by Alison Lurie
“Hell, no. Of course you will.”
“But not here—I can’t do it here. I have to go back to North Carolina, where it’s not so cold and dark and ugly. I have to cut myself off from everything, and be absolutely alone in the woods and listen for my voices.”
She’s really leaving, Alan thought, confused, as if Delia were simultaneously there in his arms and gone.
“Maybe you could work in the house,” he told her desperately.
“I couldn’t—I hate that place,” Delia said, pulling away. “It’s full of dead birds. You’ve seen them.”
“Yeah.” Alan recalled the cases in the hall and dining room.
“Darling, you’ve got to understand. You’ve got to help me.” She gazed at him, her huge gray eyes brimming with tears. “You’ll help, won’t you?”
Alan did not reply. He felt confused, angry, bereft. Then a stunning idea came to him. “Maybe I should leave too,” he said. “Maybe we could go together.” His head whirled as he tried to think how this could be arranged, how he could fly to North Carolina without terrible pain, how he could rent a studio and get supplies and work there; what he could say to the Council and his department and Jane.
“Not now, dearest. I need to be alone now, to lure my voices back.”
“But I—I need—” Alan stuttered and fell silent, unwilling to imitate all the other people who were crowding and pulling at Delia.
“And we’ll still be together, really. We’re too close now ever to be apart.” As if to demonstrate this closeness, Delia moved back toward Alan and placed one soft white hand on his shirt, over his heart. “Part of me will always be with you, wherever I go, and part of you will be with me. You know that.”
“Yes, I know—” Alan, moved, put his hand over Delia’s, then started back as her office door banged open. What looked at first like a stack of cardboard packing boxes entered the room, followed closely by Selma Schmidt. She was wearing farmer’s striped overalls and a melancholy expression, and her frizzy dark hair seemed to take up even more room than usual.
“I got them,” she declared. “Exactly the kind you wanted.” She set the stack of boxes on the carpet and gave Alan an unfriendly look. Clearly she wished he were not there.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Delia said, gazing at the boxes as if they were birthday presents. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s so awful that you’re leaving, even before my lecture.” Selma’s voice trembled with what appeared to Alan as an exaggerated parody of his own feelings. “I can’t stand it here without you. You don’t really have to go, not yet.”
“I do, though.” Delia treated Selma to one of her wonderful half smiles. “If I’m going to work again, I have to be alone for a while.”
“You could be alone here.”
“No, not anymore. You know that.” She smiled fully now, but sadly; it was the same full, sad smile she had just given Alan. Selma already knew Delia was leaving, he realized with a stab of pain. Delia must have told her, though she didn’t tell me.
“If you’ll show me the books you want packed, I’ll start now,” Selma said, casting another hostile, impatient look at Alan. Why don’t you get lost? this look said clearly. “Then I can take them to the post office today before it closes.”
“That’s not necessary, dear,” Delia said. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time.”
If he had been in good shape physically, Alan might have tried to ease Selma aside and packed the books himself; but this was impossible now. Suddenly he had no reason to be in this room. If he stayed there, he could only appear as an observer, a physically incompetent cripple.
“I’ll see you later,” he uttered, with what he hoped was significant meaning.
“Oh yes.” Delia did not smile, but she opened her huge gray eyes and gave him a brief look of profound warmth and meaning. You understand, my darling, this look seemed to promise, or to lie. One day soon we will be together again.
NINETEEN
At noon that same day, Jane was having lunch on campus with Susie Burdett’s mother, Linda, whom she had known since childhood, when Linda had been one of Jane’s sister’s best friends. She was now a secretary in a doctor’s office, still a pretty pale blonde like her daughter and, like her, usually cheerful. Today, however, she was depressed and anxious, because Susie had just told her parents that she and Charlie Amir were in love and planning to get married.
“She wants to ruin her life,” Linda wailed, shoving her half-eaten sandwich aside. “She won’t listen to us, maybe she’ll listen to you. I know she admires you a lot.”
“I don’t understand,” Jane said. “I mean, why shouldn’t Susie marry Charlie? He’s a nice man, very successful in his career, and I think he loves her.”
“Oh yeah. You can tell he’s stuck on Susie. And he looks like a friendly, ordinary guy, I admit that. I liked him fine at first. But that’s not the point. The point is, what we just found out yesterday, he’s a Muslim.”
“Yes. And?” Jane sighed under her breath.
“Those are the people that blew up the World Trade Center. And they’re awful to women. They each have four wives at once, and they shut them up in the house and make them wear these kind of black tent things when they go out.”
“I’m sure Charlie isn’t that kind of Muslim,” Jane said, hoping this was true. “He’s an educated man, a professor of economics. I’m sure he won’t have four wives and want Susie to wear a tent.”
“Well. Maybe not. But you never can tell. And if she marries him she’ll be far away and cut off from her family.”
“She’ll only be in Columbus, Ohio.”
“Yeah, but still . . .” Linda frowned. “You know, I didn’t much like that boy she was going with before, with his loud voice and his low-life friends, but if Susie had married him she would at least have stayed in town and we could have seen her all the time. You’ve got to talk to her. Please. You can convince her to break it off.”
“I can’t do that, Linda,” Jane said. “And I wouldn’t, anyhow. Susie and Charlie are in love, and people who are in love deserve to be happy together.” As she uttered these words, a desperate sinking feeling came over Jane. “I’m really sorry,” she told Linda, her voice weighted down by all the things she was sorry for.
Crossing the campus ten minutes later, Jane reached the Center and found it in disorder. Since Susie had phoned that morning with the news that Delia Delaney was resigning her fellowship and leaving town the next day, she did not have to pretend to be surprised, but she still had to pretend to be dismayed.
From a practical point of view Jane was slightly dismayed, because of the official hassle that would immediately follow. From the impractical point of view she was worse than dismayed. Delia was going away, a good thing; but Henry Hull was presumably going too. She had not called him, so she would probably never see him again in her whole life. It was a bright early winter day outside, but at this thought the rooms of the Center, especially the office, seemed to be full of dark smoke.
“It’s so sad,” Susie said, raising a gloomy face from her computer. “It just won’t be the same around here without Delia.”
“No, it won’t,” Jane agreed. “But we can’t brood about that; we have a lot to do today. I’ll call Bill and Lily now, and write the e-mails to the other council members and the dean. When you get back from lunch you can send them out, along with hard copies by campus mail. And then you’ll need to get in touch with the payroll and insurance people in Knight Hall.”
“Oh, but I can’t!” Susie wailed. “Delia’s just given me her latest revisions, and I promised I’d type them up and print everything out today so she can take it with her to North Carolina.”
“Really,” Jane sighed. Lately, much of Susie’s time had been spent on Delia’s letters and manuscripts, to the neglect of her actual job. The filing, for instance, hadn’t been done for a week.
“I’m sorry, but that will just have to wait,” she said. “We’ve got to send
the official announcements of Delia’s resignation to the Humanities Council today, before it’s all over the campus as a rumor.”
“Oh—but—” Susie wailed. “You know, I don’t have to go out for lunch. If I stay here, maybe I can finish up Delia’s work. She really needs it now, and she’s done so much for me.”
What Delia had done for Susie, Jane thought, was to tell her that Charlie Amir was in love with her, not giving a thought to the possible consequences. “Well. If you want to miss lunch, naturally that’s up to you,” she said.
Bill, when she reached him, was quite untroubled. “I told you so weeks ago,” he said, laughing. “I said Delia wouldn’t be able to take the winter, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” Jane admitted.
“You should be pleased, after all the trouble she’s caused.”
“Well, I am, in a way,” Jane agreed wearily, thinking, If only you knew. “But it always looks bad when a famous visitor cancels a lecture or walks out on the University. And now I have to write to everyone on the council, and Dean Lewis, and the people at Knight Hall, and they’ll all blame us.”
“Of course they won’t. Visiting professors do this kind of thing all the time—especially artists. There was a case just the other year in the Music Department, involving a frozen cello, as I remember.” He laughed.
“Yes, I heard about it,” she said.
“And now you can get a new state-of-the-art copier.”
“Well, that’s true,” Jane said, expressing but not feeling enthusiasm.
What is the matter with me? she thought as she hung up. I used to get a lot of satisfaction out of going into a crisis and putting everything to rights. But now it just makes me tired. I feel as if I were pushing a stone uphill—no, not a stone, something bigger and uglier, like a dead cow.
Next Jane called Lily Unger, who turned out to know the news already. Delia had confided in her yesterday, she admitted, because she knew Lily would understand and would keep her confidence. (Unlike you and most other people, was implied.) And Lily did understand, completely. Delia was so sensitive, and Southerners just weren’t prepared, biologically or psychologically or even spiritually, for our northern winters, were they?
“I suppose not,” Jane said, thinking that Lily was probably parroting Delia’s excuses. Well, maybe that was the way to go—the letters could, should, say that Delia was resigning for health reasons.
“So you have to be gentle with her. You have to remember that she’s not a tough winter-hardy plant like you, with generations of rural ancestors.”
What the hell did that mean? Jane thought. Well, it meant that Lily was a snob, no surprise really. Okay, my grandfather and great-grandfather were farmers, and I’m not a Southerner, but so what?
“Of course, we’ll all miss her terribly. But what really counts, after all, is her writing, isn’t that true?”
“I suppose so.”
“I expect everyone’s a bit upset at the Center, though.”
“Well, yes. Some of them are,” Jane agreed.
“I have friends here to lunch, but I’ll be over as soon as I can.”
“You don’t have to—” Jane began, but Lily had hung up; it was not like her to miss any crisis.
In fact, many people at the Center were upset. At the buffet lunch Davi Gakar, Charlie Amir, Selma Schmidt, two visiting graduate students, and the entire catering staff from the Hotel School had hovered over Delia, regretting her departure, fetching her plates of food, and presenting books for her to autograph. Delia, looking pale and a little weary in a flimsy gray-blue tunic and long skirt, with her golden-spaniel curls pulled into a ponytail and hanging loose down her back, thanked them all effusively, with Southern spaniel charm. She assured Charlie that no one had ever before understood how to make a cup of coffee exactly the way she liked it; she promised Davi to send his children a signed copy of her Southern folktales.
In the office, Susie was eating crackers and drinking soda from a can and sniveling as she typed, and Selma Schmidt, red-eyed and weepy, was banging about pasting address labels onto cartons of Delia’s books and papers.
“You don’t have to do this today,” Jane told her. “I mean, surely some of these books can be stored at Delia’s house for a while—” Oh, hell, she thought. It’s not Delia’s house, it’s the Vogelers’ house. It’s rented until next May fifteenth—but if Delia and Henry leave, who will pay the rent? She realized with a sinking feeling that there was no lease, only a file of letters, several of them signed by her, Jane, as director of the Center. It had never happened before that a Visiting Fellow had left in the middle of the year, and nobody had asked for an official rental agreement. But maybe Delia and Henry were still liable. Or maybe I am, Jane thought, already beginning to feel exhausted. I must talk to Bill Laird. I must remember to make sure that this never happens again.
Only Alan was not caught up in the general low-level hysteria, she realized. At the start of the lunch hour he had made himself a ham and Swiss cheese sandwich from the buffet table, picked up a bottle of sparkling water, and retreated to his office. Maybe he was trying to avoid Delia, as Jane had asked him to do. Maybe she had been wrong and even wicked to suspect and spy on him for the last couple of weeks. Maybe, even, nothing much had been happening that day in Delia’s office.
I must give him time, I must try to be more patient and more affectionate with him, Jane told herself, as her mother and Reverend Bobby had been telling her and she had been telling herself ever since she moved back into the house. And why should that be so hard? Alan wasn’t difficult and demanding now, not often anyhow. Instead, he was distant and preoccupied. Sometimes he would ask her to fetch something or do an errand for him, but he usually asked politely, even apologetically, and afterward he thanked her politely. “Thank you. You’re a very kind person,” he had said just the other day, as if she weren’t his wife anymore, but a houseguest or a distant relative.
Most of the time, when Alan was home, she couldn’t talk to him at all, because he was wearing headphones that looked like black chrome and rubber snails and listening to his CDs, or to the books on tape he kept ordering by mail or taking out of the local and University libraries. “It helps me to concentrate, and forget the pain,” he had told her last night when she finally asked if he had to have the headphones on all the time.
When they ate dinner together he took off the headphones, and responded to her questions and comments, but almost never initiated any. And as soon as she put her fork down, he would begin to clear the table and put things away, groaning sometimes with pain as he stooped to place a heavy pan on a low shelf, but refusing her assistance. “No,” he would say. “This is my job.” Then he would retreat to his study to work on his peculiar new drawings: plans for sculptures of open windows and doors and fragments of empty rooms. All empty, like their marriage, Jane thought as she looked at them, nobody there, nothing left.
More than once, as she sat alone in the evening, or lay awake in bed alone (Alan was still sleeping in the study, and when she had suggested he move back he had said he often got up at night and didn’t want to disturb her) the depressing thought came to her that he had never asked her to return to their house, she had just gone and done it.
The worst thing was that she kept thinking about Henry, something she mustn’t do. It didn’t matter that Henry was so kind and strong and honest and healthy and had curly dark hair and loved her. He was also weak and unreliable. She had to put him out of her mind and keep trying to repair her marriage, as she had promised she would. Alan was ill, he needed her. That was what she had to remember. Things had to get better between them: after all, they had loved each other once, they had been happy together all those years when everything was all right and they were friends.
Trying to shove these repetitive thoughts aside, Jane turned to her computer and began to compose the letter to the dean. But as soon as the words “for health reasons” appeared on the screen, she sighed and stopped. “Susie?”
she asked. “Did Delia say why she was leaving?”
“Uh-huh,” replied Susie. “Well, not exactly. She just said she had to go because it was so cold and she couldn’t work here.”
“I see.” For the first time it struck Jane that as the director of the Unger Center for the Humanities she, not her assistant, should have been the person to whom Delia announced her resignation. That she had neglected to do this was rude, even insulting. Probably Delia had wanted to avoid speaking to her: in fact, they had both been avoiding each other ever since the awful scene upstairs. All the same, it would have been right.
But of course Delia cared nothing about what was right. If she had, there would already be a proper letter of resignation. Jane groaned as she realized that before she could write to the dean and the council she would have to obtain such a letter.
Lunch was now over, and except for Susie, and Selma with her piles of books and cartons, the ground floor was empty. Pushing the invisible dead cow ahead of her, Jane slowly climbed the stairs and stood in front of Delia’s door. From behind it she could hear a murmur of voices, and a sensation of awful events about to repeat themselves caused her to recoil and glance across the hall. But no: Alan was in his office, standing at his drafting table with his back to her.
Taking a deep breath, she knocked. There was no response.
“Delia? Are you there? I’m sorry to disturb you now, but I have to speak to you,” Jane said, realizing that this was a lie: she did want to disturb Delia, now and always.
Silence. Then the door opened a few inches, but the face in the gap was that of Lily Unger.
“It’s Jane,” Lily announced.
There was an indistinct response from within, then the door was opened fully.
“Thank you,” Delia said, rising from the sofa. “Darling Lily, thank you so much for everything.” She put a hand on Lily’s arm and, without seeming to, conveyed her into the hall. “Really, I’ll be all right,” she added with a long soft sigh. “I’ll call you tonight. I promise.
