10

Lise handed Paul a sandwich wrapped in plastic. Tuna the color and consistency of peanut butter grinned at him from between the slices of bread. Paul sidled close to her, not wanting anyone else in the grocery store to hear him. “Can’t we get something a little better than this?”

“I want to have a picnic.”

“We can’t have a picnic. It’s pouring!”

“We’ll huddle somewhere.”

It almost sounded inviting, Paul admitted to himself, admiring the way she replaced one orange and selected another. “I’ve been on some great picnics,” said Paul. “There can be problems, though. Pine needles always fall on something you’re eating.”

She plucked the sandwich from his hand. She tossed it onto a pile of identical, sealed packages of white bread and gluey filling. Paul picked it up again. “I’m sorry. If you want to have a picnic, we’ll have a picnic. I’ll find some cheese. One of those nice Camemberts they make around here. And a wine of some sort. We can—” He pictured them huddled in the rain. “We can find someplace where it’s not raining so hard.”

“We are supposed to be having a vacation, after all,” she said.

“That’s right. And everyone knows you have picnics all the time on vacations.”

“I was reading the Song of Solomon last night. ‘O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! For your love is better than wine.’ And I wanted to have a picnic. And there’s no reason to be chained by the weather. We can do whatever we want to do.”

“Do you often read the Bible?”

“I read everything I can get my hands on,” she answered. “I read Freud in the sixth grade, hiding the book from my parents and the teacher because it mentioned things like vaginas and masturbation. And, of course, the phallus.”

Paul glanced around. One did not, exactly, say “vagina” or “phallus” in a grocery store in Calistoga. A wrinkled man in a straw cowboy hat sniffed the end of a cantaloupe.

“And recently working on Donne’s sermons, I’ve read a good deal of the Bible. King James, not that claptrap Revised Standard stuff.”

She was an amazing countryside of knowledge. He felt ignorant, and hefted a bunch of bananas to recover his self-assurance. Surely he could not ask such an amazing creature to marry him. He wasn’t a total idiot. Far from it. But she had depths. He was a shiny, sparkling stretch of water children could wade in, and sail paper boats. She was a river of unexplored shoals and depths.

She looked into his eyes, impossibly beautiful. “The Bible is so self-contradictory. I think the most important things are.”

Paul nodded thoughtfully, and selected a slender bottle of rosé.

He drove to the edge of a vineyard, and then, carefully, very nearly into it. He turned off the engine, and the rain was loud on the car roof.

They did not get out of the car, but they opened the doors so that it felt like a picnic. Paul gouged the cork with the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife. Bits of cork bobbed in the wine by the time he wrestled the bottle open, and he reminded himself never to use that particular corkscrew again.

The Camembert was barely ripe, but it suited the wine. They sipped from Styrofoam while a blackbird stared at them from the chimney of a smudge pot, then looked away, as if they belonged exactly where they were.

“See, these sandwiches aren’t so bad,” Lise said, chewing happily.

Paul swallowed a mass of mucilage, flavored faintly with tuna.

“I love picnics,” she breathed. “I suppose it’s the only speck of romanticism in me.”

“This is what they call a pointed rebuke.”

“No, it’s the truth.”

The wind gusted rain into the car for a moment. The grass among the grapevines was neon green, and a crow crawled slowly across the sky.

“Besides,” Paul said, “there’s a lot of romantic in you.”

“Not as much as you think.”

“Not as little as you think. That’s what I like about you. You’re a little bit of everything, but not in a sloppy, tossed-together way. You’re very accomplished.”

“I took piano lessons once,” she mused. “I hated them.”

“Everyone hates piano lessons. I suppose even great pianists hate actually sitting down and practicing. It’s something they have to do to do what they like.”

“Which is?”

Paul chewed his sandwich, and chased it quickly with a gulp of rosé. “Performing, I suppose. What do I know about pianists?”

Perhaps it was the feeling that she was enjoying herself, or the flush of wine so early in the day, or the fact that he didn’t really mind sitting in a small car in the middle of a vineyard, but he chose that moment to unravel the subject he had been keeping to himself. “We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of years,” he began.

She rolled the sandwich wrapper into a ball, and sipped her wine.

“Off and on,” he continued.

“Mostly on,” she said, in what sounded like an encouraging tone.

“Mostly.” Except for a man built like a bear, a bearded astronomer she had gone rafting with once. Paul didn’t think anything significant had passed between the bear and Lise, which is to say he couldn’t imagine them in bed.

Paul couldn’t talk. It wasn’t going at all well. He should have begun talking about it last night, or much later, before a crackling fire. But he had begun, and he had to continue.

“And I’ve decided,” he said in a rush, “that it might be best if after all this time seeing each other we actually went ahead and got married.”

He could not look at her. Rain drooled down the windshield, and a crow laughed slowly in a stand of trees.

The nakedness of what he had said coiled between them. Paul wrapped what was left of his sandwich, and looked away from her, watching water drop gently off the snaking branches of the grapevines.

Her hand was on his hand, and then she held him, as well as she could with the gearshift jabbing them like a robot’s erection. She breathed into his ear, and he held her, but then she drew back. “I knew you were going to ask me,” she said. “I don’t know how, but I could tell.” She was blushing, and he had never seen her blush before. He thought it was with pleasure.

“What do you think?” he asked, hoarsely.

“It’s wonderful that you should mention it,” she began.

Paul held his breath.

“And in a very strange and wonderful way, I feel honored.”

Paul waited.

“Because certainly if I were thinking of marrying anyone, it would be you.”

Paul exhaled very slowly.

She looked away, and he followed her gaze through the bleary windshield toward the perfect gray sky. “A long time ago I decided how I was going to live my life. I was just a girl, walking home from the library with books that I really wasn’t going to understand very well at all. Darwin. Milton. Melville. Anything I could get my hands on that I had heard grown-ups mention, or had read about in the encyclopedia, I wanted to read. And I decided that someday I would be a scholar, and know practically everything there was to know.”

The steering wheel was cold, and the chill that surrounded the car breathed slowly into it.

“Naturally, it was difficult. Both of my parents were basically undereducated. High school, period, and not very sophisticated high school. I don’t think college is the only way to get an education, but my father doesn’t even know who Milton, or Keats, or Dickens were. Never even heard of them. And my mother’s idea of good writing is a little collection of Hallmark inspirational verse, the sort of book with cartoon lambs cavorting in it, and butterflies with smiling faces. Butterflies, for Christ’s sake. Smiling insects!”

Paul opened his mouth to stop her, but words fled him.

“Neither one of them was at all interested in my going to college, and I had to work my way, as you know, hauling linen out of motel rooms, and pouring coffee for lechers. I’m not complaining. But I finally got a grant to do graduate work and nail a PhD, and nothing is going to stop me.”

“But someday …” Paul began.

“Someday, soon, I’ll have my dissertation polished off, and then I’ll go to teach at maybe Stanford, I don’t know. Or stay at Cal; I think they might want me. I have connections at Yale. Former professors who swear they would kill for me. I’ve made a good impression.” She spoke wistfully, as if she were not quite sure it was all true. “Of course, I don’t know everything. I have studied myself to the point that I know the extent of my ignorance.”

Paul knew about ignorance. He seemed to suffer from it most of the time. He suffered from it now, not knowing what to say to the woman he suddenly loved more than ever.

“I have never thought in terms of marriage. I have given myself over to becoming a scholar, as if I were becoming a nun.”

“You’ve scarcely been celibate,” Paul murmured.

“If I misled you, I’m sorry.” She shook, weeping. “I don’t want to hurt you, Paul. I just can’t say yes.”

Paul ground his forehead into the steering wheel, wishing that its hard, cold strength could help him. “I don’t want to hurt your career. Our marriage would not do the slightest little harm to your profession. You could go on learning, and we can move anywhere. I’m sick of my job, anyway.”

She looked away, trembling.

“All right. I won’t press it. God knows, it took me so long to mention it, I’ll probably never say another word about it. I don’t want you to say no, and then feel that you have to stick to that answer out of stubbornness. You like to make up your mind what you’re going to do, and then go right ahead and do it. I appreciate that. More than that, I admire it. You are the most remarkable woman—the most remarkable person—I have ever met. I think, hell I don’t know what I think anymore. I want you to be happy. I want us to be together. So promise me this—you’ll think about it. Okay? You won’t say for sure one way or another, but you’ll think about it. Will you?”

She nodded, blinking. “I’ll think.”

“Good. Good. You’ll think. I’ll settle for that for the time being.”

“But you promise me something.”

“What?”

“That you won’t mention the subject until I say you can.”

Paul controlled a quick response, and said carefully, “I can wait.”

“And you won’t give me meaningful, searching looks. We can just go ahead and have a nice little time away from everything, just like we had planned.”

“Sure. We’ll pretend like this conversation never happened. If that’s what you want.”

But it was clear to Paul that while Lise liked him, and was “honored” by his love for her, she was not quite as fond of him as he was of her. Oh, they were good friends. And lovers, and very affectionate. But she would rather be a scholar. It made her, in a way, all the more alluring. The scholar as beauty.

“I’m glad to be away from it,” she said. “People think of academia as an ivory tower, but it’s more like a factory. People slicing poets thinner and thinner, representations of self in Herbert, introspection in Marvell, the influence of Dante on the Romantics. Not that these studies don’t matter. But that the motive for performing the erudition is to acquire a more lustrous name, so you can move to a better university, get more money, buy a better car. Like those experiments on mice they do over and over again. Everyone knows if you make a white mouse drink a half liter of vodka a day something funny will happen to it, but they pop open thousands and thousands of animals so they can whip their livers into pâté and look at them under a microscope. I think of the poets as mice, only thank God they can’t be hurt, even the living ones, if they have any sense.”

The mice had something to do with the two of them, but Paul was not sure what. Her weariness with her studies had somehow made her tired of everything, even love. Or not love, exactly, but commitment. She had taken on so much that she could not stand any more demands.

“You’ll be a magnificent professor,” Paul said. “You’ll become the most incredible thing that ever hit the academic swamp.”

“I don’t want to be incredible. Just competent.”

“You’ll be great.”

“The competition is appalling.”

“Terrible, or very good?”

She smiled wanly. “Very good. There are about two job openings a year and about eight thousand brilliant crazed animals struggling to get in.”

He wanted to tell her: anything, anywhere. I will do anything for you.

He shifted the car into neutral without starting it, and wobbled the gear shift back and forth for a moment. “We’ll have lots of picnics,” he said.

He started the car. He eased the car over the uneven gravel road, as if the birds that peppered the spaces between the rows of grape vines were all the ways that he could lose her. He drove carefully, deliberately, so they would not take flight.