My Education (5 page)

“My best to Martha,” Laurence continued. “Let us know when you're ready to have people over. We're dying to meet Joachim. Sahba's over the moon.” I had so little experience of the sort of indispensable consideration that Laurence now was performing—saluting a dear friend's first child's arrival: what greater pleasure or privilege was there?—that I felt overwhelmed with admiration for Laurence, and hamstrung by my own awkwardness. But so was Brodeur. As if he could not escape the contemplation of his happiness quickly enough, he gave Laurence's hand a rough shake and left us, the white satin ribbon, lost in the transition, floating onto the floor in his wake.

“Poor Nicholas,” Laurence, uninjured, said after a moment. “Want to get a quick drink?”

In our usual postlecture place we had our choice of the outsize wood booths, each deep pew of which would hold six or eight drunk undergraduates later this evening as they guzzled Budweiser from pitchers and pored over a century's inane obscenities for some overlooked square inch or two they might claim as their own with the end of a Swiss Army knife. But at five-thirty the faux medieval mess hall was entirely the province of fatigued, poorly dressed graduate students and the occasional youthful professor. Martha: so this was her name. I turned it over in my mind as we carried our pitcher and steins to the farthest-off, neighborless booth. It didn't dent with astonishment, but it rumpled her smooth anonymity, gave her a texture I hadn't expected. “Poor Nicholas why?” I prompted as soon as we sat. Only when Laurence and I were together did I call Brodeur “Nicholas,” each time enjoying a transgressive frisson, under cover of Laurence's entitlement, on the basis of their actual friendship.

“I didn't mean anything by it. Just that he's overwhelmed, as who isn't by having a baby. It's overwhelming, of course. The brand-new and unprecedented being confirming one's mortality and one's immortality at the same time. Of course when they're so wee and helpless you can spend all your time having existential crises of one kind or another. Once they start to talk to you and show their personalities you forget all about it.”

His shift from the specific to the general failed to throw me off the scent of his comment. “But you think he's unhappy,” I said.

“Unhappy! No. No, he wanted this child very much. I think more than she did.” Ah, he'd done it again—it was as if I could see his mind, kicking itself.

“And she didn't? Martha,” I added, for the interest of speaking her name.

Laurence's endearing tendency toward inadvertent gossip was very poorly matched with me, as I abetted it whenever I could, despite knowing—or perhaps because of knowing—that he constantly struggled to bring it under the dominance of his better—his beneficent, discreet, chivalrous—self. I liked that self of his perfectly well, but no more than I liked the other, which was gossipy and alert to weakness, which did not suffer fools, and which when it disliked anyone, disliked them to the point of contempt. If not for this dark side of Laurence I doubt we would ever have gotten along.

“Perhaps she did,” he allowed, “with an effort of will that could render irrelevant whether she didn't.”

“Laurence, you're speaking in koans,” I complained, which made him laugh but not further explain. “Things weren't going well between them last year,” I tried, probing for sharper outlines, for as I'd told Brodeur myself, I had always had the gift of faking greater expertise in a subject than I actually possessed. “What with the accusation against him.”

“Actually, that might have made things somewhat better, at least for a while. Had any of it been true it might have been better yet.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“It might have leveled the playing field. Made her less sure of him. It's Sahba's theory, based on no information, that Martha married Nicholas because she thought he was a great deal more wicked. She believed all the hype.”

“And she would
want
him to be wicked? That's not the usual reason for marriage,” I said, with an awareness of my own hypocrisy. Hadn't I thrilled to that seemingly sinister man in the long duster coat? Though what I'd wanted from him wasn't marriage.

“Remember, all this is Sahba's fantastical vision. It's not based on anything real. Sahba is the kindest, most generous-hearted of women, but she just doesn't get on with Martha.”

“Why not?”

“She thinks Martha condescends to her. Perhaps Martha does. I actually greatly like Martha, except for the fact that she wrecks the composure of these two people I'm so hugely fond of, my wife, and her husband.” And that was all I could get out of Laurence that day on the interesting subject. But it was not very long afterward that I saw her again.

The Indian summer had held halfway into November, undeterred by the decorative pumpkins all over the town, and then even by the decorative turkeys—but the night Dutra and I threw a party, on no better pretext than that it was warm, the temperature plunged more than twenty degrees some time after I passed out and just before dawn. Now the sky gleamed coldly, scoured of haze; and the trees were simply flinging their leaves to the ground to catch up with the lonely red flags of the sugar maples; and it was, perhaps, the last opportunity for certain seasonal pleasures until the great wheel revolved once again!—“Meaning,” Dutra loudly intruded into the hungover fug of my sleep, “two words: coffee-iced coffee.”

“Please don't talk,” I implored him, for I'd had an extremely good time at our party. “And that's three words, not two.”

“Coffee-iced is hyphenated, to qualify coffee. It's a compound word. The second ‘coffee' is the second word: Coffee-iced coffee.”

“Please get out of my room,” I scraped out, with more force.

“It's an amazing day! This is this town's
quintessential
day. Autumn, baby. Better late than never.” And what better day to partake of the coffee-iced coffee, Dutra argued, given how badly damaged we were? Of course Dutra didn't seem damaged at all. He was not merely wide-awake and voluble and mintily brushed but extensively clean—I could smell the fumes of Dial and Prell, his no-nonsense self-disinfectants, wafting off his damp flesh. Bustling like a nurse he raised my blinds, ushering yet more hostile light into my room so that I saw now, on the insides of my eyes, livid branches of blood. After some vigorous scraping and straining my window came open and a cold current entered, bringing a faint scent of pine trees and mud and wet rocks—the secret breath of the town that I sometimes discerned late at night, sitting out on the porch while Dutra busied himself with his bong.

“
Ahhh
,” Dutra said in gratification. “C'mon, Ginny. Hustle or I'll spank you.”

I throttled my pillow as if it was him. “Who's still here?”

“Only your ridiculous new boyfriend Manny.”

Manny was not remotely or even potentially my new boyfriend, although he had, during the night, wrapped his arms around my waist and dropped his face in my lap and mumbled incoherent confessions while we sat dizzily on the porch. This intimacy, touching if obscure, had lasted until he abruptly thrust me from him and ran up the stairs to the single bathroom, where after locking the door he had resumed the same position in relation to the toilet, refusing to surrender his hold for the rest of the night, so that our guests, from then on, had relieved themselves on our back lawn.

“Is he still in the bathroom?”

“I was amazed to discover this morning that he was not in the bathroom or even here in your bed, but facedown in the hammock. He's breathing.”

I ignored the jibe about my bed except to turn it back on him. “What about your new girlfriend? Where's she?”

“I felt so bad! I've never seen anyone blushing so much. You know I didn't even lie on the mattress with her, I slept on the floor, and then around sunrise I heard something crash in the kitchen and went down and she was standing there, all petrified, hugging her blender the same way you're hugging your pillow. I was like, ‘How are you feeling this morning?' and whoosh, her face goes as red as a beet and she just keeps hugging on to the blender like I might try to take it, and runs out the door.” Arms clutched to his chest, Dutra mimed desperate, hunkered-down flight. “Next time you see her make sure that you tell her I never touched her, except to put her to bed.” The night before, the woman we were discussing had suddenly fainted—had been standing and talking to someone, when all at once her feet flew up and out and her rear struck the floor. I had been in the next room but had seen the whole mishap enacted by the woman's crisp shadow thrown onto the wall by one of Dutra's clip lamps. First head up and feet down, then—
whee!
—feet up and head down. It had looked like an antic performance, except that, in landing, the woman's brassiere somehow caught, through her shirt, onto the latch of one of Dutra's military-issue gun trunks, in which he stored his LPs. The latch must have gouged her, yet the woman continued to hang like a rag doll, unconscious. Before I could press through our dismayed, milling guests, Dutra had deftly unhooked her and lifted her floppy length into his arms.

“I don't know her,” I said now. “It was so odd that she brought her own blender.”

“It was sweet! We don't have one.”

“But she didn't
know
we don't have one. And we didn't need one. It never even got used.”

“No, it did. She made margaritas. You don't remember when she made the margaritas?”

“She
did
?”

Dutra drove a very old, very damaged Volvo sedan the color of calamine lotion where it wasn't afflicted by rust. The car was so barely distinguishable from the countless other aged, rusted, neutral-toned Volvo sedans living out their last days in that town it might have been part of a utopian experiment of ubiquitous, ownerless cars, as with bicycles in some parts of Europe and indeed even here, in the seventies, when the university had apparently paid for a fleet of bicycles for public use on the campus, all of which had wound up within just a few days abandoned at the base of the hill. Such socialistic ideas were nevertheless still in brisk circulation. For example at the farmers' market, where a sort of scrip was accepted that encouraged a barter economy, though who handed it out, and in exchange for what service or object, even Dutra had never determined. Leaving inanimate Manny we drove to the parking lot next to the lake, where the market was held every nonwinter weekend, and was as much a carnival and outpatient clinic for the acutely hungover as it was a real market, although the produce shoppers piously browsed, French-style string bags hung over their shoulders, amid the jug and washboard musicians and the flax muffin vendors and the overflowing crates of tumbling kittens and puppies offered up for adoption by the SPCA. Dutra and I being among the acutely hungover concerned ourselves only with coffee-iced coffee, another of Dutra's discoveries about which he held forth as if he'd been the man who invented caffeine. The coffee-iced coffee was ice-cold espresso poured over ice cubes of frozen espresso and served in ten-ounce paper cups. As Dutra would never grow tired of remarking, it grew stronger the more the ice melted. We sat with our coffees on an unused vendors' table just outside the pedestrian flow, shoulder to shoulder for warmth. Now that the weather was finally right for the season we were underdressed for it, and particularly here by the lake, we were quaking with cold. The coffee-iced coffee vendor had affirmed this was the last day this year he would sell it. “Next week it's hot cider and cocoa. Until then you're gonna have to find some other way to keep warm,” this last said with a wink. Of course anyone seeing us here on a Saturday morning, seamed together from shoulders to feet and with wet hair and twin coffee cups, would assume we were lovers. But in fact I'd stopped sleeping with Dutra the previous month, once I realized he'd somehow transformed, from an attractively provocative stranger to an actual friend. I'd worried the transition would be difficult, but the most difficult thing had been getting myself my own mattress, and so of course Dutra had done it, driving me in the Volvo to the department store in Syracuse and roping the mattress himself to the roof of the car. His matter-of-factness about it had made me love him, if not in the way that would have us keep sharing a bed.

An old-fashioned silver-wheeled pram had been making its way through the milling foot traffic, and now I realized the same woman was pushing it forward as I'd seen on that day outside Brodeur's classroom. It was Martha Hallett. Even before she approached very near, and came to a halt just a few yards away, standing revealed and obscured constantly by the traffic of shoppers, I had no doubt at all who she was, despite how transformed she appeared, not just by my knowledge of her but by the change in her body. She was radically distilled, as if she'd been somehow unsheathed from herself and buffed free of a layer of fingerprint grime. The bright luster of her straw-colored hair was restored, though despite this she had pulled the hair into a small bristly knot at the nape of her neck. Her pram was dowdy, it seemed deliberately so. Her clothes were a man's: a dishwater-gray unraveling sweater, a slightly oversize and wash-worn pair of jeans cut as straight as stovepipes, a pair of flat canvas sneakers she wore without socks. The look on her face was remotely allied to the look I'd seen before, that she'd flung through Brodeur's doorway like a grenade, but now it was abstracted: her restiveness and uncertainty weren't connected to anything here. No part of her seemed to be. A heightened quality that I couldn't call flush, or good health, or least of all joy, emanated from her like the heat from a stirring volcano and seemed to set her at odds with the actual air. I wondered if she was aware of this, and hoping to conceal it by standing attached to her pram with one hand, in her blandly unflattering clothes. She was vastly more beautiful than I'd remembered and of course Dutra called out to her, in the unsuitably confrontational tone with which he liked to discomfit strangers, “Don't look so sad. You can get your own right over there.”