They tried to act as if nothing had happened, loyally went on cooking together and phoned at night before sleep, though the conversations were strained and very much shorter.
She couldn’t bring herself to blame him. She had asked for it. Sitting beside him at the movie, she’d summoned his attentions the way women did, with a look, a pressing of knee to knee. Why, then, had she been horrified to have his mouth on hers, to have the act of love under way? Was he gay, as she’d first thought, or was it just a lack of chemistry between them? He’d moved fast, torn through the streets, getting her to his apartment and to his bed. She’d been curious about what he intended, drawn by the glint in his eye and afraid that the flare of emotion was anger, that he suddenly couldn’t stand her, and that the friendship, so newly begun, was about to be over. She had thought, as he pulled her to her feet, that he was about to say something terrible and then drive her home because she’d failed to love the Hypnotism Movie.
What was it about that movie that produced in him such a brash elation? People with their souls sucked out? The crashing wreck of every-thing? She’d been revolted. Hadn’t she lined up her past mistakes to remind herself of such consequences, to fortify herself against unfocused eyes and colliding bodies? How could she, the very next hour, allow her-self to be led where she’d just vowed she would no longer go?
Her body was desolate and confused. It was as though she’d been struck naked and couldn’t get her clothes back on. Perhaps she wasn’t made for love, and music alone was her calling. Perhaps she’d have to learn to ignore her body’s foolish buzzing.
She’d have liked to phone Ursula—someone far away and not involved. However, back in Philadelphia, Ursula was having her own bleak time in the first grueling months of her medical residency: the twenty-four hour off/on schedule, the catnaps grabbed in hospital bunks, the food from vending machines. She was too poor to call Rose, too infrequently at home to have Rose call her, too busy to write more than cramped, unhappy postcards about her wretched boyfriend. She was fighting with her boyfriend, or her fiancé, depending. But fighting or not, Ursula at least knew what it was to live with a man. If Ursula answered the phone, what could Rose do but confess another misbegotten one-night stand?
Other people couldn’t help, not Ursula, not her mother, who would blame her—Rose could blame herself without any help—and not her sister, Natalie, who would sympathize extravagantly, betraying pleasure in Rose’s misfortune. And not Frances, who might find the story irresistible to repeat. There was no one to turn to—Alan, least of all.
To her astonishment, he tried again a week later. On his way out her door one night, he turned back, and as though executing a formal figure in a dance, placed his hands on her shoulders, pressed his mouth to hers and attempted to press his tongue between her lips. She clamped her teeth together and stood frozen. He turned and walked heavily down her stairs.
In the last days of September, crab apples dropped and mixed with leaves, smearing the paths on campus. From a stand outside the student union, she bought Concord grapes, a favorite fruit of her childhood, but found the popping skins and viscous flesh unexpectedly gross and tossed them. She went about her duties woodenly. The Midwestern accents, which she’d first found intriguing, now seemed exaggeratedly flat: words without nuance.
One day as she stood at the xerox machine, Frances laid a confiding hand on her arm. “You guys have a fight?” she said in that same flat accent.
But Rose had no intention of confiding. Frances had predicted the dis-aster— love within a month—and Rose didn’t intend to give her the sat-isfaction of knowing that, a month to the day, something of that sort had happened, or a careless half-minute of it.
“You don’t have to tell me,” murmured Frances, blocking Rose’s path to her office. “It’s normal to fight.” Frances opined that Alan needed understanding. “He’s such a special man, don’t you think? So erudite.”
Rose regarded her.
“Erudite,” said Frances. “And so very high-strung.”
Rose walked into her office and closed the door. Erudite? He might be a Nobel laureate for all Rose cared. He didn’t know the first thing about himself, kissing her as though he meant it. She knew when a kiss was meant. As to high-strung, she was high-strung herself. At the moment, she had trouble meeting her students’ eyes, enduring their gaze on her, upon her body.
He hadn’t wanted her. His touch had been experimental, self-absorbed, uninterested in her. She did blame him for that much. Oh, possibly he admired her physical form as an object in his collection, like his rocking chair with the ribbon stripe. But his touch between her legs after their rushed, nearly violent union had been hesitant, almost ignorant. He’d been what she might even call shy, turning his back to put on the condom.
Could it be, was it possible that, up to that night, he’d been a virgin? It seemed unlikely, but, if true, would explain a great deal.
If it was only that, well, she might even have been unkind in what she’d said and done or failed to say and do.
Leaving his kitchen one night, she turned back and asked if they could talk about it.
“If you mean our little sexual fiasco, what’s there to say? You don’t want to. I believe I’ve made clear what I want.”
“Well, something’s not right.” She reached for his hand, drew a breath, and asked him.
His eyes widened. “A virgin? Oh, I don’t think so.” He withdrew his hand.
“Is that a no?”
He threw back his head and laughed harshly and for so long that she began to listen for him to draw a breath and gasped in, herself, to prompt him. He subsided into a chuckle of what seemed genuine merriment. He wasn’t going to tell her.
She’d only been acquainted with him for six weeks. It was vanity to imagine she knew him. She could only learn what he chose to reveal.
“Look,” he said. “Let’s not and say we did.”
“But I’m afraid we already did,” she said.
“I love you, Rose.” He kissed her, keeping his tongue to himself.
October arrived and snow had yet to fall. Afternoons were sometimes hot. Late one day, walking to the dry cleaners laden with her sweater set into which she’d sweated copiously and her splotched black dress—grease spots and the odor of sweat were not quite the professorial image; these professor clothes were expensive to maintain—she paused to check her wallet, when a voice called out to her, called hi, or hey, or something.
A man in a torn denim jacket and an old crushed fedora sat with a newspaper on the concrete wall. Not ten feet away, he regarded her in absolute stillness. Doubting herself, she’d half turned away when he called to her again.
“Seen any weird German movies lately?”
He folded his paper and stood to a sudden, staggering height. He took his hat off and she saw the flash of silver in his dark hair.
“I’ve sworn off the weird movies,” she said.
She meant it. She’d take order and peace; calm, unexceptional days and nights; a load of work and a lonely bed. She was making more work of her teaching than it probably required: hunting down obscure recordings to supplement her syllabi, leading field trips to concerts, responding more intensely than was probably helpful to the tentative scratchings of her composition students.
His name was Guy Robbin. He wanted to take her for a cup of coffee. Or tea? Did she maybe drink tea?
As a matter of fact, she did prefer tea, but how would he know that? “I can’t,” she said and showed him her dirty clothes.
“But aren’t you going to drop them off?” He flipped a long arm toward the dry cleaners. His eyes were gray with gold at the center, alive as an owl’s. His long face creased into a grin. He seemed as sure of her agreeing as if they’d had a date.
“Oh, but I have a whole list here,” she lied, and patted her purse. She wasn’t going to just go off with him. The source of their acquaintance was omen enough, the Hypnotism Movie, which she was determined to wipe from her memory. She was a busy professor, not just a girl on display for anyone to say “hey” to and take for a “cup of tea.”
On the following Saturday afternoon, however, across the river in Minneapolis, she caught sight of Guy Robbin again under the awning of a café where they’d arranged to meet. She had agreed to meet him, after all, as long as it was not on the spur of the moment. That way she’d had time to collect herself, to build caution, to think about what kind of life she intended and the conduct that would lead her there. That she felt something for him already, an unjustified something when she knew nothing about him, seemed a distinct warning sign.
She’d driven over in her “new” car, a rusty station wagon for which she’d paid a hundred dollars. Alan had helped her tape a scrap of carpet over a hole in the floor, not that he’d approved the ugly set of wheels. Let him sneer; it was transportation. She no longer needed a ride in Alan’s Volvo to get to Minneapolis—now she could get there all on her own.
Though she was on time, perhaps even early, Guy was already waiting for her on the sidewalk. She was struck anew by his height. To greet her, he had to duck under the fringe of the awning. He waited for her to park. The station wagon was longer than any car she’d previously driven. As she struggled—she had no intention of parking crooked, nor two feet from the curb just because her heart was pounding—he turned his back to her and studied the display in the window and she caught her breath and wedged the car in.
He extended his hand and she shook it, a broad, callused hand. He looked her boldly in the eye, a look full of curiosity, yet not demanding anything of her, not yet. Over a cup of tea—they discovered they were both tea drinkers—over several cups, he told her he lived not in the city, but on a lake up north, lived alone there in a shack he’d thrown up next to the foundation he’d poured for the stone house he was building.
He was a strange creature, a boy from Mason City, Iowa who’d made it to Boston University on scholarship. But, not content to stick around campus when the wilds of Massachusetts beckoned, he had, in his freshman year, undertaken to read Thoreau’s complete works on the banks of Walden Pond. And there he’d noticed new construction crowding the woods either side of Thoreau’s neglected shack. He began a campaign of letters and speeches, but convinced neither the students nor the Board of Trustees to turn their energies to Walden’s preservation. So he dropped out. What did knowledge matter if no one applied it where and when there was a crying need? He laughed as he told this—it was long ago. Back then he’d scrounged himself an actual soapbox and still had it, now turned right side up, holding stone-cutting tools.
As he spoke, he leaned to one side to look at her and then lifted his chin, laughing, his head held proud yet mobile on his neck. His face seemed all long angles, yet it was not a hard face. His cheek seemed a long expanse, a field, over the lower half of which spread the faint shadow of a whisker line like a patch of shade. And his voice: she wanted to close her eyes just to listen. His accent was Midwestern, but he played his voice like an instrument. A baritone, she thought: the occasional rumble, but bells in it, some sort of chiming.
As he described his stone house, it went up in her mind, thick bouldered walls. She saw grass growing on the roof, flowers, a goat tethered up there, grazing. She mentioned the goat and he chuckled—he’d only laid the first course of stone. But a sod roof was the right idea, and animals. A flock of geese, he thought. Goose eggs made tremendous omelets.
Like a house in a fairy tale, she said, and he rested his chin on his hand and gazed at her, unnerving her. His soft gray flannel plaid shirt had the slightest stripe of brightness running through it. His cuffs, rolled back, showed wrists surprisingly slender, though his fingers were wide and work-roughened. His gold-flecked eyes, which she’d first thought of as like an owl’s, avid and unsettling, now seemed peaceful, almost lazy, like quiet water where a stream slowed and mica-spangled granite could be glimpsed below.
“And you live alone?” she asked, abruptly leaning back in her chair.
“Do I live alone because I want to, or because no one wants me?” He laughed and his gaze slid past her, took in the rest of the room, and returned to her.
He was spectacular, and she hadn’t been the only one to notice. Other women in the room had looked up when they came in. The waitress had blushed taking his order, and she had felt proud for no good reason. She was nowhere near as striking as he; they weren’t looking at her, except maybe to question why he chose her and not them, and he hadn’t chosen her exactly; they were merely out for a cup of tea. All right, five cups. But it was an afternoon, just one, and who knew whether it would be repeated?
“I live alone because I want to live there,” he said, and described the land an uncle had left him. Below the hill where he’d built his shack, a lake opened, a deep, glacial pool out of which northern pike like prehistoric monsters rose on his fishing line. He described the trees that stood on the lakeshore—a thick stand of birch, white as candles.
“Candles,” he said, in that mobile, musical voice, not just telling her things but also, while speaking, in some way singing, making music: he was a musician, like she was.
“What?” he asked.
She’d laughed and had no idea why. He laughed with her, his eyes crinkling. Ah, he was kind. One of his eyebrows, she noticed, was set higher than the other. Above the higher eyebrow, a mole. Flaws. She liked that.
“Describe again—the trees,” she said, and made herself listen to his actual words. They talked about what they did, where they’d traveled, what hurdles each had got over. They told about themselves and did not veer into detail about other people. His eyes did not shift from her as Alan’s did; he held her gaze unswervingly and she did not look away. Yet they were careful; they did not note aloud how well they got on. They did not refer to love in the abstract nor in the concrete; signs and omens were not mentioned, nor fate.
Hours passed. She had to get up from the table to go to the bathroom. Her bladder ached even after she’d emptied it. Her throat was raspy from talking. Washing her hands rapidly, she went back to him, propelled like water moving downriver. It was that easy.
She found herself leaning across the table to tap out the rhythm and hum the last few measures of The Loser, the composition that had won her the prizes and got her the job at the college. She didn’t mention the title of the piece, nor its meaning, but simply hummed.
He paused, calculating. She became aware that the room had filled and was noisy. Then he leaned forward and hummed into her ear, repeating back to her the final measure of her composition, note after precise note, as though they were alone in silence. He heard only her. And she heard only him.
She felt a burst of shock. It was as though everyone else in the world had died in the moment she relaxed and leaned across the table to hum to him, everyone erased except two.
Two, however, was a very small number. She wanted the world, the whole of it. She wanted to hurl herself into the thick of things. If she meant to write music, she had better get on it. What time was it? What was she doing sitting at a café table? What had he, really, to do with her? Why was he detaining her?
She got unsteadily to her feet, her hands shaking from what she told herself was an excess of caffeine. Out the window, streetlights were burning where only a moment ago it had been day. Earlier she’d felt a premonition of touch, which had slowly become a certainty, but now she didn’t even offer her hand. The desire to touch him struck her as insane, akin to the impulse to jump off a bridge she’d set out merely to cross.
On her feet, she felt a surge of strength. Perhaps, at long last, she was learning caution.
Startled, he stood as well, towering over her. It took her breath away, his lanky height, the expanse of his chest, the grave, angular face, the keen eyes holding hers.
“I’ve got to go,” she said awkwardly.
“You’re married.”
“Oh, no, not at all. Not in the slightest. It’s just—my work. I’ve got to get to work.” He nodded, puzzled.
But he had her phone number. She’d given it to him, and why not? It was just a number, just a series of digits, like a series of notes in a musical scale.