Pamela Dean (10 page)

"Sure," said Janet. "Molly and Tina probably aren't up yet; I wouldn't want to wake them turning pages."

They went from the empty classroom into the vast, airy hallway of Second Masters.

The walls above the oak wainscoting were painted institutional green; but the floor was polished hardwood, scuffed over already with dusty footprints, and the vaulted ceiling was decorated with a riot of plaster molding.

"I love this building," said Janet.

"I rather like the science ones," said Nick. "All shiny black and white and silver."

"And plastic," said Janet disgustedly.

"Oh, well, I like it. You know that people built it; it didn't grow by itself."

They went down the worn marble steps, and over the worn marble floor of the first-floor lobby, and emerged between Masters's two huge Corinthian columns into a fragile sunshine and a brisk wind.

"What experimental stuff is Robin going to do?" said Janet, not feeling up to a discussion of the merits of plastic or of buildings that looked as if they hadn't just grown.

"We haven't decided," said Nick. He kicked at a dandelion on the edge of the sidewalk, and added, "We thought maybe a production of
Pygmalion
with an all-black cast."

"You can't blame Olivier, can you?" said Janet. "One of the best tragic roles ever written? He did all the rest of them."

"You didn't see that makeup," said Nick. "And he didn't have to roll his eyes. Good God, old Dickon himself never—"

"What?" said Janet.

"Somebody I knew once. Never mind. All right, you pity Olivier, and I'll pity all the black actors who'll never play Hamlet."

"That's harder," said Janet, thinking it over. "Because
Hamlet
's
a family play. All the rest of the tragedies are."

"I saw
Lear
with a black cast," said Nick, "a most gorgeous production—and I remember thinking, afterwards when I'd recovered myself, how absurd it was. They thought that because the actor playing Lear was black, his daughters must all be too. But it wouldn't have mattered. That's such an isolated play, it's got no cultural context, if Lear were black and his daughters white, it would just show up, in the proper time, the ways in which they were unnatural."

Janet thought of Molly, and Molly's brothers, and the Robin Hood game. "I'll feel sorry for all your deprived black actors," she said, "when I'm allowed to play Hamlet."

Belatedly, she remembered Sarah Bernhardt; but Nick didn't seem to.

"What, do you want to?" he said.

"No, I don't want to be an actress."

"That's refreshing."

"Why, does everybody you know want to be in theater?"

They passed between the back side of Olin and the tiny, charming brick observatory with its huge silver dome from which Janet had used to help hack the ivy every spring.

Somebody shot by them on a bicycle, bumped madly over the high curbs of the asphalt road just ahead, and slammed down the hill to Dunbar in a rattle of baskets.

"Young idiot," said Nick. "More college students are killed in bicycle accidents than commit suicide from despair."

"That's not true."

"No, probably not."

"How many do commit suicide from despair?" said Janet, thinking of pink curtains and Nora's
PDR.

"I don't keep count," said Nick, rather shortly.

They crossed the road themselves and took the steep path, made gloomy by a collection of gigantic larches. Janet kept an eye out for an overturned cyclist, but the maniac seemed to have passed safely through.

"I used to roller-skate down this hill," she said. "Before they put that new concrete bridge in."

She was used to a certain degree of wonder in response to this remark about roller-skating, but Nick said only, "It was a wooden one before; I remember."

They crossed the new bridge.

"Yes," said Janet. "We've come the wrong way, we're going to end up in the Lower Arb."

"No, I just wanted to go the long way around; I've got a friend in the woods here."

They took the curved path in between Dunbar and the lake; Janet had taken it in the other direction on her walk yesterday.

On the spot where she had met the Californian and the southerner, Nick stopped and made a chittering noise between his teeth. He was answered from a spindly elm tree, and after a moment a squirrel came headfirst down its trunk, stopped at eye level, and considered Nick with interest. He dug a tattered heel of brown bread out of his back pocket, reminding Janet of Molly's ID card, and held it out. The squirrel stretched its neck like a goose and nibbled rapidly until most of the bread was gone, then snatched the remaining piece and bolted back up the tree, flirting its tail as they all did.

"Did you ever try them on apples?" said Janet.

Nick had already started walking again, and he did not turn around for this question.

"They're fussy," he said. "Spoiled, I suppose." Janet caught up with him, and he started.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's all right," said Janet.

They turned off the sidewalk just before the wooden bridge, crossed a small meadow of goldenrod on a dusty path, and passed into the green shade of the woods. The Upper Arboretum suffered a certain amount of maintenance every year, though nobody had ever gotten the College Council to agree to spray the poison ivy. The path they walked on was broad and partially graveled. On their right, the low banks of the stream had been shored up here and there with railroad ties and large flat stones, to prevent the stream's natural tendency to spread out through the woods and convert them to marshland. The artificial lakes were also evidencing a tendency to silt up and turn into marsh; this was hailed with delight by the Biology Department and with dismay by almost e verybody else, and was at

present a matter of hot dispute.

"Do
you
think they should dredge the lakes?" said Janet to Nick's back. His shirt was sticking to it; he looked to be mostly bones.

"Certainly they should," said Nick. "If they want a marsh, they can go out to Rice Lake.
Our
lakes are manmade, and they should stay made."

"My father thinks so too," said Janet. "My mother says that when nature takes hold so aggressively, you should let it have its way."

"I'll wager she didn't say so the last time you had ants," said Nick.

"No—she put mint all over the kitchen counters and the windowsills and the threshold." Nick turned around and leaned on an oak tree. With eyes like his, he would always look a little startled. "And why did she do that?"

"She'd read it repelled ants."

"And did it?"

"Somewhat. There weren't as many of them. But it made it hard to cook dinner, and everything seemed to end up with mint in it."

"She should have recited the rhyme," said Nick.

"What?"

"There's a rhyme that goes with all these herbal remedies. 'Breathe, breathe, thou merry mint, until I may see nary an ant.'"

"You've got to be kidding," said Janet cautiously.

Nick grinned at her, and the bottom fell out of her stomach. "If you say it, lady," he said. "Let's go a little farther; I know where there are Indian paintbrushes blooming still."

He did, too. Janet had assumed he was mistaking bee balm or maybe even Indian blanket, which was supposed to stop blooming in July but often did not, for Indian paintbrush. But a little farther along the path was a round space where the stream made a loop. Three ailing willows had been removed from it this summer, and it was a meadow of grass and flowers. Next year the brambles would take it, but now it blazed with goldenrod, Devil's paintbrush, the luminous blue of chicory, and the biggest Indian paintbrush flowers Janet had ever seen.

"There," said Nick, with great satisfaction, as if he had planted them all himself.

He moved lightly through the knee-high grasses, picked one of the bright yellow flowers with their bristling red tips, and held it up to Janet, who had followed him.

The meadow still smelled of summer, dust and baking grass and greenness.

"Just matches your hair," said Nick.

"It does not; it clashes. Try the hawkweed."

"The Devil's paintbrush? Oh, no, lady, not that one. Here, look." He tucked the flower behind her right ear. He smelled like sage. "Now, see?"

"How can I see?"

"I'll be your mirror," said Nick.

His eyes were enormous. Janet tilted her head the small amount necessary to look squarely at him, meaning to make some sharp remark; and he kissed her. He took his time about it, and unlike Danny Chin he seemed to have had some practice. This—or something—made a remarkable difference in the entire sensation. Janet was wondering in an abstracted sort of way about how long her knees were going to hold out when Nick moved his mouth about half an inch from hers and said, very softly,

"'Underfoot the violet, crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay 'broidered the ground, more colored than with stones of costliest emblem.'"

Janet did not know the poem, which, she thought later, must have been the reason that, instead of melting, she thought with awful clarity, oh, no, I'm not lying down in the flowers with somebody I don't know well enough to talk about contraception with.

Nick, as if he had heard her, pulled back a little farther and smiled beatifically.

"There, that's over," he said.

"I beg your pardon?" said Janet, in the tone of one who thinks the party addressed should be begging hers instead.

"The first kiss," said Nick, cheerfully. "Always best to get that one out of the way—it's so awkward."

Janet thought of Danny Chin, and chuckled. "Come on," she said, and took Nick's hand. The sensation was peculiar. She remembered taking her mother's or father's hand when she was small; she remembered taking Andrew's hand as recently as last month.

(Lily-Milly was a standoffish child who wouldn't even hug you on your birthday.) That was family—but what was this? She cleared her throat. "I'll show you a place that's unprepossessing, now, but every spring it's covered with bloodroot. We can come back past the tennis courts and the house I'm going to buy after I get my Ph.D. and come to teach at Blackstock, and that'll get you to the Women's Center a little early for your appointment."

"Lead on, MacDuff," said Nick. Janet started to correct him, and thought better of it.

Standing between Eliot and the Women's Center after Nick had gone into the latter, Janet considered and rejected lunch, company, and another walk. She was still, now that the momentary excitement had passed, in a fever after the lecture this morning. She would go to the library and get a jump on all her classmates, who would have made the fatal calculation that two weeks is a long time.

The library was a square, flat building of yellow brick, built into the side of the hill that Masters Hall sat at the top of. The library was one story tall in front, and looked, between Masters and the even more gargantuan brick bulk of the old Chemistry building, as if somebody had stepped on it. But down the hill behind, it sank for four stories, packed with books, crammed with knowledge; and scattered with odd cushions and strange padded built-in furniture added a few years ago to placate the rioting students of the time, who could never seem to make up their minds whether they were angriest about Viet Nam, about being made to learn a foreign language, or about being made to sit at a hard wooden desk while they did it. The College, being unable to do anything about Viet Nam and unwilling to do anything about the language requirement, had reformed the furniture in the library.

Janet pushed through the revolving glass doors, strode through the stark lobby with its Klee prints, turned right to the warped wooden counter that guarded the Reserve books, and asked for
The Romance of the Rose,
reserved for Professor Evans's English 10 class.

The young man behind the desk shoved his glasses up his short nose and looked sheepish.

The expression didn't suit him; he was pale and dark-haired and ethereal, like a romantic vampire, an impression that his open-necked white shirt and mellow voice did nothing to dissipate. Janet wondered if there had been some gigantic influx of Theater majors this year. That department did not usually have many majors.

"I just this minute gave out the last copy," the young man said. He gestured over his shoulder; Janet turned, and saw Miss Zimmerman bending her sleek yellow head over a huge folio volume. She seemed to be concentrating on the illustrations.

"Well," said Janet, "how long has she got it for?"

"Till three. The first one's due back at one and the other one at two-thirty."

Janet grimaced; the young man said, "Okay, look. There's one more copy. Professor Evans wouldn't let us put it on Reserve. It's about a hundred years old and he doesn't think we should be allowed to put our grubby fingers on it at all. Here's the call number."

"Well, thank you," said Janet, startled. "But—"

"Don't check it out and lose it, that's all."

"Okay, but—"

"Shall I say I have a weakness for redheads?"

"No, please don't," said Janet, and beat a hasty retreat. The number on the slip of paper he had handed her led her down to the bottom floor of the library, to be absorbed among the Close Rolls and the Patent Rolls and other large and improbable collections of historical documents. She passed these, and wandered, head tilted at the angle that always gave her a headache, past a flurry of French titles and a flurry of Latin ones, and bumped with alarming violence into somebody—or more precisely, into a corner of the huge book he was holding.

"What the hell are you doing?" said the possessor of the book, in a voice not at all suited to a library.

For heaven's sake, thought Janet, looking up the considerable distance to his face, it's another one of them. This place is haunted by beautiful young men with lovely voices. She rubbed her forehead and said, "Excuse me."

"Yes, all right, watch where you're going."

"Could you move out of my way, please? You're standing right where—oh. You've got the book I want."

"What could you possibly want with this?"