“Then would you mind putting your stuff up on the rack?”
Her look of patience turned instantly to one of annoyance. I was forcing her to move her furniture out of the apartment just after she’d painted and settled in. She turned the look off, got up without so much as glancing at me again, lifted the guitar onto the rack and then reached for the heavy duffle.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
“Don’t bother,” she said.
She was wearing sandals and tight chinos, and I discovered her backside as she lifted the duffle up onto the rack with a great show of delicate college girl maidenhood being strained to its physical limits. The gray sweatshirt she had on over the chinos rode up as she lifted one of the valises, revealing a well-defined spine, the halves of her back curving into it like a pale ripe apple into its stem. She turned to pick up the other valise, and I saw MIT’s seal on the front of the sweatshirt, flanked by a rounded pair of breasts too freely moving to have been confined by a bra. She saw my goofy leer, made a face, hoisted the valise up onto the rack, slid back into the seat, cupped her chin in her hand, and stared through the window.
“Thank you,” I said.
She did not answer.
“Look,” I said, “your bags didn’t pay for a seat, you know.”
“I moved them, didn’t I?” she said, without turning from the window.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, but she still did not turn from the window.
“You coming down from Radcliffe?” I said.
“What gives you that impression?” she said, and turned from the window at last, and assumed again that patient expression of someone talking to a cretin.
“You sound like a Radcliffe girl.”
“And just how do Radcliffe girls sound?” she asked, so annoyed by my presence on her turf, and so confident of her own allure in sweatshirt and chinos, brown eyes burning with a low, angry, smoky intensity, white face pale against the cascading black hair, completely stepping down several levels in the social strata by deigning to utter in her New Canaan nasal twang anything at all to someone like me, who should have been up a tree someplace eating unpeeled bananas instead of trying to start a conversation with the WASP princess of the western world. I was already half in love with her.
“Radcliffe girls sound rude and surly and sarcastic,” I said. “So do Yalies,” she said.
"Are you from Radcliffe?”
“No, I’m from B. U.”
“Is that a school?”
“Ha-ha,” she said. “You’re from Yale, all right.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can tell,” she said in dismissal, and turned to look through the window again, pulling her long legs up under her.
“Must be fascinating, watching all those telephone poles go by,” I said.
“Yes, it is.”
“My name’s Wat Tyler,” I said.
She turned to me with a reproachful look. Certain she had tipped to a put-on, she said, “Mine’s Anne of Bohemia.”
“Hey, how’d you know that?” I said, surprised.
“How’d I know what?”
“About Wat Tyler. Not many people do.”
“Luck,” she said.
“Come on, how’d you know?”
“I had to do a paper on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
“What’s that got to do with Wat Tyler?”
“Nothing. But that’s how I got to him.”
“How?”
“Well... can you name the Four Horsemen?”
“Sure. Plague, Pestilence...”
“Wrong.”
“You’re not talking about the Notre Dame foot...”
“No, the Bible.”
“Plague...”
“Wrong.”
“I give up.”
“I’ll give you a clue.”
“Give me a clue.”
“They’re on different colored horses — white, red, black, and pale.”
“Pale what?”
“Just pale.”
“I still give up.”
“Death’s on the pale horse,” she said. “War’s on...”
“... the black one.”
“Wrong, the red one. Famine’s on the black one.”
“Then Plague’s on the white one.”
“There isn’t any Plague.”
“Has to be a Plague.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But there isn’t.”
“Then who’s on the white horse?”
“Christ. At least, a lot of people suppose it was Christ. Nobody really knows for sure who John the Divine meant.”
“But you thought it was Plague.”
“Yes. That’s why I went to the library to see what they had.”
“What’d they have?”
“Plagues, epidemics, blights, everything. But there was a very popular plague back in 1348...”
“Popular?”
“In that it was widespread. The Black Death, you know?”
“From the Tony Curtis movie of the same name,” I said.
“It was bubonic.”
“It certainly was.”
“Killed a third of England’s population.”
“Sound of Music was even worse.”
“Anyway,” she said, and raised her eyebrows and quirked her mouth as though in exasperation, but it was clear she was enjoying herself now, feeling comfortable enough with me to be able to make a fleeting facial comment on my corny humor, and then move right on unperturbed to the very serious business at hand, which was how she happened to know anything at all about Wat Tyler who had been killed by the mayor of London in 1381, lo, those many years ago, when both of us were still only little kids. “Anyway,” she said again, and turned her brown eyes full onto my face, demanding my complete attention, as though knowing intuitively it was wandering to other less important topics, never once suspecting, heh-heh, that I was lost in thought of her alone, of how absolutely adorable she looked when she struck her professorial pose, relating talcs of poxes and such, and stared back into her lady-hypnotist eyes and wanted to bark like a dog or flap like a chicken, “Anyway, when I was looking up all this crap, I learned that a couple of the labor statutes put into effect around the time of the plague were thought to have caused the great peasant rebellion of 1381, do you see?” she said.
“You have a tiny little beauty spot right at the corner of your mouth,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Listen, are you sure you know who Wat Tyler was?”
“Oh sure,” I said. “He led the great peasant rebellion of 1381. Against Richard II.”
“So what did I just say?”
“I don’t know, what did you just say?”
“I said that certain labor statutes...”
“That’s right...”
“... caused the rebellion of 1381.”
“So?”
“So Richard II was married to Anne of Bohemia.”
“I know.”
“So that’s why when you said you were Wat Tyler, I said I was Anne of Bohemia. Because when I was looking up plagues in the library... the hell with it,” she said. “What’s your real name?”
“That’s my real name.”
“Wat Tyler, huh?”
“Walter Tyler. Everybody calls me Wat, though. Except my grandfather sometimes. What’s yours?”
“Dana. Don’t laugh.”
“Dana what?”
“Castelli. Guess who I’m named after?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“You can imagine.”