame with souvenirs from Justina’s year abroad pressed inside— train tickets, movie stubs, cafeteria chits— and exclaimed with delight, “You want to go out with Michael?”
“I’m— I don’t know! He asked me out.”
“And he just met you?” Pascale’s eyes widened as she imagined her stalwart bachelor friend falling in love.
“Pascale!”
“What did you say?” Pascale settled more comfortably on the couch, cradling her mug of coffee. “Did you say yes?”
“No. I mean, I didn’t say yes.”
“Good. Oh, that’s good, Justina.”
“Why?” She wondered if there was something wrong with Michael.
“Uh! From what planet do you come? Why do you think he has asked you out?”
“I don’t know,” Justina shrugged. “Guess he likes me.”
“And so now you have to use that, like a seed, and grow something from it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You say ‘maybe,’ to drive him a little crazy.”
Justina shook her head.
Pascale explained, “You go from being someone he likes to someone he simply must have.”
“That’s bone-headed.”
“That’s how it happens, every time.” Justina looked skeptical. “Well,” said Pascale, taking a lemon thin from the plate, “then why did you say ‘maybe?’”
“Because I didn’t know. I don’t know him. He could be the campus weirdo for all I know.”
“No, that’s his friend.” Pascale puffed out her cheeks and attempted to leer.
Justina laughed. “What do you know about his dating history?”
“‘Dating history?’” sneered Pascale. “You mean his past affairs?”
“All right, his ‘past affairs.’ I feel like we’re in the fifties or something.”
Pascale remembered Laura and Pam, and defended Michael, saying that Laura was “a cold woman,” who mistook sex for passion and just used Michael to satisfy her urges. Justina countered that Michael was probably doing the same thing, wasn’t he?
“Yes, but he’s a man!” shouted Pascale, waving her cookie in the air. “She’s a woman! But she had no heart. Michael, he has heart. Too much, I say.”
“So, she broke his heart?” Justina hoped it was true.
“He didn’t let her. He broke up with her. He was not going to go on letting her use him, no matter how good the sex was. And I can’t believe it was any good. This woman, you had to see her, she was like a robot! What he saw in her—” Pascale gave a French shrug, lots of shoulder and lower lip.
“A woman who liked sex,” said Justina.
“Listen, Justina, this is Michael we’re talking about here, not a studding horse. He has a mind and a heart.”
“If you say so.” A slot in the CD carousel was empty. Her Brel CD. Justina’s eyes went around the room looking for it.
“He was being used by Laura. And he was being used by Pam. Ugh! Pam, what an idiot!”
Justina picked up her open French text and slipped the CD out from under it.
Pascale continued, “Pam was in love with another man. She only went with Michael to make her boyfriend jealous. But did Michael know this? No! He didn’t even know she had just broken up with her boyfriend. He didn’t do his research first, like you’re doing. If he was a musicologist instead of a musician he could have avoided these mistakes.”
“So the boyfriend got jealous and—”
“Of course the boyfriend got jealous. And Pam cried and cried and she decided he was the only man for her, and she dumped Michael. Thank God! She really was stupid. I hated that he was seeing her. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her. Lying bitch! Espèce de saloperie! At least Laura was honestly half a woman.”
Justina was silent, her hands opening and closing the CD case. Her eyes moved absent-mindedly over the poster of a Gothic church she had tacked on the wall over the CD player. It was a color photo, but all the colors were shades of gray. Lovely, she thought, this guy has no staying power. And I’m the next comfort station on his road of life. Can I go home now?
Pascale studied her new friend. “Eat a cookie before I eat them all. Everyone has a past, Justina. Older men, especially, have pasts. It’s one of their attractions, that they have this mysterious past life full of secret trysts and passionate affairs.”
“But,” countered Justina, “doesn’t it strike you as odd that in all the time he’s been here, he’s dated a total of two women? For maybe nine months?”
Pascale bit into another cookie. Perhaps her new friend was too young. Perhaps she could not understand the lure of a moment’s tenderness with a stranger to a middle aged person still looking for intimacy with a beloved. Pascale did not want to ruin anything for him. “Justina, there are women a man dates, for a time, and there are women a man dates, one time.”
Justina’s hands stilled. “You saying he—”
“I’m saying, maybe, he’s done a little picking up now and then.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s just met you and he wants to go out with you, naturally he tells you, oh
, by the way, I want you to know I am something of a pick-up artist.” Pascale threw her hands in the air, then snatched another cookie and said, “He dated Laura four years ago. And then Pam two years ago.”
“So?” said Justina, feeling abruptly dethroned and abandoned by her flighty subject.
“So, lately he seems to be trying to have, you know, a relationship.”
Justina put down the CD case and took a cookie and bit into it, crossing her arms and regarding the bookcase: one book stuck out, much taller than the others; it should be moved to one side or the other.
“Justina,” said Pascale, inclining her head toward her and looking in her eyes, “why he’s had this love life, I don’t know, but he is an older man and there’s a lot we don’t know about him. Like his younger days. He was in his thirties when he came here. I don’t know anything about him when he was in his twenties. Like you are now. It’s another whole decade. It’s a long time. Things happen in ten years.”
Justina wanted to believe Michael was good. She could not believe she could be so completely taken in, her powers of perception were usually pretty good. Was she under the influence of new career euphoria? She took the CD case and slid it back in its slot on the carousel.
“Maybe you should just get to know him, decide for yourself. How does he seem, when you talk to him?”
Justina smiled.
Pascale nodded then shook her head. “Whatever he was before, it doesn’t matter. He is however he seems to you. He is unique. And you’re unique. And whatever there will be between you will be unique.”
“You’re such a romantic, Pascale.”
“And is that a disease, now? No, I am realistic. I believe love is real. Love happens. And things that look like love happen. You can’t tell the difference in advance.”
Justina wondered if she could use her above-average intellect to predict the outcome of this thing she was contemplating with Michael, using whatever cues he gave her next time she saw him.
“You have to get at least a little ways into it, first,” continued Pascale.
“No one said anything about love,” lied Justina. Pascale was all shoulders and lower lip.
On Tuesday evening Justina and Kim had spaghetti at the tomato red Formica and aluminum table in her little kitchen. Kim gave up on conversation after getting “Fine, good,” in response to queries regarding her new office, her classes, her students, and plopped onto his bed with the Joyce book for his twentieth century novel seminar. Justina washed the dishes, running the kitchen faucet while she wiped the table, and tried to recall the minutiae of Michael’s face. She settled onto the living room couch with her survey text. It had been a day and a half since she had seen Michael and he was starting to disappear. She could recall the shape of his face, and sometimes his eyes she could see, but then she could not see his mouth. She would recall the line of his lips, and then his nose and cheeks would blur. God, I’m so tired of thinking about this, this deciding. She got up from the couch and went to the CD player. She scanned the titles, pausing at the Brel. She looked at the picture of the middle-aged Brel, lines around his eyes from too much smoking. Now wait, she thought, I liked Brel before Michael; I can play him if I want. She put the CD in and lay on the couch and listened to a bit of the first song, then used the remote to zip to another track, and let herself fall into a delicious tension as she listened again to “Le prochain amour.” She felt so good; was it just the music?
Chapter Six
Warm Shiver
Michael floated through Men’s Chorus and then Women’s Chorus the next morning. His sleep-deprivation led him to call the tenors sopranos once by mistake, and the baritones joined in the tenor-bashing to hoots from the women. He was impatient for lunchtime and the next stint of watching for Justina at the fac lounge. He talked Charles into going earlier, at eleven when it opened, and stayed till twelve-thirty. He finally left, afraid if she did show up he would not recognize her, his nerves were so taut.
He ran an errand at the administration building and headed back to his office, walking quickly across the common, the fall brilliance muted under a light mist. He came up to the modern languages building and thought of going to see if she was in the language lab. That would be wrong. He needed to leave her alone, not pursue her, a little while longer. He let out a raspy sigh of irritation and stepped up his pace as he came abreast of the building’s entrance.
“Michael?” He turned and saw her. She had just come out, was putting up her umbrella, a book bag over her shoulder.
I knew I’d see her, I knew it!
She came over to him and held the umbrella over both their heads. He marveled at her existence right next to him, the thing he had tried to will for the last two days, such a simple thing. He wanted to kiss her, she was so perfect.
She wondered at his smiling silence. “Where you going? You’re going to get soaked.”
The rain was coming down more heavily now. He started to take her waist, but thought better of it and just stayed close to her as they walked on under her umbrella. “What do you have now?” he asked. She said she was free for an hour. “Come with me to concert chorus.”
“Oh, no-no-no, you don’t want me, I can’t sing.”
“Can you carry a tune? That’s all I require, to start.”
“No, I am not singing, forget it.”
“Then will you help me with something?” He looked for the line by her mouth, that much he remembered of her face. “Will you help us with our French? Our pronunciation?”
Yes, she could see how he wouldn’t want to end up with a whole chorus singing Spanish-accented French. “What are you doing?”
“A Debussy song, I think you’ll like it.”
“Sounds like fun.” She switched hands with the umbrella and tucked her hand under his arm.
He took the umbrella from her to center it over them. Oh, lovely girl! He felt her looking at him and was surprised to feel himself shy.
They went up the steps to the next cluster of buildings. “Have you been skipping lunch?” he asked.
“I’ve been eating in my office. To save money.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“No?”
“No. You can bring your lunch to the fac.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do.” They had arrived at the music building. He shook out her umbrella and closed it as she opened the door for them.
“Did you miss me?” she asked.
“Yes.” He looked frankly at her for a moment. “Here, we’re just around the corner.” He led her into a large classroom with built-in risers shaped in concentric horseshoes around a piano and music stand.
“We have a special guest today, so watch your language, fellows,” called Michael as he entered the room with Justina. She stood with a small smile before the sixty choristers bearing down on her from their perches on the risers. “Class, say hello to Professor Trimble.”
“Hello, Professor Trimble!” responded the chorus in unison. There was a wolf whistle, and then laughter.
“Keep a cork on it, Lawson,” warned Michael, “or I make you a baritone.” Lawson made a great show of locking his lips. “Professor Trimble is a new face in the French department.”
“Very nice,” the tenors crooned.
“This is very strange,” whispered Justina to Michael.
“Yes,” he agreed, and to the chorus he said, “You are all very, very strange.” The choristers laughed. He said to Justina, “I think it’s better I warm them up, first.” He led Justina to a seat on the fringe of the alto section. “This is Minnie,” he said, introducing Justina to one of the students. “She’ll take good care of you.” Minnie smiled as Justina sat next to her. “Don’t let the sopranos get her,” he stage-whispered to the girl.
“Oooh!” sang Minnie with delight. “Are you sure, Mr. C?,” she said loudly for the benefit of the sopranos across the room. “They could use her brains, poor things.”
The men
ooh’ed as the sopranos shouted insults over the space separating them from the altos.
“Tenor wannabes!” “Come over here and say that, Minnie!” shouted one of the Lemmon sisters. “You just have top envy!” shouted the other.
“Come over here, right now, and we’ll see who has top envy!” Minnie retorted.
Justina made a face of panic to Michael and mouthed, Yikes!
Michael strided over to the music stand and clapped his hands. “Ladies, ladies! We will be happy to judge your contest, won’t we, gentlemen?”
The men erupted in whistles and calls of “Aw-right!”
“But I’m afraid I can’t give any credit for it, so—”
“Aw!” from the disappointed men.
“Shall we get started?” Michael looked to the young woman sitting at the piano. “A major.” He raised his hands and beat time as the chorus sang their warming up exercises. After several scales, he held his hands still to hold them on the note and see if they were watching. Several male voices sang on, failing to hold the note.
“Eyes on me, gentlemen,” scolded Michael. “I know I’m not the prettiest sight, but what I can do?”
Nervous laughter from the women, who sat smiling at their laps. “I can think of a few things,” whispered a female voice behind Justina. Justina glanced at Minnie and saw her trying to suppress a smile. Justina burst out laughing and shook her head at Michael’s surprised look: nothing, go ahead. He continued the warm up.
“You are really wonderfully in tune,” called Michael when he was satisfied they were ready. “You could have been on Monday, but I forget, this is New Hampshire’s Number One Party School.” Whoops and hollers. “But you are not New Hampshire’s Number One Chorus. Not yet. Fauré. First movement.”
The choristers opened their scores of the Fauré Requiem while Michael studied the music, his head nodding as he mentally set the tempo. He looked at the chorus to make sure they were looking at him. They held their scores high as they watched him. He made a small movement to set the tempo, then brought his hands down to open the piece. All parts sang together, too loud. Michael shushed them, bringing his arms close in to his body, to appear smaller. He held them on the fermata, then shut them off with a movement of his fingers, snuffing out a candle. The accompanist played alone for two measures, then the tenors came in alone. They sang two measures before Michael interrupted them.
