Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

She actually taught the Coleridge that fall, and passed around a copy of the photo Piet had e-mailed her. It was an unfortunately dull section of 222, half frat boys who only took classes as a pack (one, confused by her story, later indicated in his paper that the mariner killed the albatross because he thought it was a goose), a bunch of foreign students, mostly Korean, who never spoke, and a freshman English major named Kirstin who made every effort to turn the class into a private tutorial. They passed the photo listlessly, one of the boys raised his hand to ask how much the bird weighed, and Alex made a mighty effort to turn her answer into a discussion of the weight of sin and Coleridge’s ideas of atonement.

Kirstin compared the poem to The Scarlet Letter and one of the boys groaned, apparently traumatized by some high school English teacher. Alex wished someone else would talk. Poor Eden Su, for instance, in the front row, was one of those Korean students. She wrote astounding papers, better by a mile than Kirstin’s, and yet she never spoke in class unless Alex addressed her directly, and even then, she whispered and pulled her hair across her mouth. Alex had asked her to stop by her office later, and now Eden was slowly picking apart a cheap ballpoint pen.

By one o’clock she was in her office on the phone to Malcolm, the red leaves on the maple hitting the bottom of her window again and again. He was in Chicago, meeting with his thesis adviser. He’d be back the next night, and was asking if she wanted to grab dinner.

“I’ll take you someplace nice,” she said. “You’ll need champagne.” These meetings were probably his last before he defended his dissertation, and they were going well.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s up to you. I just won’t feel like dressing up.”

“Right.” She found herself saying it flatly and quickly, but he didn’t seem to notice. So she went on. “Sometimes girls like getting dressed up.”

He laughed. “Okay. Boys like to wear jeans.”

“My student is here.” She wasn’t. “We’ll talk later.” She hung up.

The problem, the source of all her snippiness, her cattiness, her being such a girl about everything, was that since they’d gotten engaged nine months ago he had not once, not a single time except during sex, which absolutely didn’t count, called her beautiful. In sharp contrast to the courtship phase, when he’d say it several times a week, one way or another. She’d known the staring-into-her-eyes thing wasn’t going to last forever, and it had been a crazy year, with the Australia trip and his dissertation, but nine months and nothing . Not that she was counting, but she was. She’d have settled for a peck on the head and “Hey, gorgeous.” A whistle when she stepped out of the shower.

She’d been so caught up in being engaged and close to tenure and publishing her articles and generally getting everything she wanted that it wasn’t until those weeks in the Adelaide hotel, alone with Australian TV and her own thoughts, that she started wondering if she could live with Malcolm the rest of her life, never seeing beauty reflected back at her. And she wondered, if she felt like this now, how she’d feel at nine months pregnant. Or fifty years old. Or terminally ill.

It was regressive and petty and uneducated to care about beauty, but she did. God help her, it was closely tied to her self-esteem and probably had been since about fourth grade.

Here was Eden, arriving like a prophecy, knocking with one knuckle on the open office door. Alex motioned her in. Eden’s eyes had that jet-lagged glaze common to all the foreign students. Every year Alex assumed it would wear off by October, but it never did. She’d mentioned it once to Leonard, and of course he’d had a theory. “You know why, right? They stay up all night texting their friends back home. Refuse to adjust to American time.”

Eden sat on the edge of the chair, red backpack on her lap. It almost reached her chin — a canvas shield. “Eden, I just want to touch base with you.” No response. “You’ve been getting solid A’s on your papers, but I need you to understand that twenty percent of your final grade is class participation.”

“Okay.” She said it through her hair, barely audible. If it hadn’t been a cultural issue, Alex would have worried about depression.

“Do you feel you are participating?”

She shrugged.

“Hello? Do you?” Which was harsh. She was mad at Malcolm, not this poor girl.

Eden shrugged again. “What else could I do?” It was the most words Alex had ever heard her string together, and she was pleased to note that the English was okay. When she’d been a TA, another TA actually told her to compare foreign students’ spoken English with their written English, to make sure they weren’t plagiarizing. The implication being that they were more likely than native speakers to do so. Alex had never seen this borne out.

“There’s nothing else you can do,” she said to Eden. “You need to talk.”

“Okay.”

“Look, I understand that back in Korea you weren’t supposed to talk in class, but you’re at an American university now, and part of an American education is the exchange of ideas. Not just writing about literature, but engaging . Out loud.” She always had trouble ending conversations with students, especially ones who wouldn’t look her in the eye. “Is that something you think you can do?”

Eden shrugged and nodded, but she seemed upset, staring at the bookshelf behind Alex. She looked, for once, like she wanted to say something. But she didn’t; she just stood up and left.

Alex did take Malcolm someplace nice: Silver Plum, a twenty-minute drive from home. She overdressed, in a sheer green blouse and a silk skirt, knowing he wouldn’t say anything about it at all. It was like she was daring him not to.

He was exhausted. He wore khakis and a wrinkled blue polo shirt, and he was overdue for a haircut, curls everywhere. He ordered a scotch and gulped it down. He didn’t want to talk about his dissertation, or Chicago, or work. She didn’t even try to bring up the plans for the wedding in May, which he’d probably have talked about, but the thought was starting to make her sick. Specifically: the fact that either, after months of preparations, he’d see her in her dress and say nothing at all, or he’d say something nice and she’d suspect it was out of duty.

“I finally met Jansen’s wife,” he said. Jansen was his adviser, and apparently something of a god in the world of sociolinguistics.

“Yeah? What’s she like?”

“Beautiful. She’s just this gorgeous, sixty-whatever woman with enormous black eyes.”

“Huh.”

“I mean, they’re like pools of blackness.”

“Huh.”

“Not what I expected, you know? I thought she’d be some little mousy person. And she’s just this amazing, exuberant, stunning woman.”

Winded from the effort of that much conversation, he returned to his lasagna.

Alex caught her reflection in the window to the street, and for the love of God she looked like a circus clown, all frizz and eyes and jawbone. It was a wonder he could look at her at all. But people had found her beautiful, they really had, and one of the reasons she’d even landed on her specialty (vain creature that she was) was that Donna Edwards, her college professor for Nineteenth Century British Poetry, saw her that first day of the term and said, “You — you’re a ringer for Jane Morris!” The next day, she brought in a book with Rossetti’s Proserpine and proved it to everyone.