Love, Joel
I held the open card to my chest, his words pressing against my heart. “I love you, too, Joel. I'll always love you.” And instead of looking up into the sky, I looked beside me, where I imagined him sitting in the passenger seat, fiddling with my stereo buttons. He winked at me, and I continued to speak to him. “I'm sorry I ever doubted you. And I promise to be open to feeling you in my life, guiding us, loving us, watching over us.”
“You should've known you couldn't get rid of me that easily,” he said, and he was gone.
I found Dr. Roberts on the stage, gathering up his notes as the swarm of students exited the auditorium. He was a legend-"Word Doc,” they called him-with a radio show on NPR and a blog read by thousands each day. Not bad for a man in his seventies.
Clutching my dissertation, I made my way down the aisle until I was looking up at him, my neck craned back. From that vantage point, he did look like some sort of language god, larger than life. My last living mentor, save for Panchal.
“ Ciao, Ramona. A che cosa devo l'onore? ”
Doc was fluent in eleven languages and conversational in twenty-two-something that made nice cocktail conversation, but that wasn't nearly as impressive to most Americans as it was to me. It was a game we liked to play, one of us started speaking in one language and you answered in another, until finally Doc broke into Swahili or a dead language no one spoke anymore-something only word nerds like us would enjoy.
I presented him with the dissertation, fifty typed pages.
“ A língua do amor? ”
Portuguese. Nice move. I responded in German, “ Für dein Lesevergnügen. ”
He laughed, his white beard catching the lights of the stage. “My reading pleasure, eh? I'll be the judge of that.”
I walked up the steps and we hugged. “Look out there, Ramona. Take a good, long look.”
My eyes moved from one end of the auditorium to the other, empty seats except for one sad sap who hadn't even woken up after class was dismissed. “Don't tell me. You bored him to death?”
“ Muy gracioso, señora. Very funny.”
“What am I looking at?”
Doc inhaled and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Your future. When I retire next spring, we'll need a new Word Doc in town. I've already spoken to the dean.”
“But I've never taught in a college setting.”
He tucked my dissertation in his ratty leather briefcase, the same one he'd had when I was his student seventeen years earlier. “Rubbish. I've spoken to Panchal. We've run the numbers. Did you know that you've taught seven hundred immigrants how to speak English?”
I brushed it off. “Well, that's my job.”
Doc led me down the stairs and poked at the sleeping student, who wiped drool from his mouth and scurried off like a mouse running from a cat. Doc slung his worn leather strap over his shoulder. “We both know it's more than a job and you've done more than just teaching them to speak English. You've given them the sword.”
I followed Doc down the halls of the English building, recalling the first time I learned Doc's Way of the Sword. “Sword” is an anagram for “words.” He liked the swashbuckling analogy of the sword with language; that it is only through effective communication and comprehension that the world can prosper. Doc claims that it is mis-communication that leads to poverty, war, and death.
We stopped in front of a row of photos of the deans of the university. He himself was a dean in the '70s before he went into semi-retirement, but how can one ever retire from words? Words are life. He put his hand next to the photo of the current dean, Dr. Sanford
Theodore Irvin, the first black dean of the college. “What do you see here?” He motioned with his case down the long row of deans.
“A bunch of men with bad hair.” I smiled at my power to rankle the old prof.
He pounded his wrinkled hand on the empty space. “No,” he bellowed. “You're looking at your future.”
I raised my brows. “ I'm going to be the next dean of the College of Arts and Sciences?”
Doc nodded once. “Well, I'm no psychic, but plan on twelve years from now. God willing, I'll still be alive to see it.”
Ten minutes later, I was sitting in my black station wagon in front of the ATO house watching a slew of frats wrap Christmas decorations on the Roman columns of the porch. Da Vinci had been gone for two weeks. I missed him most at night, when he would climb next to me and wrap his warm leg over mine and pat my behind and rub my back, waking me to make love. And in the morning, when he would make the boys and me omelettes and toss the New York Times crossword to me with not one square filled in. And after school when he would go with me to cheer on Bradley at soccer practice or play chess with William and lose miserably.
I'd missed his birthday, too. Twenty-six and life to go. Taking a deep breath, I grabbed for my purse in the passenger seat, noticing that one of Anh's da Vinci books I planned to return later that day had fallen to the floorboard. There she was: Mona Lisa, smiling up at me, and I couldn't help smiling back.
The mystery of Mona Lisa's smile was one of the reasons people throughout history had been so fascinated with the painting. Da Vinci himself had been rumored to carry the painting around with him everywhere he went. Five hundred years later, Mona Lisa was still an enigma. Depending on which scholars you believed, she was either the wife of a Florentine tailor, named Monna Lisa, though the painting was named well after da Vinci's death, or the juicier choice was that the woman was Isabella of Aragon, part of the famous Sforza family. The juicy part? That da Vinci was her second husband. If the second rumor was true, then her alluring smile made perfect sense to me. Making love to da Vinci can most definitely put a smile on your face.
And why would da Vinci need to doodle her name in his notebooks if he could carry her painting with him? Always by his side.
I like to think that Mona Lisa could be any woman. Every woman. Whether her veil was to commemorate the recent birth of a child, as was the custom then, or that she was deep into the second phase of mourning the death of a close relative, Mona Lisa was undoubtedly expressing contentment with her place in the universe. Her smile seems to say: I am who I am and come hell or high water, you can't take that away from me.
I peered into the rearview and curled my lips into the Mona Lisa smile. The same, exact one. This much I know: when you can feel it, you can smile it.
As I bent to retrieve the Mona Lisa book and return it to the stack, a notebook jutted out from underneath the seat. I caught my breath. The notebook. He must be going crazy without it. I plucked it from the floorboard and opened it, half-guilty for peeking at something that could be a man's diary, but after all we'd gone through, I figured I deserved one little look.
I opened it, expecting to find the sketches and musings he'd written there from his journey across land and sea, how he'd tried to love me, only to lose me, but finding a good life despite the odds.
Instead I found pages upon pages of this…
Brkfst. Omelette w/extra cheese plus dry toast-800 cals
Lunch. Double turkey sandwich. w/chips plus brownie-1,125 cals
And this…
Monday-
Jog 4 miles
200 crunches
50 push ups
Make love
I laughed out loud. Da Vinci hadn't been keeping a private journal at all, but a diet and exercise journal. He was even more obsessed than my sister. Was making love to me nothing more than a good way to burn more calories at the end of the day? I gathered the nerve to get out of the car, tucked his journal underneath my arm and made my way through the college men, recognizing Pickler and T-Bone.