She knows she’s being teased but won’t react. On the rare occasions when he gets to hear her pronounce her maiden name, she utters a priceless interlacing of Plattdeutsch and Canadian vowels that only other people from White Lake could possibly understand. She’s not crazy about the “Elsa” either. Chet Baker sang on.
Now it has to end with Maud. It’s been a week since Ellie called to tell him she was pregnant. He tried to reason it. Maud, he thought, was there to grow up.
She’s here to grow up. She has to learn a few things, and one of them is that everything comes to an end. Reasoning was not very supportive. Special pleas. As a friend of his had once claimed: “I’m not a womanizer. Just an easy lay.”
She won’t understand it now but eventually she will. It won’t be easy. Also, it was always a good idea to break upsetting news — or say anything that engaged her emotionally — when she hadn’t been drinking — which, after dark, was rarely. Maud was one of the great student juicers, a not uncommon group given the pressures of the college. The drink didn’t seem to drain her energy or affect her grades. Such was the resiliency of youth. The semester was ending; they won’t have to meet in class, and she will find herself another adviser.
Is this cynical? Yes, he realized it perfectly well. Still he felt compelled to reason a further defense. This is love, as it is sometimes called. It always has to end. In practice it has a morality all its own. Surely she didn’t expect to marry him. In the unlikely event of such folly, she would walk in a year or two, chasing the smoke of the next fulfilling experience. Maud wanted fulfilling experiences. She wanted them for free. She’s reckless, he thought — heedless, demanding, and she’ll always be that way. She’ll break a few hearts before she’s through.
Chet Baker explained love, how it was funny, that it was sad.
7
PASSING HIS CLOSED WINDOWS on the street side of the quad the following afternoon, Brookman could hear his office phone ringing. Five or so minutes later, after he had opened the last lock that secured his office from the world, the phone was still sounding off. He let it ring as he hung up his coat. He had spoken with his wife from the Toronto airport minutes before, so there was no doubt in his mind that it was Maud. His cell phone was so frantic with messages from her, ranging from the apologetic to the drunkenly enraged, that he had been driven to turn it off. Whether Maud knew he was in the office or not, she was relentless. He let it ring. No signal or wire could convey what he had to tell her. In time she would show up at his office and he would say what needed saying. He threw the office curtains open because there were no longer any wonders to conceal.
The remnants of his fire simmered in the hearth. Every morning one of the college servants was dispatched to lay and start a moderate blaze in each of the offices. This would usually go out before the first appointments. Brookman tortured a flame from the kindling. The fire irons were folk art from a hospital craft shop in Rhode Island. They had an animal theme, horned and phallic. Over the mantel was a poster from the Museum of Modern Art depicting Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse. Brookman set the wicked poker in the andirons and seated himself on a handsome black leather sofa he had salvaged from the building’s basement. He picked up the receiver. The silence on the wire was absolute. He imagined her palm pressed against the speaker.
Within minutes the phone began to ring again. This time, he thought, there might be news from Ellie on her journey, but the presence on the instrument, he was absolutely certain, was Maud. He heard street noises behind her. The Andean flutes. Traffic. When he replaced the receiver the phone rang once more.
The afflicted man was circling the quad outside. His hair was freshly and neatly trimmed to an old-time crewcut. He had newly rimmed glasses. Brookman had seen the man often enough that these refurbishings were regularly scheduled, seen to by whoever had chosen or been retained to assist his passage through middle age. He always appeared alone; Brookman had never seen him in company with anyone. Time passed, the telephone rang, and the afflicted man made his circuits.
Watching these grim winter circumambulations, breathing to the rhythms of his unrelenting phone, Brookman found himself thinking of an early summer day a few years before. It had been the last week of classes in the spring term. The mild sweet wind carried dogwood and azalea blossoms, mission fulfilled, message delivered. The college was busy with preparations for class reunions, graduations, hushed with the efforts of spring-struck adolescents striving against nature for diligence, getting ready for exam week. One of the professors in the English department was a tall, handsome, prematurely gray daughter of the coast of Maine named Margaret Kemp. Some said of Margaret that she burned with too bright a flame. At some point her comp lit class exploded into an explanation of the unitary systems behind the universe, galaxies beyond nebulae, counterworlds intricately linked. Other instructors wore themselves out waiting for the use of their classrooms, colleagues stopped speaking to her, students mainly complained and fled. Not all.
When the college politely reclaimed its rooms, four students followed her outside. There, they sat down on the cold ground until after dark and Margaret continued to delve into the arcane systems beyond whose mere appearances the heart of the cosmos beat. One of the kids was a general’s daughter. Two were the star horsewoman of the equestrian team and her boyfriend, a scholarship kid from Weed, California. The last was an unusually cultivated, impressive young man, a student from New Orleans.
Deep in the night, when the campus went quiet except for distant drunken yells, Margaret and her company of pilgrims were wandering the fragrant grounds, the four students trailing their cicerone like tourists at an antique tomb site. The campus police watched but did not question; professors had been weird for years. Morning came and another evening, and then the sun rose again on Margaret, hoarsely gesticulating, beautiful as life-in-death in her transfixion, and on the students, dead-eyed, weeping, laughing together, raising their hands in wonder at all that Margaret, once the smartest shipwright’s daughter in Bath, had conjured out of the mornings and the evenings of a few days in May.
A woman from the counseling office named Jo Carr put a stop to it with an arm around Margaret, who seemed ready to slug her. The students wandered in circles. The psychiatrists treating them thought they were on drugs, which some of them may have been, but it made no difference. Two kids dropped out of school for a year, the two others for some months. The college accommodated them. Right after the exercise Margaret made her way to her house on Nantucket.
Margaret Kemp had a close friend at the college, another English professor with an office next to Brookman’s, named Constance Haughy. Constance was an older woman who usually seemed quite sensible, but occasionally surprised. One night Brookman was working late when Constance’s telephone began to ring next door. He concentrated on the piece he was finishing. Then, after two hours, he noticed something strange: the phone was still ringing and, he realized, had been ringing the whole time. When he left his office it was still ringing. Walking home, he knew that it must be Margaret attempting to reach out. The night-shift cleaners later swore the phone had gone on ringing all night. The next day, on Nantucket, Margaret hanged herself in her garage, kicking away her bicycle.
As usual, nothing was free. Margaret was far from the first faculty suicide. Historically, violent death was never too long away. Adolescent turbulence, middle-aged despair, alcohol. Not to mention heroin and coke and speed. The pressure of relentless competition generated toxins catalyzed by the disorientation, the separation from love, the random sex, the sheer cold uncaringness of the college. When these elements came together it could be quite unsettling in the cozy firelit libraries and among the dreaming Gothic spires. Which was not to say the place lacked its pleasures, large and small.