Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  In the winter of 1973, our junior year at Harvard, on afternoons when Margaret was back from the lab and I was supposed to be at my desk reading Donne and Herbert for seminar or writing poetry for Professor Hawks’s versification class, we would hang out in Margaret’s room and drink oolong tea, which Margaret brewed so black it became a kind of solvent. Lounging on Margaret’s bed, below a periodic table she’d tacked up on the wall, we’d complain at length about our boyfriends. These young men, a couple of blameless seniors from Adams and Dunster Houses, were certainly ardent and attentive, but they bored us because they seemed appropriate. We yearned, in concert, to replace them with unsuitable men—an array of Gothic-novel types who didn’t seem at all hackneyed to Margaret and me. (Margaret, the scientist, had in fact a positively Brontëesque conception of the ideal man.) We envisioned liaisons with millionaires the age of our fathers, with alcoholic journalists, with moody filmmakers addicted to uppers; Margaret’s particular thing was depraved European nobility. A few years earlier it might have been possible for me to find the necessary thrill simply in going out with white boys, the forbidden fruit of my mother’s generation; but in the arty circles I frequented at Harvard, such pairings were just about required, if one was to cut any dash at all.

  What our fantasies boiled down to was that Margaret and I, in the age-old female student tradition, ended up angling for members of the faculty.

  “It’s just a question of days before Dr. Bellemere tumbles,” said Margaret one afternoon. (She flirted shamelessly with her adviser, but for some reason could not bring herself to call him by his first name—Don.) “And then, what naughty delights!”

  As a matter of fact, I was the one who first was offered the chance to taste those delights. In February a genuine instructor—Geoffrey Knacker, who had taught my seminar on metaphysical poetry the previous semester, and who shared an apartment in Central Square with Millicent Tunney, another junior faculty member—asked me to meet him for a cup of coffee. Margaret sat cross-legged on my bed while I got dressed for the date—we were to meet at six at the Café Pamplona—and grew snappish when I refused the loan of a pair of red tights. She told me that if I hid my light under a bushel, I wouldn’t even get him to kiss me. I didn’t listen to her. I was busy making myself look as beautiful and mysterious as I could, and when I had slicked my hair back into a bun, rimmed my eyes with dark pencil, and put on a severe gray dress with a pair of black high heels I had bought in a thrift shop, even Margaret had to applaud the result.

  “If Hopalong calls, tell him I’m riding in the Tour de France,” I said. Hopalong Cassidy was the name we had privately given my boyfriend, who had what I thought was an unnecessarily jaunty gait.

  “You’re a cold, hard thing,” said Margaret in an approving tone.

  I owned a rather rubbed-looking sealskin jacket that had belonged to my mother; when I had wrapped it around me, waved goodbye to the girl who stood studying behind the bells desk of the dormitory, and stepped outside into the February twilight, I had an agreeable feeling of satisfaction about the way I looked, and an agitated romantic feeling about the meeting to come. “Perhaps I’m in love,” I thought, though in fact I could barely remember what Geoffrey Knacker looked like.

  It was ten minutes to six. I walked down Garden Street toward Cambridge Common, listening to the unaccustomed click of my high heels on the brick sidewalk, slippery with melted snow and patches of dirty ice. In the darkness around me, students riding bicycles or walking with book bags were returning to dinner from classes in Harvard Yard. The sky over the dark buildings and narrow streets was a deep lustrous blue, streaked at the edges with pinkish light, and the air was cold and damp. Near Follen Street a small battered Datsun was trying unsuccessfully to park between a jacked-up Riviera and a Volvo plastered with psychedelic stickers. The sound of grinding gears made me think of the time during my sophomore year when a precursor of my boyfriend Hopalong had gotten very stoned at the Dartmouth game and had pursued me along Garden Street by backing up his car for a whole block, all the while declaiming the words from the Temptations’ song “My Girl.” The incident had infuriated me at the time, but now I thought of it as something gay and romantic, the sort of thing that happened constantly to a woman destined to exercise a fatal influence upon men.

  My feeling of agitation increased as I approached the Common. The usual shouts and guffaws were coming from the war monument in the middle, where Cambridge townies liked to hang around smoking dope and drinking wine, but they seemed far away. I looked through the rows of leafless maples at the university towers and traffic lights clustering ahead of me, and felt an unreasonable, blissful happiness to be walking in high heels and a fur coat on a clear evening to a meeting with a man who was likely to mean trouble—the kind of trouble that mothers and magazine articles particularly warned against. I felt a bit like Anna Karenina, burning with a sinful glow; and as if someone beside me in the darkness had spoken a few passionate, muted words, it seemed to me that I was ravishingly beautiful. I began to pretend that someone was walking with me: a lover who didn’t resemble my boyfriend, or even Geoffrey Knacker. This imaginary lover, in fact, didn’t have much of any appearance at all, only a compelling simplicity of character that granted every dangerous wish I had ever had. As I walked through the Common, giving a wide berth to the monument, where two long-haired girls were giggling beside a guy who looked like Jimi Hendrix, I crooked my fingers very slightly inside the pocket of my fur jacket, as if I were holding hands with someone. And then I did something I never afterward admitted to anyone, not even Margaret: I recited a poem to my invisible companion—Donne’s “The Flea.”

  By the time I got to the Pamplona, I had almost forgotten Geoffrey Knacker, who rose from his tiny table to greet me, with an air of being slightly startled by my appearance. He was a tall, thin man with a mournful, rather handsome face and gray halfmoons of skin under his eyes; in the white-tiled, low-ceilinged interior of the Pamplona, surrounded by graduate students chatting over cappuccino, he appeared curiously yellowish and misanthropic, as if he’d lived most of his life in a remote tropical outpost. He helped me with my coat, and I ordered an ice cream. Then the two of us began to talk, rather constrainedly, about metaphysical poetry until Geoffrey began paying me heavy-handed compliments.

  “I always felt that behind your reserved manner in class was a rare sensitivity of nature,” he said, giving me a slow, gloomy smile, and I, who had been attracted by just that smile in the seminar, found myself filled not with rapture but with an inexplicable annoyance. It occurred to me that this meeting was just like a coffee date with any callow comp lit major, who would begin by throwing out portentous hints about his ideal woman and end, ritually, by suggesting we drop mescaline and swim nude in the Adams House pool. I tried to think of the romantic fact that Geoffrey Knacker was an instructor, and that both of us were flouting lovers in order to meet, but all I could seem to feel was irritation at a flat, straw-colored mole that Geoffrey had where his jaw met his neck, and at the way that as he talked, he joined the tips of his fingers together and pumped them in and out in a tiny bellowslike motion. We were sitting at an inconspicuous table in a corner, but it seemed to me, in my hypersensitive state, that all the other students in the Pamplona could see the mole and the working fingertips, and were laughing discreetly at them.

  As I rattled my spoon in my ice-cream dish, some demon prompted me to say, “But certainly you must have seen hundreds of exceptional students in all your years as a teacher.”

  “Hundreds?” repeated Geoffrey Knacker in an injured tone. “Why, no. I finished my dissertation three years ago. I am only thirty-one.”

  We didn’t really have much to say to each other. It was clear, in fact, that our initial attraction had become puzzling and abortive, and that this meeting was one of those muted social disasters that can be devastating if one cares. I didn’t care much; nor, it seemed, did Geoffrey Knacker. We shook hands and parted outside the Pamplona without even the p
olite device of mentioning plans to get in touch. When he zipped up his jacket and, with one last unhappy smile, trudged off in his L. L. Bean boots toward Central Square, I clicked off back to Radcliffe in my high heels, feeling positively elated. Geoffrey Knacker, I decided, was a bore, but the fact of Geoffrey Knacker was exciting. As I came into Harvard Square and threaded my way through the slush and evening traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, the romantic sensation I’d had while walking through the Common returned to me in full force. I seemed, agreeably, to be taking up the strands of an interrupted idyll, and in my right palm, deep in the pocket of the fur jacket, was the pleasant tickling feeling that denoted the grasp of my imaginary lover.

  When I got back to the suite, Margaret was working on a problem sheet for Chem 105, and her boyfriend—a young man with such an earnest, childlike gaze that we’d nicknamed him Christopher Robin—was seated cross-legged on her bed, using a metal mesh contraption to sift seeds and stems out of an ounce of grass he’d just bought. (One of Margaret’s complaints about him was his methodical attitude toward sex and drugs.) “Oo-la-la—very thirties,” said Christopher Robin, giving my outfit the old once-over, and then Margaret dragged me into the bathroom.

  “Well, what happened?” she demanded, locking the door, turning on both faucets, and settling herself on the sink counter under the enormous bosom of one of the Playmates we’d pinned up. “He must have kissed you—or did you fall into bed together? You’re absolutely beaming.”

  “Knacker was actually kind of a fizzle,” I said. “But it was fun anyway.”

  “Idiot child,” said Margaret. “Take off that coat—you’ve wasted it. I knew you should have worn red stockings.”

  When I tried to explain myself, she leaned back against the bathroom mirror, closed her eyes, and giggled so that the frame of the mirror shook. “My artistic roommate,” she said. “The woman of epiphanies. You’re going to kill me with your fine points.”

  A few weeks later Margaret was dancing to a Stones tape at a party in a converted airplane factory up near MIT when she ran into her adviser, Dr. Bellemere, whom she at last succeeded in calling Don. Bellemere, who was a post-doc a bit older than Geoffrey Knacker, and who fluttered hearts all through the chem labs with his leather vest and Buffalo Bill mustache, had had a lot of the punch, which was a Techie grape-juice concoction laced with acid. He led Margaret out of the strobe lights into a dark corner of the loft, kissed her passionately, and told her he spent every lab session thinking about her legs. A triumph for Margaret—except that she inexplicably discovered a preference for Christopher Robin, and so the thing with Bellemere went no further, except for a bit of embarrassment in lab.

  “But there was something really solid there—a kiss, not just daydreams,” Margaret told me pointedly when we discussed it later. For a change, we were sitting among the scattered books and papers of my room, while I packed my book bag to go down and visit Hopalong at Adams House.

  “I don’t think the two situations were so different,” I said. “I’m afraid, sweetheart, that whatever we try to do, in our two different ways, we end up being just a couple of nice girls.”

  “Oh, I hope not!” said Margaret, flopping backward on the bed. “But anyway,” she went on stubbornly after a minute, “a real kiss is better than an imaginary one.”

  And she thumped her booted feet on my bedspread for emphasis.

  I wanted to contradict her, but then I remembered how bullheaded and tenacious Margaret could be in an argument, how tiresomely withholding of her oolong tea and the little English butter biscuits that her mother sent her, and that I loved. In the end I just raised my eyebrows with the air of one to whom has been granted higher knowledge, and kept my mouth shut.

  A Funeral at

  New African

  1

  When my mother called me at school to tell me that my father had had a stroke, it was hard to understand what she said, because the phone was only half working; it had been ripped out of the wall three weeks earlier by an ex-boyfriend of mine named Kiri, a Norwegian graduate student in physics who occasionally got drunk on aquavit and went into berserker rages of jealousy. With the help of my suitemate, the ever-ingenious Margaret, I had managed to piece the phone wires together so that a sort of communication was possible. Mama’s voice came through in a series of gasps embroidered with static, and what she said first sent a dissolving feeling through my bones and then became a part of me that seemed as if it had always been there. The facts were simple: my father had been sitting in his office at the New African Baptist Church, dictating a sermon to his secretary, when he had suddenly fallen back in his chair—a fall that in my imagination took on the controlled backward curve of the thousands of bodies he had baptized. He had been taken to the hospital, and I was to come home immediately.

  After I had gingerly hung up the phone, I sat down on the bed and looked around my wreck of a room, which I hadn’t put back together after Kiri had pulled it to pieces and I had told him finally, inexorably, to get lost. Besides yanking out the phone, he had torn down my tidy blue regulation dormitory curtains and my favorite poster—a Degas sketch of a black dancer in a Paris café—and he had put his foot through the stout wooden seat of a Windsor rocker that had belonged to my great-aunt Sarah Crenshaw. It was only a few months until commencement, and it had seemed ridiculous to try to rebuild a cheery student nest with new posters and a shiny Harvard rocker from the Coop. I had, in fact, begun to take a macabre delight in the mangled curtain that swayed spastically in the drafts of March air; in the splintered chair, where the broken wood looked new against the old black finish; and in the dancer, hanging upside-down by a shred of tape, a nasty smile on his face as he pointed a toe before a group of Belle Époque bloods. On my desk, scattered among five coffee cups and an array of wizened apples, were the yellow legal pages that held the second draft of my senior thesis, “The Literature of Adventure in Nineteenth-Century America.” During the last phone conversation I had had with my father, I had tearfully complained to him about how badly the thesis was going, and he had irritated me by asking in a voice that was tired and vacant of all emotion, “Do you think you can straighten things out on your own?”

  “I don’t know,” I had snapped back angrily. “It’s all a mess.”

  In a few minutes Margaret came back from the chem labs. She wheeled her ten-speed bicycle into the hallway of the little suite and threw down her book bag, looking wan and disheveled from an evening spent poring over enzymes and fatty acids. When I told her what had happened, she looked at me silently for a minute, her blue eyes brilliant and wide. Still without saying anything, she pulled off her big Mexican sweater and turned on the hot-plate under the teakettle. She brewed a pot of Twinings Gunpowder Green, bitter and strong enough to take the skin off the insides of our mouths; we took the tea, a couple of mugs, and a bottle of Barbadian rum that had been gathering dust on Margaret’s bookshelf and went out onto the balcony of the suite. We sat down on the edge of the balcony, sticking our legs through the railing so that they hung down in the darkness over Linnaean Street. It was about midnight on the Tuesday of a March week in which the weather had been warm and chaotic—sudden rains, wet winds, and languorous afternoons so sunny that Cambridge townies hung out smoking weed in the Common as if it were already May.

  That night low clouds were passing on a brownish sky, and the two of us sat swinging our legs and peering through the leafless trees at a set of brick faculty apartments behind the dorm. We sipped the rum and bitter tea and gossiped about our friends and boyfriends and ex-boyfriends—especially the obnoxious Kiri—and about what we were going to do after commencement. Margaret was going to take six months off to travel through the Yucatán with some friends who owned a beat-up VW camper, and then she was going to go to grad school in chemistry at Penn. I had made no plans at all, except to write away halfheartedly, back in September, to a couple of European universities. All year, until that night, I had found it hard to believe that I would be leav
ing college, but there on the balcony after the phone call about my father, I had a small, gradual but continuous sensation of removal, as if filament after filament of the ties that had bound me to my previous life of school and family were breaking. Since I had spoken to my mother, a tremendous calm had taken possession of me; I saw clearly, as if at a great distance, that this hour marked a change in everything, as inconspicuous and profound as the change a tincturing drop makes in a glass of water.

  I was surprised at how little alarmed I felt as I sat with no idea of what would happen, and not even a comfortable room to return to. Margaret and I talked for almost three hours, and our conversation seemed to me afterward to have been extraordinarily sweet: witty, frivolous, daring—the kind of conversation one always hopes to have in college. It was exciting to be outside at night, and so far aloft; the weirdly shifting clouds above the trees and roofs made me feel that I was in a crow’s nest, looking out over unfamiliar country. Every half hour or so, Margaret would push back her long hair, touch me on the shoulder, and say, in a voice at once sympathetic and sleepy, “Sarah, you have to get up early for your flight.” But neither of us really wanted to put an end to a time that it suddenly seemed we might never have again. So until the Memorial Church bell rang four o’clock, we went on sitting on the windy balcony, swinging our legs high in the darkness, while below us, one by one, the lights went out.

  2

  Back in Philadelphia, every familiar person I met and everything around me seemed slightly skewed, a few degrees off normal. It reminded me of a science-fiction story I’d read about a planet identical to Earth, except that every proportion was subtly different—landing there drove human space travelers insane. Life at home seemed funny or tediously queer; I found myself in fits of inappropriate laughter, or filled with the impatience one feels when someone goes on and on with a boring joke. My aunt Lily, normally impeccably groomed, picked me up at the airport with her hair flattened on one side of her head, and lipstick blurred on the same side of her handsome, olive-skinned face, so that she had a Cubist look. “Sarah, you’ll have to be very brave,” she murmured, hugging me, and I said flippantly into the side of her perfumed neck, “I’m not the brave type.”