Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

On Monday, Eden wasn’t in class. Why this should have been a surprise, Alex had no idea. Was she expecting her to show up obediently until the registrar came through with official permission for the late drop? Did she, on some level, think this because she expected Asians to be more mindful of authority? No, no, no, she was just hungover still, from the whole long, miserable weekend, and the coffee had only made things worse. Let’s be honest: She was still drunk. She thought she might be missing a couple of other Asian students, too, and the fact that she wasn’t sure was a very bad sign.

“‘Tintern Abbey,’” she said, and found she had nothing else to add. “Let’s read it aloud.”

She ended class fifteen minutes early, threw up in the bathroom on the second floor, bought a cheeseburger from the co-op to absorb some of the alcohol, and went back up to put her head on her desk until her afternoon class.

She woke to the ring of her office phone reverberating through the desk, a hundred times louder than it should have been. It was Malcolm.

“Your cell’s off,” he said. Really, she had no idea where it was. “So you were pretty drunk last night.” He was laughing. “What were you drinking?”

“All of it.”

“Everything okay?”

“You mean this morning? Yeah.” She turned down openings like this all the time. Because what could she possibly say? Asking if he still found her attractive was desperate and unattractive. Telling him he needed to compliment her was worse. In either case, she’d never believe anything nice he said, ever again. She realized that what she was supposed to be upset about was Eden Su. That should have been what she was working up the nerve to tell him. But it had come down to this: After twenty-two years of schooling and eight years of slogging away at her CV, she somehow cared more about her appearance than her career.

“So what’s new?” he said.

And she said, “I don’t think I can marry you.”

Bill Tossman found her on a bench outside the library, trying not to vomit again. She was sitting very, very still, hands clasped around a paper cup of coffee she didn’t think it wise to drink. “There she sits,” he said, “‘as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’” She tried to laugh or smile, but it must have come out a grimace.

“I have something for you.” He sat beside her, shaking the bench just enough to make her head throb and stomach slosh. He was a big man. Long limbs and a smooth, bright face, a soft gut that aged him. He had a crush on her. Or at least he’d always been sweet to her. She wasn’t sure she could trust her judgment anymore. Tossman was a poet, the one department member with a Pulitzer instead of a PhD. It made his loud voice all the more surreal.

He slipped his hand into his briefcase pocket, pulled out a rubber-banded pack of playing cards, and shuffled them on his knee. “Cut,” he said, and she managed to. He took four cards off the top and laid them facedown on the bench. “Okay,” he said, “flip them up.”

Seven of diamonds. Seven of hearts. Seven of clubs. Seven of spades.

“See? Your luck is turning!” He laughed, proud of himself.

“Where’d you learn that?”

“Where’d I learn what ?”

He was making her feel like his niece, and although it was sweet, she didn’t appreciate it. On a professional level. She gathered the cards and held them out to him, but he shook his head. “Why don’t you hang onto those? And hey, I’m sorry about the whole letter thing. That shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t necessary.”

She stared, trying to comprehend. He wasn’t on the Grievance Committee.

“In the paper.”

“The paper?”

“Oh. Christ. You’ve seen it, yes? In the Campus Telegraph . I should — there’s a stack in the library, if you want to — okay. Hey, I’m going to run before I make more of a jackass. Look, come by if you need to talk.” He literally backed away from her — went backward a good ten steps, then stopped. “It’s not like I don’t know about messing up, right?” He laughed at himself and walked on, hitting his briefcase against his leg. He must have meant his marriage ending last year, and then the time he broke down sobbing in front of his Frost seminar when they discussed images of adultery in “The Silken Tent.”

Alex held her head a few more seconds, then pushed herself up.

The “open letter” in the Telegraph wasn’t from Eden herself, but from the entire Minority Student Council. It named Alex, described her conversation with Eden pretty accurately, and went on to include “ten stereotypes about Asian-American students”—number eight was “Asian-American students are more likely to cheat to attain high grades”—and a quote from Leonard, stating that “the English Department works hard to include everyone.”

She put a nearby Newsweek on the stack of Telegraphs , picked the whole thing up, and dropped it in the big blue recycling bin behind the elevator. There were plenty more papers all over campus, but it felt good to get rid of these fifty or so.

Out on the sidewalk, two girls from her Pre-Raph seminar were waving energetically.

“Professor Moore! We waited for you for, like, twenty minutes!”

She checked her watch. She wasn’t even wearing a watch. They stood in front of her, smiling, expecting an explanation, or at least further instructions.

She threw up on their shoes.

Her phone was ringing, but she didn’t even know where it was, so she put pillows around her ears. She’d taken two of the Vicodin left from her knee surgery, and now everything was padded with cotton. She had told those girls she had a stomach flu and offered to buy them new shoes, but then they were gone and she was back in the English building, slumped in the door of her office, and then Leonard was asking Tossman to call her a cab, and now she was in bed in her clothes. Something sharp was jutting into her hip, but it didn’t hurt. She dug around. Seven of hearts, seven of diamonds, seven of spades, seven of clubs.

In her office, on the phone, Malcolm had actually laughed at first, unable to take her seriously. She held her silence until he got it. “What the hell do you mean?”

She said, “There are people who actually find me attractive.”

“I don’t?” His voice was an octave above normal. It bothered her now, thinking back, that she had no idea where he’d been. She didn’t know whether to picture him in front of his refrigerator, out on the deck, driving downtown, sitting on the toilet.

She’d said — perhaps too cryptically, in retrospect—“It’s like some horrible inversion of ‘The Frog Prince,’ like the frog convinces the princess to kiss him, but then she finds herself transformed into a toad. And the frog goes, ‘Hey, I’m as good as you can do now, baby.’”

There was a pause that hurt her throat. He said, “I’m supposed to be the frog?”

“No. You’re supposed to get it .” She’d hung up then, but he’d probably hung up too.

She ran a hand through her hair and realized she hadn’t even showered since Saturday. Her bed swayed, and the room turned to water.