Love within a month, Frances had predicted. To amuse herself and kid Frances, Rose put up a calendar in the kitchen and marked a month ahead with an X. Unabashed by her storm of tears, Frances continued to visit every day, though now she was openly doleful, full of sighs and choked references to Harold.
“Hey, Frances, wanna shake the place up? Rearrange the furniture?”
“No,” said Frances, but couldn’t name a reason why. It was Rose’s place for the year.
So she took down all the photos she could reach and put them in the empty chest of drawers and wrestled the chest and the mahogany table and chairs that filled the dining room and the great, wingback armchairs from the living room into the two matching studies, his and hers, Harold’s and Doris’s, that stood on either end of the apartment.
Rose would eat on the kitchen table. The bedroom was now clear of all but the bed and the window-lined front rooms of all but a couch, and while she worked Rose could pace back and forth through the rooms without having to watch where she was going.
Students were soon to arrive. She busied herself planning classes on three-by-five cards, absorbing Rules and Procedures, putting on the role of college teacher like a part in a play. It was a play for which she’d need costumes. Her lack of a wardrobe was not just the chic penury of grad school. Clothes had not concerned her parents, who didn’t entertain and never went out, except for her father, to church. It was amazing for Rose to con-template that she was about to earn a salary and would have money for clothes. Yet all she knew of how women dressed she’d gleaned from old movies on television.
On her bicycle, she ventured downtown to a department store—the department store, according to Frances, the only store for clothes—and, with a newly granted credit card, she selected her lady professor clothes: a shirtwaist dress with buttons from hem to collarbone, a sweater set in dove gray, a long skirt in tweed so craggy, twigs and pebbles seemed part of the weave. She roped all this to her bike basket and bore triumphantly back up the hill.
Reviewing the purchases, Frances made an odd little noise in her throat—Rose’s taste was a bit governessy. There’d be cocktail parties, didn’t she realize? There would be evenings.
Rose let herself be taken in hand. Half-naked before Frances in the department store fitting room, she tried on a half-dozen versions of the Little Black Dress that Frances was certain she needed. The fitting room was tiny, and though Frances averted her eyes, Rose couldn’t hide the fact that she went braless. By contrast, Frances, beneath her sundress, possessed a crisp, molded quality that indicated foundation garments, even though she, like Rose, was far too slender to have anything to shore up or hold in. Frances, however, was not the one undressed, and Rose fought the feeling that she’d become a 4H Project, Frances’s prize calf.
They’d been to the State Fair together, which in size and noise and embellishment made the county fairs of Rose’s New Hampshire childhood seem paltry. The Minnesota State Fair had livestock barns as big as factories, separate barns for sheep, goats, pigs, roosters, and even rabbits, some of which seemed not rabbits at all but pastry concoctions in fur. There were tractors with ten-foot tires, wall-sized honeycombs crawling with bees, a lagoon with seven-foot sturgeon. Frances led the way amidst the steam of dry ice and the smell of crackling fat to buy them bits of meat and starch fried on wooden sticks, foot-long hot dogs and foot-high ice cream cones. On the Midway, which reached to skyscraper heights— and on that scale, even the Ferris wheel was frightening—Frances chose a hammer-shaped ride that arced up and down and swung full circle. High in the hammerhead, plastered to the safety bar, struggling not to barf her ice cream, Rose observed Frances as her eyes went huge and shot sparks and she laughed and shrieked. Rose instructed herself not to underestimate Frances. Inside that girdle was something wild.
“Hold,” said Frances in the department store dressing room, placing Rose’s hands in her hair and stepping back to look at the umpteenth Little Black Dress.
“Buy this one. It makes your rear look tiny.”
“Oh?” Rose wasn’t in the habit of considering herself from the rear.
“You’ll want heels with it.”
“Flats,” said Rose.
“But not those,” said Frances, who knew the shoe department as well as her own garden, which was small but burgeoning, double-planted and perfectly manicured, not a weed, not a shriveled leaf. She led Rose to pumps with leather soles and small, stacked heels, classics, she said, and then to the shoe repair window for Cat’s Paws, little rubber heel reinforcements to be affixed before even a single wearing, adding years to the life of the shoes.
“Cat’s Paws? Frances, you know everything.”
She really seemed to. Just as she’d predicted, Alan Gilpin took a shine to Rose.
At the first department meeting, he approached her, faking a limp. “The woman who ran over me with her bicycle,” he announced, toasting her with his coffee cup.
“Shall I buy you a cane?” Rose retorted. He dropped the limp and sat down beside her.
She got through her first weeks of teaching with his “moral support.” She was assigned a huge section of Intro to Music; beneath her lecture hall, Alan marched his Bagpipe Corps, bleating and wheezing. Routing his evening run past her duplex, he spattered acorns against her front windows. She retaliated with hot pepper cookies, alluringly set on a doily in his mailbox. He gnashed them down and then demanded to see just how such a treat was produced—a ruse—he knew the Chair’s apartment and was avid to try out the antique Kitchen Chef range.
So began their joint cooking ventures. Showered after his evening run, he’d arrive at her door with groceries for a mouth-watering stroganoff or a magnificent paella. She sat him down to her millionaire chicken, amazed him with her blackberry crumble. They jabbered, shoulder to shoulder, at sink and stove in her kitchen or his, conversations that extended into late-night phone calls and picked up again in the office the next day.
Frances followed all this with a knowing eye and a brave little smile.
Alan called Frances flighty. “A flibbertigibbet,” he said.
But Rose knew Frances had substance and, on an afternoon in mid-September, despite Alan’s lack of enthusiasm, invited them both over for coffee.
Alan came early, arranged himself on the bench on the back stair landing, and stretched his legs in a lizardly fashion over the banister, his eyes half-lidded.
“Well,” said Frances, bursting in, “aren’t you two the item?”
“Item?” said Rose and beckoned Alan in from the porch.
“Running around campus together? Seen in the bookstore holding hands,” she breathed.
“Holding hands? I don’t think so,” said Rose. She and Alan had visited the bookstore together and perhaps one had grabbed the other’s hand in enthusiasm over some book or other, but nothing else.
“Oh, come now,” Frances persisted. “You’ve been seen weekend morn-ings out to breakfast together with your hair all uncombed.”
Alan gave a small, strangled cough. It had to be Rose who’d been seen with her hair uncombed. Alan always appeared well groomed, even in his sweaty running clothes. In this he more closely resembled Frances. But he did seem to like being seen with Rose, regardless of whether her hair was combed, and she felt the attachment to be genuine—he liked being alone with her as well. They were not an item, however. It was phony to let Frances think so, and there was something fraudulent also in the pose Alan struck and the tone with which he introduced Rose around campus. But maybe she, too, gained advantage by pretending to be half of a couple in public? It made her appear less lonely, anyway, than Frances.
“A busybody,” pronounced Alan, once Frances had gone. “A Nosy Parker. She always has to have something to report.” Rose rolled her eyes. “Really,” he insisted. “She tattles to the Higher-Ups—not that I care what she says about us.”
But there was no us—not really.
“The Higher-Ups,” Rose said and sighed.
Alan had explained all about the Higher-Ups. His third-year review was upon him; he had two more years to go before he’d know for certain whether or not he’d be tenured. The only son of a single mother, a seam-stress in Fargo, he knew exactly what he wanted: more of what he already had. His campaign was detailed and farranging. He saw to it that his students adored him; wrote and published, of course; and, in addition, volunteered for a bizarre variety of campus tasks, listable on his résumé but unrelated to music. He judged homecoming royalty, hosted alumni, life-guarded faculty kids at the pool, and, in off hours, brooded on tenure. Rose let it be known she found this boring. In her opinion, he was in danger of reducing himself to his résumé.
“Curriculum vitae,” he corrected. Résumé was the term for freelancers.
“Crummy little freelancers,” she said. “Like me?”
“Oh, tenure’s just a thing,” he sighed. “You could get on the track if you wanted.”
The college, like a number of schools in the region, styled itself as the Harvard of the Midwest, revealing a fear of inferiority. It nonetheless possessed an accomplished faculty, hailing from many lands, and the students were bright and lively. Rose could see the allure of tenure, but she wasn’t getting on any track. Why was academic tenure the be-all and end-all? He could get work other than teaching. He could travel. Why, he could live in Paris!
On what money, he wanted to know?
He could teach English. She’d go with him. They would translate. They would cook.
“Cook in Paris?”
He could play music—pack along his instruments. She’d heard him jam with a rag-tag band of city musicians, all talented, but even so, he stood out. He cut a figure: his rangy height, his well-chosen clothes, his attitude, his car, a vintage gray-green Volvo with leather seats. He was making his way and Rose couldn’t believe it really depended on a teaching job at a small college in Middle America. At any rate, tenure as a topic was becoming thoroughly tiresome.
Fortunately, he was open to distraction, dying to laugh, and game for any escapade. When distracted from the tenure thing, he seemed lighter than air.
Frances, by contrast, seemed heavier laden. Rose let her attention to Frances dwindle, returning her calls less promptly and then calling her almost not at all. She trained herself to walk swiftly through the front office, greeting Frances without really looking at her. Frances seemed to expect nothing better and Rose felt a pang. But the threesome hadn’t worked and, except for the tenure thing, Alan was so much more fun.
“Rose Marie,” he said one night. She’d let slip her middle name and he loved to tease. He was lounging in a bentwood rocker he’d rescued from a dumpster, repaired and painted a periwinkle blue with a cunning red stripe like a satin ribbon running over and around the runners. She lay on his long couch viewing a spray of reddening treetops through his windows.
“Rose Marie,” he declared, “we have got to get out of here.”
“Where to?” she said. “Downtown? To the old dead fountain and the clock tower?”
“You know nothing,” he said. “Get up. We’re going to Minneapolis.”
Minneapolis: blues clubs, sidewalk cafés, the West Bank where a parade of mimes, druggies, and street musicians kept things stirring late into the autumn night. Here was the world: the thronged voices, bursts of song, the rustle of taffeta and click of dress shoes, on-and-off blare erupting through doors opening and closing. Alan kept them to the sidelines, to the edge of the street and the back of the hall, where he watched everything raptly, silently, observant of who was present, applauding discreetly, low profile, mindful of his reputation.
Oh god, the tenure thing.
They went to a weird staging of Alice in Wonderland in a cellar, where, to get to their seats, they had to crowd into an elevator with Alice herself. The elevator was lined with mottled brown paper, and as they descended, a hurtling sound suggested they were flying through a tunnel. Alice looked right at Rose and spoke: Had she seen a rabbit, and was this the way to the tea party?
Amused, Rose answered, “Yes, it is,” but Alan took her hand and stepped backward. Rose couldn’t stand it. “And here’s your rabbit,” Rose told Alice, presenting Alan.
Once in their seats, Alan slumped back and regarded her. She crossed her eyes at him. Abruptly, he leaned over and kissed her, a kiss that landed on her ear and slid down her neck.
“Hey now,” she said, shivering.
“Oh? No touch?” He looked at her—a challenge.
“You’re gay, aren’t you?” she said quietly.
He looked away. “Who told you that?”
“No one told me. I just thought so.”
“Oh,” he said.
He didn’t say she was wrong.
She’d noticed a tone when they were tired, a plaintive tone that went slightly mean. They were stuck somehow. She’d thought it was sex, or rather the lack of that possibility between them. She wished he’d just say so.
Instead, they raced onward breathlessly, to readings, dance-happenings, to an all-night jazz diner. They got almost no sleep.
“Gotta do it all now,” said Alan. “Snow’s coming.” The weather, how-ever, was merely cool, a mellow late September. Rose adopted an after-noon nap and paced herself to keep up with him.
They went to peculiar movies. Maybe in contrast to the wind instruments he taught—all that air—Alan had a hunger for movies with brutal plots and dim, earthbound characters, movies preferably with subtitles. Toward the end of September, they went to the fateful movie, the Hypnotism Movie, as Rose would refer to it ever after. As it happened, this was exactly a month after Frances had made her prediction. The X on Rose’s calendar was by then buried under scribbled notes.
The movie’s director was, in Alan’s estimation, the high priest of German cinema, and rumor had it he might appear. They arrived an hour early and took seats twelfth row center, close enough to the front to really see but not so close as to crowd the podium.
Rose wore her Little Black Dress, deliberately overdressing to sass Alan, and a string of scarlet chili pepper beads, which clicked against each other as she moved. The beads were not a Frances selection, but papiermâché from a junk shop. And, though she rarely wore makeup, that night she layered on scarlet lipstick.
Alan failed to notice any of this. He’d dressed impeccably—khakis and grass-green polo shirt—but his normally sleepy eyes were wide; his blond, almost white hair was up in a wild thatch that he kept smoothing down without success; and his beard, under the muted lights, seemed unusually black, a dark wedge into which his pale, thick mustache streaked like ash into charcoal. Nearly catatonic with excitement, he held his mouth in a grim, handsome line.
A tiny worm of something—jealousy? envy?—turned in Rose.
Whatever was exciting him had nothing to do with her. She remembered his lips on her neck that one time at Alice and stretched a leg over his ankle. He squeezed her knee without glancing at her, but she held her gaze on him, on the fine shape of his mouth, and went from there, strip-ping off his shirt in her mind, reaching for his fly. As though he sensed something, he shifted tensely. She gave it up.
A stranger sitting two rows down turned and, over the empty seats between them, caught her gaze and held it with an intent, slightly puzzled look, as though he were trying to place her. She had an impression of a face all angles and salt-and-pepper hair.
The room hushed and the filmmaker appeared—immensely tall, with deepset eyes, a lordly mane of hair, and a bearing so stiff, he might have been a medieval knight. Rose could almost hear the armor clank. Alan released a tiny sigh—apparently a dream come true. The director said hello with a barely detectable movement of his facial features. A voice called out to ask if it were true that the actors in the movie had performed under hypnosis. In clipped tones, he promised to return for discussion and signaled the lights down.
Actors in peasant clothing came stumbling into view in front of a nineteenth-century glassworks, fires in glass kilns burning within. As could be predicted, the hypnotized actors looked like fools: slack-jawed, slack-voiced, moving with nonsensical compulsion—a god’s-eye view of human endeavor, if god had become bored and cynical.
Rose laughed unhappily. Alan shushed her.
Onscreen in a rustic tavern with plank tables and a dirt floor, someone began to play a hurdy-gurdy. The ungainly bloated lute, with a keyboard down the side and a crank at the end, creaked out a sound part harpsichord, part calliope: not an entirely unpleasant sound, and, by the music, Rose was led into the story. A pair of brothers—or were they friends?— very close and very drunk, a flailing drunkenness under hypnotism— climbed up to a hayloft to sleep. In the night, one fell over the edge to his death. The next day, the other woke to find the body on the barn floor and began loudly to grieve. He seemed to know his mate was dead, but at nightfall he dragged the body to the tavern, where, demanding that the hurdy-gurdy be played, he embraced the stiffened shape and hauled it around the floor as though he could dance it back to life.
Rose was shocked to see herself in this: dead embraces, bodies she’d clutched willfully even after the life had gone out of it.
Someone two rows down glanced back in her direction, and silver threads lit up in his hair. She found herself lurched forward, gripping the metal back of the seat in front of her with both hands. She sat back and scanned the faces of the audience caught in the reflected light from the movie, and they were all—Alan, too—as slack-jawed and dead-eyed as the faces on screen. For the first time in years, she felt a horror of unfamiliarity and longed for family and scenes of childhood. Alan was the only one there who knew her at all. She reached for him. He caught her fingers, squeezed them absently, and let them go. She slid down in her seat, cringing.
Shutting her eyes, she thought of the little house in New Hampshire with its screen of quince bushes in front of the porch. Her mother still lived there, and her sister. They were fighting, Rose knew, though Natalie had graduated from college and should have been out on her own; there should have been nothing to argue about. Their wild-eyed father was off following his religious group across the Alleghenies. Ten years before, having converted from normal Christianity to something more electrifying, he sat their mother down and demanded that she submit to him, to his spiritual headship, whatever that meant. Maybe a form of hypnotism? Her mother had cackled, delighted, it seemed, to have a fresh outrage over which to fight. They gave Rose the willies. But even so, for a throbbing moment, trapped in front of hypnotized actors, she missed her mother and father and sister and wished for them all to come, to gather in St. Paul in her borrowed duplex, regardless of the fact that they’d spend the visit arguing, and Rose along with them, arguing, sulking, and stomping out for walks alone or in pairs, briefly allied: she with her father because they both believed in discipline; she with her mother because they were the artists; she with her sister because they were the children.
On screen, kilns exploded and the glassworks caught fire. Glass shattered, timbers pitched, and the actors shouted and ran. Her father would find this grimly right: an apocalyptic scene with a Christian lesson, one the filmmaker never intended, as her mother, were she present, would be sure to say. But what on earth did the filmmaker intend?
The house lights were up and Alan sat transfixed. With great effort, he turned to Rose to confirm that they’d witnessed something splendid. She glared at him, cleared her throat, and thrust her hand in the air. At the podium, the filmmaker lifted his chin in her direction.
“Is art a conscious act? Is an actor an artist, or a thing?” she asked.
He sighed and dropped his chin to his chest.
An edge in her voice, she pressed on. “And might I ask if you, yourself, directed this picture under hypnosis and who it was who hypnotized you?”
“These actors were not mere puppets,” he said. “If I hypnotized you and gave you a knife and told you to stab your friend—” here he pointed to Alan, “—you would never do it.”
She glanced at Alan, who stared at her in horror. She barked out a laugh. For a wild moment, she saw herself, knife in hand, going for Alan in his theater seat. He turned his head away. She was a philistine and a stranger. The filmmaker called for the next question. She crossed her arms over her chest and her beads clicked against each other.
“Nice chilies,” said a voice below her. She looked two rows down into the angular face, the bright gray eyes lit up with amusement, the shock of salt and pepper hair. He sat tall in his seat and, despite the silver in his hair, his face was unlined and youthful. He drew a couple arcs on his chest and pointed, indicating her beads. She would remember that Guy Robbin, in his first gesture to her, had pointed to his own heart.
She was staring. She told herself to look away.
“You hated it?” He gestured toward the screen.
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know,” and she felt herself relax.
“Right,” he said. “It was too weird to hate.”
When the movie let out, Rose watched as he unfolded himself to an immense height and turned in her direction. But Alan bolted from his seat and Rose, suddenly shy, hurried off after him. The evening had been exhausting and though she expected nothing more than an argument with Alan, she couldn’t, at that moment, reach past the known for the unknown.
She and Alan were going to fight; she couldn’t see how to avoid it. She wanted to ask to be dropped off at home, but he drove as though possessed to his place, gave her a glass of wine and, the very next moment, took the wine glass from her and pulled her to his bed.
He was rough and sudden, plunging into her. There was no laughter, no talk; all his lightness was gone and he lay upon her afterward, a slaughtered carcass, once she’d moved his hand away from the mechanical fumbling between her legs which he’d offered in afterthought. They were about to be very, very sorry.
“Well, this was stupid,” she said, waiting for him to move his weight off her. “What are we—hypnotized?”
“Well,” he said in a bleak voice, “isn’t it always awkward the first time?”
“First and last as far as I’m concerned. I want what we had.”
He rolled off and looked at her. She turned away from him, wrapping herself in the sheet.
“We still have it,” he said.
“I doubt it.”
“No, we do,” he said, swaying to his feet. “Get up. I’m taking you to breakfast.”
“At midnight?”
“Come on, Rose Marie.” His voice was forced and trembling.
He handed her clothing to her: panties, nylons, Little Black Dress. “Just pull it on any old way. We’re going out to breakfast with our hair all uncombed.”
Sitting across the booth from him in the all-night jazz diner, she cast her eye around for some sight or sound to provide distraction. None came. The place was unusually quiet and empty. She made herself look over at Alan and, for once, he held her gaze for more than two seconds. She did feel she knew him and that he had at least begun to know her. Could they love each other after this bad beginning?
She reached over and tousled his hair. Almost imperceptibly, he shrank from her.