“So tell me about yourself,” I said, knowing if I didn’t change the subject I was a goner, that life as I knew it would end and I was too afraid of what the new one might be—it certainly couldn’t be good. “You’ve got a wife I know.”
“I don’t wear a ring, how do you know?”
“Google knows all. What I never looked for were children. We both know you’re fertile.”
“I couldn’t bet on that now, but yes, two children—a son just seventeen, a junior but already hoping for East Coast Ivy. Daughter will be fifteen next month and I can tell you I am already not looking forward to entrusting her to the Los Angeles freeways.”
“She won’t be the first teenaged girl to live into old age in LA and won’t be the last. She’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Laws are much stricter now, and education much better. I shudder anytime I recall my own recklessness at that age.”
“So where are they?”
“All home now, why?”
“No, pictures. I want to see them. Surely you carry pictures.”
“Of course,” he said. He reached into his pocket, retrieved his iPhone.
I tried to at least look interested, but physical beauty was never something that held my interest. His impeccable wife, his gorgeous children, miraculously behaved, beloved and brilliant, no doubt. What I more noticed though was Em’s face as he showed them to me. The way he lingered just a moment extra on his wife after he showed her to me. He said, “Collista,” that was all, and his finger should have swiped the image away, but it didn’t. It remained, one, two, three moments longer and I could see he was admiring her, was unable to take his eyes off her, had to will his finger to bring on the next image, and he could do so only because the next photo was one he obviously cherished more, his daughter, Alexandra, and then his son, Peter. Each image seemed hard for him to let go of until the fourth one, a family picture, all four of them lit by low golden light, a blue sky and vineyards behind them—“last summer, visiting friends in Napa”—almost a parody of the perfect family. He seemed to see this or sense my response because he put the phone away abruptly, before I’d had a chance to view it thoroughly.
“Tell me you’re all as perfect as you look,” I said.
“Don’t be mean.”
“The contrary. I’ve known only a few truly happy families, least of all one as beautiful as yours.”
“Collista and I have had our issues,” he said, looking away. “All marriages do, and we’ve weathered them.”
“No infidelities?”
Em snapped his gaze back on me hard, clearly wondering what I was up to, and I retreated.
“I’m sorry. That’s none of my business. I apologize.”
“No actual infidelities, no, not on my part and none on hers that I’m aware of. I doubt we could weather that.” I don’t know if it was his anger or my hunger but something was humming between us, like actual vibrations, which rose to a crescendo then faded, and he turned. “For seventeen years we’ve been anchored by the kids. Nothing more important to either of us. True, good anchors in stormy weather they always were. Even when they start making storms of their own. And these distract a couple from one another.” He leaned back again, extended his legs. “You?”
“Me? You mean kids? No.”
“I see no ring either?”
“One offered and refused, fifteen years ago,” I said.
“Why?”
“He loved me too much. Visiting poet.”
“Anyone I’d know?”
“Not unless you read literary quarterlies. We’d have been a good couple, and I felt that I might grow to love him, but it was too unbalanced. His affection was so much more intense than mine for him, I knew it couldn’t last. Mine could, not his.”
“You were and are as constant as the sun.”
Yes, indeed, this was when the line had been returned to me—I am. When he said it, I smiled at his game. We’d seen the Zeffirelli version of the star-crossed lovers together, in Chapel Hill, and used to quote from it, that fall and winter, long ago.
“ ‘Therefore, love moderately,’ ” I played along. “ ‘Long love doth so.’ Yes, my poet was the gunpowder and the fire to light it with. I didn’t want to stand on the sidelines of his passion.”
“Regrets?”
“About turning him down? No.”
“Any regrets at all?”
I paused. My life had been so routine for so long, I rarely asked myself about my choices. But here I did and I answered plainly since I was asking him to be so honest.
“I’d have liked to have had a child. I’d have liked to have been a mom.”
This, I was relieved to see, seemed to hurt him, so I continued with the truth rather than to let it lie there, meanly. “Not that child, or that kind of mom. Me, a college senior, can you imagine? We did the right thing. I did the right thing.” He put his hand on my knee, smiled at me. I touched his hand, just smoothed the back of it. It felt good and natural to do so.
“It doesn’t make me sad,” I continued. “Life is what it is. I’ve been an orphan now five years. Father died of pancreatic cancer at age sixty, ten years before Mother. I mourned her five years ago this month, in our dear Duke Chapel on a day very much like today. As far as offspring goes, I’m alone as a tree stump. But I have a brother and sister who are raising families nearby, I have this university, which is very much family to me, and I have five close friends I can rely on absolutely, and as long as I live here, on this land, I know who I am.”
“That makes me happy, Grimsley,” he said. “You do seem content.” He touched me again, rested a hand on my exposed knee with a fondness so benign it deflated me. “I always, always felt so good when I was with you. You always put me so at ease. I’m sure I never said that, or thanked you.”
I looked away. He took his hand off my knee.
He said, “I have two hours till I need to be at the dinner. Walk with me? I want to see the place again.”
*
Places built to be great don’t change, and Duke University is like that, though it looks older than it actually is. This West Campus—designed by a black architect I’m proud to say, from a state that did so much damage to African Americans for so many hundreds of years—was constructed during the early part of the twentieth century, but its Gothic style evokes the old eastern Ivy League schools. The chapel where we’d just been hadn’t been completed until 1935. East Campus, a mile to the east, was built first, starting in the 1890s, in a neo-Georgian style that I much prefer to the dark and heavy stone of West Campus. East Campus brings to mind the light and innovation of a Thomas Jefferson, with its great lawn extending hundreds of yards to the domed Pantheon of Baldwin Auditorium, whereas West Campus carries the heavy weight of Western Literature and Law and Medicine. Or so it feels to me.
But on a spring day such as today, with the campus cleared of the bulk of its students after last week’s commencement, a warm breeze and afternoon light falling softly here and there through the full spring leaves onto the walkways, with Em beside me, it was lightness and ease, as if the campus could at last breathe.
“Anywhere in particular you want to go?” I asked. “The gardens?”
“No, I always found the gardens kind of stuffy.”
“You liked the woods better.”
“As did you,” he said, leaning his shoulder into mine, dipping down slightly to do so. “Though it is in the gardens where we met,” he said, looking at me as we strolled.
“Is it?”
“Of course it is! Don’t you remember?”
I paused long enough to consider, then lied. “It’s kind of fuzzy.”
“Freshman orientation. Come on, Grimsley. You were my FAC.”
“I know that.”
“I remember you, just as you were. You were hot.”
“I was not,” I said, bumping him back with my shoulder, trying not to smile. “I was plain as wood.”
“I saw through that in
two seconds,” he said. He took two more strides. “You’re still hot, I hope you know, and in exactly the same way.”
We were walking the perimeter within West Campus, clockwise past languages and the psych building, past social sciences, where Em had taken so many of his English courses. We had crossed over the roadways where the East–West shuttle bus picks up and unloads, to the other side, the long connected rows of Gothic residences, buildings whose arches lead into a variety of smaller quadrangles. I did my best to ignore what he said, having no idea why he would say it. Though he was always straightforward like that. Guileless. The boy I met and knew here was utterly lacking in cunning. He hid nothing. And you could feel it on you as a genuine warmth. His natural optimism and faith in his fellow creatures was so complete he seemed, to some, simple-minded. Many of the smarter girls complained that he was dim, but I figured they resented his being so good looking and smart, supremely confident and outgoing and a sensitive writer–type. But how could he have lasted in Manhattan and made a success of himself in Los Angeles without a little inner Machiavelli? Maybe his was ultimately a cunning so deep and well hidden I never saw it and was fooled the whole time, even after he’d left me.
I stopped and turned to him. “Did you ever love me?”
He stared at me seriously and calmly, and I knew then that there truly was no cunning in him, because there was no need whatsoever. He would say the truth because it was the truth—straight at you like a knife.
“Grimsley, if I’d loved you, I’d never have left you. Or I’d have made you come with me.”
He said it with a smile as easy and light as though he’d just told me how pretty I look in a dress. What felt like an old-lady’s dress by this point.
“You do remember that, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Please tell me our last weeks together are not so far away or meaningless that you’ve forgotten—that month we lived together before I headed to LA?”
“How could I forget that?” I said.
Indeed, it was one of the best months of my life, one of the most truly carefree, happy months of my whole life, but, as it was followed by blackness, I really hadn’t thought much of it since. And so the details were unfocused—Em was always the one with the incredible memory, cursed with it, I suppose—only the emotion of ease, of summer afternoon, followed by a wintery cold snap driven in from the north, that’s what I retained.
“Grimsley, if I’d loved you, I’d never have let you go,” he repeated.
And then he reached for my hand. He held my hand, turned me gently, and we walked, just like that, hand in hand. We entered into Few Quad. I could scarcely believe it, walking hand in hand as we had many times on these same fieldstone paths.
He took a deep breath, exhaled heavily. I could feel him smiling at me, but I looked around at the lovely day to avoid his eyes.
“You see?” he said, drawing my eyes to his.
“See what?”
“This feels so good. I’ve been down for so long, frustrated with work, a difficult daughter, Collista and I are too often annoyed with each other about meaningless issues. It’s been so long since I’ve felt … at ease.” He took in a breath that was the meaning of the word: he inspired. “You were always such a … comfort. As you are this very moment. It’s as though nothing has changed, how can that be?”
“Why should anything have changed?”
“Because it’s been more than twenty years since I last saw you! People change. We’ve had different lives. We’ve become different people from who we were.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “You don’t know me. You know nothing of my life now. Now look at the evidence of your feelings. In my experience, people change only if they’re forced to. And most people aren’t forced. They cloak themselves in layers of time that dry and toughen around them. That you feel as you do, immediately at ease with a friend you haven’t seen in all these years, tells me you haven’t changed, and that I haven’t changed.”
He stopped me from walking, not letting go of my hand, and said, “Tell me that’s a good thing.”
“You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“I think I do.”
“Then yes,” I said, “it’s a good thing.”
I kissed him on the mouth.
Just once, just to close the last little distance between us. It wasn’t a peck, nor a probing kiss, just a good one-two-three smooch on the lips. The fullness and softness there, this remained too, and returned to me on contact, the tactile memory of those lips. They hadn’t changed either. They felt exactly the same.
Was he shocked? Not from the looks of it. He’d neither participated in the kiss nor pulled back from it. He gave me the easiest smile he had. I held his gaze; I hoped I was smiling in exactly the same way he was.
I suddenly felt my whole self slipping away from me. It was as though I’d stood up suddenly and all the blood left my head and I couldn’t see. I think I blacked out, because when I regained my senses, he was gone.
I turned, and he was moving toward the magnolia right outside the back entrance to my old dorm.
“Hey, Grimsley,” he called, “remember this old tree?”
*
I hate clichés as much anyone. But it’s true! Damn me if it isn’t true! As if it were yesterday … But it’s not the cliché that’s bad, is it? What’s so grave about them is how they turn sadness and pain into Muzak. Stop, you are so beautiful, I thought as I watched him move toward the magnolia.
For truly, yes, I did remember that tree. The night after I met Em in the gardens, that beautiful boy climbed this very tree before me now to scratch on my window screen and wake me. And it now seems to have been moments ago, a tesseract, a wrinkle in time touching this spot to that one. How unbearably sad it is, “as if it were yesterday.” Well it was yesterday, and what have we done in the meantime? Where did our lives go? What have I done?
He’d let his jacket drop on the dry grass like a careless boy and swung from a branch, back and forth, back and forth, building momentum, then leapt so that he arced to his feet. He let out an “oof!” when he landed and then pressed his hand to the small of his back.
“All right?” I asked.
“Barely. I can’t believe I did that. Terrible back. Too many hours, too many years hunched over a keyboard.”
“I was going to ask you to show me how you got all the way up there but I guess I’d better not.”
“A repeat performance is not in the cards, I’m afraid.”
“A pity.”
We stood side by side to regard the modest but sturdy old tree. I wondered if he was reminiscing; he studied it so hard. Then I looked, too, and thought about it.
My room had been the first window, second floor beside the small tower that contained the stairway, four flights in all, from below ground level up to a third floor, which held a few long, narrow rooms, dormers poking up from the slate roofs.
“Gosh, you gave me a scare that night.”
“Did I?” he asked, smiling at me.
“I thought you’d died.”
“Died and gone to heaven,” he said, smiling the same bright smile he’d shown me that night.
Untitled
“Grimsley.”
Slowly the girl, a junior in college, surfaced to consciousness from the hum of a stick being dragged against her window screen.
“Hey, Grimsley!”
She felt disoriented, afraid something terrible had happened.
“It’s me, Emerson. Remember?”
It took her several moments before she realized where she was, safe in her own room. Gradually what appeared to be an apparition just out of reach solidified into the boy she’d been with most of the evening, he and his two roommates. “What are you doing?”
“Talking to you!”
“You’re drunk.”
“But oh so happily!” He tried to crawl toward her window, but the branch wasn’t long enough.
“Be c
areful, you’re going to fall.”
“Won’t fall. Already climbed up twice. Wouldn’t make it up a third time.”
“Why twice?”
“Climbed up the first time, couldn’t reach the window, couldn’t wake you, sleep of the dead. So I had to go back down and find a stick to reach your window screen. You left the party—I couldn’t find you, where did you go?”
One of the fraternities had had an early welcome for some of the freshmen, same old red plastic cups fighting for the keg’s tap. The girl, the FAC, had brought her charges there and stayed as long as she could bear.
“It was one a.m. I went here and went to bed. What time is it?”
“Still night,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“To kiss you.”
“What?”
“You are so beautiful.”
“Didn’t know you were that drunk.”
She was flattered, nonetheless. She was not by any stretch beautiful, with a broad nose, heavy eyebrows, and the plainest of brown hair. It was what it was, she was used to it, and anyway, it kept her from doting on herself in the mirror.
“Can I come in?”
“Now how do you reckon on doing that?”
Not only was he as far out on the branch as he could get without its bending and dropping him off, but the dorm room windows were too narrow to slide through easily even if the lead glass frame opened fully—they opened outward like a door when you cranked the handle—and the screen hadn’t been in the way.
“It was one of those cross-that-bridge-when-I-come-to-it situations,” he said. “Hadn’t given it much thought.”
“Why didn’t you just use the stairs like a mortal?”
The girl’s eyes had adjusted, and there was enough light to see that a look of genuine perplexity came over him.
“You can do that?”
“I’m beginning to think you’re retarded.”
“This is a girls’ dorm. I thought there would be some kind of matron sentry at the entrance, protecting the damsels.”
“This isn’t 1950.”
“You mean I could walk right in?”
In Short Measures Page 4
