Music for Wartime (22 page)

Eden tried to look surprised. “Oh. Hi.” She glanced around—not, Alex realized, out of embarrassment, but to see if any friends were around to witness the strange professor accosting her like this. “Professor Moore. I’m glad you’re feeling better.” Instead of pulling her hair across her face, she tucked it behind her ear.

Alex had planned on asking her to explain, from her point of view, the problem. This would lead to a rational discussion in which Alex would not apologize—doing so might give Eden more ammunition for her Grievance Committee statement—but they would eventually see eye-to-eye, and Eden would admit what a silly misunderstanding it had been. But now the girl was staring her down, and Alex didn’t want to lose the little edge she had left. So she said, “Have you resolved the issue of those missed credits? You can’t be picking up a new course now. Will you need to overload in the spring?”

“Yeah, I—it’s okay.” Eden was starting to look uncomfortable. “Actually, what I’m doing is switching to an independent study with Professor Leonard. It’s the same reading, just one-on-one.” Her voice was still quiet, but determined, and even—something Alex would never have guessed—a little supercilious. “He offered.”

“Right. Well, I hope you’re thanking him for his time. That’s a lot to ask of someone already teaching two courses and acting as department head.”

Eden adjusted her backpack. “Okay, sure. So I’ll see you later.”

“Hold on.” She could absolutely not let Eden be the one to end the conversation. She put a thin layer of concern in her voice. “You know, Eden, part of me wonders if the real reason you dropped this class is because you weren’t getting a strong grade.”

Eden just stared ahead blankly, the way she always used to.

“Maybe you haven’t really been challenged like that before, and it seems I was wrong about where you’re from, but talking in class is still a part of a liberal arts education. And I can see from your recent actions that you have no problem speaking up for yourself.”

Eden looked around again for those invisible, incredulous friends.

“Look at it this way, Eden. How much do you know about me? Do you know my first name? Do you know where I did my graduate work? Do you know my genetic background?”

Eden was gawking at her like she was insane and drooling. Alex found it infuriating, even with the Vicodin still in her system.

“I’m going to take your silence for a no. You’ve probably made assumptions about me, and I’m sure most of them aren’t true. For instance, I’m not American.” It was a lie, from lord knows where. “I was born in Australia. I lived there till I was eighteen. If you referred to me, say, in an article for the
Telegraph
, as an American, you’d be wrong. And one thing I could say, if I were being unreasonable, is that you were intentionally denying my Australian identity. My point is, Eden, that we can’t see
anyone
, really.”

The girl shifted her backpack and smiled. She didn’t look uncomfortable at all anymore, just quietly, enragingly smug.

“For instance,” Alex said, “I thought you were an intelligent student. And I appear to have been mistaken.” She turned away before Eden could say anything, then looked back over her shoulder. “Have a super term with Leonard! I’m sure he’ll enjoy your stony silence!” She managed a ridiculous grin and walked away, pleased to note in her peripheral vision that Eden stayed planted several seconds before pulling out her phone and continuing down the walk.

She showed up outside her 222 five minutes late, just to see what was going on. The door was closed, and there were voices inside. She checked the hall: only a couple of chatting students she didn’t recognize, so she put her ear to the door. It was Tossman in there, talking about “The Daffodils.” She went to the co-op to bide her time with greasy food.

When she walked into Tossman’s office later, he actually looked frightened for a moment. Then he lit his face up and in that huge voice he said, “There she is in the flesh! The sadder but wiser girl for me!”

It took her a second. “Tossman, did you just pull a Coleridge reference by way of
The Music Man
?”

“Why, yes I did.” He was quite pleased with himself. He leaned back in his desk chair and bellowed out the chorus of the song, banging his ballpoint pen on a stack of student papers to keep the rhythm: “
The sadder but wiser girl for me!
”

She sat on the chair reserved for nervous students. “I just flipped out at Eden Su. I was trying to patch things up, but apparently I’m not very good at it.” She knocked her foot against a stack of literary magazines on the floor, sending them flying. She started to pick them up, but he stopped her. “So you’re covering my 222?”

“They’re good kids. Sandy took the Pre-Raph.” He searched the jungle of his desk till he found his coffee mug. “And look, Alex, I hope you don’t mind, I told Leonard you were having health issues, dating from your time in Australia. You can tell him I was wrong, but maybe you want to use that to explain what’s been happening. I didn’t say specifically what the problem was, so you could make up whatever you wanted. If you need to take time off, you know Leonard would agree. He just doesn’t want a scene. And he’d recommend you anywhere, as would I. But it would be nice if you stayed.” He smiled at her. He was a good man.

She let out a breath. “Tossman ex machina. You and my brother both, trying to save me from myself.”

He said, “You’d do the same for me. Take a couple more days before you decide anything. Rest.”

Two days later, there was an e-mail from Miriam Kohn: They needed Alex to appear in front of the Grievance Committee after all. “This is in light of an additional encounter between you and Miss Su,” she wrote. “It’s fair to advise you that Miss Su has produced a witness to the conversation.” A witness? The only other students had been passing at least twenty feet away. Well, if Eden could lie, she could, too. Except it was two against one, and Alex could never convince another professor or even a grade-hungry student to pretend to be her witness.

She drank some wine and called Piet and told him everything. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I like your friend’s idea. Say you’re sick. Feminine problems, so they won’t pry too much. Maybe, like, cysts.”

She flopped on her bed. “Sadly, I can’t think of anything better.”

“So why didn’t you ring up Malcolm?”

“Maybe I did.”

“No, I called him to see. Look, I was there when you pulled the card. Seven of hearts meant you were supposed to go all out. Job and man and your life back on track, yeah? So anyway, I set up a meeting for you guys.”

“You’re an ass, Piet.”

“Sure.” She heard him slurping something. His date had gone well, and he was staying with this woman downtown. “Look, Al, what’s the moral of the whole albatross poem? Isn’t it something about taking charge of your life? Like, ‘I am the master of my fate and the captain of my soul,’ right?”

“No, wrong poem. It’s about loving animals. He looks at these water snakes and decides he loves them, and then he gets saved. So the moral is love all God’s creatures. It’s a bad poem, Piet. When you stop and think about it, it’s a
really stupid poem
.”

“Okay, so it’s about love, though. There you go. Go love your man.”

They met at a little café and bakery near campus, and Alex couldn’t help feeling she was in a movie. She’d watched it a thousand times, how the former lovers meet for coffee—at a table by the window, so one person could watch the other leave, then sit there brokenhearted—and now here they were. Except they were back in a corner, at a table that wobbled, with someone’s kids running around screaming in soccer uniforms. Malcolm maintained an expression of deep concern and leaned a little over the table. He looked tired. He hadn’t shaved.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Alex said.

“Which part?”

She managed to smile. “I’d say the entire past six months. Starting with the albatross.”

“Have you been seeing someone?”

She couldn’t believe he’d think that. And she was actually flattered. She said, “I would never do that to you.”

His cup was frozen halfway to his mouth. “No—I was asking if you were seeing, like, you know. A psychologist. A therapist.”

“Oh.”

“You just haven’t seemed like yourself.”

“Honestly, Malcolm, I’ve just been drunk a lot lately. I was drunk when I said I couldn’t marry you.”

He nodded and considered this. “How do you feel now?”

“Now? I’m sober.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He made a concerted effort to drink some coffee. He set the cup down and licked his lips. “What do you need from me?” God, the man was so sweet. And she wasn’t the type to appreciate a kind heart while secretly wishing for the rough Harley man. This really was what she wanted.

If she’d learned anything from Eden Su, it was that sitting there mutely doesn’t get you anywhere. Tossman was right—she was idle, a ship frozen in a sea of trouble. And that would never do.

So she said, “I need to know how you see me.”

“I think you’re great, and I love you, but I think it wouldn’t hurt you to get some help.”

“No, I’m actually—I actually need to know what you think I
look
like.”

He was confused, and for a second she thought she’d have to explain the whole thing, all her vain neediness, but then he reached into his pants pocket for a ballpoint pen, white with a blue cap. He turned over his napkin and began to draw.

“What are you doing?” She leaned to see, but he moved it behind his coffee cup. Finally he held it out, in both hands. It was a stick figure: round head, curly hair in every direction, smiling mouth, happy eyes. Under it, he’d written ALEX.

She laughed. “That’s me?” He put it down on the table and drew wavy lines emanating from her face and body. “What’s that?”

“That’s your amazingness.”

He tilted his head and grinned at her, exactly like someone in a movie—the one the girl was supposed to end up with. And she thought, it wasn’t a Rossetti, but it was good enough. And she thought, if he was dumb enough to take her back, she might be smart enough to marry him.

In future years, when she told that story, she left out the part about Malcolm. It became instead the story of why she left Cyril College, of how she and Malcolm ended up at State, of how sweet Tossman had been to her, that year before he killed himself. Of how even in assessing all her misprisions, she’d still missed something enormous. But where had the signs been? There had been no signs: just poor Tossman slumped on the steps of the music building at midnight, gun in his hand. And no one seemed to know why. And really, she’d barely known him. She’d only read half his books.