The discussion leader smiled in the kind of pleased, condescending way that Lenore associated with people who worked at the university with Charles. “Why, Lenore! You mean to say your own husband is one of the world’s experts on Edgar Allan Poe and you don’t know that spooky story?”
With a sinking feeling, Lenore realized she had stepped in it again. It was one of those moments when she revealed her total ignorance and lack of interest in the passion that had made her husband better known than tenure ever would. It didn’t help that he had left his first wife, whom most of these women had known, to marry his undergraduate student, Lenore. The first wife shared his passion for Poe — or pretended to, Lenore thought — even going so far as to fashion a Poe costume for the great man to wear when he lectured on the greater man. Lectures and conventions still took Charles out of town many nights and weekends a year, though his second wife never accompanied him unless she just couldn’t think up a good enough excuse to avoid it. Sometimes Lenore wished Edgar Allan Poe were still alive so she could personally strangle him. Maybe she’d let a raven peck his eyes out.
“Which one?” she countered.
“Which one?” the discussion leader asked, with excessive politeness.
“Which spooky story?”
It wasn’t as if she didn’t know anything about Poe. She knew all about the raven and Lenore poems, after all, enough to know that Charles had taken “Nevermore” as a sign that they should buy the boat with that name. Charles was big on “signs.” When the “signs” were right, he did things; when they weren’t, he refused to do whatever it was they mysteriously portended. At first, that trait of Charles’s had seemed romantic to Lenore, especially when it pointed him toward her. Anymore, though, when it more often pointed him away from anything she wanted to do, it drove her crazy. “Your behavior is a sign of lunacy,” she liked to tell him. The other thing she knew about Poe was that if he was known for anything — besides being a hopeless addict and drunk — he was known for writing spooky stories. Attempting to wipe the smug smiles off certain faces, she said, “ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’? ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’? ‘The Masque of the Red Death’?”
There, she thought, that ought to show them.
“Oh, it’s not only a story he wrote,” the discussion leader said, in a way that made Lenore flush with instant humiliation. “It’s the story of something spooky that really happened in regard to Poe. And,” she added with a mischievous smile for the others in the room who were in the know, “to the real Richard Parker. You should ask Charles about it.”
“Why don’t you just tell all of us who aren’t familiar with it,” Lenore said, with a smile so gracious it made her jaws ache.
“All right.” The discussion leader matched her smile for smile. “I will. As you no doubt know...” There was a slight pause. “...Poe wrote only one novel in his lifetime. It is called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and it’s about four men who get marooned at sea. Three of them survive by killing and eating the other one. The name of the one they eat is... Richard Parker.”
She dropped it dramatically, as if they’d all gasp, but Lenore didn’t quite get it.
“That’s where the author of this book...” She held up her copy of Life of Pi. “...got his name for the tiger? Because he was a man-eater?”
The discussion leader’s laugh was a delighted trill that sent a vicious electrical charge through Lenore’s stomach, which was already upset from the liver and onions. “Oh, that’s only half of the story! That’s not even the spookiest part, Lenore. Almost fifty years later... this is true!.. four men got marooned at sea and three of them survived by eating the fourth one, and his name was... Richard Parker!”
“No!” somebody else exclaimed. “That didn’t really happen!”
Lenore was pleased that someone else was willing to look dumb.
“Oh yes, it did,” the discussion leader said. “You can check the newspapers of the day. It caused quite a stir on its own, but you can imagine the excitement when somebody made the connection between the real-life event and Poe’s novel from fifty years earlier. And ever since then, there have been reports of strange and terrible things happening to anybody with the name Richard Parker. For instance...” She checked her notes. Their discussion leaders were expected to research the books and authors they discussed. “There was another ship that went down, in eighteen forty-six. There were deaths and cannibalism aboard, and one of the victims was a man named Richard Parker.”
This time, several women did gasp.
“Well, that settles it,” Lenore said.
“Settles what?” one of the university women said.
“Settles an argument that I’m having with Charles! He wants to buy a boat and retire on it and sail around the world, and I don’t want to.”
Too late, she realized she had stepped in it yet again. From the looks on several faces she could see that she had once again proved herself to be an insufficient spouse for the great Poe expert: Not only was she ignorant of his field of expertise, but she was also so selfish that she wouldn’t let him take his dream retirement. She knew what they were thinking: His first wife would never have been so mean.
For just an instant, Lenore got a glimpse of herself that made her wonder if she might actually be as selfish as other people thought she was. She quickly sloughed off that thought, however. She wasn’t the selfish one, he was! Maybe she had stopped supporting his obsessions, but hadn’t he done the same to her interests? Once he had waxed enthusiastic about the possibility that she might one day teach at the university, but where was all that cheerleading now?
Lenore sulked silently for the rest of the evening, even though she really loved the book they were discussing. She wasn’t a dunce, she told herself. If they hadn’t squashed her, she could have talked about it as brilliantly as any of them were doing all around her now.
Just as he often did, Edgar Allan Poe had managed to step into her life and mess it up.
As she sat barely listening to the lively discussion of Life of Pi by Yann Martel, she thought about her own existence, which had somehow mysteriously turned into keeping house for Charles. She vowed to herself that was going to end; she would go back to class, she would finish her dissertation. Well, start it, at least. But to do any of that, she was going to have to keep Charles off that boat. And that meant she was going to have to be more subtle, subtle enough so that when her husband changed his mind about his retirement, everybody would believe it was entirely his decision and that she had not stood in his way at all.
“What are you doing up there, Lenore?”
She whirled around, after quickly pushing back into the bookshelf a copy of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. “Oh! You startled me, Charles.” She was up on a library ladder and she held out her right hand so he could guide her back down to the carpet where he stood staring at her.
“Not as much as you startled me by looking at my Poe books.”
His tone was wryly amused, but also a little sad, she thought.
“Oh, Charles.” Upon reaching the floor, Lenore wrapped her arms around him and gave her husband the warmest hug he had received from her in a long while. “I’m an idiot, and I’m so sorry.” She pulled away just enough to be able to look into his face. “I resist everything you love to do. I make fun of things that are important to you. I don’t know why I do it, but I have realized I do, and I’m not going to do that anymore. I love you. I want to share your interests. I want to enjoy Poe as much as you do.”