Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

Every time she taught the Pre-Raph seminar, she waited till near the end of the semester to bring out the actual photographs of Jane Morris. They’d have seen her in Rossetti’s and William Morris’s paintings, they’d seen her needlework, they’d studied the decoration of Red House. And this in addition to the lectures from an art professor about the Arts and Crafts movement, the three days spent discussing Rossetti’s poem “The Portrait,” a major focus of Alex’s own thesis:

This is her picture as she was:

It seems a thing to wonder on,

As though mine image in the glass

Should tarry when myself am gone…

Jane Morris was as much the linchpin of the course as she’d been the goddess of the Brotherhood — that daughter of a stableman, who posed and flirted and married and adulterated her way to the top of English society, outsmarting and outcharming the snobs. And so each year when Alex showed the photographs, the students — for some reason particularly the girls — were devastated. She wasn’t half as beautiful as Rossetti and Morris had painted her. Rossetti had given gloss to her hair and depth to her eyes, added a good three inches to her neck, lengthened her fingers, straightened her nose.

It was only then that the students started to see how all Rossetti’s women — Jane, Christina, Elizabeth — shared some indefinable look that wasn’t their own but something Rossetti had done to them, a classical wash he’d painted over them. This was where the feminists in the class started to have fun, and someone inevitably compared the paintbrush to the penis. At which point Alex could lean on her desk and take a breather as they screamed at each other.

She wondered now, lying in bed ignoring the phone, not about Rossetti’s fetishes or the invention of the classical but about how Jane Morris felt, to look at a finished painting and see a woman more beautiful than the one she saw in the mirror. Was this the reason she started her affair with Rossetti — knowing she could only be that beautiful when she was with him — or did it feel more like a misinterpretation, an abduction?

And she thought about Rossetti himself, how she’d never considered before that he might really have seen Jane Morris that way, not just wished he had. The way she herself had taken an albatross for a goose, an American for a Korean. How easy is a bush supposed to be a bear.

She finally answered the phone around eleven that night, and didn’t realize until she heard Leonard’s voice how strongly she’d believed it to be Malcolm.

“Thank God,” he said. “You’re okay, then.”

“How long have you been calling?”

“All day. We were starting to think — What can I do to help?”

She knew he wanted some concrete plan to fix everything.

“Because I gotta be honest,” he went on, “this doesn’t look good for the whole department. As a whole.”

She wasn’t sure if he meant the grievance or the letter or her absence. Or the vomiting.

“Oh, come on, Leonard. It doesn’t look that bad. Not as bad as half the stuff I’ve heard you say. For Christ’s sake, you use the word coed , Leonard.”

“I’m confused.” He sounded tired.

“Of course you are.”

And why not hang up on him, too, while she was at it?

From seventh grade (after she got over mono) through grad school, Alex had not missed a single class. Freshman year of college, her roommate had practically tackled her to keep her from leaving the dorm with a 104 fever, but Alex just kept walking, stopped to sit on the sidewalk halfway to biochem, got up again and staggered the rest of the way. It wasn’t a matter of maintaining her record, but of principle. Unlike Piet, who’d once shown up at home in the middle of the semester for “National Piet Week,” which he celebrated by watching television and getting his mother, Alex’s stepmother, to do all his laundry.

But the next day, she stayed home. Oddly, her phone did not ring. Maybe she’d scared Leonard off. Or maybe her students hadn’t said anything, grateful for the free time. After that one missed day, she couldn’t imagine going back the next, because she didn’t know what to expect. She pictured walking into her 222 to find someone subbing for her. Or only three students who’d bothered showing up, the rest assuming class had been canceled for the term. Or everyone asking if she was all right, and her not being able to lie. She wondered if her lifelong punctiliousness had just been a fear of losing her grip. She wondered if she’d known all along that one little thing gone wrong in her world could unravel absolutely everything else.

Oddly, she found herself taking heart in the fact that Coleridge’s mariner had made it safely home. He’d done his penance, and continued to do his penance in telling the tale, and Alex wished for something heavy to hang around her neck, something horrendously painful. She considered her ring, which she still hadn’t removed, but hanging it on a necklace chain would only call people’s attention to its absence from her finger. Instead, she took it off and put it in a Tupperware and put the Tupperware in her freezer, which she’d once heard was a good place to store jewelry.

She felt lighter, not heavier. But it was a start. She made herself go for a walk around her neighborhood, staring at people’s driveways and the falling leaves and chained-up dogs and unclaimed newspapers. When she came back, there were two messages on her phone. One was from Piet. The other was from the bridal boutique, confirming her dress fitting.

Piet was in town the next day to catch up with friends and to see a woman he’d found on the Internet.

“That’s a pretty expensive date, isn’t it?”

They met up in the morning, Piet usurping the entire red velour couch in the back of Starbucks. “Look at it this way,” he said. “I get here, which is a nice vacay for me anyhow. She feeds me, if she likes me she puts me up, and maybe in the end I come out ahead.” He was getting an Australian accent, and it suited him. The sun had aged his face fifteen years in the seven he’d been there, and that suited him, too. “Listen, Al. Where the hell’s your ring?”

She managed to get the story out, or at least the parts about Eden Su and going AWOL at work and calling off the engagement. Not the girl part, the part about wanting to be beautiful. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

He laughed. “When have you ever not known what you’re doing?” He was shredding the wooden stick he’d used to stir his coffee. “What I don’t get,” he said, “is what’s this Asian chick got to do with Malcolm?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I got all day.”

“It just set me off. Or maybe it was — maybe the idea that someone could look at you and just not see you at all. See something totally different that isn’t even you.”

“Right, but this is different. Malcolm knows you better than anyone, right?”

“Theoretically.” This was the place where she might cry, if she were the kind of person who cried. “I need you to do something with me. You’re not meeting this cyberwhore till tomorrow, right?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. We’re going to go visit my dress.”

She figured if she already owned the dress, it might as well fit her. And a lot could happen between November and May. By May, she could be marrying someone else entirely. But really, she’d gotten this stupid idea in her head that if she tried it on, something would change. She’d been hoping for something big and white and horrible to hang around her neck, hadn’t she?