Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

“Psychology,” Will said, after reviewing Adrienne’s file for fifteen silent minutes, during which he referenced the college manual four times. “I can get you out of here in January with a degree in psychology if you take five classes this semester.”

Psychology? Adrienne laughed. She could be her own shrink! But psychology had a scientific, even medical, sound that would please her father. Without stopping to think, Adrienne stepped behind Will Kovak’s desk and hugged him around the shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

He was stiff; he gave her an embarrassed smile. “You’re, uh, welcome,” he said.

Adrienne met with Will Kovak a second time to figure out what the five classes would be and then a third time to have him sign her add-drop slip. It was during this third visit that Adrienne began to wonder about him. He was an associate professor of world literature, but he was only twenty-nine. And he was cute, in a bookish way, with longish hair that curled at the neck and rimless glasses. Adrienne had hooked up with a few guys at beer parties, but these guys struck her as young and clueless, and because Florida State was as big as some developing countries, she never had to see them again. She hadn’t been on a date since her first junior year at Vanderbilt, when Perry Russell took her out for fried chicken then talked her out of her virginity. She was ready for something different. She asked Will out for coffee, and after a very long, very awkward silence with Adrienne standing there in the near-dark and Will staring at his folded hands, he said yes.

In this way, the first real relationship of Adrienne’s life began. She entered the peculiar universe of young academics. It seemed to Adrienne that in these circles the person with the most abstemious lifestyle was the most worthy of admiration. Adrienne and Will attended the free foreign film series sponsored by the university, they went to readings at the bookstore, they went for coffee, and, at Adrienne’s insistence, splurged on the occasional beer at Bullwinkle’s. They studied together at the library and they spent every night making love on Will’s futon in the condominium unit that his parents bankrolled. The condo had a tiled bathroom and a gourmet kitchen with an island and granite countertops, but it was as if Will were embarrassed by these amenities and, to make up for them, he kept the rest of the condo as spartan as possible. The living room was dominated by two card tables pushed together and covered with an Indian print tapestry and piled with books and Will’s laptop computer (also bankrolled by the parents). The bedroom had just the futon mattress on the floor, a row of votive candles on the windowsill, and a boom box on which Will played his favorite kind of CD-the movie soundtrack.

Adrienne was out of place from the beginning. Amid all the older, unwashed, ramen-noodle eating, Edward Said-reading, quiet smart people, she was a dilettante undergrad who had a steady source of cash from her doting dentist father. She liked to sit by the pool, she liked to watch David Letterman, she had zero interest in grad school. Every so often, Will would drag Adrienne to a “party” thrown by one of his teaching assistant friends. These were usually held in an un-air-conditioned studio apartment where graduate students and young professors, many of them foreign, drank very cheap Chianti, smoked clove cigarettes, listened to Balinese gamelan music, and talked about topics so erudite they might as well have been speaking another language. Adrienne hated these parties, and when she complained about them to Will, he confessed that he hated them, too, but the danger in not going was that they might gossip about him.

Will was quiet and shy and extremely concerned about what his older and more established colleagues thought about him, but he excelled at intimacy-at lighting the votive candles and putting on soft music and sharing things about himself. Adrienne knew he was an only child, that his parents lived in a Manhattan brownstone on Seventy-second and Fifth Avenue; she knew he occasionally smoked pot before lecturing because it helped him to relax; she knew the names and complete histories of his six previous girlfriends (one of whom was his second cousin, who sometimes called late at night from her job as night auditor at Donald Trump’s posh resort in Palm Beach); she knew the long and Byzantine road that led Will to his dissertation topic about War and Peace. It bothered Will that Adrienne never talked about herself. “Tell me about your childhood,” he said.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“What about your parents?”

“What about them?”

“What are they like?”

“Why are you asking me so many questions?”

“Because I want to know you,” he said. “Tell me about your first kiss, your last boyfriend. Tell me something. ”

“I can’t,” she said. She was afraid if she opened her mouth, a lie would pop out. That was how it always happened.

“You can,” Will said. “You just don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” she admitted.

“You don’t trust me,” Will said. He would usually end up leaving the bedroom and falling asleep on the bare wooden floor in front of his computer. These fights bothered Adrienne only slightly. It was a small price to pay for her privacy.

When the semester ended and Adrienne graduated, Dr. Don flew to Tallahassee for the ceremony. On the way to the airport to pick him up, Will asked, “Why isn’t your mother coming?”

Adrienne could remember staring out the window at the hot, green Florida hills. She yearned to disappear in them. Adrienne’s roommate at Vanderbilt had asked her this very same question when Dr. Don showed up alone for parents’ weekend, and Adrienne had told the roommate that Rosalie stayed home because Adrienne’s brother, Jonathan, was very sick.

“Well,” Adrienne said. “Because she’s dead.”

“Dead? Your mother’s dead?”

“This is your exit,” Adrienne said.

Dr. Don took Adrienne and Will to Michelsen’s Farm House for dinner, and in those three hours, Will mined Dr. Don for every conceivable detail of Adrienne’s childhood-including, after two bottles of wine, the maudlin story of Rosalie’s illness. Will gobbled up every word; Adrienne sat in astounded silence. She could not believe her father was emoting like this with a virtual stranger.

Dr. Don kept slapping Will on the back. “Professor at twenty-nine… really going places.” Later, to Adrienne, he said, “Quiet guy, but he’s got a strong handshake and a nice smile. And he is solely responsible for getting you out of this place before your thirtieth birthday.”

“Funny, Dad.”

“I give him credit. A professor at twenty-nine!”

“Don’t get attached,” Adrienne said.

“Why not?”

“I’m breaking up with him tomorrow.”

“Oh, honey, no. Not because of me? If I said I hated him, would you stay together? I hated him.”

Adrienne called Will the next day to tell him it was over, and she could hear the anguish in his voice reverberating through his near-empty apartment. “I thought after last night that our relationship was heading in a new direction,” he said. “I feel like I know you so much better now.”

“I’m sorry?” Adrienne said.

Ten minutes after she hung up, Adrienne called him back. She wanted his cousin’s phone number.

“Why?” he said.

“Because,” she said. “I want to work with her.”

Once Adrienne crossed the bridge into Palm Beach and was escorted through the gates of Mar-a-Lago, her future became clear. There was a world filled with beautiful places and she wanted to live in them all.