Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  "Why, does he like the Jacobeans?"

  "No, he missed them altogether, and I thought I'd reform him."

  "Tourneur's not likely to reform anybody," said Nick, "but bring him by all means; I don't imagine we'll have much of an audience."

  They settled down to their food. They were joined shortly by Sharon and Nora and the short black student who dressed like Christina. He was, mercifully, not dressed like her today; he had on black jeans and a pink shirt. He turned out to be Sharon's boyfriend; his name was Kevin Lorca; and he gave Janet one bright conspiratorial glance and then ignored her. He seemed fairly morose, but Sharon was bubbly in comparison to her usual demeanor.

  Nora looked tired, and, asked by Molly what was the matter, said that the freshmen had been acting like nitwits as usual. "Not you guys," she added. "But those kids in the two triples at the other end of the hall have been buying every sort of mind-altering substance the history of mankind has to offer, and giving away free samples to all and sundry. I expect them to put up a sign any day now. And I'm tempted to report them and let the College kick them out, but at least two of them are just silly children who will turn out very well if they can survive till they grow up."

  "It's that Beauvais girl who's the troublemaker," said Sharon darkly.

  "Who, Anne?" said Janet; next to her, Nick had moved slig htly and then taken a long

  drink of milk.

  "No, her baby sister. Anne's a swimmer, she wouldn't touch the stuff. I guess Odile needs some way to be different from Anne. She could have gone to another college and saved us all a lot of trouble." Nora sighed heavily. "I'm going to call them all in and lecture them one by one and warn them, and then we'll see. Just what I need. I've got Eco 60, isn't that enough for one term?"

  "What's Eco 60?" said Janet. "It sounds like a brand of gasoline."

  "Intermediate Price Theory," said Nora. "Or, How to Go Permanently Crazy in Six Easy Lessons."

  "That reminds me," said Sharon, "I need twelve more credits in the social sciences.

  Any decent lower-level Economics courses next term?"

  "You can take 10 and 11," said Nora. "They won't give you credit for 10 until you've passed 11, but it's not really hard."

  "I dunno if I want two courses," said Sharon; "I thought I'd take some Anthro spring term."

  "Don't take it from King," said Janet. "He makes you want to tell him, sit down, dear, I'll do this for you. It's awful."

  "Fields is doing the anthropology of religion in the spring," said Tina. "You could get credit both for fuzzy science and for scientific fuzzies."

  Nick and Molly laughed; Nora, who had probably been tired of that joke by the end of her freshman year, looked weary; Sharon nodded thoughtfully; and Janet realized that if Nick or Molly had said that, she would have laughed too. Lord, what fools these mortals be.

  Nick got up, passed behind Janet rather than Tina, and went back for seconds. Well, he hadn't had any lunch to speak of. When he got back, Sharon and Nora and Kevin were standing up to leave.

  "Don't mind me," said Nick.

  "We'll stay and keep you company," said Tina.

  "Must you?" said Molly. "I wanted to ask you about those math problems, Tina; I can't make head nor tail of them."

  "Bring him along afterward," said Tina to Janet. She grinned at Nick. "We'll give you some tea."

  "That will be excellent," said Nick with his mouth full.

  The rest of them went out chattering. Janet fought down a desire to go find something that took a great deal of chewing. "I guess you're feeling better?" she said.

  Nick was cutting up an unidentifiable meat; when she spoke, his hand jerked, and his knife clattered on the green plastic tray. He looked startled and mildly guilty, like somebody suddenly accused, several years after the event, of sneaking into the State Fair without paying. "I cry you mercy," he said; then he seemed to examine this high-flown remark and find it wanting. "I really am sorry," he said. "Let me play you a song after dinner, shall I?"

  "Certainly," said Janet, as gravely as she could manage. Pizza; theater tickets; music after dinner. It was enough to make one contrive to be offended, just to see what would be offered next. Not that much contrivance seemed to be needed. Classics majors were a sensitive lot: either starting at nothing like Nick and Thomas, or hauling bagpipes about at night like Robin and then being terribly sorry he had woken anybody up. Sensitive, or senseless? thought Janet, and almost laughed. Nick was attending with great seriousness to his abominable food, and seemed to notice nothing.

  After dinner they walked through the foggy air, out of which the falling leaves blew suddenly in their faces, to Nick's room instead of Janet's. Robin wasn't there. Nick shut the door, shot the bolt, sat Janet in his desk chair, offered her tea, dragged a battered black guitar case from under the bed, and proceeded to tune the guitar. He was a lot faster about it than Janet's friends who had taken guitar lessons in high school.

  He sang a song she could never remember afterward, a light and clever one about autumn, rather than spring, being the proper time for lovers, because it is the nature of man to defy the elements. Janet applauded when he was done.

  He laid the guitar back in its case, knelt next to Janet's chair, put his hand on the back of her neck, and kissed her. How clever of him, thought Janet, to give away the advantage of height so that she would feel matters were somehow under her control. Not long after, she decided that the person with the advantage of height got very little out of it besides a crick in the neck; and sliding out of the chair, she met Nick on his own ground.

  This time nobody quoted any Milton, but Janet was brought briefly to herself by the memory of a Bill Cosby routine about kissing couples and chapped lips, and very nearly laughed again. Then she said, "We were supposed to take you back to Tina for tea."

  "I know," said Nick into her shoulder. "What's to be done about Tina?"

  "I think," said Janet, "that if it were made clear to her where matters stand—assuming that that can be determined—then she would give up gracefully and find somebody else to be interested in. I think she has eclectic tastes." Oh, dear, that probably wasn't at all a kind thing to say.

  Nick did not seem to have noticed; he had managed, without her noticing it, to get another button on her smock undone, and was now able, because of the construction of that garment's neck, to slip it down off her shoulder. "Are we walking out together, then?" he said.

  "No," said Janet, "we seem to be rolling around on the floor." She was pleased with her insouciant tone, but spoiled it on the last word with a faint gasp; Nick had kissed the hollow of her shoulder, not a spot to which she had ever thought such attention would produce such effects.

  Nick, however, lifted his head and laughed. "It comes to the same thing, these days,"

  he said.

  "What it had better not come to," said Janet, doggedly, "is an uninvited third party to this enterprise."

  Nick thought this over. She hoped he didn't think she was still talking about Tina. She had meant to speak more bluntly, but it was difficult enough to talk at all.

  "Fair enough," said Nick. "Shall I do something about that, or will you?" He kissed the other side of her collarbone.

  "I think," said Janet, "that you should do something about it while I look into the alternatives. Anything I can do requires a trip to the doctor."

  "Fair enough," said Nick again. He laid his head back and gr inned amiably at her, and she realized that she would have to get up first. She knelt back, buttoning her smock. Her fingers were shaking. Nick, damn him, looked as if he had been attending an interesting lecture and was a little excited by it.

  They went, holding hands all the way, down the drafty stairwell of Taylor and back into a night still foggy but much colder now. The wind had died, and the leaves lay still in the gutters. Ericson was warmer than Taylor, and somebody in the basement kitchen was making chocolate-chip cookies. The door to Janet's room was ajar. A smell of Constant Comment wafted out at them. The
y went along the narrow passageway, and found themselves greeted by Tina's and Molly's backs, hunched over Molly's desk.

  "Are you sure you want to major in Biology?" Tina was saying,

  "Yes!" said Molly. "Biology is fine. I understand tidepools. No tidepool ever formed that had the slightest use for calculus. I think Mark Twain was wrong."

  "What?"

  "It's lies, damned lies, and calculus. "

  "Try Classics," said Nick. "No mathematics more advanced than Euclid."

  Both of them looked around. "You go to hell," said Molly, pleasantly.

  Janet looked smiling at Nick, whose hand had tightened on hers, and saw that he was looking sick again. Then she looked at Tina, who was pointedly not looking at their hands and who wore a fixed and less than persuasive smile. Janet thought Nick might well feel unhappy. She felt guilty herself. But when she tried to let go of his hand, to spare Tina's feelings, he went on clutching hers.

  CHAPTER 7

  The rest of the week was maniacal. Evans took the English 10 class through a collaborative analysis (i.e., he asked questions until he got either the answers he wanted or some other answer that was acceptable because he had never thought of it) of the General Prologue, "The Knight's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Friar's Tale," and "The Nun's Priest's Tale," with appalling speed. (Nick said, "If you could make a spaceship drive out of that energy, the galaxy would be yours.")

  Professor Soukup, who had handled Aristotle with the kind of offhand confidence used by the judges at cat shows on their subjects, was frankly (or so he said) bewildered by Plato, and appealed to his class for help. (They ought to have read Plato first, but the textbooks had been late arriving from the publisher—whether because of the general recalcitrance of publishers or because of Professor Soukup's handwriting, nobody seemed certain.) Janet began to wonder if her notion that her father could teach Modern Poetry by admitting ignorance and asking for assistance might perhaps be a little unfair to the students.

  Professor King became less nervous but far more boring, and announced his intention of instituting a weekly quiz "to be certain that people understand the material." Since Janet had failed to discern what there was to understand in it, aside from a fascinating study in how anthropologists mangled their native languages after dealing in other people's, this announcement left her uneasy.

  Miss Swifte decided that Janet was scoring too many hits off Nick, and gave her another partner, a young woman who was six feet two inches tall, weighed a hundred and twenty pounds (which was to say, five less than Janet, who resented it), and was composed almost entirely of arms, legs, and knee-length brown hair. She would bundle it up at the beginning of every class, but halfway through it would always tumble down and get into her eyes. This made her aim uncertain but did not dim her enthusiasm, and it was not much more pleasing to be punched by a foil in some area that did not count for a point, than to be bruised in one that did. Since Janet would have liked her opponent very much in other circumstances, and since Nick was doing brilliantly against his new antagonist, which made her suspect his incompetence against her, she was enormously annoyed in all directions.

  On Saturday they were to go see Hamlet. Saturday morning was Evans's lecture on

  The Romance of the Rose. He spent forty of the period's seventy minutes in a leisurely examination of the history of the allegorical form, which was all very well in its way but had as its main effect the entering of a list in Janet's notebook of another seven works of literature that she really ought to read. Then he stormed through the work itself, devouring the remaining half hour like a hurricane demolishing a barrier island, and leaving Janet wondering if she had been awake.

  Nick, who had borne her off for a romantic walk followed by lunch after Tuesday's and Thursday's classes, vanished after Saturday's class while she was putting her books away in her knapsack. Janet sulked back to Ericson, laid out neatly on her desk all the things she needed to read this weekend for next week's classe s, took out her complete Shakespeare, and lay on her bed to read Hamlet.

  It seemed to her, as it always had, like an uncharted sea out of which rose from time to time the familiar rocks of the soliloquies and certain well-known lines that she had been happily chewing over since she was seven or eight years old. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul. Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. There's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Blessed are those whose blood and judgement are so well commeddled that they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger, to sound what stop she please. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. This quarry cries on havoc. Such a sight as this Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

  Having read the play, and had lunch with Molly, who was fretting over what she should wear to the theater, Janet settled dutifully to her anthropological reading. She thought of writing to the university presses involved and advising them to let their clowns speak no more than was set down for them. That was all she would have to write on her quiz paper, if she didn't pay more attention.

  At four-thirty she flung the anthropology text across the room, took off her smock and her jeans, and put on a green denim skirt and a white gauze top. She was saving the velvet dress for Nick, who didn't deserve it in the least. Molly, who had read physics unmoved throughout the procedure of changing, made a strangled noise when Janet came back from the bathroom.

  "I don't own a skirt," she said reproachfully.

  "Put on that daishiki with the elephants," said Janet. "It's nice and festive. Those boys won't dress up anyway, you know."

  Molly, grumbling, shed her sweatshirt, washed her face vigorously, put on a bra, made disgusted noises, took it off again, and put on the daishiki. Those boys, when they arrived at five o'clock, had left on their patched and faded jeans, but had changed sneakers for boots and put on white shirts, a plain muslin one in Robin's case and a silk one with ruffles in Thomas's. Robin swept Molly a bow and said, "Milord Hannibal, my felicitations."

  "I only did it to please Janet," said Molly. "She thinks elephants are festive."

  "Oh, they are," said Thomas. "More suited to some other play, maybe—but never mind."

  They went across campus to the Student Union, a small, square building of yellow brick, with a clock tower to it, that contained very little of interest aside from the students'

  mailboxes. They settled on its steps to wait for the bus, a station that gave them an excellent view of the Chapel with the sunlight on its clean lines, and of the little red maples that surrounded the Bald Spot. Chester Hall lurked among its larches in the distance, and the Music and Drama Center swore at Olin over the heads of ten or so people and three dogs playing Frisbee. It had been a warm day, but it was getting chilly. Janet had her green jacket and Molly's sweatshirt in her knapsack, but the boys were going to get cold.

  They didn't look cold. Robin was teasing Thomas about something that had happened that morning in their Aristophanes class. Professor Medeous taught that one, and apparently delighted in making her students explain, in detail, the dirty jokes in Aristophanes. Thomas was attempting to uphold the theory that she invented jokes where there were none, the ambiguous nature of the Greek language and the uncertainties of translation making this an easy task.

  Robin kept saying to him, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," which was making Thomas rather angry. The bus was late. Molly was watching the entire business with a sardonic eye. Janet finally said to Robin, "Have you been reading Hamlet too? I thought I'd better; sometimes it's hard to understand the lines when they're spoken."

  "It certainly is," said Robin, grinning. "Speak the speech trippingly, my ass."

  "The review said this bunch was doing the play in American accents," said Thomas,

  "except for the actor doing Polonius, who's British."

  "That
will help," said Robin.

  The bus arrived in a cloud of exhaust, and they got on it. Janet would just as soon have sat with Molly, but Robin, laughing, drew Molly into a seat next to him. Janet and Thomas sat behind them; Janet got the window. Robin promptly turned around, rested his chin on the back of his seat, and proceeded to harangue Thomas about the production of The Revenger's Tragedy they would be doing with Nick winter term. Robin was worried about the lighting, apparently, while Thomas kept telling him he ought to be thinking about the wigs instead. They finally abandoned this contest and began to discuss the play itself.

  After about fifteen minutes in which terms like "masque" and "satirical tragedy" and

  "amorous subplot" warred with long Italian names for supremacy, and nobody listened to Janet or Molly if either of them did try to speak, Molly gave Janet a wry grin over her shoulder, took Janet's copy of A Tan and Sandy Silence out of the front pouch of her daishiki, and settled down to read it.

  Janet had Arthur Koestler's The Watershed (the next book for Professor Soukup's class) in her knapsack, but reading on the bus made her sick. She looked out the window in time to catch the best view of Blackstock, as the bus climbed the hill that led them out of the river valley the town was built in. The buildings between which she ran and bicycled and trudged laden down with books made one tight cluster, the chapel tower, the brick battlements of Taylor, the black glittering clock tower of the Student Union, the brick stack of the heating plant and the mellow sandstone of the Anthro building crammed in the center of a circle of trees, green and red and yellow. You could have put the whole thing in your pocket.

  Janet tapped Molly on the head and pointed Molly closed her book rather impatiently, but once she had looked, she went on looking. "It looks ready to sail away," she said. "On a sea of trees. Over the Arboretum and the game preserve to Canada and the end of the world."

  "They'd have to put up the sails first," said Thomas. "I don't envy them the job. I climbed that smokestack my freshman year."