Роберт Паркер - Love and Glory

In the bathroom mirror I tried the jacket buttoned and unbuttoned and decided I’d arrive with it buttoned and unbutton it as we sat down. I held a small tietack against my tie and decided instead to tuck the shorter end inside the label loop.

I didn’t have a topcoat, so I went with no coat and shivered some waiting for the elevator at Charles Street Circle. But I’d spent too much time on my appearance to set it off with an army surplus field jacket. (Not mine. Mine had disappeared long ago during the years of exile somewhere west.)

I took notes in my medieval literature course, but automatically, listening only with my hand and pencil, and my U.S. history class went by unrecorded. After class I left my books on a windowsill in Memorial Hall and cashed my check at the bursar’s. I had fifty minutes until noon. It was too cold to walk outside. So I began systematically to pace the corridors in the Student Union, ascending the stairs at the end of each corridor and walking back on the next floor in the other direction. I wanted to smoke. I hadn’t in more than a year. I wouldn’t now. I kept walking. In my head the refrain to the Four Freshman version of “Take the A Train” reiterated without volition, over and over and over. Control , I thought. Control. You’ve been shot at in Korea and you’re afraid of this? Control . The faculty club was on the top floor of the Student Union. At five of twelve I was waiting outside the door. In the hall, near the elevator. I knew she’d be late. She was always late. But I wasn’t. And I wouldn’t be.

Across the table from me Jennifer ate a crouton from her salad. She had always eaten like that. If she were given a plate of peas she’d eat one at a time.

“Have you missed me, Boonie?” Her gaze was straight at me as she said it.

“Yes,” I said.

“There have been a lot of times when I wished you were around,” she said. “To talk to. To help. To explain things. You were always so good at that.”

I nodded. The dining room was large-windowed and bright with the winter sun. The walls were Wedgwood blue with white trim. The floor was carpeted in beige, and the tablecloths were pink.

“Have you been doing wonderful, exciting things, while you’ve been gone?” Jennifer said.

I smiled. “I don’t know. A lot of what I’ve been doing since your wedding is a little vague. I was drunk early and often.”

She nodded. Her eyes steady on my face. “You were drunk at the wedding,” she said.

“That was amateurish,” I said. “I got much more professional as I matured. By the time I got west of Chicago I was a major league drunk.”

“How are you now?”

“I’m not a drunk anymore.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not that much to say. I worked at different things, moved around the country, ended up down-and-out in L.A., and decided to make a comeback.”

The weight of her interest was delicious. I remembered the department chairman yesterday, and all the men I’d seen her talk with. I knew that everyone she spoke with felt this way, but it was still as dulcet and entrancing as if it were only me. And at the moment, it was. She wasn’t calculating in that. She really was interested and she really did concentrate on whatever, or whoever, was before her. What I had come to understand in the years of booze and sorrow was that the impact of her personality created in her no sense of obligation. She could entrance people and so she did. It was a power she used neither for good nor evil, but for the simple, unexamined pleasure of its exercise. I came to understand that before I knew I understood it. There was no Eureka, merely one day I noticed that I had known this for a time. She loved being central. There was nothing malign in this, or even selfish. It was simply a need and she fulfilled it with no more thought than one would give to drinking a glass of water. I wondered if there was more. If thirty-year-old Jennifer was different. There would be time to find out.

“How has it been going for you, my love,” I said.

She nodded her head repeatedly. “Good, good. I have a daughter, Suzanna — we call her Sue Sue.”

“Sue Sue?”

“Yes. It is awfully beach-clubby, isn’t it? Her father started calling her that right after she was born. She’s almost four now. We waited until John got his degree.”

“You been going to school long?”

“No, this is the first year. I was a housewife till then, but I was getting stir crazy.” She shrugged. “So John helped me get a teaching assistantship. I love it. After eight years, I just love it.”

“And the kid?”

“John’s mother looks after her during the day. She and Sue Sue are close and they have servants, of course, too.”

“Never thought John would go into teaching,” I said.

“No. That is a surprise. His brother went into the bank, but John wanted to be a professor. There’s family money, of course. I don’t know how people do it who have to live on a professor’s salary. But John really enjoys the students. I guess banking never excited him.”

“Still in Marblehead?”

“Yes, right next to John’s parents.”

“How’s that work out?”

“Oh,” Jennifer shrugged, “not as badly as it might. Margaret, my mother-in-law, is very handy for Sue Sue, and all. She’s kind of bossy and full of advice. You know the kind. Often wrong but never uncertain? When we were first married and John was getting his Ph.D. at Harvard she came to our Cambridge apartment one day when we weren’t there and rearranged my furniture.”

“How’s John feel about her?”

“Oh, he says I shouldn’t let it bother me. If we disagree, he tries to mediate — he’s very reasonable, you know. His field is the eighteenth century. He’s always the man of reason. If Margaret and I have an argument, he judges the thing on its merits.”

“She’s wrong,” I said.

“Margaret?” Jennifer looked startled.

“Yeah. If she disagrees with you, she’s wrong. You’re right. You are much too wonderful to be wrong.”

Jennifer laughed her thrilling laugh. “Oh, Boonie. It’s good to have you around again. Can we be friends?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s one of the reasons I came back.”

“Like we were? You really were the best friend I ever had.”

“You were that to me,” I said.

“And you really were, still are, like nobody else. I still haven’t met anyone like you.”

“And I was just a kid then,” I said. “Wait till you see how much better I’ve become. You may tear off all your clothes and pounce on me.”

“Gee,” Jennifer said, “we could never eat at the faculty club again.”

The sexual reference made my throat tighten. I had to force my voice out, but it sounded normal enough once out. I thought of her and Merchent waiting before they had the baby, taking precautions, and having intercourse carefully, sleeping together each night, being naked together often. I thought of the casual and intimate possession that people develop when they’ve been married a few years, a possession that excludes the rest of the world, that sets them apart regardless of their passion for each other, that marks us and differentiates from them . It was almost too much. It almost overwhelmed me. Almost drove me backward into the despair I’d worked so fiercely at overcoming. For a moment everything swam in front of me, and ran together, and I clasped my hands beneath the table as hard as I could, swelling the muscles in my arms and then my chest and back. Control . I had come this far. I was with her. Talking of being friends. I could look at her, and if I reached out and touched her, she wouldn’t flinch. “Time is but the stream I go fishing in.” The time she’s been with Merchent, the kid, the press of nakedness, the life they led, was downstream from where I fished. The stream kept going and the water I fished in was always new. When I had her again, the others who had had her wouldn’t matter. Except as obstacles they didn’t matter now.