THE SEASONS TURNED. Through the leaf-strewn fall, through the day she married him.
Through the frigid winter, alarm clock ringing in the black mornings, the hiding under bedcovers, the sound of windshields being scraped, the steam of car exhaust, the handsome city pocked with gray scabs of frozen slush.
I turned twenty-eight.
Much to my surprise, I was not crippled outwardly. Mornings I woke and stood on my own two feet. Life, as they say, marched on. Every six weeks I continued to produce a new chapter of my dissertation for Professor Dixon’s perusal. And twice every week I continued to lead a junior undergraduate tutorial on the philosophy of politics. Such elemental concepts as Democracy, Natural Law, Justice, Sovereignty, Citizenship, Revolution, Marxism, Anarchy, Power and the State, Liberty and Reason as expounded by thinkers from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Montesquieu to Burke, Rousseau, Kant, and John Rawls. No exams, only papers. It was in helping the students determine their next year’s thesis topics that I came to know them best. Two favorites stood out: Peter, gangly and unathletic, with a hearing aid (the result of falling through the ice one long-ago winter on a pond in his native South Dakota), who shared my interest in Teddy Roosevelt and the ambiguous legacy of the Progressives; and plucky, feisty Margaret, four feet ten inches tall in platform heels, who’d grown up working evenings in her parents’ Korean grocery in Los Angeles, and who, when she wasn’t quoting liberally from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, was busy writing an allegorical novella about a rabble-rousing, bank-robbing Korean-American circus clown.
And twice in six months I went on dates, both times with women from my department: Megan, a blue-eyed ecoterrorist from Oregon; and Dal, the lithe squash champion from New Delhi. Neither relationship lasted long. By the end of our first dinner—at a Back Bay bistro, where I foolishly ordered the steak frites—Megan had already concluded that my commitment to the ecomovement was suspect. With Dal, however, the problem was not so much disappointment as a general lack of urgency. She moved to her own mysterious beat. It was she who’d asked me out, yet once at the Central Square Indian restaurant (and later back in her room), she couldn’t seem to rouse herself to any heights of enthusiasm. The diffidence she’d shown me in the past had not been personal, I realized. It was simply her way with the world, the same supreme coolness of temperament that allowed her to go for—and hit—a three-wall nick at match point in the finals of the national championships.
And (speaking of which) Thursday nights at Hemenway Gym, after the varsity was done practicing, Mike Lewin and I played a regular game of squash. We weren’t particularly skilled, but we were evenly matched. It was a routine that would continue until the first week of March. On that night I became a different person; or, to put it another way, I completed a transformation that had been in the works all winter long. Some bitter darkness was rising in me, a brutally competitive spirit taking root—no-holds-barred, win-at-all-costs. I didn’t just want to beat my friend, I wanted to annihilate him.
Back and forth the match went, and by the end of the fifth set we were tied, leading to an overset. And then on match point I hit what I thought was a winning forehand. With triumphant satisfaction I watched the ball bounce once, twice—only to feel, a split second later, Mike’s hand on my back, and hear him mutter, “Let.” I turned on him in a rage. Mike Lewin never called lets, but he’d called one now, on match point. “You can’t be serious!” I yelled at him—hearing even as I spoke a distorted echo of the words I’d said to Claire on the sidewalk outside her building. But Mike was indeed serious, and already stepping into the service box to replay the point. He was counting on the fact that squash was a “gentleman’s” sport—the rules an honor code, combatants (even the most amateurish) schooled in the accepted politesse and obliged to respect the sanctity of the opponent’s honest judgment. He knew we’d replay the point. And for that alone, just then, I hated him. A malevolent anger surged to my core from all the tributaries of those long months of disappointment. Before he could serve I slammed the flat of my hand three times against the white wall streaked with black ball marks, the noise a series of detonations that reverberated like gunshots through the court. Mike looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he served and won the match. It was the last time we played together.
Spring arrived. In mid-April, after two days of rain, I walked into the Square on an errand.
The sun was out. The slowly drying sidewalks were thronged: bearded loiterers at Out of Town News, pierced rich-kid skateboarders from Newton and Brookline, coffee-nursing, clock-punching chess masters outside Au Bon Pain. The winter was over, as though just today, the air fresh and filled with a cacophony of sounds, machine and human, business and play, the fluttering of want ads on the kiosk by the T stop, the drag and slap of boarders hitting brick, a passing boom box, a car horn, the next big thing strumming guitar in front of Warburton’s. Filled too with smells, with blueberry muffins, with hot dogs and mustard, with the astringent tang of rain evaporating off pavement, with the brackish, bracing scent of a breeze that seemed to carry the tastes of the river and the harbor beyond and the ocean beyond that, the memory of ships.
I checked my watch—I had twenty-five minutes to order my cap and gown for commencement and get over to Littauer in time to teach tutorial—and hurried into the Coop.
At the back of the main floor I joined a line of undergraduate seniors waiting to order their caps and gowns. A cheerful group, many of whom seemed to know one another: in the buoyant notes of their laughter and talk there was an expression of communal achievement, some binding stroke of good fortune. Cares had been lifted, a curtain pulled back, a limitless horizon revealed. Everybody was young. Like some stiff-backed elder brother, I eavesdropped on them for a few minutes, then pulled a folder out of my shoulder bag and began reading over my comments on Peter’s final paper:
Peter:
First, don’t be disheartened by all the pencil marks—overall, the writing here is excellent. This is no small thing. Second, I am full of admiration for the scope of your thesis. You went for it, didn’t play it safe. Intellectually this bodes well, and I’m proud of you.
That said, while interesting and elegantly elucidated, your argument that TR was more tolerant, indeed compassionate, on matters of race than generally believed unfortunately fails to convince. You seem to have completely overlooked …
The line moved up. I checked my watch. More students had arrived, I was in their midst, three young men discussing their plans after graduation—a trip to Europe for one, the Radcliffe Publishing Course for another, a job with Morgan Stanley for the third. At the front of the line two stylish women were leaning on a table where a patient Coop employee sat measuring heads and writing down sizes.
The line shuffled forward. Putting away my papers, I stepped up to the table and gave my name, academic department, and expected degree.
“Height?”
“Six feet.”
“Sleeve?”
“Thirty-four.”
The Coop employee wrote this down and stood and deftly ran a tailor’s tape around the circumference of my head. “Seven and one-quarter,” he said, and wrote this down too beside my name. “Will that be Coop charge, cash, or credit?”
I paid. The line had replenished itself; there seemed no end to its enthusiasms. Checking my watch again, I saw that I was on the verge of being late for class and hurried past the chatting students.
Halfway to the exit I stopped in my tracks.
Inexplicably I had the feeling of being watched. Though what was strange was that this wasn’t threatening but somehow familiar and wanted. My heart raced as I scanned the store.
I saw her then. She was standing across the wide room beside shelves of stationery with the rooted stillness of someone who hasn’t moved in a long while.
For a minute or more we stared at each other. Then, slowly, she approached.
She was right in front of me. Her appearance was altered. Her pants and sweater and boots were expensive and finely cut—a far cry from the faded Levi’s and hand-me-down sweater of last year. She wore lipstick, eyeliner, jewelry—diamond engagement ring and gold wedding band, new silver earrings, a new watch. Her hair hung attractively down her back in a long plait. Her body and face seemed subtly fuller and more womanly. She no longer looked like any kind of student. She looked grown up, adult, married, well off. And of course, all the same, she looked beautiful, more than ever.
She started to speak but her voice caught. She cleared it, began again.
“I’ve discovered something interesting,” she said. “If you ever want to avoid somebody, this city’s as small as a postage stamp. But if you ever really want to run into somebody, if you really hope and pray, it’s as big as an ocean.”
I said nothing. It was a nice enough first line, a line she’d probably even prepared, perhaps months ago, and we both knew it. We stood at slight angles to each other, her eyes roaming my face with an insecurity I did not associate with her. I checked my watch. I saw her take in the gesture as she was meant to—as if the appointment I had was more important than running into her again. I was trying to be cool, stoical, resolute. But in my mind the crowded store had been gutted, become a cave for the two of us, and my mouth had gone dry.
Anxiously she said, “You’re late. You probably have a hundred places to be.”
I stood looking at her. Seven months and a marriage lay between our old selves and now. A lifetime. More than her clothes and hair were different. She seemed tentative, her old confidence shaken as though by some still-remembered accident.
“I have a class,” I said.
“I don’t want to hold you up. I just … I’m glad to see you, Julian. That’s what I wanted to say.” She touched my arm, then abruptly turned and began to walk away.
“Claire.”
She stopped without looking back.
“It’s just over in Littauer. If you don’t mind walking with me.”
We went outside. Nerves up, heart rioting, static on the brain. It began awkwardly enough with silence, as if we’d forgotten how to speak to each other, which perhaps we had. Finally, sounding desperate, she jumped in and congratulated me on my doctorate.
“I don’t have it yet,” I reminded her. “I’m still writing the last chapter. Dixon may hate it and even if he doesn’t there’s the oral defense.”
“You’ll get it,” she said. There was something in her voice—I couldn’t be sure—something like quiet pride. She looked away. “Do you have … plans?”
“I’d like to teach,” I replied. “But I don’t have a job yet, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, I …” Flustered, she didn’t finish.
A red light across from the north gate to the Yard; in silence we waited for it to change, then crossed Mass Ave. Passing the newly rebuilt guardhouse just inside the gate, Claire used it as a pretext to change the subject, to try again.
“Do you know,” she asked me incredulously, pointing at the newfangled structure, about the size of an outhouse, with a uniformed security guard standing inside it, “how much that thing cost to build?”
I told her I had no idea.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars. Can you believe that? It’s like those eight-thousand-dollar toilets the Pentagon keeps building. Harvard should be ashamed of itself.”
Suddenly an old bitterness darkened the edges of my feeling, and I told her that there was no shame around here that I could see, not at Harvard or anywhere else.
Silence again. It persisted as we walked through the Yard. Already in the distance, above the high stone wall, I could see the paler stone facade of Littauer. We’d be there shortly, I thought, this would end; in two months I’d have my degree and probably never see her again. For the best, I told myself. Yet there, ahead, was Littauer. Davis and the world he’d made. His office with the tall windows and the view of the Law School and the Kennedy rocker and the brass nameplate on the door. I remembered the first day I’d met him, which was the first day I’d met her.
He is her husband, I thought for the thousandth time. Her husband.
I made myself speak, hoping to sound normal and well adjusted. “How about you?” I asked. “How’s Burne-Jones?”
“Still a genius,” she replied vaguely.
I said nothing. An image of our sitting together in the café, her books open on the table before her.
“Yes,” she added, her voice turning harsh with self-irony, “he’s still a genius, all right. But not me. I’m taking a leave of absence.”
“What?”
“I’ve left school.”
“Why?”
She shrugged, looking away.
“That’s a mistake, Claire. You were good at it. You had a passion.”
Her eyes met mine for a moment, then retreated. “I still do,” she said. She paused, visibly upset. “It’s just timing. Don’t you see that, Julian? Everything’s just timing.”
“Bullshit, Claire. You don’t believe that any more than I do. Go back and get your degree. Finish what you started.”
“I will,” she said faintly.
But her tone was equivocal and suggested the opposite. She wouldn’t look at me. And this, more than anything she’d said, alarmed and pained me. Where was her old spirit? The Claire I remembered would at least have been defensive in the face of my telling her what to do, my challenging her. It was as though her assured mask of married womanhood were no more than a single coat of paint; while behind it, unplas-tered and unattended to, lay the same cracks and gouges that had always afflicted her. She’d been touched up, that was all, and the declarations of individual mind—the I wills or I won’ts—were just words to cover the difference. She wouldn’t be going back to her studies, I realized. Burne-Jones would shrink until he was just another picture book on a table in her fine new house. She’d given up her claim on him, though not the passion that gave birth to it. And already she was bruised by the loss.
In silence we arrived at the steps of Littauer.
“How late have I made you?” she said.
I checked my watch: fifteen minutes late. “Five minutes.”
Another minute passed. We continued to stare at each other. Between us the air rippled with unsaid words like waves of light. A strand of her hair came loose from her carefully constructed plait, and I reached out, tucking it behind her left ear.
She looked down, touching the tip of her shoe to the tip of my mine.
“You’d better go.”
Neither of us moved.
I tapped my watch, put it to my ear. “It may be a little fast.”
She smiled. My heart lifted. Then her mouth went too far, her composure broke, and her eyes filled.
“You don’t know how I’ve missed you,” she said, and began to weep.